I stumbled across a news story “Peter Jennings reporting: How to Get Fat Without Really Trying.” This story is several years old but the ideas are still relevant. Although as a general rule I don’t watch much TV, this 43 minute report is a good overview of the forces at work in our food supply. [...]
Celebrity chef to the stars, Tal Ronnen, is consistently a source of quiet wisdom. I had the chance to hear him speak and watch him cook last year. He has a very calm personality, the opposite of many famous chefs who become larger than life. He has no trademark “BAM!” to try to reach celebrity status. For [...]
I’ve been (mostly) vegan now for two and a half years. I get asked all the time “don’t you miss meat?”. No, I honestly don’t. Though I do miss some of the flavorings. Take bacon, for example. My craving isn’t for the actual limp, greasy bacon. It is for something crispy and smoky to put on toasted bread [...]
Do I want to go grab a burger? Not usually. For vegans, the options are usually some freezer-burned hockey puck that no amount of ketchup will make palatable. Interestingly, the industry magazine Restaurant News featured an article “Veggie Burgers Get New Respect”. It seems there are enough “flexitarians” looking for meatless options that dusting off [...]
Big Food laboratories have been rushing to get genetically modified fish on your plate. First up? The ever popular over hyped salmon. The companies face one last hurdle: apparently consumers don’t want to eat their Frankenfish. They’ve already done a very good job of marketing the so-called benefits of eating fish several times a week [...]
A recent study out of Sweden finds that taking in more calcium than your body needs actually slightly increases your risk for bone fracture. The Swedes have good reason to study this. They are one of the few countries with higher rates of fracture than the US, despite their love of all things dairy. Conventional [...]
You can’t unring a bell and you can’t unlearn new knowledge. (Unless it is calculus and physics, I have managed to unlearn some of that.) Based on my intense love for his fiction, I picked up Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Eating Animals. Critics may say it is not scholarly enough and although well researched, it is [...]
Hosting a surprise baby shower, Mother’s Day and my eldest daughter’s birthday on the same weekend, I used it as an excuse to cook and bake for almost a week. When you’re vegan, you can’t just pop in to your local grocery and grab a tub of potato salad to serve. Plus, I like to cook [...]
Every five years, the government gets together to decide what Americans should be eating. The 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the US Department of Health and Human Services (USDHHS) were recently released. These Guidelines will be used to ‘guide’ the nutrition in federal programs, such as school [...]
Recently the know-it-alls at the FDA got together to discuss food dyes. Why now? The first reason is the The Center for Science in the Public Interest is calling for it. They are the self-proclaimed “organized voice of the American public on nutrition, food safety, health and other issues”. This advocacy group is calling for a ban on the [...]