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What is Slow Food?

The short answer is: the opposite of fast food but there’s a lot wrapped up in that snappy response. Steven Winn does a nice job of unpacking the Slow Food agenda in this article from today’s Chronicle.

Slow Food Comes to SF

The Slow Food movement was formed as a direct response to the growth of fast food and the subsequent crowding out of traditional foods and food cultures. The movement was founded in Italy in 1986 by Carlo Petrini. Slow Food USA is coming to SF this weekend and we will be linking to stories covering the event all week. Today’s SF Gate has a nice overview of the movement and the weekend’s events, you can read it here.

Phat Fat

We love fat. Fat tastes goooood. We just don’t like looking fat. Does this hat make me look fat? And we don’t like being fat or we worry what all that fat might be doing to our hearts. Once again, it’s nerds scientists to the rescue:

White fat is the traditional bane of struggling dieters and would-be beach bunnies. Brown fat is quite different. It’s full of mitochondria — the body’s energy-producing cellular machines — and burns calories to produce heat.

Abundant in babies, whom it helps keep warm, brown fat is found only in traces in adults. But with a flick of two genetic switches, scientists have transformed cells destined to become muscle into brown fat.

You can read the whole story, here.

Slicing and Dicing the Numbers

In the course of our day and lately more than ever, we find ourselves confounded by the government’s statistics for inflation. How exactly is it that food inflation rose at 5.6% over the last year when our own internal measure of inflation charts the rise at anywhere from 8-66% depending on the category? And as a side-quarrel, how can you dub something “core inflation” when you remove food and fuel from the mix?

Well, we may not be crazy after all. Kevin Phillips wrote a fascinating deconstruction of the government’s methods for measuring economic performance in last month’s Harper’s magazine. Here’s a taste:

Almost four decades have passed since the United States scrapped its last currency ties to precious metals. Our copper and nickel coinage still retains some metallic value, but not nearly enough for the purpose of currency tampering—the historic temptation of inflation-plagued or otherwise wayward governments, including, at times, our own. Instead, since the 1960s, Washington has been forced to gull its citizens and creditors by debasing official statistics: the vital instruments with which the vigor and muscle of the American economy are measured. The effect, over the past twenty-five years, has been to create a false sense of economic achievement and rectitude, allowing us to maintain artificially low interest rates, massive government borrowing, and a dangerous reliance on mortgage and financial debt even as real economic growth has been slower than claimed. If Washington’s harping on weapons of mass destruction was essential to buoy public support for the invasion of Iraq, the use of deceptive statistics has played its own vital role in convincing many Americans that the U.S. economy is stronger, fairer, more productive, more dominant, and richer with opportunity than it actually is.

You can read the rest of this fascinating article, here.

Pizza!

Ahh, pizza,  how many different ways can we praise thee? Delicous? Yes! Nutritious? Well, as it turns out, it can be. For more on that we hand it off to Marion Nestle:

Q: Can pizza ever be good for you?

A: I love pizza. My idea of culinary perfection is pizza and a salad. But not just any pizza or any salad.

You can read Nestle’s full guide on getting the most from pizza, here.

We look forward to the day when we can go into a pizza parlor and select whole wheat crust as easily as choosing a topping. Until then, we’ll just tell ourselves that the cheese is really, really good for us.