TracyFood

Monkey Monday: just past Sunday night edition 31 March 2008 12:00 am

Posted by Tracy in : Marion Nestle, breakfast, eating, health, meta, monkeys, nepal, news, nutrition, restaurants , trackback

Now with more breakfast news and commentary!

20/20 hindsight says I should have gone with a breakfast theme for last week, because the news was certainly on my side for a breakfast theme to last week. There was the study I mentioned on Wednesday, about the correlation between not eating breakfast and weight gain in adolescents, which Marion Nestle discussed a few days later over here on Eating Liberally. Here’s the heart of Dr. Nestle’s comments (boldface emphasis mine):

I believe the results. What I’m less sure about is whether the results have anything to do with breakfast itself or with education, wealth, and other markers of socioeconomic status. Breakfast-eating is a marker for a lot of other family characteristics. The Minnesota researchers know this. They point out that studies generally find that kids “who skipped breakfast on a daily basis had a higher BMI, were older, nonwhite, and from a lower SES.” Breakfast eaters, in contrast, eat better diets and are more physically active. So
breakfast-eating tracks with other healthful practices in kids.

Bam! And of course the mainstream press reporting addressed the socioeconomic issue even less than the Minnesota study did. Yeah, I’m looking at you, New York Times — but then again, your target audience is exactly the kind of people whose kids have no trouble getting a healthy breakfast if they’re not skipping meals for fear of getting fat. And of course the whole fear of fat thing is where all this research loses me a bit. Even EL fails in this regard, working a reference to Dr. Nestle’s eating habits and weight into their question. It’s intended as flattering, but comes across as a weird mix of sycophantic and fat-phobic. Blech.

But I digress, and last week’s breakfast news (and the blech) doesn’t end there, oh no. Y’see, Herb Peterson, inventor of the Egg McMuffin, died last Tuesday at the age of 89. Here’s the Associated Press story, and here’s NPR’s take, both chosen for their lack of completely tasteless headlines — suffice it to say there were some pretty bad ones out there. I’ve never eaten an Egg McMuffin myself, and I’ve generally been unimpressed by its whole genre of breakfast sandwiches, but they’re positively delicious compared to some of the obituary texts I found for the late Mr. Peterson on Google News. Yeesh, world. Let’s all work on having a little respect for the dead, shall we? Thanks!

But back to breakfasts. The other reason I should’ve made it my theme for last week is that maybe it would have motivated me to write a new entry for the Balanced Breakfasts food blogging challenge or at least taken pictures to illustrate one of my old recipes. As it is, I think my Breakfast Chilaquiles will have to do, since 1) they’re a recipe more or less of my own devising and B) shiny pictures!

So. That’s me, second-guessing last week, which is to say, I’m sorry about randomly skipping two days; it was totally my bad and in case you missed it, I tried to compensate for my Thursday-Friday slackery with a Saturday post about the America’s Test Kitchen episode aired by OPB on March 29, which was super fun to write. (My theory about recipe appearances in print and on TV turns out to be a bust, but the penne alla vodka was great for dinner just a few hours ago, mmmm.) My goal for this week is to stick to the regular daily schedule, and also to write something more than captions about the latest big mess of Nepal pictures I posted to Flickr over the past few days. Wish me luck, readers; I’ll be thinking good thoughts for the awesomeness of your Monday, too.