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Under its new owners, the Wendy's fast-food chain is zigging where others are zagging.

Rivals such as Burger King and Taco Bell are aiming squarely at the young-lunkhead set with advertising messages that, for example, extol the manly virtues of cramming as much greasy, fatty food as possible into one's gullet. But Wendy's will henceforth target older, wiser eaters, according to its new owners at Triarc Cos.

Last week, Advertising Age reported the unusual move by ad agency Wieden & Kennedy to drop Starbucks as a client. The story quoted founder Dan Wieden's platitudes about how such moves "just make sense" from time to time. Today, AdAge reports that it knows the "real reason" behind the decision: "Starbucks' micromanagement, waffling and shift to a jump-ball approach for future ad assignments."

The other day, I noted how a Chilean wine called "Palin Syrah" had been a popular choice at San Francisco's Yield Wine Bar until Sarah Palin came on the national scene, at which point, sales plummeted. The clientele simply could not bring themselves to drink the stuff, even ironically.

Chicken producers normally do pretty well during economic downturns, as consumers shift from more expensive beef and pork. Not this time.

Demand is soft, but more crucially, costs are though the roof in the form of soaring feedgrain and energy prices. Everybody in the U.S. poultry industry is hurting, but none more than Pilgrim's Pride.

In an attempt to avoid the crazy-making crowds and woefully inadequate parking, I once went to the Berkeley Bowl-a grocery store with the biggest, best produce section I've ever seen-a half hour before it opened. This was early on a weekday morning. Nevertheless, I was shocked that there was a line, as if it were 1972 and people were waiting for Rolling Stones tickets to go on sale.

"What I feared most was the screaming."

So begins a saga in Sunday's Chicago Tribune by reporter Monica Eng, who set out to witness the making of her bacon, her pork chops, and her ham. That meant she had to watch a pig being slaughtered. She also watched the killing of a cow, a chicken, a fish, and a bunch of crabs. She commits the latter act of hecatomb herself.

This is almost too good to be true, but apparently it is true: Until the ascendancy of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate, the top selling wine at San Francisco's Yield Wine Bar was Palin Syrah, an organic Chilean wine that goes for $13 a bottle.

Sales have plummeted since the Republican convention, according to SeriousEats.

If you regularly drink common, canned, grocery-store coffee, you may notice that sometimes it tastes pretty good, and other times (most times, in fact) it tastes OK at best.

Kraft, the world's second-largest food company, will soon be added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, an event that normally would be something for the firm to crow about. This week, maybe not so much.

The index had to give the boot to insurance giant AIG, which has lost about 96 percent of its market value in the past year, and most of that in the past few days. The company was essentially nationalized on Tuesday when the federal government capitalized it to save it from collapse.

As I noted on Tuesday, Kroger is doing well not despite the weak economy, but because of it. The supermarket chain aims itself squarely at the budget- conscious,and since more of us are thinking of ourselves that way lately,Kroger is benefiting. At the same time, high-end markets like Whole Foods are hurting bad. And those in the middle? They're hurting too.

I sometimes wonder how purveyors of "inferior goods"—the Wal-Marts and the Krogers of the world—feel about the term.

The executives at Kroger probably aren't bothered by it at all just now. People are flocking to their stores, and every quarter looks better than the last.

In advertising its new line of coffee drinks, McDonald's is employing the same strategy as the Republican Party: characterizing Starbucks as a place for effete eggheads and characterizing itself as a place for regular folks. Regular folks being, according to both McDonald's and the GOP, people who are not too bright—and are a little proud of that fact.

The Corn Refiners Association recently stepped up its ad campaign defending high fructose corn syrup, and a more disingenuous set of commercial messages I can't imagine.

Let's start with what they get right in these ads: HFCS is not poison. It's no different, in effect, from sugar. It's not even all that different chemically. And the ads' declarations that industrial corn syrup is OK "in moderation" are accurate.

Daily Bread examines the nexus of food and money. From the corner booth at McDonald's to the conference rooms of the World Trade Organization, this blog covers the economics that drive the food industry.