In this week’s Food News, restaurants design menus to get us to spend more, the dangers of salt, how to roast your own coffee, and a fun slideshow of meat-eating plants:
- Restaurant Marketing: The Guardian explores how restaurants get us to spend more money simply through their menu design. (Here’s an example – high-profit items are placed next to an expensive “anchor,” like a plate of seafood, so they seem “cheap by comparison.” Very smart.)
- Dangers of Salt: As I ate my highly-processed vegetarian sausage yesterday, I read articles in NPR and the Center for Science in the Public Interest about the health risks (high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke) of eating excess salt, leaving me to feel that this is the red-flag ingredient for 2010. The Center for Science in the Public Interest even calls it “the single most dangerous ingredient in the food supply.”
- Roasting Your Own Coffee: With an $150 roaster and some unroasted coffee beans from Sweet Maria’s, you could be roasting your own coffee at home like The Washington Post‘s Joe Yonan.
- Meat-Eating Plants: Smithsonian.com has a fun slide show of plants that ingest bugs and crustaceans. I’m most impressed by the Nepenthes eymae, a beautiful red and green plant from Indonesia that, when large enough, has been known to digest rats.
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if you eat mainly processed food, or a lot of fast food, than salt can be bad for you, but only because you’re ingesting way more than you’re supposed to be, often without even realizing it. but if you mostly cook from scratch at home, then unless you have high blood pressure, you shouldn’t worry about the amount of salt you use in cooking. salt is essential to your health and brings out the flavors in food. and you are controlling how much you ingest. whereas in processed foods you have no control. canned beans already contain 1/3 of you required sodium for the day. fast food burgers almost the entire amount. many food writers have commented on this. most recently, check out ruhlman: http://blog.ruhlman.com/2010/01/salt-is-it-good-or-bad.html
@hg: Thanks for sharing the link to Michael Ruhlman’s post. You know, the professionals always say too much salt is bad, but I can’t remember reading so many articles at once about its negative effects. I wonder why everyone’s attention is turning to salt now? In any event, it’s nice to see someone defending it. Also, good point about the processed foods. My grandmother gave me some veggie burgers recently so I checked the salt content – 17% in one burger that accounts for about 5% of the calories we should be eating in a day.
Also, great reminder about how much sodium is in canned beans. The dried beans look like they’re a lot of work, but they’re really easy to make if you plan ahead. If you’re concerned about salt, you may want to give them a try.