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If you want to know how serious Starbucks (SBUX) is about marketing Via, the new instant-coffee it is rolling out this week in the United States and Canada, consider that the company is actually running television commercials for the product.

The other day I characterized Cadbury's ever-changing, contradictory positions on Kraft's (KFT) bid for the company as "comical." Today, the whole thing has become a full-on farce involving not only Cadbury (CBY) (Kraft has remained wisely silent), but also the Wall Street Journal and the rest of the business media.

You would think that when there's a major recall of peanut butter—a favorite among kids—schools would be the first to pull the product and not serve it to students.

But you'd be wrong. According to the Government Accountability Office, schools continued to serve potentially tainted peanut products to children for about a week after they were recalled during a salmonella outbreak early this year. The same thing happened after a recall of canned vegetables.

You've been there: standing in line in the grocery checkout as the shopper in front of you decides to wait the last minute before they start digging around for their checkbook.

You want to kill them, or at least say something nasty to them. But the need for either ill-advised course of action may soon be obviated: Grocers are starting to experiment with banning the use of checks, accepting only cash or cards.

Red baiting: It's not just for teabaggers anymore.

Andy Puzder, the chief executive of CKE Restaurants (CKR), has been unable to match the success of some of his competitors—most particularly McDonald's—despite (or in part because of?) the obnoxious, puerile ads he has approved for the company's Hardee's and Carl's Jr. franchises.

Marler Clark, perhaps the best-known law firm involved in food-safety litigation, has launched a news site that the firm describes as "a daily Web-based newspaper dedicated to reporting on issues surrounding food safety."

Bill Marler, the firm's managing partner, will continue writing his opinionated MarlerBlog, in addition to contributing to the new site, called Food Safety News.

Bob O'Brien of Barron's gazed into a bowl of Campbell's Tomato Soup and divined the future of the American consumer economy: This "isn't the kind of consumption-driven recovery that previous bounces from economic distress [have] seen," the soup told him.

The food business is under examination like never before, with books by Michael Pollan, David Kessler, and others;  films like Single Page