A golden marketing and do-good opportunity for McDonald's may have lost its luster.

The fast food giant found itself at the center of big news this week in Cleveland, when Charles Ramsey freed three women and a girl who police say were held hostage for years. Ramsey became a viral video star, and in interview after interview, he told TV anchors that he had gone to McDonald's before rescuing the women and rushed to their aid carrying a "half-eaten Big Mac."
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Editor's note: The Southern Foodways Alliance delves deep in the history, tradition, heroes and plain old deliciousness of Southern food. Today's contributor, Emily Wallace, writes about food, art, and design.

The pattern is familiar: a small, circular border hatched with short, shallow lines; an interior ringed with four-leaf clovers. I craned my neck to glimpse a blueprint of one of the world’s best-known designs - that of the Oreo cookie. A copy of the line drawing for its emboss, drafted in 1952, hangs above a closet door in the Chapel Hill home of William J. Turnier.

Turnier handed me a step stool. “His name is in the lower right corner,” he told me. And I climbed up for a look at the print in an attempt to answer one of modern life’s biggest questions—one that had recently appeared as a headline on The New York Times website - “Who Made That Oreo Emboss?” The query, posed by designer Hillary Greenbaum, caught my eye, and I clicked the link in hopes to learn more. What I found near the top of the comments section was Turnier. He appeared as “Bill, Chapel Hill, NC,” and claimed that his father, William A. Turnier, was the artist.
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Find yourself befuddled at the butcher counter by terms like "top loin chop" and "pork rump"? A new consumer-friendly universal meat labeling system is about to help cut through the confusion.

Two of the country's largest meat councils, the National Pork Board and the Beef Checkoff Program, have unanimously agreed to implement a more uniform and descriptive labeling system for commercially-sold cuts. The revised Uniform Retail Meat Identification Standards or URMIS was developed in conjunction with the with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Marketing Service and Food Safety Inspection Service, and introduces a new common name standard designed to help consumers make more informed shopping decisions.

The system, which will apply to 350 cuts of beef and pork (with lamb and veal to join later) introduces a label that includes:
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2013 marks a milestone for the Girl Scouts, with a century of building "courage, confidence, and character" in young girls across the United States and beyond. The organization also celebrates 95 years of one of its most popular programs: the sale of its famously irresistible cookies.

For the 2013 cookie selling season, which takes place between January and April of each year, Girl Scouts of the USA has revamped its business approach, taking innovative measures to broaden customer access and overall appeal.

And these girls will stop at nothing to make their sale.
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The Wall Street Journal labeled it a “Halloween horror story.” The Internet called it something else: a “pumpkin panic.”

During the first week of October, the Journal reported that Starbucks stores around the country were running out of the syrup used to make its Pumpkin Spice Latte — one of several fall drinks the chain releases seasonally, for a limited time.

Customers, like those who frequent StarbucksGossip.com, were shocked.

“WHAT IS HAPPENING?” wrote one user.

The answer is simple.
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