Take one part pub crawl and one part contest mixed vigorously with 10 bartenders on a mini bus, and what do you get? One spirited competition to determine who makes the best drink using pisco, the South American brandy making a comeback in the United States.

Long a fixture in liquor cabinets and bars in Peru and Chile, pisco is popping up in the United States amid an obsession with craft cocktails. From January to July, export sales of the South American grape brandy grew to $2.3 million, up 139% over the same period in 2010, fueled by increased sales in the United States, Peruvian news agency Andina reports.
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A Chinese delicacy may soon disappear from California restaurants if a bill to ban the sale of shark fins makes it through the state Senate.

A symbol of wealth and luxury, shark fin soup was once prized by Chinese emperors for its rarity. Today, it's typically served at weddings and banquets to demonstrate a host's good fortune.

But it comes at a high price, for one's wallet and the environment. Shark fins, which fetch up to $600 per pound, are sometimes acquired through the controversial practice of finning: a shark's fins are cut off and the rest of its body is tossed into the ocean.

California, home to 1.1 million Chinese-Americans, is one of the largest importers of shark fins outside Asia. The California Shark Protection Act would make it illegal to possess, sell or trade shark fins.

The state Senate is expected to take up the legislation next week.

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Hosting a dinner party is not for the faint of heart. All the shopping, cleaning, cooking and schmoozing, followed by more cleaning, can suck the verve out of the most enthusiastic party planner.

Then there are people like Jen and Ryan Hidinger, who have 10 strangers over for dinner about twice a month. For them, it’s a labor of love with a specific goal: to create an experience that will make guests come back for more. That way, the Atlanta couple will have an instant following by the time they open a restaurant, if all goes planned, by the end of the year.
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World-renowned chef, author and Emmy winning television personality Anthony Bourdain visits Los Angeles' Koreatown in the next episode of "Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown," airing Sunday, April 21, at 9 p.m. ET. Follow the show on Twitter and Facebook. This story ran in 2011, and we're sharing it again as Bourdain explores the role of food in the Korean community.

Sitting over a steaming bowl of bibimbap, Helen Kim Ho recalled her father's cardinal rule when it came to food.

"He didn't feel like he'd had a good meal unless it made him sweat," Ho said as she held a chunk of the mixed rice between chopsticks over her bowl and waited for it to cool.

Piping hot dishes with an extra spicy kick are staples of Korean cuisine that transport the first-generation Korean American to her parents' kitchen. While her heart may be linked to the traditions of her family, her palate has been tempered by nearly a lifetime in the United States.

"I love Korean food but I feel just as much at home with American food," said Ho, whose family moved to the United States when she was three.
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Not all eggs are created equal in the eyes of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Kinder Eggs, a popular European chocolate egg that contains a toy inside, is banned from importation into the United States because it contains a "non-nutritive object embedded in it."

With the Easter holiday around the corner, the agency issued the reminder this week, warning that the candy is considered unsafe for children under 3. Last year, Customs and Border Protection seized 25,000 of them in 1,700 incidents.

Read the FULL STORY: "Easter reminder: Kinder Eggs banned in the United States"

The nation’s leading vegetarian news and lifestyle magazine has admitted it “screwed up” by attempting to pass off meaty recipe photos as meatless in the pages of its magazine and online.

VegNews issued a mea culpa last week after a blogger outed the publication for using images of chicken and hamburgers from a royalty-free image service to illustrate recipes such as “veganized” Brunswick stew and “Magical Meatball Burgers.” The VegNews team defended its actions, attributing them to a lack of images of vegetarian dishes and the high costs associated with image-gathering, especially for an independent publication like VegNews.

This week, the magazine went a step further, vowing to never again let images of cooked animals carcasses grace its pages and promising to host a photo bank of vegan stock images.
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Many salivate over the mere image of a juicy hamburger or a glistening rack of ribs, but vegetarians aren't usually among them.

But apparently, that's what the readers of VegNews, the nation's leading vegan magazine, have been doing for years without their knowledge.

With the help of an anonymous reader tip, the author of the vegan blog, quarrygirl.com, accused VegNews of using food images of meat in its magazine and website and passing them off as meatless. The allegation prompted the San Francisco-based publication to confess that it had, "from time to time," used stock images that turned out not to be totally animal-free.

"The pictures we've been drooling over for years are actually of MEAT!" she charged.

Read Vegan magazine in a stew over meaty stock photos

Louise Morgan wishes she'd known about "plant-based" diets when she raised her family in rural Georgia some 40 years ago. Maybe, she says, it would have saved her husband's life.

"We didn't have things like that back then. Here in the South we feed our men their Southern food. He loved his fried chicken and ribs, and that's how I raised my family," says Morgan, an 80-year-old retired biologist from Big Canoe, Georgia.

He died at 52 of a heart attack while watching TV, she says. "During a Braves game. Killed him instantly."

"If I had to do it again, I'd do it differently. But we just didn't know about that stuff back then."

Morgan's zeal for a different way of life prompted her to pile into a car with friends from her retirement community and drive 50 miles south to Atlanta for last month's screening of the independent documentary, "Forks Over Knives."
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Starbucks' signature siren is getting an updated look to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the global coffee chain.

The stripped-down logo features the siren alone, without the "Starbucks Coffee" encircling her image, an homage to the ubiquitous chain's modest beginnings in the Seattle's Pike Place Market in Washington state, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said.

Read the rest of "Starbucks unveils new logo" on CNN's "This Just In" blog.