Casual Kitchen

CK Friday Links--Friday May 24, 2013

2013-05-24T03:11:00.000-07:00

Happy Memorial Day Weekend to my USA-based readers! As always, here are this week's links from around the internet. I welcome your thoughts.

PS: Follow me on Twitter!
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Vegan no more. (Bing Wu)

If our food supply is so vulnerable, then why are crop prices declining from their highs? (Jayson Lusk)

We're seeing exactly the same stealth price hikes in our education system that we see in our grocery stores. (A.S.K.ing Questions)

This six minute TED talk will make you completely rethink your washing machine. (TED)

The muddy ethics of online book reviews. (Scott D. Southard)

We feel like our house is holding us back from living our lives. (Rethinking the Dream)

The foolish do best in a strong market. (The Aleph Blog) Bonus Post: Free money brings out the worst in people.

Do you have an interesting article or recipe? Want a little extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Could Toxins Be Good For You?

2013-05-21T03:11:00.001-07:00

In the 1980s, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) commissioned a study on the health impacts of sustained radiation exposure. They compared two groups of nuclear shipyard workers from Baltimore who had similar jobs except for a single key difference: one group was exposed to very low levels of radiation from the materials they handled, and the other was not. The DOE tracked the workers between 1980 and 1988, and what they found shocked everyone involved.

Radiation made them healthier. The twenty-eight thousand workers exposed to radiation had a 24 percent lower mortality rate than their thirty-two thousand counterparts who were not exposed to radiation. Somehow the toxins that everyone assumed and feared were ruining the workers' health were doing just the opposite.

--from Dr. John J. Ratey's book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

Wait, what? Radiation made them healthier?

If nothing else, this shocking anecdote illustrates the complex and counterintuitive biological process of stress and recovery. Who'd guess that nuclear radiation could be good for you?

The answer of course is--duh--radiation isn't good for you. But the central concept here is that we become stronger and healthier thanks to our bodies' reactions to low levels of toxins.

So can we take this concept and apply it to the food we eat? Let's see what Dr. Ratey has to say:

An enormous industry has sprung up to promote the cancer-fighting properties of foods and products that contain antioxidants. Eat more antioxidant-rich broccoli, the logic goes, and you'll live a longer and healthier life. True, perhaps, but not for the reasons the marketing folks would have you believe.

It turns out that these foods are particularly beneficial not only because they contain antioxidants but also because they contain toxins. "Many of the beneficial chemicals in plants--vegetables and fruits--have evolved as toxins to dissuade insects and other animals from eating them... what they're doing is inducing a mild, adaptive stress response in the cells. For example, in broccoli, there's a chemical called sulforaphane, and it clearly activates stress response pathways in cells that upregulate antioxidant enzymes. Broccoli has antioxidants, but at the level you could get from your diet, they're not going to function as antioxidants.

Just as with the nuclear shipyard workers, a mild toxin generates an adaptive stress response that bolsters cells.

Now don't get me wrong: nobody is telling you to drink Roundup or start playing with plutonium rods. But it does make you rethink what it means to be "exposed" to toxins, doesn't it?

Readers, what are your thoughts? I want to know.

Related Posts:
The Problem with Government Food Safety Regulation
Review: The End of Overeating by David Kessler
Recommended Reading for A Good Wine Education
Review: Cooking Green by Kate Heyhoe

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

CK Friday Links--Friday May 17, 2013

2013-05-17T03:11:00.000-07:00

Links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

PS: Follow me on Twitter!
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Maybe it's time to swap burgers for bugs. (NPR, via @RadicalOmnivore)

Michael Pollan's new book Cooked is a half-baked parody of foodie intellectualism. (Table Matters)

Getting off sugar. (Eating Rules)

Population bomb? Nope. Not even close. (Carpe Diem)

The holy and demonic pull of writing. (VQR)

Facebook isn't frying your brain. You are. (Synapses, via @hohlistic)

A 30-day trial of only 30 minutes of internet a day. (Quick Writing Tips)

The secret to wealth? Realizing how little money it really takes to lead an extremely rich life. (Mr. Money Moustache)

Do you have an interesting article or recipe? Want a little extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Ask CK: Are Your Waffles Supposed To Be This Bland?

2013-05-14T03:11:00.000-07:00

New reader Christie writes in (edited slightly for length):

Hi Dan,

First wanted you to know that my family seriously loved both the crock pot beef stew and the risotto. I admit I had my doubts while making the risotto, it seemed like an awful lot of liquid. My husband kept looking at the rice and making comments. But by the end it was super creamy and delicious!

My experience with your waffles recipe was less overwhelming. The texture of the waffles was absolutely perfect, light and airy. They were however, to be blunt, bland. My four teenage boys (not seriously picky I might add) each had about one (a minuscule amount for a bunch of teenage boys) and I threw out about a 1/3 of the batter – unheard of in this household! Any suggestions to improve the taste? I’ve always used the “Classique Fare Belgian waffle mix” from my local Wegmans, and the taste is decent. I’ve never found another brand to taste as good. However they are not nearly as light and airy as yours, and are sometime downright soggy. So I’d love to perfect your recipe. What is missing? Vanilla? I’m not sure.

Christie makes a good point. CK's waffle recipe isn't sweetened or sugared up like many store-bought waffle products. Instead, our waffle recipe is mild. In fact, I consider it a vehicle for maple syrup more than anything else. This might explain why kids might not like it, unless of course they can dump a ton of maple syrup on top. And please, please don't tell me you used fake syrup with these waffles.

However, if you're looking to turn CK's waffle recipe into something with more "pop" and a more assertive flavor profile, here are some variations to try:

Cinnamon. Add 1/2 to 3/4 of a teaspoon to the dry ingredients.
Vanilla, as you suggest. A teaspoon should be enough. Add to the egg yolks/milk/oil.
Chocolate bits. Gently fold in 1/4 cup to 1/2 cup as you fold in the egg whites.
Cayenne pepper. Yes, cayenne pepper! Add 1/2 teaspoon to the dry ingredients.

Here at Casual Kitchen we sometimes add oats to the recipe too (about 1/3 cup--also be sure to add a little bit more milk to keep the liquid/solid ratio constant), or we will add a combination of the ideas above: oats+cinnamon; vanilla+chocolate, etc. Finally, fruit and whipped cream could be a tasty, if less healthy, option to consider too.

Readers, what suggestions do you have for jazzing up breakfast waffles? And if you try out any of the variations I've shared above, let me know your results!

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

CK Friday Links--Friday May 10, 2013

2013-05-10T03:11:00.000-07:00

Links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

PS: Follow me on Twitter!
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Recipe/Food Links:
Embrace your inner caveman with this Sweet Crockpot Pulled Pork recipe from the authors of the new paleo cookbook Caveman Feast. (Owlhaven)

How do I grill the perfect whole chicken without a rotisserie? Here's how. (Dad Cooks Dinner)

Separate your egg yolks easily using a common water bottle. (Youtube, via @barbarellabo)

Eat more fat for breakfast. (Mr. Money Mustache) Bonus: Helping your spouse learn to love frugality.

Off-Topic Links:
How Dove sells self-esteem to you. Read critically. (The Last Psychiatrist)

The next time you have an urge to talk about your goals, zip it! (TED) No, wait: you should always share your goals. (Absolutly Fit)

How GDP measurements understate true economic growth... especially in poor countries. (The Guardian)

Do you have an interesting article or recipe? Want a little extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Why Do My New Year's Resolutions Always Fail By Mid-May?

2013-05-07T03:11:00.000-07:00

I stole this image from a friend's Facebook page:

Hilarious. Seriously, who hasn't done this with their New Year's resolutions?

Then again, maybe this photo hits a little too close to home, especially if your resolutions for this year are already beginning to slip away. So let's set aside the humor for a moment and ask a serious question: What is it about the goals in the photo above that caused repeated failure, and how can we avoid failure like this? What can we do to ensure we select effective goals we will actually achieve?

I'd love to hear you share below what types of goals work for you. Here are a few of my thoughts:

Be specific.
An effective goal is specific. To see what not to do, look at the first two resolutions above. "Lose (more) weight" and "get fit" aren't goals--they are shapeless generalizations.

If you're setting a goal, and if you actually want to achieve that goal, it must be clear, defined and precise. So how can we change vague, failure-bound resolutions like "lose weight" and "get fit" into something that has a snowball's chance of working?

With body weight, start by defining a specific goal weight or a specific weight loss target: Lose 20 pounds, or Get my body weight to X. [Special note: read this post on the dangers of depending too much on body weight as a health indicator]. With fitness, use a specific and sensible parameter that's a meaningful measure of fitness to you:

Run two miles without having to stop.
Do forty pushups in under two minutes.
Exercise twice a week for a minimum of 30 minutes.

However, being specific isn't enough. You need one more element to make an effective goal.

Include a specific time horizon.
Effective goals have end dates. A goal with a proper time horizon and proper specificity would be something like:

By December 31, 2013, I will weigh X, 25 pounds less than my current weight.
By December 31, 2013, I'll be able to run 3 miles in under 36 minutes.
By December 31, 2013, I will have saved $5,000 in an emergency fund.

Even better, consider mapping out intermediary steps on the way to your end goal:

By June 30, I will have lost 15 pounds on my way to losing 25 pounds by Dec 31.
By June 30, I will run 2m in 30 minutes; by September 30, I will run 3m in 40 minutes.
By March 30, I will save $1,250 in an emergency fund (1/4 of my goal). By June 30 I will save $2,500. By September 30 I will save $3,750.

And so on. Divide up the goal so it makes sense to you, either by breaking up both the year and goal into exactly equal parts, or by front-loading the goal (if you front-load a goal--in other words, if you do more than half of it in the first half of the year--things get easier as the year goes on). A front-loaded version of the Save $5,000 in an emergency fund goal might look like this:

By March 30, I will save $2,000 in an emergency fund (40% of my goal). By June 30 I will save $3,500 (70%). By September 30 I will save $4,500 (90%!).

By June, you can already look back proudly on what you've done. By September you can coast! Revel in your goal-conquering awesomeness.

Remember: by the time March or April rolls around, most people have already given up on their New Year's resolutions. You, on the other hand, have set up a process and a roadmap--and you're systematically and relentlessly accomplishing steps towards your goals.

Fewer = better.
With all due respect, the poor person who wrote the list of goals above needs to know a central truth about goal setting: Six goals is too many. Three would be better. Maybe four. And keep in mind: there's absolutely nothing wrong with setting just one goal--especially if it's an important and meaningful goal.

It's easy for modern humans to fall in love with lists. It feels good to put down, in writing, lots of things that you'd like to do. It shows how serious you are about self-improvement.

That's all fine and good, but we're not making lists. We're accomplishing goals. There's a gigantic difference.

The more you focus your attention and your will on a small number of extremely well-defined goals, the more likely you'll achieve them. It's okay if you save back a few goals for next year, or even the year after that. It's far better to achieve two or three of your most important goals now than it is to write down six or seven goals and achieve none.

We're almost done. There's just one more step to take. A critical step. And it will guarantee that you accomplish your goal.

Consequences.
The most important element of effective goal-setting is this: set a specific consequence if you fail. All the better if you set up a consequence that you'll do anything to avoid. (Protip: make the goal--and the consequences--public.)

Here's an example that resonates with me in a way that I'd... well, in a way that I'd rather not explain:

I will save $5,000 in an emergency fund by December 31, or I will sing the theme song to "Titanic" in a Karaoke bar, and then post the video on Facebook for all my friends to see.

Congratulations. You've mindfully and consciously set up conditions that are utterly congruent with your success. You will not fail.

Here's the tl;dr version of today's post: Good goals...
...Are specific
...Have a time horizon
...Are focused and few in number
...Have clear consequences for failure

One last thought. Reading a post on how to set goals is not the same as achieving goals. Time to get to work.

Readers, what additional thoughts would you add?

Related Posts:
Ask CK: The Two-A-Day Workout
Eat Less, Exercise More Doesn't Work. Wait, What?
Becoming a Knowledgeable and Sophisticated Investor: Six Tips
Two People, Fifteen Days, Thirty Meals. Thirty-Five Bucks!

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

CK Friday Links--Friday May 3, 2013

2013-05-03T03:11:00.000-07:00

Links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

PS: Follow me on Twitter!
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An interesting except from Michael Pollan's new book: Cooked. (Medium)

Exercise is the junk food of moving. (Katy Says, via Mirrorhaven)

Recipe Links:
Pressure Cooker Mac-n-Cheese. (Dad Cooks Dinner)

So good you'll want to double it: Crock Pot Mongolian Beef. (Alosha's Kitchen)

Off-Topic Links:
Did you know that the USA leads the world in reducing carbon dioxide emissions, and our CO2 emissions per capita are now lower than they were in 1964? (Carpe Diem)

Giving up the fix of a relentless diet of internet information. (HBR)

Do you have an interesting article or recipe? Want a little extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Substitute Canned Tomatoes for "Fresh" Tomatoes

2013-04-30T03:11:00.001-07:00

Laura: Your Italian Sausage and Tortellini Soup calls for 3/4 of a pound of chopped fresh tomatoes.
Dan: Nope. Substitute a can of diced tomatoes instead.
Laura: A 15-ounce can?
Dan: Yep. There, I just saved you two bucks. And you're no longer hostage to tomatoes decomposing in your fridge.

The next time you're preparing a recipe that calls for fresh tomatoes, consider using canned tomatoes instead. It's an easy, money-saving substitution.

Remember the key insight from Tomatoland: those out-of-season tomatoes sitting in your grocery store's produce section aren't just tasteless and overpriced. They're also likely to be grown under questionable labor and environmental conditions.

Most of North America's canned tomatoes, however, are grown in California under far better conditions. Better still, canned tomatoes are shelf stable: if you decide to postpone cooking your tomato-requiring recipe until next week or next month, you can. With fresh tomatoes, you're held hostage: you have to cook your recipe before those tomatoes spoil.

Most importantly, canned tomatoes actually taste better than out-of-season tomatoes. Remember, out-of-season tomatoes are picked green, ripened artificially with ethylene gas, and arrive at your grocery story tasting like... nothing. At least canned tomatoes taste like tomatoes. Why? Because they're canned at peak ripeness rather than picked green.

Finally, you can buy a small can of unbranded diced or whole tomatoes for 60c to perhaps a dollar. Larger cans cost even less per unit. In stark contrast, out-of-season tomatoes could run you as much as $3.50 a pound.

What kinds of recipes are best for a canned-vs-fresh tomato substitution? In my view, canned tomatoes work best with soups, stews, chilis, casseroles and stir-fry dishes--essentially, recipes where the tomatoes get cooked down.

Fresh salads, however, are an entirely different matter: canned tomatoes most likely won't work as a fresh tomato replacement. The texture just won't be right.

But wait: who says a fresh green salad with fresh tomatoes is some kind of obligatory meal element? An alternative solution here would be to employ antifragile thinking to your diet and ditch out-of-season fresh salads entirely.

The next time you prepare a recipe calling for tomatoes, forget those tasteless, overpriced "fresh" tomatoes in your grocery store's produce section. Use canned tomatoes.

There. I just saved you two bucks.

Readers! What's your take?

Related Posts:
The "Don't Buy" List For A Low-Budget Kitchen
Where Going Generic Works... And Where It Doesn't
Is Organic Food Healthier? Or Just Another Aspirational Product?

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

CK Friday Links--Friday April 26, 2013

2013-04-26T03:11:00.000-07:00

Readers! I'm back from traveling--thanks for your patience while I took a break from running my links posts. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

PS: Follow me on Twitter!
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Why the Standard American Diet is not the ERE way. (Early Retirement Extreme)

Consumers, beware when retailers "anchor" you. (Save. Spend. Splurge.)

Excellent criteria for dividing up the household chores. [Readers, how about you? How do you divide up housework?] (BbSezMore)

Money-saving spring cleaning tips. (Owlhaven)

Five fitness buzzwords that make me want to punch a hole in the wall. (Nerd Fitness, via Ombailamos)

Do I have to make my blog mobile? Do people still read, even? (5 Second Rule)

We should decriminalize certain types of plagiarism. (Poynter Institute)

Do you have an interesting article or recipe? Want a little extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Disputing My Own Negative Self-Talk

2013-04-25T03:11:00.000-07:00

Readers, this is just a quick follow up to Tuesday's post on disputing our negative internal explanations. I have to share my own personal example of negative self-talk with you.

I had been working on the other day's post for forever, and I was really struggling with it. I just couldn't get it right. In fact, I still kind of think it's pretty bad. The flow of the piece isn't quite right and, I don't know, it seems kind of boring.

Which is a tragedy on some level because this concept from Martin Seligman's book Learned Optimism was a truly powerful, life-changing insight for me. I wanted to get the central idea across to readers using an everyday example, but it just wasn't working.

So, here was my negative self-talk as I was working on the post:

Jeez Dan, you really suck at writing. You are so slow. It takes you a zillion edits to even get a decent paragraph written. You are never going to amount to anything as a writer.

Heavy, right? But then I burst out laughing at the irony of it all: I was guilty of negative self-talk as I was writing a piece on disputing negative self-talk! Hilarious.

So, what did I do? I took my own dose of Dr. Seligman's medicine: I "disputed" it.

Stop! You don't suck at writing. You're just struggling with this specific piece. And so what if it takes you lots of edits to get something worded just right? PS: A zillion isn't even a real number. Finally, who says you're not going to amount to anything as a writer? What does that even mean? You had 800,000 pageviews last year at Casual Kitchen, and you've created a body of work here that's approaching 700 articles. I'd say that amounts to something, wouldn't you?

I couldn't really come up with anything to dispute the "you are so slow" statement. But, well, three out of four ain't bad.

Guess what happened next after I conducted this little experiment in disputation (besides realizing that maybe I should, uh, reread Seligman's book)? I went right back to writing and pounded out yet another post. And I had a big smile on my face.

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Dispute This! Negative Self-Talk And Better Health

2013-04-23T03:11:00.000-07:00

Susie* had been careful and disciplined with her diet. For the last three weeks, she'd been paying extra attention to what she ate. She cut out sugary drinks and reduced her between-meal snacking. And what little snacking she did do was on healthier foods like unsalted nuts, fiber-rich fruit, and so on. She was starting to find real success changing her eating habits.

Everything was going great.... until last Friday.

That's when Susie went out with a big group of coworkers after work. It was fun. She had a couple of big, sugary frozen margaritas. Somebody ordered a big platter of chicken wings, and she ate... several. And then, for dinner, she had a huge burger and a ton of fries.

So when Susie woke up Saturday morning, this is what she said to herself:

Great job Susan. Really good. You really blew it with your diet, didn't you? Jeez, you are such a glutton. Absolutely no self-control. You've just ruined your diet.

Readers: what is Susie likely to do next? Do you think the odds are good that she'll return to her prior habit of cleaner eating? Or will her diet go off the rails?

Would you believe that Susie's own words play a gigantic role in determining the answer?

One of the most important insights in Martin Seligman's striking book Learned Optimism is the strong link between what Susie says to herself and her future actions. Let's take a moment and analyze her self-talk:

You really blew it with your diet
Jeez, you are such a glutton
Absolutely no self-control
You've just ruined your diet

What do these sentences have in common?

For one thing, they're judgmental and pessimistic. Deeply so. Dr. Seligman would say they are permanent, pervasive and personal. Sure, admittedly, Susie experienced a setback in her diet. But what she's doing here is taking a one-time mistake and extrapolating it into permanent negative traits. This is a single instance of poor eating, but according to her self-talk, she views it as "proof" that she's a diet-ruining glutton with no self-control.

Look, we all screw up occasionally. We're only human. And from time to time, we all use negative language when we're angry at ourselves for screwing up. Take it from me, an expert negative self-judger: it is really, really hard to avoid doing this.

The problem is, this negative explanatory style sets us up for future failure. Our negative explanations usually become self-fulfilling. With her negative self-talk, Susie is actually increasing the chances that she will revert back to her old, unhealthy eating habits.

So what's the solution? The solution is to train yourself to dispute these negative statements--and to do so instinctively. Here's an example of what Susie could say next:

No, wait. Stop. Just because I overate on a single Friday night does not mean I "blew it" with my diet. It does not mean I am a glutton. In fact I've eaten really well for three full weeks! If anything, that is proof that I do have a lot of self-control. I just had a one-evening letdown in my eating habits. There's no way my diet's "ruined." It's up to me to decide how I eat going forward.

Unlike the first set of Susie's statements, all of which are either false or cartoonishly exaggerated, these disputative statements have the benefit of actually being true.

In fact, it's usually quite easy to find evidence to support your disputations. As Seligman says: "most of the time you will have facts on your side, since pessimistic reactions to adversity are so often overreactions." We tend to catastrophize in reaction to our setbacks, and our minds reach for extremely negative conclusions. And once again, our negative internal explanations can lead us into a self-fulfilling prophesy. In Susie's case, it may mean actually behaving in the future like a glutton with no self-control. It's the exact result she dreads.

Okay. You've heard Susie's initial negative self-talk and you've heard her disputation of that self-talk. What do you think her most likely course of action will be now? I'd bet she gets right back to her established pattern of clean eating.

Our minds are always chattering away, constantly making predictions, judgments and explanations. And when we experience a failure or a setback, our minds instantly leap to the most dire negative explanation. Once again, the secret is to dispute that instant negative explanation. Change it.

Our observations of reality are both highly subjective and self-fulfilling. We owe it to ourselves to see ourselves in a positive--and accurate--light.

This post is gratefully dedicated to Dr. Martin Seligman and his book Learned Optimism.

* not her real name--in fact I pretty much made this person up.

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

The Extreme Reach Fallacy

2013-04-16T03:11:00.000-07:00

1) Count calories? Who has time for that?

2) Keep track of what I eat? Nah, I don't want to watch my diet that carefully. Can't I just enjoy my food?

3) There's no WAY I'd track my expenses to the penny. What are you, anal?

Readers, can you see what these three sentences have in common?

Each involves shooting down an idea by jumping to the extreme. In all three cases, the speaker makes a potential solution seem more difficult than it really is, which gives him a gift-wrapped justification for ruling out the idea.

This "Extreme Reach" fallacy is an excuse script that lets us rationalize and maintain our prior unsuccessful habits.

Let's put the sentences above in context by imagining a conversation that might surround them:

Person A: I'd really like to lose 20 pounds.
Person B: Really? Well, I managed to lose 45 pounds by counting calories. It really worked well for me.
Person A (defensive): Count calories? Who has time for that?

See what just happened there? Person A opens a conversation by claiming he wants to lose weight, but then when presented with a possible solution, he makes the absurd claim that counting calories takes too much time.

Never mind that counting calories actually doesn't take much time at all, and never mind that some have found it to be astoundingly effective. The point, of course, is that Person A gets to act like he wants to lose weight, while creating a ready-made rationalization for not taking action. And if Person B is a member of polite society, she'll smile wanly and change the subject. Which completes the circle of rationalization.

Hard to believe all this can happen in such a short conversation, right?

Okay, let's move on to our second example:

Person C: How in the world do you stay so thin? What do you do?
Person D: Oh, I struggled with my weight for years. But in 2010, I decided to keep a notebook where over three months I wrote down everything I ate. Literally everything. Man, I couldn't believe it when I saw it all in my own handwriting--how many sodas I was drinking, how much ice cream, how many snacks. It forced me to really accept what I ate. After that I started making big changes to my eating habits.
Person C (defensive): Keep track of what I eat? Nah, I don't want to watch my diet that carefully. Can't I just enjoy my food?

Person C leaps to an extreme conclusion too: keeping track of what she eats means she has to watch her diet more carefully than she'd like. Worse, it will interfere with her enjoyment of food.

This claim is of course exactly backwards. It's actually more plausible that keeping track of what she eats would help her enjoy her food more. Further, what does "watch my diet that carefully" mean, exactly? There are lots of ways to track your diet, some of which are probably easier than she thinks.

Sadly, she didn't leave the door open for these considerations. This idea died the moment it collided with her mind.

Do you see the pattern here? Now, to our last example:

Person Y: How did you manage to retire at such a young age? Man, I'd love to quit my job and retire early.
Person Z: Have you heard of this book Your Money Or Your Life?
Person Y: Yes! I saw something about it on some guy's food blog that I read every so often. He wrote some series on it. It was kind of long and boring, so I didn't read it.
Person Z: Well, we basically followed the steps of the book, starting several years ago. We started by tracking our expenses to the penny for a full ye--
Person Y (defensive, interrupting): There's no WAY I'd track my expenses to the penny. What are you, anal?

Ouch, right? Person Y spontaneously murders the conversation with an extreme reach excuse, and he also gets in a bonus dig at Person Z. (Well played!) Person Y knows for sure that tracking your expenses is "anal" and therefore unworthy of consideration.

But wait. What if tracking your expenses is just another minor daily habit, like brushing your teeth? That's what we found here at CK: within days of adopting our expense-tracking habit, we were doing it in a fraction of the time we spent brushing our teeth.

Or is brushing your teeth anal too?

Either way, instead of considering a new idea that might be congruent with her goals, Person Y employs the extreme reach fallacy to rationalize taking no action. And he likely walks away from this conversation with an improved opinion of himself.

Watch for this excuse script in and around your daily life. Believe me: now that you're familiar with it, you'll see it and hear it all over the place. Don't complete the circle of rationalization.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Ramit at I Will Teach You To Be Rich for helping me think through some of the ideas in this post.

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

What Is An Antifragile Diet?

2013-04-09T03:11:00.000-07:00

So if you agree that we need "balanced" nutrition of a certain combination, it is wrong to immediately assume that we need such balance at every meal.
--From Nicholas Taleb's latest book Antifragile

The idea that every meal should consist of, say, a salad, a vegetable, a meat, a piece of fruit and a dessert is pretty much a complete fiction created in just the past few centuries of human existence.

Yes, you need a balanced diet. But you don't need every single one of your meals to be balanced. Moreover, your diet may actually be better balanced if you subject it to imbalances from time to time.

Roll this idea over in your mind and you'll arrive at some interesting implications. For one thing, it supports one of the fundamental pillars of the food philosophy here at Casual Kitchen: you don't need meat at every meal. Over a period of days and weeks, yes, of course, your body has specific protein needs you'll need to fulfill. But you do not need a fixed amount of protein every single day. In other words, consider that your body's protein and amino acid needs can be met flexibly, creatively and far less expensively without a daily helping of high-cost meats.

Further, we can find intriguing support for other central elements of low-cost eating. There's nothing wrong, for example, with building your diet almost entirely on low-cost, in-season fruits and vegetables. Don't worry if you eat mostly tree fruits, leafy greens and summer vegetables in the spring and summer--when, conveniently, these foods are least expensive. And don't worry if you completely switch away from these foods when they go out of season (and their prices skyrocket) in the fall and winter. After all, that's when you'll switch to those seasons' least expensive foods, like healthy cabbage, potatoes and root vegetables.

The idea that a "real" meal has to have a broad range of specific elements--that it must contain things like soup, bread and a salad of mixed greens with three and half grape tomatoes on it--is just an artificial expectation created for us by restaurants, the food industry and by our own presumptions of a proper life of modern convenience.

And of course, basing meals around these artificial expectations costs us an unexpectedly large amount of money, with little nutritional return. Long before the modern conception of a "balanced meal" ever came about, humans survived just fine. Your body will survive too.

We can go still further. There's nothing wrong with completely leaving out certain high-cost elements of our diet that we think we need. Consider your family's daily glass of refined, deoxygenated and overpriced Pure Premium orange juice. The idea that your day should start with citrus juice is nice, sure. But it's also an arbitrary idea created for you by modern society. Orange juice is just one example among many of foods and beverages modern eaters consume, most of which are heavily advertised, high-cost, and promoted to us to the point where we assume they are natural. You can safely eliminate these foods from your diet.

Thinking about food this way can be immensely freeing, not to mention immensely less expensive.

Here's the punchline: dietary variation is a positive stressor for your body and for your health. Try it. And remember: everything in moderation. Including moderation.

Related Posts:
Is Organic Food Healthier? Or Just Another Aspirational Product?
The "Don't Buy" List For A Low-Budget Kitchen
How to Blind-Taste and Blind-Test Brands
Thoughts On High-End Cookware

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter(follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

How Do I Add Eggs To My Diet?

2013-04-04T03:11:00.000-07:00

A quick addendum to the other day's post:

Are you looking to add eggs to your diet? Here are the specific posts at Casual Kitchen you can turn to for help:

Seven Ways to Jazz Up Your Morning Eggs
How to Make Pickled Eggs
How to Make a Simple Frittata
The 911 Frittata
Egg on Tata
An Easier Way to Crack An Egg: Blunt Force Trauma
How to Make a Perfectly Boiled Egg Every Time
How Do I Follow the Wheat Belly Diet?
How to Fight Back Against Overpriced Cereal

Enjoy!

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

What's the Link Between Dietary Cholesterol and Blood Cholesterol?

2013-04-02T03:11:00.000-07:00

Readers, I want to let you in on a little dietary experiment I've been running.

Over the past year or so, I've made one modest adjustment to my diet: I've been starting my days with a simple breakfast of... two eggs. Sometimes I'll include some fruit, occasionally I'll add a third egg, and once in a while I'll add bacon, sausage or some other easy-to-prepare meat. But most of the time, my breakfast is just eggs, a big splash of Tabasco and nada más.

Which means for more than a year, I've been eating about fourteen eggs a week.

More importantly, here's what I don't eat for breakfast: I skip the orange juice, I skip milk. I skip overpriced cereal, toast, and all the rest of the mostly unnecessary foods our society considers "normal" parts of a balanced breakfast.

Other than this change to my breakfast, I've otherwise maintained my reasonably healthy diet and lifestyle.

As a breakfast food, eggs fit my needs perfectly. Unlike carb-heavy cereal, eggs don't leave me ravenous ninety minutes later. They won't give me a brief burst of glucose spaz and then leave me dragging the rest of the morning. Because they're high in protein, eggs are a "slow burn" food with a high satiety factor, so it's sometimes four or five hours before I feel hungry again. Plus, it's easy (and laughably cheap) to fry up a couple of eggs: in 3-4 minutes you're fueled up and ready to go.

Well. A few weeks ago, I went in for a physical and bloodwork. Laura makes me go every so often, so I make sure I go grudgingly and make a big passive-aggressive production out of it.

This year, however, I was really interested to see my cholesterol levels. Would this egg-heavy diet impact my blood cholesterol? I've always had good numbers and good ratios, and my total cholesterol has been stable for years in the 160-170 range.

And the results were a huge surprise. My cholesterol fell even more: from an already-low 165 on my prior test... to a hard-to-believe 146. With good ratios.

After all those eggs--fourteen eggs a week for more than a year--my cholesterol numbers went from excellent to kickass.

Is this a controlled study? No. Is this a scientifically defensible experiment? Duh, of course not. And no, "kickass" is not (yet) a scientifically valid term. This is just a single anecdote, from one guy, with his own genetic and environmental markers. Your mileage is almost guaranteed to vary.

But there's one conclusion you can safely consider here: the link between dietary cholesterol and blood serum cholesterol is far more tenuous than you think. Food for thought, isn't it?

For Further Reading:
Understanding Cholesterol Numbers at WebMD

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

CK Friday Links--Friday March 29, 2013

2013-03-29T03:11:00.000-07:00

Readers! A quick update: I'll be traveling for the next few weeks, so our next Friday Links post will run sometime in late April. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

PS: Follow me on Twitter!
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A dispute between the co-owners of VegNews Magazine takes a bitter and ruthless turn. Vegans can be vicious too, apparently. (Appetite for Profit)

An immense and incredibly thorough roundup of links to everything you could possibly want to know about food blogging. (Recipe Girl)

Recipe Links:
Easy-to-make comfort food: Chicken a la King. (Coconut and Lime)

Don't eat these: Homemade Dishwasher Detergent Cubes. (Louise's Country Closet)

Off-Topic Links:
If you really love writing... should you do it for free? (Renegade Writer, via A Life of Spice)

Excellent advice for individual investors, from the author of Think, Act, and Invest Like Warren Buffett. (Index Universe)

Do you know your investing timeframe? It's crucial. (Washington Post, via Abnormal Returns)

How our "fear of missing out" ruins everything. (Seth Godin)

Do you have an interesting article or recipe? Want a little extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

The 4-Hour Chef: An Extended Review of a Terrible Book

2013-03-26T03:10:00.000-07:00

Tim Ferris is pretty good at a lot of things. He writes good copy and great titles--both of which are critical ingredients for any best-seller. He's got a knack for applying the 80/20 rule to a wide range of disciplines. And he's good at writing to his own demographic--let's call it 20-39 year old urban/suburban men.

However, what Tim Ferris is really good at is hype. And let's be honest: you have to be good at marketing and hype to get the 20-39 male demographic to read you. The problem, however, is that all this hype makes Ferriss's books appear more rigorous than they really are.

And as we'll soon see, what intelligent readers will mostly do while reading The 4-Hour Chef is question Tim Ferriss's credibility to write it.

Affectation
Speaking of 20- and 30-something men, here's yet another thing Tim Ferriss is good at: affectation. Like hype, affectation is utterly useless to readers, but it at least produces some unintentional humor. If for some foolish reason you buy The 4-Hour Chef, prepare yourself for countless name-dropping experience brags like these:

"The Maasai warrior I bought this from was eager to talk, which we did for more than an hour."

"Marc Andreesen [ed: this is the founder of Netscape, which invented the internet browser] introduced me to a series of [whiskeys] over dinner. At the time his kitchen featured a walk-in whiskey library stocked with a fit for every palate, each scored from 1-4 (4 being the best)."

"I was once invited to a rather fancy cocktail party in San Francisco, held at a billionaire's house."

[In a section on the USA's best hunting locales] "Catskill Mountains, New York. Squirrel season: Sept. 1--Feb. 28, though I particularly like January and February."

Now, these could be the casually tossed-off comments of a garden-variety narcissist, or they're the deliberate statements of a tone-deaf young man who doesn't yet know that "eager to impress" is an oxymoron. Maybe both.

But in a huge book that's scattered, disorganized, covers too much ground too superficially, contains perhaps 300 pages of fluff, and contains all the bragging above, it suggests to me that Tim Ferriss doesn't know when he is outside his circle of competence. Reread the "squirrel brag" quote above. Are we really to believe Tim Ferris has a favorite month for hunting squirrel?

Expertise You Don't Have
Sure, okay, it's just squirrel hunting. No big deal, right? We could laugh it off and not take it seriously. But I want to focus on this quote, because it illustrates an enormously important point about author credibility.

This squirrel brag is one of dozens of examples in The 4-Hour Chef of what I'd call pretend expertise. Ferris acts as if he knows, through personal experience, which months he likes best to hunt squirrel. But the problem is this: knowing the best months would involve actually hunting in all the other months, most likely over a period of years. You'd have to do this before you could believably make the claim that you "particularly like" a given month.

Yet judging by both context and the book's production timeline, it's infinitely more likely that Ferriss simply went out and hunted for squirrels... once. It happened to be in January or February and he "particularly" liked it. Readers, do you see the distinction? In this tossed-off brag, Ferriss lays claim to expertise he doesn't actually have.

And when an author pretends to have expertise he doesn't have, he annihilates his credibility. Just one or two instances of this in a book can destroy the reader-author bond of trust. The 4-Hour Chef contains dozens. Which leaves readers unable to rely safely on all the information in this book. It's not always clear exactly when Tim is out of his depth, but you can be certain that it's more often than it should be.

Combine this credibility problem with the laughably exaggerated claims both in and on the book (e.g.: dramatically improve your sex life, or worse: speak fluent Spanish in 8 weeks), and The 4-Hour Chef starts to feel a little like talking to the pathological liar kid from your high school. Sometimes he'd say something fully true, but not often enough for anyone to trust him.

How Do You Define "Fluent"?
Consider Tim's discussion of languages (Ferriss spends several pages on the topic as part of a broader discussion of rapid learning). Admittedly, Ferriss shares some excellent techniques for efficiently learning a foreign language. But anyone with success learning languages will know instantly that Tim uses a generous-to-the-point-of-meaningless definition of the word "fluent." Which means even this particularly useful portion of the book loses credibility too.

The thing is, The 4-Hour Chef didn't have to be so bad. It actually teaches some useful things. Like how to throw a low-stress dinner party. How to manage leftovers. How to add more herbs and greens to your cooking. How to employ aggressive use of 80/20 principles to make cooking less intimidating. How to buy cooking gear cost effectively. How to modify recipes. Except that you can already find all this advice, ahem, elsewhere. And rehashing information your readers can easily find online--for free, even--doesn't really help your credibility either.

And yes, there are competent recipes in The 4-Hour Chef too: Union Square Zucchini (page 158) and Coconut Cauliflower Curry Mash (p.154) are simple, inexpensive recipes that would resonate with Casual Kitchen readers. The Eggocado (p.183) is a creative--albeit also rehashed and unoriginal--idea for a quick and easy meal.

But the rest of the book? Terrible. Filled with how-to's on getting the perfect cup of coffee, the best whiskey, the best tequila, the best slow-carb white wines, and the best tea pairings to go with dinner. Essentially, a collection of lists for people who want the "best" of something, but who don't want to work too hard to get it, find it or learn about it.

Eating Crickets and a Failed Vermonster
Worse, the entire book becomes extremely thin after about page 350. There's no reason to include a ten-page spread (complete with silly pictures) on failing to eat an entire Ben and Jerry's Vermonster. That's the kind of crappy content for a backup blog post, not for a book. The sections on coffee and sous vide cooking are incoherent and need rewriting. Likewise, the section on eating crickets needs rewriting too: it's so try-hard witty that it's impossible to take seriously.

I could go on: Tim's instructions for "coffee for lazy people" require a digital scale, a temperature probe, a handheld grinder, an Aero Press coffee maker and eight discrete steps. There's a preposterously useless liquid nitrogen-based ice cream recipe that strokes the author's ego more than it informs the reader. There are dozens of full pages in this book containing nothing but a profoundish-sounding one-sentence quote from some famous person. The outdoors section of the book contains page after page of photos of snares, slingshots, firepaste, explosives, knives and Maasai warrior swords--and it reads like Tim's personal application to be The Most Interesting Man In The World.

Remove the brags and filler, get rid of the full-page Lincoln and Da Vinci quotes in gigantic print, and this 670-page book boils down to maybe 150 pages of useful material.

Reviewgate
Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't address the 4-Hour Chef "Reviewgate" controversy. Anyone who looks over the Amazon reviews of this book should be aware that more than 50 separate 5-star reviews spontaneously appeared on Amazon the very same day the book came out.

Remember, the 4-Hour Chef is 670 pages long. Should we believe all these 5-star reviews came from impartial readers who had actually read the entire book? I'd say that's about as believable as... well, as Tim Ferriss having a favorite month for hunting squirrel.

Final Thoughts
Readers, what makes a writer credible? What makes us trust a writer enough to rely on what he or she teaches?

Let's return briefly to a concept we touched on above: the "circle of competence." This concept comes from none other than Warren Buffett, who was well-known for protecting his investors by avoiding investing in industries he didn't understand. Buffett made it his personal policy to know--and remain within--the boundaries of what he knew well. Tim Ferriss will probably never read Casual Kitchen, but for what it's worth, I think he should read up on Warren Buffett's circle of competence concept. It's discussed repeatedly in Buffett's free and publicly available annual letters to his shareholders. It might help Tim better define the scale and scope of his next book.

But wait! Ferriss wrote at least three blog posts about Warren Buffett, and he even goes so far as to claim that he devoured Buffett's "incredibly readable annual letters."

And yet, if the concept of the circle of competence comes up repeatedly in Buffett's annual letters, how can Tim not know about it? Did he really "devour" Buffett's shareholder letters? Or did he just skim 20% of them and confuse that with knowing the material? Does this mean Tim defines "devour" the same way he defines "fluent" and "favorite month"?

80/20 Won't Make You Credible
This gets to the fundamental problem of exclusively using 80/20 strategies to learn. It seems really cool to think you can get away with just learning the most important 20% of Spanish, the most important 20% of cooking, of hunting, of tango, of whatever. It's alluring to think you can skip 80% of the dumb stuff in any subject and yet still be an expert.

But you miss things when you skip 80% of the material. Sometimes you miss really, really important things, and it then becomes painfully obvious to your readers that you've strayed far beyond your circle of competence.

Maybe an 80/20-type approach to learning is sufficient to fake it. Maybe it's enough, even, to become a competent amateur. But if you want to author a book and have real credibility with your readers, you have to learn the whole 100%, and learn it well.

Readers: This is the harshest (and longest) book review I've written in a while. What are your thoughts?

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

CK Friday Links--Friday March 22, 2013

2013-03-22T03:11:00.000-07:00

Links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

PS: Follow me on Twitter!
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Are we wasting billions on gluten-free food? Read critically. (Time)

Modern chicken has no flavor, so... let's make it in a lab! (Salon, via Addicted To Canning)

Off-Topic Links:
The New Yorker rejects itself... twice. Why this should encourage you as a writer. (The Review Review, via A Life of Spice)

An intriguing post from a blogger who conducted several striking self-experiments, and then recorded his results and observations. (Raptitude, via I Will Teach You To Be Rich)

A doctor rethinks the value of his time. (A Country Doctor Writes)

In these trying economic times, there's a growing movement of people saving thousands and thousands of dollars a year... just by thinking. (Early Retirement Extreme)

Do you have an interesting article or recipe? Want a little extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Easy White Bean Spread

2013-03-19T03:11:00.000-07:00

This White Bean Spread is so laughably easy I feel like a complete doofus for waiting so long to write about it. This recipe is as simple as it gets: it's perfect for a super-healthy snack, great as a delicious, filling appetizer, and it's so hilariously cheap you'll feel like you're cheating the system by making it.

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Basic White Bean Spread

Ingredients:
About 2 cups of cooked white beans (see below for directions, see also note #1 below)
2 Tablespoons lemon juice, to taste
2-4 garlic cloves, to taste
Fresh ground black pepper, cayenne pepper and salt, to taste
2 Tablespoons olive oil, to taste
1-3 Tablespoons reserved liquid from cooked beans

Directions:
1) Cook white beans according to directions below. Drain, reserving some of the cooking liquid.

2) Add two generous cups of the cooked white beans to a food processor. Pulse a few times, then add the lemon juice, garlic, pepper and salt. Blend thoroughly. Then, add the cooking liquid and olive oil in increments of 1 Tablespoon each, until you're happy with the thickness of the spread. Adjust seasonings to taste.

3) To serve, place spread in a small bowl, make a well in the center and pour a small amount of olive oil in the well. Shake a generous few shakes of cayenne pepper or paprika over everything to add a splash of color. Serve with crackers and/or raw veggies.

How to cook dried white beans:
Cover beans with 3-4 inches of water in a large soup pot. Let soak overnight. The next day, rinse the beans, then cover with 3-4 inches of new water. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 1-2 hours, until the beans are done to your liking. Drain, reserving some of the liquid to adjust the thickness of the bean spread.

Serves 4 easily as an appetizer.
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Recipe notes:
1) Dried or canned? Readers, it's really easy to cook your own dried beans. But if you're pressed for time, or (like me until recently) slightly intimidated by the idea of dealing with dried beans, you can feel free to substitute a 1-pound 13-ounce can of canned white beans. Drain the beans, reserving about a quarter-cup of the canning liquid (you'll use it to adjust the spread to your desired consistency), rinse the beans in a colander and you're good to go.

2) Modification ideas: A standard white bean spread is modest, mild and simple, but there's a gazillion ways you can modify it and jazz it up. Consider adding handful of leafy greens, like spinach or swiss chard. Or a handful of fresh parsley for color and an extra flavor nuance. Some versions of this recipe call for roasted garlic, which adds still more nuance.

Of course, the possibilities with spices are endless. A half-teaspoon of ground cumin. A few shakes of cinnamon or nutmeg. And obviously you can bring the heat: chipotle pepper for a smoky hot flavor, or a full teaspoon of cayenne pepper for a five-alarm white bean spread.

Readers, if you have your own spice or ingredient variations, please share them in the comments!

3) Help! I cooked a 1-pound bag of white beans and I'm drowning in beans! One pound of dried white beans (which is just over 2 cups of this magical fruit) leaves you with a lot of cooked beans. Your beans will expand to nearly 3x their volume as they cook, leaving you with 6 cups of cooked white beans in total.

So here's an idea: cook a full 1-pound bag of dried beans. Use 2 cups of cooked beans for your spread, and then use the remaining 4 cups for two separate recipes: a batch of Easy Minestrone Soup and a double batch of White Bean and Kielbasa Soup. Wham. You're sitting on a week's worth of food.

4) Laughable cheapness alert: In other words, this single pound of dried white beans not only produces a healthy and delicious bean spread, it also can go on to be the foundation ingredient for two different soups that collectively feed up to 15 people. All from a cute little bag of beans that cost perhaps $1.29.

5) Finally, this is what the bowl looked like 30 seconds after I set it on the table.

No, I'm not married to a pack of wolves... I'm married to a perfectly nice, petite woman who briefly lost control of herself when I set this down in front of her. See? I'm telling you, it's good.

Related Posts:
The Hummus Blogroll: 17 Easy To Make Hummus Recipes
Feta Walnut Dip
Garden Pasta
Moroccan-Style Carrots
The 25 Best Laughably Cheap Recipes at Casual Kitchen

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

CK Friday Links--Friday March 15, 2013

2013-03-15T03:11:00.000-07:00

Links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

PS: Follow me on Twitter!
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Let your school-age children loose in the kitchen and this is what you get. (Simple Bites, via Addicted to Canning)

Do you have a "friendly incompetent" on your restaurant or retail staff? (Food Woolf)

Why it's both immoral and inhumane to oppose GM crops. (Mark Lynas)

Recipe Links:
Delicious and easy: Ginger Scallion Noodles with Shrimp. (Kalofagas) Bonus: Kalofagas Lamb Ribs.

A snap to put together: Chickpea and Eggplant Masala. (80 Breakfasts)

Off-Topic Links:
"Most women are past the idea that they measure themselves by money. But women are instead using respect as our measuring tool, which is just as dangerous." (Penelope Trunk)

Unlike fish, we humans have the ability to change our own water. (The Angry Therapist)

Do you have an interesting article or recipe? Want a little extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Garlic Sundried Tomato Soup

2013-03-12T03:11:00.000-07:00

You can put this Casual Kitchen original recipe on the table in about 30 minutes, with fewer than 10 minutes of prep time. And it tastes even better as leftovers the next day.

The flavorful combination of butter, sun-dried tomatoes, garlic and onions in this striking soup is absolutely heavenly. And the chickpeas add a healthy protein source to complete this inexpensive, delicious and laughably easy meal.

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Garlic Sun-Dried Tomato Soup

Ingredients:
2-3 Tablespoons butter
1 large onion, coarsely chopped
3-4 cloves garlic, pressed or minced
Ground black pepper, to taste
About 1/2 cup of sun-dried tomatoes (in oil), chopped
1-2 teaspoons dried basil (to taste)
2 to 2.5 cups water (more or less according to desired thickness of soup)
1 chicken bouillon cube
1 28-ounce can diced tomatoes
About 3/4 of a 15-ounce can of chick peas, drained and rinsed

Directions:
1) Melt butter over medium heat in a stock pot or large saucepan. Add onions, saute on medium high for 2-3 minutes, until translucent.

2) Add black pepper and garlic, saute for another 2-3 minutes. Add sun-dried tomatoes and dried basil, saute for another 2-3 minutes.

3) Add water, bouillon and diced tomatoes, stir well. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes.

4) Optional: Ladle some (or all) of the soup into a blender or food processor (or use an immersion blender) to puree. Puree thoroughly or just pulse a few times, according to your preferences, then return the pureed soup back to the pot or saucepan.

5) Finally add the drained and rinsed chickpeas, briefly return the soup to a boil, then serve. Garnish with a few (optional) fresh parsley or basil leaves.

Serves 4 as a main dish, serves 6 as an appetizer. Can be easily doubled.
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Recipe Notes:
1) Admittedly, sun-dried tomatoes add some cost to this dish, but they're worth it. They have an intense flavor and they add a layer of nuance that takes this recipe beyond a simple (and potentially boring) tomato soup. Sun-dried tomatoes in oil will keep for practically forever in your fridge, so I encourage buying a larger container to help lower your per-unit costs. Yes, you'll pay a higher up-front cost, but your future per-recipe costs will be far lower. Plus, you'll have the option, at any time, of making Sun-Dried Tomato Risotto or hilariously easy Citrus Orzo Salad with Sundried Tomatoes.

2) Vegans! You can veganize this recipe easily. Replace the butter with olive oil and replace the chicken bouillon with vegetable bouillon.

3) Step 4, the pureeing step, is totally optional, and here at CK we're not sure ourselves whether we prefer this soup pureed or unpureed. It's good both ways. Honestly, I'm leaning toward the unpureed version--in part because the cleanup is easier. I'm curious to hear readers' opinions on this step as you attempt this recipe.

4) What kind of fool writes a soup recipe that calls for just 3/4 of a can of chickpeas? Well, me. I'd normally have you add the entire 15-ounce can of chickpeas to the soup, but a full can overwhelms the recipe a bit. Chickpeas are a secondary ingredient, not a central ingredient here. However, if you really, really love chickpeas and simply can't get enough of them, feel free to add them all in. I guess.

Finally, wondering what to do with the remaining 1/4 can? Snack on 'em while you're cooking. Chef's privilege.

5) Okay, let's break out the green eyeshades and calculate this recipe's cost:

Butter: 15c
Onion 20c
Garlic 10c
Sun-dried tomatoes $2.00 to $4.00 (tough to put a strict value here, YMMV)
Diced tomatoes $1.50
Chick peas 89c

Total cost: from $1.21 to $1.71 per serving. Enjoy!

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

CK Friday Links--Friday March 8, 2013

2013-03-08T03:11:00.000-08:00

Links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

PS: Follow me on Twitter!
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As much as I want it to be true, chocolate does not improve cognitive function. An excellent example of the "ecological fallacy." (EpiAnalysis)

Break out your critical thinking skills for this post, but also read it for more reasons to ditch overpriced cereal. (RealDose Nutrition, via La Vie au Zoo)

Recipe Links:
Got some unsalted butter and a firm attitude? Homemade Ghee. (The Messy Baker)

One of those dishes you can’t get enough of: Marinated Eggplant with Mint and Capers. (A Thought For Food)

Off-Topic Links:
Unsolicited book recommendation of the week: Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman. I spent the past week reading and taking careful notes from Seligman's well-known and well-regarded book, and I can't recommend it highly enough. It's about learning to change your internal "explanatory style" when thinking about setbacks in life. An excellent and extremely practical book.

When it comes to investing, never be guilty of "first-level thinking." (The Brooklyn Investor)

Mental illness is up six-fold since 1955. Why? (Mangan's Adventures in Reaction)

Do you have an interesting article or recipe? Want a little extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

The Current State of Individual Blogging

2013-03-05T03:11:00.001-08:00

This post is off-topic. And a little whiny.

Let's say you're like most people who take up blogging: you enjoy writing and you want to get better at it. You have insights and ideas to share, and if you're lucky, your insights and ideas are useful and interesting. Finally, and understandably, you want to build your blog's audience, increase your pageviews and, hey, maybe even make a little money while you're at it.

There's a problem however. You're competing for a finite resource: attention. And you're up against powerful competitors: sites like The Huffington Post, Gawker Media, and thousands of other professional media companies, with more staff, more resources, and the ability to pump out incredible amounts of content. And don't forget, you're also up against a monstrous army of SEO engineers constantly tweaking titles, lead paragraphs... anything to capture all the pageviews they can.

Of course, all of us are up against an even bigger force: Google's search algorithm, which changes, abitrarily, all the time.

What Swiss Chard Taught Me About Search
I'll share an example. Until recently, one of the most heavily trafficked posts here at CK was, weirdly enough, How to Cook Swiss Chard.

Somehow--and to this day I have no idea how--that post became Google's first result for the search query "how to cook swiss chard." I never optimized it, I never pumped it full of keywords, I never did anything. All that search traffic just... happened. And back in 2009 and 2010, this post by itself drove nearly a third of my search traffic.

Until a few months ago, when that traffic spontaneously vanished.

Later, I found out it was around the time Google rolled out Penguin, its new search algorithm. Now, I'm third on the list for "how to cook swiss chard."

Is this a big deal? Yes. A huge deal. By going from first to third, I now get less than a tenth of the traffic from this search string. Incredible, isn't it? The rule of thumb is about 35-40% of search traffic goes to the first result, and the rest of the traffic is divided up by everybody else in rapidly diminishing shares of the spoils.

And if you fall off the front page, forget about it. Page two results capture as little as 1/100th the traffic of the #1 result. Search is in many ways the ultimate winner-take-all market.

Worse, there's next to nothing I can do about it. Hiring an SEO firm to "fix" this would make zero economic sense. Casual Kitchen simply doesn't make enough revenue. Not to mention, there are probably hundreds (or even thousands) of SEO firms working for other websites... all trying to do the exact same thing. All the time.

Of course, anything anybody does could easily vanish the minute Google decides to roll out yet another iteration of their search algorithm.

And this is just one insignificant post on an insignificant blog in an insignificant corner of the internet. Imagine this happening to your carefully-tended blog across multiple posts and across all of your search traffic. Because at some point, it probably will happen. The bottom line? Nobody can really count on having a stable share of internet traffic.

HuffPo Thinks You Have No Attention Span
Next, imagine who you're competing against in the race for pageviews, revenues and reader attention. Take Gawker media as an example, with its enormous collection of websites, each with full-time staff using real-time search activity to generate purpose-built posts to capture traffic. We're talking about staff writers who pump out as many as twelve posts a day, who are paid based on pageviews. (For more on information mills and other internet publishing trends, I strongly recommend Ryan Holiday's eye-opening book Trust Me, I'm Lying.)

I haven't even mentioned the content farm industry, where you can pay a firm to generate customized, pre-written, SEO-enhanced articles for your site. It makes me feel dirty just thinking about it.

The idea of competing with these companies is hilarious to me. It would mean never writing a post longer than 300 words (HuffPost presumes its readers don't have the attention span to digest a 900 word post like the one you're reading right now). It would mean writing "worry porn" articles like Does Tabasco Cause Birth Defects? or posting multi-pageview slide shows of anti-informative things like The Ten Worst Foods In The Entire Universe. Anything--anything--to get you to click through.

All of this is exactly what I don't want to do here at Casual Kitchen. There are too many truly interesting things out there to teach, learn and write about. In the meantime, however, I still have to accept a fundamental truth: my traffic stats and my ability to reach new readers is increasingly out of my hands.

Concluding Thoughts
Oh man. It sounds like I'm just wringing my hands and complaining, doesn't it? But what really I'm trying to do is understand the lay of the land where Casual Kitchen lies. Which takes me to my final question: What's a blogger to do?

Heck, I don't know. But I have some ideas. For one thing, accept that this is the reality of individual blogging. And accept that as a writer, sometimes your fate, popularity and economic success are as arbitrary as your search rankings.

Which means what we've all known all along about blogging: you write for the love of it and for the love of interacting with your readers. No matter how many or how few there are.

Readers, what do you think? And why do you blog?

Related Posts:
In Defense of Big Farms
Doing More Harm Than Good
Zombies, Processed Foods and the Advertising-Consumption Cycle
A Fund For... Who, Exactly? Addressing the "A Fund For Jennie" Controversy

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

CK Friday Links--Friday March 1, 2013

2013-03-01T03:11:00.001-08:00

Links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

PS: Follow me on Twitter!
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We were smug about our diets... but after six years of being vegetarian, we slowly and progressively became more ill. (The Independent, via Addicted to Canning)

It turns out that most of our high sodium intake can be boiled down to just ten foods. (Sodium Girl)

Recipe Links:
You'll make this Egg Curry recipe again and again. (A Life of Spice) Bonus: Cumin Rice with Peas.

A One-Bowl Chocolate Cake recipe you can make in 30 minutes. (5 Second Rule)

Off-Topic Links:
"What would you do if you won the lottery?" "I'd be that man." (Social Extinction)

Why you should carefully--very carefully--rethink the value of your time. (Mr. Money Mustache)

Why would anyone choose a hard life? (Erin Pavlina)

Do you have an interesting article or recipe? Want a little extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

When It Comes To Banning Soda, Marion Nestle Fights Dirty

2013-02-26T03:11:00.001-08:00

I don't have a dog in the fight on the proposed New York City large-soda ban. But what I do care about, deeply, is using sound reasoning to think through important public policy issues. I believe it's offensive and unethical for pundits, leaders and public policy experts to employ fallacious logic and base appeals to emotion in their attempts to persuade us. I guess I'm just naive that way.

And this is why, in today's post here at CK, I'm going to break down and deconstruct Marion Nestle's latest defense of New York City's large-soda ban. First, I ask readers to read her post on its own, which ran both at the San Francisco Chronicle and on Nestle's own blog, Food Politics. (Friday Links readers have already seen this article.)

Next, read below, where you'll find her article combined with my parenthetical notes (in bold text) on each of Nestle's various fallacies and logic holes. I'll say up front: this article is one of the most dubious, illogical and unethically argued things I've seen in seven years of writing Casual Kitchen. My goal today is to give Marion Nestle's article a thorough Fisking, and expose, systematically, all of its questionable logic and tactics. What she's done here, as you will soon see, is misleading and wrong.

I have always respected Marion Nestle. I read her regularly. I look up to her for reasoned food industry analysis. But when I see a respected and admired food expert argue an important issue almost entirely based on appeals to emotion, innuendo, conspiracy theories, proof by vigorous assertion and conflicting logic, I simply cannot let it go uncriticized--even if I might actually agree with her position.

And when I see her strongly imply that important minority organizations acted against their own members' interests in this debate, I had to call Nestle out. Read on and you'll see what I mean.

Warning: Today's post is long--more than 2,000 words. But if you care whether our public policy issues are discussed fairly, reasonably and rationally, I encourage you to read the entire thing.

Once again, I don't have a dog in the fight over large sodas. I have a dog in the fight over honest debate.

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Soda-Cap Size Is a Public Health Issue by Marion Nestle

Here’s my monthly Food Matters column from the San Francisco Chronicle. The question (edited) came from a reader of this blog.

Q: You view New York City’s cap on any soda larger than 16 ounces as good for public health. I don’t care if sodas are bad for us. The question is “Whose choice is it?” And what role should the nanny state play in this issue?

A: Your question comes up at a time when the New York State Supreme Court is hearing arguments about whether New York City’s health department has the right to establish a limit on soda sizes.

As an advocate for public health, I think a soda cap makes sense. Sixteen ounces provides two full servings, about 50 grams of sugars, and 200 calories – 10 percent of daily calories for someone who consumes 2,000 calories a day (This reason--that there's lots of sugar and calories in soda--actually doesn't make sense unless you ban all large sizes of all high-sugar and high-calorie drinks. A sixteen ounce glass of orange juice provides almost exactly the same amount of sugar and even MORE calories than soda. Calorie and sugar content therefore can't be a rationale for a large soda ban unless we ban many other high-calorie drinks too).

That’s a generous amount. In the 1950s, Coca-Cola advertised this size as large enough to serve three people. (This is a convincing appeal to emotion, but logically it's irrelevant. This debate doesn't hinge on what Coca-Cola may have advertised in the past. Heck, in the 1890s, Coke advertised coca leaf extract in its cola).

You may not care whether sodas are bad for health (This is shaming language; it subverts and criticizes the questioner's character and motives. It's an example of the ad hominem fallacy and it is also an appeal to our base emotions), but plenty of other people do (this fallacy, which we're about to see in the next sentence, is called the False Authority fallacy). These include, among others, officials who must spend taxpayer dollars to care for the health of people with obesity-related chronic illnesses, employers dealing with a chronically ill workforce, the parents and teachers of overweight children, dentists who treat tooth decay, and a military desperate for recruits who can meet fitness standards (While these are all groups that we all care deeply about, none--with the possible exception of dentists treating tooth decay--is relevant to this argument. In order to have logical justification for a soda ban, you must at least show some evidence that soda is a key cause of the problems each of these groups face. But there are countless drivers behind obesity and chronic illness.

Further, why in the world are we including the military on this list of hypothetical groups who care whether sodas are bad for health? A soda ban in New York City plays no role in any issue facing our military. This is just a list of sympathy-inducing groups meant to appeal to our emotions at the expense of rational thought.)

Poor health is much more than an individual, personal problem. If you are ill, your illness has consequences for others (Agreed that my hypothetical illness may have economic consequences for others, however we lack evidence that banning large bottles of soda will have any impact on obesity or on obesity-related illness. This is a poorly substantiated leap of logic.)

That is where public health measures come in. The closest analogy is food fortification. You have to eat vitamins and iron with your bread and cereals whether you want to or not. (Let's set aside the basic tone-deafness of an expert saying you have to eat something "whether you want to or not" and consider that the idea of food fortification is an example of a health policy decision that may not be good for us at all. This isn't evidence to support a soda ban--if anything, it's evidence that public health elites are often wrong in the things they decide for us.) You have to wear seat belts in a car and a helmet on a motorcycle. You can’t drive much over the speed limit or under the influence. You can’t smoke in public places (Readers: are these fair analogies or fallacious ones? Hint: smoking in public directly harms the people around you. Driving over the speed limit directly increases risk to other drivers. Drinking large sodas harms others only if we can swallow the unsubstantiated leap of logic Nestle makes in the prior paragraph.)

Would you leave it up to individuals to do as they please in these instances regardless of the effects of their choices on themselves, other people and society? Haven’t these “nanny state” measures, as you call them, made life healthier and safer for everyone? (I don't want to get into a debate on civil liberties here, but in a free society we actually can do more or less what we want as long as we don't injure others. Thus I can eat food or drink soda whenever I wish, even if might be bad for me. This argument, as definitional as it might be, doesn't concern Nestle.)

All the soda cap is designed to do is to make the default food choice the healthier choice. (But what is stopping people from buying two, three or ten 16-ounce sodas?) This isn’t about denial of choice. If you want more than 16 ounces, no government official is stopping you from ordering as many of those sizes as you like. (This is an incoherent contradiction. Is this a ban or not? If it won't impact our choices, then why have it? This is where a citizen should begin to suspect that things are not as they seem: Don't worry about our ban, it won't impact anything, really. It won't.)

What troubles me about the freedom-to-choose, nanny-state argument is that it deflects attention from the real issue: the ferocious efforts of the soda industry to protect sales of its products at any monetary or social cost. (Here's where Nestle shifts the argument onto even more tenuous logical ground with a neat sleight of hand. She dismisses the issue of civil-liberties as irrelevant, when it quite obviously is an incredibly important issue to many. In its place we are presented with a rhetorical diversion and a new enemy: greedy corporations. Emotional words and phrases like "ferocious" and "at any monetary or social cost" help lubricate this transition. Most readers will never notice the logical fallacy.)

The lawsuit against the soda cap is a perfect example. It is funded by the American Beverage Association, the trade association for Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and other soft-drink companies, at what must be astronomical expense. (Any organization, person or corporation has full rights to use the court system in an appropriate way under the law. But if you use phrases like "at what must be astronomical expense" you've now framed it up as just another manifestation of corporate greed. Nestle is painting a picture here, not using logic. This is another example of appealing to emotion. PS: If you hate corporations too, you will always fall for this argument technique.)

To confuse the public about corporate profits as a motive, the beverage association enlisted two distinguished civil rights groups – the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation - to file an amicus brief on behalf of its lawsuit. (Here's where Marion Nestle starts making some really big, and really bad, mistakes. Here, she implies--unintentionally, I hope--that the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation were somehow duped into filing friend-of-the-court briefs in an effort "to confuse the public about corporate profits as a motive." Keep reading. Things are about to get very ugly.)

Never mind that the obesity rate for the communities these groups represent is considerably higher than average in New York City, and that these neighborhoods would benefit most from the soda cap. The amicus brief argues that the soda cap discriminates against them. (Hold on: A paragraph ago, Nestle claimed the amicus brief was intended to confuse the public about the beverage association's motive for profits. Now, she's implying that the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation are acting contrary to their own members' interests.)

The brief, however, neglects to mention that both amicus groups received large donations from soda companies and that the NAACP in particular has a long history of partnership with Coca-Cola (Nestle now puts herself on very risky rhetorical ground. She implies that the NAACP and Hispanic Federation wrote an amicus brief to the court in a quid pro quo... for money. I ask readers to reread the prior three paragraphs and decide for themselves whether it is truly ethical, appropriate and relevant to make these allegations. This article is supposed to be a defense of the large-soda ban, yet Nestle strays totally afield, resorting to the oldest rhetorical trick in the book: smear the opposition. This is a sophisticated use of the ad hominem fallacy.)

Financial arrangements between soda companies and ostensibly independent groups demand scrutiny. (This is still more innuendo: an analogy would be to demand to see and scrutinize all the donors--corporate and otherwise--who give money to NYU, where Marion Nestle teaches. That said, if Cadbury-Schweppes or PepsiCo donated money to NYU, would this invalidate all of Marion Nestle's views? Of course not.) National and local reporters – bless them – have done just that. (I'm sorry, but blessing them has nothing to do with anything.)

They report, among other connections, that one of the law firms working for Coca-Cola wrote the amicus brief, and that a former president of the Hispanic Federation just took a job with that company. (That's all? That's all the support Nestle has behind the implication that NAACP and the Hispanic Federation sold out their members by offering an amicus curae brief for a court case?)

Last fall, the East Bay Express exposed how the soda industry exploited race issues to divide the electorate and defeat the Measure N soda tax initiative in Richmond. It revealed that the beverage association not only paid for the successful “grassroots” campaign against Measure N but also encouraged views of the soda tax as racist (And yet it isn't exploiting race issues to imply that the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation were either duped or acted contrary to their members' interests--as Nestle does across the previous six paragraphs. The illogic here is simply astonishing).

Driven by this experience, the soda industry is repeating this tactic in New York City.

Is a cap on soda sizes discriminatory against groups working for civil rights? Not a chance. (Nestle offers no evidence to support this statement. This is the proof by vigorous assertion fallacy).

Public health measures are about alleviating health disparities and giving everyone equal access to healthy diets and lifestyles. (Yet this is a completely different issue. It has nothing whatsoever to do with banning large soda sizes. These are feel-good phrases and emotional appeals; there's no logic here.) This makes public health – and initiatives like the soda cap – broadly inclusive and democratic (Even if you don't have a problem with policy experts deciding what size soda we're allowed to drink, you have to admit that calling it "broadly inclusive and democratic" is egregious doublespeak).

If anything is undemocratic and elitist, it is suing New York City over the soda cap. (On the contrary, eliminating peoples' choices--even if you believe it's for their own good--is undemocratic and elitist. A related thought: when a public policy expert says "I'm not elitist, my opponents are!" immediately after using ad hominem arguments to attack that opposition, consider Shakespeare's quote you doth protest too much.)

In funding this lawsuit, the soda industry has made it clear that it will go to any length to protect its profits (now Nestle launches into pure conspiracy theory in an overt appeal to emotion), even if it means discrediting the groups that would most benefit from this rather benign public health initiative. (No. In reality, it was Marion Nestle who did all the discrediting here by implying that both the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation acted contrary to their members' interests.)

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Final Thoughts
I was afraid to publish today's post. I'm worried readers might interpret it as nothing more than a really long hatchet job. Or that they might think I have nothing better to do than to criticize and take potshots at a perfectly harmless public health professor at NYU. Or that I'm in over my head on issues I have no credibility discussing.

But the reason I hit the publish button on this post boils down to one thing: I believe--strongly and perhaps naively--that debates on important public policy issues should be honest, earnest and fact-based.

If you have to rely on fallacy, appeals to emotion and smearing the opposition to "win" a public health policy debate, can your position really be defensible?

Readers, please share your thoughts.

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter(follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.