In his new book, "Sex, Bombs and Burgers," Nowak argues that porn, fast food and the military have completely reshaped modern technology and our relationship to it. He points to inventions like powderized food, which emerged out of the Second World War effort and made restaurant chains like McDonald's and Dairy Queen possible. He shows how outsourced phone sex lines have helped bring wealth to poor countries, like Guyana. And he explains how pornography helped drive both the home entertainment industry and modern Web technology, like video chat. An entertaining and well-research read, filled with surprising facts, "Sex, Bombs and Burgers" offers a provocative alternate history of 20th-century progress.

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It wasn't long, then, before Aviva Shen, editorial fellow extraordinaire, realized that you could put together a whole menu of toy-made foods: "Basically," she said, looking at dozens of Easy-Bake bootlegs, including one that grilled hamburgers, "if a child had to survive on toy oven food alone, they could do it ... though they would quickly develop diabetes."

Bah! A small price to pay for self-reliance! And probably no more dangerous than giving hormone-charged 17-year-olds keys to thousands of pounds of rocketing steel. (Probably.) So we scoured history to find the finest play-date victuals. Please, sit back and enjoy our menu of toy-made foods.

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The meat mixture sold by Taco Bell restaurants contains binders and extenders and does not meet the minimum requirements set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to be labeled as "beef," according to the legal complaint.

The class-action lawsuit was filed Friday in federal court in the Central District of California by the Montgomery law firm Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles.

Attorney Dee Miles said attorneys had Taco Bell's "meat mixture" tested and found it contained less that 35 percent beef.

Miles said the lawsuit does not seek monetary damages, but asks the court to order Taco Bell to be honest in its advertising.

"We are asking that they stop saying that they are selling beef," Miles said.

Irvine, Calif.-based Taco Bell spokesman Rob Poetsch (PAYCH) said the company denies that its advertising is misleading.

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Since the photo is at least a few years old, uncredited and unlabeled, and since we kind of couldn't believe that chicken could be made to look like a mutant cone of strawberry soft-serve, we spoke to David Radford, director of sales and marketing of BFD Corp., which makes advanced meat recovery machines, who confirmed that yes, that is an accurate depiction of what mechanically separated chicken looks like.

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And yet, inspired but a recent chance encounter with a personal collector of such things, a little bit of digging finds the food world rife with genius-level inanity, from the fork-cum-pizza-cutter to the Motorized Ice Cream Cone. Here, then, are a few of our favorites. And no, we don't own any of them. Yet.

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Started by New York photographer Sally Davies, as a part-art, part-food science experiment, the Happy Meal Project involves Davies documenting a Happy Meal every few days until it spoils. At day 137, the meal still looks pretty great.

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Conde Nast, which closed the money-losing print magazine last fall, said Tuesday that it is launching a digital product called "Gourmet Live" for the iPad and other mobile gadgets.

It is another bet by Conde Nast on the world of apps -- the mobile software applications popularized by Apple Inc.'s iPhone. The publisher has invested heavily to bundle its magazines as applications on both the iPhone and now the iPad.

Robert Sauerberg, the head of Conde Nast's consumer marketing division, emphasized that Gourmet's app is not a digital magazine. But he said the impetus comes in part from the reception its magazines have gotten on mobile devices.

Wired magazine's first iPad edition sold more than 90,000 copies at the regular print newsstand price of $4.99 each -- an accomplishment considering that few publishers have been able to charge for their content online.

"What it has done is demonstrate to us and other publishers that paid digital content packaged in a beautiful form is valuable to consumers," Sauerberg said. "There's demand for the Gourmet brand, and I think we'll see plenty of people testing it out."

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McNeil Consumer Healthcare, based in Fort Washington, Pa., issued the voluntary recall late Friday in the United States and 11 other countries after consulting with the FDA. The recall involves children's versions of Tylenol, Tylenol Plus, Motrin, Zyrtec and Benadryl, because they don't meet quality standards.

The FDA said it was reviewing procedures at McNeil, which appears to be the sole source of the problems. "We are following through with the facility to make certain that everything has been checked," said FDA spokeswoman Elaine Gansz Bobo.

According to McNeil and the FDA, some of the products recalled may have a higher concentration of active ingredient than is specified on the bottle. Others may contain particles, while still others may contain inactive ingredients that do not meet internal testing requirements.

The FDA called the potential for serious medical problems "remote," but it advised consumers to stop using the medicine as a precaution. It said a health care professional should be consulted if a child has recently taken any of the recalled products and is exhibiting unexpected symptoms.

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At issue: what produces the better recipe -- rigorous professional test kitchen protocols or the online consensus of multiple cooks.

It began last fall, when Cook's founder Christopher Kimball threw down the oven mitt with a blog post saying a test kitchen is likely to produce a better recipe and declaring, "I am willing to put my money, and my reputation, where my big mouth is."

Food52, which was started by Merrill Stubbs and Amanda Hesser, cookbook author and former food writer for The New York Times, took up the challenge and the contest took shape.

Each side was to come up with two recipes, one for chewy sugar cookies, one for roasted pork shoulder. The results from each side will be posted on the online magazine Slate, then put to a public vote.

At Cook's, editorial director Jack Bishop thinks portraying the contest as a battle of old-line vs. online is oversimplifying. He says Cook's gets plenty of reader feedback on its recipes.

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With growing interest in locally raised food, cities including New York, Los Angeles and Seattle are looking at ways to foster and manage urban agriculture. San Francisco's mayor has proposed creating community gardens on vacant public land citywide.

But no city seems to have as much potential for urban farming as Detroit, where land is cheap, empty lots are plentiful, and residents are desperate for jobs. The number of community gardens has been growing each year, and bigger, commercial agriculture could be coming as city planners draw up land use rules for farming.

"Most other cities aren't quite ready to think about large-scale agriculture," said Michael Score, president of Hantz Farms, which has plans to create the world's largest urban farm in the city. "We have vacant land and that used to be something that we were ashamed of."

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The change is a timely one. Yes, the recession has put a significant dent in the home appliance market, but it has also led more and more people to forgo eating out in favor of heating up frozen foods at home. Microwave purchases increased by a stunning 9.5 percent over the last year -- the first sales increase in several years -- and, as the WSJ reports, companies are betting that now is the time to innovate.

Several companies are betting that steam is going to be the next big thing, because it seems cleaner and healthier, and a real steam oven is damn expensive. Sharp is introducing a "$1,000 microwave that uses steam to cook more thoroughly, keep food moist without adding fat and help heat penetrate better (consumers fill a water reservoir attached to the oven)." Whirlpool is rolling out steam in a "combination microwave-ventilation hood."

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After conducting tests, the military has decided to use the thumb-sized "bhut jolokia," or "ghost chili," to make tear gas-like hand grenades to immobilize suspects, defense officials said Tuesday.

The bhut jolokia was accepted by Guinness World Records in 2007 as the world's spiciest chili. It is grown and eaten in India's northeast for its taste, as a cure for stomach troubles and a way to fight the crippling summer heat.

It has more than 1,000,000 Scoville units, the scientific measurement of a chili's spiciness. Classic Tabasco sauce ranges from 2,500 to 5,000 Scoville units, while jalapeno peppers measure anywhere from 2,500 to 8,000.

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Americans are currently embracing a strange sort of primitivism. Bicycles are losing gears, runners are afoot in shoes designed to create a barefoot sensation (some are even running barefoot), and men are growing bushy Will Oldham-like beards. It's all very curious and entertaining.

But nowhere has our love for the supposed simplicity of the past been more evident than in food trends.

McWilliams, a historian at Texas State University, has made challenging the mores of the organic, slow food, eat local movements his life work. The title of his last book: "Just Food: How Locavores Are Endangering the Future of Food and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly," is sufficiently illuminating. This time out, his argument is straightforward: The reaction against "industrial food" is just another time-honored manifestation of an American infatuation with a simpler life.

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We're not talking about a machine that can slice, dice and cook on its own. We're talking about a machine that can actually make food materialize -- in whatever size, shape and flavor you want -- without your even going to the grocery store. As posted on its MIT Web site, the Cornucopia is a three-dimensional printer for food that looks like a small portable grill, with an attachment of multicolored metal canisters and, according to the project's Web page, tubes and fixtures that can pipe, extrude, heat and cool ingredients to create dishes from scratch. As the blog Engadget claimed: "It may be the next major revolution in food preparation." A Web site called Coolest Gadgets called it "the food of the future."

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