i.want.world

Think about apples for a second. There are Granny Smiths, Red Delicious, Fuji, etc. Now think about bananas. There are just, like, bananas, right? The only bananas that Americans eat — and they eat more of them than they do apples and oranges combined — are the Cavendish, which is just one variety out of at least one thousand. And now, a fungus is threatening to destroy pretty much every Cavendish in existence. How real a possibility is it that all of our bananas will be wiped out? It already happened once.

This week's New Yorker has a huge story about the banana industry that touches on all of the familiar complaints against it: the inherent lack of sustainability of their product, companies aiding anti-government military forces in banana-growing countries. But what it mostly focuses on is Tropical Race Four, a sort of super-fungus that turns Cavendish bananas into mush. So scientists are trying to build a better banana! One that is resistant! Here's the thing: It doesn't sound like they're making a lot of progress.

One of the most interesting pieces of info in the story is that this already happened once. See, the bananas that were originally eaten all over the U.S. weren't the Cavendish variety, they were Gros Michel bananas. (They were also, by all accounts, far tastier.) But a fungus called Race One, which is closely related to Tropical Race Four, wiped them out in the first half of the twentieth century. Really, one of the main reasons we have Cavendish bananas is because they're resistant to Race One. But it sounds like we might not have them for much longer either.

Actually, this whole banana thing has bothered me since I saw a New York Times op-ed a few years ago that is VERY similar to this New Yorker one. In an age of super-local, sustainable, organic, blah blah blah, how have bananas — genetically altered fruit shipped in from tropical climates — managed to escape scrutiny? We don't really want to admit this, but we used to be convinced that something like heirloom bananas would become the next big dessert trend (right about the time this book came out). But then, nothing! People just kept on eating Bananas Foster and peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches.

But maybe now's the time for other banana varieties — Some are fuzzy! Some have striped skin! — to enter the U.S. market?

We Have No Bananas [NYer]

It’s straight out of 1950s science fiction: an entire country connected by food-transporting pipelines, sending baked beans and smoked kippers sailing between London and Liverpool at 60 miles per hour. And it’s arguably more sensible than what we’re already doing.

In the United Kingdom, 8 percent of all carbon dioxide mixed into the atmosphere comes from the diesel gas used to move around food trucks. That’s a ton of unnecessary pollution, particularly when you consider one estimate suggests only a small percentage of that gas is actually needed to move the food if things were run efficiently. That’s where Foodtubes enters the picture.

The brainchild of a British team of academics, engineers, and project planners, Foodtubes calls for the creation of high-speed food pipelines throughout the UK. Each major city and center food production would be linked with a pipeline, and the cities would also have their own internal pipelines to get the food to various different neighborhoods.

The food would sail along in small capsules at upwards of 60 miles per hour. As many as 900,000 capsules could be in circulation in the nearly 2,000 miles of pressurized pipe, all of which would be controlled by smart grids that would keep food from crashing into each other. To give some semblance of order, the capsules would generally be organized into little trains of about 300 linked capsules, each spaced about a meter apart.

Not sure if they’ve considered what they will do with all those suddenly future unemployed truck drivers though.

11-year-old Birke Baehr presents his take on a major source of our food — far-away and less-than-picturesque industrial farms. Keeping farms out of sight promotes a rosy, unreal picture of big-box agriculture, he argues, as he outlines the case to green and localize food production.

I believe that individual freedom is at the core of any social institutions and within any realm of social endeavour. I am a pure advocate of individual liberty and freedom of action and thought with very few limited exceptions and my life has reflected that very fact ever since my teenage years before I even knew what liberty really means.

I believe that individuals, neither groups of any kind nor states, are the masters of the self and that governments should neither posses greater nor lesser power than the individual. The individual "must exist for his own sake," Ayn Rand wrote in 1962, "neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself."

For these reasons, I seek out in any way possible where I might be able to change the fabric of the misinformed through collective reason and the voice of the individual. I firmly believe that it is only through reason and logic thought that one can acquire knowledge and mend, shape his surroundings.

Based on this notion, the idea of a platform where one can freely contribute and empirically elucidate the concepts and methods of all agricultural processes is essential and of a pressing matter. Proof of departure from and violation of the loosely established policies is known and rampant. With respect to aggressive lobbyism, it remains a known yet ignored fact that progress and reforms within the political spectrum is futile and knowledge of this, though known by many, remains unacted upon.

My purpose behind Diplomatic Goods, which are the results of Diplomatic Standards, is to educate, show and protect the nature and our ideal view of our food and agricultural systems through objective reasoning instead of mindlessly delegating this undertaking to the governments or private enterprises.

It is known that any form of centralization weakens the bargaining power of the individual and thus your liberty within the societal framework. Thus, an unaffiliated platform is vital in forming a decentralized collective group of individuals of every circumstance and privilege who seek to deem empirically and reasonably for themselves what is of nutritional value to them or not - what is of sustainability to them and to the planet or not.We are to collectively form an intelligent group of members who can freely partake in Discourses to form a global consensus on agricultural methods and processes.

With Diplomatic Standards, I hope to issue a call to volition on each of everyone's part to partake in an endevour that's here to establish a new policy and a new guideline that will ultimately reflect us and the intended quality of all our foods. It is a stepping stone at transforming and democratizing an active, centrally controlled piece of a policy that almost all have deemed to be insufficient and full of biases.

It is one of many solutions that I know we owe to the planet in regard to our environmental concerns and to ourselves - after all, we all do eat. Therefore, Sustainability and Transparency are the two main core concept and principles with which I hope to guide the ideas of the Diplomatic Standards Community in working to form collectively defined standards for organic goods.

High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) has, over the past few decades, gradually displaced cane and beet sugar as the sweetener of choice for soft drinks, candy and prepared foods. In recent years, there have been a growing number claims that HFCS is a significant health risk to consumers, responsible for obesity, diabetes, heart disease and a wide variety of other illnesses.

In fact, there are large amounts of experimental data supporting the claims that high levels of fructose in the diet can cause hyperlipidemia (high levels of fats — triglycerides primarily — in the blood), obesity and insulin resistance and may lead to cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes (for a good recent review, see here). A high-fructose diet is thought to cause hyperlipidemia (and probably visceral obesity) because fructose is preferentially “sent” to fatty acid synthesis and it also reduces the activity of lipoprotein lipase (for a good review, see here). The mechanisms by which fructose causes insulin resistance and cardiovascular disease are less clear (see, for example here, here and here), but there is no shortage of hypotheses. Despite the fact that some of the underlying mechanisms are not clear, the evidence seems pretty solid that there are real risks to high fructose consumption.

However, the question remains — is HFCS more of a health risk than other sweeteners? Many of the sources that demonize HFCS list alternative sweeteners — cane sugar, honey, agave syrup, etc. — that they claim are healthier than HFCS, but those claims usually rest primarily on the fact that these alternatives to HFCS are “natural” rather than any actual data showing that they are safer than HFCS.

Sugar 101:

Before we can properly analyze these claims, we need to understand a bit about sugar. To begin with, what is sugar? To most people, sugar is the white granulated solid that they find in the sugar bowl. In reality, sugar is a much broader term. There are two general classes of sugars — aldose and ketose — and over twenty individual sugars (monosaccharides), if you limit yourself to only those found in nature. Of these, only a few play any significant role in human nutrition, primarily glucose, fructose and galactose (ribose, a sugar that forms the backbone of DNA and RNA, also plays a minor nutritional role).

Further complicating the issue, there are also sugars — disaccharides — that are compounds made of two monosaccharides covalently bound together. The most common of these is sucrose, a compound made by joining one molecule of glucose to one molecule of fructose. Sucrose is the sugar in the average sugar bowl. It is also the sugar in brown sugar, molasses, cane sugar, beet sugar and is the major component of maple syrup (and maple sugar). Another common disaccharide is lactose (milk sugar), which is a combination of glucose and galactose. Less commonly encountered is maltose, a combination of two molecules of glucose.

Starches, such as corn starch, are also sugar. They are made up of long interlinked chains (polymers, also known as polysaccharides) of individual sugars (usually glucose). Cellulose, the major component of paper and wood, is also a polymer of glucose (with different bond geometries). Insect and crustacean shells are made of a sugar polymer known as chitin (also a major component of fungal cell walls). We literally live in a world of sugar.

One final note about sugars — humans only absorb monosaccharides; no matter what form the sugar enters the digestive tract, it is only absorbed after it is broken down to its component monosaccharides (there are, as usual in biology, a few minor exceptions to this rule). There are a variety of enzymes — amylases, disaccharidases, etc. — that perform this function. Any disaccharide or polysaccharide that isn’t broken down (such as the raffinose and stachyose in beans and many other gas-causing foods) remains inside the gut, providing food for our gut bacteria.

“Natural” Sweeteners:

Now, let’s take a look at some of the sugar-based sweeteners in common use today. Honey was probably the first sweetener — at least in the part of the world where honey bees are native. Honey is about 82% sugar, with almost all the remainder being water. The sugar in honey is 43% glucose, 50% fructose, 4% galactose, 2% maltose, 1% sucrose and trace amounts of other sugars. As mentioned earlier, it is considered by many to be a natural sweetener that is a healthy alternative to HFCS.

Another sweetener used in ancient times — especially in regions where honey bees were not native — is tree sap. The most famous of these is the sap of sugar maple trees, used to make maple syrup and, when crystallized, maple sugar. Natural maple syrup is 60% sugar, with that sugar being 95% sucrose, 4% glucose and 1% fructose.

Fruit juices also have an ancient history of use as sweetening agents and — not surprisingly — are often cited as natural and healthy alternatives to HFCS. The sugar content of fruits varies with the type of fruit and even with the variety. Apples, for instance, are a bit over 10% sugar by weight, with that sugar being 57% fructose, 23% glucose and 20% sucrose. Peaches, in contrast, are 8.4% sugar by weight with that sugar being 57% sucrose, 23% glucose and 18% fructose. Pears – the most common fruit juice used in sweetening – are 9.8% sugar, with that sugar being 64% fructose, 28% glucose and 8% sucrose. Table grapes are about 15% sugar, with the sugars being 53% fructose and 47% glucose.

Sucrose, the disaccharide in common table sugar, was originally obtained in ralatively pure form from sugar cane, which can only grow in the tropics. The high cost of cane suger led to a search for alternative sources. As early as the 1700’s, sucrose was being extracted from sugar beets, but it took both selective breeding of sugar beets to increase their sucrose content and improvements in the extraction process to make beet sugar economically viable. By the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, sucrose from sugar beets had outstripped cane sugar in Europe and the U.S. Sugar beets have the advantage of growing throughout the temperate zone, closer to the demand. Just to be clear, beet sugar and case sugar are indistinguishable — they are exactly the same chemical compound (sucrose).

The rise of HFCS:

So, with all of these sugar-based sweeteners available, what prompted the development of HFCS?

Corn syrup is a relatively recent arrival as a sweetener; it had to wait until food processors discovered how to take corn starch (which, like most starches, is a polymer composed of long interlinked chains of glucose molecules) and break it down into isolated glucose molecules using the enzymes amylase and maltase. Commercial amounts of corn syrup were available by the middle of the 20th century. Corn syrup was so much cheaper than sucrose that it saw extensive use as a sucrose substitute for thickening foods and to help retain moisture. It wasn’t much used solely as a sweetener because it isn’t as sweet as sucrose.

The fact is that not all sugars are equally sweet. If we assign sucrose (table sugar) a sweetness of 100%, glucose has a sweetness of 60 – 75% (on a gram-per-gram basis) and fructose has a sweetness of 140 – 170%. (Note: the sweetness of fructose varies with its conformation, and so will differ under different circumstances) Candy and soft drink manufacturers exploited the greater sweetness of fructose even before HFCS was available by using what is called “invert sugar”. Invert sugar is sucrose that has been treated with a weak acid solution and then recrystallized (to get rid of the acid). This treatment causes a portion of the sucrose to break apart into fructose and glucose. Although the glucose part is less sweet than sucrose, the fructose is so much sweeter that the overall effect is to get more sweetness with less sugar. This allowed the manufacturers to use less sugar and thereby save money, even though invert sugar was more expensive than plain sucrose.

In 1957, a process was developed to convert some of the glucose in corn syrup to fructose, yielding a product that was 42% fructose and 58% glucose. This dramatically increased its sweetness, making a product that was a commercially viable competitor to sucrose as a sweetener. This was HFCS 42, which has a sweetness — gram-per-gram — slightly greater than sucrose (110%).

The primary advantage of HFCS 42 to food manufacturers was its low cost — much lower than the cost of sucrose. Secondary advantages were that it retained moisture better than sucrose (twice as many molecules), was slightly sweeter than sucrose (so less was needed), was in a liquid form and didn’t caramelize as readily as sucrose (this last one could be an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on the use).

Later, HFCS manufacturers began putting some of their HFCS 42 through separation columns to produce syrup that was 90% fructose (HFCS 90). Today, the bulk of the HFCS 90 production is used to make corn syrup with 55% fructose, known as HFCS 55, although a very small amount is used in some reduced-calorie confections (HFCS 90 is about 60% sweeter per gram than sucrose, which allows a 35% reduction in the amount of sugar used).

With the introduction of HFCS 55, which is 25% sweeter than sucrose, food manufacturers found that the slightly increased price (which was still less than sucrose) was more than offset by the fact that they needed less of it to get the same level of sweetness.

That’s right, HFCS allowed food manufacturers to use less sugar — and thus fewer sugar calories — in their products without compromising sweetness. Using sucrose — cane or beet sugar — would require 20% more sugar (and 20% more sugar calories) than using HFCS 55.

How safe are other sweeteners compared to HFCS?:

Still, none of this alters the fact that a diet high in fructose has been shown to cause — or at least contribute to — hyperlipidemia, obesity, insulin resistance and cardiac disease. However, those who have been paying attention will have noticed that HFCS is not the ONLY sweetener that contains significant amounts of fructose.

In fact, sucrose — even “natural” cane sugar — is 50% fructose once it is digested and absorbed. While this is 20% less than the fructose content of HFCS 55, food manufacturers need to use less (about 20% less) HFCS 55 to get the same sweetness, so it’s a wash as far as fructose content.

Honey, long touted as a “healthy” and “natural” alternative to evil HFCS, is also 50% fructose. Agave syrup (also called agave nectar), often promoted as a healthy alternative to HFCS (especially in diabetics), is very high in fructose, although there is some disagreement over how much fructose it contains. According to the USDA, the sugar in cooked agave is 87% fructose (due to breakdown of fructans — a starch-like polymer of fructose — in the plant when it is cooked). A wholesale supplier of agave syrup, however, lists the fructose as 70 — 75% of the total sugar in their syrup. Either way, agave syrup is higher in fructose than any other natural sweetener (and any form of HFCS except HFCS 90).

Even fruit juices (and what could be more natural and healthy than fruit juice?) are 40 — 70% fructose, if you count the fructose in sucrose. And for those who argue that ingesting sucrose delays the absorption of fructose, Monsivais et al (2007) showed that sucrose breaks down spontaneously in carbonated beverages (and, presumably, all acid solutions), with 50% of the sucrose being hydrolyzed to fructose and glucose within the first 30 days after bottling.

Finally, a study that directly compared the short-term effects of fructose, HFCS and sucrose showed that they are indistinguishable.

What does all this mean?:

So, what are the take-home messages from all of this?

HFCS 42 and HFCS 55 have essentially the same amount of fructose, as a fraction of their total sugar, as honey, sucrose (cane or beet sugar) or maple syrup/sugar (to be agonizingly precise, HFCS has slightly less, and HCFS 55 has slightly more).
HFCS 42 and HFCS 55 have an equal or smaller amount of fructose, as a fraction of their total sugar, as many commonly consumed fruits.
Agave syrup has higher fructose content than any type of HFCS except HFCS 90.
For people who are worried about their health or their children’s health — and who isn’t, these days — the data suggest that the best choice is to reduce intake of all sweeteners containing fructose. That includes not only the evil HFCS, but also natural cane sugar, molasses (which is just impure cane sugar), brown sugar (ditto) and honey. Even “unsweetened” (no added sugar) fruit juices need to be considered when limiting your family’s fructose intake.

Finally, the best nutritional advice is to eat everything in moderation — and that includes sweets. While a diet high in fructose may increase your risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease — maybe — a fructose-free diet is not guaranteed to prevent those diseases. Eat a variety of foods, including a small amount of sweets, get enough exercise, watch your (and your children’s) weight and see your doctor for regular health check-ups.

And stop worrying that HFCS is poisoning you and your children.

Haitians are a resilient group of people. The evidence is very much clear as it was back when I was there five years ago and, even today, as I browse the news that's coming from the despoiled anomaly island.

As it was distinctly predicted, one of the recent earthquake's many repercussions is already in sight. Food scarcity now leaves many in desperate situations where families are resorting to eating stored seeds to feed the unending arrivals of the estimated 500,000 people who migrated to the rural areas after the quake. When compared to two years ago, when prices had risen by 56% compared to 12 months prior, that raised the expectation of starvation and mass hunger, violent unrest had swept through Haiti and the spectre of famine soared. This predicament at this moment seems very much real again. The effects of a 30% price increased in bread last week sparked riots in Mozambique which left 13 dead.

International food prices were up 5 per cent in August, the biggest one-month increase since last November, said the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, which has called a one-day meeting on Sept. 24 to examine the global markets for grains and rice. European wheat prices hit more than €231 ($308 Canadian) a tonne last week, which was close to the two-year high of €236 set in August, largely because drought has hammered the crop in Russia. Corn prices are at their highest level since mid-2009. Sugar and oilseed prices are also climbing.

This all comes after the recent extension of the Russian export ban on cereals. The FAO however maintains that this is not to be held as a 'crisis' and attempts to pacify the threat as the it could cause unintended market overreactions, which, the FAO claims, is what drove up the prices of the last food crisis.

It seems to me that the supply side may be the culprit this time around as it was argued that the causes of the 2007-2008 food price crisis was due to unforseen changes in the demand side where population growth, shifting diets (the nutrition transition), urbanisation, unsustainable lifestyles, and increasing private investor demand contributed heavily. We are indeed about to inaugurate what Dupont and Thirwell called 'a new era of food insecurity.' Yet I have no fear in terms of Haiti's withstanding yet another hardship whether natural or not.

Locavores' main argument remain the fact that due to an exuberant amount of energy and costs that are entailed in transporting a tomato across the country, one is held morally to eat locally as it is an environmentally and sustainably sound way of reducing one's greenhouse gas foot print. Steven Landsburg mocks this kind of micro-mindedness as follows:

You should care about all those costs. And here are some other things you should care about: How many grapes were sacrificed by growing that California tomato in a place where there might have been a vineyard? How many morning commutes are increased, and by how much, because that New York greenhouse displaces a conveniently located housing development? What useful tasks could those California workers perform if they weren’t busy growing tomatoes? What about the New York workers? What alternative uses were there for the fertilizers and the farming equipment — or better yet, the resources that went into producing those fertilizers and farming equipment — in each location?

In any case, misrepresentation of information is very much abundant when anyone is trying to advocate one's pride agenda. It is the nature of things. As demonstrated by the guy whom Landsburg ridicules:

It is also an almost complete misrepresentation of reality, as those numbers reflect the entire energy cost of producing lettuce from seed to dinner table, not just transportation. Studies have shown that whether it’s grown in California or Maine, or whether it’s organic or conventional, about 5,000 calories of energy go into one pound of lettuce. Given how efficient trains and tractor-trailers are, shipping a head of lettuce across the country actually adds next to nothing to the total energy bill.

The real energy hog, it turns out, is not industrial agriculture at all, but you and me. Home preparation and storage account for 32 percent of all energy use in our food system, the largest component by far. A single 10-mile round trip by car to the grocery store or the farmers’ market will easily eat up about 14,000 calories of fossil fuel energy. Just running your refrigerator for a week consumes 9,000 calories of energy.

In all fairness, Budiansky, the guy quoted right above, maintains the argument that energy consumption should not be of paramount concern. It is rather the given set of values that the locavores choose to optimize. If they were to have chosen to advocate that families did not need a second or a third refrigerator neither a standalone freezer in their home nor a dishwasher, the locavores' argument could have well worth its case. It is a fine thing to eat locally but this is not a virtue in itself. Rather, when presented with the overall picture, the relative amount of energy spent on farming is of minute pertinence compared to our well-being and in the yield of the land.

A group of investigators, named the Monitoring Group, that was sent by the Security Council to Somalia has released an encyclopedic, 110 page study of the criminal situation in Somalia. The media, however, has fanatically picked up on the diversion of food sent by the World Food Program from the needy to armed radical Islamist and corrupt contractors. Browsing over the report, however, I came across a short, rather interesting hidden explanation in the annex of the business model of the Somali pirates which is just remarkable:

A basic piracy operation requires a minimum eight to twelve militia prepared to stay at sea for extended periods of time, in the hopes of hijacking a passing vessel. Each team requires a minimum of two attack skiffs, weapons, equipment, provisions, fuel and preferably a supply boat. The costs of the operation are usually borne by investors, some of whom may also be pirates.

To be eligible for employment as a pirate, a volunteer should already possess a firearm for use in the operation. For this 'contribution', he receives a 'class A' share of any profit. Pirates who provide a skiff or a heavier firearm, like an RPG or a general purpose machine gun, may be entitled to an additional A-share. The first pirate to board a vessel may also be entitled to an extra A-share. At least 12 other volunteers are recruited as militiamen to provide protection on land if a ship is hijacked, In addition, each member of the pirate team may bring a partner or relative to be part of this land-based force. Militiamen must possess their own weapon, and receive a 'class B' share - usually a fixed amount equivalent to approximately US$15,000.

If a ship is successfully hijacked and brought to anchor, the pirates and the militiamen require food, drink, qaad, fresh clothes, cell phones, air time, etc. The captured crew must also be cared for. In most cases, these services are provided by one or more suppliers, who advance the costs in anticipation of reimbursement, with a significant margin of profit, when ransom is eventually paid.

When ransom is received, fixed costs are the first to be paid out. These are typically:
* Reimbursement of supplier(s)
* Financier(s) and/or investor(s): 30% of the ransom
* Local elders: 5 to 10 %of the ransom (anchoring rights)
* Class B shares (approx. $15,000 each): militiamen, interpreters etc.

The remaining sum - the profit - is divided between class-A shareholders.

Driven by an impressive success rate, the high profitability and relative low risks of piracy of the Somali coast has wielded a business model designed for the ages.

Do they teach that at Wharton?

The results of this experiment might have been well explained through the Hawthorne Effect concept. However, it is undoubltely remarkable and a must to note that in all possible soloutions this might be much more cost effective than just the plain old assumption of "through education the consumer can wise up."

Epstein and colleagues simulated a grocery store, "stocked" with images of everything from bananas and whole wheat bread to Dr. Pepper and nachos. A group of volunteers -- all mothers -- were given laboratory "money" to shop for a week's groceries for the family. Each food item was priced the same as groceries at a real grocery nearby, and each food came with basic nutritional information. The mother-volunteers went shopping several times in the simulated grocery. First they shopped with the regular prices, but afterward the researchers imposed either taxes or subsidies on the foods. That is, they either raised the prices of unhealthy foods by 12.5%, and then by 25%; or they discounted the price of healthy foods comparably. Then they watched what the mothers purchased.

To define healthy and unhealthy foods, the scientists used a calorie-for-nutrition value, or CFN, which is the number of calories one must eat to get the same nutritional payoff. For example, nonfat cottage cheese has a very low CFN, because it is high on nutrition but not on calories; chocolate chip cookies have a much higher CFN. The researchers also measured the energy density- essentially calories- in
every food.

The results, just published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, show that taxes were more effective in reducing calories purchased over subsides. Specifically, taxing unhealthy foods reduced overall calories purchased, while cutting the proportion of fat and carbohydrates and upping the proportion of protein in a typical week's groceries.

By contrast, subsidizing the prices of healthy food actually increased overall calories purchased without changing the nutritional value at all. It appears that mothers took the money they saved on subsidized fruits and vegetables and treated the family to less healthy alternatives, such as chips and soda pop. Taxes had basically the opposite effect, shifting spending from less healthy to healthier choices.

Situated within Vienna’s historical center, Karl Wlaschek Junior’s stylish café delivers a new approach to gastronomy within the city, accentuating his flair for hospitality and promoting a culinary concept built upon quirky design, quality ingredients and stellar service.

Universal dishes thread throughout the menu such as a Caesar salad, steaks, handmade ravioli and burgers, each one spruced up courtesy of quality ingredients and expert preparation. Pastry chef Pierre Reboul’s artful creations are a beacon, outshining many a competitor in this the Habsburg city of sweets, shunning traditional Viennese treats for thoughtful designs such as the dazzling Tarte Tropezienne.

The drinks menu offers an exotic selection of foreign wines, excellent Belgian beers and a coffee from Galapagos islands that will have you here on a daily basis.

That microscopic attention detail doesn’t just end in the kitchen. Everything about this place has been thought out to the nth degree, from the surreal interior design (inspired by the trinity of a Tyrolean girl, Queen Elizabeth and 50 Cent), to the attire of the enthusiastic, well-informed staff and time-appropriate music: soft and relxing in the morning to more revved up at night, when it all crescendoes into a dinner and dance scene.

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Freyung 1, 1010 Vienna, Austria