On Saturday, my friends and I headed down to Koreatown for the Korean BBQ Festival and Cook-Off. Korean BBQ is known to be heavy in meat, so I felt this would be a great opportunity to tackle my daily meat intake.
The festival ran from 12:00-5:00 and although we arrived around 1:00, the lines were already getting pretty long. I wasn’t too surprised by the long lines since the event was free, plus $10 per plate.
Assuming the longest lines had the best food, I jumped into one of the lines without
Just when I thought hall of fames were becoming a tired concept (there’s a Robot Hall of Fame?!), I discovered the Meat Industry Hall of Fame. At first, I hoped this might be a place to showcase the best and most famous meats. Inductees could be the porterhouse steak or buffalo wings. But then I got scared. If this is anything like sports hall of fames, the meats would have to be retired and I would be stuck watching reruns of their greatest hits on Food Network Classic, rather than enjoying them on my plate. Fortunately for unvegans of the world, our favorite meats are safe. The Meat Industry Hall of Fame isn’t around to thank meats for feeding us, but to thank the people that help to bring those meats to our plates.
Well, it was really only a matter of time before Ted Nugent got the spotlight on People for the Ethical Eatment of Animals. We all know he is a great rock star and outdoorist (read: hunter), but in a recent episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit, he really goes off on animal rights “extremists” like PETA. He declares, “Meat is food. Case closed.”
He also gets a little personal on the subject, saying that the lives of his children have been threatened because of the lifestyle they live as meat eaters. Amazing that these extremists care more for the animals than for their fellow humans.
Ok, yes I know I sort of reviewed some Indian food last week from Tara’s, but that was really Himalayan. So when I went to Gate of India in Hollywood, it was essentially my first time getting some full-on Indian food since moving to LA.
A buddy of mine took me to the place because it was the best Indian he had yet found in LA. Although he is Jewish, I took his work for it. Gate of India isn’t exactly what you would imagine for a place in Hollywood. It’s in a nondescript little row of shops on a street corner. The interior conveys a sense of a banquet hall more than an ethnic restaurant, but fortunately the prices weren’t so painful, with just about everything on the menu coming in under 10 bucks.
According to my research, somewhere between 20-40% of the population of India are vegetarian. This would be enough to frighten away many meat eaters from Indian restaurants, but not me. That means the majority is still of the meat-eating persuasion. The menu at Gate of India reflected this, because while a majority of the food was meat-laden, there was still a pretty extensive vegetarian section.
Barry Groves is a man who knows a lot about health. And he’s not just some know-it-all with a blog (read: me), he has a PhD to back it up. So when he decided to write about the diet of some important mammals, as compared to humans, I took notice. In his article, “Should all animals eat a high-fat, low-carb diet?” he debunks some common theories that vegans cling to in order to justify their unnatural lifestyles.
Sometimes it’s best to keep things simple. As Henry David Thoreau once said, “Simplify, Simplify, Simplify.” Quite often, restaurants fail to recognize this necessity by throwing in vegetable garnishings or trying to turn a burger into a gourmet meal. Big Daddy’s Burgers in Lake Tahoe, however, wouldn’t dream of crossing this line. They only make burgers, hot dogs and fries. It’s a menu so simple that it makes In-N-Out Burger’s menu look like a novel.
After a long day of hiking, there’s nothing better for an unvegan than beer and greasy food. Luckily, just a few steps from my hotel in Lake Tahoe, there was a nifty little joint called McP’s Irish Pub & Grill.
We took our seats in the upstairs and outdoors dining area, just outside the doors of a small performance. As we looked at our menus, there was a small child dancing like a crazy person to the sound of the music from within. This was infinitely more entertaining than the menu, but food had to be ordered. There was plenty of good-looking food on the menu, and eventually I decided to get the BBQ Beef Sandwich.
Charles Washington has an interesting way of eating right. Originally posted in his blog, Zeroing in on Health, he has some rules for eating that put even an unvegan like myself to shame. The rules are as follows:
1) Eat only from the animal world (eggs, fish, redmeat and fowl and some dairy are all animal sourced foods, i.e.: meat).
2) Eat nothing from the vegetable world whatsoever. (Very small amounts of flavourings such as garlic/chillies/spices/herbs which may be added, are not food).
By suggestion, I went off to the Grand Casino Bakery in Culver City in search of some good Argentinian food after I came back from Georgia. I’m not entirely sure how they wound up with a name like that, which really doesn’t convey images of South American food, but somehow it works in this crazy town of LA.
This one might be a bit of a stretch, but reading it just made me so happy that I thought I should write about it.
Sadie Nardini is a big-time yogi (for my loyal readers, this is someone who practices yoga). Typically the thought of yoga people makes me sick. They often carry a holier-than-thou attitude and usually a vegetarian diet comes along with it. Nardini, however, has recently outed herself as a meat-eater to buck the trend.
