Food
What’s the Best Diet? Healthy Eating 101
Like everything it's complicated, depends on your goals and desires.
Don’t eat the rice, you’ll get arsenic poisoning! 🍚
Don’t eat the rice, you’ll get arsenic poisoning! 🍚
White rice is unhealthy, fruits and vegetables are often contaminated with heavy metal, especially if you don’t get the special expensive organic type from the yuppie store, and you might as well not eat fruits and vegetables if you don’t eat kale.
And other bullshit along those lines.
I’m passing up on the free cake at work and I’m making sure to eat many pounds of fruits and vegetables every week now. I make rice a part of many meals — a mixture of white and brown rice. Brown rice is more filling and healthier but it takes longer to cook. So I do both, and make a big portion for multiple dinners and lunches. Cook it with lentils, which are another cheap food source that is quite healthy.
I often think the organic and pure healthy foods crowd really doesn’t want you to eat healthy but is just a shrill for the processed food industry. Let’s be honest — an apple or broccoli farmed with conventional methods is far healthier then any junk food you could find at the store. Cheaper too, as most processed food looks cheap but it’s not compared to fruits and vegetables bought in bulk, especially if they are flash frozen.
I was listening to a podcast the other day, and they had an advertising segment for Whole Foods. Yes, they did mention healthy foods, but quickly switched to reminding people they have a bakery full of cakes and desserts. I can’t help to think that many people go to Whole Foods to buy “fresh” kale to only allow it to rot on kitchen counter while they gorge on the brownies they bought while healthy shopping.
I’m quite happy to shop at Walmart and get my apples and frozen fruit and rice there, even if it is conventionally grown. There may be heavy metals residues in foods, we live in a world of modern chemistry. Milk, cheese and meat — and most processed foods have dioxins, PCBs, and other chemicals. But let’s be honest what kills most people, it’s not the trace levels of arsenic or even dioxins in food. It’s the fats and sugars that are part of our contemporary diets. Federal food safety standards provide a reasonable level of safety for eating healthy food, and any trace levels of toxins in healthy food are far surpassed compared to the unhealthy, common alternatives.
Potato Doughnuts – Gastro Obscura
The perfect doughnut is fluffy, soft, tender, and moist. The secret ingredient? Potatoes. The starchy tubers absorb moisture, but are stiff enough to hold air.
In the 18th century, German immigrants in Pennsylvania fried up sweet, potato-based doughnuts the day before Ash Wednesday (which kicked off the Lenten season) to help get rid of sugar and fat sitting around the house. In 1937, Yankee?magazine published a recipe for “Maine Potato Doughnuts.” Yankees were thrifty, and potatoes were cheap, local, and helped make flour stock last longer.?
What to Know About the Egg Shortage and Misinformation – The New York Times
Eggs can’t catch a break.
They’re scarce on store shelves. If you do manage to track some down, you may have to shell out considerable cash, as eggs reach record prices. An avian flu outbreak in the United States killed millions of hens last year, eliminating a critical egg supply. And now, a frenetic flurry of misinformation is being volleyed between pro- and anti-egg camps on social media. To Joe Rogan, eggs cause blood clots. To some on Twitter sharing screenshots of the abstract of a scholarly paper, yolks can ward off Covid.
This is not the first egg war. For the last 60 years or so, scientists have sparred over whether eggs are bad for the heart, said Walter Willett, a professor of nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Nutritionists have debated whether the high levels of cholesterol found in eggs outweigh the punch of protein they offer.
The Kraft Caves, Springfield MO
Deep under Springfield, Missouri, lies a cheese cave of industrial proportions, a 2-million-square-foot refrigerated warehouse called Springfield Underground. Since 2008, Kraft Foods has rented 400,000 square feet of the repurposed limestone mine as a massive distribution center, from which to ship 680-pound, Velveeta-bright barrels of Oscar Meyer meats, Philadelphia cream cheese, Velveeta pasteurized processed cheeses, Jell-O, and Lunchables. Unlike traditional cheese caves, which can impart the particular flavors of time and place—the unique combinations of bacteria, yeast, and mold that cheese makers call terroir—Wired magazine explains that in the case of Kraft's cave: