When I skimmed the news this morning, I saw this bizarre story from the Los Angeles Times: “Freegans” are a growing subculture that has opted out of capitalism by cutting spending habits and living off consumer waste. For lunch in her modest apartment, Madeline Nelson tossed a salad made with shaved carrots and lettuce she dug out of a Whole Foods dumpster. She flavored the dressing with powder she found in a trash bag on a curb in Chinatown. She baked bread made with yeast plucked from the garbage of a Middle Eastern grocery store.

Gross! Forget that! I went to Read/WriteWeb to see what they were up to: iFood.tv!

“A couple of week’s ago, we wrote about iFoods.tv, which was attempting to create “Facebook for foodies.” Recently, I was contacted by a very similarly named start up: iFood.tv (notice the lack of ’s’). If iFoods.tv (s) is trying to become Facebook for foodies, then iFood.tv (no s) has already nailed MySpace for foodies.”

Food again! That’s a coincidence! Next I went to my Netvibes page. SimpleSpark is one of my favorite feeds. The topic?

Biggest Menu: A community for you and your friends to share pictures of your favorite foods.

But not just Biggest Menu, they also had Crazy Menu! This was starting to get weird.

Crazy Menu What’s for lunch? Start your search here to find a great lunch near you.

An Alternative Search Engine feed that I have on Netvibes is TheFind.com. Their blog post?

Dinner on the Go!

“Some of you may assume that dinner on the go means “take-out” or “fast food,” right? Nope, I’m talking about a home cooked meal right in your car! Yep, you read that right…cooking in your car.

How do you perform this minor miracle from your car? It’s easy, if you have a Burton 12 Volt Lunch Box “Stove to Go” Cooker. The 12 volt cooker plugs into an outlet in your car and you can cook a casserole, soup, stew, or whatever you want. You can even heat up leftovers or a frozen meal!”

That’s it! I gave up and pulled in some alternative sites; specifically, the recipe makers.

foodieview. Instead of going to all your favorite recipe sites and searching them one by one, you can just use their search service. You can search by dish name, ingredient, cuisine, or chef.

RecipeMatcher. Start by typing in items in your pantry or your bar, and we’ll show you what you can make.



Recipes Engine. I think you should try the Random Recipe feature!

Now, let’s get serious (sort of).

If I Google my zip code and lunch, “22901 lunch” I get some local restaurants and if I click ‘map,” I can see where they are. Very nice. (See bottom left map).

But my alternative heart is rejoicing over -wait for it- “The Wheel of Lunch!” This is a good local search engine with a fantastic UI. Just perfect for Nitin and I to take Kaila to lunch. After you input your zip code, the wheel spins (turn your sound on) on a wheel of local lunch choices. If you get “spin again,” grab a wooden handle with your mouse and spin again.

I would love it if you would give the Wheel of Lunch a spin, so to speak, and come back and leave a comment.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 5:31 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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