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<p>Welcome back to Off The Menu, where we bring you the best and strangest food stories from my email inbox. This week, we have the classic tales of customers who were pretty much just trolls in human guise. As always, these are real emails from real readers, though names have been changed.</p>

There's nothing like a fresh baguette, hot out of the oven. And one company has made it as easy and quick to get as a Snickers bar. Le Bread Xpress has opened vending machines in San Francsico that produce hot and fresh baguettes in seconds. The machines are operating at the new Myriad market in the Castro. The baguettes rise at a bakery in Burlingame and are slighty baked. The baking process finishes in the vending machine. Operators say the machine is a hit in France. "In a mall next to transportation, people come back from work, get their fresh...

Twitter Pinterest Email print comment Pro Football Hall of Famer Warren Sapp found himself battling a shark while on a lobstering charter boat off the Florida Keys on Wednesday. While Sapp was going for a lobster, the shark got a piece of the former Tampa Bay Buccaneers star's left forearm. "He was lobstering with me, and a shark bit Sapp, while he was grabbing the lobster. He's OK," charter captain Jack Carlson told the Tampa Bay Times. The Instagram account of Carlson's boat, Two Conchs, posted a photo of Sapp's gash (warning: graphic image).

Get ready, Toronto A "toilet-themed dessert bar" is headed to Canada. The aptly named Poop Café Dessert Bar is slated to open in mid-August in Toronto's Koreatown, according to the Toronto Star. Menu items will include chocolate soft-serve, pudding, and traditional Asian desserts like patbingsoo (shaved ice with red beans and various other toppings). Per the Star, "All of the poo-ticular items available at the café will be brown, formed like a stool and served in toilet-shaped dishes." What a world. Owner Lien Nguyen says she's "trying to make poop cute," as evidenced by the restaurant's poo-themed murals accompanied with...

Think twice before killing the next cockroach you find in your apartment. A team of scientists at India’s Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine discovered that cockroach milk may be the greatest superfood of them all.

A new study finds that a commonly used insecticide kills much of the sperm created by male drone honey bees, one reason why the bees are dwindling. The class of insecticide called neonicotinoids didn’t kill the drones. But bees that ate treated pollen produced 39 percent less live sperm than those that didn’t, according to a controlled experiment by Swiss researchers published Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. It essentially acted as an accidental contraceptive on the drones, whose main job is to mate with the queen — but not one that prevented complete reproduction, just...

I attended a buffet-style party recently where the food reminded me of the classic Italian appetizer/starter ‘antipasto’ - which literally means ‘before the meal’, or before the main course. And given the temperatures we’ve had here during the past week, it seems that a nice antipasto platter, along with a good bread and a round red wine would be a perfect meal in itself, for an unbearably hot evening - the kind where one would just like to ‘graze’ lazily on some cold, refreshing bites, and share a long conversation while the cicadas sing. The offering classically consists of cured...

The milk crystals of the Pacific beetle cockroach are beautiful. Slice open an embryonic roach under a microscope, and the crystals spill out in a shower of nutrient-dense glitter. But the flavor of cockroach milk is nothing to write home about. Subramanian Ramaswamy, a biochemist at the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine in Bangalore, India, told The Washington Post as much early Tuesday. As a party dare — he’d lost a drinking competition — one of Ramaswamy’s colleagues once ate a sprinkling of the crystals. “He said it doesn’t taste like anything special,” Ramaswamy said. Most roaches...

It's not unusual to find kids selling lemonade on a hot summer day. What might be unusual though, is finding a child selling lemonade so that she can help pay her family's bills. 11-year-old Sierra Kirkman and her friend Karleigh Jernigan sold lemonade from sun up to sun down Saturday. Sierra is raising money to help her Mom pay household bills. Her Mom recently lost her job. Sierra said she wanted to help so they wouldn't be forced to down-size and move to another area. The girls only expected a few customers to stop by, but they received many more...

A truck taking expired beer to a recycling plant crashed on a Denver highway leaving cans strewn across several lanes during rush hour. The semitrailer was hauling Miller Genuine Draft when it almost careered off the overpass from Interstate 70 onto the I-25 below. With the truck left on its side and roof ripped open, hundreds of beer cans then spilled over onto express lanes following the accident at around 6pm yesterday. The Denver Police Department said there were no injuries, according to Fox 31. A front-end loader was used to clear the beer debris on the eastbound I-70 ramp...

If Starbucks was as liberal as they think they are, they would give their coffee away for free. I'm mean free coffee ought to be a constitutional right, right? How many times have you heard people say they can't live without a cup of coffee in the morning? This is how socialists are. They see something someone has and believes everyone should have it for free. Like health care. So they demand that the coffee business make their coffee for free and I don't mean just the bland stale regular coffee. That's just not fair. Triple Cappuchino Frappachino extra latte...

An 86 year-old woman from Manchester saved herself from a robbery by using a pack of the bacon. The incident took place in a supermarket in Altrincham, UK and was recounted on the Greater Manchester Police Facebook page on Tuesday morning. They wrote: "Yesterday afternoon an 86 year-old female withdrew a large quantity of money from a cash machine before heading into a supermarket in Altrincham.

An animal rights group is up in arms after a study suggested that beef from cows that graze naturally outside has a higher environmental impact than beef from cows fattened on farms. The study, published by the Swiss federal government’s agricultural research body, Agroscope, last month, compared the environmental effect of cows raised on alpine pastures in the summer and those reared on farms complying with the Terra-Suisse label. The report found that, since cows reared on pastures graze on natural grasses, they take around 20 months to reach the required weight for slaughter, compared with 15 months for cows...

When I was younger and worked part-time, I would always start ‘Creating Christmas’ in July. I made a lot of my gifts back then, and would start work on them and on planning food and decor, in Summer; and by the end of September almost everything except cooking and decorating the house was finished, and many recipes and notes were saved/jotted-down for cooking, decorating and shopping. It made for much more leisurely holidays than I’ve enjoyed in recent years, and I’m trying this year to get back to handling things that way again. A while back I bought a gadget...

he UK has ditched Scotland – at least in terms of its drinking habits. The nation’s most popular whisky to drink at home is no longer a Scotch, after Jack Daniel’s outsold The Famous Grouse in the past year. Sales of Jack Daniel’s in shops and supermarkets have risen by 9.3%, according to trade magazine The Grocer, while The Famous Grouse’s sales have tumbled by 14.3% in the same period. Alwynne Gwilt is a whisky specialist for William Grant & Sons and runs the Miss Whisky blog. She sees the change as a sign of our post-recession shift in drinking...

July 15, 2016 – ConAgra Foods, a Russellville, Ark. establishment, is recalling approximately 195,597 pounds of frozen chicken and beef entrée products that may be contaminated with extraneous materials, specifically metal, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced today. The metal fragments range in size between 2 and 9 millimeters (mm) in diameter, and are curled, malleable and shiny. The metal fragments may be embedded in the sauce contained within the frozen entrée products. The frozen chicken and beef entrée items were produced on various dates between May 31, 2016 and June 22, 2016. The...

With good steak now costing more than $20 a pound, a grill out can bust the budget. So we decided to try out some new dollar store steaks that cost just $1 each, to see if they are the real thing or a case of "don't waste your money." What's a Dollar Store Cut of Steak?

Among the many things New Yorkers pride ourselves on is food: making it, selling it and consuming only the best, from single-slice pizza to four-star sushi. We have fish markets, Shake Shacks and, as of this year, 74 Michelin-starred restaurants. Yet most everything we eat is fraudulent. In his new book, “Real Food Fake Food,” author Larry Olmsted exposes the breadth of counterfeit foods we’re unknowingly eating. After reading it, you’ll want to be fed intravenously for the rest of your life.

Anheuser-Busch InBev, which will soon make almost 30% of the world’s beer, wants to serve more low and alcohol-free brews to drinkers trying to live a healthier lifestyle. The Belgium-based brewer, on the verge of buying its largest rival SABMiller, has forecast lower and zero strength beer will grow from a small base to make up 20% of its sales by the end of 2025.