OMG...what is this???

In-vitro meat

I'd never thought about it that way, but I guess it's possible to grow meat for consumption if it's already being done for surgery, right? Apparently PETA wants to award the first company that makes lab-grown meat available for public consumption. Just needs a crazy enough investor with iron confidence to take the risk, and maybe a little more research to make it a more efficiently produced product.

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Recently, I've been linking around Wikipedia looking for food inspiration, and I found out something about beans: some kinds of raw edible beans(kidney beans, for example) contain toxins, so they must be cooked thoroughly before consumption, by boiling for at least 10 minutes. I think most people would do this anyway to get the beans soft enough, but apparently using a slow cooker may not bring the beans up to a high enough temperature, and instead make the toxins more powerful. Soaking overnight and pouring away the water, or fermenting, also help to remove the toxins.

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And here's an interesting history nugget about soup:

The word restaurant (meaning "[something] restoring") was first used in France in the 16th century, to describe a highly concentrated, inexpensive soup, sold by street vendors, that was advertised as an antidote to physical exhaustion. In 1765, a Parisian entrepreneur opened a shop specializing in such soups. This prompted the use of the modern word restaurant to describe the shops.

Kind of makes you feel like having some soup yourself...