Food Truck Mixtape

As soon as you get word of an approaching hurricane, set your fridge and freezer to the coldest setting. Chilling your food as much as possible will help it last longer in the event of a power outage.

The challenge is that experts can't narrow down exactly where the contamination began - the field, the packing and processing plants or the grocery store. New technologies are being developed to make it easier and quicker to track food from the field to the grocery store.

Yes. The Food Safety Modernization Act, enacted in 2011, requires food producers to create better safety measures. But some experts say it's not comprehensive. "We have not implemented a system that allows us to trace back to the farm level," said Jaydee Hanson, senior policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety. 

Take, for example, out-of-season packaged, pre-washed produce. It's gone through several steps - from the field to the processor, the packager, the distributor and then the grocer, with the possibility of contamination at each step.

"Fifty years ago you would have gotten lettuce from a farmer in your state, now it's coming from California and Arizona on a much larger scale," said Matthew Jon Stasiewicz, an assistant professor of applied food safety at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

Tracing the food's path to the consumer's mouth is an active area of research. Traditionally, a foodborne illness diagnosis (determined by a stool sample) is reported to local and state health departments that work with the CDC try to drill down to the source of the pathogen.

Sonic's drive-in aesthetic works better, for me at least, on paper. You park your car in its own little bay with its own little intercom, press the red button, place your order, and wait for one of the car-hops to bring you your food. It seems kind of unmanageable from a logistical point of view, but I appreciate the idea. These fries, however, were b-a-d bad. They could have been good, or passable, but they had clearly been sitting out for a while, and had taken on the characteristics of F.F.R.M. (French Fry Rigor Mortis), which sets in approximately nine minutes after leaving the fryer. They were grainy, stiff and tasted of cold potato. I could have gone to another location and gotten an order that would maybe have been hot, but why should I have to do that? Texture ranking: 19.

The Jack in the Box I visited had an unusual smell to it — septic tank mixed with cleaning product, each scent sharp and distinct from the other. The fries, sadly, made a not dissimilar impression. They had a decent texture but tasted almost gassy, like there was a leak in the back. The curly fries I ordered, which I elected to have slathered in chili and something resembling cheese, were better but didn't redeem the experience. Texture ranking: 11.

This is No. 1 with an asterisk, like Wilt Chamberlain's 100 points, or Cy Young's 749 complete games. Not only is Five Guys No. 1, but it's also so far ahead of everyone else it’s almost unfair. You get a generous heap of hot, properly salted, natural-cut spuds, with a good balance between crispy fries and the odd one that's pleasingly soft. Five Guys fries in peanut oil, which imparts a milder taste than more industrial oils that mask potato flavor. These were the fries that tasted most strongly of tuber. Excellence comes with a price, though — a medium order of these fries costs roughly double that of other chains. Texture ranking: 4. 

Source: Food.com

No need to call for delivery when you’re craving a cheesy pan pizza from Pizza Hut. This recipe gives you all the information you need to create one at home, right down to the fresh pizza dough and homemade sauce. The dough needs to rise for at least an hour and the oven pumped to 475 degrees Fahrenheit for maximum effect.