Iowa Farmers vs. Animal Rights Activists, Restaurateur vs. Yelper

Farm Sanctuary/Flickr

Move along, nothing to see here.

​​ Today's notes on national stories, local trends, random tastes, and other bycatch dredged up from the food media.

1. No-shoot zones. Yesterday, HuffPo posted an article about an Iowa bill that that has been approved by both the state senate and house. It would outlaw filming on farms, and is intended to keep animal-rights groups from posting videos like this one (don't click "play" unless you own copies of every Halloween movie ever made). When did farms become national-security sites? I've found some of those videos shocking and others merely exploitative, but I can't imagine the Iowa law, if it passes, would withstand a legal challenge.

2. Revenge is sour. Very sour. What should a restaurateur do with a customer who's had a bad meal and has spread vitriol across multiple online review sites? If you're Bruce Buschel, owner of Southfork Kitchen in Bridgehampton, N.Y., and author of the infamous "100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do," you one-up your tormentor by writing a long, falsely apologetic blog post in the New York Times about the customer. I started reading the post with deep sympathy for both diner and restaurateur, and by paragraph eight couldn't figure out which one was a bigger tool.

3. Ronald McDonald dons Valentino. When we were in Auckland last fall, my boyfriend and I kept laughing at how the KFC in Ponsonby, the city's equivalent of Hayes Valley, looked like it should be serving modernist cuisine (we weren't the only Americans who were gobsmacked at the sight). McDonald's in London: even more styley, it turns out.