My husband is from a red-meat loving family; its not dinner unless it bled on the way there. I myself was raised by very omnivorous folks, we can throw down BBQ with the best of them, but beans and rice were also a staple. The first time I served dear hubby our favorite summer-time supper; big garden salad with chopped boiled eggs and a sprinkiling of Baco-s with chewy whole grain bread, he ate it up! And then asked what was for dinner.

There's an column in the Washington Post today that brings up a subject that is intriguing to me.

Fiona Mathews of the University of Exeter and her colleagues studied 740 women who were pregnant for the first time.The more calories they consumed in the year before they got pregnant the greater their chances of ending up with a boy. Fifty-six percent of the women who ate the most calories had boys compared to 45 percent of those who consumed the least, the researchers reported this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

When the researchers examined exactly what the women ate, those who tended to eat cereal for breakfast were the most likely to have a boy. That's right: A big bowl of cereal. Same goes for potassium and salt -- providing support for those old wives tales.

Since I have one daughter and one son, this made me try to think back about my eating habits prior to each of their conceptions.

so, the other forum i spend too many working hours checking obsessively is a work related one, cheftalk.com.
there have been a couple of recent posts from some of my fellow (male) chefs about parents bringing their children into fine dining restaurants, as well as some sneering remarks about feeding children chicken fingers and pasta.
http://www.cheftalk.com/forums/late-night-cafe-non-food-cooking-discussion/42497-magnum-opus-touchy- subject.html
and:
http://www.cheftalk.com/forums/professional-chef-s-forum/42473-people-their-stupid-kids.html

Remember the farm bill? It's baaaaaaaaaack. I wrote this post today where I showed how Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-CO) is raking in campaign cash from out-of-state sugar industry interests while stating that she wants to preserve the decades-old sugar price support program.

Maybe you are interested in doing similar digging into your representative's campaign cash--check here to see if your representative is, like Musgrave, on the conference committee to hammer out the final version of the legislation. If so, give me a shout--I'd love to help you along--and indeed, that's an official part of my job description in my new gig with the Sunlight Foundation.

A new study came out linking diet soft drinks to the development of metabolic syndrome, a set of symptoms that indicates a high risk for cardiovascular disease and diabetes.  This is a prospective study that assessed the dietary intake of over 9000 metabolically normal middle-aged participants, then followed them for 9 years watching for the development of metabolic syndrome.

Unsurprisingly, high intakes of meat and fried food were positively correlated with metabolic syndrome while dairy appeared to be weakly protective.  But the strong correlation with diet soft drinks was not predicted.

If you've met me, even for five minutes, you know that I hate the US food industry with great gusto. Every single day, though I try very hard not to, I read something about the obesity epidemic and the alarming rates of depression, anxiety, ADHD, bipolar disorder, heart disease, diabetes, cancer. The list of woes goes on ad fricking infinitum.

Before I rip on the government, who should be watching over the food industry to ensure that our food supply is safe and nutritious, but most assuredly isn't, not only because they are fascist bastards who love corporate goodies, but also because they are f#@king idiots who know absolutely nothing about health or nutrition....breathe.....before I rip on them, let me say that the joke known as the food pyramid has actually, finally, been revised a tiny bit in the right direction. Still, the pyramid only addresses the quantities of food that should be consumed and doesn't speak a word about nutrition, so it's still pretty worthless.

It's National School Lunch Week, and I'm glad President Bush has proclaimed it—part of his ongoing commitment to our children's health. (Yeah, right.) How to celebrate such an occasion? Whip up a batch of "American Chop Suey," a meat, tomatoes, and macaroni mixture I remember from my own tray-carrying days? Throw some canned fruit into orange Jello and have a party?

I think a better way is to share the advice of Chef Ann Cooper, the "renegade lunch lady" with a mission to improve the quality of school food in our nation and instill our children with healthy habits for life. In honor of this week, she suggests in her podcast, "I think every single parent in America should go and eat lunch with children at their schools and really see if the food they're eating in their schools is delicious and nutritious."

Her current podcast is also a good introduction to her ideas on how schools can find money to serve fresh foods, things parents can do to build healthy habits in their kids, and why we need to make childhood food and nutrition a priority in the U.S. In fact, she wants to make the issue of school-lunch funding "part of the 2008 presidential debate," as she told me last December when I spoke with her and reviewed her book Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children. Below are a few of the sobering statistics from that post; here's the full original.

• Children born in the year 2000 will be the first in our country's history to die at a younger age than their parents.
• More than 35 percent of our nation's children are overweight, 25 percent are obese, and 14 percent have type 2 diabetes, a condition previously seen primarily in adults.
• Current research shows that 40 percent of all cancers are attributable to diet.
• 78 percent of the schools in America do not actually meet the USDA's nutritional guidelines.

Are you happy with the lunch options in your school district? Discuss, or take the poll.

Most of us have complaints about our kid's school menus. Let's see how ugly it is and how good the exceptions are. For the bad, tell us what needs to change and post an image of the menu. For the good, how did the change come about? What did the school do to make this possible and what can we other parents learn from the experience to send to OUR schools. I want to gather a list of the stories, create one huge post and then send a link to what works to my kid's school. You can send a link to your kid's school. Just let them know you want better options and you know it is possible.

Send it to parents in your school district. Use it as a talking point. Whatever.

Here's how:

1. Post an image or text of the current menu along with why/how it is good or bad.

2. Go to this post.

3. Leave me a comment with the link and I will gather all the links into one big post in a month from now. We can all see what shows up. Hopefully some good lessons.

Fewer than a third of American adults eat the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables, according to a new study by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The government's goal is for 75 percent of Americans to have two servings of fruits and 50 percent to have three servings of vegetables each day by 2010. (A serving is a cup of leafy greens or a half-cup of other fruits and vegetables.)

It can't help their cause to have presidents (George H. W.) who say things like "I do not like broccoli. And I haven't liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. I am President of the United States, and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli." Many of us also remember that during the Reagan era, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) tried to reclassify ketchup as a vegetable to help schools meet federal standards for reimbursable school lunches.

Columbia University law professor Michael C. Dorf has looked at the ketchup fiasco in an article that examines the concept of a "'natural kind'—a grouping with a sharp boundary determined by nature itself." The objection to the USDA, Dorf posits, was not that ketchup isn't 'really' a vegetable. It is, in fact, largely composed of tomatoes, which are vegetables. (Okay, they're a fruit, but close enough to a vegetable for our purpose here.) "Vegetable" is not, therefore, a "natural kind," since it could encompass items picked directly from a tree or processed into a tangy spread for hamburgers. Dorf concludes "The objection was that through the redefinition, the Department sought to permit states to avoid responsibility for providing healthy meals to kids."

This brings us, strangely enough, to same-sex marriage, as Dorf later turns his definitional analysis thither: