Food for Thought

For this week's Food for Thought, a slew of food-related articles and sites, many of which I found via the Food News Journal:

1. Smaller belly = bigger brain?  Not necessarily, but according to this story from NPR, eating meat and cooking food is what has allowed humans to grow bigger brains.  I encourage you to listen to the story, and to remember that there's a reason why we cook our food!  [NPR]

2. So how do popsicles and cakeballs fit into our evolutionary process?  Riddhi Shah concludes in this article that these kinds of fads are perhaps a byproduct of such American values as progress, open-mindedness, and entrepreneurship.  Might be a bit of a stretch, but I do agree that America does lack a concrete food tradition of its own.  The question is whether the lack of a food tradition counts as a food tradition in and of itself.  What say you, wise reader?  [Salon]

3. Michelle Obama on childhood obesity and getting kids to eat right: So, can we change the way kids think about food?  The first lady of the United States thinks we can, with the help of the Child Nutrition Bill.  [The Washington Post]

4. Speaking of American tradition, apparently we're drinking more than ever these days.  I have nothing to say, except... well, that sounds about right.  [Time]

5. And speaking of booze, I've been obsessed with this boozey blog lately.  Ever since David Flaherty did an interview with Serious Eats, I've had a huge crush on him.  It helps that I love both Hearth and Terroir, where Mr. Flaherty is the operations manager.  Check out his blog for some insight into your favorite cocktails, and the results from the 8th Annual Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans.

6. Last, but not least, this little piece from Mark Bittman.  I originally read it on his site, but it's been reposted and posted about and tweeted about up the wazoo in the 2 days since it went up, so I can't ignore it.  Basically, the famous foodie found some plastic in his soup.  Readers, outraged that anyone could not recognize Bittman, went nutty and demanded that Bittman post the name of the restaurant.  Now, this kind of thing has never happened to me before.  An occasional hair that may or may not have been mine, yes.  A bug in my salad, certainly.  But plastic?  I don't even know what I would do.  What would you have done?  Though the restaurant staff handled the situation very, very poorly, I think people are kind of overreacting.  Bottom line: there shouldn't have been anything but soup in Mark Bittman's soup, but no one was hurt.  Yes, diners deserve to know what they're getting when they enter a restaurant, but this kind of thing, if and when it happens, is rarely publicized because it's not just happening to Mark Bittman.  The level of anxiety over some plastic in Mark Bittman's soup seems disproportionate to how much people care about the actual ingredients that go into their restaurant meals.  Just sayin'.  What do you think?  [MarkBittman]

Happy Wednesday!