Are you reading all these instructions about assiduously overwashing fruits and vegetables and thinking, I'll just indulge my longterm desire not to eat fruits and vegetables?

I'm reading things like this: "Can washing produce help prevent cyclosporiasis? What experts recommend. The way you prepare produce may make a difference in your risk for the 'diarrhea parasite' that’s going around" (WaPo).

And I'm about to give up on fresh produce. I walk into Whole Foods, and the first experience is, of course, the very grand array of fruits and vegetables, but the news media has demanded that I see invisible filth permeating everything. If you knew there was cyclosporiasis — we can't just say "cyclosporiasis," because it's too hard a word, none of us idiots can be trusted to learn it, so we always need to hear the atrocious word "diarrhea" — if you knew there was cyclosporiasis on a vegetable or fruit you wouldn't even touch it. The issue of bringing it home and washing it to death wouldn't arise. But we are expected to view the entire array of fruits and vegetables as innocent enough to buy in the hope of eating but suspicious enough to plan to subject to some elaborate treatment.

From the article:

"Let's make watermelon fried yogurt."

Lots more great videos from Ms Shi and Mr He: here.

"How did the adults of my youth manage these gatherings so effortlessly? Part of the answer is Oh, Dad, too: Life was simpler."

"Lake houses were more affordable then, and less fancy. No dishwasher, no A.C., no TV. And no choices. Meals happened at fixed times. You ate what appeared. Cleanup by committee followed, and then the moms would declare, 'The kitchen is closed,' with despotic authority. If we got hungry later, there were snacks. Snacks that would make a nutritionist spiral: Ruffles and onion dip, port wine cheese food. Breakfast was sugary cereal. Lunch was mystery bologna. Dinner was barbecue, beans and slaw. Repeat until Labor Day."

Writes Dan Kadlec, in "The Lake House That Taught Me How to Dad" (NYT)(gift link, in case you need to learn to dad).

How to eat like Babe Ruth.

"To feed its millions of troops in World War II, the military turns to food science. Orange juice is reduced to concentrate, potatoes are dried into easily reconstituted flakes..."

"... and Cheddar is dehydrated and pulverized. But the war’s end leaves mountains of surplus cheese powder. Charles Elmer Doolin, riding high on the success of the Fritos he created 16 years earlier, fries extruded puffs of cornmeal and coats them in the powder. Dozens of other food companies take advantage of food technology developed for the war effort, ringing in the heyday of ultraprocessed foods."

That's the NYT, selecting Cheetos to represent the 1940s, in "1776 – 2026/The Pursuit of Hungriness: 250 Years of American Food Innovation" (gift link).

"Limiting food and water has been used to hasten death in people dying at home since long before it had a formal name."

"But to accelerate decline this way for people with advanced dementia, whether their deaths are imminent or not, is uncomfortable territory for many.... While some patients are late enough in their dementia as to be nonresponsive, others may still be enjoying and requesting food and may not remember writing a directive to withhold it. 'Which person do you listen to: the person who had capacity once and made this decision that they wouldn’t want to live this life, or the person with dementia, who may seem very, very happy with the life that they have?' asked Dr. Eric Widera, a professor of geriatric medicine at University of California, San Francisco...."

From "She Didn’t Want to Live With Advanced Dementia. So Why Was She Being Kept Alive? Some consider the regular feeding of late-stage dementia patients to be nonnegotiable. Others see it as extending life unnecessarily" (NYT).

The article cites a paper that presents the idea of minimal comfort feeding: "The nursing staff could provide small quantities of food and liquid if the patient signaled she wanted it, enough to keep her comfortable while still allowing her to die."

"Plants depend on carbon dioxide to perform photosynthesis — but that doesn’t mean they grow better when there’s more carbon in the air, scientists say."

"A sweeping survey of changes among 32 compounds in 43 crops found that nearly every plant that humans eat is harmed by rising CO2 levels. 'As a scientist, it’s really interesting,' said Sterre F. ter Haar, an environmental scientist at Leiden University in the Netherlands and lead author of the survey, published in November. 'As a person … you don’t want to see such a shift, because it’s so negative.' For the past several years, ter Haar and her colleagues have worked to compile a database of all existing research on nutrient changes linked to rising CO2.... Next the team used their dataset to calculate the nutritional densities of each crop under different carbon dioxide levels — and to predict how their composition could continue to shift in the future. On average, they found, nutrients have already decreased by an average 3.2 percent across all plants since the late 1980s, when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 350 parts per million...."

From "Carbon pollution is making food less nutritious" (WaPo). That's a gift link, so you can figure out the science and whether this is a case of lying with statistics.

It occurs to me that percentages of nutrients would change if plants just contain more water, but a plant composed of more water might be more appetizing, so just eat a bit more of it. I'm always suspicious of articles that stir up climate-change anxiety.

"I hadn’t intended to offend anyone, but the B-roll I posted to an account with a scant 100 followers was evidently being promoted as rage bait for the masses — and still is."

Writes Tammy Teclemariam, in "'U Went Viral for the Wrong Reasons Honey'/After I posted a video of some garlic bread, TikTok took over" (NY Magazine). She's getting excoriated by commenters who are mad at her for saying, bossily, "You didn’t ask if you could do that," when her tablemate, who'd ordered the bread, started cutting into it with a spoon.

"Within 23 days of posting, the video surpassed a million views.... Whatever machine learning was needed to push this onto the FYP of so many people, it seems to have worked as designed. Everyone I showed the video to in my real life couldn’t understand the controversy. But everyone leaving comments seemed willing to ignore any reasonable context to insist I must be a horrible person. 'You must be fun at parties,' commented LucyInTheSky. Lucy, I am fun at parties.... Some friends, understandably, suggested I just delete it. While that might seem like a quick escape from nuisance behavior, it doesn’t change the threat of this happening again. In order to speak freely on the internet, you have to take the haters for granted...."

"But much of the ube flavor in foods and beverages doesn’t come from the yam itself."

"In T. Hasegawa’s low-slung building in an industrial district about 10 miles northwest of Anaheim, Calif., teams of food chemists spend their days trying to create concentrates of flavors — some that exist in nature and others that don’t, like 'unicorn' or 'glazed donut' — for food and beverage companies. First, the chemists analyze the composition of real food... to identify the molecules responsible for aroma and taste. Then, natural extracts, oils and aroma compounds are combined to create concentrated versions of the flavor.... 'You can’t just put blood orange juice into an energy drink.... It would require so much juice that there wouldn’t be enough room for other ingredients.' Compared with Dubai chocolate, which exploded in popularity a few years ago thanks to TikTok and its photogenic bright-green filling, ube has been more of a 'slow burn' flavor.... 'It had been on our radar for three years before we named it the flavor of the year'...."

From "A Must for the Next Food Craze? Be ‘Social Media Gorgeous.’ The ascent of ube has little to do with the purple yam’s taste or Filipino origins. It’s the color, flavor experts say" (NYT).

"Stench of 20 Tons of Spilled Tofu Hits Missouri Town 'Like a Brick Wall.'"

That's the Headline of the Day for me.

It's in the NYT: 

The tofu and the truck languished in the ravine for three weeks while the private towing companies that had been hired to clean up the mess tried to confirm that the trucking company had enough insurance to pay for the job....

The Doolittle Rural Fire Protection District has referred to the mess on its Facebook page as “the infamous Jerome Tofu Monster” and the cleanup as “the Great Battle of Jerome.”...

We were talking about raspberries.

We were talking about the level of pain and sacrifice Americans are willing to endure to make it through these perilous war weeks.

The New York Times brings harrowing forebodings: "Where Might the Iran War Hit Your Wallet? Start With Raspberries. It takes a lot of fuel to produce this delicate fruit, which can be a sensitive barometer as oil costs rise."

Raspberries are the divas of fresh produce.... They do best stacked lightly in refrigerated trucks cooled and powered with diesel fuel. Even on a plane, the berries must be refrigerated. All this makes them one of the most fuel-intensive items in the produce aisle. And they bear a message from the near future: The Iran war is likely to grow your grocery bill. Raspberries were already expensive, but the wholesale price of fresh berries has doubled since January, according to federal Agricultural Marketing Service reports. At a Whole Foods Market in Atlanta on Tuesday, a six-ounce plastic container of organic raspberries cost nearly $8. That’s about 20 cents a berry....

You know what you could do in support of the war effort? If the price of fresh raspberries doubles, eat half as many raspberries. Or don't buy fresh raspberries when they are out of season. Be more of a locavore and pick something that is in season or buy frozen berries. They're fine in a smoothie. I mean this war with Iran has been going on since the Carter administration and we're currently very heavily committed to forcing it to end decisively. Can't you handle this insanely minuscule raspberry problem? Who is this out-of-season-berry-munching Whole-Foods-shopping lady who won't contribute?

Remember when women dug in and helped:

"So, buy books at an estate sale, remove the dust jackets, then organize by color? Fire the podcaster and rehire your book reviewers."

Says a commenter at the WaPo article "The multiuse home space trend is coming for your dining room/A DIY dining library can create the perfect space for reading, crafting, work or dining with friends. Here’s how to get one."

The article is verbiage about putting bookshelves in the dining room. The author is Jolie Kerr. Was she a podcaster? I look it up. Wikipedia says:

Jolie Kerr (born 1976) is an American writer and podcast host. Her book, My Boyfriend Barfed in My Handbag... and Other Things You Can't Ask Martha, was a New York Times best-seller.... Writing for The New York Times, Dwight Garner called My Boyfriend Barfed 'the Lorrie Moore short story, or the Tina Fey memoir, of cleaning tutorials...[a] wise and funny new book.' At NPR Linda Holmes praised Kerr as 'at her most irresistible when she's handling the kinds of awkward questions that do traditionally go unanswered in your women's magazines and your perky home-maintenance shows.... Kerr now hosts a podcast... called Ask A Clean Person.

I can see why WaPo wants a writer like that, but this books-in-the-dining room thing is pretty ridiculous, and it is upsetting that WaPo canned the book review.

Is it possible for an American to maintain good health while spending $65 a month on food?

I'm reading "The Fantasy of a Comfy Retirement Has Always Been a Mirage" (NYT), which begins:

On Thursday, a woman named Sharon from Minnesota called into C-SPAN’s “open forum” to express her despair about the cost of living. “I’m 65 years old. I’m legally blind. I’m on disability. I went to my doc, and I lost 28 pounds in the last year. I did not need to lose 28 pounds. I did not try to lose 28 pounds. I lost the 28 pounds because I cannot afford to eat anymore,” Sharon explained, speaking clearly even though she sounded near tears. Because of Trump administration cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and the high cost of groceries, gas and electricity, Sharon only allows herself $65 a month for food....

Of course, that sounds shocking and horrible. I have empathy for Sharon and do not like to see anyone struggling so hard, but I wondered whether it was a least possible to maintain your health while spending only $65 a month. Grok assures me that it is possible. I think we all know what this diet would consist of — lots of oatmeal, rice, beans, potatoes, cabbage, and carrots, along with some apples, bananas, and eggs. It's terrible to allow yourself to lose 28 pounds (that you couldn't spare) before switching to this basic diet or going to a food pantry, but not everyone has enough energy or mental clarity to make the adjustment.

Anyway, to be clear, I'm not saying the government shouldn't help people in this circumstance. On the contrary, I think the country deserves excellent food policy. I'm not a source of advice on what that would be.

"Watch out, girl dinners, the boys have found their own culinary niche, and it’s like dog food but worse."

"While the lady chow of internet fame consists of no-cook, low-effort meals (cheese, biscuits etc), TikTok has now revealed what men eat when on a diet: boy kibble. While I hate to ruin Brooklyn Beckham’s next cooking video, to make boy kibble you need an unseasoned batch of ground beef and very little else."

From "Men may call it a ‘protein-rich bowl’. I call it boy kibble/Meaty snacks are trending online for blokes. Please no, says Eilidh Dorgan" (London Times).

Here's the kind of thing she's talking about:

"If you use chopsticks to pick up apple slices, begin the day with hot water and goji berries before meandering down to a nearby park for a dose of t’ai chi..."

"... there’s a chance that this is a 'very Chinese' time in your life. If you’re under 30, you won’t be the only one. One of the more unusual cultural trends to sweep Gen Z recently has been among TikTok users who share wellness tips typically associated with China.... Chinamaxxing, as the social media trend is known, is all the rage in the US...."

From "I taught America how to be Chinese, says 23-year-old TikTok star/Gen Z is mastering chopsticks and t’ai chi, thanks to Sherry Zhu from New Jersey" (London Times).

You can sample the TikToks of Sherry Zhu here. I'll embed 2 of them:

1. "You didn't know it, but you are Chinese."

"We now know that the things that you eat are driving mental illness in this country.... There are studies right now that I saw two days ago where people lose their bipolar diagnosis by changing their diet."

Said RFK Jr., quoted in "Kennedy Makes Unfounded Claim That Keto Diet Can ‘Cure’ Schizophrenia/The claim vastly overstates preliminary research into whether the high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet might help people with the disorder, experts said" (NYT).

Mr. Kennedy was apparently referring to Dr. Christopher Palmer, who in 2019 wrote about “two patients with longstanding schizophrenia who experienced complete remission of symptoms” with the keto diet. He said both patients “were able to stop antipsychotic medications and have remained in remission for years now.”

More recently, Dr. Palmer and his colleagues described the diet as a “promising therapeutic approach for schizophrenia.” Dr. Palmer did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

"Well, of course, we contact our Trinidadian friends and all the people that like to eat iguanas... and they eat the eggs and they eat the legs and they eat the tail."

"So this is easy snacks, fallin' out the trees this mornin'."

Meet Jessica Kilgore the South Florida iguana slaying queen!!!! pic.twitter.com/CDNQvsok8O

— Branch Floridian (@JackLinFLL) February 1, 2026

"There’s pasta in the pantry and jarred sauce in the refrigerator. So what compels Kiely Reedy to keep having spaghetti with marinara delivered..."

"... from the restaurant down the street, for several times the cost of cooking the dish herself? It’s not that the restaurant dish is particularly good, she said. 'It’s the instant gratification.' From her roughly $50,000 annual salary as a data processor in San Diego, Ms. Reedy, 34, spends at least $200 to $300 a week on food delivery.... Between raising two young boys and putting in long hours at a marketing job in Atlanta, Kevin Caldwell can almost never find the time to make dinner. So he and his husband spend about $700 a week to order in. 'I am so burned out and tired, I would rather just throw my credit card at the problem and delay that unhappiness until the bill comes,' he said. His 4-year-old son doesn’t read yet, 'but he can put together an order' on the Chick-fil-A app, said Mr. Caldwell, 39. 'I am impressed, but I am also terrified.'"

From "Freedom With a Side of Guilt: How Food Delivery Is Reshaping Mealtime/Almost three of every four restaurant orders in the U.S. weren’t eaten in a restaurant, according to recent data. We spoke to readers who are devoted to delivery but question the costs" (NYT)(gift link).

I've never ordered in prepared food. I mean, back in the 1900s, I would order pizza sometimes, but not since then. I know about these services — Door Dash, Uber Eats, etc. — but I simply don't want them. We don't go to restaurants either, but I wonder if delivery is preferable to restaurants. Restaurants involve going out, which could be either a positive or a negative. Do you have time to burn? Even if you do, do you want to spend it sitting at a table waiting and under social pressure make conversation (and not to look at your phone)? Maybe that's just not what people do anymore. 

"For people who make and sell beef tallow, a golden age has dawned. Consumers spent $9.9 million on food-grade beef tallow in 2025...."

"Jars of it landed on the shelves of Costco this year, and big retailers like Walmart and Target sell it. Fat Brothers beef tallow sells for almost $20 for 14 ounces on Amazon, and business is brisk... Jenni Harris is a fifth-generation rancher whose father in the late 1990s transformed their small conventional cattle feeding operation in South Georgia to an organic one where cows are raised on pasture. She remembers a time when they had no market for the fat from the animals they slaughtered. 'We damn near gave it away' she said...."

From "Beef Tallow, Long a Health Pariah, Rises to the Top of the Food Pyramid/The new dietary guidelines give federal approval to a fat that has slowly caught on with consumers, even as doctors have warned against it" (NYT).

Have you made the transition from seed oils to beef tallow? Or do you think butter is tracking the new food pyramid well enough? Or do you think this new fat advice is just crazy?

I'm reading the comments over there, including: "The man is barefoot as he stands next to a vat of hot oil while removing a drippy bird. What can go wrong?" And: "Anyone that works over a vat of 400 degree oil barefoot shouldnt be in charge of anything safety-related be it food, drugs, or healthcare."

They're responding to this photo, which is taken from RFK Jr.'s own social media:

And I like the NYT's correction at the bottom: "An earlier version of this article misstated how much consumers spent on beef tallow in 2025. It was $9.9 million, not $900 million." That's kind of a never mind correction. They wrote this whole article about the hot new business that is beef tallow and then it turned out to be on 1.1% of what they thought it was!

What's worse, the Secretary of Health's risky approach to home cooking or The New York Times's embarrassing and extreme botching of the dollar amount as it conducts its supposedly professional journalism?

And by the way, while RFK's feet deserve some attention, a lot of us are noticing his torso. He's 71 years old, and look at him. And he's eating beef tallow.

Bobby flips the food pyramid.

From "Welcome to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2025–2030."

The message is simple: eat real food.... American households must prioritize diets built on whole, nutrient-dense foods—protein, dairy, vegetables, fruits, healthy fats, and whole grains.... For decades, federal incentives have promoted low-quality, highly processed foods and pharmaceutical intervention instead of prevention.... Under President Trump’s leadership, we are restoring common sense, scientific integrity, and accountability to federal food and health policy—and we are reclaiming the food pyramid and returning it to its true purpose of educating and nourishing all...