#foodreads is our new digest of food and cooking ephemera from around the internet.
A report published in JAMA Internal Medicine last week suggests that in the 1960s the sugar industry convinced researchers to downplay evidence that sugar is unhealthy while at the same time highlighting the role dietary fat might play in the development of conditions like coronary artery disease. The deceptions, which observers have compared to those committed by Big Tobacco, were culled from internal sugar industry documents.
The New Food Economy profiles Alice's Garden, a community garden that "connects two essential movements in Milwaukeeās African American neighborhoods: Black Lives Matter, and a garden movement focused on healing a community traumatized by the racism, abandonment, and day-to-day realities of living in the countryāsĀ most segregated metropolitan region."
Deposing broccoli rabe, which held the title only since June, kelp has been dubbed "the new kale."
Despite the rise of Islamophobia in recent years, sales of halal food are surgingāup one-third since 2010, according to one estimate. Bloomberg wonders: What gives? (Also in politics + food news, the Trump campaign released on its website and then quickly deleted a set of proposals that would reduce regulation on food safety in the U.S.)
In order to eat a vegetable, do people need to be tricked into thinking it's something unhealthy? That's the deception posed by the zoodleāerr, zucchini noodle; that is, a zucchini put through a spiralizerāand the question put to us by the Atlantic's Bettina Makalintal, who writes that vegetable noodles are "just one example of a growing dietary trend of replacement instead of restriction."
For Eater, Adam Rhew goes deep on livermush, a "loaf of pork liver and meat scraps bound with cornmeal"āand a relative to scrapple or liver puddingāthat reflects the immigrant influences in Rhew's native North Carolina. Generation by generation, it's also disappearing.
