Food Brands Are Extremely Thirsty on Valentine’s Day

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Happy Valentine’s Day. The #brands are thirsting for your love real hard, and they’re not afraid to show it. Food companies with millennial-focused marketing teams will take any opportunity to pull a stunt in hopes of going viral and drumming up some business. Here’s what’s going on in honor of this February 14.

Free wedding catering for lovebirds who get engaged at Panera Bread

The chain that is most famous for serving its soups, stews, and chowders inside hollowed-out loaves wants people to pop the question at one of its 2,000-plus locations. Those who do will be entered into a contest to have Panera cater their wedding for free. Bread bowls aren’t exactly typical wedding food, but for the five winners, cutting a major expense out of their big day would be a pretty good deal.

See more food brands here

Finding a Lost Strain of Rice, and Clues to Slave Cooking

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CHARLESTON, S.C. — Among the biologists, geneticists and historians who use food as a lens to study the African diaspora, rice is a particularly deep rabbit hole. So much remains unknown about how millions of enslaved Africans used it in their kitchens and how it got to those kitchens to begin with.

That’s what made the hill rice in Trinidad such a find.

The fat, nutty grain, with its West African lineage and tender red hull, was a favored staple for Southern home cooks during much of the 19th century. Unlike Carolina Gold, the versatile rice that until the Civil War was America’s primary rice crop, the hill rice hadn’t made Lowcountry plantation owners rich off the backs of slaves.

Read the full article here