Lentil Stew with…Pineapple?

You’d think the rule for making pineapple work in something savory would be that the other main item has to be pretty salty to stand up to all that acidic tropical sweetness. But that’s not the only way to deal with it. This Lebanese lentil and vegetable stew takes advantage of pineapple’s tang while mellowing out its jarring sweetness, and it contains no salt at all.

Thanksgiving Vegetariots, or, How Can You Have Any Pudding If You Won’t Eat the Meat?

The idea of vegetarians at the Thanksgiving table seems to throw everyone from newspaper food columnists to my mother-in-law and even Top Chef contestants way off their game, even in California. The world’s cuisines are full of good vegetarian protein dishes, and some of them are pretty easy to make on the fly. So maybe it’s time to feed the people and stop worrying about who eats turkey and who doesn’t.

Food as Barometer

The past week has seen a number of shock waves go through the food world. Gourmet magazine’s announced closing yesterday is the latest and the one with the best PR. But Gourmet isn’t the most important food barometer, particularly because it represents a shrinking target audience at the top of the food chain, as it were. The Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) food supplement program has just changed to allow low-income participants to buy fresh fruits and vegetables and whole grain foods with the credits.

The Meaning of “Tasty”

Everyone from food industry veteran Hank Cardello (see the Stuffed book review) to NYU nutrition professor Marion Nestle in What to Eat talks about fast food and junk food as “tasty”. Either they mean they find processed food tasty or they mean they think everyone else finds it tasty and irresistible–even if there’s something better to eat. That’s kind of defeatist, isn’t it? If everyone “knows” fast food is tastier than fresh produce, what hope is there for mainstream Americans to eat healthier than they do today? The ugly assumption they’ve bought into is that people who eat mostly processed food can’t change, won’t change, and most importantly, wouldn’t like fresh food if they tasted it. But no matter what you normally get to eat or what neighborhood you come from, if you can get out to an open air market, or grow something with your neighbors in a community garden, you’ll want to taste the produce. The fast-food version of “tasty” gets knocked aside in an instant for the real thing.

You want fries with that?

With the return to school, public debates over what children should eat have intensified. Nobody seems to have trouble zeroing in on french fries as the worst offender. Are fries really that bad, or just taking a bum rap? Can they be part of a balanced lunch at school, or are they insidious grease-and-salt bombs masquerading as a vegetable side dish? Thanks to the new New York City and California nutrition labeling laws, we finally have the tools to get their number.

Pack your own lunch

Lately I’ve been seeing a slew of trendy new books on how to pack your kid’s lunch, from vegan-friendly brand names to grow-your-own-garden-first. Few of them even consider the things I took to school every day as a kid–peanut butter and jelly, apple, carrots and celery. Or peanut butter and jelly, orange, carrots and celery. My mother was dull. My sister and I had no cool foods like Ho-Hos or Cheetos to distract us, and we usually ate at least some of the vegetables and the apple. Actually, so did most of the other kids in our school. It was that or suffer the cafeteria kale.

Stuffed: A Food Industry Insider Attempts Moderation

Stuffed is neither a counterattack from the food industry nor the next go-green manifesto. It’s Cardello’s attempt to mediate between restaurant chains, supermarkets, Big Food manufacturers, Big Agro, the government, public schools, and pretty much every other player in food politics. It does pack some original insights about the interlock between food industry, government, and consumer behavior and a few genuine surprises among his recommendations—some reasonable, some so strange it’s worth reading just to find out how Big Food envisions its future.

Dolmas by microwave

When we first moved to Pasadena 10 years ago, one of my favorite places for Sunday dinners out was Pita! Pita!, a family-run Lebanese restaurant in the “Old Town” section of the city. One of the reasons I loved it was the usual reason to love middle eastern food: the mostly vegetarian mezze were wonderful, [...]

Best new (fantasy) fresh produce ad

A few posts back I was daydreaming of a new campaign by the Ad Council promoting fresh produce. I’d thought the “Got Milk?” campaign would be something to model it on.
Washington Post columnist Paul Farhi, who was doing live chat with readers this week about why, when, and how fast food ads on tv started [...]

Suing for Salt

The Center for Science in the Public Interest is supporting a New Jersey man’s class action lawsuit against Denny’s Restaurants after private talks apparently failed to convince the chain to lower the exaggeratedly high sodium content in its meals. Apparently CSPI combed through the nutrition data on the Denny’s web site. A couple of sample [...]