Fish heads, fish heads, roly-poly fish heads....

There are things my great- grandmothes recognized as food that I simply will not. Never. Lutefisk, people.

Fish heads, yes; but, good fricken luck convincing me to eat those.

Fish heads are delicious! You just need to put them through a food mill to get rid of all the sharp and icky bits. And also try not to look at them too much while they're cooking, because eyes are creepy.

Nutty, your great-grandmothers wouldn't have recognized tomatoes as food?

(I don't know what my great-grandmothers would have recognized as food, but I'm pretty sure that tomatoes, bok choi, tofu, and avocadoes would not have been on the list. Fish heads, yes; but, good fricken luck convincing me to eat those.)

Well, it's more the idea that someone from a couple of generations ago would recognize yogurt as a concept, but not much of what is sold as yogurt.

The only thing that bugged me about In Defense of Food was his assumption that everyone eats like the average American. So he says things like "you have this much soy/corn/salt in your diet because you eat this", when, in reality, I don't eat that. So please say "average American" and not "you".

Fish heads are delicious!

mmmm sardine cheeks!

Salon's How the World Works column talked briefly about the Omnivore's Dilemna on Friday, specifically about how the situation regarding the price of corn has changed since he wrote it:

If one had to choose one sentence to sum up "Omnivore," it might be: Our diet sucks, because corn is too cheap.

Except, of course, now corn isn't cheap at all -- it's $5 a bushel (up from $2 at the beginning of 2006). Livestock owners are outraged, and food security in the developing world is the new rallying cry for activists of all persuasions. The price of food is once again a political issue. In the space of barely 18 months we've gone from a scenario in which American farmers routinely overproduced to one in which they can't possibly produce enough to satisfy demand. The prospect of this coming to pass is never even hinted at by Pollan. Indeed, one could almost imagine him applauding, if he had been told when "Omnivore" was originally published that two years later the beef industry would be screaming bloody murder about how ethanol had forced the cost of cattle feed sky-high. Fantastic news! Cows were never designed to eat corn! High fructose corn syrup isn't healthy!. Make corn more expensive, and maybe Americans will be a little less obese.

Maybe this explains why, as Pollan was recently quoted saying in a San Francisco Chronicle feature, that his next book might be on the topic of ethanol.

If I were a cannibal, I wouldn't want the people-heads either.

Nutty, your great-grandmothers wouldn't have recognized tomatoes as food?

I don't think so. Even if they'd fully made the transition from "ew, they're poisonous!" to "yum," which I'm not sure about the timing of, I don't think they were grown much in my region at that time. They're difficult to raise from seeds with such a short growing season, unless you've got a lot of leisure and indoor space at your disposal.

I bet Mark Bittman doesn't mean for me to be eating tomatoes canned in lead tins, with whatever scary stuff might have been mixed into them!

(Also, my great-grandmothers were Anglo enough that I bet they regarded the tomato as suspiciously "ethnic.")

Indeed, one could almost imagine him applauding, if he had been told when "Omnivore" was originally published that two years later the beef industry would be screaming bloody murder about how ethanol had forced the cost of cattle feed sky-high. Fantastic news!

One can imagine me applauding right now. What's their point?

A few escape Sunnydale, but many are trapped.

Whoa - that headline caused a double-take.