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ST: Sweet on sour (Recipe for Pig Trotters in Black Vinegar)

This dish is something that I will never eat. However, according to my mom, it is good to take this during confinement (i.e. after giving birth). For those out there searching for recipe - happy reading and happy cooking.

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Lifestyle

Home > Lifestyle > Taste > Story

Apr 24, 2011

Sweet on sour

Maisy Koh's confinement dish of pig trotters calls for black sugar and black vinegar

By Rebecca Lynne Tan, Singapore Cooks

 

Chocolate is the one thing Ms Maisy Koh cannot live without.

The housewife confesses shyly that the dark, addictive confection is always in the refrigerator of her Bukit Timah condominium.

'Oh, I love chocolate,' says the 38-year-old mother of two, Sophie, two, and Sonya, nine months. Her husband, Dr Beh Swan Gin, is a civil servant.

Yet, whenever she dines out, she hardly picks chocolate desserts, such as lava cakes which ooze warm chocolate from its centre, simply because she can make it at home.

In fact, the former brand management professional who used to work for a luxury resort chain can bake almost anything - from muffins and breads for her kids to kueh salat (a Nonya cake of glutinous rice topped with a pandan-flavoured coconut jam) to fluffy pandan chiffon cakes and carrot cakes.

And it is for those reasons that she always has a good stash of unsalted butter in her fridge, too.

She says it is important to have certain ingredients such as butter and coconut milk in the pantry, just in case you need them at the last minute.

'We had some black glutinous rice the other day, and it needs a dash of coconut milk to go with it, too,' she adds.

But the home cook more than just bakes in her well-stocked kitchen.

She also smokes her own salmon with herbs such as kaffir lime leaves and thyme, as well as cooks Asian dishes like pig trotters in black vinegar. She shares the recipe below.

She admits she was never keen on the 'sourish fatty pork' dish, but enjoyed the one her confinement nanny Yat Yee prepared for her after she had Sonya.

'It is not my favourite dish, but I learnt to cook it because my mother loves it, and so does my mother-in-law,' she says.

The dish is traditionally prepared for mothers after the birth of their babies during the month-long confinement period, and it is also consumed by friends and family who visit the mother during this time.

Ms Koh likes Yat Yee's recipe because of the balance in flavours - the dish is sour yet sweet.

The recipe calls for black sugar, a very dark brown sugar that can be found at wet markets and supermarkets. Use refined white sugar or rock sugar instead, and you will not achieve the right taste, she explains.

She also recommends the Chan Kong Thye brand of black rice vinegar. 'Any other brand might do but I cannot guarantee the dish will turn out good,' she adds with a chuckle.

She took an interest in cooking when she was in primary school and would help her late paternal grandmother with menial kitchen tasks such as pounding condiments with a mortar and pestle.

As a child, she would also stand by her grandmother's side, watching intently as she wrapped bak chang, a glutinous rice dumpling filled with pork, wrapped in bamboo leaves.

She has since learnt to make the dumplings and also cooks dishes such as char siew, spare ribs and tang yuan (glutinous rice balls).

In fact, it seems no recipe fazes her and she is even keen to make gnocchi from scratch with older daughter, Sophie, some time soon.

She says with a laugh: 'I think Sophie will like it, and the recipe for gnocchi doesn't look like rocket science.'

rltan@sph.com.sg

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MAKE IT YOURSELF: PIG TROTTERS IN BLACK VINEGAR

INGREDIENTS

10 eggs

1 pig trotter, cut into large chunks

800g pork collar, cut into large chunks (about 10cm by 5cm each)

30ml sesame oil

300g old ginger, unpeeled and sliced

375ml black rice vinegar (1 bottle, Chan Kong Thye brand)

375ml water

1 Tbs light soya sauce

5 Tbs black sugar

1/2 tsp ground white pepper

METHOD

1. Put eggs into a pot of water and bring to a slow boil. Allow to boil for six minutes, drain and set aside. When cool enough to handle, peel the eggs and set them aside.

2. Bring another large pot of water to the boil. Blanch pig trotter and pork collar in the water.

3. Remove any impurities that might have risen to the surface of the pot. Take the meat out of the water. Clean it thoroughly and remove hairs from the skin. Set aside.

4. Pour sesame oil in a large pot over medium heat and fry ginger slices for about two minutes, until fragrant.

5. Pour the entire bottle of black vinegar into the pot. Then fill the empty vinegar bottle with water and pour the water into the pot as well.

6. Add soya sauce, sugar, pepper and hard-boiled eggs. Cover and allow to simmer gently for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally to keep the colour of the eggs even. Remove eggs and set aside.

7. Add pig trotter to the pot and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer gently for 30 minutes.

6. Add pork collar and bring to a boil again. Keep the pot on a rigorous simmer over medium heat, with the lid left ajar. Simmer for 1 to 11/2 hours, or until the meat is very tender.

7. Just before serving, scoop out any impurities that may have come to the surface such as the ginger skin. Place the eggs back into the pot.

8. When ready to serve, bring to a boil again. Serve hot.

Serves 6.

This recipe is featured in Heritage Feasts. The cookbook costs $75 and is available at major bookstores, the Miele boutique, 167 Penang Road, Winsland House II, B1-01, tel: 6738-6286, and online at www.webshop.miele.sg. All proceeds from book sales will go to Kidz Horizon.

NY Times: Doctor's Orders - Eat Well to Be Well

A doctor believes that in health circles, the kitchen should become as crucial as the clinic.

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September 21, 2010

Doctor’s Orders: Eat Well to Be Well

By KATRINA HERON

OAKLAND, Calif.

DR. PRESTON MARING was striding along a hospital corridor at double speed on a recent Friday morning, his tall frame, white hair and frequent gesticulations prompting waves of greetings from colleagues, who also took care to sidestep his forward momentum. His destination was the weekly farmers’ market he started in 2003, just outside the front door at the Kaiser Permanente medical center here.

“Since it’s mine, I made the rules — all organic,” he said as he skimmed by a line of stalls where fresh fruits and vegetables are sold to hospital workers, passers-by and even, he said, those bringing patients to the emergency room.

Dr. Maring, 64, a gynecologist and obstetrician with three decades as a surgeon, is well known as a former physician in chief at the hospital, the man who spearheaded the creation of its new pediatric neurosurgery unit.

But increasingly, his reputation and perpetual motion revolve around his conviction that in the health professions, the kitchen must become as crucial as the clinic. Food is at the center of health and illness, he argues, and so doctors must make all aspects of it — growing, buying, cooking, eating — a mainstay of their medical educations, their personal lives and their practices.

Though Dr. Maring blithely refers to himself as “that food nut around the hospital,” he is serious about the role he believes doctors should play in creating awareness of healthy food choices. To that end, he has worked to obtain fresh local food for hospital trays and in cafeterias. He began a Web site and blog that offers recipes and advice on meal planning and budgeting. He spent the summer working on a series of three-minute Web videos to explain the basics of shopping for healthful foods and efficient preparation techniques.

He also created a kind of culinary road show, which regularly takes him to health care institutions around the country, toting a PowerPoint presentation, a couple of plastic vegetable knives (“one of the great technological breakthroughs”), some salad ingredients and the makings of a vinaigrette.

“I like to put doctors on the spot,” he said, referring to his penchant for hauling a senior clinician up to the front of the room to chop vegetables with him. “We tend to be exalted, and I want to show the staffs that many of us don’t know how to mince garlic.”

If there was ever a time when doctors need to be as handy with a peeling knife as they are with a scalpel, this may be it. The draft version of the federal government’s 2010 Dietary Guidelines, which will be formally released in December, identifies obesity as the nation’s greatest public-health threat. It also notes the relationship of fast food (and physical inactivity) to unhealthy weight gain and emphasizes the importance of plant-based foods in the diet.

Despite evidence that doctors have a greater life expectancy than average, they don’t necessarily look after their own dietary health, said Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health. “You’ll have a pretty hard time these days finding a doctor who smokes, but not nearly as hard a time finding one who eats terrible food.” He recalled a major breakfast gathering he attended several years ago: “I came in a bit late and was struck by the surreal image of senior scientists feeding on junk while discussing solutions to national nutritional problems.“

Dr. Willett cited surveys showing that during examinations of obese patients, doctors often don’t remark on overweight as a health issue. “Many of them just avoid it,” he said, either because they doubt their counsel will be heeded or because they don’t know the issues well enough themselves, leading the patient to underestimate the gravity of the situation.

For many doctors, an uneasy relationship with nutrition starts as early as medical school. Long hours and ready access to fast food, often on the hospital grounds, tends to undermine students’ best dietary intentions, said Dr. Robert F. Kushner, a professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, where he directs the Center for Lifestyle Medicine. “Even the ones who come in excited about eating well and exercise find that good habits are harder and harder to maintain as time goes on,” Dr. Kushner said.

Dr. Maring’s son, Ben, 30, a fourth-year medical student at New York University School of Medicine, hopes to change that. Mr. Maring has developed a series of cooking classes that incorporate salient aspects of nutrition and clinical medicine. He named his scheme CHEF — for Cook Healthy, Eat Fresh.

In 2009, he began lugging duffel bags filled with cooking implements and ingredients from his Brooklyn apartment to the medical school campus on East 31st Street in Manhattan, where he commandeered a spare lounge and taught fellow students simple preparation techniques, introduced guest speakers in specialties like diabetes and endocrinology, and handed out reams of recipes.

“I thought it was important for medical students to learn how to cook and eat well,” he said. “I also thought it was important for us to walk the walk when it comes to counseling patients about the importance of diet. We get so little training in nutrition that I wanted to provide some basic knowledge.”

Dr. Maring said: “You should have seen him trying to drag a convection oven into a taxicab. We cooked together as a family when he was a kid, but he blew past me a long time ago. Now I’m his sous-chef.”

Ben Maring, who has his father’s imposing build and forceful personality, but with a quieter, more scholarly mien, first planned on a career as a chef and did a post-culinary-school apprenticeship at Thomas Keller’s Per Se restaurant in Manhattan in 2005.

“It was very much like the world of a hospital, where you’re on your feet the whole time, you have to make the right decisions very quickly, and you have to be highly self-motivated while also working as part of a team,” Mr. Maring said. Nor was Mr. Keller’s keen appraisal of the neophyte’s technique unlike the scrutiny he now endures on hospital rotations. “I remember being at the pass” — the area closest to the dining room — “about to sauce a plate, and Keller came and stood right next to me,” Mr. Maring said. “I was so nervous. I was trying to artfully drizzle a broken foie gras vinaigrette, and my hand was just shaking. He jokingly asked if I had had too much caffeine.”

Mr. Maring is encouraged that CHEF’s feedback surveys show students are developing confidence in their cooking skills, making better food choices and feeling more comfortable talking to patients about the links between diet and health. He is developing recipes geared to the seasonal offerings at a new farmers’ market at Bellevue Hospital Center, adjacent to the N.Y.U. medical campus, which was begun in July by Aviva Regev, 24, a third-year student and CHEF participant.

Mr. Maring has another ally in Benjamin Navot, 25, a third-year student who entered medical school directly after graduating from the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan and has taught some CHEF classes. Mr. Navot acknowledged that, like Mr. Maring, his perspective on food is greatly influenced by his previous experience. But he, too, senses a widespread interest in food and healthy eating among his peers.

“This is a generation that cares a lot more and knows a lot more about the importance of diet,” he said. “We need a system that educates physicians about nutrition, and we’re the ones who are going to have to fight for it.”

But the older generation can pick up a few new tricks, too. Preston Maring said that in some ways, his attempts to get more fresh local foods into hospitals have been reminiscent of his days as a young resident at Kaiser, particularly the need to climb a steep learning curve.

“I became the person who asks dumb questions constantly,” he said of the time he has spent over the last couple of years studying the technical aspects of food-distribution systems. “I just learned, for example, that cherry tomatoes with the stems still on are a no-go in an inpatient setting, and that at Kaiser there’s a specific size limit for an apple on a tray, because they’re stacked vertically for delivery.”

Kaiser Permanente, which is a provider and an insurer, is the largest nonprofit health care system in the country, with about 8 million members, 15,000 doctors and 170,000 employees, predominantly in western states. The sheer scale of Kaiser, which holds farmers’ markets at 30 sites, makes changing the way food is bought a challenge, but also an opportunity.

“We can leverage our size to create greater demand for healthy food,” Dr. Maring said. Kaiser Permanente Oakland, for example, serves 6,000 inpatient meals a day, 80 percent of which have no special restrictions.

“It’s difficult for farmers to crack the institutional supply chain,” he said. “We need a ‘universal adapter’ that can pair small producers with big customers.” Toward that end, he helped start a regional growers’ cooperative and joined the board of the nonprofit entity that administers it, the Community Alliance With Family Farmers.

Dr. Maring also envisions Kaiser’s role expanding into areas like environmental stewardship, and he has carved out a kind of subspecialty in institutional real estate, with the goal of eventually putting some of Kaiser’s undeveloped land into agriculture.

“As someone who relies on evidence-based medicine, it bothers me that we don’t have clear metrics to guide these food-related initiatives,” he said. “But for now, I remind myself of the enduring value of another care-giving principle: common sense.”

TIME: Organic Eggs - More Expensive, but No Heathier

Thursday, Jul. 08, 2010

Organic Eggs: More Expensive, but No Healthier

By Jeffrey Kluger

This year, like every year, has been a busy one for America's chickens. What the birds lack in smarts they make up for in work ethic, laying about 78 billion eggs annually (or 6.5 billion dozen), supplying a $7 billion industry. GM should be doing so well.

Like any other workers, hens turn out economy, premium and luxury products — known as factory, cage-free and organic eggs — and consumers pay accordingly. A recent survey conducted in one random city — Athens, Ga. — found factory eggs going for $1.69 per dozen, cage-free for $2.99 to $3.59, and organic for $3.99 to a whopping $5.38.

But it's worth it to pay more because you're getting a healthier product, right? Wrong. Most of the time, according to a just-released study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the eggs are indistinguishable. When there is a difference, it's often the factory eggs that are safer. (See pictures of chefs at work in the fields where their food is grown.)

The study, led by food technologist Deana Jones, was not designed to explore the question of which egg-laying conditions are best for the hens themselves — simply because there is no question. Factory hens are confined in what are known as battery cages, which leave them crowded and all but immobilized, reduced to little more than egg-laying machines. Free-range and organic chickens have different degrees of freedom to move and are raised on varying levels of higher-quality feed. There's no question what kind of life the birds prefer.

What Jones and her colleagues wanted to learn is whether a happy hen in fact produces a better product. To do that, they relied principally on something known as the Haugh unit — a highly specialized egg-quality metric developed by food technologist Raymond Haugh in 1937. The white of an egg is where all its protein is found; it's made of both thin albumen — the watery fluid that runs farthest from the yolk when the egg is cracked into a cold pan — and thick albumen, the more viscous fluid that stays closer to the middle. The greater the amount of thick albumen, the more nutritious the egg. (See TIME's special report on food labels.)

"The Haugh unit factors together the weight of the egg and the thickness of the albumen layer at the center," says Jones. And that number, she found in her study, is not affected a whit by how a hen is raised. "We found no meaningful differences at all," she says. "We sampled eggs from a number of stores and kept getting the same results over and over. For shoppers, the decision comes down to your ethical and moral choices."

That, at least, is all that's involved when it comes to egg nutrition. But what about safety? Don't organic eggs have the edge in terms of antibiotics and other contaminants? Surprisingly, the USDA has not devoted a great deal of study to the antibiotic question, mostly because the drugs are used sparingly in the egg-laying industry — at least compared with the cattle industry, in which even healthy animals are kept dosed to prevent infections. (See pictures of what makes you eat more food.)

"There's just very little research I've seen on this," says USDA immunologist and microbiologist Peter Holt. "Hens are not routinely treated with antibiotics, though they may be if they're sick." In those cases, the eggs the birds produce lose their organic designation temporarily, until the drugs have cleared their systems.

The bigger problem comes with the environmental contaminants, and here the factory eggs have the edge. Research in both the U.S. and the E.U. has shown that free-range chickens have higher levels of PCBs, simply because they get out more and can peck almost anywhere. "There was a study in California of a free-range or organic farm with a wood-processing facility nearby," says Holt. "The chickens there had 100 times the PCB level of battery-cage chickens." A Brazilian study found something similar with DDT, even though the pesticide, which is slow to degrade, hadn't been used in the area in nine years. "You really have to know the history of the land before you can be sure it's safe," Holt says.(Comment on this story.)

Another mistake some health-conscious consumers make — though it doesn't take the new USDA study to reveal it — is believing that the color of an egg makes a difference and that brown shells are somehow better than white ones. They're not. Color is determined entirely by the breed of chicken laying it, and the fact that brown eggs often cost a little more has nothing to do with quality. "It simply takes more feed to get a brown-shell species to lay," says Jones. "You're paying that additional production cost." As in any other industry, when the workers get a raise — even if it's chickenfeed — you'll see it on the price tag.

Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2002334,00.html

FT: Where organic food is new and ancient

Where organic food is new and ancient

By Joe Leahy in Mumbai

Published: June 3 2010 23:38 | Last updated: June 3 2010 23:38

A sign announcing the café inside Mumbai’s Farmers’ Market seems to sum up the whole enterprise: “Organic Café – Finally”.

The café, set in the market in tiny Nilgiri Garden at the heart of Bandra, a trendy northern suburb of India’s financial centre, serves popsicles that are flavoured naturally with palm syrup.

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But its ultra-chilled atmosphere (in spite of the soaring summer temperatures) belies the almost fanatical determination of its founders.

“These are the earth heroes of India, doing so much without really thinking about themselves,” Kavita Mukhi, the organiser of the market, says of the farmers selling organic mangoes, vegetables and even ghee – the clarified butter used in Indian cooking.

For India, the concept of an organic farmers’ market is something of a paradox – strikingly new and at the same time ancient.

Until the green revolution of the 1970s, which introduced high-yielding seeds for rice and wheat, most of India’s produce was completely organic. Even today, many farmers by default still use few chemicals.

But in a country set on rapid development at all costs, the principles of alternative methods of cultivation and food production are increasingly being swept aside in favour of more industrial methods.

“This is the first time we are getting organic vegetables. It used to be impossible,” says Nina Sawhney, a customer inspecting some of the potatoes, onions and tomatoes at the stall of one farmer from Nashik, a region near Mumbai in the rich agricultural heartland of Maharashtra state.

Kavita Mukhi, who organises the organic market, studied nutrition in America in the 1980s before founding one of India’s pioneering organic products groups

Ms Mukhi studied nutrition in Texas in the 1980s. After she returned to India, she founded Conscious Foods, one of India’s pioneering organic products groups, in 1990.

The company sells its products through several Indian retail chains and to a licensed outlet of the same name in the UK.

For Ms Mukhi, the market, which launched in March and runs every Sunday (it will close for the monsoon this month and reopen in October), is the next great project.

It is also a labour of love. Farmers do not pay a commission to the market. They only need to ensure they have secured the right government permits to sell their produce there.

In one corner, Vijay Khairnar of Shree Organic sells ghee alongside organic disinfectant, made from cow urine. “Paralysis, diabetes, all our problems come from chemicals,” he says. His products are 10-20 per cent more expensive than the non-organic variety because “organic production is less in terms of output”.

Across from him, Sanjay Pawar hands over a paper cup containing cane juice as he packs up the remainder of his tomatoes, capsicums and mangoes. “The earth doesn’t belong to us, we’re just trustees,” he says in a mixture of Hindi and Marathi, the regional language of Maharashtra.

The market is growing. About 1,700 people have joined its Facebook page and 20 farmers regularly attend. Most vegetables and fruits sell out by noon.

Ms Mukhi might not have envisioned it, but the farmers’ market has also become a beacon for other alternative movements.

In one area, two young men operate a pedal-driven power generator (essentially an exercise bike attached to a battery). They are looking for seed funding to turn the invention into one answer to climate change. The pair’s other project is “Buy Nothing Day” – an anti-consumerist statement, which they hold every November.

This all sounds like fun but Ms Mukhi admits that keeping this eclectic mix of people together is difficult. The farmers’ behaviour, for instance, can be distinctly contradictory. They tend to buy non-organic chai, or Indian tea, in plastic cups from roadside stalls outside and then litter the market with them. Their produce can also be sub-standard.

“The farmers need to get their act together. They can’t just rest on their laurels that their produce is organic,” she says.

Titoo Ahluwallia, one of Ms Mukhi’s former customers who now owns Conscious Food, says that while the western concept of organic products fits well with Ayurvedic medicine and traditional beliefs about the qualities of different foods, it is still very niche in India.

“It’s very largely, not entirely but very largely, popular among those who have been exposed to what’s going on in the west,” he says.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

ST: New-style preserves - preserved fruit snacks

Lifestyle

Home > Lifestyle > Taste > Story

May 30, 2010

New-style preserves

Preserved fruit snacks have been revamped with new flavours to attract young buyers

By Veronica Koh and Kezia Toh

Adding variety is the way to draw customers jaded with the old flavours of preserved fruit snacks, say retailers such as East Ocean. --ST PHOTOS: LAU FOOK KONG, BENJAMIN NG

Preserved fruit snacks have been popular with Singaporeans of all ages.

But the kiam sng ti (literally salty, sour, sweet in Hokkien) tidbits of yore have been made over with an explosion of new flavours.

On the shelves of the supermarket snack sections, among the usual raisins and nuts are snazzy packets of preserved fruit with exotic flavours such as green tea and mint. And these new-fangled flavours are proving to be a hit with consumers.

Said accountant Linda Wong, 28: 'I've been eating preserved fruit since I was very young and I love the new flavours that are available now, especially the mint ones. They add variety to the usual products.'

For 62-year-old taxi driver Lim Hock An, the new flavours add spice to a traditional snack. He said: 'I'm quite used to the traditional flavours that have been around for a long time but the new flavours in the market are just as good, if not better.'

Food retail company Umeya, which specialises in preserved fruit snacks, has expanded to 14 outlets since it first opened at Liang Court in 1999. The chain offers about 20 different types of flavours of preserved fruit snacks at its outlets, from more common ones such as shredded plum strips to unusual ones such as licorice lemon.

To keep customers coming back, new products are frequently brought in. Said co-founder of Umeya, Mr Peter Tan: 'We try to source for interesting and tasty new flavours and introduce them at our outlets when we find them.'

Some of the new flavours the company has recently introduced include Dried Phillipine Green Mango and Hot Guava.

Its competitor, snacks retail outlet East Ocean, brings in 10 new flavours every three months.

Said co-founder of East Ocean, Mr Alan Loh, 53, who runs the business with his wife: 'Even though preserved fruit is a traditional snack more popular with the older generation, it can be revamped to attract younger customers by packaging it nicely or by bringing in new flavours for added variety.'

His products are mostly imported from Taiwan.

He added: 'While it used to be mainly aunties who patronised my shop, I see more youngsters buying preserved fruit now, including boys. They enjoy very sour and salty flavours, so I try to bring in what I think they would like.'

Some consumers like these snacks because they believe that they aid digestion and relieve nausea.

Said housewife Alison Wee, 39: 'It is good for dispelling bloatedness. And when I was pregnant, I ate them frequently to relieve nausea.'

However, according to nutritionists, there is no scientific evidence that preserved fruit snacks have any medicinal effect.

And while Singaporeans are fond of their preserved fruit, eating too much of it may be bad for health.

Nutritionist Teo Kiok Seng of private nutrition consultancy Nutrition Network Services explained: 'Preserved fruit is usually high in salt, sweeteners and other food additives such as sulphites. And during food processing, much of the fruit's nutrients is destroyed.'

Those with high blood pressure should also steer clear of it, as the high salt content can cause a rise in blood pressure, added Ms Teo.

Instead, preserved fruit lovers may want to consider the healthier Japanese pickled plum, umeboshi.

It is typically prepared using less salt and steeped in seasoned liquid or vinegar.

But this makes no difference to those who enjoy their pickled nibbles.

Student Kelvin Ho, 19, said: 'I care more about whether it tastes good than whether it has health benefits. So many snacks out there are bad for you anyway, one more won't make a difference.'

keziatoh@sph.com.sg

vkoh@sph.com.sg

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Bestsellers

LICORICE LEMON

What: Whole dried lemons with a tough powdery texture and intense sourness, mixed with the woody sweetness of licorice.

Where: Umeya stores

Price: $3.60 per 100g

SEEDLESS COOL PLUM

What: Velvety flat folds of preserved plum with a subtle mint flavour.

Where: Umeya stores

Price: $6.80 per 100g

TAMARIND MANGO

What: Thin tough strips of dried mango dotted with candied tamarind.

Where: Umeya stores

Price: $2.40 per 100g

GREEN TEA DRIED SEEDLESS PRUNE

What: Conveniently packaged in nifty resealable packs, these finger-sized pieces of dried prunes combine an intensely sour flavour with the bitter piquancy of green tea.

Where: Cold Storage supermarkets

Price: $2 for a packet of 30g

BAN MEI (Mandarin for half plum)

What: Neatly sliced halves of crisp preserved plum with the seed intact. Sweet and pleasantly tangy.

Where: East Ocean Foodstuff, B1-03B Bugis Junction

Price: $2.80 per 100g

BLUEBERRY PRESERVED PLUM

What: Bite-sized cuts of preserved plum dusted with blueberry powder. Tart and sweet.

Where: Most medicinal shops, such as Goodtrust Marine Product Trading, Block 269 Queen Street, 01-245, tel: 6336-8385

Price: $2 for a packet of 200g, three packets for $5

RYUJIN ORGANIC UMEBOSHI

What: Organic salt-pickled plums from Japan, which are said to be a healthier option. Smooth and velvety texture, laced with a salty and sour aftertaste.

Where: Essential Living at Far East Shopping Centre, 15-08. Also available at Paragon Market Place and ThreeSixty Market Place at Ion Orchard

Price: $19.90 per 150g

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Where to buy

Umeya

14 branches island-wide, including outlets at:

Raffles City Shopping Centre B1-47, open: 10am to 10pm daily

Junction 8 Shopping Centre B1-02, open: 10.30 am to 10pm daily

Yue Hwa Chinese Products

Two branches island-wide at:

70 Eu Tong Sen Street, open: 11am to 9pm (Sundays to Fridays), 11am to 10pm (Saturdays)

Jurong Point Shopping Centre, 03-05/06/07, open: 10am to 10pm daily

East Ocean Foodstuff

Bugis Junction B1-03B, open: 10am to 10pm daily

WSJ: The Flu Fighters - in Your Food

 THE INFORMED PATIENT

NOVEMBER 24, 2009

The Flu Fighters—in Your Food

New Research Points to Ways to Boost Immunity by Making Sure Your Diet Has the Right Nutrients

• By LAURA LANDR

While many people are still waiting for swine-flu vaccine to become available in their area, there is a lot they can do in their own kitchens to help fight off disease and build a strong immune system.

Scientists in the growing field of nutritional immunology are unveiling new evidence of the complex role that nutrition plays in fighting off infectious diseases like influenza. A diet rich in nutrients such as vitamin A, found in colorful fruits and vegetables, and zinc, found in seafood, nuts and whole grains, can provide the critical fuel the body needs to fight off disease, heal injuries, and survive illness when it does strike, experts say.

Key Ingredients

Click on the image below to see key ingredients in your food

Scientists are still studying all the complex ways in which nutrients interact with the immune system. There is still much that they don't know about minerals such as zinc, for instance, including how they are absorbed and all the roles they play in the body. But scientists do know that certain vitamins and minerals can improve the body's ability to fight off infection: Studies in healthy elderly adults, for example, have shown an improved immune response to vaccination and fewer infections after receiving extra doses of vitamin E.

To create immune cells to fight off a specific infection, the body has to rapidly draw nutrients from the bloodstream, says Anuraj Shankar, a researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health. "If you don't have an adequate intake of vitamins and minerals, you won't be able to produce the number of immune cells you need, and the immune cells you do produce may be compromised," Dr. Shankar says. That makes it impossible to mount an effective response to infection, he says.

The benefits of good nutrition may have been recognized first by Hippocrates, the ancient Greek physician who declared "let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food." An 18th century naval surgeon's discovery that citrus fruits could cure scurvy in sailors was later recognized as a vitamin C deficiency, and after the 1930s, when dairies began to fortify milk with vitamin D, the disease known as rickets was virtually eliminated in the U.S.

Researchers warn that malnourished people may be a breeding ground for more dangerous infectious diseases. Animal studies at the University of North Carolina show that in a host with poor nutrition, viruses mutate in the face of a weak immune response to become more powerful. And once those mutations occur, even well-nourished hosts are susceptible to the newly virulent virus. "A lot of people may think malnutrition on the other side of the world isn't their problem," says Melinda A. Beck, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. But malnutrition "is a driving force in emerging infectious diseases that are spreading around the world," she says.

The human body doesn't have to be starving to suffer from malnutrition. Studies show that obesity, in addition to its other health risks, may also make people more susceptible to infections like the flu. A diet heavy on processed and fast foods may be low in the vitamins and minerals important for health. And diets that are high in saturated fat appear to actually depress the body's immune response, increasing the risk of infections.

Dr. Beck says studies of mice show that only 4% of lean animals infected with the flu virus die. That compares with a death rate of between 40% and 60% in obese mice infected with the virus. And after a small study showed that obese people vaccinated for the flu didn't mount a strong immune response, the University of North Carolina is expanding its trials to compare vaccination response rates in lean and obese people.

When obese people fall ill, "their immune function may not be strong enough to mount an effective response," says Donald Hensrud, a Mayo Clinic specialist in preventive and internal medicine and editor-in-chief of "The Mayo Clinic Diet," a new book promoting weight loss through a healthy diet that allows unlimited quantities of fruits and vegetables.

Warning on Supplements

Dr. Hensrud and other experts caution against loading up on supplements to add vitamins and minerals to the diet. While a multivitamin is a good addition to any balanced diet, individual supplements and vitamin pills may not be as well absorbed by the body as nutrients in foods. Some supplements also can have toxic effects in too-high quantities. An excess of zinc, for example, can interfere with absorption of other nutrients, including iron and copper. And too much of the mineral selenium can cause nerve damage and has been linked recently to an increased risk of diabetes.

There is no single test to measure if your body has enough vitamins and minerals, and assays for individual nutrients are generally expensive and unreliable. Blood tests used to screen for blood-cell abnormalities can pick up changes that are linked to possible vitamin or mineral deficiencies, but they can't necessarily identify the cause.

Scientists have long known that some vitamins, minerals and other nutrients can play a key role in the immune system by acting as antioxidants. These protect and repair cells from oxidative stress, the damage caused by molecules known as free radicals.

But nutrients work in ways beyond acting as antioxidants, says Dr. Beck. For example, vitamin A can enhance the immune system "by stimulating specific proteins necessary for immune function by activating specific genes," she says. So, if vitamin A is deficient, then the immune cells that require vitamin A to function properly won't work as efficiently. Animal studies show that a deficiency of vitamin B-6, which helps maintain the health of organs that make white blood cells, can decrease antibody production and suppress the immune response. And selenium in small amounts can help stimulate immune cells and may prevent the growth of some tumors.

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• Vote: How many fruit and vegetable servings do you consume in an average day?

Nutritional experts generally agree that the best way to get the right balance of nutrients is a balanced diet that includes plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables, lean proteins and dietary fiber. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's www.fruitsandveggiesmatter.gov Web site offers a calculator to determine how many servings are ideal based on calorie needs for age, sex and activity level. Harvard's Nutrition Source Web site includes a healthy eating pyramid based on the most up-to-date knowledge of nutrition requirements. And the National Institutes of Health's Office of Dietary Supplements Web site (dietary-supplements.info.nih.gov) offers detailed information on the risks and benefits of supplements, along with tables that list food sources for each vitamin and mineral.

A survey by the CDC in 2007 showed that the majority of adults consume less than the government's recommended five servings of fruits and vegetables daily. But quantity matters: A 2004 Harvard study of 110,000 men and women showed that people who averaged eight or more servings of fruit and vegetables daily were 30% less likely to have had a heart attack or stroke than those who had only 1.5 servings daily.

Nutrition experts say to boost immunity it is also important to avoid processed foods, and to minimize trans fats and unhealthy saturated fats from animal products and vegetable oils like palm and coconut. Instead, they say, people should eat foods rich in unsaturated fats such as olive oil.

Contradictory Advice

Some advice for a healthy diet can seem contradictory. For example, heart-healthy diets typically include unsaturated fats such as omega-3 fatty acids, which are found in fish such as salmon and trout and in flaxseed and walnuts. For people who don't want those foods, nutritionists may recommend fish-oil supplements, which can be beneficial in suppressing chronic inflammation in the body, a condition that can lead to coronary artery disease and arthritis.

But those same anti-inflammatory properties of fish oil can also suppress the immune responses necessary to combat an acute viral infection. Studies at the University of North Carolina have shown that mice fed with fish oil have an impaired resistance to infections, including the flu. "If I suppress the immune response and get a viral infection, I'm worse off," says Dr. Beck, who is studying the links between fish oil and resistance to influenza.

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• discuss

“ The key to supplements for strengthening the immune system is time. You have to be using them for months before the infection for them to be effective. ”

—David Wayne Osedach

One nutrient hard to get in food is vitamin D. Even with the fortification of milk, orange juice and other food products, some experts have been sounding the alarm in recent years about wide deficiencies, especially in children. Tests are available for about $100 to determine vitamin D levels, but their accuracy is in question. And just how much vitamin D different people need is the subject of considerable debate. The federal government's current recommendations range from 200 international units daily for children to 600 IUs for adults, with a safe upper limit of 2,000 IUs daily. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends 400 IUs for children, and vitamin D experts at Oregon State University and elsewhere recommend 2,000 IUs daily for all adults. The Institute of Medicine, a government advisory group, is expected next year to update the recommendations.

Adrian Gombart, a researcher at Oregon State University's Linus Pauling Institute, says vitamin D, in addition to building strong bones and fighting off a variety of diseases, appears to activate proteins that help the body fight off infection. "Vitamin D won't prevent you from getting the flu, but it might allow you to mount an optimal immune response, suffer less of the effects, and resolve the infection more quickly," says Dr. Gombart, who is researching the nutrient's role in stimulating immune cells.

Write to Laura Landro at laura.landro@wsj.com

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

FT: The benefits of vitamin D

The benefits of vitamin D

By Sam Apple

Published: October 23 2009 16:56 | Last updated: October 23 2009 16:56

Sunlight 10,000 IU from 15-20 minutes of midday summer sun Oysters 270 International Units (IU) of vitamin D per half-dozen Dried shiitake mushrooms 172 IU per 100g

Reinhold Vieth is frustrated. A thin, bald professor at the University of Toronto’s Department of Laboratory Medicine and Patho-biology, Vieth is among the most knowledgeable people in the world on the subject of vitamin D. He began studying it as a graduate student in 1974 and hasn’t changed his focus since. “I stick with vitamin D and follow it where it goes,” he says.

In recent years, vitamin D has been going to some exciting places. Reports of new and promising studies seem to emerge almost weekly. A 2007 analysis of vitamin D studies found that individuals with higher vitamin D levels are significantly – as much as 50 per cent – less likely to develop colorectal cancer. Another 2007 study found that women who took 1,100 International Units (IU) of vitamin D per day together with a calcium supplement reduced their overall cancer risk by 60 per cent. And the excitement is not only about cancer prevention. Low vitamin D levels have been linked to an increased risk of osteoporosis, heart disease, multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, depression and rheumatoid arthritis, among other diseases. Perhaps not surprisingly, in light of the other studies, one recent review of the health records of more than 13,000 Americans found that individuals with the lowest vitamin D levels were 26 per cent more likely, in an eight-year period, to die than those with the highest levels.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Reportage - Nov-24

So why is Dr Vieth so frustrated? You might think he’d have cause for celebration. But for him and other vitamin D researchers around the world, the good news comes with a bitter aftertaste. They believe they can prove vitamin D could help millions live longer and be healthier and yet they have not been able to convince their own governments.

In the US and Canada, official vitamin D policy is set by the Institute of Medicine. And in the opinion of Vieth, the current recommendations – 200 International Units per day for people under 50, 400 for people aged 51-70, and 600 for those 71 and older – are outrageously low. Bruce Hollis, professor of paediatrics at the Medical University of South Carolina, calls 400 IU a day “a joke”. That’s because the best research suggests that to achieve the higher vitamin D blood levels associated with disease prevention, most adults in the US would need to take 1,000-2,000 IU a day: five to 10 times more than the current official recommendation for adults.

In the UK, the government’s Committee on Medical Aspects of Food and Nutrition Policy has declined to set a “Reference Nutrient Intake” value for people “leading a normal lifestyle”, arguing that you can get the vitamin D you need from food and sunlight. But they fall in line with the Americans where they do make recommendations: for people confined indoors, the elderly and pregnant women, they suggest a daily intake of 10 micrograms a day. That’s equal to 400 IU.

. . .

Mackerel 643 IU per 100g. Halibut gives you 230 IU per 100g, pickled herring 113 IU per 100 Tinned sardines 23 IU per 12g fish. Tinned salmon gives you 550 IU per 100g, tinned tuna 270 IU per 100g

Vitamin D was discovered in the early 20th century as scientists searched for a cure for rickets, a disease that softens the bones of children, leaving them bowlegged and deformed. It had been known for some time that children in cities were more likely to suffer from rickets than those in the countryside. But it wasn’t until the 1920s that scientists in the US and UK realised rickets was caused by a vitamin D deficiency, caused in city kids by lack of sunlight. We obtain our other vitamins from our food; but while it’s possible to get vitamin D from oily fish and some other foods, most of the vitamin D in our bodies doesn’t come from diet at all but from a chemical process that takes place when the sun’s ultraviolet light strikes our skin.

In the 1950s and 1960s, when American and other dietary guidelines first specified vitamin D intakes of up to 400 IU for adults, nobody understood that vitamin D could do anything other than regulate calcium. And since 200 IU is enough to prevent rickets in children – assuming they have at least a moderate amount of calcium in their diet – it was assumed that 200 IU was sufficient. It was only in the following decades, as scientists came to understand how vitamin D works in our bodies, that the picture changed.

After it forms in our skin, vitamin D undergoes two critical transformations. First our liver metabolises it, turning it into calcidiol. If you have your vitamin D blood levels checked, it’s the amount of calcidiol in your blood that will be tested. From the liver, calcidiol makes its way to the kidneys, where it is turned into calcitriol, arguably the most potent steroid hormone in the body. In other words, while vitamin D is lumped together with other vitamins, by the time our bodies are done with it, it has more in common with testosterone or oestrogen than with vitamins A or C.

If you have only a small amount of D in your body, it will all be used by the kidneys to produce calcitriol and maintain blood calcium levels. But when there is more vitamin D available, something very different happens. As scientists have discovered in recent decades, it’s not only the kidneys that can make calcitriol from the calcidiol produced in the liver. Many tissues throughout the body can as well. These tissues use the hormone locally, within the cells, to regulate their behaviour.

“Calcidiol is like a blank piece of paper,” Vieth explains. “And calcitriol is like the message written on to it. Calcitriol is needed by our bodies to convey many kinds of messages, and virtually every cell in our body has a receptor that can read and respond to it.”

The first real evidence for the cancer-fighting properties of vitamin D emerged in the early 1980s, when researchers found that if they added calcitriol to immature malignant leukaemia cells, the cells would stop growing. They could only guess why this was, but scientists have since shown that vitamin D interacts with an unusually large number of genes and has the apparent ability to turn them on and off.

. . .

Hard-boiled eggs 26 IU per egg; 25 IU per egg yolk Fortified cows’ milk 250 IU per pint Fortified orange juice 270 IU per pint

This new understanding of how vitamin D works in our bodies, together with a large quantity of evidence of the benefits of higher vitamin D levels, might make it seem like an obvious move for the world’s governments to adjust their recommendations for daily intake. But Vieth and other vitamin D advocates have good reason to think there will be minimal changes made to dietary guidelines. Last December, the World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer issued a 465-page report that concluded there was no need to raise vitamin D recommendations.

The reason is not a lack of research but a lack of the right kind of research, say vitamin D sceptics. Most evidence for vitamin D and health is based on epidemiological surveys. Many of these studies, particularly early ones, were based on geography. Epidemiologists have found, for example, that multiple sclerosis – a disease of the central nervous system – and a number of cancers become more common the farther you move away from the equator. In the US, you are four times more likely to develop MS if you live in a state that borders Canada than if you live in the south. The theory is that as you move away from the equator, you receive less “UVB” ultraviolet sunlight (UVB is a subtype of UV light and the most important for vitamin D production), and thus fewer opportunities to make vitamin D in your skin.

This may sound like persuasive research to lay readers, but for scientists, such correlations aren’t generally convincing, as there could be plenty of other possible reasons why people living at higher latitudes are more likely to suffer from MS.

The more compelling evidence for the connection between vitamin D and disease onset comes from the wide range of studies in recent years that have actually measured vitamin D levels in blood. But even these studies only show correlations. They can demonstrate, as one Harvard School of Public Health study did in 2006, that the vitamin D status of healthy young adults can predict their future risk of developing MS, but they can’t definitively demonstrate that higher vitamin D levels prevent MS. It’s possible, for example, that there is another mechanism at work in the early stage of MS that causes vitamin D levels to drop during the first stage of a progressive disease (see box below for more on MS).

The link to MS

Multiple sclerosis is thought to be caused by a mix of environmental and genetic factors. And while scientists are still trying to unravel how these interact, a growing body of research points to vitamin D as a key environmental factor.

In people with MS, the immune system malfunctions and attacks the protective coating around nerve cells known as myelin sheaths. The disease can affect sight, balance, continence, speech and more, and reduces life expectancy. Vitamin D’s influence on MS – and other autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes – is thought to be related to the vitamin’s ability to suppress autoimmune responses.

The link between vitamin D and MS was for many years thought to be wild speculation. Now more and more studies point in the same direction: people who have higher levels of vitamin D in their blood early in life are less likely to get MS later in life. Also, MS patients have been found to have low levels of vitamin D in their blood– and the levels appear to be even lower during relapses.

One small study published this year found that MS patients who took high doses of vitamin D – an average of 14,000 IU a day for a year – had significantly fewer relapses than those MS patients who took an average of 1,000 IU a day. Studies have also shown that vitamin D prevents experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), the mouse model of human MS.

Few mainstream researchers would disagree that a single correlation study should not be given much weight in determining public policy. It’s only when looked at in aggregate that these survey studies – together with the many small clinical trials and our new knowledge of how vitamin D works at the cellular level – begin to make a powerful case for increasing the current vitamin D recommendations.

And yet, if the WHO report of 2008 is any indicator, such a case isn’t always strong enough to sway a sceptical committee. All the recent research notwithstanding, vitamin D is still missing the gold standard of evidence-based medicine: large, randomised controlled trials which can demonstrate its ability to prevent major diseases. The WHO report concludes that “we should wait for the results of new randomised trials” before changing vitamin D recommendations.

It’s a position echoed in the UK by the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (Nice), which advises the government on whether drugs should be paid for by the state. After reviewing the vitamin D literature, in 2003 Nice pointed to the absence of randomised clinical trials and suggested that there was no need even to recommend vitamin D to pregnant women – a conclusion that was overruled by the government’s chief medical officer after paediatricians objected.

. . .

For Britons, the most alarming aspect of these government responses is that people living in the UK have so much to lose. For much of the year, it is impossible in this country to obtain vitamin D from the sun – for the same reason it is impossible to suffer sunburn. There is simply not enough UVB ultraviolet radiation in our winter and autumn sunlight. And unless you happen to consume a lot of oily fish, it’s very hard to get much vitamin D from your diet. (In addition to oily fish, eggs and fortified foods have small amounts of vitamin D.) It’s no surprise, then, that a 2007 study of middle-aged British adults found that 90 per cent had less-than-optimal levels of vitamin D during winter and spring. In the US, by comparison, three-quarters of teenagers and adults are estimated to be deficient in vitamin D.

Advocates of changes to the vitamin D recommendations in the UK and elsewhere don’t disagree that large, randomised control trials are important. The trouble is, trials that could convince policymakers to advise an across-the-board increase to vitamin D recommendations for all children and adults might never take place.

There are a number of obstacles to the research, but the simplest, and biggest, is money. Vitamin D is not a proprietary compound. It’s cheap and easy to produce. A bottle of 180 1,000-IU capsules can be purchased online for about £9. No pharmaceutical company is going to put up the many millions of dollars necessary to conduct the trials.

Michael Gleimer, a research fellow at Harvard Medical School who has no connection to the vitamin D controversy, notes that it is easy for a medical research fellow to do a small-scale study on something like vitamin D. “It is non-controversial, easy to get approval for, and popular-sciency enough that it may land you in the science section of BBC news,” Gleimer says. “But to do a large, definitive, long-term study, one needs cash. This is something a pharmaceutical company could do. But why would they want to push vitamin D? It’s cheap and there is no patent for it.”

Vitamin D also has to overcome the baggage of other vitamins. Asked for his thoughts on the US and Canada’s current daily vitamin D recommendations, Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, said that “similar ‘signals’ regarding other vitamins and nutritional supplements – suggesting that they decreased the incidence of certain cancers – have not been borne out in subsequent randomised clinical trials.”

The main culprit here is vitamin E, which caused a great deal of excitement in the early 1990s. The enthusiasm for vitamin E at the time was great enough to convince the US government to invest millions in just the sort of large clinical trials that have yet to be conducted for vitamin D. But E turned out to be a disappointment, showing no benefits whatsoever in preventing cancer.

There’s a third obstacle in the way of large clinical trials with vitamin D. Like other nutrients, it faces a systemic problem. A typical clinical trial follows what Vieth calls a “pharmaceutical drug company model”, where a group of sick people are given a carefully selected dose of a drug to see if it makes a difference to their condition, compared with a second group of sick people who receive a placebo.

Fortified tofu 120 IU per 80g Vitamin D capsules 100-5,000 IU; most multivitamin pills contain 400 IU of vitamin D Cod liver oil 450 IU per teaspoon; capsule amounts vary

The drawback of this model is that it doesn’t work nearly as well if the goal of the study is not to determine if a person gets better but to determine if the substance can prevent you from becoming ill at all. “It takes a great deal of time and huge population to look at healthy people and see what develops,” says Mariela Glandt, an endocrinologist and the former director of the Diabetes Clinical Trials Center at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. “It’s just much more expensive and time-consuming.”

Not even the recent announcement of a $20m study by Harvard Medical School and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston is enough to make Vieth optimistic. Funded by National Institutes of Health and other institutions, the research will look at vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acids (which have also shown disease-fighting promise) in the primary prevention of chronic disease in adults ages 60 and over. If the results are good, they could help make the case for raising vitamin D recommendations for older adults. But Vieth believes it would still be difficult to persuade policy-makers of the need to raise vitamin D levels for everyone. “‘If you start with people older than age 65 and do clinical trials with them’, policy-makers say, ‘Why should we impose this drug on everyone in society?’”

And if it remains challenging to raise enough money to study prevention in older adults, it’s nearly impossible to find the money to study younger people; a younger population is less susceptible to disease, so any convincing study would require an enormous number of participants.

. . .

Then there is a problem that is more specific to vitamin D. The latest research suggests that it takes 1,000 IU a day or more to achieve vitamin D’s anti-cancer benefits. But often when a smaller vitamin D trial does receive funding, it is conducted with the current lower vitamin D recommendation – and then fails to prove effective.

These failures, such as a highly publicised Lancet study in 2005 that found 800 IU of vitamin D and calcium given in prevention trials (trials in which many participants did not take the supplements regularly) did not prevent bone fractures, are then used by review committees as grounds for leaving the current vitamin D recommendations in place.

It was precisely such studies that convinced the authors of the WHO report that there was no need for action on vitamin D. The report concluded that vitamin D recommendations did not need to be raised because there was not yet evidence that supplementing with 400-840 IU of vitamin D could prevent cancer. What the conclusion left out, as though the authors couldn’t imagine anyone taking more than 840 IU, was a randomised clinical trial which found that 1,110 IU taken daily is effective in preventing cancer in women.

With so many factors weighing against a large vitamin D trial for anyone who is not old or sick with cancer or another serious disease, the best hope for advocates of higher vitamin D recommendations may be convincing the medical authorities and the public to take the epidemiology survey studies more seriously. (Even if a large trial did get off the ground, it would probably be at least a decade before there were results.)

It’s not an impossible task. In other instances, the medical community has been ready to recognise survey evidence: “The evidence favouring vitamin D is probably as good as the evidence that shows smoking is bad for you,” Vieth says, explaining that just as smoking is correlated with certain cancers, so are low vitamin D levels. “But when these government officials see the same kind of evidence that deals with vitamin D as they see with smoking they go, ‘Oh wait a minute. We can’t really trust this.’”

Vieth pauses, as though he can barely stand to talk about such a miserable state of affairs. “It’s easy to say ‘don’t do something – don’t smoke’. It’s very hard to say ‘take this. Take vitamin D.’”

Sam Apple is a regular contributor to the FT Weekend Magazine and founder and publisher of the news website TheFasterTimes.com

......................................

Can we overdose?

One of the debates surrounding vitamin D is whether too much can be toxic. The US’s Institute of Medicine’s recommendations – unchanged since 1997 – were influenced in part by a 1984 study concluding that 3,800 IU of vitamin D per day could cause hypercalcemia, or too much calcium in the blood. Symptoms include kidney stones, vomiting and muscle atrophy.

But the 1984 study was flawed: it failed to measure the amount of vitamin D administered; based on the findings of other studies, it now looks as though subjects were given 100 times more vitamin D than intended.Moreover, how could it be that 3,800 IU was toxic, when 20 minutes of midday sunbathing in the summer makes at least 10,000 IU of vitamin D in our bodies?

In 1999, Reinhold Vieth (pictured right) published a review of vitamin D research in response to the IOM conclusions. In it, he argued that there was no evidence that amounts lower than 20,000 IU a day could be toxic. “Throughout my preparation of this review, I was amazed at the lack of evidence supporting statements about the toxicity of moderate doses of vitamin D,” Vieth wrote.

Studies have since shown 10,000 IU a day of vitamin D to be safe. While any substance will become toxic in excess, vitamin D researchers today accept that the current vitamin D recommendations could be more than quadrupled with no fear of toxicity.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

NY Times: Bento Boxes Win Lunch Fans

September 9, 2009

Bento Boxes Win Lunch Fans

By SAMANTHA STOREY

ARMED with kittens of molded rice and sweet potato flowers, Sheri Chen took aim at her 2-year-old daughter, Lucy — a picky eater.

“I have to make her food look like something she recognizes,” said Ms. Chen, 42, a stay-at-home mother in San Leandro, Calif. “If her boiled egg is shaped like a bunny and it is holding a baby carrot, she’ll eat it.”

With cookie cutters Ms. Chen makes her daughter star-shaped vegetables; and with decorative skewers, a plastic top hat and pieces of nori (dried seaweed), cherry tomatoes become smiley faced, mustachioed creatures.

Her ruse includes assembling each meal in her version of a bento box, a Japanese lunch box, decorated with cute cartoon characters.

It might seem like silly kids’ stuff, but that sense of fun has helped make bento boxes — obentos as the Japanese call them — increasingly popular with grownups in the United States, too.

For dieters, they are an eye-popping form of portion control. Artistic preparation of ingredients can act as a pleasant distraction for health-conscious parents. For others, bentos are a way to make lunch pretty or indulge their love of things Japanese.

In Japan, compact, compartmented bento boxes are traditionally filled with rice, pickled vegetables and fish or meat. Japanese mothers take pride in their obentos and hope they outshine those of other mothers, said the Japanese cookbook author Hiroko Shimbo.

“Obento making is a kind of cult,” she said.

It’s approaching cult status in the United States. On Saturday in Central Park, as part of its Crossing the Line festival, the French Institute Alliance Française will be handing out bento boxes with components made by some top French and American chefs — including Inaki Aizpitarte, Pascal Barbot, Alexandre Gauthier, Michel Bras, David Chang and Wylie Dufresne.

On a more plebian level, Amazon.com said sales of the boxes and accessories like egg molds, rice shapers, plastic skewers shaped like animals or flowers have been growing.

But toothache-inducing cuteness is not the only appeal.

Jordan Smith, 20, a junior majoring in East Asian studies and political science at Yale University, started making bento boxes in high school in Port Orange, Fla.

“I was on the football team,” Mr. Smith said, “so I tried to have a balanced diet and eat healthy as much as possible.” He would group protein, rice and vegetables. “I would usually use snap peas, tomatoes, carrots; basically things that were relatively colorful and not too bland tasting.”

He endured a bit of ridicule — “like, look at that white person pretending to be Japanese” — but that didn’t stop him.

“Japanese culture here is getting more popular by the day,” he said.

He’s still making bento boxes, but now they’re mainly a way to save money by making his own lunch.

Debra Littlejohn, 52, a quality-assurance engineer from Edmonds, Wash., estimated that she and her husband were spending $400 a month buying lunch out every day.

So in June she started packing her dinner leftovers into bento boxes.

“If I had to price out all my ingredients,” Ms. Littlejohn said, “each box would probably cost $2.”

She likes to find artistic ways to present the food.

One of her recent boxes included a multihued medley of halved figs, curried eggplant, green leaf lettuce and sliced purple carrots.

“I don’t have time to break out the art supplies in my drawer,” Ms. Littlejohn said. “Every evening when I pack our lunches, I get this creative outlet. And if I don’t do something artistic, I might implode.”

Creativity matters as much as taste and nutrition to Jason Miller, a graduate student in anthropology at the University of South Florida.

“It doesn’t hurt to add a funny element as well,” Mr. Miller, 28, said. He recently made onigiri, triangles of sticky rice with various fillings. “Instead of leaving them plain, I cut nori — seaweed — in strips and made the onigiri into sumo wrestlers.” Artistry is what differentiates a bento box from a plastic container of leftovers, said Makiko Itoh, 46, who lives outside Zurich and runs the blog justbento.com, filled with how-to’s, recipes and discussion forums.

“Food presented attractively looks more appetizing, since we eat with our eyes as much as our taste buds and stomachs,” said Ms. Itoh, who was born in Japan but lived for a while in New York. “That’s emphasized more in Japanese cuisine and culture perhaps than in other cuisines.”

She said bentos often reflect the Japanese belief that each meal should have five colors — a version of the food pyramid. It helps people remember to vary their food, especially since the most colorful foods are usually fruits and vegetables.

“You can apply that to any lunch combination,” she said. “For example, sliced bread (let’s call that white, even if you use whole wheat) with peanut butter or cold cuts (brown), a green salad (green) with red peppers and cherry tomatoes (red) and a banana (yellow).”

A balance of flavors, textures and cooking methods also matters, she said.

Sheri Lindquist saw bentos as a healthy choice for her five sons and her husband after he had triple-bypass surgery. “I don’t make them bento lunches all the time,” said Ms. Lindquist, 48, who lives in Denair, Calif. “But if there is something especially yucky or healthy or new I do try to present it in a more fun format.” Like breaded spinach balls with carrot ears and faces.

Acquiring accessories like plastic giraffe picks or star-shaped nori punches, however, proved challenging for Ms. Lindquist, as most of the boxes and tools were sold only in Japan. So in March 2008 she began iloveobento.com, an online bento box store.

Another bento blogger, Jennifer McCann, began veganlunchbox.blogspot.com on her son’s first day of school in 2005.

She made him sushi for lunch in a bento box from laptoplunches.com, which sells Americanized bento boxes with lidded compartments for items like yogurt or dips like ketchup. She took a picture of it and posted it.

“I thought it might give a lot of vegan moms inspiration for other lunches besides PB and J, “ said Ms. McCann, 38, who lives in Kennewick, Wash.

Within months she was getting thousands of page views a day of the boxes she was making, she said. She’s since published “Vegan Lunch Box” (Da Capo Press, 2008) and “Vegan Lunch Box Around the World” (Da Capo, 2009), which includes recipes for a Japanese tiger bento, Caribbean plantain wraps and Indonesian tempeh.

Her son, James, now 11, has outgrown the boxes and no longer takes the bentos to school. “He wants his lunch to be totally normal now, like everyone else,” she said.

Making lunches look cute for children is an art called kyaraben in Japan.

But some bento-ists think cute takes too much time.

Deborah Hamilton, 40, who writes the blog lunchinabox.net, makes boxes for her husband and 4-year-old son of, for instance, tamales, broccoli florets, cherry tomatoes and a strawberry. “You can make these as intricate or fancy as you like,” she said, “or you can make them plain and simple. You don’t have to get all kinds of Martha with it. My regular bento takes 10 to 15 minutes, maximum.”

Ms. Itoh, the author of justbento.com, said the boxes, about the size of a fat turkey sandwich, let her control her portions and helped her lose 30 pounds.

“Generally speaking, for a tightly packed Japanese-style bento, the number of milliliters that a box can hold corresponds roughly to the number of calories it holds,” she wrote on her blog.

Crystal Watanabe, 30, an administrative assistant in Honolulu, used bento portion control when she began a Weight Watchers program in 2007. She lost 22 pounds and wrote about her experience on her blog, aibento.net (Adventures in Bentomaking).

The blog got her involved in the bento community on the photo-sharing site Flickr.com.

“We post pictures and people take ideas from each other,” Ms. Watanabe said. “It’s really a very creative community and fun. Everyone is so supportive.”

Ms. Chen, in San Leandro, one of the more prolific contributors to the photo pools, can be a little wilder when making bentos for Lucy’s brother, Koa, 6, who, unlike his sister, is not finicky.

“He even eats the lettuce I put in his boxes as garnish,” she said.

A recent lunch box for him included teriyaki salmon with peapods, two kinds of sweet potato and golden beet “maple leaves.” On the side: skewered purple carrot discs and a tomato made to look like a frog man. For dessert: a strawberry, champagne grapes, blackberries and a litchi.

“I am not a gourmet cook,” Ms. Chen said, “but when you put anything in a bento box it looks nice.”

Where to Get Boxes and Supplies

BENTO & CO Bentoandco.com (French language site, ships from Japan).

BENTO CRAZY Bentocrazy.ecrater.com.

FROM JAPAN WITH LOVE From-japan-with-love.com (ships from Japan).

I LOVE OBENTO Iloveobento.com.

JAPAN CENTRE Japancentre.com (ships from England).

J BOX Jbox.com (ships from Japan).

KINOKUNIYA 1073 Sixth Avenue (41st Street), (212) 869-1700.

LAPTOP LUNCHES Laptoplunches.com.

BOOKS: “501 Bento Box Lunches: 501 Unique Recipes for Brilliant Bento” (Graffito Books, 2009) and “Vegan Lunch Box Around the World” by Jennifer McCann (Da Capo, 2009).

Sheri Chen, 42, of San Leandro, Calif., fills her version of bento boxes for her children, assembling each meal in a Japanese lunch box decorated with cute cartoon characters. That sense of fun has helped make bento boxes increasingly popular with grownups in the United States, too.

"I have to make her food look like something she recognizes," said Ms. Chen, referring to her daughter, Lucy. "If her boiled egg is shaped like a bunny and it is holding a baby carrot, she'll eat it."

Ms. Chen's children, Lucy and Koa.

 

Deborah Hamilton, 40, who writes the blog lunchinabox.net, makes boxes like this one for her husband and 4-year-old son.

 

Another one of Ms. Hamilton's creations. "You can make these as intricate or fancy as you like," she said, "or you can make them plain and simple."

Creativity matters as much as taste and nutrition to Jason Miller, 28, a graduate student at the University of South Florida. The bento he created at far left includes onigiri, triangles of sticky rice with various fillings.

Aster Sentiati goes by the name "bentomom" on the photo-sharing site Flickr.com, where she posts photographs of the bentos she makes for her children, like this one at left.

Another one of Ms. Setiati's bentos. 

A balance of flavors, textures and cooking methods matters in assembling a bento, said Makiko Itoh, who runs the informational blog justbento.com. At left, a bento by Ms. Setiati.

Debra Littlejohn, 52, from Edmonds, Wash., estimated that she and her husband were spending $400 a month buying lunch out every day. She started packing her dinner leftovers into bento boxes.

Debra Littlejohn, 52, from Edmonds, Wash., estimated that she and her husband were spending $400 a month buying lunch out every day. She started packing her dinner leftovers into bento boxes.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

ST: Thunder in a bowl - Hakka thunder tea rice (Lei Cha Fun)

Aug 16, 2009

Thunder in a bowl

Gone is the traditional grind but Hakka dish thunder tea rice is still a favourite with Anna Eng

By Huang Lijie

Madam Anna Eng's love affair with Hakka thunder tea rice (lei cha fan) began at a young age. The 62-year-old Singaporean who was born in Malaysia says: 'I grew up with my grandmother and as a child, I would tag along when she visited the homes of neighbours in the village to chat and share their home-cooked meals. 'On these outings, I always looked forward to eating lei cha fan, an everyday type of food, because it is very fragrant.' Thunder tea rice is a traditional Hakka dish of rice topped with assorted vegetables and a broth of green tea leaves and herbs. The dish derives its name from an important, if old-fashioned, step in the cooking process - grinding the tea leaves and herbs in a handmade earthen vessel with scored markings on the inside. A guava tree branch - chosen because it is hard and non-poisonous - is used as a pestle. The Chinese word for this action, lei, is a homonym for thunder in Mandarin, hence the English name of the dish. Indeed, her love for thunder tea rice is so well known among friends and relatives that her grandmother gave her the special earthen vessel as a wedding gift. And for many years, the housewife faithfully made thunder tea, which she learnt to cook from her mother, using the vessel even though she owned a food processor. The mother of two grown-up sons says: 'My friends could not understand why I refused to use a food processor, but I believed that the taste of the thunder tea would suffer if I used a machine. 'So I stuck with the traditional method and ground the thunder tea manually even though I knew my arms would ache terribly afterwards.' When the vessel cracked after years of use one day, she had her husband mend it before continuing to use it. That her guava tree branch pestle had whittled to a third of its original 60cm length through years of wear and tear did not deter her from preparing the dish the traditional way either. In 2006, however, all that changed. The grandmother of one says: 'As I grew older, it became more tiring to grind the ingredients. I would get my sons to help but they would complain of the ache in their arms and quietly slip away after grinding the tea for a while.' Unwilling to go without her favourite Hakka food, which is not widely available at eateries, she succumbed to modern-day convenience and used a food processor to grind the thunder tea mix. She says: 'The difference was not obvious and I've grown accustomed to its taste. The best part really is that it is so much easier for me to cook lei cha fan.' But she still keeps the pot and pestle for sentimental reasons. She shares the recipe for the dish below and adds that those who find it too tedious to cook all six vegetable toppings in the recipe can pick the ones they prefer. When she cooks the dish for big gatherings though, she whips up at least nine toppings, including stir-fried chye sim and cabbage. She says her interest in cooking is a natural extension of her love for eating, although the second of seven children did not learn to cook until she was about 20. When she came of a marriageable age, her mother nagged her to learn to cook and she took time to observe her mother in the kitchen. One of Madam Eng's specialities is rice dumplings for the Dragon Boat Festival. She came up with her own filling and it includes quail's egg, peanuts, chestnut, mushroom, dried prawns, chicken and pork. She wraps more than 200 dumplings over two days for the festival every year, and gives them to friends and relatives. 'Every year, I tell myself I'm never going to wrap dumplings again because it is so tiring. Yet I always forget the pain the following year. But it is worthwhile when people appreciate my food and tell me it tastes good.' lijie@sph.com.sg

=== MAKE IT YOURSELF: HAKKA THUNDER TEA RICE RICE AND TOPPINGS INGREDIENTS 500g rice 5 blades pandan leaf 31/2 tsp salt 15 cloves garlic, 12 of which are finely chopped and separated into four portions 221/2 Tbs cooking oil 600g firm soya beancurd, cut into small cubes 200g dried shrimps, finely chopped 5 stalks leek, finely sliced 600g preserved radish (chai poh), rinsed and finely chopped 200g red beans (the black-eyed variety) 5 medium red onions, finely sliced 300g French beans, finely chopped 200g kailan, finely chopped METHOD 1. Cook the rice with pandan leaves, 1 tsp of salt, 3 cloves of garlic and 1/2 Tbs of oil in a rice cooker. Set aside. 2. Stir-fry the firm soya beancurd in 3 Tbs of oil for about five minutes until golden brown. Drain and set aside. 3. Stir-fry the dried shrimps in 3 Tbs of oil for about five minutes until golden brown. Drain, separate into four portions and set aside. 4. Stir-fry the leeks in 2 Tbs of oil until limp then add the firm soya beancurd, a portion of the shrimp, 1/2 tsp of salt and fry for another two minutes. Drain and set aside. 5. Stir-fry a portion of chopped garlic in 3 Tbs of oil until fragrant, add the preserved radish, mix well and stir-fry for another 15 minutes over medium fire until the preserved radish is lightly charred. Drain and set aside. 6. Place the red beans in a pot, cover with water and bring to a boil. Drain and repeat with the water level twice as high the second time. 7. Fry a portion of chopped garlic in 2 Tbs of oil until fragrant, add the twice boiled red beans, 1/2 tsp of salt and stir-fry for another five minutes. Drain and set aside. 8. Stir-fry the red onions in 3 Tbs of oil for about five minutes on high heat until fragrant, add a portion of the dried shrimps, 1/2 tsp of salt and stir-fry for another two minutes. Drain and set aside. 9. Stir-fry a portion of chopped garlic in 3 Tbs of oil until fragrant, add French beans, a portion of dried shrimps, 1/2 tsp of salt and stir-fry on high heat for another five minutes until the vegetable is soft. Drain and set aside. 10. Stir-fry a portion of chopped garlic in 3 Tbs of oil until fragrant, add kailan, 1/2 tsp of salt and stir-fry for another three minutes on high heat until the vegetable turns deep green. Drain and set aside. THUNDER TEA INGREDIENTS 500g peanuts 200g white sesame seeds 11/2 Tbs oil 50g koo lek sim, a bitter herb, finely chopped 40g mint, finely chopped 60g basil, finely chopped 50g sawtooth coriander, finely chopped 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped 1/2 tsp salt 125ml water 20g green tea leaves 4 litres water METHOD 1. Stir-fry the peanuts in a pan without adding oil for about 20 minutes until they turn pale brown. Set aside. 2. Stir-fry the sesame seeds in a pan without adding oil for about 20 minutes until they turn golden. Set aside. 3. To a hot pan, add oil, koo lek sim, mint, basil, sawtooth coriander, garlic, salt and stir-fry for two minutes on high heat until the herbs turn limp. 4. Scoop the mixture into a blender, add water, tea leaves and blend on high speed for about five minutes until a smooth mixture forms. 5. To the mixture, add sesame seeds and 200g of roasted peanuts and blend on high speed for about 10 minutes until a smooth mixture forms. If necessary, add a little water to lubricate the mixture. 6. Pour the mixture into a large mixing bowl and gradually stir in about 4 litres of boiling water or until the liquid mixture reaches a desired strength in flavour (above). 7. Scoop rice into serving bowls, add toppings from before and ladle the desired amount of tea mixture into the bowls. Top with remaining roasted peanuts. Serves eight

Copyright © 2007 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved. Privacy Statement & Condition of Access

Washington Post: The Next Course

The Next Course
Why Children Are Key Players in Michelle Obama's Food Policy Moves

By Jane Black
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 15, 2009

It was the ultimate photo op. Thirty-six smiling fifth-graders eating a healthful meal they'd cooked themselves at a picnic table in the First Lady's Garden. The story line was as simple as it was seductive: They came. They planted. They harvested. In three short months, Michelle Obama had accomplished what other food advocates could only dream about. Good food was no longer just virtuous. It was cool.

That was easy. Now what?

That's the question Obama's food policy team is working on this summer. The garden was always intended "as a jumping-off point for getting to what sometimes can be a complicated conversation about how we eat [and] the food choices we make," Obama policy director Jocelyn Frye said in an interview. But as it moves beyond the symbolic to those meatier matters, the White House is grappling with the very issues that have challenged the so-called good food movement for decades: How do you simplify and sell a new way of eating?

That isn't so easy. Food -- unlike, say, the space program -- is a fundamental and intimate part of everyone's life. It's culturally, politically and economically complicated. And there's a fine line between government involvement and paternalism: It's one thing to educate people about the importance of a healthful diet and quite another to tell them what to eat and where to buy it. The garden has been an unqualified success; on the first family's trip to Moscow last week, Russians were far more interested in Obama's garden than in her fashion sense. The challenge now is to craft a strategy to capitalize on Obama's newfound clout to improve school lunches and access to fresh fruits and vegetables and to make how we eat an integral part of the national health-care debate.

The main architects of the plan, along with Obama herself, are Frye and Sam Kass, an assistant chef who also serves as the White House food initiative coordinator.

Frye, 45, a Washington native, attended Harvard Law School with Obama. Kass worked as a personal chef for the Obama family in Chicago before joining the family in Washington. The 29-year-old oversees the garden and is often photographed in his chef's whites working with students. But Kass spends a significant amount of time in a suit in the East Wing and out and about in Washington. Last week, he sat in the front row alongside members of Congress as Vice President Biden announced the administration's new food safety proposals.

Given the success of the garden, it's no surprise that part of the East Wing strategy is to keep doing what they're doing: make fresh, healthful food seem accessible, even normal. In interviews and at public events, Obama makes a point of telling her own story. As a working mother, she often took her daughters out to eat several times a week or ordered a pizza for dinner. When the girls began to gain weight, she says, her pediatrician suggested she rethink how the family was eating. By making a "small change in our family's diet and adding more fresh produce for my family, Barack, the girls, me, we all started to notice over a very short period of time that we felt much better," Obama said at the harvest event.

To create that down-to-earth feeling, Obama has invited local schoolchildren, not celebrity chefs, to the garden. (Chez Panisse's Alice Waters, who lobbied for a White House garden for more than a decade, hasn't been asked to any of the official garden events, for example.) Obama also has made a point of appearing at soup kitchens and community health centers to talk about the importance of a healthful diet. And produce from the garden is donated to Miriam's Kitchen, which serves healthful meals to the homeless in Washington. "Accessibility and affordability has always been part of the message," Frye said. "It's why we partner with elementary school kids. You pierce through all the constituencies and say, 'It's about kids.' "

That might not sound like tactical brilliance. But Waters and other pioneers of the local-food movement have long struggled with perceptions of elitism. Critics mocked their breathless praise of farmstead cheeses or the ultimate roast chicken, painting them as out-of-touch, arugula-loving yuppies. "Michelle has used her position in a way that has made people realize this is a very simple, very American impulse," said Josh Viertel, president of Slow Food USA, which promotes small farmers and artisan producers. "What they're doing is normalizing something that should be normal."

"She has enormous influence," added Tony Geraci, director of food service at the Baltimore City Public Schools. Where funders used to ask for feasibility studies, he said, they now are looking to invest, even in the midst of an economic downturn. "In the last months, there has been a national awareness that these food issues are real."

Most appraisals of Obama's efforts have been positive. But she hasn't escaped criticism. In a May 31 Op-Ed in the New York Times, food writer Amanda Hesser chided the first lady for implying that cooking is a chore when she breezily admitted that she was happy to leave the cooking to White House chefs. "Terrific local ingredients aren't much use if people are cooking less and less," Hesser wrote. "Cooking is to gardening what parenting is to childbirth."

Frye and Kass counter that inspiring families to cook is part of the White House plan. Earlier this month, for example, Obama invited graduates of the Brainfood program, a nonprofit organization in Washington that teaches life skills through cooking, to help prepare for a White House luau and the Fourth of July celebration. Over the course of a week, 19 students shucked corn, washed lettuce and made strawberry tiramisu.

"The garden showed the step-by-step process of how food gets to the table, but the major event culminated in cooking and eating," Kass said. "We're really trying to highlight that it all leads to the table."

Kass also is working on a series of White House seasonal recipes, though it hasn't been decided how they will be distributed. A White House cookbook? A special Web site? The series "is going to be a bigger part of what we do," Kass said. "We are exploring new avenues to get real, practical recipes into the hands of mothers and fathers."

What the White House isn't doing is as significant as what it is. For example, though many advocates might wish it, the first lady has not championed local food. She has used the word -- "What I've learned is that if it's fresh and grown locally, it's probably going to taste better," she told local fifth-graders at the June harvest day -- but on the whole, Obama focuses on freshness and seasonality.

"Despite the fact that there's a huge local food movement, they haven't made it an issue," said Sam Fromartz, author of "Organic, Inc." "By keeping it vague, it becomes much more inclusive."

Nor will Obama stump for farm-to-school programs. It's a pet project of many sustainable-food activists who see them as a win-win because they create new markets for small farmers and increase the amount of fresh produce in schools. It is, Kass said, one small piece of the larger puzzle, but it is not a priority.

Indeed, a key part of the White House strategy is to stay focused. Food reformers are working to change agricultural subsidies, environmental regulations, nutrition standards and food labeling. The White House, Kass said, recognizes that all are important and interconnected. But to succeed, Obama is trying to highlight the issues that most directly affect children: "We're focusing on kids, even though food and health are issues we all face," Kass said. "We want to look at the process from how and what is grown to how it gets to our plates without going in a million directions."

Obama is taking off the month of August. But she will relaunch her efforts in earnest in September. That is back-to-school time and when the debate will heat up in Congress over funding for child nutrition programs including school breakfast and lunch. No specific events have yet been scheduled, but staffers say Obama will continue to try to link the personal to the political by gardening, cooking and eating with students.

"The more they can tell the story of what they're doing, the better it will be," said Slow Food's Viertel. "If they can let people see a family meal, if people see that the busiest man in the world takes time to sit down with his kids for dinner, that could have an incredible impact."

© 2009 The Washington Post Company