Fast Food Juice In South Africa

  From South Africa, fast food chain Juicy Lucy. I wish US fast food outlets had juice like Juicy Lucy's! This menu is from 2006 - also of interest is "redespresso" - rooibos tea prepared in an espresso machine!

Crisfields Keeps At It Greatly!

    We recently went to Crisfields Seafood In Silver Spring. I first went there in 1981 - 33 years ago. The place is wonderful for it's simplicity and it's slow acceptance of change - no bacon wrap to be found here. Fresh fish. What a concept. Nothing new about it - there is the old Greek saying about fish should live in water and die in oil (olive oil of course!).
    Even the menu is simple - barely giving away the treasures to be served.

A Better Nutrition Label From The Man Who Designed The First One

A better nutrition label?

No appetite for changes to the FDA’s Nutrition Facts label

By Burkey Belser, Published: April 25

Burkey Belser is the president and co-founder of Greenfield Belser, a brand-strategy and design firm. He designed the FDA’s Nutrition Facts label in 1992.
There is very good reason to support Michelle Obama’s push to revise the Nutrition Facts label. If nothing else, a successful redesign would support the first lady’s effort to reduce obesity in the United States. But it’s worth examining whether the label itself can help fight the epidemic, as research shows that about one-third of Americans regularly rely on it when buying food.
The original label, which I designed in collaboration with the Food and Drug Administration more than 20 years ago, was born out of concern about obesity. Before that, the label was not really a label at all. Its Nutritional Information Per Serving, an undistinguished hard-to-find collation, was created when memories of the Great Depression were still with us. In the 1930s, hunger was bad enough but the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables led to vitamin-related diseases such as rickets and scurvy.
Almost overnight, the American diet changed from one of scarcity to one of abundance. Food manufacturers responded by fortifying products with the long list of vitamins and minerals you still see on cereal boxes. To give these vitamin-packed foods appeal, Corn Flakes became “Sugar Frosted Flakes.” As the processed-food industry grew, meats were more broadly distributed. Refrigerated trucks were already on the roads, but the real problem was the roads themselves — they were tortuously narrow, slow and disconnected. With the building of the interstate highway system, suddenly fresh foods from California and Florida hit grocery store shelves still plump and gleaming. The gaunt figures in Dorothea Lange portraits became the roly-poly figures in today’s news photographs deploring or, more to the point, gawking at obesity.
Enter Nutrition Facts. I was tasked with designing a food label for the FDA that would capture the detail that the transformed marketplace required. Four thousand pages of regulations had to be reduced to a few square inches, flexible enough to appear on a candy bar wrapper or a cereal box — and on wax paper and cellophane, which tend to blur small print. The label had to be digestible for Americans with low literacy, for non-native English speakers and older Americans with failing eyesight.
The food label assumes that all readers are familiar with the metric system, and that they understand nutrients and their relative value. For example, what’s the difference between fat, trans fat and saturated fat? Why are complex carbohydrates and sugars subsets of carbohydrates and, most important, why should the public care?
The label also assumes that all consumers understand percentages and daily values, what their usual caloric intake is and should be, and how to convert the information on the label to their needs.
The label’s information was so complex that, while designing it, we resorted to sliders, pie charts and asterisked notations to organize the information for the consumer. At one point, we tried to separate nutrients into “good” and “bad” (as one of the FDA’s proposed new labels essentially does) until the scientists convinced us it was not so simple. You can’t always neatly distinguish healthful from unhealthful. If dietary fiber and sugar are carbohydrates, are both bad or both good? Actually, scientists objected to the use of boldfaced type because, as soon as one nutrient was highlighted over another, we weren’t conveying scientific information but veering into public policy.
The original label was a tightrope walk between science and policy. The successful introduction of Nutrition Facts depended on broad acceptance, not just by consumers, but by industry and public-interest groups as well.
Using color was not an option because it could be costly for manufacturers. Colors also have different meanings around the world: Chinese brides wear red, while most Americans slam on the brakes when they see it. Only black and white steered relatively clear of such cultural differences.
Today, the White House is working with the FDA to redesign the original label to influence behavior. But I believe these changes will hinder comprehension of an already complex label.
The FDA did call me about the redesign project, but I was out of the country. When I returned, I submitted designs close to the one shown here; my concerns were not addressed in the FDA’s new version. The fine points of design that I’ve noted at right are not simply aesthetic, nor do they reflect any pride of ownership on the part of the guy who designed the label that’s being supplanted. To the contrary, these details affect consumer comprehension and, ultimately, their personal well-being: If they can’t understand the label, it won’t help them make healthier choices.
Such radical changes as the ones proposed are not required to achieve the FDA’s goals and would force consumers to relearn the label. Change is necessary, but let’s make sure it’s done in the best possible way.
burkeyb@gbltd.com


http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-fdas-proposed-changes-to-nutrition-facts-label-are-problematic/2014/04/25/97269852-c99e-11e3-95f7-7ecdde72d2ea_story.html

Nutritional facts

Burkey Belser, who designed the FDA's original Nutrition Facts label, explains why some of the label's proposed changes are problematic.

Original label

"Nutrition Facts" may not look like a logo, but it is. Over the past 20 years, it has become a powerful brand. Although manufacturers make claims about nutrition on the front of their packages, the facts on the back become an island of trust among self-promotional claims elsewhere.

Very bold and light type — as well as bold and light rules — help organize the information for the consumer.

A bounding box secured our space on each package, protecting it from incursion.

The FDA's proposed new label

"Servings per container" competes for your attention with "Nutrition Facts."

The word "calories" and the number of them are shouting at you. The "amount per 2/3 cup" gets lost when tucked above "calories."

The body of the label has dissolved into chaos: It's no longer right-justified and balanced.

"% Daily Value" is tough to understand even without being abbreviated and buried in the footnote. The %DV values are squeezed and separated by a vertical rule that stops the eye from scanning right and forces it to read down.

A better label

Calories and the calorie count are the same size and a bit smaller than the riotous shout-out proposed by the FDA.

Serving size is moved below the number of calories so it reads like a sentence, more clearly relating calories to serving size. As a measurement, the gram is still a mystery to most Americans.

% Daily Value is moved to its original position. The label "% Daily Value" is larger, and the line separating it from the values themselves has been removed. Balance and harmony have been restored.

Nutrients might appear in a different order because we have learned that fat does not affect obesity as much as calories and sugar do.

SOURCE: Burkey Belser. GRAPHIC: The Washington Post. Published April 25, 2014.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-fdas-proposed-changes-to-nutrition-facts-label-are-problematic/2014/04/25/97269852-c99e-11e3-95f7-7ecdde72d2ea_story.html

W. Devon Ave. Chicago - Food Wonderland! Annapurna Simply Vegetarian

   W. Devon Ave. in Chicago is a culinary wonderland - a vibrant area of Indian and Asian restaurants, grocery stores (and one supermarket), bakeries and various household and clothing stores. This one of the vegetarian restaurants on Devon St. from 2012 -

ubiquitous food additives

Salmonella prompts processed-food recall
By Lyndsey Layton
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 5, 2010; A02
Thousands of types of processed foods -- including many varieties of soups, chips, frozen dinners, hot dogs and salad dressings -- may pose a health threat because they contain a flavor enhancer that could be contaminated with salmonella, the Food and Drug Administration said Thursday.
Officials believe the public health risk is low, and no one is known to have fallen ill as a result of the contamination. But manufacturers voluntarily recalled 56 products Thursday, and that number is expected to balloon in the coming weeks into what could be one of the largest food recalls in U.S. history.
"We don't know precisely how large this recall will get," said Jeff Farrar, associate commissioner for food protection at the FDA. "The potential amount of products . . . is very large."
Salmonella was detected early last month in one lot of the flavor enhancer -- hydrolyzed vegetable protein, or HVP -- made by Basic Food Flavors, as well as inside the company's Nevada manufacturing facility, the FDA said. The company, one of only a handful that make HVP, has an extensive customer list. The additive, which comes as a powder or a paste and is mixed into foods to give them a meaty or savory flavor, is similar to monosodium glutamate, or MSG.
The contamination is believed to date to September 2009, meaning millions of pounds of potentially tainted HVP -- all of which the company has recalled -- was shipped in bulk to foodmakers over five months. Many of those companies then sold their products to other clients, complicating the chain and making it hard for federal officials to gauge the scope of the problem.
"This can potentially be in over 10,000 products," said Michael Hansen, senior scientist at Consumers Union.
The FDA has posted on its Web site a searchable list of products being recalled by manufacturers. It can be found at http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/HVPCP/.
Federal officials said the public health threat is low because most products containing HVP are cooked during processing or carry cooking instructions for consumers, so any salmonella would be destroyed before the food was eaten. Ready-to-eat products, such as chips and other snack foods, would carry greater risks.
In recent days, FDA officials have told foodmakers that their products do not need to be recalled if they can document that foods containing HVP were heated to appropriate temperatures.
Because of the number of products involved and the uncertainty of the risk, officials have been struggling to find the balance between protection and alarm.
"They're trying to come to some reasonable decision about how to protect the public health but not be so cautious as to be ridiculous and throw out tons and tons of product that may be fine," said Don Schaffner, a professor of microbiology professor and food-safety expert at Rutgers University, who has been advising several foodmakers that bought HVP from Basic Food Flavors.
FDA officials declined to say Thursday when they or state health officials last inspected the Nevada plant, or whether the company had a history of sanitation problems. The FDA was still attempting to determine what caused the contamination.
The company did not return calls seeking comment.
The salmonella bacterium is usually found in animal or human feces. Most healthy people infected with salmonella recover without treatment but experience fever, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain. Salmonella infections can cause serious problems and even death in the young, the elderly and those with compromised immune systems.
The agency learned about the problem after a foodmaker found the bacterium in a shipment of HVP and reported it under a new law that requires companies to notify the federal government if they detect contamination in a product or ingredient. Before September, the food industry was not required to alert the government to contamination.
"The FDA identified this before any major outbreak [of illness], and I think that is very good news," FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg said.
Joshua Sharfstein, deputy commissioner of the FDA, said the outbreak underlines the need for the Senate to pass a food-safety bill that has stalled since the House approved it last year. The bill would require companies such as Basic Food Flavors to take actions aimed at preventing contamination in the first place.
"We want to be able to set up preventive standards, so we don't have situations like this at all," Sharfstein said.




http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/04/AR2010030403863.html

Tiffin Marketing In Brattleboro, Vermont

   This is in a store front in Brattleboro, Vermont - October, 2009.

Channa & Pumpkin Roti at Ritas / Georgia Ave NW, Washington, DC

      This channa and pumpkin roti is from 2009 but Rita is keeping at it on Georgia Ave in 2014. I have been loving various veggie rotis at Ritas since the 1980s. Good stuff.