Quarantine Meals From Jennie Cook

...back to what she used to do: cook home meals for pickup and delivery. Her food is delicious and the portions are generous. If you live in the Los Angeles area consider ordering some food from her. It will support Jennie and her employees and you’ll get a break from cooking. On Saturday Jennie sent over a package with an Easter ham dinner. While I’ve enjoyed cooking from scratch for the past four weeks it was nice to have a special meal for a chan...

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Thomas Pynchon on Pizza

...I do remember Pynchon’s spot-on description of 1970s era California health food cooking, Prairie worked at the Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple, which a little smugly offered the most wholesome, not to mention the slowest, fast food in the region, a classic example of the California pizza concept at its most misguided. Zoyd was both a certified pizzamaniac and a cheapskate, but not once had he ever hustled Prairie for one nepotistic slice of the Bodhi Dh...

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Weekend Linkages: A Weird World

...Levi Walter Yaggy’s Geographical Maps and Charts Photographs of the Los Angeles Alligator Farm (ca. 1907) The Navajo farmer taking a traditional approach to making baby food Historic San Francisco tiki bar the Tonga Room is a rite of passage. But is it really worth visiting? ‘They’re in the air, drinking water, dust, food …’ How to reduce your exposure to microplastics Doppler Radar Telegram Critter Cam for Under $10!...

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Raw Pork Sandwich Anyone?

...ing continued, my aversion to barfing prompted an extended conversation on food safety that, as usual, left the question of the wisdom of culinary thrill seeking unanswered. Sometimes you just have to have to strap on the wingsuit and visit the raw oyster, fugu and Hackenpeter buffet line. In the case of raw pork the safety issues involve salmonella and, more rarely, trichinosis, which is caused by a nematode. Trichinosis is rare in Germany as all...

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The problem with polar fleece: it’s in the ocean, it’s in sea creatures, it’s on our plates

...lution in the ocean, they are also consumed by marine life. They enter the food chain. Confused bivalves and shrimp eat this stuff, and we eat them. In short, we are eating our fleece jackets. And nobody knows what health impacts all this ingestion of microplastics will have for us, or the sea creatures. The news first came to me, ironically enough, via Patagonia, purveyors of very expensive polar fleece. They’d commissioned a study on this, which...

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