Who would have thought it? Stress levels go up and chewing gum goes down? I tripped over that sticky bit of news within the news when I was reading an Irish Times article about Kraft wanting to buy Cadbury. Cadbury has been counting on its Trident gum brand to push sales for the past six years.

I dug a little deeper and came across several suggested reasons for the drop in chewing gum, from tobacco and smoke go together and smoking is down, to packaging changes make the cost of gum higher.

And in case you’ve ever wondered what exactly chewing gum and how it’s made, check out Cool Quiz’s detailed explanation. Answers.com has a nice, if out of date, history of gum.

But I’m still puzzled about why Americans are chewing less.

My favourite bit of newspaper (online for me) reading this summer is the refreshing and interesting series of articles by Jean-Claude Peclet that Geneva-based newspaper Le Temps has been running about chocolate, “Sur les pistes de chocolat”, tracing it from the Côte d’Ivoire to the Amazon, looking at sources around the world, looking at various business and economic issues – and I imagine we’ll eventually end up in Switzerland with the author, eating some excellent Swiss chocolate. Highly recommended!

Check out the gastronomy event details on our events page. Note that Geneve Saveurs is this weekend, 28 February and 1 March.

We’ve agreed, for the first time, to give away 50 tickets to an event – all you have to do is ask for them. Value CHF20.

We’d love to hear from you to know if you think we should do more of this.

Swiss Alpine milk cow near Crans-Montana, Valais, Switzerland

My favourite bit of Swiss news today is about the growth in Swiss cheese exports, with Emmental cheese, as always, leading the pack. It’s the one with holes often known elsewhere as Swiss cheese.

That of course overlooks the hundreds of other Swiss cheeses on the market. In 2008 Switzerland exported 61,190 tons of cheese, says swissinfo, which represents 22 million litres of milk. The cows next door to my Alpine chalet suddenly look more valuable to me.

Emmental sales are actually down very slightly, but raclette, the cheese we grill before we eat it, has seen its sales go up by 31%. So in the end, perhaps holes in cheese are not what we love in an economic downturn as much as something we can sink our teeth into – after venting a bit by setting fire to it.

Search for Swiss cheeses on the Switzerland Cheese Marketing site.

The latest media assault on English-speaking consumers in the region is being made on our tastebuds, and it appears to have happened by accident: as a niche group, we are being wooed to eat and drink more, and better, and more often. There is a sudden wealth of information out there for our apparently hungry fingertips.

The newest offering arrives Friday, 7 November, with the publication of the first-ever English version of the popular Swiss wine reference work, The Swiss Wine Guide. The CHF39 book contains introductions to all the wine-producing cantons, and it lists 450 of the top producers, with detailed information about them.

Ed. note: Ellen Wallace, owner of Zidao Communication, a digital publishing house that publishes GenevaLunch, was responsible for the English version of the book. The third editions of the French and German version of the book will also be published 7 November.

The Monday morning (3 November) feature on AngloInfo, a Geneva information site, was devoted to an overview of Swiss wines, a useful short guide.

At the end of October, Swisster, a commercial news web site aimed at multinationals and published by Swiss media giant Edipresse, began to publish a food and wine corner, moderated by Gail Mangold Vine.  (Ed. note: as a strong supporter of free Internet news, GenevaLunch does not generally link to sites that require payment, but some of this material is free according to Mangold Vine; subscriptions for access to most of the site is CHF300 a year). Mangold Vine produces an annual wine booklet for the canton of Geneva, Terrific Terroir.

Earlier in 2008 Anne Glusker, who has written for GenevaLunch, was hired by World Radio Switzerland for its new food programme, Stir It Up. Glusker describes herself as a foodie for many years, who has worked as an editor and writer for the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Whether there is truly a jump in interest in the subject of food and wine, or mainly an increase in interest in this potentially lucrative public, the English speakers, on the part of media remains to be seen. Will too much of a good thing make us all feel a bit – stuffed?

Meanwhile, cheers! Or santé!

Ad Age today explains the astonishing success of Spam,
the meat and not the other annoying stuff. I read this article all the way to
the end and I still just don’t get it: spam or Spam, it’s disgusting
stuff and we’d all be better off without it.

Sorry, Hormel, I’m a fan
of Spam-free living (spam-free, too). Give me peanut butter for my sandwich, any day.

Photo, sea of chocolate, Blondel’s in Lausanne – E Wallace 2007

A startling discovery when I moved to Switzerland was that Swiss people buy good chocolate for themselves. They buy it just to eat it. I came from a culture where you ate candy bars, a far cry from good chocolate, and  you offered the finer stuff as a gift. People still offer it, of course, and when I’ve interviewed heads of chocolate companies such as Favarger in Versoix and Lindt near Zurich, they are quick to point out that gift-giving is a basic ingredient in their businesses.

Now it seems that chocolate has, from the time it was discovered, been used to impress, to flatter, to show that you think well of someone. Cornell University researchers studying pottery vessels from 1100 BC in
Puerto Escondido, Honduras have discovered that people there fermented the pulp and made a beer-like drink from it, according to a story in Xinhua.

This was news to me, so I decided to hunt for details. I found them on the Cornell University web site, but in a news release dated 1998. Just goes to show: chocolate keeps well, at least in its web stories form.

But then, in fairness to Xinhua, which in the past five years has become a much stronger international news agency, I pursued this further and discovered that this week UPI, the US-based wire service, reported the story again, based on an article run a few days earlier by the Los Angeles Times. There I learned that the  old Honduran drink had an alcohol content of 5%. I also read that the Chinese were drinking wine 7,000 years ago, so Honduras is far being a record-holder for inventing alcoholic drinks with its chocolate.

But why the sudden interest in this story, which was earlier (1998) published by Science Daily as well IN that article I learned that chocolate drinks may account for the "remarkable longevity" of the community where the pottery was found. Why have wars when you can drink chcolate beer together?

It turns out the Guardian also picked up the story this week, adding a nice academic touch, that the chemical found in the pottery that showed the researchers that people drank alcoholic chocolate is called theobromine. And  lo and behold, the Guardian explains why we are all interested anew in this rather dated story: the news peg is that Cornell’s Henderson published a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the US, reporting on his 10 years of work in Honduras. Here’s Softpedia’s report, where one of the research team people is interviewed briefly.

Oddly enough, I can’t find the original PNAS article. Does it exist? Is this a recycled chocolate story that is nearly 10 years old? One thing is clear: we love to read about chocolate.

The Swiss president is talking today, Swiss national day, about patriotism and how one of Switzerland’s strengths has always been that a nation with very different cultural groups and languages has found a way to live together in peace for more than 800 years.

Like many Swiss, I squirm slightly at the idea of patriotism, which in too many countries takes on a negative  streak of "we’re better than the rest of the world." When you start out as part of the rest of the world and then join the club, whatever flag it bears, you see another side of the story.

And yet I love Switzerland because of its variety, in terms of the people, their ideas, the landscape. Politicians show their appreciation through speeches. I prefer to set the table with treats from all parts of Switzerland, each of which reminds me of a beautiful corner of this country. Here is part of what we’re eating at a mostly Swiss meal Wednesday (as a gesture to my American roots and the Swiss abroad – our Swiss son is in China – we’re having a T-bone steak, barbecued):

Photo, near sunset in the Valaisan Alps, the Val d’Anniviers in the distance

To drink: pinot gris from Domaine de la Colombe, F

Arch-ecologists at the WWF and arch-consumption backers at Coca-Cola raise their glasses to each other to improve water resources. Five years ago I would have thought this was a joke if someone had mentioned it.

This is what has just happened, with the two signing an agreement to save water resources around the world. True, $20 million is just a drop in the bucket, so to speak, for a company whose net operating revenue in 2006 was $24 billion.

Another $7 million was pledged by the soft-drinks manufacturer in March to work with USAid on water resources. I hope all the skeptics in the room slink

Read more…

I couldn’t really rationalize including an Australian economist’s blog post on milk prices in a news article about Swiss milk prices but one of the things I love about the Internet is the things you fall upon when you are doing research. Despite being married to an economist whose specialty is developing economies (so I hear comments about government subsidies while watching BBC news on TV) and despite the lovely Swiss cows in a barn near me, I am floored at how complex it is to put a price on a glass of milk. Seems to me it should all be simpler, but on the other hand, I’m not ready to milk a cow.