eating

The WHFoods “World’s Healthiest Foods” website (run by the George Mateljan Foundation) has a really cool “Weekly Bulletin” mailing list with informative articles on various food topics. The latest has a brief article answering the question, “Can you tell me more about the Mediterranean Diet?”

The article has nothing really new if you are already familiar with the ideas surrounding the diet, though it serves as a good introduction if you aren’t.

Of more interest is the References list at the bottom, with a dozen scientific articles that folks interested in diving into the nitty gritty might like to track down if they have the access and means to do so.

Via Serious Eats, there’s a thread started over on Chowhound asking for ‘Local Food’ Restaurants in L.A.?.

So, I’m one of those post “The Omnivore’s Dillema” people who got all excited about eating local food and ethical meat and all that, but I haven’t been able to find a good resource to help find “local food” restaurants here locally in L.A. Anyone have any favorites?

Okay, let me see if I can get this described efficiently.

There’s this guy, Adam Roberts, who has a popular food blog, The Amateur Gourmet.

Adam is currently also writing for the new food groupblogsite, Serious Eats, which published a new article of his today, “Meeting Mario”.

The “Mario” of the title is none other than celebrity chef and clog wearer Mario Batali, most famously from various shows on the Food Network, but also an NYC restauranteur branching out to LA now with Mozza.

Meanwhile, back at the interview, Mario is promoting a new book from pasta corporation Barilla, entitled “The Celebrity Pasta Lovers’ Cookbook”.

Now, normally this wouldn’t be that big of a deal. However, the PDF cookbook is free to download, and Barilla is donating $1 to the America’s Second Harvest food charity every time somebody does. Batali and fellow celeb-chef Giada De Laurentiis edited the various stars’ recipes.

Got all that? ;)

Thus begins “Unhappy Meals”, an article by Michael Pollan published in yesterday’s New York Times, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.” Now this is a diet I can get behind.

There’s a good reason seemingly half the blogosphere is linking to this article. Pollan presents a concise explanation of what you should probably be eating and why, sort of a distilled version of his famous book The Omnivore’s Dilemma which I recently purchased (though have yet to read). While there’s way more to this article than the typical online screed-demon paragraph or two, this is somehow appropriate given its condemnation of fast foods and heavily processed supermarket products. I’d recommend printing it out or downloading to a handheld (where’s my damn e-paper already?!) and savoring it.

But if you take anything away from the article, this is perhaps the best part (save the terse first sentence),

Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.

There’s much more to learn, though in the process you begin to be able to ignore all the needlessly complicated and contradictory “nutritionistic” voices out there.

Eat food. Sounds like a good plan.