As I sit here eating my lunch, food is naturally on my mind. It may be on yours as well after this post. Here’s a collection of food related news chum: articles on what we eat, how we eat, and where we eat:
- What We Eat: Marred Fruit. Our country wastes tons and tons of food each year because we’ve been led to believe by the media that our food must look perfect. Guess what? Not only does your food not have to look perfect, eating marred and ugly fruit may actually be healthier for you. It turns out that the mechanisms used by the plant to fight off infection from the damage actually makes the food better for you.
- What We Eat: Avocados. Here, supposedly, is a method for ripening a rock-hard avocado in 10 minutes. I haven’t tried it yet.
- What We Eat: Cracker Jack. Cracker Jack, that snack-food of Baseball, is ditching the prize in every box for a QR code. A sign of the times, but also (if you think about it) disenfranchising for the poor that cannot afford internet access or phones to read the codes.
- What We Eat: Internal Impacts. It turns out that what we eat and drink has a significant impact on our internal microbiome. Coffee, tea, water, wine — these are loved by the biome. Sodas and artificial sweetners — bad for the biome. Foods like fruits, vegetables, yogurt and buttermilk can increase the diversity of bacteria in a person’s intestines. Foods containing loads of simple carbohydrates appear to reduce bacterial diversity in the gut. Of course, medicines we take have a big role as well. This cements my belief that we’ll soon discover the best weight loss method, and the best way to be healthy, is to treat our biomes right.
- How We Eat: Exercise Doesn’t Help Lose Weight. Increasingly, the belief that you exercise to lose weight is turning out to be a myth. That’s not to say exercise is bad; rather, exercise is important for overall health and wellness. However, the calories you burn exercising just aren’t enough to make a significant dent in your weight.
- How We Eat: The Clean Plate Club. If you are like me, you were brought up in the generation that believed you needed to clean your plate (for those starving children in China), and that it was a crime to waste food on your plate. Here’s an article that opines that plate size is a big reason for the obestity epidemic. Basically, the notion is that our plates have grown in size, and we were raised to “take a plateful and eat it all”. As such, we’re increasing portion sizes without realizing it. It is certainly something I’ve believed on the dining out side for a while: restaurants serve you too much food because food is cheap, and you need to see a lot of food to justify the prices you need to pay to cover labor. I think it is true at home as well. I’ve been consciously been trying to use smaller plates.
- Where We Eat: Hollywood Bowl. There’s a new food lineup at the Hollywood Bowl this summer, and you can learn what it is in these pictures. This year, the Bowl has partnered with James Beard Award-winning chef Suzanne Goin and business partner Caroline Styne—the team behind local hotspots Lucques, A.O.C., Tavern and The Larder—to bring a range of delicious new dining options to the historic amphitheater. The new partnership will replace the Patina Restaurant Group, which will catered the venue’s numerous restaurants, markets, and food stands for over 15 years. The overhaul features all new offerings that will appeal to a wide variety of tastes, including everything from tacos and BBQ to wood-grilled fish and grab-and-go salads. The new food and drink options will be scattered throughout the venue, and will include a burger stand, a wine bar, a raw bar, a marketplace for sandwiches and salads, as well as several fine dining options. They’ll even have retro-style food trucks parked around the venue for quick bites.
- Where We Eat: Portos. Here’s a great article on Portos Bakery, and the work required to keep it in operation. There is evidently method to the madness of the place. They are working on finding just the right balance between being busy, and being too busy that customers go elsewhere.
- Where We Eat: Mexican Kosher Groceries. Here’s a neat article on a Catholic grocer in Mexico City that caters to the Jewish population needing to keep Kosher.
