What happens when a food trade company and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence team up? You get high tech, food-of-the-future fortune cookies: ‘Consumers bake the cookies before decorating them with the enclosed QR codes, printed on edible paper. The recipient of the cookies scans the QR code with their phone to be directed to either a video on YouTube, a photo on Flickr, or a personalized web page containing a specific message, as dictated by the sender’.

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If you’ve maxed your liver credits on standard drinks why not try your luck with Choya Umeshu Wine? This sturdy elixir is made from ume, a green plum-like fruit that is native to Japan. Mix it with soda water for a refreshing spritz and nibble on the hyper-alcoholic fruit floating in the bottle.

Yeah, yeah, so you’ve eaten a thousand cupcakes … whatever, right? Not so fast; there are still some really fun things happening out there like the sweet sprout cupcake toppers and pot sets that you can score from Mimi Cafe Union. Kinda puts a new spin on mud cake.

‘Always proper. Always mischievous. And occasionally adventurous.’ That’s probably not how most people would describe fudge – that quintessential grandmotherly treat. Most people, but probably not anybody who’s been lucky enough to bite into a piece of fudge from Burnt Sugar, a little British confectionary based in the south of England.

Using fair trade sugar and traditional copper pots to brew their magic, the Burnt Sugar team churns out crumbly, delectable fudge in flavours like dark chocolate, stem ginger, and – our personal favorite – the gloriously addictive caramel sea salt. And now they’re rocking playful new packaging too, thanks to the creative minds at d.studio.

Find Burnt Sugar’s ‘perfectly irregular shaped little pieces of randomness’ at London’s Borough Market, as well as at various supermarkets around the UK. Maybe buy a pack or two for your grandma — she’ll be inspired.

You know what they say: when in New Zealand, do as the Kiwis do. Pegasus Bay is a beautiful, family-owned winery producing some of New Zealand’s finest wines. But people don’t visit just for the wine. The food is a secret weapon, with the restaurant serving up great local and seasonal dishes, using fresh, seasonal ingredients with some top-shelf choices mixed in. Our favourite dish was the black truffle frittata, which melted with flavour as we sat overlooking the wintery gardens in front of an open fire.

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Designer Karl Lagerfeld has created a chocolate hotel room complete with a chocolate model eating chocolate ice-cream. It required around ten tons of Belgian chocolate to make this unique environment.

We’ve set-up a worldwide snail-mail-challenge for foodies and all of those who love to share recipes, experiences, or just plain ol’ cookie dough fresh out of the bowl. It doesn’t get any easier than this.

Get an applicant’s address on the Eat With Me website who has signed up for the Mail Me Cookies Galore event (really from anywhere in the world), whisk up one of your favorite cookie recipes, and send them by post with a copy of the recipe to follow-through and a short story on why this particular flavor came to be such a big part of your life. Super easy, right? Well then, let’s make it happen. Get bakin’ and get a postin’!

This is a cookbook with a difference: it’s filled with original artwork — fully realised paintings, not sketches, as well as delicious vegetarian recipes. The artwork aims to capture the essence of each dish, with piece being noticeably stylistically different.

In February 2011, Konstfack and Stockholm Business Region hosted a six-course dinner for over 150 guests, called ‘Composite Dinner’, featuring a twelve-meter long table of food presented in all the colours of the visible spectrum, as a part of Stockholm Design Week. There are a few simple rules of the night: make a combination of three to have in one bite, you can never have the same combination twice, but do tell other guests about your experience.

This dinner presents a stage where individual creativity morphs into collective knowledge creation. Like Konstfack, the dinner assimilates and distributes products of its wondrous assemblage. Konstfack aims to create an innovative interpretation of interdisciplinarity by rendering an artistic approach and design-thinking to an ever-widening dining discipline. Composite Dinner is the third iteration in the Mixology series, in collaboration with Master Chef Fredrik Eriksson of Långbro Värdshus. A work of Prang Lerttaweewit, Josefin Vargö, and Anders Mellbratt of The Experience Design Group, the newest discipline represented in Konstfack’s MFA.

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Food art that’s more squeamish than delicious. Helga Petrau-Heinzel makes realistic human entrails out of marzipan. Will this inspire a new wave of cannibalism?

This month sees the relaunch of Crabtree & Evelyn’s fine food range under a new packaging design by Smith and Milton. In response to a challenging brief to inject life and character back into the brand, Smith and Milton delved deep into the Crabtree & Evelyn archives and found generations of beautiful hand-drawn illustrations, reworking them into an opulent wrapping to deliver stunning results.

Rich pralines, vivid petit fours, wispy French meringues, and deep pastry creams piped into light éclairs, then coated with iconic works of art. Only at Fauchon. And now, happily, no matter where you are, you can capture a year’s worth of this hyper-luxe French foodie haven’s sweet and savory delights right on your coffee table.

With Une Annee de Fauchon (A Year of Fauchon), all of the foodie boutique’s drool-inducing eats are captured in this chic, photo-laden book. Kaleidoscopic rows of éclairs are sandwiched between minimalist pages of dazzling macarons. Each page promises to induce hunger of grand proportions, even if you don’t parlez francais.

Think of cheese and it’s typically the French or Swiss that come to mind. Not the Brits. Or is it? Thanks to a growing group of talented, enthusiastic, and young artisanal cheesemakers in the UK, it seems Britain is claiming the throne. Of cheese, that is. One place showcasing England’s new energy of cheesemaking is Neal’s Yard Dairy, based in London. Here, the fine work of over 70 organic artisanal cheesemakers is carefully selected from farms through Britain and Ireland. At their Old England style boutique shops, wheels and chunks sit perched, piled upon one other and sorted in the shelves forming a sort of mouldy rind wallpaper.

There’s tangy, buttery Stilton, next to salty, meaty washed rind sheep’s milk cheeses, opposite moist, farmy cheddar. The fragrance tickles your noise when you enter the shop and when tasting all your senses are tugged; the texture, the color, the way it bites as you savor it on your tongue. Fruity, unctuous, rich cheeses all diligently selected and perfectly ripened. So next time you’re in London, check out Neal’s Yard Dairy and remember that it is here where cheese reigns king — or queen, as it were. [First photo via HauntedMansion on Flickr]

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You know, a lot of people look at a latticed sheet of bacon with ground pork rolled up inside of it as an unnecessarily extreme indulgence, sure to cause an instantaneous heart attack, but I look at that slab of protein and fat as — I’ll say it — health food. Ok, bear with me, please. I just read the book Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health by Gary Taubes. I know it sounds like a crazy fad diet book due to its unfortunate title, but it’s actually an obsessively researched tome that documents the history of the nutrition debates between doctors and scientists, and how the ‘fat is bad’ hypothesis won out more for political reasons than for hard scientific and medical reasons. Citing dozens of studies and dissenting researchers from the past century of medicine as well as describing clearly the physiology and science behind their claims, Taubes asserts that the increased consumption of refined carbohydrates such as bleached white flour and high fructose corn syrup are the real culprits behind the epidemic of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer.

Well, that’s what most reviews of the books phrase it, but what most people seem to miss is that along with the indictment of refined carbohydrate, Taubes also suggests, like Dr. Atkins and many others before him, even if you consume way more calories than you need in the form of saturated fat and protein while eliminating most carbohydrates, you’re likely to lose weight and reduce your risk of many of the diseases often attributed to eating in just such a way. I’ve been reading a lot about the diets of many North American tribes before they were forced onto reservations – many of the ones that subsisted primarily on animal protein, fat, and virtually no carbohydrates were renowned for their fortitude, good teeth, and surprising lack of ‘diseases of civilization,’ but this all changed when they were forced to live on government rations consisting mainly of flour. I’ve also been obsessing over the lies and half-truths the pharmaceutical companies have helped promulgate about cholesterol to sell cholesterol-lowering drugs, but I’ll save that for another time.

I am coming to believe that grain and our dependence on it is much more of an evil than meat, and that animals, when raised properly, can be eaten in abundance while promoting biodiversity and ensuring the continued existence of many species. I will also leave this for another time.

71 is the kind of place which is small enough to miss, but once you see it, you realize everyone somehow knows about it. It’s set three steps down from the sidewalk level, and it’s always packed, except for week late nights and mid-mornings. Even though their service is not the friendliest — like any other spot in New York that’s too cool for school — 71 has a noticeably loyal clientele. Lots of writers hang out with their computers, while photographers check out the scene, and artists meet up with their reps. Besides hot and cold drinks, including their own coffee, they also offer a great selection of pastries, sandwiches and my friend Nicolas’ favorite chicken soup ever.

Cambridge artist Alan Warburton collaborated with a non-art audience to produce this series of work in which he asked volunteers to use fruit to explain politics: ‘In Caracas, Venezuela, volunteers explained the complex and lively political scene using melons, and in Cambridge, diverse residents used locally picked apples to explain the issues that affect the city’, he says of how the series unfolded.

Foodies should rejoice in the website Eat Drink or Die, a great YouTube-like resource devoted to cookery and food. It’s chock-full of user generated videos as well as cooking instructions by professionals, the most prominent of whom is Tom Colicchio of Kraft and Top Chef fame.

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I think eating in restaurants alone is sort of amazing, even though when I see other people do it, I get pangs in my heart. People are just so vulnerable when they’re shoveling food in their mouths, an act that humanizes anyone, which is why Crying While Eating is one of the most amazing blogs I’ve seen in a while.

Situated on the corner of Fifth Avenue and St Marks Place, in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, Total Wine Bar serves wine, beer and some small eats (their Mac n’ Cheese is seriously the best that I’ve eaten). Smallish in size, and often populated with some neighborhood regulars, the U-shaped design of the under-lit bar maximizes the use of space, and allows its patrons to either choose to sit down privately on their own, or encourages them to partake in the conversations of those who are seated on the other side (of the bar). The staff’s charm, humor and friendliness aid in the creation of an atmosphere that is non-intimidating even for those who want to venture in on their own. This is a wine bar ala Cheers, but with a contemporary decor and feel; a place where, if not everyone knows your name, then they’ll eventually learn it — if you keep on going back.

One of our favourite artists, Balint Zsako, is showing his collages in an exhibition with his mother, Anna Torma (textiles), and father, Istvan Zsako (paintings,) at The Proposition Gallery in New York opening September 13 and running until October 18.