Health
Habits
Food
Weight 
Better Than Butternut: Roasted Delicata Squash Recipe
10 Simple Ways To Eat Less Without Noticing
Juicing: Stupid and Pretentious or Nourishing and Enlightening?
10 Tasty Carbs That Won’t Make You Fat
How To Start Working Out When You Don’t Like To Exercise
Focus More on Your Brain and Less on Your Diet if You’re Serious About Losing Weight
Home Court Habits: The Secret to Effortless Weight Control
10 Reasons You Aren’t Losing Weight When You Think You’re Doing Everything Right
How To Burn More Calories Without Breaking A Sweat
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Foodists
For The Love Of Food
by Darya Rose | Apr 20, 2012
For The Love of Food
Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.
This week, the risk of storing food in plastic, everything you’ve ever wanted to fight about regarding meat production and consumption, and how an herbal remedy is causing cancer in Taiwan.
Want to see all my favorite links? Be sure to follow me on on Digg. I also share links on Twitter (@summertomato), Google+ and the Summer Tomato Facebook page. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you.
Links of the week
- If the food’s in plastic, what’s in the food? <<A really good question, in my option. (Washington Post)
- To Heal, First Eat <<Woohoo! Some doctors are finally starting to understand why spending time in the kitchen is so important. (New York Times)
- Joel Salatin responds to New York Times’ ‘Myth of Sustainable Meat’ <<It’s no secret that I adore Joel Salatin, and I thank him deeply for calling BS of the week on the New York Times for their reprehensibly irresponsible article on sustainable farming. (And thanks Grist for publishing it).
- The FDA takes action on animal antibiotics, at long last <<And speaking of sustainable farming, it appears the FDA is finally coming around… (Food Politics)
- Is Eating Meat Ethical? <<Mark Sisson does a great job of explaining why this is a loaded question. (Mark’s Daily Apple)
- Herbal Remedy Ingredient Tied to Cancer, Kidney Failure <<Just a friendly reminder that not all natural remedies are helpful, or even harmless. (Medline)
- What Eating Too Much Sugar Does to Your Brain <<This is from a couple weeks ago but it combines my two favorite subjects, so I thought it was worth sharing. I think the main idea here is a bit too oversimplified, but it’s an issue worth thinking about. (Forbes)
- The dilemma of pink slime: cost or culture? <<Interesting take on the pink slime stuff. Honestly I’ve been confused why this is such a hot topic. Didn’t you guys know most ground meat was made from sterilized processed scraps? Is this news? Besides, entrails and offal are among the most trendy items on fancy SF restaurant menus. (Food Politics)
- The magic of mise en place – How a ‘chef secret’ can help you prepare for the busy week ahead… <<Cool kitchen time saver. It’s intuitive, but sometimes we need stuff like this spelled out for us. (Stone Soup)
- Creamy Asparagus Soup <<Nothing says “springtime” like the intoxicating aroma of asparagus pee. Ha! Seriously though, it’s only in season for a few weeks so get your asparagus fill while you can. (Simply Recipes)
What inspired you this week?
I went to culinary school, where one of the very first words and things you learn is, “Mise En Place.”
And it’s something I try to teach every one of my friends and family who aren’t too keen on cooking.
It can really change things from an organized kitchen to a frantic one, when trying to cook a meal. And thus completely changes the experience from miserable to enjoyable.
As small of a thing as it may seem, I think it’s a very important building block into making cooking a more approachable activity, and eventually shifting us all back into a society of cooks, rather than simply grocery shoppers.
So, I say to anyone who has a hard time getting someone into actually “cooking” their own meals? This is one of the most important pieces you must teach them. Teach them a flow to working in the kitchen. So they aren’t running back and forth for things, going crazy and feeling lost.
It is sad but all the Dr’s I know personally have the worst diets and/or feed their kids tons of sugar. The lifestyle that youhave to have when you attend medical school doesn’t provide much opportunity to develop healthy eating habits and cooking skills–which I think truly crystalize in young adulthood, a time when med students are just eating junk to get through school and crazy hours.
And most nutritionists I know are so obsessed with “healthiness” and managing nutrient intake, that they miss the part about people wanting to eat food that tastes good. The nutritionists I knew in grad school were mostly studing nutrition to manage their own eating disorders.
On the pink slime issue, I was more concerned about the ammonia being used to “clean” the meat prior to being used as a food additive more so than the parts of the animal that were used. Am I off base here?
It’s certainly gross, but there’s ammonia in a lot of foods, especially cheese.