Breakfast Buffet: Monday, 9/22

By OWEN MORRIS

I remember the first time I entered the back of a bakery as a young child and was shocked to see they weren’t using Nestle or Hershey chocolate chips but these round chocolate discs out of a huge, plain cardboard box. When I asked them where they hid the Hershey’s they looked at me like an idiot (French bakers even expect eight-year-olds to know the basics) before my dad took me aside to explain the concept of cocoa butter in chocolate. Ever since then, I’ve been like this KC blogger in avoiding the “soylent brown.” (General Blather)

A Berkeley grocery market has a rather stiff fine for anyone caught sampling the produce without paying: a lifetime ban. That and other stories make this store seem right out of a sitcom. (LA Times)

Our ancestors started cultivating crops 10,000 years earlier than previously thought. That is, if the scientists’ new computer models are correct. According to the evidence, some of the first things to be cultivated were small cereals. Shows how little we’ve changed. (Scientific Blogging)

The biggest news in Japan right now is not the stock market, but a rice scandal that’s just caused a Japanese minister and his assistant to resign. (Telegraph)