Weekly Media Mix: 2-Year-Old (Edible) Sandwiches; The 'Fast-Food Bandit'; And Beer Candy

The Daily Byte's Weekly Media Mix rounds up the week's big food stories.

World
• Shanghai opened the World Chocolate Wonderland theme park, with 200 art pieces made out of chocolate. These include a life-sized car, china-like vases, and Transformers robots. [Daily Mail]

Desserts
• How do you make candy more manly? Add beer. [WSJ]

Restaurants
• Over at Gradisca Restaurant, the head chef flies in his mother from Italy to help make "tortellini that come out light enough to charm a table of carb-dodging dieters and small enough to serve as tricorner hats for an army of toy soldiers." [NYT]

Shame of the Week
• The 'Fast-Food Bandit' who has robbed some 28 restaurants around Washington state was finally caught. [The News Tribune]

Booze
• A small-scale study found that alcohol tastes sweeter when loud music is playing, explaining every bad decision you've ever made at a club. [NZ Herald]

Science
• The Army has invented a way to make a sandwich last two years by adding "oxygen scavengers," or "iron filings, to absorb the oxygen so that it's not available to bacteria, yeast, and mold." [NPR]

Politics
• What happens when berry pie gets dropped on a priceless White House rug at a holiday party? "Three black-clad staffers materialized immediately, armed with spray bottles and towels to mitigate the damage. The mess was gone in an instant." [Obama Foodorama]

Video
• A man balances 50 spoons on his body to break a Guinness World Record; he's touted as having a "magnetic body." [Reuters]
 

 The Daily Byte is a regular column dedicated to covering interesting food news and trends across the country. Click here for previous columns.