Archive for 2014

You are not who you think you are. You are not yourself. You are merely a vessel for a bazillion, gadrillion bacteria who live in your gut, and who control your every move, action and thought. Those tiny guys call the shots, not you. About your health, your weight, your emotional well-being, your longevity, your voting choices, your internet provider. Everything. Really. And the more we learn about them, the more clearly we see that. But, if you are like literally everyone else ever, since the invention of Penicillin—the first antibiotic, your gut may not be itself either. Because rounds and rounds of antibiotics over a lifetime wipe out those tiny dictators, and once they’re dead, it’s hard to get them back up to their fighting numbers.

And losing those little critters can mean a lifetime of illness, especially autoimmune disorders, and even worse, obesity. Because when you wipe out the gut flora, the body reacts by gaining weight, and this may well be a contributing factor to the epidemic of obesity around the world. Well, that and all the Foodiness™, and all the soda, and the triple meat stuffed-crust pizza and the pillow-sized bags of cheezy puffs and the peanut butter-cup flavored cereal and the rainbow-flavored “go-gurt”. That stuff doesn’t help much, either.

The lunatic fringe (me) has been screaming about this stuff for years, and now the very un-fringe-like New York Times has taken up the call. Hard to believe, but it’s finally on, and the fringe is winning. An article in Sunday’s Times confirms it, along with another very odd and very BIG coincidence in my life that also confirms that my life is full of odd coincidences…and it’s all in tonight’s show. So tonight, on “Let’s Get Real, the cooking show about finding, preparing and eating FOOD”, we take a look at the situation. From celebrity sighting in the mountains of New Hampshire, to my newly Paleo-eating niece, to scab covered crazy ladies in Portland, it’s all here, and it’s all live tonight at 6:30 on www.heritageradionetwork.org, or later on www.letsgetrealshow.com

On tonight’s episode of Let’s Get Real…the truth is revealed! The truth about where I come from, and who or what created me. No, not my very short Jewish parents of Eastern European descent, they barely had anything to do with it. My true ancestor, the holder of my DNA, the source of all of this darkness and doom, turns out to be Howard Beale, the legendary protagonist of the brilliantly dark 1976 film “Network”! I never realized it, but after attending a screening at the Museum of the Moving Image, and a discussion by David Itzkoff and Keith Olbermann afterwards, (Itzkoff just wrote a book about the film), I now know. I get it. The truth has been revealed. Forget being the Jon Stewart of Food, I’m the Howard Beale of food! But with much better teeth…Wow did people have ugly teeth in 1976. What was Fay Dunaway thinking?

And after watching two straight weeks of Olympic coverage, and the endless parade of advertising that enveloped it, I can tell you this. If those guys in “Network” thought the lines between corporations and people, capitalism and journalism, truth and advertising were breaking down back in ’76, they had NO idea what was coming down the slushy half-pipe a few decades later. Athletes eating sh*t for money? That’s nothing new. How about the surreal, rabbit hole-y image of your favorite radio host dressing up as a hungry homeless person for a photo shoot about homeless people and hunger? Confused? All will be revealed in this new episode of Let’s Get Real, The Cooking Show About Finding, Preparing, and Eating FOOD.

And to paraphrase Howard Beale…I’m mad as hell about Foodiness™, and I’m not gonna take it anymore!

Since it hasn’t snowed in at least 12 hours here in NYC, it means I can finally get out of the house and back to business. The superhero business of unmasking Foodiness™ for you! And since we got the marshmallow peeps-biofueled snow plow up and running this year here at the Foodiness™ Fallout Shelter, I can finally get out to the garage. So in this episode of Let’s Get Real, I take the Foodiness™ Time Machine out of storage, and take a trip down the salad rabbit hole. Down and back to where the grilled chicken salads grow, back to the late 90’s and early 2000’s. Back to the place where we’re all fearfully afraid of fat, and a dry, tough, tasteless grilled chicken breast is the supposed answer to our chubby prayers. Especially if it’s served over mixed greens, with fat-free raspberry-balsamic-poppyseed-ranch dressing. And oat-bran crackers.

It lives down there, lurking, waiting for an extinction or an obsolescence that never seems to come. Because it never dies, somewhere there’s someone ordering a grilled chicken salad, and that one person keeps it alive. There’s a whole colony of irrelevant salads living down there, the Waldorf, the iceberg wedge, the jello…they’re all on life support, but the grilled chicken is the strongest.

But once we get down there, to the place where the most unfortunate chicken parts sleep on their downy beds of salad, we’re going to do a little housecleaning, and eradicate the most famous salad of that era, and install a new queen of the overexposed salad world, the gem of the 20-teens, the Kale Salad. Because as overexposed and cliche as it may be, it’s so much better than anything else ever gone as mainstream, as quickly, in the salad column of the chain restaurant menu.

And while we’re in the Time Machine, I’ll show you around the newly renovated pantry and kitchen, and maybe we’ll throw together a winter vegetable salad, sound good? Just because its winter, it doesn’t mean your salad eating has to stop. You just need a little imagination, guidance, dare I say mentoring…perhaps? I’m here for you, I’m your mentor, and if you’ll just listen to and do every single thing I say and pay close attention, you could learn something.

So if you don’t want to eat salad sh*t or look like an un-mentored buffoon, listen to this episode of Let’s Get Real, and improve yourself.