With brief, occasional, italicized and sometimes gratuitous commentary…
• From Food & Wine:
"Among the many hardships we’ve faced over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the suspension of McDonald’s all-day breakfast service clearly isn’t the most serious. Many locations were already over the 2015 menu extension: Last year, McDonald’s granted franchises the option to slim down their all-day offerings to help improve operations before coronavirus was even on our radar. So when the pandemic forced the burger giant to simplify things further, all-day breakfast was a logical place to start.
"However, now that locations nationwide have remembered what life was like before all-day breakfast, Business Insider reports that a growing push exists to get rid of the service altogether. And when asked for comment, McDonald’s corporate didn’t increase confidence that all-day breakfast would definitely return."
But, the story says, "Permanently removing all-day breakfast a mere five years after introducing the concept would certainly be upsetting for McMuffin fans who spent decades dreaming of McDonald’s pushing breakfast items into the PM hours."
• From the Associated Press:
"A Massachusetts construction worker’s love of black licorice wound up costing him his life. Eating a bag and a half every day for a few weeks threw his nutrients out of whack and caused the 54-year-old man’s heart to stop, doctors reported Wednesday … The problem is glycyrrhizic acid, found in black licorice and in many other foods and dietary supplements containing licorice root extract. It can cause dangerously low potassium and imbalances in other minerals called electrolytes.
"Eating as little as 2 ounces of black licorice a day for two weeks could cause a heart rhythm problem, especially for folks over 40, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warns."
I am not making light of this tragedy … but I must admit that the first thing I did when I read this story is Google, "Do strawberry or cherry Twizzlers contain glycyrrhizic acid?" The answer, thankfully, is no … because for me, Twizzlers are like heroin.
