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In the past month, calorie restriction (or CR, as the kids are calling it) has become the hottest new health craze to read about, if not to try. Last week there was the gonzo feature in New York magazine, which described the near-starvation diet that CR practitioners live on in the hopes of increasing their lifespan. And Tuesday saw two CR-related pieces in The New York Times (requires registration) and The Wall Street Journal. Readers are eating this stuff up—in just a few hours, the Times piece floated to the top of the “Most E-Mailed” list and stayed there.
Perhaps its popularity is due in part to its promise that in the future, we may be able to get CR’s benefits without the hunger pangs. Recent findings about the link between calorie restriction and longevity in lab animals, the article says,
suggest that other interventions, which include new drugs, may retard aging even if the diet itself should prove ineffective in humans. One leading candidate, a newly synthesized form of resveratrol—an antioxidant present in large amounts in red wine—is already being tested in patients. It may eventually be the first of a new class of anti-aging drugs. Extrapolating from recent animal findings, Dr. Richard A. Miller, a pathologist at the University of Michigan, estimated that a pill mimicking the effects of calorie restriction might increase human life span to about 112 healthy years, with the occasional senior living until 140, though some experts view that projection as overly optimistic.
The life-extension community may be psyched about the possibility of a CR diet-in-a-pill, but I’m more inclined to side with the skeptics discussed in the Journal piece (and notably absent from the Times story): Do researchers “really understand the workings of CR well enough to mimic them in a drug?”
And, I’d add, do they really want to? The kind of people who are interested in living that long might not actually be the type you’d want to have hanging around for more than a century … but maybe that’s just me.
Posted
on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006
by Christy Harrison in Food Media |
More like this: calorie restriction, health, longevity, media, new york times, the grinder, wall street journal
This month’s edition of Cook’s Country reverse-engineers and scales up the Monte Cristo sandwich, an old-school Disneyland favorite.
As someone whose only vivid memory of going to Disneyland as a wee kid was loving the bread bowl clam chowder at the Pirates of the Caribbean restaurant (You can eat the bowl! Holy crap! This entrée is seditiously awesome!), this struck a sympathetic chord. And in the fine tradition of Cook’s Illustrated, the deconstruction of the Monte Cristo is both painstaking and crystal clear, resulting in a recipe that practically begs the home chef to implement it immediately.
Moreover, Cook’s Country took the time to identify the Monte Cristo’s Achilles heel—for a sandwich, the damn thing takes a long time to make. The CC version is scaled up so as to allow chefs to crank out six at a crack.
The magic of the Monte Cristo is that it’s a unique marriage of the classic grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich and, well, French toast. With ingredients that include powdered sugar, Gruyère cheese, raspberry jam, and cayenne pepper, it sounds like a train wreck waiting to happen, but it’s maintained 40 years of popularity at the theme park’s Blue Bayou restaurant.
Then again, there’s no accounting for American taste …
Posted
on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006
by James Norton in Food Media |
More like this: cooks, country, cristo, disneyland, media, monte, sandwich, the grinder
The week’s edition of Gleeful Profiteering We Saw in Gourmet is a brief item called “Prints Charming.”
We’ve always admired the gorgeous botanical prints produced in centuries past. But with price tags often in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, that was all we could do. Now Discovery Editions is using new technology to reproduce these mouthwatering treasures in exquisite detail…. (From $495)
Translation:
Are you looking for a way to spend $500 or more for a reproduced picture of grapes? Now discoveryeditions.com is using new technology to bill your credit card an amount equivalent to the fee a skilled artist would charge for actually visiting your kitchen with one of those little palette things and just painting the grapes from scratch.
Seriously: Does Gourmet presume that its readers don’t know about eBay? Or, say, estate sales? Or vintage wine labels? Or antique book sellers? It would be one thing if Discovery Editions were selling actual prints for $500. It would be another if they were charging $50—or even $100—for high-quality reproductions. But in our modern era, you can go to a Kinko’s and get color copies of a luscious fidelity on high-quality paper for an entirely reasonable amount of money.
At any rate, a much more legitimate item immediately below “Prints Charming” details Bar Code Revolution, a Japanese design firm’s effort to inject UPC numbers with artistic oomph while retaining their technological utility. Now that’s progress.
Posted
on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006
by James Norton in Food Media |
More like this: botanical, gourme, media, prints, the grinder
Cheerios in the car seat, GoGurts at recess, SunChips after soccer: Is kiddie life just one long graze-a-thon? Tough-talking thriller writer Harlan Coben rallies the ‘rents from the bully pulpit of the Times’ op-ed page, pledging to fight American Snack Tyranny, surburban-sports division.
Coben points out, rightly, that the little darlings on the soccer team are supposed to be expending energy, not fueling up on “yet another bag of Doritos and a juice box with enough sugar to coat a Honda Odyssey” the minute the running stops. In other words, whatever happened to good old water?
And don’t think you can get away with dumping a platter of “softball-sized cupcakes” off at school when it’s little Tyler or Emma’s birthday, either.
Have you ever seen the leftovers brought into the school’s main office? By two in the afternoon, the place looks like the San Gennaro festival.
The verdict on the Letters page? Unsnackers, unite (requires registration)! After all, it’s never too early for calorie restriction.
Posted
on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006
by Stephanie Rosenbaum in Food Media |
More like this: coben, harlan coben, media, snack, snacking, snacks, soccer, the grinder
So, if the astronauts get Alain Ducasse and Emeril Lagasse, what do we pathetic earthlings get?
Well, if you’re lucky enough to fly BusinessElite on Delta, you get to sup on meals created by celebrity chef Michelle Bernstein. Delta and Bernstein offer such tempting treats as pomegranate-glazed lamb with pilaf, and grilled fish with sweet corn succotash and ancho lime butter.
Delta tells us:
[i]n addition to a refurbished personal dining menu, Delta’s enhanced BusinessElite experience will include: comfortable all-leather sleeper seats with 60” of legroom; a digital, on-demand entertainment system with an extensive movie selection, the ability to build a personal music playlist, a suite of video games, and in-seat laptop power outlets; and a cleaner, brighter cabin.
Don’t mind us plebes back in normal-people class—we’ll just starve in our cramped, boring, and apparently dark and dirty cabins. Or we’ll bring on some food from SkyMeals. This month, Health Magazine announces that you can order meals, such as shrimp and asparagas farfalle fra diavolo, or snacks, like chilled stuffed artichoke with prosciutto, from SkyMeals and have them delivered curbside in an insulated tote.
While the food can run you anywhere from $7.25 for vegetarian sushi to $29.95 for a European Brunch, it certainly seems cheaper than bumping yourself up to business class. However, in order to get these rather pricey meals, you have to be flying out of the L.A. area.
Other carriers are getting in on the “special food for especially rich fliers” plan. Lufthansa will be offering two—smoked marlin with beet gelée and air-dried beef from Leon from Juan Amador, holder of two Michelin stars. Singapore Airlines has snagged the profane Gordon Ramsay, and Air France trumps Lufthansa by offering meals created by Guy Martin, who has three Michelin stars.
I think I’ll just keep brown-bagging it. At least until I win the lottery.
Posted
on Monday, October 30th, 2006
by Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic in Food Media |
More like this: delta, media, michelle bernstein, skymeals, the grinder
The San Francisco Chronicle reports on the high jinks going on at the recent Slow Food Terra Madre conference in Turin. OK, maybe the high jinks were few, but there’s no doubt that California’s sustainability stars—like Alice Waters of Chez Panisse and Berkeley prof Michael Pollan—were hotshots among the Slow Fooders munching lardo and discussing the superiority of prosciutto made from acorn-fed pigs. (And take a look at the CHOW digest, with food editor Aida Mollenkamp reporting from Turin.)
The conference’s own blog, featuring postings in French, Spanish, English, and Italian, offers a small window onto the diversity of cultural traditions and innovations celebrated at the conference, a five-day gathering of over 5,000 farmers, food artisans, chefs, and activists dedicated to sustainable, small-scale agricultural production.
Despite the surrounding Piedmont region’s reputation for culinary excellence (requires registration), though, some Californians were a little surprised at what they couldn’t get for dinner. Chronicle writer Carol Ness quotes Blong Lee, a representative of the Fresno County Economic Opportunities Commission, on his Central Valley group’s quest for Italian food:
‘We went to a fancy restaurant last night,’ said Lee. ‘We tried to order pizza with pepperoni and they didn’t have it, and lasagna and spaghetti and meatballs, but they didn’t have it. It’s not the type of Italian food we expected.’
Posted
on Monday, October 30th, 2006
by Stephanie Rosenbaum in Food Media |
More like this: media, san francisco chronicle, slow food, terra madre, the grinder, turin
You can’t open the newspaper these days without reading some alarming new tidbit about the wages of fatness or childhood obesity.
Happily, tomorrow is Halloween, and we get to lay all that aside for one night and indulge in a bacchanalia of candy consumption only dreamed about on the other 364 days of the year.
Some people, of course, have a harder time laying aside their concerns about fat, calories, and tooth decay: nutritionists, dentists, spokespersons for nutritionally correct organizations. The L. A. Times has corralled a group of these professional healthy eaters to ask what they plan to pass out to the little witches, ghosts, and goblins who ring their doorbells.
The overwhelming favorite? Candy! Oh yes, they may offer toothbrushes or toys alongside the Snickers, but even the director of nutrition policy for the Center for Science in the Public interest is planning to go with the Halloween flow and pass out the sweet stuff. And while my personal hero Marion Nestle isn’t planning on passing out anything (she says no kids come to her Manhattan apartment), she does admit to an occasional candy apple jones:
“Especially ones with the worst red, hard candy on them.”
Posted
on Monday, October 30th, 2006
by Miriam Wolf in Food Media |
More like this: candy, halloween, l.a. times, media, obesity, the grinder
If this week’s episode of “Top Chef” clinched your impression of Marisa as uptight, humorless, and not very nice (Cf. her handling of Lycheegate and willingness to sell out a teammate to save her neck), it’s time to add another adjective to the list: sexxxy. As Blogging Top Chef discovered, the ostensibly buttoned-up cheftestant has a weirdly porny website where she hawks her bikini calendar.
It’s got to be fake, right? Well, her site links to her Myspace profile (apparently she’s in my extended network), and it looks pretty legit—it would have taken a lot of work on the part of a hoaxster to come up with all those friends and create all those comments, at any rate.
Speaking of Top Chef profiles on Myspace, guess what comes up as the first Google result for Harold Dieterle (last season’s Top Chef winner)? The profile’s Google ranking may have something to do with this link from The Modern Age, which comes up fourth in the search results (and which makes a rather good point about the annoyingness of Harold’s declared musical tastes).
Am I the only one who’s simultaneously horrified and fascinated by the sudden intimacy that Myspace’s awful “comment” function creates? If some of the first things people read when they google a chef are his sister’s (I think) text-message-esque personal note (“Give me a RING when u can. Gotta ask u somethin….”) and his cousin’s (again, inferring) wacky photo caption (“Someone said we could be brothers…or did they say lovers…haha none-the-less..ROCKSTARS! HOLLA!!”), doesn’t that take things into uncomfortably unprofessional territory? But then, maybe having millions of people read these messages doesn’t feel weird after you’ve been on a reality show.
Posted
on Monday, October 30th, 2006
by Christy Harrison in Food Media |
More like this: harold dieterle, marisa, media, myspace profile, the grinder, top chef
Just in time for Halloween snacking, the Wine Enthusiast comes out with perfect wine pairings to go with your trick-or-treat loot (or the loot the trick-or-treaters left you with).
Want to know what to drink with caramel apples (muscat or gewürztraminer), fruity Jujubes (Prosecco), or nutty little “fun-size” candy bars (Madeira)? This article will be your guide to flawless Halloween pairings.
After all, the little ones shouldn’t have all the Halloween fun.
Posted
on Friday, October 27th, 2006
by Tea Austen Weaver in Food Media |
More like this: candy corn, halloween candy, jujubes, media, the grinder, wine enthusiast, wine pairings
On the Eat Local Challenge blog, Sara brings our attention to a short movie highlighting the true cost of factory-farmed, commercially raised, and non-local food. The price is staggering.
Put out by the Sierra Club as part of their Sustainable Consumption campaign, the video (made by the same company that did the Meatrix) touches on a number of important and topical issues—monocropping, feedlot-raised beef, loss of topsoil, chemical usage, agricultural runoff, and decreasing crop yields. When all these factors are valued and given a price, the true cost of a commercial tomato is far beyond anyone’s budget.
The campaign, which seeks to “encourage people to think about the environmental impacts of their consumption choices,” also offers a discussion guide, as well as information and action suggestions for those wishing to evaluate their impact as consumers. From background information on the importance of eating locally and organically, to projects that can be done as a group or with children, and even cooking suggestions, there are resources for learning more and steps for putting these ideas into action. And the FAQ section clears up niggling questions (so you know about GMOs, but what about COOL?).
The Sierra Club hopes that this campaign will “promote more informed choices about how the way we eat affects our planet and our quality of life.”
With elections around the corner, here’s a campaign to get behind.
Posted
on Friday, October 27th, 2006
by Tea Austen Weaver in Food Media |
More like this: eat local challenge, Green, meatrix, media, organic, sierra club, sustainable consumption campaign, the grinder, true cost of food
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