Batch of links

- Burger King will now require its pork and eggs to come from cage-free animals. Hurray!

- NPR article (with audio) about all the microbes that can lurk in ready-to-eat salad bags and what the big companies are doing about it. Molly Wizenberg pitches in at about 8 minutes (and here’s her and Matthew Amster-Burton’s podcast on lettuce).

- Turn a refrigerator ice dispenser into a candy machine: is this the coolest thing or what?!?

- A new app called Eatery teaches users about their diet, and the data-mining aspect allows for other nice conclusions, too (types of food according to location or time of the day, for example – as the day wears on, we are less and less likely to make healthy choices).

- I meant to post this earlier, but it somehow got misplaced into my “Sewing” folder… Sorry! It’s a list of possible menu items for a 2012 Oscar party (still applicable for movie-themed parties in general).

- Great post on Gluten-Free on a Shoestring about the myth of cup-for-cup gluten-free flour. And all those recipes look delicious!

- This story has been popping up in the news regularly over the past few months, so I figured I’d post it here. It’s an actual scientific study that says there may be wisdom in eating dessert for breakfast, in that it satisfies cravings and curbs over-eating later in the day. I occasionally eat dessert at breakfast, like a piece of cake or pie, but that’s because somebody has to eat the food before it goes bad! Now I have a scientific reason.

- And finally, the good news of the day: orange cheese, like cheddar, is orange because of the addition of annatto, not artificial coloring. I’ve used annatto before. I confirmed this by actually looking at the ingredients on my package of extra-sharp Tillamook cheddar. This is good news to me because when I was a child, my mother refused to buy orange cheese, in an effort to keep us from ingesting artificial coloring. But it’s all natural! I can now resume the guilt-free orange-cheese eating.