Healthy Eating

The City's Best New Rugelach Is at Breads Bakery Near Union Square

Go right this second to Breads Bakery and chances are a tray of warm chocolate rugelach ($2.50 each) has just been set out -- Israeli baker Uri Scheft pops a new batch in the oven every hour. They're tender pastries, soft as layer cake, tasting of browned butter and dark chocolate. Nothing like the ... More >>

My Weight-Conscious Version of "I Will Survive"

"I Will Survive" was one of the landmark songs of the disco era--an anthem of defiance and strength in the face of one of those horrible men disco songs were always getting dramatic about. Gloria Gaynor took that ditty to the top of the charts all over the globe with her powerful (yet extremely dan ... More >>

NYC Hospitals Cracking Down on Junk Food

New York City hospitals are cracking down on junk food, according to Fox News. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who recently successfully banished super-size sodas from the city, is now aiming to get rid of sugary and fatty foods from both public and private hospitals. Fox reports that though city hospital ... More >>

Fat, Shiny (Rice) Balls

Brown rice isn't the most glamorous of grains, but when you watch someone fastidiously mold it into a fat, geometrical shape and wrap it in a shining sheet of seaweed, it begins to take on a certain allure. Like the onigiri at Brooklyn Flea from Rice & Miso Everyday.

EAT IT UP

Alison Knowles invites 
you to taste her art

Funny Food Teaches Parents to Get Creative With Breakfast

A pair of New York educators think they have the answer to the question of how to get kids to eat healthy breakfasts and snacks. Forget for a moment that nobody has quite figured out what "healthy" means, and that the definition of "healthy" changes daily.

Hot Dog With Chili, Cheese, and Onions at Papaya King

​Papaya King, 86th Street and Third Avenue, 9:30 pm Founded in 1932, Papaya King is the first of the Greek-owned hot dog chains to serve papaya drink--to aid in digestion, or so the claim goes. The pairing of hot dog and papaya drink was also thought to be especially healthy and nutritious ... More >>

Make Rocco DiSpirito's Chicken Noodle Soup

Laine Doss​Chef Rocco DiSpirito's new food truck, called "Now Eat This" after his series of recipe books, has recently started serving New Yorkers nutritious comfort food. DiSpirito says his way of prepping favorites such as meatballs, enchiladas, jambalaya, and brownies shows that good-for-yo ... More >>

Peanut Butter Too Expensive for Food Banks

​If you didn't already have your concerns about food banks -- considering that they can be stocked with shit you wouldn't want to eat -- here's more unsettling news.

Walmart Goes After New York Locavores

Your friendly neighborhood Walmart​ You may want to check your mailbox (the snail one) for the latest effort by Walmart to butter up New Yorkers into letting the massive chain set up shop here. Now that it has Michelle Obama proclaiming its expansion into "food deserts" part of the country's h ... More >>

Letter Grades on Food Carts Not Imminent; Food Corps Still Placing Unhealthy Products

​Mayor Bloomberg is at odds with the Health Department over letter grades on food carts. He wants them, but with just 20 out of 100-odd inspectors assigned to mobile vendors, there aren't enough resources to grade the city's 5,100 street-food carts. [NY Post] Major food corps may have pledged ... More >>

Bringing Borscht Back; Queen Mary 2 Fails Health Inspection

​After a few years of folly -- i.e., focusing on healthy snacks -- it appears that PepsiCo is turning its attention back to Pepsi. [Wall Street Journal] Cold borscht certainly isn't as hip as it used to be back in the 1950s, but Marc Gold, CEO of Gold Pure Food Products Co., hopes to bring th ... More >>

Kiddie Meals Become Less Kid-Friendly at Jack in the Box

You might be smiling, but the kids sure won't be.​Kids are out of luck at the mostly West Coast burger chain Jack in the Box -- they'll no longer be receiving a free toy along with their children's meal, following new laws in San Francisco and Santa Clara County that require such meals to meet ... More >>

Stellina Is Open, And Here's the Menu

Rebecca Marx​After a short delay, Stellina opened this morning for business. Staff at the bakery, located at 95 Allen Street next door to its sister restaurant Sorella, were just getting set up when we stopped by earlier. Nothing was available for take-out, but they gave us a menu, and given w ... More >>

VOTE FOR MURS

His stump speech is not to be missed

Old People Eat Whatever They Want, Thank-You Very Much

Colonel Sanders: Elderly, ate fried chicken.​The silver lining on the enormous cumulus cloud of old age? Eating whatever the hell you want, regardless of whether or not a damn nutritionist says it's good for you.

Lady Gaga's Boyfriend Lands Drunk Diet Book Deal

drunkdiet.comLuc Carl, drinking and dieting.​The USDA Dietary Guidelines state that moderate drinking is good for your health, but surely this is not what they meant.

Restaurant A-List Still Excludes Top Chefs; Domino's Launches Low-Fat School Pizza

​Close to 60 percent of the 24,000 restaurants in the city that have been inspected by the city received an "A" grade. So, why are some of the city's most highly regarded restaurants still struggling to even get a "C"? [NY Times] Do you have the time and patience to make your pet's food? Thos ... More >>

Man Uses "Cooked Rabbit" Excuse When Smuggling Cocaine

cocaine.com and slowtrav.comUS Customs is definitely not the bunny slopes.​ A 29 year-old man was recently arrested for smuggling cocaine into the United States from Georgetown, Guyana. Why, exactly did he get caught? Oh, right, because he told guards he was bringing "cooked rabbit" into th ... More >>

Kick Off Wholesome January with Olea's Farro Pasta

Rick S.Wholesome farro goodness.​ For many of us, the first month of the year is a time for remorse and salad, maybe even going teetotal. It's a time to be healthy after weeks of end-of-year debauchery. Detox Month. But let's be reasonable: It's still January, and New Yorkers can't subsist on ... More >>

Newark Mayor Cory Booker Vows to Lose 57 Pounds, Will Facebook and Tweet All About It

​Just a week ago Newark Mayor and "social media darling" Cory Booker was digging out his own citizens a tweet at a time, subsisting on Diet Coke and Advil, and becoming the hands-down hero of Snow-pocalypse 2010. Now he's taken to Facebook and Twitter with another cause: He plans to hit 240 ( ... More >>

The Best Thing I Ate Yesterday

Welcome to The Best Thing I Ate Yesterday, where we endeavor to remember the very best thing we stuffed down our gullets over the past 24 hours. Why? Because the only thing better than enjoying a meal is wallowing in the memory of one savored in the recent past. Today's fond reminiscences ... Robe ... More >>

The Best Thing I Ate Yesterday

Welcome to The Best Thing I Ate Yesterday, where we endeavor to remember the very best thing we stuffed down our gullets over the past 24 hours. Why? Because the only thing better than enjoying a meal is wallowing in the memory of one savored in the recent past. Today's fond reminiscences ... Vict ... More >>

Mayor Bloomberg Cutting Carbs, Pudding in Jail

​Prisoners at Rikers Island will eat less thanks to Michael Bloomberg's budget cuts, which are now coming for carbohydrates. Instead of eight slices of whole wheat bread every day, inmates will get six as part of a $1.6 billion budget adjustment proposed this week, the Daily News is reporting. ... More >>

City Unsure If Soda Really Makes You Fat

​The New York Times got its hands on some internal e-mails today that show how desperate city health department officials were to sell a "soda makes you fat" campaign in an effort to boost support for a penny-per-ounce soda tax proposal that ultimately fizzled.

Best Of NYC: How a Chock Full o' Nuts Opening Means the City's Back

The Best Thing I Ate Yesterday

Welcome to The Best Thing I Ate Yesterday, where we endeavor to remember the very best thing we stuffed down our gullets over the past 24 hours. Why? Because the only thing better than enjoying a meal is wallowing in the memory of one savored in the recent past. Today's fond reminiscences ... Robe ... More >>

Rikers Island Carrot Cake: To Die For?

Not From Riker's​The New York Times City Room blog has the inside scoop (slice?) on the sweetest thing at Riker's Island: the bakery culture, but specifically the carrot cake. "They don't hardly give it to us enough," said Hilberto Vargas, a baker currently serving time in Rikers for stripping ... More >>

Finnish Ruis Bread Harnesses the Powers of Rye

Ruis bread, decked out in butter and cucumbers.​ While the idea of a freshly-baked loaf of bread -- or really anything that emerges from a burning oven -- isn't overtly appealing in the middle of a heat wave, Finnish ruis bread provides an unlikely balm to the crippling temperatures.

Food Companies Pledge to Remove 1.5 Trillion Calories From Their Products

thisiswhyyourefat.com1.5 trillion calories...​Yesterday, a coalition of food companies pledged to remove 1.5 trillion calories from their products by 2015. The announcement from the group, the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation, was made yesterday by Michelle Obama at a White House press con ... More >>

Pat LaFrieda Meatpacking Space to Become an Art Gallery; Whole Foods to Stop Stocking Raw Milk

​Wtih 12 new cases of illness in the Midwest linked to unpasteurized milk, the raw milk debate is heating up, leading Whole Foods to pull raw milk from its shelves. [Wall Street Journal] Environmental activists have been attacking Nestlé over YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter for its purchases ... More >>

Is Freekeh the Next Big Grain?

MlleNoelle.wordpress.comWill chefs get freekeh fever?​ Contained within the Times' glowing review of the Northern Spy Food Company is a mention of the restaurant's risotto, which is made from freekeh, a roasted green wheat. The grain, combined with the risotto's butter and mascarpone, earns th ... More >>

There's Poo In Your Coke; Smoky Foods May Be Toxic

​Curtis Allina, the candy company executive responsible for the modern Pez dispenser, has died at age 87. The former vice-president of what is now Pez Candy helped develop the first character dispensers, which became highly collectible. [NY Times] A recent study reveals that nearly half of al ... More >>

Tavern on the Green Donates Two Tons of Food; New York Has Its Own Grain Belt

​Taiwan is looking to mend trade ties with the U.S. after recently repealing its decision to import U.S. beef products. A change to Taiwan's food safety laws made some U.S. beef products no longer eligible for import. [Reuters] New York's grain belt is being revived and expanded with specialt ... More >>

A New Food Network On the Way; Julia Child Contemporary Charlotte Snyder Turgeon Dies

​Scripps Networks has plans to launch a cooking-focused TV channel next year, called the Cooking Channel, that will replace Fine Living. The company has a growing appetite for food programming following a joint venture to bring the Food Network to Europe. [Wall Street Journal] New Jersey can ... More >>

The Top 10 Riskiest Foods Features Some Unlikely Culprits

​Though spinach, berries, and tomatoes don't have a place on the This Is Why You're Fat honor roll, they are newly minted members of an even more dubious club: the Center for Science in the Public Interest's Top 10 Riskiest Foods list, which was published today. Though some of the foods, such ... More >>

Organic Groceries Come to the Other Park Avenue

Clinton Hill Blog brings news that a new organic grocery store is opening this week in the old Chocolate Factory building on Park Avenue. The store, called Fresh Fanatic, will be situated under the BQE, on the border between Clinton Hill and the Navy Yards. According to its owner, it will have a sus ... More >>

Regional Indian Cooking: Making Chapatis

Chapatis are simple, griddled whole-wheat flatbreads, a staple over much of India. In some places they're called rotis, but in Mumbai, where my husband's family is from, it's chapatis all the way, eaten with almost every meal no matter how basic or extravagant. His grandmother's chapatis are legen ... More >>

A New Deputy Food Commissioner Will Protect Us From Our Food Here at Home; Codex Alimentarius Does the Job On a Global Scale

The Obama administration has created a new deputy food commissioner post in an effort to better curb salmonella and E. coli contamination following a rash of outbreaks in the last year, including the peanut product recall, the largest in U.S. history. An improved tracing system for identifying the o ... More >>

Small Fancy Foods & Big Spoiled Food

Spoiled food alert: The latest in food safety scares is JBS Swift Beef's expanded recall of 380,000 pounds of meat products potentially contaminated with E. coli. Some 24 illnesses in multiple states prompted the investigation in the products. [Newsday] Oh, no they didn't! The Nestle plant at the c ... More >>

Food Nazi Gives Healthy Eating a Bad Name

Photo borrowed from jessicagottlieb.com Yesterday, we pointed to a Times piece about MeMe Roth, the Upper West Side mother of two who has her kids sneak any junk food they've been given at school into a Tupperware she calls a "junk food collector" so that they can bring it back to her and she can u ... More >>

Cookbook Tester: Takashi's Noodles

Wakame Soba (the photos in the book are much prettier than mine)Takashi's Noodles by Takashi Yagihashi is a new cookbook from 10 Speed Press containing Yagihashi's exacting and precise recipes for Japanese noodles. The chapters are broken up by noodle type: ramen, soba, udon, somen, Asian noodles ( ... More >>

Medical Headlines of the Day

Gillibrand Supports Sliced Apples For, and From, New York

New senator Kirsten Gillibrand hasn't been able to do much lately besides get in and out of trouble about her guns. Such is the lot of a senate noob even in the best of circumstances. But, perhaps aware that all politics is local, she's going outside the U.S. senate, teaming with state senator Darr ... More >>

Obama Eats Food, Roams Halls, Reports ABC

What's Jake Tapper up to as ABC's senior White House correspondent? Today he reported on the President's life in the White House. "At 6:45 (super: digital watch) he's in the gym," Tapper told a breathless nation; Obama runs on a treadmill and listens to Jay-Z (brief musical sting). His "heathful" br ... More >>

Gioia Wants Queens Costco to Accept Food Stamps

Tax Day Special: Cheapest Meal Possible

Treasure Hunting: Your local Supermarket

Air-Frying: Just Hot Air?

Whole Foods, Bowery: The Hippest Supermarket Ever, or Something