For The Love of Food

Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.

I’m pleased to announce that I did another guest post, this time over at TwiTip about Twitter and the value of food tweets. I also found some divine homemade pizza recipes, great advice for choosing (and not choosing) smart seafood and an urban legend debunking session. Oh, and I call B.S. on Men’s Health for pretending slightly-less-fattening fast food is “healthy.”

If you would like to see more of my favorite articles each week or just don’t want to wait until Friday, be sure to follow me on Twitter (@summertomato) or the Summer Tomato Facebook fan page.

Submissions of your own best food and health articles are also welcome, just drop me an email using the contact form.

For The Love of Food

• How To Make Any Tweet Worth Following << My latest guest post (at TwiTip by @problogger) where I discuss the value of tweeting what you eat (on Twitter). Alternate title idea -  In Defense of Food: A Tweeter’s Manifesto. Please retweet!
• How to Make Money on Food Items in the Shape of Religious Icons <<Worth checking out for the picture alone. Hilarious, irreverent entrepreneurship. Does it get any better? (from Serious Eats)
• Eat Healthy at the Airport <<B.S. of the week. Leave it to Men’s Health to redefine “healthy” to include complete garbage. Real airport health food? Nuts, fruit, vegetables, eggs, water. Better yet, bring your own.
• Chew better, stay full longer? <<Great advice on getting more satisfaction from your meals by chewing longer. Courtesy of the Nutrition Diva herself, Monica Reinagle over at Nutrition Data.
• Red Bull’s New Cola: A Kick from Cocaine? <<Apparently Red Bull has traces of cocaine in it, according to Time. Better than fiction.
• Sardines for the eco-conscious <<Wonderful guide to choosing the healthiest, most sustainable fish from Limes and Lycopene (by @kathrynelliott)
• Tastier, Healthier Pizzas <<I altered the title a bit because I do not think the New York Times gave their pizza recipe enough credit. Sure it’s healthier, but what most people don’t understand is that these kinds of pizzas taste orders of magnitude better than typical take out. Seriously.
• All you can eat <<More than you ever wanted to know about where Red Lobster gets their bottomless shrimp. This article is long, but I was enthralled from start to finish (via @sandrasay)
• Chewing gum, spiders and jellyfish stings — all with a dose of skepticism <<The always skeptical Tami Dennis of the Los Angeles Times debunks some urban legends about food and other oddities.
• Daily Delish – Cheer for cherries <<Shout out to the lovely Shannon at The Daily Balance (@thedailybalance). I’ve always known Shannon was awesome, but she topped herself this week by mentioning basketball and cherries in the same post. FTW!!

What links did I miss? Share your faves of the week in the comments.

Tags: B.S. of the week, basketball, chewing, entrepreneurship, guest posts, Los Angeles Times, Men's Health, New York Times, pizza, recipe, Red Bull, Red Lobster, shrimp, TwiTip, Twitter, urban legends

Curious what I eat everyday? Follow me on Twitter!

Lately I’ve been investigating all these social media websites and wondered what to do with the Twitter phenomenon. For those of you who don’t know, Twitter is a networking service that revolves around the simple question, “What are you doing?”

In short, Twitter uses what is called a “Status Update” to let your friends know what you are up to and what you care about right now.

The beauty of Twitter is its simplicity, but this is also what makes it challenging to use as a tool. It is almost impossible to give too much information on Twitter, so whatever you communicate has to be simple and concise. Another term for Tweeting is “microblogging.”

So I asked myself, what am I doing?

Since my primary concerns are food and science, what I am usually doing is thinking about and eating food! I believe that what you eat can vastly improve your quality of life through great taste and better health, and I built this blog because I want to show you all how easy and delicious healthy eating can be. But I still often get questions about my personal habits and what I might do in certain situations.

To this end I have started Tweeting everything I eat, a term I refer to as TwEating.

If you do not use Twitter this may sound like a big time commitment, but it is actually a ridiculously small amount of work. Twitter only allows 140 characters to express yourself, so these TwEats are not very detailed and only take up seconds of my time.

What will be interesting, however, will be the archive that is created as a result of constant TwEating. You will be able to follow patterns and trends, and see firsthand how often we really have birthdays (and cake!) in the lab.

I hope you follow along and share your TwEating adventures as well. Some of you may be doing it already….

My Twitter profile is @summertomato.

In addition to TwEats, I also occasionally Tweet food-related news and science articles that I do not feel like writing entire blog posts about. Believe it or not, a lot goes through my brain that never makes it to SummerTomato. You can now find the overflow on Twitter.

What do you think about TwEating? Will you join me?

Bon Appetweet!

Tags: @summertomato, microblogging, TwEats, Twitter