→ 5 Things you should know about plant based meat

Plant based meat ain't the fix that I was looking for. It's looking like a processed food alternative to processed meat. In my book, a lost. Lot's more information from Juliette Luini on the website defining those next points.

We’re inundated with talk of plant-based meat, so we’ve teamed up with the True Health Initiative to suss out what we know and, as important, what we don’t regarding how products from Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat influence animal welfare, the environment, and our health.

Here are five takeaways from the talk:

• Plant-based meats are obviously better for animal rights, but replacing a beef burger with a Beyond burger isn’t going to save the planet from climate change.

• Vegetables are better for the environment than plant-based meats.

• Plant-based meats are ultra-processed, but beef has a hefty ingredient list, too.

• The health impacts of plant-based meat are TBD.

• If you’re a carnivore, switching from a beef burger to a plant-based burger is a good thing for your health, the health of the planet, as well as animals. But if you are comfortable with plants tasting like plants, just stick to unprocessed vegetables and grains.

→ Tips to fall back asleep in the middle of the night

• Remain in bed
• Stay in the dark
• Block out noise
• Adjust the temperature (65 degrees)
• Quiet your mind
• Think positive

→ Rethinking Gluten Free

Interesting article about the food system industrialization and how it affects our health. People with gluten intolerance might want to take a look at this since it does makes you wonder what you put into your belly. I have been skipping wheat for our kids for a long time now but Im slowly re-introducing sourdough bread into their diet. They are doing great.

Gluten-free diets simply sidestep deeper problems in our food system, problems that wheat points out to us. As one of the most intensively industrialized crops in the world, wheat is giving us a glimpse of where we’re headed as we continue on this path with other foods. If we ignore these warnings, we’ll soon add other foods to our list of dietary sensitivities. But if we heed them, we have a golden opportunity to address many other pressing problems linked to our food system, including its climate footprint and its devastating impact on rural communities. So instead of ditching wheat, let’s fix the way it’s bred, the way it’s grown, and the way it’s processed.

The wheat you eat in a typical store-bought cookie or hamburger bun is very different from the wheat your great-grandparents ate. Over the course of the twentieth century, wheat was aggressively bred to improve crop yield and loaf volume — the number of loaves of bread industrial processors can squeeze out of each bag of flour by pumping as much air into the dough as quickly as possible.

In the process, the chemical composition and nutrient profile were significantly changed. Medical trials with subjects who alternated between a modern wheat and ancient wheat diet have demonstrated just what a difference these breeding programs have made to our ability to digest this staple grain. While modern wheat has been shown to cause inflammation, ancient wheat actually reduces it, improving outcomes for patients with chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and irritable bowel syndrome.

→ Follow your bliss

Interesting article by Deepak Chopra about following your "bliss".

Let’s say that you want to follow your bliss as far as it can take you. There are essentially three stages on such a path. Stage 1 is the experience of personal joy, which all of us have known at least once in our lives. These moments touch the lives of people who fall in love or who achieve a triumph or who simply find themselves overjoyed for whatever reason. You grab and hold on to Stage 1 bliss as long as you can, but eventually the moment passes.

A change occurs in Stage 2. Instead of possessing an experience of joy, the joy possesses you. By this I mean that it is more impersonal. In Stage 1, bliss is all for me, the ego-personality. In Stage 2, you rise above personality. The Latin roots of the word “ecstasy” mean “to stand outside.” That’s how Stage 2 bliss feels. You go outside your normal boundaries.

Stage 2 feels light and sometimes out-of-body. Religious awe falls into this category, along with wonder before the beauty of Nature, or its immensity. There can be a sense that time has stopped or that your mind has expanded into a new space that is free, open, untroubled, peaceful, and forever calm. But the essential aspect of Stage 2 bliss is that it possesses you, not the other way around.

Stage 3 is the experience of Stage 2 bliss on a permanent basis, so that it becomes the default state of your awareness. Every person’s mind has a default state already, a set of grooved-in reactions, responses, beliefs, and attitudes that make up their personal story. Stage 1 bliss occurs inside this default setting, while Stage 2 takes a brief vacation from it, and then Stage 3 leaves the old default setting behind completely.

At that point, “Follow your bliss” has accomplished what it was meant to accomplish: liberation. There are many terms for this state, such as enlightenment, waking up, Nirvana, Moksha, or the peace that passes understanding. The important thing is the experience, which begins simply enough, by focusing on the bliss you can create in your life, valuing it, and beginning to experience, usually through meditation or Yoga, a settled sense of the quiet, peaceful mind.

→ My Restaurant Was the Greatest Show of Excess You’d Ever Seen, and It Almost Killed Me

I'm always interested reading about chefs who are forgoing alcohol as a way of life. Restaurateurs like David McMillan and Fred Morin were well know for being excessive in their food and drinks. Things change and when they do, it usually is for better.

When the chefs of Joe Beef in Montreal gave up alcohol, their whole restaurant changed.

McMillan- I was never falling-down drunk. I was never belligerent. I always got my work done. I was never unkempt. I was always clean, I was always shaved, I always performed at work. I was always kind and gracious in the dining room. But I lived in hell.

→ The Dark Horse path to happiness

Here is something that I have been interested in lately is more about how we live our daily live, our mindset, over the end product so more about process then outcome. Check this article written by Bradley Stulberg in Outside magazine. Here are my answers to the 3 steps.

Apply a Process of Outcome Mindset to Your Own Life

Reflect on what motivates you. Try to come up with three to five core values or things that matter most to you, the guiding principles in your life.

1. Health - physical and mental
2. Family and Friends
3. Making stuff
4. Misc. creative output

Think about how you can turn these core values into daily practices. What actions work in service of your core values? How can you adjust your life to ensure you are taking these actions regularly? How can you incorporate these actions into your current routines? How will you measure whether or not you’re taking them?

1. Exercises and meditation
2. Taking the time to spend time with family and friends either physically or virtually
3. Plan stuff, test stuff and do stuff
4. Fail some stuff

Whenever you find yourself seeking, or wanting a certain outcome out of life, note what you’re doing and then refocus on practicing your core values. “When it comes, happiness is most often caused indirectly,” writes Patten. It’s the result of repeatedly practicing the actions that work in service of your core values, a lifestyle that compounds with consistency and over time.

→ Open Last Document in Drafts

One of the best features of Drafts for iOS is how it almost always opens to a blank document ready from me to type. This is a double edged sword though. Sometimes I come back from doing a web search and the document I was working on has been replaced with a blank screen.

You can go to his website for the link and I think its clever. I wish I would have known about this when I subscribed to the Drafts app. Its a big time saver to be able to open the last document with a keyboard shortcut.

→ What Happens When Five Sober Chefs Share a Kitchen?

Julia Bainbridge writes about a gathering of the top chefs in Portland. It's an interesting read and I hope one that we will see more often, a booze free environment that is celebrated in a positive way.

None of the men involved in the dinner know what the effect will be, but “if one chef de partie in the US decides to get clean and sober after this, that’s enough of a reason to do it,” says Solomonov. According to Brock, “I want [sobriety] to be something people are proud of rather than shameful of. The simple fact that you have made the decision to take better care of yourself? That should be the proudest moment of your day.”

→ A noob’s attempt at reverse engineering Google’s Cash

Here Nihal Pasham walks us through his process to figure out how Google cash works. Basically the app uses near ultrasonic sound to process payment when nearby. It's an interesting read.

→ Can we talk about alcoholism and Anthony Bourdain?

Jo Ann Towle wrote in the Chicago Tribune and I agree with the article. Alcoholism is a problem that one view only as a thing that you push under the rug. I would also put mental health in the same boat. I think we need to tackle with them. It will only get bigger as we move forward.

I didn't know Anthony Bourdain, but felt like I did in one small important way. In him, I saw a drinking alcoholic with a front-stage vigorous attempt to do it successfully. His was a fantastic life-embracing show, with drinking taking a prominent role in the joie de vivre, and sometimes that made it hard for me to watch.

When he threw back shots, indeed got wasted, I saw a fellow alcoholic living dangerously whereas most viewers, I imagine, saw “a man who knew how to drink, knew how to live.” His state of mind will be called depression, and who can argue with that in the wake of his suicide. But can we please, people, start connecting the dots to alcoholism (also a disease of the mind), at least when it is screamingly evident?