Quotable Quote

“The family meal is a social event, not a food ingestion event.”

- Dr. Cindy Post Senning, great-granddaughter of Emily Post, as quoted in a New York Times article on the subject of texting at the table.

Tom Colicchio Doesn't Eat "Healthy"

In an interview posted on the New York Times' Well Blog today, celebrity chef and restaurateur Tom Colicchio shares some interesting opinions about how kids should eat and how parents should be cooking.

The Top Chef head honcho will participate in a panel discussion on family eating this weekend at the South Beach Wine and Food Festival, along with the likes of Rachael Ray, South Beach diet founder Dr. Arthur Agatston and cookbook author and famous significant other, Jessica Seinfeld.  Even though I have no little ones of my own (unless you count dust bunnies), I found his comments on this subject enlightening and refreshingly off-the-cuff.  For instance, when questioned about whether restaurants are doing their fair share when it comes to promoting healthy eating, Colicchio quipped, "What chefs can do when it comes to getting the word out is have people understand food differently.  If food is well sourced and well prepared, I don’t think the word healthy needs to be brought into it. ...I’m not worried if I’m using four different cheeses and it’s high in fat.  It’s real food.  That’s what’s more important."

I wholeheartedly agree.  Between this and his recent life-saving heroics, Mr. C's stock has gone way up in my book.  Click here to read the interview in its entirety. 

C&S

 

The One Dollar Diet Project

Could you live on just $1 a day?





Kerri Leonard and Christopher Greenslate of Encinitas, California fed themselves on just $1 a day for the month of September this year, and chronicled the experience in their blog, One Dollar Diet Project. The New York Times' Tara Parker-Pope wrote of the couple and their eye-opening experiment in an article that came out this week entitled Money is Tight, and Junk Food Beckons. After reading that piece, I was eager to find out more about Kerri and Christopher's month of scarcity, conceived as a means by which to better understand what it's like to live at or near the poverty level on a day to day basis.

I read the blog from beginning to end yesterday, and it was both fascinating and thought-provoking. Through the course of their One Dollar Diet Project, these two social studies teachers ate countless servings of peanut butter, rice, beans and (often just shy of stale) homemade bread, all the while learning firsthand of the emotional and physical impact of subsisting on pennies a day.

On the first evening of the experiment, after running down her day's intake of unadorned oatmeal and tiny bean burritos, Kerri wrote, "It seems odd to me that we have the luxury of doing this as an experiment when there are millions of families who have to budget their meals like this every day." As days turned to weeks, she and Christopher maintained this thoughtful perspective, with only a few instances of weakness, temptation or general hunger-induced grumpiness (Christopher, Day 12: "I'm exhausted. I have a headache. I lost another pound. I wish there was more to report."). Instead of dwelling on their hunger and dwindling energy levels, the couple delved deeper and deeper into feelings of communion and empathy with those around the world living in poverty or just struggling to make ends meet.

This blog has amassed a large group of readers since the beginning of September, and will no doubt continue to attract even more as word spreads of the One Dollar Diet Project. Ultimately, the couple's goal is to raise awareness. As Christopher put it on Day 18: "...the need to have a dialogue about poverty is long overdue."

Kerri and Christopher are now considering what their next experiment might entail. It should also be mentioned that they accepted donations during the project, and ended up making a sizeable contribution to a non-profit in their area. Here's to this smart, thoughful couple! Reading their diary made me think long and hard about the food choices I make every day, and about how fortunate I am to be afforded the luxury of making those choices in the first place. I will not soon forget the lessons that I learned from their sacrifice.

Food for Thought

If all Americans observed one meatless day per week, 

we'd save an amount of carbon equal to taking 

20 million midsize sedans off the road for a year. 

Wow.  

I learned that from Michael Pollan's article, Farmer in Chief, in last weekend's New York Times Magazine.  Check it out - there's plenty more where this came from.

New York Times Magazine Food Issue

Fellow foodie friends, if you have not yet seen last Sunday's issue of the New York Times Magazine, click the link below to check out a collection of incredible readables on a wide-ranging array of food-related topics.

New York Times Magazine - Food Fights!

This week's special Food Issue is chock full of interesting, though-provoking and downright entertaining stuff. Why Tip? by Paul Wachter got me thinking about, well, why we tip, and presented an interesting study of a restaurant that decided tipping should be a thing of the past. Mark Bittman, as usual, was awesome, and I'm smack in the middle of Samantha Shapiro's Kosher Wars (will finish up right after this post!). I'm also curious about the interactive feature titled Inside the Fridge of a Foodie.

The real stand-out, however, is Michael Pollan's Farmer in Chief. This author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto has presented an eloquent and persuasive argument for the sweeping change of this country's relationship with food and farming in the form of a letter to our next President. Holy cow - talk about food for thought...