Recently, I had a post about some recent articles linking picky eating to OCD and even autism, so this Daily Beast article caught my eye: veganism may also be a manifestation of eating disorders. A 2009 study of young adults ages 15-23 showed that those who said they had adopted “vegetarian” diets were also more likely to have engaged in binge/purge behaviors and use of laxatives or other “diet pills” for weight loss. The article also says that adopting a vegan or vegetarian diet is a recommended tactic for hiding an eating disorder promoted on “pro-ana” websites. The article is careful not to say that all vegans have eating disorders, it’s that people with eating disorders often turn to vegetarian or vegan diets as extreme weight loss mechanisms.
On the opposite end of things…this article from Twin Cities.com informs us about a Vietnamese restaurant in St. Paul, MN that has begun offering its diners a pho eating challenge: consume a bowl of pho that contains TEN POUNDS of rice noodles, along with the usual assorted slices of beef within 45 minutes to win a t-shirt proclaiming you to be “The Pho King”. The writer tried the challenge and couldn’t get anywhere close. He got a “Pho King Loser” t-shirt for his trouble. I loves me some pho, but I know I couldn’t slurp down ten pounds of rice noodles even if I had all day. But I would give it a go just for the “Pho King Loser” t-shirt. Sounds to me like the owners of the restaurant are deliberately angling to get “Man Vs. Food” to come pay them a visit.
This post at The Atlantic’s food blog by contributor Sarah Eltman makes me sad. She writes about going back to Barcelona after many years, expecting to enjoy a foodie holiday visiting all the local eateries and sampling authentic dishes made with local ingredients, only to find that the globalization of industrialized food means that the ingredients used in those places now are the same over-processed crap we eat at home. I’ve wanted to go to Barcelona for years, but maybe I’ll just go to Taco Bell instead.
And on a more practical note, this Serious Eats post tells us how to make our own crème fraîche at home. I was a little surprised to realize that I did not already know how to do this, because I’ve long known how to make yogurt and make a substitute for buttermilk, but there you have it. Indeed, all you need to do to make crème fraîche is to add a tablespoon or two of plain yogurt or buttermilk to a pint of heavy cream and let it sit for 12-24 hours, unrefrigerated. Just make sure none of the dairy involved is ultra-pasteurized because that kills the necessary bacteria. It gets harder and harder to find dairy that isn’t ultra-pasteurized these days, but if you’re lucky your grocery store still sells a local dairy’s products that aren’t. Once you get the tang and consistency you want, refrigerate your finished product and it will keep for 7-10 days.
Britain has always taken a back seat to other countries, especially France and Italy, when it come to cheese, but did you know that there are 700 varieties of cheese made in the U.K.? Only 14 of them rise to the level of AOC-style designation, but it’s not unusual for artisanal cheeses to be as good or better than traditional styles. This BBC article talks about the growing public appreciation for cheese in the U.K. and the resulting explosion of cheese-making throughout the country.
Speaking of British traditions…for centuries, British sailors were issued a daily tot of rum as part of their rations. The rum was typically added to water and called “grog”, since the water wasn’t particularly palatable. Crews would even mutiny if their grog was withheld. The Royal Navy continued this tradition until 1970, if you can believe that, and the final issue of rum was ceremonially served to RN sailors as “The Black Tot”. The last of that specific stock of rum is now being sold, having been kept in storage all these years (just in case, I guess…you never know when they might need a flagon or two), at the rather steep price of £599 for a pint…although you do get a nifty replica of the copper cup used on ships to measure out the rations.
On our vacation to Cape Cod earlier in the summer, we took Charlotte to her first-ever drive-in movie at the Wellfleet Drive-In. There are so few working drive-in movie theaters left that we figured it might be a once-in-a-lifetime thing for her. I was tickled that when the screen finally lit up one of the very first things they showed was a real 1950s ad for the concession stand just like the one in the YouTube clip above. This recent Serious Eats post has a handful of some of the better known ones, and if you go to the webpage for that YouTube clip, you will notice a slew of similar nostalgic bits of drive-in ephemera. Sadly, the actual concession stand food was still just as shitty and overpriced as it ever was, but at least she can say she got to have the experience.
This is called the “Toast-E/R”, and it lets you make your breakfast a little more exciting by pretending that you are defibrillating your bread into toasty deliciousness. It’s a project from designer Shay Carmon, so don’t rush on over to Target to try and buy one just yet, but don’t you just want it like RIGHT NOW?
A pair of articles have drawn some interest in various online haunts:
First, the Wall Street Journal had this story a couple of weeks ago about classifying adult picky eating behavior as a variant of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and adding it to the DSM-IV as a clinical diagnosis.
So, clearly we’re not talking about your average childhood aversions to food or even those adults (and you know who you are) who won’t eat mushrooms or tomatoes, or something. The people in the WSJ article have full-blown eating disorders that rival the severity of anorexia and bulimia because they restrict their diets to very limited numbers of foods, often based on irrational reasons. Meanwhile, the British researchers observed that children who developed autism often had more limited ranges of preferred foods, but it’s more of a symptom in the vein of some of the other sensory issues that affect autistics than a dysfunctional behavior. Nevertheless, given the link between autism and OCDs, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that eating behaviors would be a common element.
It has been nearly fifteen years since I moved away from Portland, ME and there is precious little I miss about it, but going to Harbor Fish Market to buy my seafood is definitely one of them. So is the best freaking pad thai I ever had, but that’s another story. Slashfood had a short interview last week with the owner of Harbor Fish, Ben Alfiero. They’ve expanded their business to include a wholesale business and they now include non-local product to cater to more sophisticated consumer demand, but they are still in that smelly little run-down wharf building and if you want the freshest possible fish in Southern Maine, they’re still THE place.
In case you hadn’t heard, the Great Bitters Drought of 2010 is finally over. Or, maybe you hadn’t heard there was a shortage of bitters in the first place…well, there was, but now there’s not. So there. This Atlantic Monthly food blog post from April explains the whole story behind bitters, what to look for, and how to use them in your cocktails for that exquisite little floral note.
So this list of 20 “Harmful Drinks in America” has been popping up here and there since I first saw it last week. The list is based mainly on the sugar content of the drinks (with calorie count as the second most important factor), and they illustrate each bullet item with an equivalent (in sugar) snack food as well as suggest a “better” alternative for each. The drink they rate as #1 is this milkshake from Cold Stone Creamery, which tops out at over 2000 calories, 153 grams of sugar and 131 grams of fat. The calorie content alone is about what an adult man should consume in an entire day’s worth of meals, and the fat is TRIPLE the daily suggested amount. That much sugar is the equivalent of over 30 teaspoonsful of sugar, or about half a cup.
Unbelievable.
And yet somehow they missed this drink, which, while lacking in sugar, is certainly waaay too popular with people in Washington:
We’ve all got our hate on for the KFC Double-Down sandwich, right? I mean, could anything BE more disgusting and such a symbol of our gluttony? Well, this The Smart Set post by Greg Beato would kindly like you to remember that the Double Down doesn’t even qualify as an amuse bouche compared with the 12-egg omelets, truck-tire-diameter pancakes, and side-’o-beef burgers that Adam Richman finds in restaurants all over the country on Travel Channel’s “Man vs. Food” or the cheese-laden, deep-fried, gut-busting “off the hook” dishes Guy Fieri lauds on “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives”.
The BBC reports that the British department store Selfridge’s will officially roll out its Christmas shopping season this year on AUGUST 2. But American retail chain Toys R Us has them beat with a “Christmas In July” sale that runs this week. (although, as far as I can tell, that’s just a sale and not [...]
On Friday, I decided to stop having Facebook scrape and post my blog feed. I just don’t feel like blog posts fit the very ephemeral vibe of FB, and, frankly, it irritates the living crap out of me when people post comments about the blog posts on FB instead of posting them here. I am [...]
In my copious spare time, usually whilst sitting in the waiting area at Charlotte’s karate studio, I have been making slow but steady progress toward adding tags to all the posts on this site. As of right now, I have completed tagging all the way back to April 1, 2008. The current archive of this [...]
Just the other day I posted about a young man from Nepal who was trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records as the shortest man in the world. He’s only 22 inches tall, compared to the 29-inch tall He Pingping of China, who is the current record holder. Well, WAS the current [...]
boobcheese tickle fights child actor suicides Betty White Zombie Farrah Fawcett Canadian pissing habits that milkaholic Lindsay ChatRoulette whatever half-assed thing Google did this week out-of-control Toyotas
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
I recently posted about the use of menhaden in making fish oil dietary supplements and the potential risk that poses to the entire Atlantic Ocean ecosystem. One of the alternatives to using menhaden for omega-3 supplements is algae oil, because algae is the primary diet of the menhaden and is actually the source of all [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
This week Barack Obama committed the United States to at least two more years of war, 30,000 troops in harm’s way for no other reason than saving face, and umpteen billions of dollars wasted FOR NO GOOD REASON WHATSOEVER and we are inundated with: Tiger Woods proving he knows how to put it in the [...]
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
