Seems like a new vegan place in North Beach is imploding before I even paid a visit.

MenuPages has the run-down: “The initial reviews were mostly glowing and there was talk of the Usual Suspects giving popular veggie spots like Herbivore a run for their money. But a meltdown in the kitchen seems to have left this promising upstart reeling on the brink of closure.”

Sad that they kept the cruelty off the menu, but not out of the kitchen…

So, by now, the stories are everywhere about tomatoes carrying salmonella and now, today, it is also possibly linked to jalapeno and serrano peppers and possibly cilantro. The story always seems to be the same, some vegetable gives you food poisoning, but it nearly always ends up being produce from near some animal agriculture factory, with the barely-inspected fecal runoff going where it shouldn’t. But, it gives meat eaters the usual dodges they love… “you say meat will give me cancer, but spinach and tomatoes give you food poisoning.” It is nice that the animal agriculture industry finds a way to taint other products, too…

And, 8 year olds might be able to score cholesterol-lowering drugs now, so they won’t have heart problems later in life? As part of the same recommendations, kids can go on low-fat milk earlier, since they already get enough fat… so they have that going for them.

Just an FYI, but this whole post will contain WALL*E spoilers, if you’re concerned about such things.

I’m not a big animation nut, but after being disappointed by Wanted and Hancock, I tried to see something bulletproof, so I went to a late night showing of WALL*E (to lessen the amount of kids in attendance).

Wall*E is a robot that is cleaning up the Earth after humans evacuated 700 years earlier, with the hope they would eventually recolonize after the clean-up. But it’s been going for a while now…

Since this isn’t a movie review site, suffice it to say, the robot gets himself transported onto one of the spaceships that held evacuees 700 years earlier, and now houses their descendants. They basically fly around in hover chairs, eat everything in a cup (including cupcakes), and every generation aboard the ship has gotten increasingly fatter and atrophied from doing nothing, since they have robots to do everything for them.

While I did have problems with the movie from a story perspective, it was interesting to
see Pixar be so brazen about a movie where we ruined the earth and became a race of lifeless, connected slugs beholden to a big box store that provides everything we need.

Fact, fiction, or foreshadowing?

If I wasn’t so nutty about keeping my in box cleaned out, I’d never write on here, it seems… big plans in the works to change up the game, don’t worry. Anywhere, here’s this month’s McDougall news:

McDougall is really pushing more lately. First, suggesting that Bill Clinton had brain damage because of his bypass surgery and now, a posthumous interview with Meet the Press’s Tim Russert, who reports on the diet in the afterlife: “…the food’s terrible. Nothing but rice, potatoes, beans, corn, fruits and vegetables.  Everything’s bland, but they say I’ll get used to it.”

This month’s recipes include items from the recent Celebrity Chef Weekend, so worth checking out for Fat-Free Karei-Rice (Japanese-style Curry Rice), Mexican-Spiced Summer Squash, Bryanna’s Italian Polenta, Bean, and Kale Slices, and Bryanna’s Fat Free Vegan Brown Gravy.

And congratulations to Beth Burns, the most recent Star McDougaller, who attributed her switch to a low-fat vegan diet as a cure for her migraine headaches: “My migraines became fewer and farther between. They appeared once a week, once a month, once in a while, and then they completely disappeared. The last time I had a migraine headache was October 2006.”

According to the PCRM newsletter: A study in today’s American Journal of Epidemiology found that people who were obese or overweight in adolescence were three to four times as likely to have died of heart disease by middle age as compared with their thinner peers. A total of 226,678 Norwegian teens were measured for body mass index (BMI) as part of a compulsory national health survey and followed for an average of 34.9 years. They were found to be two to three times more likely to die from colon cancer or respiratory disease. Women in the highest BMI category were at increased risk of death from cervical cancer and both sexes were at increased risk for sudden death.