For The Love of Food

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

I’m thrilled to announce this week the launch of an amazing project. 55 Knives is a new e-book just launched by my friend Nick at the wonderful Macheesmo blog. The 55 Knives project is a joint effort of 55 top food bloggers offering personal stories paired with hand-selected recipes. I contributed a chapter, as did many of my favorite food bloggers including Local Lemons, The Bitten Word and Chez Us. I’ve read through it and highly recommend it. 55 Knives is offered at a discounted price of $14 until next Thursday.

If you read one food article this week, make it Michael Pollan’s new piece in the New York Review of Books. I also really enjoyed the article about how health food labels are complete BS.

I read many more wonderful articles than I post here each week. If you’d like to see more or just don’t want to wait until Friday, be sure to follow me on Twitter (@summertomato) or the Summer Tomato Facebook fan page. For complete reading lists join me on the social bookmarking sites StumbleUpon and Delicious. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you there. (Note: If you want a follow back on Twitter introduce yourself with an @ message).

Links of the week

• The Food Movement, Rising <<New must-read by Michael Pollan. Still wonder if the food movement is a shill for liberal politics? Do your parents? Read (and share) this article to discover how people from all political dispositions are seeing local food as the cornerstone of their values and goals. (New York Review of Books)
• The Crisper Whisperer: 10 Tips to Take to the Farmers’ Market <<Awesome tips for a great farmers market experience. (Serious Eats)
• No evidence organic foods benefit health: study <<BS of the week. What kills me is that the headline is so misleading. What should it say? More research needed on benefits of organics. (Reuters)
• Nutrition buzzwords make hay out of grains of truth <<Great article explaining why many “healthy” products deserve a BS sticker as well. (Washington Post)
• Apps for iPad Cooking <<I love my iPad and I love cooking. Win. (New York Times)
• NBA cooks up edible logos to make mark on pizza and toast <<This is gross, except I love basketball so much it’s awesome. Too bad they picked the wrong ball club to feature 😉 (USA Today)
• BPA Found in 92% of Canned Foods <<I almost wish there were something that the industrial food chain didn’t turn to poison. At this point I almost feel like I’m gloating. (Slash Food)
• Regimens: Eat Your Vegetables, but Not Too Many <<A good reminder to avoid being too crazy when it comes to food. When in doubt, ask yourself: am I enjoying this? (New York Times)
• 20 Worst Drinks in America 2010 <<You probably already know these drinks are bad, but did you know they were this bad? (Men’s Health)
• Radish-dill tea sandwiches <<Simple, beautiful, delicious recipe. (The Sophisticated Gourmet)

What inspired you this week?

With the launch of the iPad I was excited to review and recommend a few of the early release health apps for Summer Tomato readers. But after spending a few days browsing apps from the “health,” “diet,” and “food” categories it became clear such a post would be impossible.

At this point there is still nothing worthy to recommend.

So far there are only a handful of healthy eating apps, and by far the majority of them are calorie counters and rudimentary or overly complicated food journals. Some of them seem okay for what they are, but I couldn’t picture myself using them or recommending them to anyone looking to get healthy.

But my time searching wasn’t entirely wasted. In my quest it appears I may have stumbled upon the worst (aka funniest) iPad app in existence.

HealthCalc XL is supposed to be a Body Mass Index (BMI) calculator and health assessment app. I’m not sure why you would need this on your iPad, but since it is free I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

So far, so good.

To calculate BMI the interface is pretty close to what you might expect. Since BMI is a ratio of height to weight, you can enter those fields. Unfortunately, however, the default measurement units are centimeters and kilograms, which isn’t particularly useful for most of us here in the U.S. You can switch over to feet and “lbf” (presumably that means pounds) if you wish, but this requires an extra step.

In addition to height and weight, HealthCalc XL asks for your age, gender and physical activity level. No standardization of what is considered “low,” “middle,” or “high” activity levels is provided.

Once you’ve entered this information you hit the “calc” button for a read-out of your “BMI,” “Ideal weight,” “recommended calory” (no, I did not mistype that), and an assessment of your health in the form of: “You are”

This is where the fun starts.

HealthCalc XL does not sugar coat your health assessment for you. And chances are it thinks you are carrying a few too many pounds.

Anything at the higher end of the normal BMI range (typically measured as between 18.5-24.9) HealthCalc XL considers “a little fat” (see top image). If your BMI creeps above 27, HealthCalc XL is sure to tell you “You are fat.”

And if your BMI is higher?

Whether you agree with HealthCalc XL’s assessment or not might be a point of debate if the BMI was calculated correctly. Unfortunately, it is not.

According to HealthCalc XL, a highly active 5’5″ woman weighing 100 “lbf” has a BMI of 19.4.

In reality this height and weight pair calculates to a BMI of 16.6 and is considered significantly underweight.

But HealthCalc XL considers her “standard.” This is more than wrong, it is dangerous. Young girls are the most prone to body images and incorrect BMI calculations can fuel eating disorders and other health problems.

At the end of the day, HealthCalc XL is both mean and incompetent. I hope it never applies for a service job in San Francisco.

Have you found any decent health apps yet for iPad?