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Alle sombere berichten ten spijt, de wereld is ook in 2008 niet vergaan. Ditmaal naar verluid vanwege elektronische problemen. (BigPicture)

Gespeeld en genoten in 2008:
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NPR’s Weekend Edition, Can ‘Blue Zones’ Help Turn Back the Biological Clock?

“Sardinian sheepherders, Japanese grandmothers and Seventh-Day Adventists in Los Angeles don’t seem to have that much in common. But within these groups there are some of the longest-lived people in the world.”

(…)

“Although the aging process isn’t fully understood, scientists do know that there’s a complex interplay of genetics and the environment that factors into health and longevity. And Buettner says he was able to identify shared patterns among people who live in Blue Zones.

“They didn’t take any supplements or pills or wine extracts,” he says. “They tended to live in houses and environments that nudged them into bursts of physical activity in kind of an effortless way.

“Okinawans sat on the floor; Sardinians lived in vertical houses; the Costa Ricans had gardens. So they were doing little things all day long that added up significantly over the years and the decades,” Buettner says.”

Excerpt: Dan Buettner, The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest.

Zie ook: How To Live Forever. Is the secret to be found among the centenarians in an isolated region of Sardinia?

“Radish, where is thy sting? At flavor-tripping parties, guests find that miracle fruit makes everything sweet.”

NY Times, The Miracle Fruit. A Tiny Fruit That Tricks the Tongue:

“You pop it in your mouth and scrape the pulp off the seed, swirl it around and hold it in your mouth for about a minute,” he said. “Then you’re ready to go.” He ushered his guests to a table piled with citrus wedges, cheeses, Brussels sprouts, mustard, vinegars, pickles, dark beers, strawberries and cheap tequila, which Mr. Aliquo promised would now taste like top-shelf Patrón.

The miracle fruit, Synsepalum dulcificum, is native to West Africa and has been known to Westerners since the 18th century. The cause of the reaction is a protein called miraculin, which binds with the taste buds and acts as a sweetness inducer when it comes in contact with acids, according to a scientist who has studied the fruit, Linda Bartoshuk at the University of Florida’s Center for Smell and Taste. Dr. Bartoshuk said she did not know of any dangers associated with eating miracle fruit.

During the 1970s, a ruling by the Food and Drug Administration dashed hopes that an extract of miraculin could be sold as a sugar substitute. In the absence of any plausible commercial application, the miracle fruit has acquired a bit of a cult following.”

Zie ook: The Wall Street Journal, To Make Lemons Into Lemonade, Try ‘Miracle Fruit’ en TheMiracleFruit Man.

‘Satomi Kobayashi and Mikako Ichikawa nosh down on fresh lobster in Naoko Ogigami’s new film, “Glasses.”‘

The Moment, The Post-Materialist | Japanese Food Porn:

“(…) eating and sleeping are their reason for living. If sex is curiously absent, it’s because the eating is sex.”

The Independent, YAWN: The new yuppies: They’re back – and this time they’re green. (more):

“They brag about their wind turbines rather than their wads, and they’re more likely to wear recycled trainers than red braces. But be in no doubt – they’re still loaded.”

IHT, Voluntary simplicity movement re-emerges:

“Modern “downshifters” are chasing a utopian vision of a self-sustaining life as partisans of a movement some call voluntary simplicity.”

Horecaprofiel stadsdelen in Amsterdam en het gemiddeld besteedbaar inkomen per inwoner per jaar. (Amsterdamse horeca: opmars restaurants – O+S)

‘Rabbit with Hot Apple Jelly’

View from the Wing, Off to Roses, and diner at El Bulli:

“We were greeted warmly, of course, and then offered a visit to the kitchen. The chef came over and took photos with us while he clearly managed to continue to oversee the kitchen staff while visiting and greeting us. Kitchen had several rooms and we noticed perhaps three dozen cooks.”

Meer over ‘s wereld beste restaurant elBulli en chef Ferran Adrià: Meet the world’s best chef.

Kona Kampachi. Zie ook: A ‘new’ fish from Hawaii is delighting chefs (Slideshow).

Fortune, The Wonder Fish:

“So just what is Kona Kampachi? Think of it as a more versatile cousin of hamachi. It’s not genetically engineered in any way, just well bred. It’s sashimi-grade and sustainably farmed without hormones or prophylactic antibiotics. It’s richer in omega-3 than just about anything else in the ocean and has no detectable mercury. It melts on your tongue, holds up on the grill, and is so rich in oils that it’ll fry in a pan without butter.

Pregnant women, nursing moms, young children: Eat as much as you want of what might just be the best-tasting fish you’ve ever had. Really. It’s that good.

Kona Blue calls its designer yellowtail the “fish of the future.” In truth, it’s more like a fish of the past. After all, sea life wasn’t always scarce or poisonous. But the cultivation does involve scientific and technological advancements. The most obvious example is the sea station. Sims helped modify submersible pens to make them flippable and therefore more easily cleaned. Every few weeks a net is raised, turned over, scrubbed, and dried in the Hawaiian sunshine. The company also regularly takes water and seabed samples beneath the pens and at various control sites, records the process with webcams, and posts the data and video online.”

Website: Kona Blue. Via Serious Eats, Kona Kampachi: The Wonder Fish.

Part 1: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Serious Eats, Michael Pollan Interview and Lecture:

“From online food show Cooking Up a Story comes this four-part interview and lecture with Michael Pollan during which he talks about eating real food instead of their imitations, the ideology of understanding food solely through its nutrients, learning how to eat from culture instead of science, and “voting with your fork” to influence food producers to make better food.”

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Nieuwe Media, Biologisch winkelen bij MarQt:

“Vandaag opent MarQt zijn deuren aan de Amsterdamse Overtoom. Dit ‘vernieuwende winkelconcept’ (een hippe biologische supermarkt, zeg maar) pakt het viraal aan, met een mailtje van oprichter Quirijn Bolle aan zijn netwerk, inclusief een link naar een winkelreportage op YouTube.”

Michael Specter in The New Yorker, Big Foot. In measuring carbon emissions, it’s easy to confuse morality and science:

“Possessing an excessive carbon footprint is rapidly becoming the modern equivalent of wearing a scarlet letter. Because neither the goals nor acceptable emissions limits are clear, however, morality is often mistaken for science. A recent article in New Scientist suggested that the biggest problem arising from the epidemic of obesity is the additional carbon burden that fat people—who tend to eat a lot of meat and travel mostly in cars—place on the environment. Australia briefly debated imposing a carbon tax on families with more than two children; the environmental benefits of abortion have been discussed widely (and simplistically). Bishops of the Church of England have just launched a “carbon fast,” suggesting that during Lent parishioners, rather than giving up chocolate, forgo carbon. (Britons generate an average of a little less than ten tons of carbon per person each year; in the United States, the number is about twice that.)”

NY Times, I Love You, but You Love Meat:

““I went out with one guy who said I seemed really great but he liked bread too much to date me,” said Ms. James, 41, a writer in Seattle who cannot eat gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye.

Sharing meals has always been an important courtship ritual and a metaphor for love. But in an age when many people define themselves by what they will eat and what they won’t, dietary differences can put a strain on a romantic relationship. The culinary camps have become so balkanized that some factions consider interdietary dating taboo.”

VPRO’s Tegenlicht: de integrale versie van het interview met Michael Pollan.

Tegenlicht uitzending: De toekomst van ons voedsel: landbouw of laboratorium? (maandag 28 januari 2008, 21:00 Ned 2)

Michael Pollan, In Defence of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating (eerder)

Extract 1/2: Consuming passion:

“That eating should be first and foremost about bodily health is a relatively new and destructive idea – destructive not just of the pleasure of eating, which would be bad enough, but paradoxically of our health as well. The scientists haven’t tested the hypothesis yet, but I’m willing to bet that when they do they’ll find an inverse correlation between the amount of time people spend worrying about nutrition and their health and happiness. This is, after all, the implicit lesson of the French paradox, so called not by the French (Quel paradoxe?) but by Anglo-Saxon nutritionists, who can’t fathom how a people who enjoy their food as much as the French do, and eat so many nutrients deemed toxic by nutritionists, could have substantially lower rates of heart disease than others on elaborately engineered low-fat diets. No people on earth, by contrast, worry more about the health consequences of their food choices than Americans – and no people suffer from as many diet-related health problems.”

Extract 2/2: How to get back to real food

“The first time I heard the advice to “just eat food” was in a speech by the nutritionist and author Joan Gussow, and it baffled me. Of course you should eat food – what else is there to eat? But Gussow, who grows much of her own food on a flood-prone finger of land jutting into the Hudson River, refuses to dignify most of the products for sale in the supermarket with that title. “In the 34 years I’ve been in the field of nutrition,” she said, “I have watched real food disappear from large areas of the supermarket and from much of the rest of the eating world.” Taking its place has been an unending stream of food-like substitutes – “products constructed largely around commerce and hope, supported by frighteningly little actual knowledge”.

Real food is still out there, however, still being grown and even occasionally sold in the supermarket. Here are a few rules of thumb to help you recognise it – and then make the most of it.”

In Defense of Food. An Eater’s Manifesto, Michael Pollan.

Morning Edition, ‘In Defense of Food’ Author Offers Advice for Health (interview):

“”Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

(…)

The implication of Pollan’s advice, however, is that what we’re eating now isn’t food.”

Slate, The Holy Church of Food:

“There’s always been a streak of the willfully impractical in Pollan’s worldview. Like the other great, radical writers whose subject is the death grip of the food industry—Joan Gussow, Marion Nestle, Eric Schlosser—he’s eloquent and persuasive; but come the revolution, he probably doesn’t belong on the tactics-and-logistics committee. What he likes best is spinning long, mesmerizing tales from his immense research, as he did in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the book that made him a star. It’s a beautifully handled polemic against modern agribusiness until you get to the last chapter, the one that’s supposed to bring it all home.”

LA Times, ‘In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto’ by Michael Pollan

“The third section offers rules (rather, gentle suggestions) for how to “escape the Western diet.” Many are familiar, if you’ve spent any time paying attention to what you eat — for example, don’t eat packaged foods with lots of chemical ingredients. Some involve behavioral changes: Eat mostly plants, avoid supermarkets whenever possible, buy a freezer, “don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” pay more to eat less and don’t buy food where you buy gas. Some are more about how we eat than what we eat — for example, do all your eating at a table, don’t eat alone, eat slowly.”

nl20:

“Bilal omschrijft zijn keuken als een wereldkeuken. Naast Hollandse gehaktballen kun je hier terecht voor een groenteschotel met lamsvlees of een pasta . Knoflook en uien zijn de basis voor een goed gerecht. “Dat is gezond. En ik gebruik veel Turkse kruiden”, vertelt Bilal. Typisch Tante Til is bijvoorbeeld een Italiaanse lasagne met totaal andere ingrediënten en kruiden. “Zo kwam er hier eens een Italiaan die het bestelde. De volgende dag kwam hij terug en zei: dit is absoluut geen lasagne, maar dit is wel veel lekkerder dan lasagne.””

Photo: jamon, borough market, by owenbooth

The New Yorker, Red, White, and Bleu. What do we eat when we eat meat?:

“Is it possible that meat is now openly enjoying a renaissance—that it’s finally cool to be a carnivore? If so, it has been a long time coming. Meat-eaters, having already ceded the moral ground to vegetarians (no one has ever really come up with a persuasive rejoinder to the claim that a warm-blooded, pain-feeling creature’s life shouldn’t be taken for your supper), have more recently had to accept that their diet is probably the source of much of the world’s heart disease and much of its obesity. That diet is also sustained by an industry that is just flat-out evil: the factory farms, the egregious economies of waste in fast food, the ghastly genetic manipulations of chickens and turkeys, the pigs raised in no-room-to-move confinement, the reckless use of antibiotics and growth hormones (as well as the frightful possible consequences—early breasting in children, difficult-to-defeat superbugs), the contamination of fields and rivers by noxious excrement runoffs from feedlots the size of small nations, the tricks and shortcuts adopted by supermarkets (cheap animals fattened on cheap grain, butchered by high-pressure hose, and packaged at their bloated maximum weight). And yet, at a time when things could not seem worse, there is a generation of people (in their forties or younger) who are thinking hard and philosophically about their food and are prepared to declare: Enough! I’m a meat-eater and proud of it!”

Chew on This. Take a deep breath, swallow hard, and follow the food you eat on its day-long journey through the digestive system.

Foodparing:

““Food combines with each other when they have major flavour components in common.”

A list was made of 250 food products each with their major flavour components. By comparing the flavour of each food product eg strawberry with the rest of the food and their flavours, new combinations like strawberry with peas can be made. The way to use is, is just to select a food product like strawberries. You will get a plot where you have strawberry in the middle surrounded by other food products. Take one of those other food products and try to make a new recipe by combining those two. The more flavours food products have in common the shorter the distance between the food products.”

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