At this stage of the game in World Cup 2010 your home team was eliminated (or maybe never qualified to start with), is there anyone else you want to root for and why?

In Who to support in the World Cup, based on national cuisine (SBS, Mouthfull Blog, June 10), Phil Lees shares that Ethan Zuckerman solved this by showing a preference for “Places I’ve been to over those I’ve never visited, with quality of national cuisine as a tiebreaker.”

Phil Lees then lets food run the show in his piece with following criterias:

• Perceived popularity and distinctiveness of barbecue in that nation. This makes Group A more complex with Uruguay’s asado; Mexico’s carne asada and South Africa’s braai.
• Number of cookbooks that I own, from or about this nation. This places developing nations at a huge disadvantage and place a large bias towards English speaking countries. At least, this is a quantitive measure.
• Number of national breweries that I can name. I unashamedly like beer.
• Number of restaurants that I’ve eaten at from that nation’s cuisine, this year.

Russell (Britannia) offered his snarky ratings of all 32 countries with teams playing in World Cup of Food (Endless Simmer, June 7). He deserves a red card for it.

World Cup fever is also strong in Dubai where Kitsch Cupcakes created some custom team treats like these...

Finishing on a sweet note...

(* Photo above from Kitsch Cupcakes photo album)...