pollan nyt mag piece

Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

…
Scientists operating with the best of intentions, using the best tools at their disposal, have taught us to look at food in a way that has diminished our pleasure in eating it while doing little or nothing to improve our health. Perhaps what we need now is a broader, less reductive view of what food is, one that is at once more ecological and cultural. What would happen, for example, if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?

Pay more, eat less. The American food system has for a century devoted its energies and policies to increasing quantity and reducing price, not to improving quality. There’s no escaping the fact that better food — measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often correspond) — costs more, because it has been grown or raised less intensively and with more care. Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is shameful, but most of us can: Americans spend, on average, less than 10 percent of their income on food, down from 24 percent in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation. And those of us who can afford to eat well should. Paying more for food well grown in good soils — whether certified organic or not — will contribute not only to your health (by reducing exposure to pesticides) but also to the health of others who might not themselves be able to afford that sort of food: the people who grow it and the people who live downstream, and downwind, of the farms where it is grown.

food

• thai red curry with chicken and okra
• bacon and spinach quiche, salad, and bread
• roasted-vegetable and goat cheese crêpes, and salad
• dirty rice with lamb andouille, maybe some ground buffalo
• pork tenderloin (courtesy of Alex)
• leang (fishy) curry with tofu, mushrooms, babycorn, and sticky rice

on bathrooms

"Flushed with Pride" from Slate

new soup to try

"more different than better"

Better Than XP
I could keep bringing up examples, but I think you get the idea. At the UI level, the human level, Vista is different far more often than it is better. Even so, I think it must be said that Vista is indeed an improvement on Windows XP. Honestly, I think that's the only metric that really counts when you think about it: Is Vista better enough than XP to be worth the upgrade? I'll say yes. This may be more of a comment on how bad XP really is more than how good Vista is.

food

• asian salad with rice timbale, orange, crisp noodles, and baked tofu with hoisin
• polenta with some sort of lamb stew
• apple-lamb bratwurst and sauerkraut
• salmon with gingery mashed sweet potatoes and blood orange beurre blanc
• pasta with ricotta and cinnamon (sorry, Atlantic subscription req.)
• matzo ball soup (mostly for scott to freeze)
• chicken paprikás
• ricotta pancakes (NYT)

yay for paint!

paintedapt5
Originally uploaded by gay.goy.gourmet.

we have color on the wall in our apartment now! orange hallway, blue wall, purple under the bar… go see!