• Label design for a Sunkist fruit crate

So this piece on the Smithsonian's Design Decoded blog about the history of fruit crate labels is more information than you really needed about fruit crate labels, but if you're in the latter category of eater/thinker/ponderer, it's very interesting.

The blogger notes that the original orange crate labels painted California as the exotic land of sunshine and fresh fruit, attracting so many settlers that eventually the groves were bulldozed to build housing for the waves of new arrivals.

Crate and can labels are the album covers of the food world. Food historians love them, and decry the loss of individuality and artistry in the face of focus-grouped, neural research specificity. If you've ever seen fruit crate and can labels from early 20th century, they're really quite beautiful works of art. The design, the commitment to difficult printing processes and quality papers signal such pride in the contents. I own antique can labels printed in metallic ink and embossed. Imagine putting that kind of label on a canned food nowadays.

So read it, eat it, and think about it.

Our table of five huddled for several minutes just to assimilate what was being offered, and how it should be ordered. Like cavemen discovering tools, we'd share when we figured out some portion of it. "Oh look, you get chips with that." And, "I think you can get soup with that, but you don't have to."

It starts well enough, with standard delicious photography at the top. Then below on the left, a diagram to "Build Your Own Combo." Then below that, "Start Here."

"Start here" implies a journey. We've already been to the art museum and the chart department; where else could be possibly need to go before ordering?

We're at soups and salads, and here's a big sign that says "Get a Drink." I was ready to order, but here's a whole new "Finish the job" column. Figuring out what's in there, and how it compares to lunchy selections already encountered requires reading back through the previous sections.

Finally, before the end of the order journey, there's a bright yellow bar at the bottom for "Bottomless Express Lunch." And then there are choices within that.

Menu disaster forensics: It's hard to know what happened here, but here's an imagined scenario.

The commission will work with other Metro agencies, possibly including the fire, health and codes departments, on a set of regulations that will then be presented to the Metro Council for approval.

By deferring the issue indefinitely, the commission freed itself from what has become a pattern of monthly deferrals. Taking a multi-department approach allows for discussion of issues beyond traffic safety and parking.

If you're reading between the lines here, "issues beyond traffic safety and parking" probably means issues of competitive balance — in other words, whether food trucks have an unfair advantage over bricks-and-mortar restaurants. Such concerns have come to dominate the conversation, in spite of initial attempts to limit discussion to the nuts-and-bolts, where-and-when of regulation. "Business is business," one commissioner put it early on, though with a whole new class of vendors taking the city by storm, business is not as usual.

According to the City Paper story, The Nashville Food Truck Association, formed shortly after the first public hearing on regulations, has been granted inclusion in the new round of discussions.

With the council now the ultimate destination for any set of regulations, it looks like this won't be resolved any time soon. An email to Public Works, asking how this multidepartmental effort is going to work and who's going to lead it, had not been answered as of this morning.

Food trucks! Sexy romps! Technology!

OK, so a couple weeks ago, when Chris asked how you keep tabs on your favorite food trucks, two similar sites came up — Roaming Hunger and Food Trucks Map.

Eades says his take on the food truck tracker (now live, but in beta) is "implemented much more effectively," with one caveat: Food truck owners have to include geodata (i.e., location information) in their tweets in order to make it work. Luckily, this is easy to do, as explained by the Twitter folks here.

Obviously, this will only be a useful service if all Nashville's food truckers start using geodata — in a cursory search this morning, I could only find Pizza Buds, though it wasn't really time for the lunch rush yet. But it definitely has the potential to be really cool, and a great alternative for folks who don't use Twitter or are barred from doing so at work. Speaking of, you can also follow @YourMobileEats.

So what say you, mobile-dining Bitesters: Is this the solution you've been looking for?

Heck, I've got over 1,200 photos on my iPhone — every one of them a brilliant work of art, I tell ya. (Only 750 of them are of my dogs.) And frankly, I'm kind of bummed, because I'm ineligible to enter the Nashville Scene Photo Contest. But the good news for you, dear reader, is that you are eligible — assuming, of course, that you don't work for the Scene. (And if you do work for the Scene, get back to work, slacker.)

So get a move on! Photos must be uploaded to the Scene's website by midnight Sunday, Nov. 6. Approximately 30 of the top photographs will be printed in the Nov. 24 issue of the Scene. Any subject matter is welcome, but the pictures must be taken in the Middle Tennessee area, which includes Davidson, Williamson, Rutherford, Wilson, Sumner, Robertson, Dickson and Cheatham counties. There will be one grand prize winner and one special category winner. This year's special category is "Nashville Eyesores," defined as "anything you view as a blemish in the city's landscape."

Read the rules and upload your photos here.

• Photo: Eric England
• From left: Tracy Ardoin-Jenkins and Jane Nickell

Fast-forward about a month and Sugar Wagon co-owners Tracy Ardoin-Jenkins and Jane Nickell are hanging out before-hours at Flyte, the innovative eatery on Eighth Avenue where they first met and, about a year ago, hatched the idea to go mobile with a smart, contemporary take on classic American desserts. (Both still work at Flyte, Nickell as hostess and Ardoin-Jenkins as bartender.) The original plan was to go the hood-full-of-horsepower route and outfit a full-size baking truck. But when the financing didn't work out, the duo decided they had a choice: Scrap the whole project or, as Nickell puts it, "shrink the idea, start small [and] show the idea has value." They chose the latter, and so far, the value is apparent — even if the Sugar Wagon, which is about the size of a double-wide podium, looks a bit small when parked alongside "mobile slabs" blasting rock music, cupcake-dispensing converted school buses and the like.

Everything I've tasted of theirs — including a gingersnap-and-pumpkin-ice-cream sandwich that I demolished on my walk back to the Scene office from Flyte — has been scrumptious, bordering on ridiculous. (And I'm not even really a dessert person, usually.) Check them out on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

• gustav katz / tastingtable.com

Other cooks' imaginations have also been captivated by the rich combination of wood and liquor as a flavoring agent.

From Tasting Table comes this chatty map that reveals the destiny of lucky barrels that have done their duty in service to flavoring alcohol. Most cross the Mason-Dixon line, but at least a few end up in the kitchen of Husk restaurant in Charleston, S.C., in the hands of onetime Nashvillian Sean Brock, a man who knows how to coax the astonishing from the unexpected.

At Grant Achatz's cocktail palace The Aviary in Chicago, cocktails are aged in various barrels. (Eater Chicago has a video showing Josh Habiger, now co-chef at Nashville's Catbird Seat, helping taste-test the results with chef Craig Schoettler at The Aviary last fall. Habiger says one elixir tastes like "adult candy.")

See the chart online here for as big an image as you could wish.

• Photo: Eric England
• The remodeled interior at Germantown Cafe East

"The Internet is so different from when we opened Germantown Café eight years ago," Lowry says. "To open a restaurant six years later and have the whole landscape of criticism be so different was difficult. But then we thought, let's really look at [what's being said] — remove the haters and grab what comes up in a recurring pattern." Lowry and Luther began studying the feedback on websites such as Bites, Yelp and Open Table, taking under advisement what the majority of diners agreed upon, from interior design to menu offerings.

Read the full review to see which dishes made it across the river (like coconut curry salmon), which Germantown favorites have come out of retirement (like trout with olive-pepper relish) and what to expect from the new Germantown Café that's not in Germantown and was influenced by — gasp! — Internet commenters. Speaking of the Internet, GCE even has a new drink called the Honey Badger. (Don't worry, it doesn't have bee larvae in it.)

• Bilingual fortunes at Golden Coast

As about the same moment I registered two Central American diners at the Golden Coast buffet, the youth at our table cracked open fortune cookies. And, sign of the times, they're in Spanish on one side, English on the other.

The fortunes themselves aren't like the inscrutable eastern fortunes of the past. They're more like sayings: "Out of sight, out of mind" and "Don't worry, be happy."

No future tense, easier to translate.

This Wednesday your grocery money buys something much better than mere groceries at Whole Foods Market. You'll also be giving to the Predators Foundation.

There'll be lot of Preds activity at the store, starting at the front: in the lobby, you can register to win Preds tickets. From 5:30 to 6:30 captain Shea Weber and right wing Jordin Tootoo will be meeting, greeting and signing autographs. Make a $5 donation to the foundation (at the customer service desk) for chance to win cooking class with a Predators player. Five winners will be selected, and each gets to bring a guest.

Or just shop any time from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. and you've done good for the Predators Foundation and the youth-oriented organizations they serve and fund.