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A lot of people try to avoid television commercials, for good reason. They are kind of like an uninvited guest in your living room: there you are, hanging out with your funny friend Jon Stewart, when along comes some way-too-perky lady trying to sell you car insurance. Not cool.

But Super Bowl Sunday—February 7 this year—is the exception. Some people look forward to watching the commercials even more than the game. With so many receptive eyeballs (a rarity in this age of DVRs, the Internet and cable fragmentation), advertisers put on their best effort to entertain. This is not so easy to do in 30 to 60 seconds, while also getting across a convincing sales message. I previously worked in an advertising agency “creative department” for seven years, so I can attest to this firsthand.

Knowing how difficult they are to produce, I truly appreciate a good commercial when I see one. Food commercials have an advantage—if you make the product look mouth-watering, it will sell. But it is still not easy to make something memorable.

The following are a few of the food commercials of the past that I think were most successful, either because they have embedded themselves in the popular culture or they were just plain entertaining.

Children’s cereals have produced some enduring icons—the Froot Loops toucan, Rice Krispies’ Snap, Crackle and Pop, and the Lucky Charms leprechaun, to name a few—but none has had the lasting impact of Life cereal’s “Mikey” commercial from the 1970s. The message is simple: it’s good for you, but even picky eaters will like it. And although the original ad hasn’t aired since 1982, people who are too young to have watched it during their Saturday morning cartoons (like our co-blogger, Abby Callard) still know the line, “He likes it! Hey, Mikey!”

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, “Got Milk?” might be the most sincerely flattered commercial campaign of all time. Ever since the California Milk Processor Board aired the first (and possibly best) in the series, “Aaron Burr,” in 1993, everyone from exterminators to gyms has ripped off the slogan.

Some of the best commercials are those that ring true. Such was the case with the campaign that asked, “How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Roll Pop?”  The answer, of course, was impossible to discover, because no one (myself included) can resist biting through the crunchy candy coating to the chewy center. The burning question had a revival a few years ago, in the form of a suggestive song by rapper Lil’ Kim.

You don’t hear jingles as frequently as you used to, yet they are one of the most effective (if annoying) ways to be remembered. Oscar Meyer’s brand was particularly good at this: its jingles for Oscar Meyer wieners and bologna still occasionally creep into my head today, even though I haven’t heard them for more than 20 years. Watch them if you dare—you’ll be singing “B-O-L-O-G-N-A” for days.

While we’re on the topic of jingles, you know you have a successful one when it becomes a hit record. That’s what happened with the 1971 song “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,” which originally aired as a Coca-Cola commercial (and included the line, “I’d like to buy the world a Coke”). The ad, featuring a multicultural group of young people, tapped into the idealism of the era, and the song was re-recorded without the Coke reference, selling millions of copies.

In between “How many licks?” in the 1970s and “Got milk?” in the 1990s, the biggest question in advertising was “Where’s the beef?” In 1984, Claire Peller posed this query to a fictional Wendy’s competitor that served her a gigantic fluffy bun with a tiny patty. Twenty-five years later, the catch phrase is still used to imply that something or someone is lacking substance.

Finally, since we’re talking about the Super Bowl, I’d be remiss to leave out beer advertisements. This could be a whole post on its own (maybe next year), so I’ll just mention my personal favorite. So many beer ads, even if funny, are shamelessly sexist (to both genders). The long-running Bud Light “Real Men of Genius” campaign, though, manages to play on male stereotypes in a light-hearted way that is hilarious rather than offensive. So, Mr. Funny Commercials With Awesome ’80s-Style Back-up Singer Writer, I salute you.

Cheese in coffee, courtesy Flickr user daftgirly

The New York Times restaurant critic, Sam Sifton, recently tweeted something about “kaffeost,” a Finnish concoction in which hot coffee is poured over chunks of soft cheese. I have to admit, it looks decidedly unappealing to me in this YouTube video—but as food writer Meredith Modzelewski responded, “traditions exist for a reason,” so maybe it’s worth a try!

It got me thinking about other unusual things I’ve heard of people putting in their coffee, both before and after brewing. Here are a few:

1. Reindeer bone My grandmother, who is mostly Norwegian and has been to Norway dozens of times, says she’s seen at least one relative toss what looked like a smooth, whitish stone into the coffee grounds before brewing. He told her it was a piece of reindeer bone, to make the coffee taste less bitter. I can’t find any Internet references to this tradition (other than Laplanders putting fresh reindeer milk in coffee), so it may be just a quirky family habit or even a joke. But it makes some sense to me on a basic level: bone contains calcium, which counteracts acid.

2. Salt This was a hot topic on the CHOW discussion board a few weeks ago, after one poster asked if anyone else put a pinch of salt in their brewed coffee. Apparently, it makes a certain ubiquitous chain’s burned beans taste less bitter. Others recommend putting salt in the coffee grounds, rather than the final product, to improve the brew’s flavor. Personally, I’d like to try the Taiwanese salted coffee recently featured in Time; I like the idea of combining several taste sensations at once (sweet, bitter, salty—and, perhaps, kokumi).

3. Ice cream Back to my grandma again: Her favorite way to drink hot coffee, last time I checked, is with a scoop of ice cream floating on top (preferably coffee-flavored, but vanilla will do). What a nice way to get your cream and sugar, right? When we traveled to Germany together, she felt right at home: Germans love Eiskaffee. It’s a cold, blended drink there—coffee and ice cream, topped with whipped cream—and wildly addictive, in my experience.

4. Eggs Some people believe that adding crushed eggshells to coffee grounds improves the flavor, probably similar to the reindeer bone theory (eggshells are full of calcium, too.) And others crack an egg or egg whites into the coffee itself, making “egg coffee.” This Scandinavian tradition is popular in the American midwest—or at least in Hendricks, Minnesota, where the town website features egg coffee recipes in “family” and “Lutheran Church” sizes. Even John Steinbeck is a fan of this method: In his road-trip narrative, Travels with Charley, he describes adding both an egg white and shell to his coffee pot before percolating, “for I know nothing that polishes coffee and makes it shine like that.”

5. Okay, this is amazing. There is an entire blog called “Putting Weird Things in Coffee.” Its author, a Canadian grad student, has already experimented with everything from smoked salmon cream cheese (dissolves into a curdled-cream texture, bad idea) to bacon in coffee (“time-saving and delicious,” he claims). Why? Because, as he puts it, “I drink coffee every day, but get bored with the same old cream and sugar.”

Your turn. What is the weirdest thing you’ve ever had in coffee?

Milk bottles from Japan, courtesy of Flickr user Adam Chamness

No, the kokumi sensation is not a Japanese pop group, which would have been my guess. You’ve heard of umami, right? It’s the fifth basic taste, in addition to salty, sweet, sour and bitter. Translated from Japanese as “savory” or “yummy,” umami has only relatively recently been recognized in the West.

Well, kokumi is another food attribute identified by the Japanese. It is sometimes translated as “heartiness” or “mouthfulness” and describes compounds in food that don’t have their own flavor, but enhance the flavors with which they’re combined. These compounds include calcium, protamine (found in milt, or fish sperm, which is eaten in Japan and Russia), L-histidine (an amino acid) and glutathione (found in yeast extract).

Food scientists have been studying kokumi compounds in hopes of exploiting their enhancement qualities to create healthier, lower-salt or -sugar versions of foods that still taste good. But first they have to figure out how the mechanism works—which they are now a step closer to doing. In the January issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Japanese researchers published the results of a study demonstrating that calcium channels on the tongue are the targets of kokumi compounds.

I bet you didn’t know you had calcium channels on your tongue—and, until 2008, neither did scientists. According to the journal’s press release, “these channels sense and regulate the levels of calcium in the body … [The researchers] noted that calcium channels are closely related to the receptors that sense sweet and umami (savory) tastes and that glutathione (a common kokumi taste element) is known to interact with calcium channels.”

The researchers conducted taste tests on a panel of volunteers trained to distinguish flavors, and found that the compounds—including glutathione and calcium—that activated the strongest response in calcium receptors also produced the most flavor enhancement.

So does this mean adding a calcium supplement to diet foods will make them more palatable (while giving you a boost in your levels of the necessary mineral)? It’s not that simple. The 2008 study that discovered the calcium receptors on the tongue also noted that many people appear to experience calcium as an unpleasant taste, except in foods like milk and cheese, where it binds with fat. As Paula Deen would attest, fat (especially butter) is the ultimate flavor enhancer—but not exactly diet food.

Turmeric, courtesy of Flickr user megabeth

Amanda recently wrote about cinnamon having a reputation as a good food for healthy eyes, and it got me thinking about spices. I tend to think of them merely as flavor, but cinnamon isn’t the only spice that people are investigating for its possible health benefits. I was looking for a recipe for sweet potato curry the other night and remembered another spice that some people think of as a health food: turmeric.

Turmeric is a rhizome, like ginger, that is native to South Asia and used commonly in curries. It’s famous for its yellow color, which stains almost everything it comes in contact with—even your skin.

Last year in TIME magazine, Dr. Scott Haig penned a piece about turmeric relieving pain in a patient of his who took capsules of the stuff daily. (The story was anecdotal and rightly labeled “one doctor’s opinion.”) Turmeric made Oprah’s list as a top 25 superfood for 2010.

Asian cultures have been using the spice for centuries. In India, turmeric has been used in Ayurveda medical practices as a “blood purifier.” Traditionally, it is ingested to treat indigestion, gas, liver and urinary tract diseases. It is also used as a salve for skin diseases and inhaled to alleviate the symptoms of the common cold.

Recently, curcumin, a chemical found in turmeric and other spices, has been the subject of research testing its effect on cancer, cystic fibrosis and Alzheimer’s disease among others. A cancer research center in Ireland found that curcumin began to kill cancer cells in 24 hours. Curcumin has also been tested, with some success, as an anti-inflammatory. Most of the research is still preliminary, but it might yield some interesting results.

My guess is that with the Oprah effect, jars of turmeric will be flying off the shelves this year. I’d resist the urge to pop pills of the yellow stuff until more substantial evidence comes along, however. But having an extra curry dish here and there couldn’t hurt. Turmeric isn’t just for curry either, I put it on baked chicken breasts and to add some kick to rice.

Movie award season kicked off recently with the Golden Globes, and continued Saturday night with the SAG awards, and Meryl Streep already added another trophy to her case. She won best actress in a musical or comedy for her comedic (and, you might say musical, considering her sing-song voice) portrayal of Julia Child in Julie & Julia.

Of course, the real star of that movie is food, and the joy of both cooking and eating it. Its scenes of culinary victory and defeat, pleasure and horror, join a long line of classic movie food moments. I scoured my memory—and that of Smithsonian staffer and cinephile, Erik Washam—for other great food scenes on film. Here are a few I think merit  a Food & Think “FaTty” Award:

Outstanding Use of Magical Food
Like Water for Chocolate: In the Mexican movie based on Laura Esquivel’s novel, Tita expresses her forbidden love for Pedro through a dish of quail with rose petals (recipe adapted here) that sends everyone at the table, especially Tita’s sister Gertrudis, into a sensual frenzy that ends with Gertrudis galloping away, nude, on the back of a soldier’s horse.

Chocolat: Same title ingredient, different country. This time, Juliette Binoche shows some uptight French villagers how to enjoy life with her charmed confections, which have peculiar effects on those who eat them.

Best Food Fight
Animal House: This one’s a no-brainer. By which I mean both that it is an obvious choice for the category, with its famous cafeteria food-fight scene featuring John Belushi squirting mashed potatoes from his cheeks, and that it is not exactly cerebral. But a classic nonetheless.
The Public Enemy: James Cagney’s character proves he’s a dirty rat when he smashes a grapefruit in Mae Clarke’s face. The scene caused quite a stir when the film was released in 1931.

Of course, we have to give an honorary FaTty to silent-film director Mark Sennett, whose Keystone Cops movies popularized the pie-in-the-face gag.

Best Use of Food as Personality Signifier
The Breakfast Club: You don’t need to know anything more about the five characters in this classic 1980s high-school flick by John Hughes than what they eat for lunch. They are a jock (a bag of chips, chocolate cookies, three sandwiches, milk, a banana and an apple), a nerd (soup, PB&J with the crust cut off and apple juice), a criminal (nothing), a princess (sushi, which was considered très chic at the time), and a basket case (a Pixy Stix and Cap’n Crunch sandwich).

Best Ordering Scene
Five Easy Pieces:  A young Jack Nicholson gives voice to dissatisfied customers everywhere when he tells his unaccommodating waitress, who has informed him he can’t have a side order of toast with his breakfast, to bring him a chicken salad sandwich on toasted bread, hold the chicken, mayonnaise and lettuce.
Runner-up: If the waitress above is an example of poor customer service, Sally (Meg Ryan) in When Harry Met Sally is the other side of the coin. Her fussy and complicated order, with multiple contingencies, drove Harry nuts (and, in true romantic comedy form, became one of the things he grew to love about her).

Outstanding Performance by a Crustacean
Amy Adams in Julie & Julia wasn’t the first actress to wrestle onscreen with a lobster. Thirty years earlier, Diane Keaton and Woody Allen had to wrangle a whole kitchen full of escapees, in Annie Hall.

Best Use of Egg Consumption to Establish Character’s Virility
This one is a toss-up. Which is manlier: gobbling down 50 hard-boiled eggs in a row, as Paul Newman did in Cool Hand Luke, or slurping down raw eggs before a training run, as Sylvester Stallone did in Rocky? I don’t know, but both scenes make me queasy.

Most Poignant Demonstration of Passion for Cooking
Big Night: Brothers Primo (Tony Shalhoub) and Secondo (Stanley Tucci) try to revive their failing restaurant with a sumptuous feast. You’ll be rooting for them to succeed, and wishing you could reach into your television to taste the timpano.

I could easily keep going, but I’ll hand it over to you readers (who proved very creative with your contributions to the food lessons in children’s books comments). What are your favorite movie food moments?