A light-hearted piece in The Economist details the culinary battles among Silicon Valley technology companies. Back in 1999, Google appointed Charlie Ayers, who has cooked for Bill Clinton and The Grateful Dead, as its first "chief food officer," and during his reign he fed employees grass-fed beef, sautéed clams, and shots of wheat grass. The company, after all, is not too far from San Francisco, a city where restaurants often provide the spectacle of a Broadway show.
Now, it looks like Facebook is surpassing Google on the food front. Google's Executive Chef Josef Desimone -- "admired chiefly for the kombucha tea that he ferments from scratch and that gets the employees' creative juices flowing" -- is defecting to the Palo Alto-based social networking site: "On Wall Street, no doubt, the short sellers have taken note."
--Anabel Lee
