I can no longer responsibly recommend that you drop everything to try to become a food writer. Except for a very small group of people (some of whom are clinging to jobs at magazines that pay more than the magazines’ business models can actually afford), it’s nearly impossible to make a living as a food writer, and I think it’s only going to get worse.

Food writing pays little and there are fewer positions available these days, so why not find another job in the food industry and write on the side? I must admit that Hesser’s argument is hard to disagree with, and I would’ve followed her advice had the editors at D decided to pick someone else for my position. For all I know, I could’ve been on a farm in North Carolina right now, planting strawberries. But if I were actually a farm help, I’d still be dirt poor and not any closer to becoming a food writer. John Birdsell from CHOW has a great post on “What Amanda Hesser Got Wrong.”

Do you guys think she’s right about this being a golden age for bloggers now that food writers are becoming a rare breed?

For her meal, Hagerty ate a chicken Alfredo pasta and drank a cup of water. She writes of the server: “She first brought me the familiar Olive Garden salad bowl with crisp greens, peppers, onion rings and yes — several black olives. Along with it came a plate with two long, warm breadsticks.”

She goes on to earnestly praise the Olive Garden for being “the largest and most beautiful restaurant now operating in Grand Forks. It attracts visitors from out of town as well as people who live here.” (Marilyn, honey, maybe it’s time to move….)

In response to her popularity, Hagerty told the Village Voice, “I don’t get it. I don’t have time to sit here and twit over whether some self-styled food expert likes, or does not like, my column.”

This article, for some mysterious reason, has 1) increased my desire to eat those remarkable breadsticks at Olive Garden and 2) kowtow to Marilyn’s genius writing. There’s no way you can’t fawn over a lady who simply finds joy in having black olives in her salad!

Michelle Gamradt with her mango bbq shrimp and sausage bowl

D Magazine intern Michelle Saunders is a vegan who enjoys healthy eating. Now I feel bad for stuffing my face with a cream cheese puff pastry as I was editing this post for her.

Okay, I’ll admit it. When I first heard about Genghis Grill’s Health Kwest, a 60-day weight loss contest centered on daily meals at the chain, I was more than a little bit skeptical. After all, this is the restaurant inspired by the legendary thirteenth-century Mongol warrior whose nomad diet purportedly consisted of large quantities of meat and dairy products – not exactly commonly recognized diet foods. I wasn’t sure how many (if any!) options they’d have for a no meat, dairy, or gluten enthusiast like myself, but I was reassured to discover the menu is not all meat. There are, in fact, lots of vegetables as well as healthier starch options such as steamed brown rice. They even have tofu if you’re looking for a meat-less protein substitute, so vegetarians, fear not – the Khan has not forgotten you.

I met 26-year-old “Khantestant” Michelle Gamradt at the Arlington location she represents with hopes that she could shed some light on the second annual Health Kwest. Since this was my first time eating at GG, I had her walk me through the process she goes through every day. Upon arrival we were seated and each given a surprisingly small bowl then encouraged to go through the cafeteria-style line and “build our bowls.” Michelle and I discussed the khantest over her mango bbq shrimp and sausage bowl (under 500 calories!) and my spicy veggie bowl.

Jump for more.

The veggie bar

She first heard about the Kwest in January when she was signing up online for their free birthday bowl. Like many, the start of the new year found her trying to get on track with her diet and exercise but she had attempted to make changes before with little success. “January is the time you’re trying to get healthy,” Gamradt admitted. “But every time I’d start a diet it would just fizzle out.”

The idea of participating in a public weight loss contest appealed to her because she knew she’d be held accountable, so she decided signing up couldn’t hurt.

“If I got chosen I told myself I was going full-throttle,” she recalled. “You don’t get this opportunity often and I was not going to blow it.”

A couple of days later she was notified that she had been chosen to represent Arlington and on February first she joined approximately 78 others on the journey to “a healthier Khan.”

The competition rules are fairly simple. The contestants are required to eat one meal a day at any Genghis Grill and as Gamradt put it, “just try to lose weight.” The daily meal is complimentary for participants and they are otherwise free to diet and workout as they see fit. They are also required to maintain a personal blog on the Health Kwest’s website that they update regularly with their progress. They must spread the word about the challenge to as many friends and family members as they can who can then ‘like’ each post two different ways by visiting their blog directly. Each ‘like’ counts as a vote and the winner is determined by the highest number of votes received (25%), most blog posts (25%), and highest percentage of weight lost (50%).

So where does Gamradt stand? At the time of our interview last week, which was exactly halfway through the competition, she was in approximately thirteenth place and had lost about 14 pounds, which is, she says, the most weight she’s ever lost in one period.

You know what they say…a carrot a day…oh wait…they don’t say that…

Far more important than her rank, however, are the drastic changes she’s made in her diet and lifestyle. “You don’t realize how much you put into your mouth until you stop doing it,” Gamradt confessed. Since starting the Kwest however, she has begun eating smaller meals throughout the day. Breakfast typically consists of oatmeal and water, lunch is a GG bowl, and dinner consists of a lean protein served with a side salad and wholegrain carb. Between meals she snacks on fresh fruit and she has given up all alcohol and refined sugar for the duration of the contest.

She has also begun working out regularly, recently joining Camp Gladiator and using the Couch to 5k app to prepare for the annual St. Patty’s Day Dash Down Greenville. With less than a month left in the competition and the top competitors leading with more than 70 thousand votes, Gamradt knows her chances of winning the 10 thousand dollar prize are slim. She is not fazed, however, and claims to already be reaping the rewards for her efforts. “I know [winning] will be a long shot,” she says. “But [the contest] has given me the motivation to change my life. I’m already a winner.”

After the contest is over she plans to maintain her new and improved lifestyle, saying, “I want to use the momentum from the weight I’ve lost to keep me going after this ends.”

Although I won’t be hurrying back to GG for more “Mongolian Stir-Fry” any time soon (it’s not exactly fine dining or memorable Asian cuisine), I stand corrected on two points. One, Mongol warriors apparently did not consist entirely on meat, and two, the Khan may actually know a thing or two about inspiring healthier lifestyles. And for that, I say the khantest is a success.

To vote for Michelle Gamradt, visit her profile.

image from gourmet.com

We sent editorial intern James Williford to attend the Tate Lecture Series with Michael Pollan, the best-selling author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Here’s what he learned from the Pollanator:

Last night, after toting bagfuls of Tom Thumb groceries onstage at SMU’s McFarlin Auditorium, Michael Pollan opened this year’s Oncor Lecture with a familiar pronouncement: Americans have a disastrous relationship with food. Aside from an apple, the locally-bought foodstuffs—which, one after another, he pulled out of the bags and joked wryly about—were over-processed junk with appallingly misleading label copy. Holding up an almost neon-yellow tube, he said: “No one has ever confused Pringles with health food, right? But now you can get Pringles Multigrain. ‘Cheesy Cheddar,’ artificially flavored, but multigrain. So that’s a real winner. You put ‘multigrain’ on everything, because we’ve read that it’s good for you.” The audience laughed.

Pollan has his shtick down, but his message is serious and not quite as uncontroversial as it might at first seem. It’s not just the quality of the food that we eat, he says, but the way that we think about food in general that, over the last 30 years or so, has swelled our guts, impoverished our culinary culture, and left us increasingly susceptible to coronary disease, diabetes, and certain types of cancer. And how do we think about food? As nutrition.

According to Pollan, we don’t see whole, simple, recognizable items to be placed on the table and consumed anymore—we see a collection of nutrients, each either “good” or “bad,” depending on the prevailing and highly variable trends in dietary research and marketing. “You don’t eat a steak,” he said, “you eat a quantity of protein and fat and salt and iron.”

He calls this attitude “nutritionism,” and identifies it as an ideology, not a science. Consider: Have you ever seen a nutrient? Most of us don’t spend our time peering through microscopes at our dinner plates. And even if we did, without at least a modicum of scientific training, we wouldn’t be able to distinguish the carbohydrates from the proteins, much less decide which of the two we should be putting into our bodies and in what amounts. Nutrients are effectively invisible. And the upshot of basing our understanding of food on its invisible qualities is that we have to rely on experts to tell us what to eat. “It’s sort of like a religion,” Pollan said, “a religion in which the gods no longer talk to us. You then need a priesthood to mediate your relationship to those gods. Well, we’ve come to that point. We need a priesthood of experts.”

The problem with that, of course, is that the experts don’t quite seem to know what they’re talking about—not yet. Their science is young, given to errors, and too easily co-opted by crafty big food marketers (recall those “healthful” Pringles). We don’t know, Pollan pointed out, exactly what happens to our bodies when we drink a soda, or why we have as many neurons in our stomachs as we have in our spinal columns (“What are they thinking?”), or why some people get sick from beta carotene extracted from carrots. Our blind faith is an unproven science, he argues, at the heart of our dietary dysfunction. “As I see it, nutrition science is today approximately where surgery was in the year 1650—really promising, really interesting to watch, but I think I’ll wait to get up on the table.”

In the meantime, Pollan insists, the situation isn’t hopeless. His advice poses the wisdom of culture—which he says is just another word for “mom”—against the bizarre logic of nutritionism. “Don’t eat meat in an airport,” he remarked, reading one of the 83 rules detailed in his latest book, Food Rules. “Avoid products containing ingredients that a third grader can’t pronounce.” And one of his favorites, “The Great-Grandma Rule”: “Pretend that your great-grandmother is there with you, rolling down the aisles of the supermarket. If she would not recognize something as food, then it’s not food.”

Michelle Obama cheers on the Red Team (Paul and Grayson)

[Ed. Note: Thanks to Carol for this report. Plus, she took all of the photos. She says: " Big cameramen were blocking me so I had to crawl under people and touched a lot of legs]

First Lady Michelle Obama made a pit stop in Dallas this morning to promote her project, Let’s Move! inside the basketball court of Kleberg-Rylie Recreation Center. Her three-day national tour celebrates the second anniversary of her initiative designed to combat America’s growing obesity problem.

“Healthy food can be good and delicious too,” said Mrs. Obama to a room filled with Nancy Moseley Elementary students, “And that’s what we’re going to learn today.”

As 110 kids cheered, BRAVO’s Top Chefs Paul Qui, Grayson Schmitz, Richard Blais, Fabio Viviani, Jenn Carroll, and Spike Mendelssohn cooked healthy and nutritional meals within a 30 minute time limit under the watchful eyes of judges Tom Colicchio, Sam Kass (White House chef), and the First Lady.

Jump for the play by play.

Tom Colicchio (left); Tom and Sam Kass (right)

Shiny egg-head Tom meets his brother-from-another-mother, Sam Kass – a fellow shiny egg-head. They stall the kids before the First Lady arrives, and their heads reflect all the light in the room.

First Lady Michelle Obama

Then the First Lady arrives and all the kids are fawning over her, of course. Who could dislike a woman who rocks J. Crew?

Red team: Paul and Grayson (left); Turkey bacon tacos (right)

Red Team: Paul Qui, Grayson Schmitz, Dallas Cowboy DeMarcus Ware, and two Nancy Moseley students

What they cooked: Elizabeth and Anna (the students) grabbed fresh cantaloupe and carrots from the ingredients table and started peeling and chopping like pros. Sweaty Paul and blushing Grayson (who is so photogenic, by the way) created turkey bacon tacos with fresh tortillas made in a baby oven. There was quinoa and slaw (made out of fennel, cabbage, and carrots) on the side. Grayson and the kids mixed skim milk with sweet melon to create a smoothie-like drink that the First Lady enjoyed.

What the judges said: “A lot of flavor for healthy food, but doesn’t taste like it,” praised Tom Colicchio.

Random: Paul wore skin-tight jeans while Grayson flirted with #94 Demarcus Ware. Future love couple, maybe?

P.S. The press release tricked me. Paul was supposed to be here, not Ed. Hmm. Does this mean Paul doesn’t win Top Chef? Must think about this…

White Team: Spike Mendelssohn, Jenn Carroll, Dallas Cowboy Miles Austin, and two Nancy Moseley students

What they cooked: Smoked pork chops with apple sauce, sweet potato, greek yogurt with whole wheat pita chips

What the judges said: “Flavors were good and not too seasoned,” said Tom, while Mrs. Obama told Spike and Jenn that it reminded her of comfort food.

DeMarcus Ware and other Cowboys cheer on their respective teams.

I got a little too close to blue team member, Fabio..

Blue team: Richard Blais, Fabio Viviani, Felix Jones, DeMarco Murray, and two students

What they cooked: Spiced turkey tenderloin, carrots, peas, and chocolate pudding with no chocolate in it.

What the judges said: Tom thought the dishes were rich and colorful.

Random: Richard Blais had Michelle Obama sign his wife’s birthday card, because his wife told him he couldn’t leave Texas without her autograph. What a smart wife!

The judges conferring.

Tom to First Lady: “Talk to the hand, not the face!”

First Lady: “No, I must speak to your egg-head!”

… just kidding. That would never happen. Instead, they discussed which team won the competition. Then Mrs. Obama announced that the winner was “Red, White, and Blue.”

Grayson toasts the kids.

Speech time.

Mrs. Obama made the following remarks: “As everybody here knows, this challenge is run by the Department of Agriculture, or the USDA as we call it. And it recognizes schools that meet the highest national standards for nutrition and physical activity — the highest standards. These schools are the schools that are finding creative, innovative ways to serve healthy meals and to get kids active. So it’s a twofer — it’s not just nutrition, but it’s also physical activity. And these high-ranking schools are doing it at a time when budgets are tight — and we all know that budgets are tight — and there aren’t a whole lot of resources to go around, again, which is why this competition is important, because schools are being asked to do so much more with less.

Right here in Dallas, more than 150 schools have been recognized in this challenge. That includes 78 schools that have earned Gold Awards, which go to schools that meet the highest levels of standards. And that’s more than any other school district in the entire country. Did you hear that? Dallas, you have more Gold schools in this district than anywhere in the country. And that includes schools like Nancy Moseley Elementary School!”

Richard Blais and student

Richard Blais – who’s already heavily involved with children’s health and nutrition around the nation – told us, “Mrs. Obama has inspired me to get involved in the local scene.”

Part 1: Quickfire/Asian Domination

Last week, the chefs realized that one of the losing contestants (either Bev or Grayson) would be returning through Last Chance Kitchen, which would increase their numero to cinco. Sarah (who looks like Austin Eater editor Andrea Grimes, don’t you think?) is noticeably disappointed when Bev walks through the doors to compete with the other four in this elimination challenge because tiny Bev is a fierce competitor. She is a beast.

Now three out of the five contestants are repping the Asian continent. I would just like to point that out. #minoritypride

Jump for more shenanigans.

Padma then tells the chefs they have to walk around with blindfolds as they’re gathering ingredients. They must use every single ingredient they pick up, and the winner gets to choose between a new Prius v or a spot in the final four. Poor Bev. Half of the time, she is nowhere near anything edible; and the other half, she is feeling everybody up. (Not a bad excuse to bump into Paul, eh?) Bev and Paul undercook their fish and prawn (respectively) while Sarah and Ed’s dishes stand out to the judges. Ultimately, the corn soup with red chili and peaches that Sarah whipped up earns her a spot in the final four. She declines the Prius v (dumb, so dumb..) and chooses to spend the rest of her day lollygagging instead of competing in the elimination challenge. LUCKY HER.

Part 2: Elimination Challenge

Tom and Padma introduce the next part of this saga: The cheftestants must create a dish that will please their mentors. Somebody cue the waterworks. As soon as the mentors file in, Paul spots his Uchiko boss of eight years, Tyson, and immediately turns into a blubbering fountain of tears. Eventually, all the chefs start crying as introduce their mentors to the judges. Then the mentors start tearing up too, and the whole situation just turns into a big gooey mess.

Nobody wants to make their mentor look bad at the judging table, so the pressure is on. Since there aren’t any fresh oysters in Whole Foods, Ed picks up pre-smoked oysters which everyone knows is a dumb move except for Ed because he’s stressing himself out. Ugh. While Ed’s in the kitchen cooking his stupid smoked oysters, he says, “I just hope I didn’t psyche myself out.” Double sigh. Bravo, please keep all the heavy foreshadowing to yourself. I don’t want Ed to leave.

Part 3: Judging Table

While Sarah is off frolicking with her mentor, Paul cooks a chilled sunchoke and dashi soup, Bev fires up BBQ noodles with a risky wok move, Ed makes braised pork belly with pickles, and Lindsay adds too much cream to her seafood stew with mussels and clams. When the judges realize Ed bought smoked oysters instead of fresh ones, Padma nicely tells Ed to “please pack his knives and go.” Oh, Ed. Whyyyy did you have to pick those stupid smoked oysters? It’s OK, though, because at least this means I get to see you tomorrow with Michelle Obama.

Episode 15 Preview

The fearsome final four are in British Columbia, cooking Canadian game in thick jackets and snow boots. Is anyone else confused? I thought this show was supposed to be about Texas.

Oh yeah, it's for real.

We’re suckers for any press release that contains the following sentences:

• Yes, this is really real.
• Don’t you judge us; we all knew it would end up here someday.
• And yeah, your right we probably did go too far this time.
• Sorry, Mom.

It seems a couple well-intentioned entrepreneurs have teamed up with J&D’s Foods to create a little something they’re calling baconlube—the world’s first bacon-flavored, water-based, American-made, personal lubricant.

Billing itself as the “gold standard of meat-flavored massage oils” (natch) baconlube, they say, is like the McRib of sex: it’s delicious, makes men crazy, is here for a limited time, and is in short supply.

If you’re thinking “stocking stuffer!” (let’s stay on track here), we’re right behind you. But the boys only made 3,000 bottles of this pork-flavored nectar. It hit the interwebs yesterday at www.baconlube.com. How much, you ask, for a product that promises such a satisfying holiday season? Only $11.99.

you know you want more. jump for it…Still on the fence? Here’s a little rationalization.

FACT – People are passionate about bacon.  According to a recent survey of Canadians by Maple Leaf Foods, Canada’s market leader in the bacon category, when asked to choose between bacon and sex, more than four in 10 (43%) chose bacon.  Thanks to baconlube, Canadians will never have to choose between two of life’s greatest pleasures again.  So you’re welcome Canada, you’re welcome – we’ve got your back.

Need I mention, we’ve requested a sample?

Leave it to Ben & Jerry’s