Cutting the salt in Indian cuisine

Last week I got a Chanukah package in the mail from my sister. In it was India with Passion: Modern Regional Home Food by Manju Malhi, a British food writer with a popular UK cooking show, Simply Indian, on home-style cooking. One of my sister’s food-savvy friends had tried out the recipes and raved about [...]

Smart Choices Labeling Program Falls Apart

Smart Choices has been suspended only about two months after going live, and participants like PepsiCo have pulled out altogether.The great surprise for me is how little real effort it took to shut down the fantasy-laden program. Three or four years ago it might well have prevailed. Smart Choices is obviously a big and publicly important target, but on the other hand, it seems to have been exposed and skewered satisfactorily already by public reporting of the Froot Loops fiasco. The FDA can ride the crest and put the final touch on it, but it’s gotten a huge boost this time from public opinion.

The Case Against Bologna

In today’s Washington Post, columnist Jennifer LaRue Huget comments on Oscar Meyer’s claim that a classic peanut butter and jelly sandwich has nothing on a classic bologna sandwich for health. Their contention is that the bologna sandwich is healthier because it has only 4 grams of sugar, and somewhat less total fat. Obviously Oscar Meyer is trying to play up its few nutritional points and hide its glaring weaknesses–most of the processed food players have been doing this aggressively for years now. We’re mostly inured to it, and frankly we expect bologna to be high-salt and kind of fatty. No big surprises there. So let’s get back to the main strangeness of this comparison and ask the key questions: How could peanut butter possibly have more protein than bologna? Isn’t bologna meat? What’s going on?

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.

Can Better Nutrition Curb Violence?

Researchers have set up a large double-blind study at a prison in Scotland to test the possible effect of nutritional supplementation — vitamins, minerals, and essential fatty acids — on lowering the frequency of violence. If the study does show a real connection between malnutrition and violence in prisons, it may also have implications for school cafeteria food offerings and the fate of American civility under a massively processed diet.