#21: A Fridge Clean-out Omeletter
What was I saying about the social status of vegetables last week?
Apparently, the rice lobby (?) is majorly P-O'ed at the market domination of so-called cauliflower rice:
“Vegetables are vegetables, and they shouldn’t try to pretend they are anything else," proclaims the CEO of USA Rice.
Edith Zimmerman takes a long look at this short grain, and the simmering debate about cauliflower-as-disruptor. For whoever wrote the article's headline. Well done, you.
Should you feel the need to do your part for rice preservation, why not make this fantastic center-stage rice dish in celebration of Nowruz, the Persian new year, celebrated on Tuesday.
Elsewhere in veggie crimes, the NYTimes reports that most produce in the US is actually imported, due in part to the demands for year-round availability, but also as a reflection of a more global palate. As a strong advocate for eating seasonally and locally as possible, I still have to wonder what percentage of the imports is strictly avocados? 🥑
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Last week the nominees for the 2018 James Beard Awards were announced, an exciting moment for cookbook junkies and avid consumers (and producers) of food media like myself. I'm happy to see Boston chef Matt Jennings recognized for his creative yet reverential takes on New England cuisine in Homegrown: Cooking from My New England Roots, but beyond that, I found the list a bit uninspired.
That said, the journalism category sings with a few truly noteworthy pieces worth the click:
- GQ's round-up of the "best restaurants in unexpected places," inspiring many aspirational eating pilgrimages to come.
- Tejal Rao's "Day in the Life" of downtown chicken and rice vendor Kabir Ahmed, which offers some much-needed perspective on the mysterious world of NYC's ubiquitous halal carts, aka street meat.
- This jarring piece of food science that describes the encroaching effects of climate change on the nutritional quality of what we eat.
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You've probably seen a few pieces, like this one in the NYT or this one from Vox covering the head-scratching/face-palming trend of 'raw water.' In short, otherwise intelligent individuals are paying big bucks for unfiltered, or non-fluoridated water. No, really, they are. Despite the obvious fact that accessibility to potable water remains a massive humanitarian crisis around the world, the bros of Silicon Valley continue to biohack their way to some version of perfection.
Are they onto something? Probably. Maybe you could say that this is what evolution looks like in the digital age. The raw waterists say that current filtration techniques eliminate beneficial minerals as well as the "good bacteria" that help to build up our immunity. Enter Mother Dirt, a company making "probiotic" skincare products that cleanse while keeping our 'skin biome' in check, protecting us from the increasing array of skin irritations and sensitivities that have emerged in correlation with our obsession with cleanliness.
The more we learn about our microbiome, the more it reveals about how much it really makes us tick. It's early days, but according to this article in The Guardian, the field of sleep science is beginning to find links between the 'brain in our gut' and the digestive issues that may be standing in the way of a good night's sleep.
Sure, everyone knows that eating pizza gives you nightmares. But if you're looking for the one-stop shop on how to eat everything, Mark Bittman and doctor David L. Katz present a definitive Q&A on Grubstreet that sensibly and patiently covers everything you need to know about eating right, hard stop, end transmission.
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Meanwhile in dude food, enjoy a satisfyingly deep eye roll with this piece on men who eat like boys. Though he's more or less come around over the years (not for any lack of goading and frequently sneaking vegetables into his meals without detection), my own father's eating habits led me to believe that men simply did not eat vegetables. Consequently, I had to date a string of vegetarian boyfriends to be convinced otherwise.
If perhaps you're interested in what some incredibly high-performing men are eating, ESPN has a fascinating feature on JaeHee Cho, the executive chef for the NBA's Philadelphia 76ers. And if you're really interested, football stud Tom Brady recently released a book of his own enigmatic dietary habits. Smartly, Big Papi has his priorities in order.
While I'm on the topic of boys-to-men (though not, sadly, Boyz II Men), the latest issue of New York magazine featured some amazing and provocative perspectives on How to Raise Boys in the era of #MeToo. I'm not a parent, but I have many friends with precocious, energetic, sweet, yet frequently feral-acting young boys, and these essays were truly eye-opening to the cultural and systemic challenges to what it means to be or become a good man. Required reading.
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Finally, lacking an oven at the moment, I'm going to get lost in this longread about bread and continue binge-watching Ugly Delicious even though it's definitely a major bro-down (as covered in last week's missive on the state of women in food, ICYMI)