Shangri-La

Weird hack, or what?

September 16, 2010

Seth Roberts, he of the Shangri La diet, has a blog. I see it in my RSS reader. I was amazed to see a post that seemed to have been, er, penetrated, thusly: So I went to the blog post itself. And lo! all those nasties were invisible. So I checked the source, and they’re [...]

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Food news (new series); advice

February 9, 2010

Start: 95.4 Last week: 89.3 This week: 88.7 Drifting, very slowly, down. I think. Marion Nestle, Colin Tudge, Michael Pollan. Any one of them could have said this. Let the scientists and their interpreters fight it out over single nutrients. Eat food and enjoy your dinner. It was, in fact, Marion Nestle.

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Food News (new series) 19: Excellent news on children’s nutrition

December 16, 2009

Start: 95.4 Last week: 87.6 This week: 87.5 A day late, because I wanted to get yesterday’s bread recipe done. But that’s yesterday’s weight up there. Everyone knows that kids need advertisements to tell them what to nag for. Food is no exception. But food manufacturers, smarting under recent attacks, decided in 2007 to launch [...]

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Food News (new series) 18: Wasted

December 8, 2009

Start: 95.4 Last week: 87.6 This week: 87.6 Blast. Plateaued again. The Economist alerted me to a paper in PLOS One by Kevin Hall and his colleagues at the Laboratory of Biological Modeling at the NIH in the US. The Progressive Increase of Food Waste in America and Its Environmental Impact, subtly published the day [...]

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Food News (new series) 17: Spoiled by choice

December 1, 2009

Start: 95.4 Last week: 87.3 This week: 87.6 Two helpings of everything for Thanksgiving cannot have been the only issue. Maybe it was the fresh almonds? Does anyone need a choice of more than 50 breakfast cereals? Many more. I’m trying to remember that fancy word from economics, where a single supplier creates several goods [...]

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Food News (new series) 16: Inventive

November 24, 2009

Start: 95.4 Last week: 88.9 This week: 87.3 My grand scheme to end world hunger using modern technology seems to have fallen on stony ground. Fortunately I can still eat. When I joined the secret confraternity of home bread bakers back in the summer, the restaurant Necci 1924 fed us a remarkable lunch to tide [...]

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Mobile phones make it work

November 17, 2009

Ok, so this morning’s idle fantasy has all the hallmarks of a sixth-form debating society also-ran. But like many crazy notions, maybe it isn’t completely crazy. One reason why sending US$ 2.50 to one of the hungry billion is so appealing is that it is direct. You have money, you send money, they spend money. [...]

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Food News (new series) 15: Strike One

November 17, 2009

Start: 95.4 Last week: 87.8 This week: 88.9 Yes, I missed a week. Of writing, not weighing. But I’m not beating myself up about it, so you shouldn’t either. There’s something mesmerizing about being at a Very Important Meeting of Very Important People and listening to all the Very Important Utterances. They are, by and [...]

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Food News (new series) 13: An interesting end to overfishing

November 3, 2009

Start: 95.4 Last week: 87.0 This week: 88.0 I wanted to write something else, but haven’t finished doing the homework. The Economist’s Green View has a fascinating piece that offers a fascinating by-catch from Copenhagen: reduced fishing. Globally, fishing is a disaster. Landlubbers hand pots of money to fishermen. Rashid Sumaila, a researcher at the [...]

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Food News (new series) 12: MyTube

October 27, 2009

Start: 95.4 Last week: 88.9 This week: 87.0 Did I really dump almost 2kg in a week? Yes. But it’s not quite what you think. I’ve been putting off an absolutely routine, age-related procedure for almost a whole year now, put off myself by the necessary preparation and fear of the unknown. Everything I read, [...]

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Food News (new series) 11: A “nuanced view” on GMOs

October 20, 2009

Start: 95.4 Last week: 88.9 This week: 88.9 Stuck on another plateau. We used to have World Food Day on 16 October every year. This year the FAO decided, in its infinite wisdom, to acknowledge the fact that the we-meet-so-they-can-eat shindig goes on for the best part of two weeks. Enter World Food Week. The [...]

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Food News (new series) 10: Neo-artisans

October 14, 2009

Start: 95.4 Last week: 88.7 This week: 88.9 No excuses. Damn. For the weight. For the date, see previous post, The software ate my homework, honest. Having touched on some global stuff, it occurred to me to bring the topic back home, by making good on my promise to write more about the bread-making course [...]

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Food News (new series) 9: With great power …

October 6, 2009

Start: 95.4 Last week: ??.? This week: 88.7 Last week was a week away on duty travel, normally fatal, but I guess that 24 hours of projectile vomiting was a blessing, in some ways. I’m not quite sure when it became fashionable to point out that there was no global shortage of food, just unequal [...]

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Food news (new series) 7: No news

September 22, 2009

Start: 95.4 Last week: 87.8 This week: 90.1 A long weekend away, with a decent Indian, a wedding feast, fine home cooking with friends, and then the world’s saltiest (and tastiest) little lamb chops last night — of course I’m heavier. But I’m sure tomorrow’s scale will tell a different story. Alas, though, I have [...]

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Food news (new series) 6: Stories to savour

September 15, 2009

Start: 95.4 Last week: 88.9 This week: 87.8 That’s even more encouraging. Moving on again … I read a nice piece by Madronna Holden on her blog Our Earth/Ourselves. She tackles the larger theme of the story of consumer products, reminding readers of Wendell Berry’s remark that we should not eat any food we are [...]

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Food news (new series) 5: I take the bait

September 8, 2009

Start: 95.4 Last week: 89.5 This week: 88.9 That’s encouraging. Moving on … I know that a dignified silence is far and away the best response to the raving lunatic who insists on sitting next to you on an otherwise empty bus. I also know that it only takes good people to stay silent for [...]

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Food news (new series) 4: Who provides our food?

September 1, 2009

Start: 95.4 Last week: 89.5 This week: 89.5 Darn! I slipped below 89.0 on two days, but this morning was up at 89.5. No cheating. Five Farms is a wonderful, engaging audio documentary series that tracks five American farm families through the year in five episodes. It comes from the Center for Documentary Studies at [...]

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Food News (new series) 3: fat taxes

August 25, 2009

Start: 95.4 Last week: 90.5 This week: 89.5 All fine, all good; got to keep going. I recently spent a fine vacation in the United States, a singularly pleasant experience except for the sickening “debate” on reform of health care. That, however, is not my main subject, except tangentially. Fat people, according to a recent [...]

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Food News (new series) 2

August 18, 2009

Start: 95.4 Last week: 93.3 This week: 90.5 That’s better; of course a loss of 2.8 kg in a week is absurd. I mean, I trust the scales and all (especially relatively) but obviously that wasn’t all fat. I suspect a good deal of it was, ahem, gut microflora and the rest probably water being [...]

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Food News Some Large Number

August 11, 2009

Start: 95.4 Last week: ? This week: 93.3 This morning’s weight was totally scary, almost back where I started from. A wake-up call, and a reminder that the Shangri La Diet really isn’t a diet, it is more a way of life. You have to have those flavourless calories to maintain appetite suppression. At least, [...]

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Food News 75

December 12, 2007

Start: 95.4 Last week: 90.1 This week: 88.6 Wednesday 12 December: Yup, it has been almost two months, and a packed time at that. Barely time to glug my oil. But I’m back on that now, and still bouncing around the 88-89 kg mark. I suppose that by now I should know that it neither [...]

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Food News 67

October 16, 2007

Start: 95.4 Last week: 89.5 This week: 88.8 Tuesday 16 October: Today is World Food Day. Irony and sarcasm are superfluous.

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Food News 66

October 9, 2007

Start: 95.4 Last week: 89.5 This week: 89.5 Tuesday 9 October: Things are settling down, and the appetite suppression seems to have mostly kicked in again after a couple of weeks of no oil. Mostly, because yesterday I had the oddest cravings for chocolate. A Magnum after lunch, a teeny bar of croccante, and then [...]

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Food News 65

October 4, 2007

Start: 95.4 Last week: ??.? This week: 89.5 Thursday 4 October: Pleasantly surprised this morning after getting on the scales for the first time in three weeks. I’ve been eating three meals a day for the past two weeks, and I thought it would show more. But maybe that’s the unfamiliar foods effect kicking in. [...]

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