How to Eat Like Muhammad | Anthony Rogers

According to Islam, human beings don't know how to eat properly without guidance from Allah. Fortunately, Muhammad told his followers the correct way to eat. Muslims must eat and drink using three fingers of the right hand. Anyone who eats or drinks with the left hand is imitating Satan, who eats and drinks with his left hand.

Prince Charles Tells America to Cut Down on Steaks ... for the Sake of the World
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: America's appetite for beef is jeopardising the world's water supply, the Prince of Wales said during a visit to the US.

In a speech in Washington, the Prince said that the need for vast amounts of irrigation in industrialised food production was threatening to deplete reserves of the "magical substance we have taken for granted for so long".

"For every pound of beef produced in the industrial system, it takes two thousand gallons of water," he told the Future of Food conference at Georgetown University.

"That is a lot of water and there is plenty of evidence that the Earth cannot keep up with the demand." » | Jon Swaine, in Washington | Thursday, May 05, 2011

Only in America! Fatty Food as Lifestyle Choice
Welcome to the Heart Attack Grill, a Texan restaurant that celebrates cholesterol.

The pick of the menu? The quadruple bybass burger.



Al Jazeera's Rob Reynolds reports on how some people are choosing to buck the politically correct healthy eating trend.

Five a Day 'Will Not Stop Cancer'
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Eating fresh fruit and vegetables will not protect you from cancer as they have little effect compared with alcohol and obesity, a study finds.

Official guidelines recommend at least five portions of fruit and vegetables a day in order to be healthy but new research has found that this may not have a substantial effect on cancer.

The science suggests that people should be told that cancer risk is much more related to how much you eat and drink rather than what you eat.

The review, published in the British Journal of Cancer, looks at a decade of evidence on the links between fruit and vegetables and the development of cancer, but it concludes that the evidence is still not convincing.

The only diet-related factors that definitely affect cancer risk are obesity and alcohol, they discovered.

Tobacco is still the single biggest cause of cancer.

While smoking increases the risk of cancer by as much as 50 fold, even large consumptions of fruit and veg will only reduce the risk by a maximum of 10 per cent. Read on and comment >>> Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent | Wednesday, December 01, 2010

McDonald's Targeted in US Health Ad
THE GUARDIAN: Unhappy meals: American doctors' TV ad features a corpse holding a hamburger and the line 'I was lovin' it'. McDonald's, which has thrived in the recession, isn't laughing



It is an image to sap the flabbiest of appetites. An overweight, middle-aged man lies dead on a mortuary trolley, with a woman weeping over his body. The corpse's cold hand still clutches a half-eaten McDonald's hamburger.

A hard-hitting US television commercial bankrolled by a Washington-based medical group has infuriated McDonald's by taking an unusually direct shot at the world's biggest fast-food chain this week, using a scene filmed in a mortuary followed by a shot of the brand's golden arches logo and a strapline declaring: "I was lovin' it."

The line is a provocative twist on McDonald's long-standing advertising slogan, "I'm lovin' it" and a voiceover intones: "High cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart attacks. Tonight, make it vegetarian."

The commercial, bankrolled by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), goes further than most non-profit advertising and has drawn an angry reaction from both the Chicago-based hamburger multinational and the broader restaurant industry. >>> Andrew Clark in New York | Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Pope's Pantry a Hymn to Glories of Grease
NZ HERALD: Italians impressed by Pope Benedict's good health and quick mind at the age of 83 have been shocked to learn that the German Pontiff's favourite recipes are a suicidal mix of fried, buttery and carnivorous pleasures.

The glimpse of Joseph Ratzinger's culinary wish list is granted by a new book, Eat Like a Pope, which details, in all their greasy glory, the top dishes served in the Ratzinger household in Bavaria by his mother before the war.

A cholesterol roller-coaster, the recipes range from stuffed pigeon with butter, cream and sherry, to soup with liver and onion dumplings, to the "exquisite butter and jam biscuits" that young Joseph loved.

Publisher De Agostini says the book is already into its second edition since publication last month, despite coinciding with the child abuse scandal swirling around the Vatican.

But Italian weekly L'Espresso warned children against attempting to follow the Ratzinger diet if they wanted to grow up to be Pope themselves.

"With these dishes, there is the risk of not reaching adulthood at all," the magazine stated. "This is a triumph of animal fats, sugar and cholesterol." >>> Tom Kington | Monday, June 21, 2010

The Coarsening of Western Society!
Photo of a typical British, middle-class dining room of yesteryear courtesy of The Telegraph
The trend of doing away with the dining-room is to be lamented. It shows that British society is coarsening; it also shows that family life is becoming more and more casual – far too casual, in fact.

The dining-room was at one time an essential room in the house. No self-respecting housewife would have wanted to be without one. It really wouldn’t have been the ‘done thing’. These days, however, anything goes. Pop- and entertainment-culture has taken over. Mothers don’t wish to cook anymore; and their children don’t want to sit down to eat, let alone dine; rather, so many of our young prefer to eat ‘on the hoof’, watching the box, or listening to their favourite ‘cool’ music. Many, I’m sure, eat whilst they surf the Web.

To so many people these days, because they don’t think for themselves, following the likes of Posh and Becks or Jamie Oliver or Kathie Lette has become de rigueur, and far more important than convention.

Let Posh and Becks and their ilk do their thing. The experience of dining is something which really shouldn’t be lost to our children. Heaven knows our children have become coarse enough already!

If we apply the logic that it is wasteful of one’s money and resources to buy dining-room furniture or silverware, and too much trouble to use the dining-room, then we might as well use the same logic and throw out the dinner plates too. The family can eat out of the carton, standing in front of the refrigerator, using their fingers. How civilized and uplifting that will be! I dare say, many already do eat this way. Need we wonder why so many people have no manners anymore, let alone any dining etiquette?

Ultimately, if we want to be super-efficient, we can do as the Bedouins do: We can use one huge round plate, placed on the floor, sit cross-legged in a circle around it, and eat with our fingers – right hand, of course! (The left hand is used for unclean things.)

Perhaps this is all part and parcel of the next stage in the Islamization of our culture!

It is so sad that Britain, once a nation which led the world in matters of etiquette, is in the process of losing all that we have held so dear for so long. A few days ago, we got news that Gordon Brown was doing away with Britannia on the back of our 50p pieces; now we hear of the demise of our dining-rooms.

I promise you, one day, we shall come to rue the day that we dispensed with all that was considered refined. - ©Mark

THE TELEGRAPH: Britons can't be bothered with separate eating areas, says Alice Thomson. We want home cinemas instead

First it was fish knives and finger bowls, next went napkin rings and decanters, then mustard pots and marmalade spoons, now the British are throwing out the entire dining room. We have had enough of them.

They were usually dingy affairs anyway, the place where mothers laid out sewing patterns and fathers filled out tax returns, where children were told to keep their elbows off the table and great aunts served prune juice. With their swag curtains and brown furniture, they were a sign that you had finally made it to the middle classes.

In days gone by, they also facilitated the dating game, as Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, explains: "Dining rooms were vital in the 18th century. It was one of the few ways that a man could meet a single woman." Times have changed; the internet takes care of social introductions now.

No one shows off about their dining rooms anymore. Dining rooms were for hostess trolleys and hot plates, vol-au-vents and souffles. They required a huge amount of effort. If you have a dining room you can't serve the carrots out of the saucepan.

You have to put them in a serving dish. Even the ice-cream has to be decanted and, along with the rest of the food, either has to be trundled along a corridor or dispatched through a hatch in the wall.

The washing-up involved in having a dining room is horrendous. Most are also filled with silver which means several hours a week polishing the candelabra. And the cutlery. You must have serious cutlery, as well as a proper dinner service. Then there are curtains to think about and formal chairs. You have to dress the part too. Pyjamas look as out of place as a milk carton at a dining room table.

It's easy to see why the dining room has gone the way of trifles and Christmas pudding. It requires too much perspiration. Far easier to knock the kitchen and the dining room into one huge space and let the children use it as a football pitch and grazing ground.

Everyone has open kitchens now, from David Cameron to Posh and Becks and Jamie Oliver. Guests on Location, Location are more likely to ask for wet rooms than dining rooms. Kathy Lette, the comedienne, changed hers into a television room because she "loathes entertaining". Even the Queen prefers having her breakfast out of tupperware in an informal atmosphere. Dining rooms are not cut out for modern life >>>

Mark Alexander (Paperback)
Mark Alexander (Hardback)

The Shrinking World of Food

Photo of the Ayme family of Tingo, Ecuador courtesy of TIME

TIME: Originally the food of emperors, the cuisine known as kaiseki is the pinnacle of Japanese eating—and few restaurants serve a more refined menu than Kikunoi, in the former imperial capital of Kyoto. The experience begins before a single plate is served, with the setting: a tatami-mat room, bare save for the tokonoma, the alcove in the corner that displays a single scroll of calligraphy and a seasonally appropriate flower, today a lily. Then the food begins to flow, course after course of carefully trimmed portions, delivered by a kimono-clad server: a single piece of sea-bream sushi wrapped in bamboo leaf, a tiny grilled ayu fish with water-pepper vinegar, fried prawns and bamboo shoots with an egg-yolk-and-cream sauce. Kaiseki dining is the product of centuries of cultural evolution, but though Kikunoi is high-end—as the bill will indicate—its cuisine is meant to be a grand elaboration of the basic Japanese home meal: rice, fish, pickles, vegetables and miso soup, artfully presented in small, healthy portions.

"I believe that Japanese cuisine is something embedded in Japanese people's DNA," says Kikunoi's owner, Yoshihiro Murata. That may be true, but it's a legacy under assault, increasingly crowded out by fast, convenient, Westernized food. These days, Murata says sadly, his college-age daughter doesn't see much difference between cheap restaurant food and the haute cuisine he makes. "I think that in Japan, people should eat good Japanese food," he says. "But they are far away from it."

Japan is not alone. Food and diet are the cornerstones of any culture, one of the most reliable symbols of national identity. Think of the long Spanish lunch followed by the afternoon siesta, a rhythm of food and rest perfectly suited to the blistering heat of the Iberian peninsula in summer. Think of the Chinese meal of rice, vegetables and (only recently) meat, usually served in big collective dishes, the better for extended clans to dine together. National diets come to incorporate all aspects of who we are: our religious taboos, class structure, geography, economy, even government. When we eat together, "we are ordering the world around us and defining the community most important to us," says Martin Jones, a bioarchaeologist at Cambridge University and author of the new book Feast: Why Humans Share Food.

Even the traditions we learn from others we adopt and adapt in ways that make them our own. Japan received chopsticks from China and tempura from Portugal. Tomatoes, that staple of pasta and pizza, arrived in Southern Europe only as part of the Columbian Exchange (so-called because of Christopher Columbus' journeys to the New World, where tomatoes originated). "A lot of what we think of as deeply rooted cultural traditions are really traceable back to global exchange," says Miriam Chaiken, a nutritional anthropologist at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. How the World Eats (more) By Bryan Walsh

Mark Alexander