NEXT TO GLOBAL warming, perhaps the most critical and urgent issue of the day? The supply and demand for basic resources as the world population -- a billion here, a billion there -- continues to explode. In a recent study, the McKinsey Global Institute urges companies and governments to launch a "resource revolution" to improve resource productivity, and to meet the vast global need for energy, materials, food and water in the near future. A McKinsey e-mail to subscribers reads:
HATE SHOPPING. BUT like the sleek new breed of retail centers that have risen in the United States and globally in recent years, from Santana Row in Silicon Valley to the Menlyn Park Shopping Centre in South Africa.
Adapting to consumer trends, developers and designers are reinventing the old-style malls, transforming them into destination sites and "lifestyle centers" with live entertainment, townhouses, gourmet restaurants and bars and other cultural attractions. Consumers of all cultures love to dine, stroll, relax in stylish townsquares -- not in sterile, gloomy malls.
COMFORT FOOD COMES in all tastes and colors, and the streets and homes of America have been filled with culinary diversity for as long as folks have migrated here. That's two or three centuries, eh? So it's good to see the Food Network discover even more stuff in the multicultural heartland, a sprawling diaspora of down-home comfort food that us common folk can enjoy. The network's newest star is Aarti Sequeira, and her show, Aarti Party debuted this week. Beyond the glitzy clothes and makeup, her food is real, urban, earthy.
STORY IN THEFreakonomics blog that makes your stomach growl. It's on copying the Korean taco, made famous by the Kogi Korean BBQ-To-Gofood truck in Los Angeles run by Mark Manguera, Caroline Shin-Manguera and chef Roy Choi. (Freakonomics.blogs.nytimes,"Who Owns the Korean Taco?" by Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman.) Capitalism being capitalism, the wildly successful food concept has been blatantly copied by many others. Conventional wisdom says that copyright law should protect creators, but that doesn't seem to apply to food, according to law professors Kal Raustiala from UCLA and Chris Sprigman of the University of Virginia.
