This place is enormous, and packed to the gills: to use a term borrowed from the Oreo people, what we have here is a Double Stuf event. Picture a stadium–sized exhibition space in New York City, filled with booths displaying tempting-looking snacks, sweets, and savouries. Behind these irresistibly designed and invitingly lit items stand busy, [...]

“Like buttah!” Who could forget Mike Meyers on Saturday Night Live, sending up his fantastically Jewish mother-in law in the classic sketch Coffee Talk With Linda Richman? Oh. My. God. The poufy hair, the glamazon shoulder pads, the most perfect nails evah? The hilarious diva worship: “This show is dedicated as always to Barbra Joan [...]

Stop – do you hear that noise? Is it the rumble of distant thunder? And what’s that colossal shadow? The ground shakes, the birds flee, as – terrifyingly – a huge cheese trundles into view. Laugh not, people of Ontario – in the very near future an 8,900 pound chunk of cheese will be coming [...]

Salt Spring Island Cheese Co. Basil Chevre 140g, $12.99 available at gourmet and specialty food stores and at WholeFoods stores. West Coast goats won’t give it up for just any guy with a stool and a spoon. In 1991 Torontonian David Wood shuttered his fabled gourmet food emporium and moved the family to B.C.’s Salt [...]

We all scream for ice cream – everybody knows that. But who knew that we’ve been yelling for nearly a century? Interestingly, the very first manufactured ice cream bar – invented by Christian Kent Nelson in Onawa, Iowa, in 1920 – was dubbed by its creator the ‘I-Scream’ bar. When Nelson and chocolate maker Russell [...]

Shelf Life adores heavy thinkers – researchers, professors, boffins of all kinds. We also love ice cream, particularly chocolate. But we’re not sure we’d mention both of them in the same breath; academics and ice cream would seem to go together like Isaac Newton and, well, Fig Newtons. But no – it turns out that [...]

It’s been a long day’s journey into cheese. Listening to Loverboy’s greatest hits; watching The O.C.; perusing our well-thumbed copy of UFOs Are Real; discussing our cheese taste test – for Shelf Life, these last twenty-four hours have had a rubbery, yellow-orange flavour to them. Along the way, we’ve discovered why cheddar cheese, in particular, [...]

At first glance, Shelf Life wouldn’t seem to have much in common with a tub of plain low-fat yogurt. But there are eerie similarities. For example: yogurt starts life as milk; Shelf Life started life by drinking milk. Later, mysterious processes leave the milk fermented and sour – which sums up Shelf Life’s Christmas in [...]

Ice cream really is food for smiley faces: market research has shown that the sweet cold stuff evokes so many pleasant associations that the mere mention of it – or, more effectively, a picture of an ice cream cone – stimulates an involuntary smile response from many consumers. Chuckles ‘n mirth, then, will be the [...]