Kraft Foods is pushing the all-American cookie on Great Britain this month, hoping to convince the finicky biscuit eaters that two crisp chocolate wafers sandwiched with “creme” trumps a digestive any old day. The Oreo is already the top-selling cookie in China, though it’s been modified to suit Chinese tastes (less sugar, wafers instead of cookies and oblong instead of round). The Chinese are also dunking their Oreos in milk, the ever-perfect combo for this resilient cookie.

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Have more profound words ever been uttered? That’s one of the rallying cries of Save Our Taco Trucks, a movement opposing a new law that restricts taco trucks in Los Angeles County. The law requires the trucks to change locations every hour, with violators “facing fines, misdemeanor charges and, possibly, jail time,” the New York Times reports. 

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Okay, not only the French eat frog legs. Europeans have apparently been eating them since the Stone Age, and Michiganders like to deep-fry ‘em in beer batter. But the French, sticklers for home-grown cuisine, are likely eating the legs of frogs that have been shipped in from as far away as Indonesia, reports NPR. French laws limit the frog harvest in France, which is why the country turns to imports. A lucky few frog hunters can occasionally sauté the fat little frogs of Burgundy in a parsley and garlic purée. 

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Homer Simpson may have introduced you to fugu. Or perhaps Anthony Bourdain. They’re among those who have eaten the potentially deadly blowfish and helped make it “the thrill-seeking gastronome’s equivalent to scaling Mount Everest,” writes Adam Platt in New York Magazine. It’s banned through much of Europe and available only in a few restaurants in the U.S., though the FDA-sanctioned importing process, according to Platt, renders the fugu “less toxic than a piece of mercury-saturated tuna sushi at your local Korean deli.”

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Daniel Duane loves to eat wild salmon, which used to live in abundance off the West Coast of the United States and whose numbers are now crisis-level low. His home, the San Francisco Bay area, was once famous for its seafood. But many San Franciscans now get their seafood from elsewhere, like the rest of American supermarket shoppers. It’s an antiseptic setting, and it just won’t do for an outdoorsy foodie like Duane. So he traveled by seaplane to southeast Alaska to glimpse one of the last remaining American paradises and to catch “this beautiful food” in “a web of freshwater, saltwater, and surrounding wildlands healthy enough to generate 5 billion pounds of seafood year after year, without diminishing anything.”

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The Irish pub may be ubiquitous around the world, but it’s struggling in parts of its homeland. Mary Jordan writes in the Washington Post, “Wealth has given the Irish more options and less time—a bad combination for the local pub. More people are spending sunny weekends in Spain rather than evenings of ‘craic,’ as good times and conversation are known, down at the pub.” The video that accompanies Jordan’s story is below. 

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We’ve already noted the rise of see-it-before-it’s-gone tourism, or climate tourism. Is “drink-it-before-it’s-gone” tourism next? A scientist in New Zealand is warning that climate change could affect the growth of malting barley, both in New Zealand and neighboring Australia, thus causing a fall in beer production.

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But I love it. I was in Scotland last week, eating the herbivore version of Scotland’s national dish as much as possible. It’s not that I’m afraid of the real haggis -- an agitative mix of sheep liver, heart, lungs and other internal organs blended with meat, oats, barley and spices and cooked inside a sheep stomach. It’s just that “fake haggis” tastes better and seemed far easier to find. It may be a sign of the health-food times in Scotland, great purveyor of heart-attack cuisine. But a furious Robert Burns is surely scoffing in his grave.

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Nabil Hadj Hassen, who arrived in Italy at 17 and went on to train with some of the country’s top chefs, won the heart of highly regarded reviewer Gambero Rosso with his dish of pasta, eggs, pecorino cheese and guanciale (cured pig cheek) at the restaurant Antico Forno Roscioli. But The New York Times recently explored how his triumphant carbonara also flagged a question looming over Italy’s revered cuisine: Is the food still Italian if the chef is not? 

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Yoshoku means “Western food” in Japanese, and it’s been a staple of the country’s cuisine for decades. Chefs have taken hamburgers, spaghetti and other dishes, and “reshaped” them for Japanese palates. Most foreigners, though, have never heard of yoshoku, writes Norimitsu Onishi in The International Herald Tribune.

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In the summer of 2007, when the New Seven Wonders of the World were announced, World Hum rolled out its own list of wonders: the Seven Wonders of the Shrinking Planet. My favorite pick was the California roll, which represented not only the rise of sushi from obscure “ethnic” cuisine to corner store standard but also, as Jim and Michael wrote, “the many ways that cuisines from every corner of the planet are mixing in new, inventive and surprisingly tasty ways.”

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It tops a story in the Sydney Morning Herald, which begins: “German supermarket shelves have been stocked with koala-shaped biscuits in a bid to lure more big-spending German tourists to Queensland.” Guess this campaign didn’t grab enough big-spending German koala lovers. 

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