There's now an honest-to-God scientific explanation as to why these taste so good.

​So we all know, deep in our hearts and thighs and especially our tongues -- and despite all those resolutions we made a couple of weeks ago -- that fat is one of the most awesome things that can ever happen to a piece of food. But it is the goal of Science to illuminate and explain the mysteries of life and nature, and so a group of scientists at Washington University School of Medicine has taken the first step to discover why we love fat so much.

"My key interest in fat is to know why we crave fat," says M. Yanina Pepino, one of the scientists who worked on the study, which appears in the current issue of the Journal of Lipid Research. The answer, or at least part of the answer, lies in a gene called CD36, which is connected to the taste buds. People who make more of the CD36 protein have an easier time detecting the presence of fat in food.

This does not mean, Pepino stresses, that they like fat more. "We have to learn what the signal means," she says. "It could be how much fat they need to absorb to get the signal of satiety. This is just the tip of the iceberg, the beginning of the story."

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Ramadhan Abdulla, a Tanzanian cassava farmer who has benefited from the Danforth Center's expertise and the Gates Foundation's money.

​If there were an easy way to end starvation around the world, somebody would have thought of it by now. Obviously. But there are still one billion people worldwide suffering from chronic malnutrition and another billion who don't get enough to eat between harvests. Three-quarters of the poorest people in the world are farmers who grow their own crops. Most of them don't grow enough to sustain themselves and their families, let alone enough to sell at the market.

The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center has teamed up with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to figure out a way to solve this seemingly-insurmountable problem.

Wednesday night Kathy Kahn, a representative from the Gates Foundation, and Paul Anderson, the director of the Danforth Center's international programs office, held a public "conversation" at the Center to explain their plans, which could, conceivably, lead to world peace. Explained Anderson: "Hunger and poverty are the major causes of insurrection around the world."

(The Gates Foundation is also working on preventing school dropouts. Let's add to their list finding a way to keep Windows computers from crashing constantly, since it seems like they're up for attempting the impossible.)

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​Wentzville Holt High School got national exposure this week when Fox & Friends highlighted a student boycott over the district's school lunches.

As student Hannah Lucas explained to the show's host Gretchen Carlson (video below), the school got rid of ketchup and mustard dispensers this year to mitigate food waste. Now the students are given up to five packets of ketchup per meal. If they want any more, they have to pay 5 cents per packet. Kids who want extra salad dressing, have to pay 30 cents per packet.

"Students were a little upset about being regulated on their condiments because -- you know -- they're so used to piling it on," said Lucas.
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​At the risk of bragging, Riverfront Times cleaned up recently at the annual Association of Food Journalists Awards.

RFT editorial contributor Brooke Foster won best food feature (for a newspaper under 172,000 circulation) for her article (right), "What happens when you take the same shopping list to four very different markets?"

Former staff writer Kristen Hinman won best newspaper food news story for her article, "The Humane Society and Big Agriculture Slug It Out Over Animal Rights."

And the RFT's Ian Froeb won third place for best newspaper restaurant criticism.

​Here's your weekly St. Louis bestseller list for the week ending October 2, as compiled by the St. Louis Independent Booksellers Alliance and based on sales at Left Bank Books, Main Street Books, Pudd'nhead Books, Subterranean Books and Sue's News.

There are plenty of new titles on this week's adult bestseller list, including Rosanne Cash's memoir Composed; Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus (which Salon critic Laura Miller called "the first Etsy novel"); 1493, Charles Mann's exploration of life in North America immediately post-Columbus (and a sequel to his earlier 1491); Habibi, graphic novelist Craig Thompson's long-awaited follow-up to the classic Blankets; and The Art of Fielding, which, sadly, is not a not a how-to, but rather a novel by Chad Harbach.

But atop them all is Stone Soup Cottage: A Vignette of Seasonal Recipes by Carl and Nancy McConnell, proprietors of the eponymous fine-dining restaurant in Cottleville, Missouri, in St. Charles County. In addition to producing a cookbook, the McConnells are giving weekly cooking lessons this fall, and they are offering private at-home catering to anyone who feels like paying. It's an empire to rival Gerard Craft's. The restaurant itself is in an 1850s farmhouse and has just seven tables and the website notes that reservations are required; it's definitely special-occasion dining. (For the record, Gut Check's Veggielante visited and approved.)

What would be super-cool, though, is if other local restaurants started producing cookbooks, too. We'd be thrilled to see Niche: The Cookbook, or 300 Fun Things You Can Do With Pork Belly or, better yet, Ted Kilgore's Guide to At-Home Mixology by Niche. Or Duck Fat, a Primer from Salt or Kakao: How to Mix Things in Your Chocolate That Shouldn't Go in Chocolate and Still Have Them Taste Good. There are so many innovative chefs in this town, and we're pretty sure that they won't be giving any secrets away: By the time the cookbooks come out, they'll have moved on to new creations. But it'll give gastronomes who can't afford special-occasion dining except on really, really special occasions the opportunity to enjoy exciting developments in cooking in their own kitchens.

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photo by Laura Miller

​The flying saucer where so many drunken late-night tacos were scarfed, the Del Taco on Grand Boulevard, may be getting demolished, despite being on the National Register of Historic Places and causing an outpouring of love on Facebook.

At tomorrow's meeting of the board of aldermen, there's an item on the agenda that could allow developer Rick Yackey to tear it down in favor of other retail space, and may even help out with the cost of the demolition.

Head on over to Gut Check for all the details!

A curious suit over questionable meat.

​At a news conference today in St. Louis, Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster announced that he's filed a civil suit against a meat processor with stores in Overland and Festus on claims that the company mislabeled some of its products.

According to the attorney general's office, sixteen separate tests by the USDA and the Missouri Department of Agriculture confirmed that products labeled as "ground beef" and "sausage" at John's Butcher Shoppee contained heart muscle. In some tests, heart muscle was the primary ingredient, according to the AG. The state's top prosecutor also claims that tests revealed soy in the sausage.

The suit names the owners of John's Butcher Shoppee, brothers Michael and Thomas Kolish, as defendants. This afternoon Daily RFT put in a call to the store's Overland location on Walton Road. Judy Kolish, the men's mother, answered the phone. She says the family company -- in its 38th year in business -- has been blindsided by the accusations.
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You know you wanna eat me.

​Sparky's Homemade Ice Cream in Columbia, Missouri, sold out of its first batch of cicada ice cream last week before it officially went on sale. Alas, the first batch was also last.

This week the city's health department advised the ice cream retailer to hold off on a second batch of the dessert that included cicadas covered in brown sugar and chocolate. Like much of Missouri, Columbia is swarming with the arrival of the 13-year cicada.

And while Sparky's did boil the bugs before adding them to the ice cream, health officials say the city's food code has no information on how to safely prepare insects for consumption. Sparky's now has a sign on the door informing customers to come back for the cicada ice cream again -- in 2024.
 

​If you've read this week's feature story "Back From the Undead" about Vincentennial, the 100th birthday celebration for Vincent Price, the biggest movie star ever to come out of St. Louis (and why, pray tell, wouldn't you?), you're undoubtedly eager to participate in the festivities. RFT calendar editor Paul Friswold and his crack team of writers have created a complete day-by-day rundown of all the events. Just think! you can see a Vincent Price movie (or two) every day for the next week!

And some of them promise to be very, very special.

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If it had been a massive tofu spill, no one would be barfing. Just sayin'.

​Excuse us while we hork demurely into our trash can...

Apparently a truck full of plastic-wrapped parts of dead chickens lost its load yesterday in west county, resulting in a horrible smell and a mystery. Motorists driving through the mess slimed Highway 40 for about a mile going eastbound near Timberlake Manor Parkway, officials told the Post-Dispatch.

Whoever was driving the truck that let the chickens cross the road (most violently!) apparently didn't stop, and the cameras monitoring the stretch of road weren't recording; they were only capturing a live feed.

So not only is there a lingering reek of pre-nuggets in the air, there's a chicken-spiller at large. If you have a lead on who the poultry perp might be, call the Chesterfield Police Department at (636) 537-3000.