This handy infographic from Guard Your Health offers a quick reminder that your butter pat should be no larger than the size of your fingertip, that your protein should be roughly the size of your palm, and that your carbs should only fit the size of your clenched fist.
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No matter your stance on capital punishment, eating and dying are universal and densely symbolic human processes. Death eludes the living, and we are drawn to anything that offers the possibility of glimpsing the undiscovered country. If, as the French epicure Anthelme Brillat-Savarin suggested, we are what we eat, then a final meal would seem to be the ultimate self-expression. There is added titillation when that expression comes from the likes of Timothy McVeigh (two pints of mint-chocolate-chip ice cream) or Ted Bundy (who declined a special meal and was served steak, eggs, hash browns, toast, milk, coffee, juice, butter, and jelly). And when this combination of factors is set against America’s already fraught relationship with food, supersized or slow, and with weight and weight loss, it’s almost surprising that Pizza Hut didn’t have a winner on its hands.
The idea of a meal before an execution is compassionate or perverse, depending on your perspective, but it contains an inherently curious paradox: marking the end of a life with the stuff that sustains it seems at once laden with meaning and beside the point. As Barry Lee Fairchild, who was executed by the state of Arkansas in 1995, said in regard to his last meal, “It’s just like putting gas in a car that don’t have no motor.”
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Liz divides cheeses into six families — fresh, bloomy rind, washed rind, pressed, cooked and blue — each with its own appearance, aroma, flavor and texture. (There is no set number of families, and cheesemongers may define them slightly differently.) Once you absorb the basics of the six families, you can use cheeses from the same family interchangeably in a recipe with good results.
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On Tuesday, the commission charged four companies with deceptively marketing weight-loss products, asserting they made “unfounded promises” that consumers could shed pounds simply by using their food additives, skin creams and other dietary supplements.
The four companies — Sensa Products, L’Occitane, HCG Diet Direct and LeanSpa — will collectively pay $34 million to refund consumers. They neither admitted nor denied fault in the case.
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America might think of itself as a nation of beef eaters, but for the first time in over a century, Americans are eating more chicken than beef, Priceonomics reports.
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This month, Milwaukee began a pilot program to repurpose cheese brine for use in keeping city roads from freezing, mixing the dairy waste with traditional rock salt as a way to trim costs and ease pollution.
“You want to use provolone or mozzarella,” said Jeffrey A. Tews, the fleet operations manager for the public works department, which has thrice spread the cheesy substance in Bay View, a neighborhood on Milwaukee’s south side. “Those have the best salt content. You have to do practically nothing to it.”
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“Unlike the anonymous inventors of such American staples as the hot dog, the grilled-cheese sandwich, and the milkshake, the creator of the chocolate-chip cookie has always been known to us. Ruth Wakefield, who ran the popular Toll House restaurant in Whitman, Massachusetts, with her husband, Kenneth, from 1930 to 1967, brought the Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie into being in the late nineteen-thirties. The recipe, which has been tweaked over the ensuing decades, made its first appearance in print in the 1938 edition of Wakefield’s “Tried and True” cookbook. Created as an accompaniment to ice cream, the chocolate-chip cookie quickly became so celebrated that Marjorie Husted (a.k.a. Betty Crocker) featured it on her radio program. On March 20, 1939, Wakefield gave Nestlé the right to use her cookie recipe and the Toll House name. In a bargain that rivals Peter Minuit’s purchase of Manhattan, the price was a dollar—a dollar that Wakefield later said she never received (though she was reportedly given free chocolate for life and was also paid by Nestlé for work as a consultant).”
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The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday put in place a major new policy to phase out the indiscriminate use of antibiotics in cows, pigs and chickens raised for meat, a practice that experts say has endangered human health by fueling the growing epidemic of antibiotic resistance.
This is the agency’s first serious attempt in decades to curb what experts have long regarded as the systematic overuse of antibiotics in healthy farm animals, with the drugs typically added directly into their feed and water. The waning effectiveness of antibiotics — wonder drugs of the 20th century — has become a looming threat to public health. At least two million Americans fall sick every year and about 23,000 die from antibiotic-resistant infections.
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“Once upon a time, English mealtimes were miserable things. There were no potatoes, no cigars and definitely no turkey. Then people began to import a strange, exotic bird. Its scientific name was Numida meleagris; its normal name now is the helmeted guinea fowl, because it’s got this weird bony protuberance on its forehead that looks a bit like a helmet. It came all the way from Madagascar, off the southeast coast of Africa, but the English didn’t know that. All the English knew was that it was delicious, and that it was imported to Europe by merchants from Turkey. They were the Turkey merchants, and so, soon enough, the bird just got called the turkey.”
– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/28/opinion/the-turkeys-turkey-connection.html?ref=todayspaper
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None of the obstacles to limiting food stamps to healthier foods seem insurmountable. It is administratively simple to draw a line.
But not politically simple. It’s not just that people on food stamps are an enormous market for soda and junk food. Big Soda has unusual allies. Restricting purchases is not controversial with WIC, which exists to supplement nutrition. But it is with food stamps, which exist to supplement income.
“There are people in the anti-hunger community who support a soda tax in general because it affects everyone, but they oppose banning soda from SNAP because it affects only poor people,” said Marlene B. Schwartz, director of the Yale Rudd Center. “Their philosophical argument is, if it’s the right thing to do for everyone, then make it for everyone.”
Other approaches exist. A portion of food stamps benefits could be set aside for produce. Or states could use the guidelines they already follow — to little controversy — with sales taxes. More than half the states tax soda or junk food at a higher rate than the food tax rate — in effect, they do not consider them food.
“Instead of arguing about healthy versus unhealthy, I would almost rather say what counts as food,” said Ms. Schwartz. “States already figured out what is and isn’t food.”
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– http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/16/to-fight-obesity-a-carrot-and-a-stick/?ref=todayspaper
shaun james bockert 