Macadamia Nuts: Hawaii's Signature Food

Casual Kitchen had the good fortune to spend four months in Honolulu earlier this year, and this post is another installment in our series on the foods of Hawaii. You can find all of the other posts in this series under the label Hawaii.
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You can't help feeling a little depressed when an extended vacation comes to an end and you have to return to your regular life. That's how our return to New Jersey several weeks ago felt to us. The four months we spent in Honolulu were by far the fastest four months of our lives.

But we did bring home with us memories of great Hawaiian foods. And perhaps the key signature food of Hawaii is the glorious macadamia nut.


Any visitor to Hawaii can find both Mauna Loa and Hawaiian Host brand macadamia nuts in stores all over the islands. They're delicious and extremely popular as souvenirs, but be prepared to get separated from your money--a smallish 4.5 ounce canister of nuts can cost $3.00 to $4.00, which works out to about 20-25c a nut.

It sounds odd to say this, but that high cost is actually a blessing, because it means that macadamia nuts can still be grown competitively and profitably in Hawaii. Sadly, many of Hawaii's traditional agricultural crops (taro, sugar cane, pineapple, papaya, mangoes, etc.) have become disturbingly uncompetitive against lower-cost food imported from Asia and Central America.

Macadamias are extremely nutritious and contain high concentrations of protein and monounsaturated fats (that's the "healthy" kind of fat). And a recent study showed that consumption of macadamia nuts reduces both LDL and total cholesterol levels. Sounds a lot tastier and cheaper than a Lipitor tablet, doesn't it?

Also, macadamias nut trees are popular with environmental groups because the trees are extremely efficient at sequestering carbon (absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it in the tree itself).

And if you've ever enjoyed wasabi peas, you'll love the wasabi and teriyaki-flavored macadamia nuts (see the photo above). Once we tried them we were completely addicted. Fortunately, you can easily get them on Amazon.

But even wasabi can't hold a candle to the most dangerous food combination of all: dark chocolate and macadamia nuts:


Again, be prepared to pay up: the little bag you see here costs $4.00 and it contained a mere 11 individually wrapped chocolates. Not exactly laughably cheap.

Related Posts:
Calling All Coffee Addicts: 100% Kona Coffee
Spending to Save: Frugality and Expensive Food
How to Prepare and Eat a Rambutan Fruit
Hawaii and its Love Affair with SPAM
The Chocolate Gene
Conclusions from the Chocolate Fast



How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

How to Give Away Your Power By Being a Biased Consumer

Today's post is about how we can seriously hurt our power as consumers by holding biases and preconceptions about products, companies and industries.
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I want big companies to compete intensely for my readers' spending dollars. I don't want them to get those dollars by default because of our preconceived notions.

But when we make purchasing decisions based on our biases and preconceptions, we give away all our power as consumers.

Read the following three statements:

1) I only drive American cars.
2) I only buy organic.
3) I never shop at Wal-Mart.

Do any of these sound familiar to you? I'd bet most of my readers have made at least one, if not all, of these statements at some point in their lives.

My goal in today's post is to show that statements like these hurt us more than they help us. In fact, many widely held shopping- and purchase-related biases, despite sounding reasonable or ideologically agreeable, actually do considerable damage to the average consumer's choice and power.

All people have biases--it's fundamental to the human condition. But when our biases become unthinking or out of date, we hand over our consumer power before we even walk into a retailer's place of business. Let's go over each example:

"I only drive American cars."

I heard this statement regularly in Syracuse, NY when I was growing up. And if I had a nickel for every gas-guzzling, rusted out American car on the roads up there during the 1970s--well, let's just say I'd have a lot of nickels.

People back then who held this ideologically comfortable bias thought they were being loyal to American automakers (uh, oh--there's that dangerous word "loyal" again). The awful irony, however is this: because they refused to consider other products on the market, not only did they limit their own choices, they also wasted money, energy and environmental resources. But worst of all, they rewarded Chrysler, Ford and GM for making substandard cars.

[Those of you too young to remember, watch a classic 1970s-era movie like The French Connection or Taxi Driver to get a sense of the monstrously large cars everybody drove back then. And if you want to imagine what we all drove in Upstate New York, imagine those same monstrous cars covered in rust and falling apart.]

The new competition from international automakers actually helped everybody. The US automakers had no choice but to respond to the superior Japanese imports, and they grudgingly improved their product lines, finally making cars that had fewer defects, ran better and got far better gas mileage. Foreign automakers built plants and dealer networks here, providing hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Best of all, American consumers had more choice, and they ultimately ended up getting better, safer and more fuel-efficient cars for their money.

"I only buy organic."

Let's set aside for the moment all the recent questioning of the nutritional and health benefits of organic food. Do you realize that paying to meet all the government requirements to qualify for organic labeling can be onerous, especially for small farmers? It's quite likely that you have local farmers in your community who grow all of their food responsibly, yet they can't label their foods as such because it's too expensive or time-consuming to follow national organic standards to the letter of the law.

Don't assume that food lacking an organic label is by definition grown unethically. By holding that assumption as an article of faith, I guarantee you will miss out on the opportunity to buy local and support many ethical food growers in your community. Isn't that just as "brand stupid" as thinking a Givenchy bag is superior--just because it has a label?

[Forgive a quick tangent: when the government sets onerous rules and regulations on any industry, it generally has the perverse effect of limiting competition. Here's a particularly painful recent example: Altria Corp. (the former Phillip Morris tobacco company) was happy with the recent FDA decision to expand its authority and regulate tobacco. Why? Because heavy FDA regulations mean significantly increased costs for potential competitors.

The largest players in a market can always bear new regulatory requirements with ease. However, those extra requirements typically create barriers to entry for potential new entrants, and they increase the cost of doing business for smaller, marginal players to a point where they exit the market. This means fewer choices for consumers and maximum market share for the big guys. Don't get me wrong: I support intelligent regulations, but not when those regulations create counterintuitive outcomes that hurt the consumer.]

"I never shop at Wal-Mart."

This one is going to get me in trouble, I know it.

There are lots of things I don't like about Wal-Mart, but their pro-consumer pricing strategy isn't one of them. This company simply decided to build a business based on lower operating margins than other retailers. If you'll excuse the finance-speak for a moment, Wal-Mart's operating margins tend to be in the 2-4% range, while most other department store retailers charge higher prices so that they can achieve 5-7% operating margins. Those higher profits come directly out of consumers' pocketbooks.

Granted, there are plenty of other issues Wal-Mart faces, a discussion of which is far beyond the scope of this post. But few people give Wal-Mart credit for this highly pro-consumer strategy, a strategy many other retailers could also follow--if they chose to be equally pro-consumer.

Readers, what are other biases that hurt our consumer power and limit our choices? What else did I miss?

Related Posts:
Why Spices Are a Complete Rip-Off and What You Can Do About It
Stacked Costs and Second-Order Foods: A New Way to Think About Rising Food Costs
Just Say No to Overpriced Boxed Cereal
The Problem with Government Food Safety Regulation
How to Write an Effective Complaint Letter

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

CK Friday Links--Friday September 25, 2009

Here's yet another selection of particularly interesting links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts and your feedback.

PS: follow me on Twitter!
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Dana reports on the surprisingly humane conditions at a nearby foie gras farm--and an army of foie gras haters go bonkers in the comments. (Dana McCauley's Food Blog)

Is overstocking your pantry the same as being greedy? (Frugal for Life)

Have you heard of acrylamide? Some believe this chemical, formed during the cooking of starchy foods, to be a cancer risk. Here's why it's not. (Food Production Daily)

A Hooters Girl's perspective on objectification. Worth an open-minded read. (The Hooters Girl)

Are you a "foodiot?" (Grub Street NY, via @jules_stonesoup)

Recipe Links:
A visually stunning and surprisingly easy Tomato, Corn & Cheese Galette. (Alexandra's Kitchen)

An easy recipe for White Chili with Chicken that will leave you swimming in leftovers. (Banging on Pots and Pans)

A laughably cheap and easy Yellow Split Pea Soup. (Thirty Bucks a Week)

Corn on the Cob cooked to absolute perfection under steam pressure. (Exploring Food My Way)

Off-Topic Links:
Five sure-fire sources to help you think up killer headlines. (Copyblogger)

Ten tips for mastering the nude beach. (Brave New Traveler)

How to escape the curse of perfectionism. (Harvard Business Review)

Buying is not the solution...it's the problem. (mnmlist)

Do you have an interesting article or recipe that you'd like to see featured in Casual Kitchen's Food Links? Send me an email!

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Ask Casual Kitchen: Advice for a New Blogger

As Casual Kitchen's readership has grown over the past several months, I've been getting a lot more questions emailed to me directly from readers. I'd like to address some of the most thought-provoking questions publicly, so I'm creating a new (and occasional) column, Ask Casual Kitchen, for that purpose.

If you have a question you'd like to ask, contact me!
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Q: I'm starting up a blog to accompany my business. What are the four or five top suggestions that you'd give to a beginning blogger?

A: Here are five things I tell new bloggers, based on my three years' experience blogging here at CK and elsewhere:

1) Pace yourself
Don't let yourself get carried away with enthusiasm in your early days as a blogger. Establish a posting rate that you can maintain for the long term--especially after your initial blogging excitement wears off. A good starting rate is 1-2 posts a week. Stick to that for a while and see how it goes.

2) Keep a backlog of extra posts "in the can"
Have four or five posts ready to go at all times (or even already queued up and future-posted) so you never have to write something under the gun or at the last minute. Those last-minute posts are almost always substandard, and they'll be a burden to your readers.

Also, if you write an article that happens to be time-sensitive, you can always put it in the front of your queue.

3) Make it daily
Make a daily habit (and I mean every day) of writing or working on blog content. Set an easy goal that will at the least get you to sit down and write. A good goal that works for me is to write for a minimum of 30 minutes. And more importantly, keep non-judgmental track of the days you write and the days you don't. After all, what gets measured gets controlled.

This single tip will probably be the most important determinant as to whether you sustain your blogging efforts long term.

4) Make sure your work provides value.
Most blogs are forgettable or irrelevant because they are narcissistic and self-absorbed, or they cover already well-trod intellectual ground.

What can you write that isn't already being written? What can you teach your readers that they haven't already seen in a million places already? What angle can you take on an issue or subject that is new and different and will help your readers think differently? If you ask these questions when you sit down to blog, you'll increase the chances that your blog will become something new, different, and useful to your readers. And they will read you.

5) Reach out
Interact with other bloggers. Don't be insular in your blogging. Link to other blogs. Leave insightful comments on other bloggers' articles (but please, please don't leave comments that say "great post!" and nothing else--don't be a waste of pixels). Write articles in reaction to other bloggers's posts. Gather other bloggers together to do roundtable discussions, either virtually or in person. These steps will help you gain a following and your readership will grow.

Good luck!

PS: Readers, if you're interested in other thoughts on the writing and blogging process, have a look at my Quick Writing Tips Blog.

Related Posts:
On Writing for Casual Kitchen
On Writing for Casual Kitchen, Part 2: Keeping Track
Blog Improvement 101 Links
A Sincere Thank You to Casual Kitchen Readers

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

How Food Companies Hide Sugar in Plain Sight

Today's post is about an increasingly common labeling trick that makes food look like it contains less sugar than it really does.
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Everybody knows that if you want to see what's in the food you buy in the grocery store, all you have to do is check the ingredients list. All foods are required to list all their ingredients, ranked by prevalence, somewhere on the label.


Therefore, if you want to get a rough sense of how much high fructose corn syrup is in your breakfast cereal, or how much sugar is in your pasta sauce, all you have to do is glance at the ingredients. If sugar or HFCS is one of the top three or four ingredients on the list, then you can safely roll your eyes and put the product back on the shelf. It's an easy decision-making method for consumers who don't want to eat over-sweetened food.

Or is it?

Insidious Workarounds
Unfortunately, a quick glance just isn't enough any more, because many food companies have caught on to us. They know that we've all trained ourselves to scan the ingredients and make sure sugar and high fructose corn syrup aren't near the top of the list.

So they've arrived at an insidious workaround that subverts our quick glances, and often leads consumers to underestimate the sugar content of a food. How? By using three, four or even five different kinds of sugar in the food, and listing each sweetener separately.

Thus a sugar-heavy cereal that years ago might have listed sugar as the second ingredient may now be made with sugar, brown sugar, molasses, dextrose and corn syrup solids. And those ingredients may be listed as the sixth, seventh, ninth, tenth and twelfth ingredients, respectively. Here's the insidious part: the sugar/sweetener content is higher than ever, but sugar now appears sixth instead of second on the list. And the consumer, who quickly glanced and didn't see sugar among the top three ingredients, is misled into thinking that this food has less sugar than it really does.

Protect Yourself
How can you protect yourself from being misled? Here are three tips:

1) First, you'll have to read ingredients lists a lot more closely than you did in the past. There's just no way around it.

2) Second, be on the lookout for the following ingredients--any of them can be used in addition to, or as a substitute for, plain old sugar:

molasses
brown sugar
honey
maple syrup
glucose
fructose
juice concentrates (these are typically fructose- and glucose-heavy)
brown rice syrup
high fructose corn syrup (or HFCS for short)
corn syrup (an often-used alternate name for HFCS)
corn syrup solids (HFCS in powder or crystalline form)
dextrose (a form of glucose, also a sweetener)
maltodextrin (another sweetener, made up of a chain of glucose molecules)

[A brief word on the last two items on this list, dextrose and maltodextrin. Despite having fancy names that don't sound sweet at all, these two variant forms of glucose are indeed sweeteners.]

3) Third, be aware that when you're looking at a list of ingredients with multiple sweetening agents, there simply isn't enough information for you to estimate the total sugar content of that food. However, a good rule of thumb is to assume that any food with three or more sweetening agents has an inappropriately high sugar content.

Walk Away
Finally, let the consumer products companies know that you won't use your wallet to support hyper-sweetened foods or misleading ingredient labeling. Of course it's one thing if you're buying cookies or candy--you'd expect to see sugar and its variants prominently (and repeatedly) listed in the ingredients.

But if you see this labeling technique used with cereal, pasta sauce, prepared dinners or any other food that really shouldn't contain tooth-aching quantities of sugar, punish that brand immediately. Put the product back on the shelf, shake your head at the shortsightedness of the processed food industry, and slowly walk away.

Related Posts:
Why You Should Always Read Ingredient Labels
Brand Disloyalty
Just Say No to Overpriced Boxed Cereal
How to Enjoy Wine On A Budget
Stacked Costs and Second-Order Foods: A New Way to Think About Rising Food Costs

This post owes a debt of gratitude to David Kessler's The End of Overeating, which got me started thinking about this issue.



How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

CK Friday Links--Friday September 18, 2009

Here's yet another selection of particularly interesting links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts and your feedback.

PS: follow me on Twitter!
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Some great thoughts on lighting and POV when taking food photographs. (Another One Bites the Crust)

If local strawberries are $5.99, but California strawberries are $3.99 and they taste better, which would you buy? (Christie's Corner)

A painfully cute video reprising the famous Stanford "marshmallow study" testing kids' ability to defer gratification and resist delicious food. (Eater)

Why fortified "technofoods" aren't healthy either. (No Meat Athlete)

Kellogg's reformulates Fruit Loops with 3 grams of fiber--triple the previous amount. Does this make it good for you? (Food Politics)

Yet another reason to eat more chocolate: it may ease migraine symptoms. (NutraIngredients USA)

Recipe Links:
Kris receives an enormous supply of yellow tomatoes mere hours before a weekend getaway. Several excellent recipes ensue: 1) Provencal Stuffed Tomatoes, 2) Yellow Tomato Salad with Roasted Red Pepper, Feta, and Mint, 3) Yellow Tomato Sauce, and 4) Yellow Tomato Soup. (Cheap Healthy Good)

A preposterously delicious Rotisserie Beef Chuck Roast Barbacoa. (Dad Cooks Dinner)

A delicious and healthy Roasted Portobello Mushroom Salad. (Closet Cooking)

I'm still horrified by the idea of bacon in a cookie, but for those who get it: Peanut Butter and Bacon Cookies. (Joy the Baker)

Off-Topic Links:
Two critically important words that empower personal change: I can. (The Change Blog) (Bonus post: How to Meditate)

42 ways to radically simplify your financial life. (Man vs. Debt)

Jay-Z as an aspirational brand, and why white kids have no longer have any symbols of masculinity. (The Last Psychiatrist)

“The absence of fear is not courage. The absence of fear is some kind of brain damage.” (The Art of Nonconformity)

Calling all geeks: Full episodes of the original Star Trek are now available on Youtube. EEEEEEEE! (Youtube)

Do you have an interesting article or recipe that you'd like to see featured in Casual Kitchen's Food Links? Send me an email!

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Seven Rules On the Value of an Experience

Since my last post on forgotten restaurant meals, I've been thinking quite a lot about the value of experiences, and I've come up with a list of rules of thumb you can apply to help you assess whether an experience will be worth the cost.

This is of course a food blog, and therefore much of this thinking is geared towards food experiences, but I think today's post could be broadly applicable across all sorts of experiences.

You'll notice the appearance of my trusty 80/20 Rule in this list, along with several other counterintuitive (and even one or two contradictory) thoughts.

One final note: My goal isn't to be prescriptive--I'm not here to tell you what to do. My goal with this post is to help you think about what gives you real value in life and thus help you think about what things are worth the extra money.

1) Money spent on experiences you don't remember is wasted money.

2) The "rememberability" of an expensive meal may have more to do with its infrequency than its absolute cost. If you have expensive dinners out several times a week, they are likely to blend together, be forgotten, and thus become a waste of money.

3) However, if you truly value expensive restaurant meals, it may be optimal to have just a few fancy and pricey restaurant meals per year. Frequency and rememberability are generally inversely proportional.

4) Rethink what paying for an experience means to you. Will you remember this experience? Will it be salient to you in a year or two? Or three? This might be a better measure of value to you than the cost.

5) At the same time, the value of an experience may be directly related to its cost, all else equal. Extremely expensive dinners tend to be more memorable, assuming they are relatively infrequent. Regular restaurant meals that you have for no reason at all will probably end up being utterly forgotten.

6) You can waste enormous sums of money on regular "forgettable" experiences.

7) By cutting out one or two weekly "forgettable" dinners out, you can save an enormous percentage of your entire food budget without sacrificing any long-term happiness whatsoever.

Readers, what would you add? And which of these do you agree with or disagree with?

Related Posts:
Spending to Save: Frugality and Expensive Food
Ten Tips on How to Cut Your Food Budget Using the 80/20 Rule
Doing Your Favorite Thing: How to Spend Exactly the Right Amount of Money For an Important Celebration
Results of the Casual Kitchen Reader Food Spending Poll

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

On the True Value of a Forgotten Restaurant Meal

I had an interesting moment of clarity about the true value of restaurant meals when I recently went through a pile of credit card receipts from a year ago. In that pile were receipts from fifteen or so restaurants we had been to in mid-2008.

These dinners were from barely a year ago, and yet I hardly remembered any of them. Heck, I couldn't even remember the names of some of the restaurants, much less what kind of food they served. And yet the aggregate cost of these culinary experiences was hundreds and hundreds of dollars.

You'd think after spending all that money I'd remember more of these experiences, but sadly, I don't. The ones that really stuck in my mind boiled down to a couple of really fancy restaurant meals we had, Laura's 40th birthday dinner, and the spectacular all-you-can-eat ribs we had last fall during our visit to Belgium. That's three or four restaurant meals--out of fifteen.

In complete contrast, I remember nearly every dinner party I've hosted at our home, going back many years. Those dinners were all truly salient and meaningful experiences, full of fun conversations, good eating (well, I did make the food after all!) and good times with friends. And yet the entire cost of all the food--for everyone--for a dinner in our home was usually far less than what Laura and I would end up spending on just ourselves for the average forgettable restaurant meal in this forgotten pile of receipts.

Readers, get ready, because here's the punchline of this article: you will completely forget most of your restaurant meals, making them an utter waste of money. Only a select few of your dinners out--the ones with particularly special circumstances--will stick in your mind.

Moreoever, you'll get more value from your experiences by going out to eat only for really, really important occasions. Otherwise eat at home. And host lots of dinner parties. You'll spend a lot less money, and you'll probably keep more meaningful and salient memories.

What is the point of spending extra money on an experience if the odds are you'll end up forgetting all about it?

Readers, what do you think about the value of forgotten experiences?

Related Posts:
The Dinner Party: 10 Tips to Make Cooking for Company Fun and Easy
Doing Your Favorite Thing: How to Spend Exactly the Right Amount of Money For an Important Celebration
A Recession-Proof Guide to Saving Money on Food
A Simple Way to Beat Rising Food Prices


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

CK Friday Links--Friday September 11, 2009

Here's yet another selection of particularly interesting links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts and your feedback.

PS: follow me on Twitter!
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How to healthify any baking recipe. (No Meat Athlete)

How come packaged foods never look as good as in that photo on the box? (Food in Real Life)

Why Dominican banana farmers have abandoned fair trade practices. (The Banana Blog)

The food industry starts a new "Smart Choices" healthy food labeling campaign, and (cue the hysterical laughter) Fruit Loops, Cocoa Krispies and Fudgesicles make the list. (Accidental Hedonist)

Ever heard of teff, amaranth, kamut or farro? Ten healthy whole grains, with recipes and prep ideas. (Chow, via Cheap Healthy Good)

Seven counterintuitive reasons why you should eat more saturated fats. (Tim Ferriss' Blog)

Try a chocolate tasting at your next dinner party! Here's how to do it. (stonesoup)

Recipe Links:
You'd never imagine it could be so easy to make Braised Leg of Lamb. (Hot Off the Garlic Press)

Fight fire with fire--and clear out your sinuses--with this highly original spicy Chilled Red Pepper Soup. (The Well-Seasoned Cook)

The best tomatoes you'll ever eat: Slow Roasted Tomatoes. (Wives with Knives)

Football season is starting up, so here's a delicious Game Day Chili recipe. (Aggie's Kitchen)

Off-Topic Links:
Why being a pessimist can save you a lot of money. (Bargaineering, via Beingfrugal.net)

Who's fault is it when a marriage fails because of an unequal division of chores? Hint: it's not as obvious as you'd think. (Toronto Star, via Dana McCauley's Food Blog)

Do you know a young kid who is looking to gain experience in an unpaid internship? Sorry, they're illegal. (Blog Maverick)

Applying the "broken windows theory" to blog comments, posting schedules and entrepreneurialism. (The Art of Nonconformity)

A disturbing article on how the media manufactures reality. (The Last Psychiatrist)


Do you have an interesting article or recipe that you'd like to see featured in Casual Kitchen's Food Links? Send me an email!

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Review: The End of Overeating by David Kessler

Note: An expanded version of this post is on my book review blog, What I Just Read.
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Why is it impossible to eat just one Dorito? Why do we crave some foods and not others? Why is it easy for many of us to eat far beyond satiation--even though we know we're going to regret it?

Why, in short, do we overeat?

These are the fundamental questions that former FDA Commissioner David Kessler asks in his new book The End of Overeating.

In this book, you'll learn why some foods, tweaked and optimized by food designers and engineers to be "hyperpalatable," drive us to irrational cravings. You'll learn how our biology and our psychology conspire with these hyperpalatable foods to lead us to engage in "conditioned hypereating," causing us to eat far past the point where we're full.

You'll also learn how foods are processed, standardized and saturated with sugars and fats before being served at casual theme restaurant chains across the country. One particularly disturbing example describes chicken breasts pierced with hundreds of needles (for a more tender texture), injected with water or saline (to add moisture and bulk), breaded with sugary, salted flour (for extra palatability), and then par-fried, frozen and shipped to your local restaurant franchise. After a second frying, the chicken is practically pre-chewed by the time it arrives at your table.

Sheesh. And I thought I had already come up with all the best reasons to avoid second-order foods.

Needless to say, it is not normal to eat food prepared this way. But because so much of the food in restaurants and grocery stores is heavily processed, who's to say what is even normal anymore? And while there is an enormous amount of personal responsibility each of us can exercise between our forks and mouths, you can't help feeling after reading this book that the food deck is stacked against all but the most iron-willed of people.

This book has a few flaws: The first section contains some 10-15 pages of borderline erotic descriptions of chocolate chip cookies, pizza and M&Ms as Kessler gradually sets up his arguments against engineered foods. Two or three pages would have sufficed and would have left me quite a bit less hungry. And at times Kessler plays an unconvincing innocent, wandering Michael Moore-like into meetings and conversations with industry insiders and expressing affected shock at the techniques and methods used in the food business. The innocent guy act might work if Kessler wasn't one of the most politically savvy civil servants ever to head up the FDA--and a key force behind most of the new food labeling regulations passed during the 1990s.

But these are minor criticisms of an otherwise exceptional, insightful and shocking book.

Read The End of Overeating and you'll learn how our biology and psychology cause us to crave and consume foods to the point of irrationality. Read it to learn how the food industry entices us to eat more than we should of foods that are less healthy than they could be. But most importantly, read this book to become a more aware eater and a more aware consumer.



Readers, those of you familiar with my reading blog know that I love putting together reading lists from the books I read. If you're interested in further reading on the many subjects touched on in The End of Overeating, here's a list of some of the most interesting books Kessler used as sources:

1) Fat Girl: A True Story by Judith Moore
2) Waistland: The R/evolutionary Science Behind Our Weight and Fitness Crisis by Deirdre Barret
3) The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food by Jennifer 8. Lee
4) Dieter's Dilemma: Eating Less and Weighing More by William Bennett and Joel Gurin
5) Willpower's Not Enough: Recovering from Addictions of Every Kind by Arnold Washton and Joan Zweben
6) Biting the Hand That Starves You: Inspiring Resistance to Anorexia/Bulimia by Richard Maisel, David Epston and Ali Borden

Related Posts:
Does Healthy Eating Really Cost Too Much? Blogger Roundtable
A Question of Food Quality
Why Our Food Industry Isn't So Bad After All
Just Say No to Overpriced Boxed Cereal

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Scarred for Life by a Food Industry Job

One of my very first jobs was working in the food prep station of a Burger King the summer after I finished high school. It was a job for which I was enormously grateful, and not just because it paid me the princely sum of $2.75 an hour and showed me my potential future if I didn't go to college.

The real advantage of working at a BK for a summer was that it permanently cured me of my addiction to fast food.

I had this job for a summer more than 20 years ago, yet to this day french fries are the only thing I can eat at a Burger King or at a McDonald's.

And it's not because of any lack of sanitary standards--the Burger King franchise I worked at was pretty darn clean. It was because I made thousands and thousands of burgers. Cheeseburgers, hamburgers, double cheeseburgers, Whoppers, double Whoppers--all ordered with every combination and permutation imaginable of ketchup, mayo, mustard, pickles and special sauce.

After every shift I had to take a shower to get the Burger King smell off me. I saw burgers in my sleep. It was a fast food version of immersion therapy, except instead of desensitizing me, it it had the reverse effect.

Being around this food so much cured me of this "cuisine" for the rest of my life.

Have you ever had any food industry jobs that taught you lifelong lessons? What were they?

Related Posts:
Guess What? We Spend Less Than Ever on Food
Ten Rules for the Modern Restaurant-Goer
Ten Strategies to Stop Mindless Eating
When High-Fat Food Can Actually Be Healthy For You
The Pros and Cons of a High-Carb/Low-Fat Diet

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Blog Redesign Update

A quick housekeeping note for readers.
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You might have noticed that things look a little different around here.

Today I'm updating Casual Kitchen with a new look, thanks to the great team over at CPS Creative. CPS did both the design and the implementation you are now looking at, and I was extremely happy with their work. I hope the new design helps Casual Kitchen bring even more value to you as a reader.

A large percentage of CK readers are bloggers themselves, and given that my experience working with Jim and his team at CPS Creative went so well, I'm happy to endorse them to anyone who is looking do any kind of blog design or website design work.

If you have questions about the process, or if you want to know any specifics of what it was like working with CPS Creative, please feel free to email me. I'd be happy to talk about the details.


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

CK Friday Links--Friday September 4, 2009

Here's yet another selection of particularly interesting links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts and your feedback.

PS: follow me on Twitter!
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How will the American Heart Association square their new position on eating less sugar with their paid endorsements of many high-sugar cereals? (Food Politics)

Oh great, all US freshwater fish are contaminated with mercury. (Food Politics)

This is what a glorious day of homebrewing looks like in time-lapse photography. (Accidental Hedonist)

Put on your critical thinking cap: grain and hormone fed beef is better for the environment than organic grass-fed beef. (Feedstuffs Foodlink)

Whole Foods tries valiantly to apologize for their CEO's ill-conceived op-ed.... (Daily Kos, OpenLeft), while supporters stage a Whole Foods "buycott." (St. Louis Business Journal)

How to make the most of mediocre fruit. Worth reading just for the weirdly perfect analogy to nose hair. (The Economical Epicurean)

Recipe Links:
Curried Brown Rice with Tomatoes and Peas, along with a bonus: a hilarious story of the worst date in recorded human history. (Cheap Healthy Good)

An easy, healthy homemade Cheese Thins Crackers recipe. (Chocolate & Zucchini)

Another great use for zucchini: Lasagna Sans Pasta. (Beach Eats)

Ooooh baby: Dark Chocolate Ice Cream. (Ice Cream Ireland, via The Dogs Eat the Crumbs)

Off-Topic Links:
Why people wig out inappropriately over a simple money-saving suggestion. (The Simple Dollar)

How to ask for help on Twitter in five steps. (Seth Simonds' Blog)

When you find yourself with 65 tubes of toothpaste, 50 bottles of body wash and 36 boxes of cereal, perhaps your frugal shopping has turned into an addiction. (4 Hats and Frugal)

An excellent and counterintuitive take on federal budget deficits. Long, but worth it. (Economic Perspectives)

Do you have an interesting article or recipe that you'd like to see featured in Casual Kitchen's Food Links? Send me an email!

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Keyword Gawking

Warning: this is a preposterously off-topic post.
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Everyone knows that you can vaporize a lot of time looking at your blog's analytics.

But for me, there is nothing more fun than looking deep into Casual Kitchen's list of keywords, seeking out the kookiest and most obscure searches that bring people to my blog.

I call this dubious pastime "keyword gawking" and I thought I'd share some of the best search strings with you. Every single one of these searches actually brought a reader to Casual Kitchen.

Some searches I truly sympathize with:
* i crave chocolate constantly
* i love you too alcoholic drink
* chocoholic withdrawal symptoms

Some searchers are looking for acceptance and sympathy from Google:
* is it normal to eat a whole bag of doritos?
* i don't want to make dinner
* i boiled an egg but it broke
* i quit cooking no one appreciates it
* finally give dinner party and my dinner was terrible

Some searches sound like cries for help to the Google gods:
* terrible cook needing to make dinner, recipes easy and quick
* why are moms expected to cook?
* i may have ingested raw chicken what should i do
* i did great today with my eating now tonight i find myself eating cookie dough
* help, i have to do a last minute dinner party for 10 what can i cook
* when i feel hungry i eat. the more hungry i feel the more that i will eat. that's positive feedback. is this an example of positive feedback?

Some searches are for things that don't exist:
* affordable kona coffee

Sometimes I really hope the searcher didn't find what he was looking for at Casual Kitchen:
* unpalatable cooking
* unethical vegetarian restaurant
* tips for how to cut
* stale granola recipe
* mayonnaise-based pasta sauce
* health benefits of salmon eyeballs
* erectile dysfunction and cheating
* a pain in the ass recipe

Some are critically important questions that we all wonder about:
* why do my teeth hurt after i eat icecream

Some deal with the breakdown of society:
* why do people eat stuff and put the empty bag back
* how to cook methadone
* home expedient method to make meth
* easy fake crystal meth recipe
* im going porkin

Some sound like Jeopardy questions:
* the kitchen expression for being prepared for cooking is

Some are downright weird:
* perfectly preserved body chocolate in one hand what a ride
* cavatappi, scooby
* "sure kill" x-files dedicated to...
* more i brush my teeth, my teeth spread
* mole sauce pregnant
* tabasco sinuses
* dear sir or madam ...in this letter i am going to write about why tv is so important today

Some I'd like to know the answers to myself!
* something special about the name daniel
* how will future cooking be done
* the coolest unpatented ideas
* how to feel full without actually eating food

Some are eye-burningly ungrammatical:
* stuff to eat when your ill
* what spices can you get high off of?!
* what to eat to get better eye site
* how to write a unsatisfactory letter to a company
* how is overeating a evolutionary trate

Finally, some search strings are exactly what I would search for myself:
* delicious, fast, easy, inexpensive recipes
* salmonella chicken paranoia
* one gallon tabasco
* manliest alcoholic drinks
* laughably cheap meals
* recipes that aren't a pain in the ass

I'm particularly proud to say that Casual Kitchen comes up as the number one search result for those final two search strings. I must be doing something right.

I hope that the tens of thousands of people who search on Google and stumble onto Casual Kitchen find what they seek. To all of you out there: thanks for finding me!

Related Posts:
Best Of Casual Kitchen
Most Popular Posts of Casual Kitchen
Our New Zealand Travel Blog

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Being a Part-Time Vegetarian

Readers! I was recently invited to guest post at Heather Solos' site Home Ec 101, and I wrote a post entitled On the Merits of Being a Part-Time Vegetarian.

Long-time Casual Kitchen readers know this is a subject near and dear to my heart. In the article, I talk about the cost and health advantages of going part-time veggie, and I list four critical cookbooks you should consider acquiring if you'd like to explore this cuisine further.

Head on over Home Ec 101 and join the discussion!

Casual Kitchen's Top Five of the Month: August 2009

This once-a-month post is for those readers who may not get a chance to read everything here at CK, but who still want to keep up with the best and most widely read articles.
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Top Five of the Month for August 2009:

1) Guess What? We Spend Less Than Ever on Food

2) What Percent of Your Budget Do You Spend on Food?

3) Spreading the New Frugality: A Manifesto

4) A Question of Food Quality

5) How to Make Creole-Style Coffee


From the Vault: Top Five Posts from One Year Ago:

1) Stacked Costs and Second-Order Foods: A New Way to Think About Rising Food Costs

2) Favorite Food Photography Links

3) Homemade Corn Tortilla Chips

4) How to Spend Exactly the Right Amount of Money For an Important Celebration

5) Sauteed Penne with Broccoli and Chickpeas


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!