By My Own Hand

Talk to the hand, tell me what you're doing over there. Hand it over. Oh, it's the iPhone! Handsome. Mmmm, all those apps. Which one to choose?

PC NMagazine has come out with a list of the top ten foodie apps; we recommed UrbanSpoon, the most useful restaurant locator, with links, comments, and (not shown in this illustration) a Scope that turns on the phone's camera and overlays icons of nearby restaurants when you aim it down the street. As for the Yelp app, it's even more frantic than the website, like walking down a maze of dark alleys in a rainstorm at midnight persued by packs of rabid jackals.

So why are we writing about iPhone apps and wringing our hands? Because we heard about a new app for strawberry recipes. Coming soon, perhaps: the app as hand lotion? We commented last year on an absurd campaign to promote avocados as "hand grown." Now strawberries. Let's quote a news release from our inbox.

I wanted to let you know that later this week the California Strawberry Commission will be launching its free STRAWBERRIES iPhone app. {It] offers a collection of more than 50 hand-selected strawberry recipes from some of the most popular food bloggers and chefs from around the web...

Confess we stopped reading after the "hand-selected recipes" part and wrote back to the hapless hack:

You can hand-pick a strawberry, but you don't "hand-select" recipes. You can carefully select from a sheaf of contenders, or consider thousand of recipes and pick four dozen of the best, but "hand-selected" means SELECTED BY HAND. What did you do, print them out one by one and put them in piles?

Not for an instant losing her cool, the PR rep emails back: "Thanks for your response. Please let me know if you have any questions about the iPhone app or would like images. Have a great week." Okay, here's the link to the iPhone strawberry app, including a recipe by Mark Ruhlman. But the whole thing still deserves a big raspberry.