Food product dating, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture calls it, is completely voluntary for all products (with the exception of baby food, more on that later). Not only that, but it has nothing to do with safety. It acts solely as the manufacturer’s best guess as to when its product will no longer be at peak quality, whatever that means.

This really made me feel better about eating food, ordering takeout, and grocery shopping. Questions about COVID-19 and food safety, answered.

To fight the pandemic, restaurants are shuttering across America with no aid in sight. What will happen to the rest of us? --- The boldest action on the parts of government includes eviction bans and more funding for paid sick leave and relaxed liquor regulations. What do these regulations offer an undocumented dishwasher who just got laid off, beyond the hope that his landlord might not demand four months’ back rent in due time? What do they offer business owners trying to keep their employees employed, beyond hope for a fraction of the revenue needed to pay for rent, supplies, and staff? Restaurants are suffering from this pandemic because they’re the center of communal life in America, but the awful cascade of consequences lays bare how broken American life has become. American restaurant culture is a glorious public-works project, like a train station or a bridge, built during more prosperous times; its rusting supports and cracked concrete would have been tough but possible to fix oh, any time, for decades. But no one did. And now, the earthquake has come. Without major and unprecedented government intervention and responsible community support, independent food culture could go the way of the neighborhood pharmacy and department store in the wake of this pandemic. In high-rent neighborhoods in American cities, the transition is already underway, with high-rent blight stuffing neighborhoods with chains, fancy and otherwise. And as restaurants go, so will independent stores of all kinds, whether it’s repair shops or clothing stores or bookstores like the one I worked in, which are now struggling to survive and temporarily laying off staff. Any retail that’s not a grocery store is in serious danger. In the aftermath of the Great Shuttering, without help, the only operators with capital to reopen will be the same massive corporations whose irresponsible treatment of their workers is threatening to worsen the outbreak.

Mark Bittman and Dr. David L. Katz patiently answer pretty much every question we could think of about healthy food. --- In fact, the basic theme of optimal eating — a diet made up mostly of whole, wholesome plant foods — has been clear to nutrition experts for generations. What does change all the time is the fads, fashions, marketing gimmicks, and hucksterism. How do you avoid the pitfalls of all that? Focus on foods, not nutrients. A diet may be higher or lower in total fat, or total carbohydrate, or total protein, and still be optimal. But a diet cannot be optimal if it is not made up mostly of some balanced combination of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, legumes, nuts, seeds, and water. If you get the foods right, the nutrients sort themselves out. But if you focus on nutrients rather than foods, you quickly learn that there is more than one way to eat badly, and we Americans seem all too eager to try them all.

It’s a simple formula for weight loss: burn more calories than you consume. How come that often doesn't work? --- The discrepancies between the number on the label and the calories that are actually available in our food, combined with individual variations in how we metabolize that food, can add up to much more than the 200 calories a day that nutritionists often advise cutting in order to lose weight. Nash and Haelle can do everything right and still not lose weight. None of this means that the calorie is a useless concept. Inaccurate as they are, calorie counts remain a helpful guide to relative energy values: standing burns more calories than sitting; cookies contain more calories than spinach. But the calorie is broken in many ways, and there’s a strong case to be made for moving our food accounting system away from that one particular number. It’s time to take a more holistic look at what we eat. […] It increasingly seems that there are significant variations in the way each one of us metabolizes food, based on the tens of thousands—perhaps millions—of chemicals that make up each of our metabolomes. This, in combination with the individuality of each person’s gut microbiome, could lead to the development of personalized dietary recommendations. […] Or maybe the focus will shift to tweaking your microbial community: If you’re trying to lose weight, perhaps you will curate your gut microbiome so as to extract fewer calories without harming your overall health. […] None of these alternatives is ready to replace the calorie tomorrow. Yet the need for a new system of food accounting is clear. Just ask Haelle. “I’m kind of pissed at the scientific community for not coming up with something better for us,” she confesses, recalling a recent meltdown at TGI Friday’s as she navigated a confusing datasheet to find a low-calorie dish she could eat. There should be a better metric for people like her and Nash—people who know the health risks that come with being overweight and work hard to counter them. And it’s likely there will be. Science has already shown that the calorie is broken. Now it has to find a replacement.

That MSG isn’t the poison we’ve made it out to be has been well-established. News stories are written regularly about the lack of evidence tying MSG to negative health effects. (Read here and here, for example. Or here, here, here, here and here.) Still, Yelp reviews of Chinese restaurants tell tales of racing hearts, sleepless nights and tingling limbs from dishes “laden with MSG.” Even when the science is clear, it takes a lot to overwrite a stigma, especially when that stigma is about more than just food.

Studies in humans in Britain, Denmark, Canada and in the United States could find no association between saccharin consumption and bladder cancer once they accounted for cigarette smoking (which does cause it). Based on these newer studies, saccharin was removed from the carcinogen list in 2000. But by that time, opinions were set. It did little to make anyone feel safe.

If the government were to redefine normal weight as one that doesn’t increase the risk of death, then about 130 million of the 165 million American adults currently categorized as overweight and obese would be re-categorized as normal weight instead.

An overview.

All orange juice tastes the same because the juice from the oranges has its oxygen (and taste) removed for spoil-free storage and then ‘flavor packs’ are added to the flavorless juice. The flavor packs are loaded with supplementary chemicals but still technically qualify as ‘orange juice’, so there is no ingredient listing requirement for them. And: ‘Juice removed from the fruit is just concentrated fructose without any of the naturally-occurring fiber, pectin, and other goodies that make eating a whole fruit good for you.’ So don’t drink juice.

It’s not terribly shocking that a reality show about an ignorant millionaire trying to fix a school’s lunch program with his own special menu was a costly, exploitative, and ruinous failure, but the disastrous state of school lunch programs nationwide *is* shocking.

On how *all* grains contain bio-chemical defense systems that cause an inflammatory reaction in your gut and lead to a host of health problems, and how the paleolithic diet is a cure for it. The comments section is very long and bewildering in its inevitable conflict. (I should be following this diet already, but I cheat too often. At the very least, I should do what the post suggests and try to go 100% for a month.)

A good collection of information.

Cooking is not easy - for me as least. I can cook but only some very basic stuff. Found out a good site that can get me started on cooking something good

Bottled water is crap.

Sometimes cooking takes a lot of time in our life. We gathered an excellent list of easy healthy foods compiled into cooking recipes