learning from past

Use Food to Promote Conviviality without Promoting Indulgence

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Image by silviarita from Pixabay

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about party food, even more than usual, because I’m working on a cookbook about such stuff (working title: Tiny Bites). Lately I’ve been testing my take on Swiss buttercream frosting. (Yesterday’s version was root beer. The batch is now in the freezer awaiting its use as a topping for root-beer brownies at the wedding reception I’m helping with in August. It was pretty good, but I’m still tweaking the basic recipe.)

So, as I’ve often said, food can be a tool that promotes conviviality. People aren’t eating because they’re hungry

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Resist the Call of the “Purchase Justification Machine”

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Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

I’ve mentioned this blog before, having stumbled upon it by accident several years ago. While MMM has gone through some upheaval in his personal life, and while he also isn’t writing very frequent posts these days, I check in periodically to see what he’s up to. His most recent article concerns his back-and-forth inner debate about whether or not to buy a Tesla, about which I could not possibly care less, but he’s actually onto a bigger principle:

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So if the Food Sensitivity Diet Is a Scam, Why Do People Feel Better on It?

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In the previous post I discussed what the popular “food sensitivity” tests are actually testing, which is exposure and not actual food reactions. This one fact explains why the lists of forbidden foods that people get are so similar: a conventional American diet is going to have lots of gluten, dairy, and corn, with probably a lesser amount of soy. Getting rid of these four items will mean, for most people, a huge shift in their eating, often coming with the possibility of the loss of important nutrients. But the 

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A Keto Case Study, Part Three

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A reminder if you’re just coming across this series of posts: I am taking some material from the website Addicted2Decorating which I follow faithfully and enjoy tremendously. Ordinarily it’s a DIY home improvement site, but the author sometimes includes a personal post—what music she’s listening to, how the new dog is doing, and, for my purposes, what new diet plan she and her husband are following. I want to emphasize again that I am in no way trying to badmouth Kristi, the website author. I am simply using what she says herself as a means of examining the mistakes people make when they adopt some type of extreme fad diet, in this case the so-called “ketogenic” diet. I’m putting the name of the diet in quotation marks because it’s actually very difficult to get your body into the state of ketosis, a condition in which your body has switched from burning glucose, its preferred fuel, to “ketone bodies,” which is fuel made from fat. This switch in fuels is supposed to “trick” your body into dipping into its fat stores, thus helping you lose weight. I’d encourage you to go back and read parts one and two of this series if you haven’t already done so. You’ll note below that I’m still mining the ideas contained in the original quotations I used, as there’s so much to say about just this short section.

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Three Human Drives that Feed (!) into Fad Diets.

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I’ve already talked about the human taste for drama, a characteristic that draws us into all sorts of extravagant and unsustainable announcements and commitments. The inherent weakness of drama as a long-term tool for change is this:

We think that the dramatic and public announcement (“I’m going keto!” “I’m joining a gym!”) will do the work for us. Now, to be clear, we don’t necessarily believe this consciously. If someone asked us, “Do you honestly think that saying you’re going to lose 50 pounds will somehow make you lose 50 pounds?” you’d say, “Of course not! What kind of nitwit do you take me for?” But we’ve all done it, haven’t we? We say, or think, “I have to do something about this! I’m going to . . . “ And the momentum carries us along, for a little while. Once that initial excitement wears off, though, so does our motivation. And what is motivation, anyway? Gretchen Rubin has a great article on her blog about this whole question. Sometimes when people use that word they really mean “desire”–”I want to do so-and-so.” Sometimes it means “reasons why”–”I know why I need to quit staying up late to play video games.” Sometimes it’s a statement of some kind of vague moral impulse–”I should spend less money on impulse buys.” As she puts it, people aren’t really motivated by motivation. That’s a tautology, in which you just go around in circles: “I’m going to do something because I’m motivated to do it and so I will do it because I’m motivated.” As I’ve said myself before, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” That’s what a lot of so-called “motivation” is—a wish. As the estimable Gretchen points out, you need a clear aim and and plan of action, not some vague motivation.

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Where are you on the food-choice pyramid?

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I plan to do a series of posts on some of the fad diets floating around out there, many of them on celebrity websites, but today I want to write in more general terms about what guides the food choices that many people make. Let me say a couple of things first:

1. Making choices is better than not making choices. If you just eat what’s in front of you without thinking, snacking on the candy bowl at the office, always getting the soft drink/chips/cookie combo with your sandwich for lunch, cleaning out the popcorn bowl as you sit in front of the TV, that’s just mindless eating. At least if you’ve decided to follow some strict regimen you’re paying attention.

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My Weight History–What’s Yours?

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Well, the post that was going to be written on Christmas Eve is being written today. What with cooking, and running around madly, and game playing, and movie watching, all with our guests in the house, my beloved sister-in-law and her husband (my brother-in-law-in-law), not a whole lot of blog posting has taken place. I have some time this morning, though, and want to get some more material down before the start of the new year.

I may be re-plowing old ground here, but I’m not going to go back through all 500+ articles on this site to find out. My point here is to encourage you to do what I’m doing today: go back and look at your weight history. Let me emphasize again: this blog has not transitioned into some rivulet of Weight Watchers. But your weight is an indicator of how you’re eating, and I am obsessed with the subject of eating well and healthfully. The more we can see our weight as an end result of behavior that can be changed, the better off we’ll be.

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In Which I Give the Green Light to “The Green Book”

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Green Book poster.jpg
official trailer image; accessed and copied from Wikipedia.

As I’ve said a number of times, this website is switching over to an emphasis on food and hospitality. But I plan to still include book and movie reviews in some way, and since we haven’t made the complete switch yet I’m just writing a regular post on a movie I think you should see. Jim and I had been very intrigued with a segment on the PBS NewsHour about the film, and after our rousing success at our voice recital we found a location and time that worked for us. Jim was a little doubtful about it as there’s been some backlash, especially from the brother of one of the main characters portrayed in it, but I was all gung-ho and he was willing to be a good sport. Honestly, we just sat laughing in pure delight throughout most of the two-hour running time. The interplay between two award-winning actors, Viggo Mortenson and Mahershala Ali, is brilliant. One of my big tests for a movie is, Would I want to see it again? The answer is YES. Maybe we’ll go see it with our son when he gets home for his college break.

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The Thanksgiving Post-Mortem

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Roast Turkey just out of the ovenHow was your Thanksgiving? I have to say that this was one of the nicest I can remember in an unbroken string of enjoyable holidays. We had our 15 people who ate, played games, talked, watched college football, and hung around for a long time. That’s always my yardstick for measuring how successful a party is.

But since I’ve been writing about the food, I’m going to tell you how that part went. Also, if you don’t particularly care about my results, at least scroll down and read about the two things you shouldn’t do when cooking a turkey. As I said in an earlier post, this is a bit late for Thanksgiving but you may end up having a turkey for Christmas too. (I’m hoping to be asked to do some cooking for that meal, too.)

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