DailyDirt: Artisanal Foods Are Automatically Awesome

Too Much Free Time

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Fri, Nov 14th 2014 5:00pm — Michael Ho

The price of a fancy meal often involves buying a story -- that the ingredients for the dishes were grown locally or picked fresh the same day or fed only grass or given free range of an outdoor plot of land. But sometimes the story behind expensive food-related items is a bit harder to justify. Would you pay more for water that was filtered a few more times than tap water? How about painstakingly sliced and heated bread? Here are just a few more artisanal items that might be a joke (or not).

Artisanal ice is a thing now. Hand-cut completely transparent ice can be added to your cocktails for an additional price. These handcrafted 2 inch blocks of ice melt ever so slightly slower than regular ice cubes, so you might be able to enjoy your drinks for just a bit longer without diluting your beverage. Or you could just use chilled rocks. [url]
If you take NYC tap water and zap it with some UV rays and ozone, wouldn't you think that water should taste different? Maybe it does, but the added processing doesn't make that water any safer or more healthy for you. [url]
Artisanal air is bottled in small batches in San Francisco. The idea of an oxygen bar has been around for more than a few decades (if not centuries), but capturing ambient pressure air in a bottle to be inhaled in a time-shifted experience is... not always a joke. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: air, artisanal, fad, food, ice, ingredients, oxygen bar, taste, toast, water

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Anonymous Coward, 14 Nov 2014 @ 6:46pm

A fool and his money are soon parted.
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Lawrence D’Oliveiro, 14 Nov 2014 @ 10:38pm

Talking Of Artisanal Ice...
...I saw an item on TV many years ago about a Japanese man who made and sold “musical ice” according to an old, and secret family recipe. As you broke up one of his blocks of ice, it would produce a musical note, which went up in pitch as the remaining piece became smaller.

Sadly, it seems there is no item on the Web about him...
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Pseudonym, 16 Nov 2014 @ 5:46pm

Artisinal air...
The latest dystopian fiction to become real is now Ben Elton's play, Gasping.
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Nicci Stevens (profile), 17 Nov 2014 @ 6:45am

UV, RO, Ozone and DI Water
These are processes which are used for bottled water... some bottled water companies just use "city" water with those processes. Those processes can also be used at the final stage of a gray water operation -- where sewage is filtered and purified to produce clean, drinkable water. (I have worked on operations like this and while it is chemically safe to drink its not appealing when you actually see where it started).

With NYC tap water tho, it's already some of the best around and in a blind taste test actually fared higher than some bottled water.

When, however, water becomes too pure -- no minerals or salts, where the total dissolved solids is < 5ppm, it starts to become harmful. It will leach these salts and minerals from your system and negatively impact your health. Remember from science class, boys and girls, water is the universal solvent.

Another trick a lot of bottled water companies use: adding minerals to purified water. By doing this the water is both safe and with the proper minerals tastes good. This is why, for example, Arrowhead tastes better than the store brand. It's not that "Mountain Spring Water" which the FDA says there can be only a few drops per ounce actually in the water sold to carry that label.
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CrushU (profile), 17 Nov 2014 @ 11:44am

All I want to know is if the company doing the bottled air thing is named 'Perri-Air'.

(Joke shamelessly stolen from timeless movie.)
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