“Lutefisk is cod that has been dried in a lye solution. It looks like the dessicated cadavers of squirrels run over by trucks, but after it is soaked and reconstituted and the lye is washed out and it’s cooked, it looks more fish-related, though with lutefisk, the window of success is small. It can be tasty but the statistics aren’t on your side. It is the hereditary delicacy of Swedes and Norwegians who serve it around the holidays, in memory of ancestors, who ate it because they were poor. Most lutefisk is not edible by normal people. It is reminiscent of the afterbirth of a dog or the world’s largest chunk of phlegm.”

– Pontoon: A Lake Woebegone Novel by Garrison Keillor

One of the best gifts I received this year was a flat of tomato seedlings from Arthur Allen, author of RIPE: The Search for the Perfect Tomato.

After several years of tomato blight in our urban DC garden, my husband and I were excited to receive the plants in April from Art, who, let’s face it, knows from tomatoes. No way would these be the “little red cannonballs” you get in supermarkets. These were Tasti-Lees, a hybrid that he discovered in the course of writing his fascinating book, which traces the rise of the agri-industrial complex through a single crop. These babies, he assured us, are hard to kill and yet taste divine. Talk about the gift that keeps on giving; we harvested the first batch of sweet, juicy red fruit in June and picked the last valiant one in early November. I think of them every time I walk into a grocery store and see the flavorless ethylene-gassed tomatoes on display. Sigh.

This just in from the Firm-Grasp-of-the-Obvious Department: Television is a nutritional wasteland. According to a report published in the June issue of theJournal of the American Dietetic Association, researchers watched 96 hours of prime-time broadcast TV over 28 days and analyzed food commercials. Their earth-shattering conclusion? A 2,000-calorie diet consisting entirely of advertised foods would contain 25 times the recommended servings of sugars and 20 times the recommended servings of fat, but less than half of the recommended servings of vegetables, dairy, and fruits.