Category: nutrition
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Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken (Cornerstone Press, 2023)
Definitions of Tragedy When I mentioned in my last blog that everyone inevitably suffers tragedy, that’s not quite correct – some people do escape it – because tragedy refers to untimely death. The death of parents, even though it might feel tragic to their children, is not a tragedy (unless those children were really young)…
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Jules Clancy’s new e-book, Love Your Waistline and Your Food
Jules Clancy (pictured) was living in Cooma when I first discovered her blog, https://thestonesoup.com and I was working at the National Rural Health Alliance. Jules was a good example of an enterprising rural woman and I shared much of her nutritional and culinary advice as well as her blogs and books with my readers. She…
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Titans and sex goddesses: on Tim Ferriss and Helen Gurley Brown
What do you have for breakfast? This is one of the questions that Tim Ferriss asks those he interviews in his Tools of Titans: the tactics, routines and habits of billionaires, icons, and world-class performers (Vermilion, 2016). Protein shakes are popular with many of these titans. Tim Ferriss (See www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog ) is the best-selling American…
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Eating real food: a quick comparison of cookbooks
‘Gosh it’s easy to write a cookbook. Well, it’s easy if your primary role is “quality control”, and all the actual work is done by seasoned professionals and my slave-driven wife,’ writes David Gillespie in the Acknowledgements of his The Sweet Poison Quit Plan Cookbook (Melbourne, Viking, 2013, p. 199). He states that he ‘did…
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A kinder way to treat a potato
‘Don’t get your food from the same place your car does.’ This is the advice of writer Michael Pollan. American petrol stations make more money from food and cigarettes than from petrol. It’s very probably the same here in Australia. And the food is all ‘Highly process non-perishable snack foods and extravagantly sweetened soft drinks…’…
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Eliminating the Inessential
‘Creativity has more to do with the elimination of the inessential than with inventing something new.’ Helmut Jahn. That’s out of a book by Alena Hennessy called Cultivating Your Creative Life. I buy these things but never have time to read them. But I can flip through them and get a lot from the gorgeous…
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My father gave me the gift of sleep
‘At our most moving moments are we not all without words?’ Marcel Marceau, the famous French mime artist said that. Or wrote it, I suppose. It’s enigmatic and powerful, I reckon, because it says so much. Doris Lessing had a phrase about the thinning of language against the density of our experience. But you wouldn’t…
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Playing with language and playing with food
This blog is about language and literature and health and life so today I’m going to share the websites and blogs of three people who improve our mental and physical lives by their brilliant ideas – the first one is Jules Clancy, the second Sarah Wilson and the third a Canadian guy called James Harbeck.…