Working at McDonalds and Not Quite Getting Paid Enough Cash?

The Pastis Fairytale Islands

Sidonie Sawyer — Fri, 19 Sep 2014 13:00:16 +0000

Have you heard of the insanely weird French drink Le Pastis? A fierce 40-45 percent ABV -- or alcohol by volume -- mélange of anis, liquorice and various herbs (it's a well-guarded secret, my lips are sealed). This favorite at bars primarily in the south of France took over after the total ban in 1915 of the absinthe concoctions in any form. As opposed to absinthe, which was declared a forbidden and dangerously addictive psychoactive drug because of the wormwood content in it, pastis is drug-free, but will still get you up there quickly.

Paul Ricard from the city of Marseille was the first one to commercially produce the pastis liquor in 1932, even though at the time in Provence pretty much everyone had their own homemade pastis family recipe. In 2015, his grandson Alexandre Ricard will take over and continue the family tradition.

Located across the water from Bandol, a seaside resort favored by Aldous Huxley, Paul Ricard first bought the Isle of Bendor in 1950, an uninhabited and barren 17-acre rock. The island can only be reached by a few minutes-long boat ride, or you could always try to swim. Now sporting pretty Provençal houses surrounded by palm trees and local bougainvilleas, Bendor has sculptures dispersed on the land, an art gallery and a Village des Créateurs (Designers' Village.)

The second pebble he acquired in 1958 is the Isle of the Embiez, a 235-acre resort-like location by the sea. This is also only accessible by boat from Le Busc, a small fishing village on the coast. On both islands, there are no cars -- only rocky trails and secret coves of deep blue waters named calanques and a few vineyards among pine forests. Embiez has an old ruins tower and a few famed red, white and rosé wines distributed all over Provence. In June, a small harbor excavated on the former salt marshes was named the Best Mediterranean Port in France by Voile Magazine, a sailing publication.

On this island, in the former Saint-Pierre Fort used by Napoleon Bonaparte, the Oceanographic Institute Paul Ricard houses a team of researchers year-round. An early environmentalist and ecologist, Ricard understood the challenges faced by the Mediterranean Sea and its wildlife, anxious to help preserve and understand the typical animals, fauna and flora.

The calanques of South Provence are a marvel to visit by boat, by foot or even while para-sailing or cliff-jumping. Referred to as the fjords of the French Riviera, the rocky cliff paths can sometimes be tricky to maneuver if you try by car. One summer, we rented a car -- one of those family van-for-seven-plus-luggage -- and decided to go to lunch at a one of Marseille calanque's restaurant aptly named LUNCH.

The magnificent cove only has a tiny restaurant built on wood planks over the shallow waters of the sandy beach, a fishing supply shack for boaters in need and a locked first-aid shed for dire emergency -- don't know who had the key to that, perhaps the waitress? Up at the entrance of the serpentine road, two men seated on folding canvas chairs were checking to see if you had a reservation for lunch at LUNCH, as no one else was allowed to descend the insane way. We did.

Eyeing our monstrous vehicle, they warned us that we might want to leave it at the parking lot and walk down to the cove. We asked why, and they said that some cars do not make it back up easily. Come on, we had a brand new rental -- certainly it would make it back, right? The long winding walk down would take about one hour, and we would have missed our reservation time. We did not dare to ask how long the trek back up could possibly take.

The fish was divine, the mussels out of this world, the wine, the crisps, the warm bread, the berries, the onion soup, the kittens jumping in our plates -- I will spare you the amount of the addition (bill) for the four of us. Our heavy stomachs did not help, and our van never wanted to go up the steep and turning road. We passed the mailman van, who was laughing his head off. After burning some tire material and a few back and forth scary tries, the stick shift car finally sprung forward, with everybody (but me) drunk, finding the situation quite hilarious. I will never drive down to a calanque in my life again. Period.

The two locals on top saluted us as we drove by smiling. If they only knew what we had just gone through!

Both private Paul Ricard Islands are open to visitors and tourists. Each island has a couple of small hotels and a couple of restaurants -- and they won't make you drink the drink. On Bendor, the serene all-white Hotel Delos will make you want to stay forever.

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The Mediterranean Diet: A Healthy Addiction

Michael Psilakis — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 14:59:50 +0000

As with all addictions, there is always an unspoken, secret pain hidden behind an untold truth. We seek comfort from this pain through the abuse of a substance. The vehicle often begins as a playful experiment, becomes a crutch over time and ultimately takes over our daily life with compulsions that distort reality and inevitably bring greater pain than the one it intended to avoid. This is the curse of an addiction. It lures you with the lies of an irresistible temptation that carries the promise of immediate relief as it steals your strength to break free of the binding web it spins.

Imagine the surprise when you finally realize that the addiction came in the form of a substance that provides the necessary nourishment that we all must partake daily to survive. It was, and still is, the thing that defines me as a person, man and a chef: FOOD!!! Over the years, I slowly began to use food as a method to cope and surrender, mourn and rejoice, avoid and confront. I unknowingly hid behind the unlikely demon. How could something that had brought me so much joy, fame and success become the enemy I would battle for 20 years?

Most people who don't suffer from this dependence and its weight gaining, health jeopardizing side affects can't even begin to recognize its potential as an addition. After all, it is something we all need and use. But imagine, for a moment, the physical pain someone feels when they carry an extra 40 pounds of weight around all day. Your back, feet, bones all hurt. Imagine if you tied a belt of weights around your waist and tried to accomplish your daily tasks. Tying your shoes, bending to pick up the pen you dropped, walking up and down a flight a stairs too and from your bedroom in your home. Imagine that you became so accustomed to that daily pain that it became something you treated as "normal." Imagine the mental pain of seeing yourself in the mirror, avoiding clothes that hang in the closet from a happier, "thinner" time all the while torturing yourself by not removing them in hopes of one day returning to that level. Imagine declining an invitation to a summer outing because of the fear and impending anxiety of having to dress for the occasion. Imagine how many times you would try to break the addiction. How many diets you would begin, only to fail and fall deeper into an addiction that would ultimately lead to depression and drive you right back into the arms of your addictive crutch. The vicious, endless cycle taking over your life without much hope for change.

The word diet to such addicts equates to one thing: weight loss. That in turn, equates to starving their addiction. This is why most diets fail the addict. It asks them to walk without a crutch to lean on before teaching them how to remove it without falling. The Mediterranean diet, on the other hand, refers to a healthier way of eating that allows you to feed the addiction in a way that conditions your body to accept the beauty of food. It allows us to use food in many of the same psychologically dependent ways that we have grown accustomed to while creating an alternative, equally satisfying food mechanism for coping. It does not remove the addiction but rather feeds it with items that you will find pleasure in eating.

This is the beauty of the Mediterranean diet. It allows us to create wonderfully flavorful, highly rewarding dishes that are medically proven to be the healthiest in the world. It destroys the notion that diet food cannot comfort the body. It embodies, to the contrary, the opposite. Food can be healthy and TASTE GOOD TOO! They are not mutually exclusive.

Imagine the much written about "farm to table" approach to cooking that combines both recognizable and accessible ingredients to yield healthy, delicious food. Simple, time efficient recipes can translate into food that nourishes both our bodies and soul.

I have spent a lifetime viewing food as an intimate gift between the cook and those he is nourishing. I challenge you to begin to use it as a vehicle to create memories with the people you love. Use it, as I have, to bring family and friends together to celebrate the sharing of time, our most valuable commodity. When I lost my father, seven years ago, I realized that food is not art. It is rather a means to share the joy of human company, conversation and life. In the chaotic world that we live in, we need to find the time to create the everlasting memories of a simple shared meal.

The Mediterranean diet provides the foundation of these wonderful moments, but also organically creates a modern day life style "diet." We can have it all and eat it too!!!

This post is part of a series produced by The Huffington Post and the Harvard School of Public Health, in conjunction with the "Mediterranean Diet and Workplace Health" conference (September 27-28 in Boston at HSPH). This event will feature lectures, panels, select chef-supervised meals and a Greek food and wine exhibition to increase awareness, appeal, and understanding of Mediterranean dietary habits as a vehicle for improved workplace and school health. For more information about Mediterranean Diet and Workplace Health, visit here.

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Fork Makes Broccoli Taste Like Bubblegum

Kate Bratskeir — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 11:00:15 +0000

Gone are the days of dreaming about candy-flavored broccoli from our high chairs. The dream is now reality.

The Aromafork, a near-magical product that is part of the Aroma R-evolution kit (HuffPost first reported on the product's patent in April), has the potential to transform bland flavors into thrilling ones.

The contents of the Aroma R-evolution flavoring kit

The fork plays with perception, Sophie Boivin, the public relations representative for Molecule-R Flavors, told The Huffington Post. It tricks the mind into thinking that it's eating what you're smelling. Since our nose is actually more adept at taste than our tongue is (our tastebuds can detect five flavors, while our nose can distinguish trillions), the gadget emits scents to influence taste as you eat.

To work the utensil, you drip a droplet of one of the liquid aromas -- which is very concentrated -- onto a paper in the handle, and then inhale while biting into whatever is at the end of the fork.

Boivin says chocolate mousse eaten with the wasabi aroma, for example, is a combination that really mystifies the senses.

"You have the feel and texture and meltiness of chocolate mousse, but the taste of wasabi," she says. And, while you're tasting, your sight is also a bit befuddled: the brown chocolate tastes like what you visually assume is green heat. The whole experience is delightfully confusing.

The Aromafork might give anyone allergic to peanuts (up to one percent of the population) the chance to enjoy the ever-beloved peanut butter and jelly sandwich, so long as they're willing to eat it with a fork. Each aroma is free of all known allergens, including peanuts, nuts, milk, fish and eggs. So, those who have restrictions may finally be able to taste the foods they miss. Even those who've cut meat from their diets might add the "smoke" aroma to their fork, which Boivin (a vegetarian herself) says makes things taste a lot like bacon.

In total, the kit is equipped with 21 aromas in 6 different flavor categories:

Beyond novelty combinations and tastes for allergy sufferers, the flavor fork can also replicate traditional food pairings. Team plain, try mashed potatoes with the butter aroma and you've got buttered mash potatoes.

This may be revolutionary for anyone in search of a healthier waistline: Just a tablespoon of real butter contains 100 calories, but the smell will cost you nothing. Boivin says the kit was originally developed for education and entertainment, but there has been talk of adapting it for diets and weight loss in the future.

If you're intrigued and would like to do a little sensory manipulation of your own, you can purchase the Aroma R-evolution kit online.

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You Can Now Drink Girl Scout Cookies

Kate Bratskeir — Wed, 17 Sep 2014 20:45:35 +0000

If you've ravaged through the last of your Girl Scouts cookie supply and are experiencing withdrawal, Nestlé's Nesquik is here for you.

The chocolate milk brand teamed up with Girl Scouts to reinvent two classic cookie flavors as drinks. Thin Mint and Caramel Coconut (better known as Samoas) milk are available for a limited time in stores. We were able to acquire the latter from a local CVS.

Of course, the drink does not physically resemble a cookie.

And, we are sad to report, it does not taste of cookie nor chocolate milk. Our taste-testing editors provided a range of "eh, just fine" reviews. "Drinking this was a lackluster experience, similar to drinking the milk you've been dipping a coconut caramel cookie in, but not nearly as magical," said one. "At first it smells like fake maple, then it tastes like coffee. Its flavor is underwhelming for a cookie, and overwhelming for flavored milk. Regardless of what I just said, it's relatively pleasant," said another.

But, as one tester pointed out, "This would make a great White Russian-type drink." This is the truth. Nesquik's Girl Scouts cookie drink would make a fine, milky cocktail. (But that feels a little sacrilegious.)

What's really sacrilegious is the sugar content in a bottle of this bad boy. A single serving (half the bottle) contains 24 grams. Here's the nutritional breakdown for the whole container (two servings):

It's not really fair to measure two measly cookies against a 14-ounce sweetened beverage, but we will. Two Samoas contain 140 calories, 8 grams of fat, 10 grams of sugar and 1 little gram of protein. But, again, comparing cookies to sugary beverages is like comparing apples to oranges.

Nesquik's well-known rabbit is promoting this flavor infusion as a "double awesome accident," as you can watch in this deeply unprovocative YouTube clip below:

If you're really in need of Girl Scouts cookie-flavored something, you can use Nesquik's store locator to hunt them down, or you can make your own, homemade versions instead:

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New Marijuana Ad Campaign Asks Users To Learn From Maureen Dowd And 'Consume Responsibly'

Matt Ferner — Wed, 17 Sep 2014 16:57:37 +0000

The advocacy group that helped to legalize the recreational use of marijuana in Colorado is reminding people to please "consume responsibly."

Wednesday marks the launch of a new public education campaign from the Marijuana Policy Project, a group that vocally backed Amendment 64, the 2012 ballot measure that legalized marijuana for recreational use in Colorado. The group's new campaign features a billboard in Denver that offers a word of advice to tourists interested in taking advantage of the state's progressive marijuana laws: "Don't let a candy bar ruin your vacation."

The billboard depicts a red-haired woman sitting in a dark hotel room, looking distressed -- a clear reference to Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist who wrote in June about eating too much of a marijuana-infused candy bar in her Denver hotel and entering what she described as an unpleasant eight-hour "hallucinatory state."

Here's a look at the billboard, to be unveiled on Denver's Federal Boulevard Wednesday morning:

The billboard encourages a tempered approach to marijuana-enhanced food.

"With edibles, start low and go slow," the billboard reads -- meaning that if you're going to eat marijuana in any form, start with a low dose and be patient. While the effects of smoking marijuana can usually be felt immediately, cannabis-infused food can take anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours to kick in, depending on the dose and the person.

Inexperienced users sometimes start with a higher dose than they need to, or gobble extra doses because their first one "isn't working" -- thus accidentally turning what could have been a manageable trip into one marked by panic and anxiety.

In at least 10,000 years of human consumption, there have been no documented deaths as a result of marijuana overdose. Indeed, a person would need to ingest thousands of times the amount of THC in a single joint to be at risk of death, according to a frequently cited Drug Enforcement Administration ruling from 1988.

But some edible products can still contain enough THC to create a traumatic experience, especially for new users. Edibles come in all forms, from cookies to candy bars to drinks, and each one has a different THC concentration and recommended dosage.

Weed-infused candy bars and brownies are often made with much higher levels of THC than those found in an average joint. Of course, these snacks are supposed to be split up into multiple doses. The candy bar that Dowd bought was meant to be divided into 16 pieces, a fact that did not appear on the label. (It's not clear how much of the candy bar Dowd actually ate.)

"For decades, efforts to educate people about marijuana have been characterized by exaggeration, fearmongering, and condescension," said Mason Tvert, director of communications for MPP, in a statement. "They have not made anyone smarter or safer. Like most Americans, Ms. Dowd has probably seen countless silly anti-marijuana ads on TV, but she has never seen one that highlights the need to 'start low and go slow' if they choose to consume marijuana edibles."

Users who over-indulge on pot-infused food tend to complain of highs that last much longer than desired. In those cases, there's usually not much that can be done: Doctors typically just have the patient stick around for a few hours until the effects wear off.

New labeling of marijuana products is on the way in Colorado, and potency limits in marijuana edibles may follow. Until then, curious parties can visit the campaign's website, ConsumeResponsibly.org, and find advice about preventing and responding to over-consumption and accidental consumption, as well as other detailed information about cannabis products, their effects, and the laws that govern their possession, sale and use.

The "Consume Responsibly" campaign, developed with the support of the marijuana vending machine company Medbox, will include print and online ads as well as additional materials found in retail marijuana stores.

The campaign will start in Colorado and later expand to Washington, the only other state where recreational marijuana is legal. The Marijuana Policy Project says it may bring the campaign to other states if and when similar laws are passed there.

UPDATE, 6:20 p.m. -- The Daily Beast reports that Dowd doesn't seem upset about her bad trip being immortalized in a cautionary billboard.

"I love the billboard," the Times columnist wrote in an email to The Daily Beast on Wednesday. "I'm going to make it my Christmas card."

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Every Once In A While, Someone Invents Something Truly Amazing

Maxwell Strachan — Wed, 17 Sep 2014 16:01:52 +0000

Can everyone stop talking about the iPhone 6 and start talking about this?

Post by Hanher Hu.

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Huge, Terrible Menus Are Hurting McDonald's And Olive Garden

Jillian Berman — Wed, 17 Sep 2014 13:03:13 +0000

The days of a restaurant menu that reads more like a chapter book may soon be coming to an end.

As foodie-ism invades American culture, diners are looking for restaurants that excel at one thing instead of offering dozens of mediocre dishes. Fast-casual chains like Chipotle and Shake Shack, which make a small number of items well, are flourishing. Restaurants that have ballooned their menus in recent years, like McDonald’s and Olive Garden, are suffering.

“The thought was if I load up my menu, I’ll drive more people to the doors,” John Chidsey, the former CEO of Burger King, said of restaurants weighing down their menus. “It just got so complicated in the kitchen, and the accuracy and the quality of what got made suffered,” added Chidsey, now executive chairman of Red Book Connect, a technology company that helps restaurants become more efficient.

Restaurants are paring back their menus in response:

The number of items on menus has dropped since reaching a high in 2007, according to Datassential:

The success of these slimmed-down menus encourages new restaurants to limit their offerings to a few things that can be easily customized. In Washington, D.C., for example, there are several independent eateries that can be dubbed "The Chipotle of" Indian, Greek, Korean food and more, The Washington Post reported this week.

Michael Lastoria, the co-owner of &pizza, a restaurant where diners build their own pizzas, scoffed to WaPo that traditional menus "scream fast food."

The difference in average menu size at new restaurants and established restaurants, according to Datassential:

McDonald’s executives admitted in January that the burger chain’s menu had grown too complex, making it hard to serve food as quickly as people expect. From 2006 to 2013, the chain’s menu mushroomed from 86 to 107 items, according to research firm Datassential.

“We overcomplicated the restaurants,” said Tim Fenton, McDonald’s chief operating officer, on a conference call with analysts in January. “If you remember, we introduced McWraps, we introduced Egg White Delight, we introduced Quarter Pounder Toppers and really didn’t give the restaurants an opportunity to breathe.”

Along with complaints about breadstick temperature and unsalted pasta water, investment firm Starboard Value criticized Olive Garden’s menu strategy in a scathing 294-page presentation last week. Starboard argued that slimming down the menus at chains owned by Darden Restaurants, Olive Garden's parent company, could save $10 million to $15 million a year. Starboard also said the complex menu increased the risk of errors and required too much training for cooks and servers.

Starboard slide on Olive Garden's menu strategy with a customer complaint circled in red:

Darden Restaurants, the parent company of Olive Garden, defended its new menu in a report released Monday, arguing that it offered diners variety, value and convenience.

McDonald's and Olive Garden are examples of how the industry responded to stagnating traffic by trying to offer everything to everyone, said Maeve Webster, a senior director at Datassential.

But complex menus can also scare people away.

“If you’re offering everything, you’re not doing anything specifically well,” said Darren Tristano, executive vice president at Technomic, a food research firm. Tristano compared McDonald’s more than 100 menu items to California-based In-N-Out Burger, where the menu hovers around just 10 items, including drinks.

“You know when you go there you’re getting burger, fries and a drink,” Tristano said. “What a customer wants is to know your story. Why are you in business? What are you known for?”

To be sure, there's one restaurant that’s known for successfully executing a wide variety foods, ranging from Thai lettuce wraps to a macaroni cheeseburger: The Cheesecake Factory. That chain offers extensive training unmatched by competitors, so that anybody who comes to work at the restaurant will be able to make anything on the menu, according to Webster.

“It’s taken a lot of effort in order to be able to pull that off,” Webster said.

But most chains should probably look for other ways to increase variety without adding a million things to the menu, like offering something for a limited time, according to Tristano.

Wendy's Pretzel Bacon Cheeseburger was a limited-time offer that was so successful it become permanent.

Counterintuitively, stripping down a menu can give people more choices. Five Guys has only burgers, fries, hot dogs and a few sandwiches on its menu, but diners can customize their order with toppings, like grilled mushrooms and A.1. Sauce. At Chipotle, there are 60,000 ways someone could place an order, even though the chain only sells tacos, burritos, burrito bowls and salads, the company claims.

In fact, customization has become so trendy that McDonald’s may be expanding a test concept for a build-your-own burger joint in an aim to compete with the Chipotles and Five Guys of the world.

“Customization is replacing the need to have so many options on the menu,” Tristano said.

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The Pros and Cons of the Paleo Diet

John Berardi, Ph.D. — Wed, 17 Sep 2014 12:29:33 +0000

You've probably heard about the Paleo diet; maybe you've even tried it. The "primal eating" trend is everywhere.

Paleo, of course, encourages us to eat like our ancient ancestors did.

The concept is this: Humans evolved on a diet very different from today's eating habits.

Therefore, the Paleo proponents argue, to be healthier, leaner, stronger and fitter, we must re-think our diet and remove some of the food groups we consider basic.

Promising everything from fat loss to more energy and clearer skin, Paleo certainly has appeal.

But what is Paleo really? Is it a diet worth trying?

Why "Paleo": The basic concept of eating primal

To understand Paleo thinking, we've got to go back in time. (My DeLorean is parked right outside.)

Let's have a quick look at what our ancestors ate:

60 million years ago: Our oldest cousins, the earliest primates, ate a lot like, well, primates. They subsisted mainly on fruit, leaves, and insects.

2.6 million years ago: Evolution at work! Humans started using tools and fire, and moved to a hunter-gatherer diet.

10,000 years ago: At this point, "agriculture" had taken the world by storm.

Paleolithic humans definitely got some eating habits right. In general, they consumed:

three times more produce than the typical American,

more fiber,

more protein,

more omega-3 fatty acids,

more unsaturated fat,

more vitamins and minerals,

and much less saturated fat and sodium.

That said, Paleo fans tend to overlook the fact that hunter-gatherers were not models of pristine health. Paleolithic humans suffered from parasites, infectious diseases, and even atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries).

The dangers of our modern diet

Fast forward to today. Our diet has changed significantly, and not necessarily for the better. For one thing, it contains far more processed, packaged and commercially-produced foods than ever.

Case in point: The top six calorie sources in the U.S. diet today are:

grain-based desserts (cake, cookies, etc.),

yeast breads,

chicken-based dishes (and you know that doesn't mean roast chicken),

sweetened beverages,

pizza,

and alcoholic drinks.

Yikes. Not only are these foods not ancestral, some of them could barely be called food.

Meanwhile, obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases have dramatically increased over the past 50 years.

The Paleo claim that our modern Western diet isn't healthy rings true. So what should we do to make it better?

According to Paleo: What to eat and what to avoid

Paleo fans suggest we return to the meat and produce-based diet of our past. Specifically, the Paleo dietary model encourages us to base our diets on the following foods:

animals (especially a "whole animal" approach, including organs, bone marrow, cartilage, and organs),

animal products (such as eggs or honey),

vegetables and fruits,

raw nuts and seeds,

and added fats (like coconut oil, avocado, butter, ghee).

Notice what's missing from the list? Paleo tells us to avoid grains (even "whole grains"), heavily processed oils (such as canola and soybean oil), and processed foods in general.

Legumes and dairy are typically off limits too, though some guidelines allow these foods as the Paleo diet continues to "evolve."

Should you stop eating grains and legumes?

We already know the above list of processed foods and treats aren't good for us -- but what about whole grains and legumes?

Let's tackle legumes first. Paleo people say we shouldn't eat legumes because of their high concentration of anti-nutrients like lectins or phytates. Supposedly that reduces their nutritional value to zilch.

Fortunately for bean fans, that's not true.

Research suggests that the benefits of legumes outweigh their anti-nutrient content. Cooking eliminates most anti-nutrient effects, and some anti-nutrients (like lectins) may even be good for us.

As for grains, Paleo proponents say grains can lead to inflammation and related health problems. This can be true for people with celiac disease (about 1 percent of the population) and for those with non-celiac gluten sensitivity.

But a substantial body of reliable research suggests that eating whole grains improves our health. At the very least, whole grains appear to be neutral when it comes to inflammation.

Bottom line on grains and legumes: Completely eliminating these important foods from our diet is probably a bad idea.

The problem with Paleo

Paleo-style eating has a lot of good qualities: It emphasizes whole foods, lean proteins, vegetables, fruits, and healthy fats. Incorporating more of these foods into your diet would likely be a big improvement.

However, the Paleo diet has some flaws. The evolutionary arguments don't hold up, and the evidence for excluding dairy, legumes, and grains isn't strong (yet).

But my biggest concern is this: A one-size-fits-all "best diet" approach doesn't work.

Strictly following a list of "good" and "bad" or "allowed" and "not allowed" foods is problematic for most people.

Even more, long-term, it's tough to be consistent on a strict diet regime like Paleo. Sure, most people can follow it for weeks or months. Maybe even years. But decades? That's unlikely.

Of course, without being consistent, you can't make progress.

What you can do today

Instead of signing up for a strict lifestyle template, think about small changes you can make in your "modern" life that support what your "ancient" body needs.

For example, look for simple ways incorporate a bit of what's good about the ancestral lifestyle into your day. Could you:

Eat a little more fresh food, like adding some fresh fruit or vegetables to dinner tonight?

Consider replacing a bit of the processed food you might normally be eating? (Not all of it, just some.)

Get outside for some movement and fresh air?

Go to bed a little earlier to get a good night's sleep?

These small actions -- done consistently -- can do much more for your health and happiness long-term. And consistency is more important than any food list or evolutionary theory.

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Want some help finding the best diet for you? Download this free guide: Paleo, vegan, intermittent fasting...Here's how to choose the best diet for you.

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About the author

John Berardi, Ph.D. is a founder of Precision Nutrition, the world's largest online nutrition coaching company. He also sits on the health and performance advisory boards of Nike, Titleist and Equinox.

Dr. Berardi was recently selected as one of the 20 smartest coaches in the world by livestrong.com, the internet's most popular fitness site.

In the last five years, Dr. Berardi and his team have personally helped over 30,000 people improve their eating, lose weight, and boost their health through their renowned Precision Nutrition Coaching program.

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What To Do With Overripe Bananas (Besides Making Banana Bread) (VIDEO)

Lisa Capretto — Wed, 17 Sep 2014 11:13:20 +0000

There are endless recipes and cooking ideas for making the most of your fresh fruit, but what do you do when your ripe produce, like bananas, become discolored and mushy after sitting a little too long on the kitchen counter? If you're like most, you throw away the overripe offenders, but sustainable foods advocate says you shouldn't be so quick to turn toward the trash can.

Jenny McGruther, food educator and author of The Nourished Kitchen, is all about cooking with simple ingredients that are inherently flavorful, and says that overripe fruits fall beautifully into that category. You just have to know how to use them. Her favorite combination? Overripe bananas and smoothies.

"You can absolutely use overripe, brown bananas in a smoothie," she says during an interview for the web series #OWNSHOW.

The only thing McGruther suggests being cautious about is how the ripeness of the banana changes its flavor. "Overripe bananas can be sweeter than bananas that are just yellow," she says. "So you want to cut down on any additional sweetener you might add."

This natural sweetness makes bananas an ideal ingredient in smoothies, but McGruther points to two other big benefits in blending this fruit. "They're also super creamy, so they can add a creamy texture to your smoothies without necessarily adding dairy," she explains. "Another benefit to adding bananas to smoothies is that they are a binding ingredient. That means that they help the emulsification process, which helps all the ingredients blend together and stay together."

Bananas aren't the only overripe fruit that McGruder says are great in smoothies. She also suggests incorporating mushy peaches, plums and strawberries as well -- with one caveat.

"You don't want to add anything that's clearly 'off,' like molded, for example," she says. "But any of the other fruits that are slightly soft are really great in smoothies because they're extra sweet, which is nice, and also because of their soft texture, they blend together really well."

More smoothie advice from Jenny McGruther:

The science behind making the perfect smoothie

The most important 15 seconds in smoothie-making

What to do with those smoothie leftovers

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5 Recipes You Should Stuff Inside An Avocado

Kate Bratskeir — Wed, 17 Sep 2014 11:00:16 +0000

Have you ever felt the urge to stuff an avocado with rich, flavorful tomatoes, a divinely drippy egg or crispy bacon?

This is a rhetorical question. The answer is as vibrantly clear as the green of a perfectly ripen avocado first exposed from underneath its skin. The only matter to further examine is how, exactly, you might fill your avocado.

The wonders of the green, fleshy fruit are many: Avocados boast healthy fats, can keep cholesterol levels in check and function effortlessly as a tasty little bowl to house your favorite ingredients.

Try these five, almost too-easy avocado boat recipes below.

Pico De Gallo: Chopped tomato, red onion, garlic granules, jalapeño, cilantro, Himalayan sea salt, and lime juice.

Turkey BLT: Off-the-bone turkey breast, nitrate-free bacon, chopped tomato, fresh spinach.

Israeli Salad: Cucumbers, ripe tomatoes, parsley and onion. Add in some feta if you like! Check out the full recipe here.

Baked Egg: Crack an egg into the center of your avocado half. Bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes until egg whites are opaque.

Tropical Salsa: Mango, tomato, cilantro and lime juice. Check out the full recipe here.

Image courtesy of American Express' Tumblr, which creates and curates content to inspire, motivate and advise people on a range of subjects--covering health/wellness, food, personal finance, DIY and the new definition of success. This specific image was created by Lexi's Clean Kitchen for American Express' Tumblr.

Want to read more from HuffPost Taste? Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Tumblr.

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Why Do You Eat the Food You Eat?

Margaret Marshall — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 22:35:07 +0000

What we eat and don't eat is largely a result of what group we belong to," according to an article titled Food and Ethnic Identity, by Robert A. Leonard Ph.D. and Wendy J. Saliba, MA,MBA.

I met Dr. Leonard when we sat next to each other at a dinner at Hofstra University for the instructors of the Hofstra Continuing Education (CE) program. Leonard is currently Professor of Linguistics, and heads the Graduate Program in Forensic Linguistics at Hofstra. Along with being a world-famous forensic linguist, he was also an original member of the musical group Sha Na Na, and opened for Jimmy Hendrix at Woodstock in 1969.

In their fascinating article, the authors' state, "Food is an important part of who you are. The food you eat, and how you eat it, can identify you as a member of a group, and further identify what smaller group you belong to within that group." It goes on to name different cultures, the foods they choose, and how food choices change through generations as immigrants seek acceptance into an American lifestyle.

Growing up in a predominately Jewish neighborhood, and being Irish Catholic, I found my friends' families served different food than mine. Foods like brisket, knishes, or gefilte fish, where never served in my home yet commonplace in theirs. It was their ethnicity, not mine.

It's ironic that I read this article just days after attending my 40th high school reunion, where many of my classmates, returned to Long Island from various parts of the country. The common comment from the out-of-towners was, "I have to get bagels to bring back for everyone." Bagels are especially popular in communities with a large Jewish population, and a staple in my hometown. When people moved away they realized the bagels they grew up with, are an anchor to their roots, and part of their being.

Leonard points out that "Others' food generally amount to claiming that they eat what we do not." And, "Within our own groups, we affirm our membership by preparing and eating certain good or 'real' foods."

Understanding this may help you to realize why you choose the food you do, and why others' food selections may seem odd to you.

This rang true within my own family. In working with my Italian American clients, I have always heard them lament that on Thanksgiving it is not the American customs they find so challenging in managing their weight, it's the melding of their Italian customs along with the American. It's the antipasto, the large pasta meal, followed by the turkey, trimmings, and desserts. Being of Irish decent, this type of celebration was alien to me, until my Italian sister-in-law joined our family. On the first Thanksgiving she hosted, she served both the Italian and American menus. It was then I truly understood the challenges for my Italian American clients.

In their article, Leonard and Saliba discuss three food type concepts that provide insight into different cultures:

Indispensable Foods: Foods that must be included for people to feel they've had a complete meal. For example, American meals include a piece of meat, while Italians want pasta and bread.

Emblem Foods: Foods that are used to identify a culture's cuisine by outsiders. As an example, non-Chinese may view chop suey and fortune cookies as emblem foods of the Chinese, yet these are barely eaten at all by Chinese, themselves.

Insider Foods: Foods that only people within a culture eat and outsiders do not. An example would be that Thais use 'meng da', a water-bug-like insect for seasoning, while Koreans enjoy kim chi, a spicy vegetable pickle.

According to Leonard you can be accepted by another person's culture quickly by eating their insider food. It's as important as knowing their language and customs. This concept is invaluable in today's culture where the world is smaller and business is conducted on a global scale.

A later version of the article appears in The Asian Pacific American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities) Hardcover -- October 1, 1998

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Tiny Hamster Eats Tiny Hot Dogs In Epic Food Battle

Sarah Barness — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 19:35:17 +0000

If you saw the viral video of tiny hamsters eating tiny burritos, then chances are you've just been sitting patiently at your computer, waiting for anything the comedic -- and culinary -- geniuses of YouTube channel Hello Denizen release.

They followed up their original "Tiny" video with "Tiny Birthday For A Tiny Hedgehog," and now they've produced the masterpiece above, featuring a tiny hamster eating tiny hot dogs.

Only this time, our foodie hero must do battle against world famous competitive eater Takeru Kobayashi.

Who will win? Our money's on the little guy.

H/t Hello Giggles

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Why Do We Call Good Food 'Orgasmic'?

Maddie Crum — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 13:17:32 +0000

The following is an excerpt from The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu, in which author Dan Jurafsky analyzes user-generated restaurant reviews to draw conclusions about the language -- positive or negative -- that we use to talk about food:

You can always get a good argument going in San Francisco by asking people for their favorite taqueria. I lean toward the carnitas at La Taqueria on Mission, but our friend Calvin can be pretty eloquent on the subject of the al pastor at Taqueria Vallarta on Twenty-Fourth. San Franciscans are similarly contentious about the best dim sum, and have been politely disagreeing about tamales since the 1880s, when the city was famous for the vendors plying the streets every evening with pails of hot chicken tamales. (Some things, of course, are simply not a matter of opinion, like the best place for roast duck -- it’s Cheung Hing out in the Sunset, but don’t tell anybody else, the line is already too long.)

It’s not just San Francisco. You can’t go on the Internet these days without stumbling over someone’s lengthy review of a restaurant, wine, beer, book, movie, or brand of dental floss. We are a nation of opinion-holders. Perhaps we always have been: in De Tocqueville's prophetic study of the American character, the 1835 Democracy in America, he noted that in the United States “public opinion is divided into a thousand minute shades of difference upon questions of very little moment."

Consider online restaurant reviews, those summaries of the wisdom of the crowd that have become a familiar way to discover new places to eat. Take a look at this sample from a positive restaurant review (a rating of 5 out of 5) on Yelp (modified slightly for anonymity):

I LOVE this place!!!!! Fresh, straightforward, very high quality, very traditional little neighborhood sushi place... takes such great care in making each dish... You can tell the chef really takes pride in his work... everything I’ve tried so far is DELICIOUS!!!!

And here are bits of one negative review (a rating of 1 out of 5):

The bartender was either new or just absolutely horrible... we waited 10 min before we even got her attention to order... and then we had to wait 45 -- FORTY FIVE! -- minutes for our entrees... Dessert was another 45 min. wait, followed by us having to stalk the waitress to get the check... he didn’t make eye contact or even break his stride to wait for a response... the chocolate soufflé was disappointing... I will not return.

As eaters we use reviews to help decide where to eat (maybe give that second restaurant a miss), whether to buy a new book or see a movie. But as linguists we use these reviews for something altogether different: to help understand human nature. Reviews show humans at their most opinionated and honest, and the metaphors, emotions, and sentiment displayed in reviews are an important cue to human psychology.

In a series of studies, my colleagues and I have employed the techniques of computational linguistics to examine these reviews. With Victor Chahuneau, Noah Smith, and Bryan Routledge from Carnegie Mellon University, my colleagues on the menu study of Chapter 1, I’ve investigated a million online restaurant reviews on Yelp, from seven cities (San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Boston, LA, Philadelphia, Washington), covering people’s impressions between about 2005 and 2011, the same cities and restaurants from our study of menus. With computer scientists Julian McAuley and Jure Leskovec, I looked at 5 million reviews written by thousands of reviewers on websites like BeerAdvocate for beers they drank from 2003 to 2011.

As we'll see, the way people talk about skunky beer, disappointing service, or amazing meals is a covert clue to universals of human language (like the human propensity for optimism and positive emotions and the difficulty of finding words to characterize smells), the metaphors we use in daily life (why drugs are a metaphor for some foods but sex is a metaphor for others), and the aspects of daily life that people find especially traumatizing.

Let's start with a simple question. What words are most associated with good reviews, or with bad reviews? To find out, we count how much more often a word occurs in good reviews than bad reviews (or conversely, more often in bad reviews than good reviews).

Not surprisingly, good reviews (whether for restaurants or beer) are most associated with what are called positive emotional words or positive sentiment words. Here are some:

love

delicious

best

amazing

great

favorite

perfect

excellent

awesome

wonderful

fantastic

incredible

Bad reviews use negative emotional words or negative sentiment words:

horrible

worst

terrible

awful

disgusting

bland

gross

mediocre

tasteless

sucks

nasty

dirty

inedible

yuck

stale

Words like horrible or terrible used to mean “inducing horror” or “inducing terror,” and awesome or wonderful meant “inducing awe” or “full of wonder.” But humans naturally exaggerate, and so over time people used these words in cases where there wasn’t actual terror or true wonder.

The result is what we call semantic bleaching: the “awe” has been bleached out of the meaning of awesome. Semantic bleaching is pervasive with these emotional or affective words, even applying to verbs like “love.” Linguist and lexicographer Erin McKean notes that it was only recently, in the late 1800s, that young women began to generalize the word love from its romantic core sense to talk about their relation- ship to inanimate objects like food. As late as 1915 an older woman in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of the Island complains about how exaggerated it was that young women applied the word to food:

The girls nowadays indulge in such exaggerated statements that one never can tell what they do mean. It wasn’t so in my young days. Then a girl did not say she loved turnips, in just the same tone as she might have said she loved her mother or her Saviour.

Semantic bleaching is also responsible for meaning changes in words like sauce or salsa from their original meaning of “salted,” but I am getting ahead of myself. For now there’s much more to learn from reviews.

Let’s start with the negative reviews. Consider the very specific and creative words used to express dislike (sodalike, metallic, wet dog water, force-carbonated, razor thin) in this strongly phrased negative beer review from BeerAdvocate:

Clear light amber with a sodalike head of white that immediately fizzles to nothing. Very sodalike appearance. Aroma is sweet candy apricot with slight metallic wheat notes. Flavor is wet dog water infused with artificial apricot. Bad, bad, bad. Mouthfeel is razor thin, watery, and highly force-carbonated. Drinkability? Ask my kitchen sink!

My colleagues and I automatically extracted the positive and negative words. While reviewers generally called beers they disliked “watery” or “bland,” they tended to describe the way they were “bad” by using different negative words for different senses, distinguishing whether the beer smelled or tasted bad (corny, skunky, metallic, stale, chemical), looked bad (piss, yellow, disgusting, colorless, skanky), or felt bad in the mouth (thin, flat, fizzy, overcarbonated).

By contrast, when people liked a beer, they used the same few vague positive words we saw at the beginning of the chapter -- amazing, perfect, wonderful, fantastic, awesome, incredible, great -- regardless of whether they were rating taste, smell, feel, or look.

The existence of more types of words, with more differentiated meanings, for describing negative opinions than positive ones occurs across many languages and for many kinds of words, and is called negative differentiation. Humans seem to feel that negative feelings or situations are very different from each other, requiring distinct words. Happy feelings or good situations, by contrast, seem more similar to each other, and a smaller set of words will do.

Negative differentiation comes up in all sorts of domains. For example, across languages there seem to be more adjectives to describe pain than pleasure. We use more varied vocabulary to describe people we dislike than people we like. People even describe attractive faces as more similar to each other while unattractive faces differ more from each other. This generalization that there are more different ways to be negative than to be positive was most famously stated by Tolstoy at the beginning of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Words for smell seem particularly disposed to the negative trend. English, for example, has no commonly used positive word meaning “smells good” that corresponds to delicious for taste or beautiful for sight. Languages generally seem to have a smaller vocabulary for smell than for other senses, relying on words for tastes (like sweet or salty) or names of objects (like gamy, musky, skunky, or metallic).

Some languages do have somewhat richer olfactory vocabularies, like Janet’s native language, Cantonese. Unlike English, Cantonese has a common word that means “smells good,” heung 香, often translated as “fragrant.” Fragrant in English is rare and poetic, but the everyday Cantonese heung (and its Mandarin cognate xiang) is just how you say you like the smell of what’s cooking. It’s such a frequent word that you’ve all seen it: heung is the first part of the name Heung Gong (Hong Kong; “smells-good harbor”).

Cantonese is particularly rich in words for negative smells. Here are some:

suk1 the bacterial smell of spoiled rice or tofu
ngaat3 the ammoniacal smell of urine, ammonia
yik1 the smell of rancid or oxidized oil or peanuts
hong2 the stale, rancid smell of old grain (uncooked rice, flour,
cookies)
seng1 fishy, bloody smell
sou1 musky, muttony, gamy, body odor smell lou3 the smell of overheated tires or burnt hair

Note the numbers following each word. Cantonese has six tones, characteristic rising or falling pitches, and the meaning of a word varies depending on the tone used. The richness of this language is not limited to ways to say stinky.

Many of the words listed above exist in other Chinese dialects as well, and some are very ancient. An essay on cuisine in a third-century bce Chinese encyclopedia (which Chinese cuisine scholar Fuchsia Dunlop calls "perhaps the world’s oldest extant gastronomic treatise”) records the ancient advice of the sixteenth-century bce cook Yi Yin on how to eliminate fishy (seng1 腥) and gamy (sou1 臊) smells.

Sadly, use of this ancient and rich negative smell vocabulary seems to be dying out of Cantonese. Studies show that younger Hong Kong speakers know fewer of these words than their elders, as sanitization and plastic wrap eliminate opportunities to experience what linguist Hilario de Sousa delicately calls “the variety of olfactory sensations experienced by their ancestors.”

The minimal smell vocabularies of many languages may be recent and due to urbanization (languages retaining the vocabulary are often spoken outside the cities), ancient and genetic (many genes coding for the detection of specific odors are turned off in humans, perhaps dating back to the development of tricolor vision in primates), or related to human variation in smell perception. For example, genetic variations lead to differences in detecting the grassy smell of sauvignon blanc, partially caused by the flavor compound cis-3-hexen-1-ol. The ability to detect the sulfurous smell of asparagus in urine has similar genetic links; according to one recent experiment, about 8 percent of people don’t produce it, and about 6 percent can’t smell it. (My biologist wife, upon reading that paper, immediately conducted an impromptu experiment on yours truly by cooking up a big batch of asparagus.) The vast variation over the many different abilities of smell might have made it harder for a language to develop a stable shared olfactory vocabulary.

The greater differentiation of negative smells is but one aspect of negativity bias, the idea that humans are biased to be especially aware of negative situations. Bad reviews like the one at the start of the chapter display another. To understand, we need to look beyond the negative emotional words like horrible, terrible, awful, and nasty and focus instead on the story being told. Yes, story.

Linguist Douglas Biber has shown that we use past tense, communication verbs (said, told), and event words (then, after) much more frequently when telling stories, and the negative reviews are filled with these features. Let’s also look at the common nouns most strongly associated with them:

manager
customer
minutes
money
waitress
waiter
bill
attitude
management
business
apology
mistake
table
charge
order
hostess
tip

Not a one of these words refers to food! Instead, bad reviews are stories about bad things done by other people. The waiter or waitress made some mistake, messed up the order or the bill, or had a bad attitude, the manager didn’t help, the hostess caused a long wait, and so on.

In addition, bad reviews overwhelmingly use the pronouns we or us (“We waited,” “our entrées,” “us having to”). While other reviews use those pronouns too, “we” and “us” are vastly overrepresented in negative ones. What is the common denominator of these three features: negative emotional words like terrible and horrible, narrative stories about other people, and a vast increase in we and us, all strongly linked to 1-star reviews?

The answer comes from the pioneering work of Texas psychology professor James Pennebaker, who for decades has studied how words like function words are veiled cues to people’s personalities, attitudes, and feelings. Pennebaker has particularly studied the aftereffects of trauma. His “social stage model of coping” suggests that immediately after a traumatic event, people feel a need to tell stories about the event, stories expressing their negative emotion, and suggests that traumatized people seek comfort in groups by emphasizing their belonging, using the words we or us with high frequency.

Pennebaker and his colleagues identified these tendencies in bloggers talking about their feelings after September 11, 2001, in fans writing about the death of Princess Diana, and in student newspaper articles after campus tragedies. In each case, what people write is just like terrible reviews of restaurants: narratives, stories about the negative things that happened to them, bulwarked against these negative emotions by the solidarity of us and we. In other words, bad reviews display all the linguistic symptoms of minor trauma.

We always confirm our automated methods by carefully reading selected samples of the reviews. And the tendency toward negative bias is clear, from the negative differentiation in describing skunky beers to the trauma narratives of bad restaurants.

Why do we find negative things more intense and more differentiated than positive things? One possibility is that negative things in the world really are more different from each other than positive things. Perhaps there really is more difference between being evil, brutal, sad, sick, or skunky than there is between being good, gentle, happy, well, or nice. Another possibility is that negative things aren’t actually more different or more potent than positive things, but it's evolutionarily useful for us to treat them as if they were so. Humans need to worry about and be exceptionally good at distinguishing among negative events. The intuition of this theory is that there are a lot of ways for things to go wrong in life, and even though they may be very rare (like tiger attacks and earthquakes and bee stings), they require very different responses. Having different words to talk about how to avoid them helped our ancestors outlive the tiger and the earthquake.

Of course, reviews aren’t all negative. What are the metaphors and other linguistic structures that reviewers use in positive reviews of food or wine?

Let’s start by talking about sex.

Adrienne Lehrer, a linguistics professor at the University of Arizona, studied how wine reviews changed over time from 1975 to 2000. She noticed that in the 1980s wine reviewers began to increase their use of the body as a metaphor, starting to use words like fleshy, muscular, sinewy, big-boned, or broad-shouldered. At the same time, influential wine writers like Robert Parker began to emphasize the sensual pleasure of wine, repeating words like “sexy” and “sensual,” describing wines as “supple and seductive,” “offering voluptuously textured, hedonistic drinking,” or even “liquid Viagra.” Literature professor Sean Shesgreen says that all this erotic talk about wine as “pretty and caressing,” “rav- ishing,” “pillowy,” and “overendowed” affirms that “in the kaleidoscope of Americans’ fixations, gastronomy has eclipsed sex.”

This metaphor of sex seems especially associated with expensive foods as well. We examined this in the million restaurant reviews by extracting every mention of sex (or related words like sexy, seductive, orgasms, or lust) in the reviews. We then used regression, a statistical technique that allowed us to ask how these mentions of sex were associated with people’s ratings of a restaurant, after controlling for factors like the type of cuisine and the city.

Reviewers who liked a restaurant were indeed more likely to use sexual metaphors. But we also discovered an economic interaction; mentions of sex like these are especially frequent for expensive restaurants:

The apple tarty ice cream pastry caramely thing was just orgasmic sumptuous flavors, jaw-droppingly good, sexy food
succulent pork belly paired with seductively seared foie gras

The association is quite strong: the more mentions of sex in a restaurant review, the higher the price of the restaurant. People use a very different metaphor when they like the food at cheap restaurants. In reviewing inexpensive restaurants, they use the language of addiction or drugs instead of sex to talk about their fries or garlic noodles:

garlic noodles... are now my drug of choice

these cupcakes are like crack

be warned the wings are addicting

...every time I need a fix. That fried chicken is so damn good!

I swear the fries have crack or some sort of addicting drugs in them

The examples above show what we “crave” or are “addicted to”: chicken wings and fried chicken, cupcakes, garlic noodles, French fries, and burgers. It’s the snack foods and bar foods, guilty pleasures because of their fat, sugar, and deep-fried goodness that invite the comparison to drugs. Researchers still aren’t sure of the biochemical link between junk-food cravings and drug addiction, but in any case the cravings for fat and also sugar are quite strong. A study that varied the fat and sugar in chocolate milkshakes suggests that sugar may light up the reward center of the brain even more effectively than fat. Writer Adam Gopnik describes nights during his experiment in giving up dessert when he would wake up and -- like a golem controlled by external command -- sleepily wander toward the freezer and the ice cream.

In any case, the linguistic ubiquity of this metaphor of drugs demonstrates how deep this addictive understanding of junk food and desserts is embedded in our culture. By placing the blame on the food, we’re distancing ourselves from our own “sin” of eating fried or sugary snacks: “It’s not my fault: the cupcake made me do it.” Our research also found that women are more likely than men to use drug metaphors in reviews, suggesting that they are especially pressured to conform to healthy or low-calorie eating.

What are people eating when they talk about sex in reviews? We can study this by looking at food words that occur more frequently near sexual words. Two kinds of foods are associated with sex. One is sushi, because of the modern trend of giving sexy names to sushi like these:

sex on the beach roll foreplay roll
sweet temptation roll orgasmic spicy tuna roll
sexy mama roll sexy lady roll
hot sexy shrimp roll sexy lizzy roll
The other food most frequently associated with sex is dessert:
molten chocolate cake... honestly an orgasm on a plate
I still lust for the silky panna cotta and tantalizing sorbet marshmallows... so... sticky and sweet, they’re nearly pornographic warm chestnut mochi chocolate cake... seductively gooey on the inside

The examples above also exhibit another class of words associated with both dessert and sex: texture words like sticky, silky, gooey. Here are the sensory words most commonly used to describe desserts in the million reviews:

rich

moist

warm

sweet

dense

creamy

flaky

light

fluffy

sticky

gooey

smooth

crisp

oozing

satin

soft

velvety

thick

melty

silky

oozing

thin

crunchy

spongy

All of these are from the sensory domain of “feel,” of textures and tem- peratures. When we talk about desserts, we talk about their feel in the mouth, not their appearance, smell, taste, or sound. Americans usually describe desserts as soft or dripping wet, a tendency that linguist Susan Strauss, in her comparison of TV advertising in the US, Japan, and Korea, found to be a general property of food advertising in American English. US commercials emphasize tender, gooey, rich, creamy food, and associ- ate softness and dripping sweetness with sensual hedonism and pleasure.

This association between soft, sticky things and pleasure isn’t a necessary connection. For example, Strauss found that Korean food commercials emphasize hard, texturally stimulating food, using words like wulthung pwulthung hata (solid and bumpy), ccalis hata (stinging, stimulating), thok ssota (stinging), and elelhata (spicy to the extent that one’s nerves are numbed).

The link between dessert and sex is visible in many aspects of our culture, from the sensual advertising of chocolate to women (like Ghirardelli’s slogan, “Moments of Timeless Pleasure”) to modern music, where my students Debra Pacio and Linda Yu found that recent songs like Kelis’s “Milkshake” or Li’l Wayne’s “Lollipop” use dessert and especially candy as a metaphor for sex. There is a gender effect with dessert too. Our study shows that women are more likely than men to mention desserts in their reviews.

Dessert is also so prized that people find it very difficult to say any- thing bad about it. Notice the overwhelmingly positive sentiment of the 20 most frequent sentiment words associated with dessert:

delicious
amazing
yummy
decadent
divine
yum
good
OK
wow
fabulous
scrumptious
delectable
wonderful
delish
refreshing
awesome
perfect
incredible
fantastic
heavenly

In fact, the more Yelp reviewers mention dessert, the more they like the restaurant. Reviewers who don't mention a dessert give the restaurants an average review score of 3.6 (out of 5). But reviewers who mention a dessert in their review give a higher average review score, 3.9 out of 5. And when people do talk about dessert, the more times they mention dessert in the review, the higher the rating they give to the restaurant.

This positivity exhibited by reviews, filled with metaphors of sex and dessert, turns out to be astonishingly strong. Despite the negativity bias that makes us especially sensitive to negative situations, people are actually much more positive than they are negative.

One sign of our positive nature is word frequency. Positive words, though weak in variety, occur much more often in reviews than negative words. Restaurant reviewers use words like great, delicious, and amazing 3 to 10 times more often than words like bland, bad, or terrible.

Review scores themselves are also skewed toward the positive. Reviewing scores on most sites go from 1 to 5, so the median score should be 3. Instead the median score, whether for restaurants or beers, is about 4 out of 5. My colleague down the hall Chris Potts has shown that this skew is true wherever people review things on the web -- books, movies, cameras, you name it.

This tendency toward the positive is not a recent trend caused by the Internet, but has been shaping our language for millennia. Linguists are deeply interested in linguistic phenomena that hold across all languages, key to our goal of discovering true human universals. A bias toward positivity in vocabulary is one of the strongest universals we have found. This idea that people are positive is called the Pollyanna effect, after the heroine of Eleanor Porter’s 1909 book for children, Pollyanna, an orphan who always looked on the bright side. In common usage “Pollyanna-ish” describes a naïve or foolish optimism, but the Pollyanna effect is a more neutral observation of humans’ remarkable tendency toward optimism.

The Pollyanna effect is not just specific to reviews. If you ask Google how frequent a word is (or check the frequency in a carefully con- structed academic database of texts), positive words are (on average) more frequent than negative words. English good is more frequent than bad, happy than sad; Chinese kaixin 开心 (happy) is more frequent than nanguo 难过 (sad); Spanish feliz is more frequent than triste.

More subtly, positive words have a special linguistic status called unmarked. Markedness has to do with oppositions: in pairs of words like happy/unhappy, good/bad, capable/incapable, or honest/dishonest, the first of each pair is unmarked or neutral and the second is marked. There are many linguistic cues to which member of a pair is unmarked. The unmarked form is shorter (marked unhappy and dishonest have an extra un- and dis- than unmarked happy and honest). Unmarked words tend to come first in “X and Y” phrases like “good and evil” or “right and wrong.”

Unmarked words are neutral in questions. Ask- ing “Is your accountant honest?” is the neutral way to find out about the honesty of your accountant. If I instead ask, “Is your accountant dishonest?” that suggests that I already have some reason to believe you have a cheating accountant. Sure enough, across languages, the unmarked form is much more likely to be positive (happy, honest) rather than negative (unhappy, dishonest); it’s very rare across languages for a negative word like sad to be the basic form and unsad to be the way to say “happy.” Thus we have English words unhappy, incapable, uncomfortable, but not unsad, un-itchy, unklutzy.

The Pollyanna effect has been confirmed in dozens of languages and cultures, and comes up in all sorts of nonlinguistic ways as well. When psychologists ask people to think of items or remember them from a list, they name more positive things than negative things. When people forward news stories, they are more likely to forward the positive stories than the negative ones.

In other words, although humans have a lot of ways of talking about negative events, and are especially traumatized when other people are rude or mean to them, although people differ in all sorts of ways, perceive different tastes and smells, and range hugely in their personalities, these differences only serve to highlight a fundamental similarity as humans: we are a positive, optimistic race. We tend to notice and talk about the good things in life. Like dessert. And sex.

And all of this, joy and trauma, is visible in those reviews on the web, offering a little insight into the human psyche along with advice on where to go for dinner. Just don’t forget to order dessert.

Excerpted from The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu by Dan Jurafsky. Copyright © 2014 by Dan Jurafsky. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Can You Cook Octopus at Home?

Ali Rosen — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 08:31:57 +0000

For more food drink and travel videos visit www.potluckvideo.com

Octopus has become a restaurant standard on menus across the country and across cuisines. But for the home cook it still remains a bit of a mystery. Questions abound about where to purchase octopus; how to properly prep it; and how to actually cook it.

We went to Tuome to get the answers to all those questions and it made cooking octopus seem downright easy. So instead of reaching for the same old chicken or pork chop, why not give octopus a try?

Watch the video above to learn everything you need to know about making octopus at home.

For more great food, drink and travel videos make sure to check out Potluck Video's website, head over to our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter

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Do We Have an Internal Calorie Counter?

Wray Herbert — Mon, 15 Sep 2014 16:11:32 +0000

Many explanations have been offered for the country's obesity epidemic, and one is nutritional ignorance. People simply don't know what a calorie is, so how can they be expected to know a calorie-rich food when they see one? Most of us don't even know what a gram of apple or an ounce of milk looks like, so how can we possibly calculate a sensible portion?

Well, perhaps arithmetic is not required, and it may even be misleading. Psychological scientists in Canada have been studying how people make food choices, and it appears that our deliberate estimates and calculations may not be much use to us. Instead, we may implicitly know how fattening foods are, even when our estimates are way off. Indeed, our brains may respond to the true caloric density of foods, and guide our food choices.

Neuroscientist Alain Dagher of the Montreal Neurological Institute, working with colleagues there and at McGill University, wanted to see how awareness of caloric content influences the brain's response to familiar foods. Specifically, the scientists wanted to compare explicit and implicit awareness of caloric content by measuring the brain's response to both estimated and true caloric content of various foods.

They recruited healthy, normal-weight subjects, and showed them pictures of familiar foods, some low-calorie and others high-calorie. They asked them to rate how much they liked each food, and to estimate each food's calories. The subjects then took part in an "auction," in which they stated their willingness to pay for each food -- a measure of its implicit value. During the auction, the subjects underwent fMRI brain scanning, to see what kind of brain activity was associated with the valuing of various foods.

The idea is that food choices and consumption are governed by the anticipated effects of foods -- effects that we have learned over time through experience. The sensory properties of foods tell the brain that this or that food will be rewarding, or not. Based on the brain's response, we are more or less willing to pay for whatever food is available at the moment. The scientists expected that the true caloric value of foods -- and not the conscious estimates of calories -- would determine the neural response.

And that's just what they found. As reported in a forthcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, the true caloric density of foods was linked to activity in the brain's ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a neural region that encodes the value of sensory stimuli and triggers immediate consumption. The subjects were quite poor at judging foods' caloric content, yet their willingness to pay and their brain activity both reflected the actual caloric density of food choices.

Our world offers an increasing array of poor and fattening food choices, and this no doubt contributes to our national obesity problem. These findings, taken together, suggest that the reward value of food depends on its nutritional value, most notably its caloric content. We appear to have this reliable internal calorie counter, fine-tuned by years of experience as eaters, yet we are still making unwise eating decisions. Better understanding how this calorie counter works -- and how we can use it -- may illuminate how we can make better choices even in a fattening world.

Follow Wray Herbert's reporting on psychological science in The Huffington Post and on Twitter at @wrayherbert.

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