Can Eating Palm Oil be an Environmental Hazard?

Consumer Trends Fuel Environmental Problems

Ever thought about how political food is?  Or how about certain food trends having an impact on the environment?  There's an interesting article at www.mongabay.com about how rain forests in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand or being replaced with oil palm, the world's number one fruit crop.  The oil palm cultivation is encroaching on the orangutan habitats and sensitive bio systems. The article is Why is palm oil replacing tropical rainforest? if you want to look it up.

Check out this food website!

If you're a foodie and you haven't discovered  www.foodbuzz.com  yet, you definitely want to check this one out.  Not only do they have a data bank of over 100,000 recipes that you can browse, but you can connect with other foodies, find food blogs, locate restaurants and review and rate restaurants.

A Better Avocado?

I've never been a big fan of avocados. I don't like the squishy texture of a fully ripened avocado or the darkness of the oxidation on the surface if you don't eat it all at once. But recently "First" magazine did an article on weight loss (as it always does) that was based on balancing your body's PH, and one of the ways to do this was to eat an avocado a day. OK, I need to lose a few pounds, and if adding an avocado a day is a way to do it, I'm game to give it a try. So, I bought a few avocados that weren't fully ripened and discovered that I much preferred the texture of a partially ripened avocado to a fully ripened one. All I did was to cut it in half, peel off the skin and salt it generously with seasoned salt. I actually enjoyed it as a snack. So then, thinking that I had discovered the secret to enjoying this vegetable that I had once found unpaletable, I tried a new type of avocado that is lower in fat, is about twice as large as a regular avocado, has a much more attractive medium green skin, and best of all, retains a firm texture as it ripens. It's called a SlimCado - wait - don't go running out the door to buy this sucker, stay with me until I finish this. It's easier to peel and remove the pit than a regular avocado, another plus. But what I want to know is, did the people who developed this new avocado actually taste it before they put it on the market? First bite; watery, where's the flavor? OK, it's 35% lower in calories, it's 50% lower in fat, so you're going to lose a little flavor, right? Second bite; it really tastes like water with avocado flavor added, only you have to chew it to get it down. The avocado flavor is actually faint, barely there at all. A few more bites and the section I had cut off the avocado is gone. I doesn't accumulate any flavor as it is eaten, in fact, it tastes increasingly watery. Now, the last bite is gone, and I realize that I had tasted a faint bitterness between bites that I was able to ignore, but after the last bite, the bitterness stays on and becomes increasingly bitter. I'm trying to think of a way to describe this - If you just ran a twenty mile marathon and came home and pulled off your sweaty sneakers and socks and your dog ran over and licked your feet in adoration, I'm pretty sure this is the same flavor he would have in his mouth. After 10 minutes, the aftertaste still hadn't left, so I scrounged for some leftover General Tso's Chicken in the refrig. and thankfully got the sweaty sneaker taste out of my mouth. I hate wasting money and this stinker cost $2.88. Don't even bother, people.