Thug Kitchen

Thug Kitchen is my new favorite food blog and everyone should read it.

He's a vegetarian gangsta. Despite the graphic I chose, he offers a lot of recipes, and they all look great. Plus he makes me laugh out loud and at inappropriate times.

In the immortal words of one Mr. Lavar Burton, you don't have to take my word for it. Saveur just named Thug Kitchen the Best Food Blog of 2013.

Word.

To Meat, or Not to Meat

From washingtonpost.com

Did you know pigs wiggle and wag their tails like dogs when they're happy? This horrifying detail was mentioned in the first of a series of 3 articles in the Washington Post, about a couple in the DC area who is planning to raise, and then slaughter and eat, 3 piglets.

In the article, the woman who is raising the pigs describes getting their living area ready and then picking them out and bringing them home. She describes naming them and worrying about their well-being- clearly, this woman is taking good care of her pigs. The little piglet in the picture above is in fat piglet heaven- until November, when he will be divested of his mortal coil so that it might be turned into a delicious pork chop.

Comparing Apples to...Rib Roast

As I'm gearing up for this project, I thought it might be helpful to review the different diets' rules and restrictions, to make the comparison between them a little more straightforward. The table below lays out the 6 different diets I'm planning to test out, and their basic rules about various food categories. 

I didn't include fruits or vegetables as a category because consumption of these food groups is almost totally unrestricted in all of these diets. Some of the low-carb diets, like Paleo, caution against eating too much fruit, and dried fruit is meant to be limited, but otherwise, you're free to go to town. No one ever got fat eating too many carrots.

One caveat here: I haven't researched all of these diets in detail yet, so some may be off. If you see something that needs to be changed, please let me know and I'll fix it.

Diet Comparison Chart

These diets share some similarities- the chart below makes that a little easier to see. The green boxes show food categories that the diet doesn't restrict at all, yellow boxes show food categories that a diet allows with conditions, and the red boxes indicate food categories that the diet rules out entirely. Verbotin!