Hawaii Food News Round-up, Aug. 8-14

How good are you at telling what you are eating without seeing it?

Oahu News

• It’s the second weekend of Aug., so what better way to talk about ice cream! Check out Honolulu Weekly’s guide to some cold treats. – Also if you are interested in the history of ice cream check out Refridgeraider’s post here.
• By the way, what is your favorite frozen treat? Refridgeraider loves gelato over ice cream, but another HGC member loves ice cream. How about you? Take out poll at the bottom of this post.
• Formaggio Grill gives a whole new meaing to blind taste test, try eating your food blind-folded at Dining in the Dark to see how well you know your food. For the Star-Advertiser’s article click here. If you want to find out more about Dining in the Dark click this link.
• Midweek’s Jo McGary brings another close-up of a local chef, this time Hiroshi Eurasion Tapa’s Executive Chef Hiroshi Fukui.

Neighbor Island News

• Curious about eating beets, making cake out of them (yes, I did mean a Beet Cake), and the getting info on the Kaua‘i County Farm Bureau Fair, check it out here.
• Finally, I know some of you like gardening (or attempting to garden) and love fresh herbs, so take a peek here to help you get started with your own herb garden.

Honolulu Grub Club Stuff

• Don’t forget next weekend (Aug. 21) is the First Annual HGC Cheesecake Competition, which is shaping up to be a tasty battle. We have five competitors preparing their most awesome Cheesecakes. There will be cheesecake (served by the competitors) and coffee to go along afterward. Don’t forget to bring $5 and a mug for your cheesecake and coffee! E-mail for details.

Respect Your Steak, it Probably Made Us Smarter

NPR (I will find another source of information in a couple of more posts I’m trying to make up for the dearth from the past two weeks ok!), has come up with interesting story about the evolution of humans with regard to our diets.

Keeping with the theme of the last post, the article discusses how our ancestors used to eat things raw. However, instead of that being a benefit (as raw foodists proclaim), foraging and eating all that raw food required a large gut. Not a fat gut, but a big one for processing all that food to survive.

There was one problem with that, big guts require a lot of energy. Therefore, more energy meant less power for our brains. Digestion required a lot of energy and the brain power was not a priority. Eating trumped thinking (which I can sometimes agree with). Anyway, we then discovered MEAT!

What’s so special about meat? It’s packed with a lot of calories and fat. With influx of energy our guts shrank and no longer needed to be a veggie processor. And what did we do with this new found energy? Think of new ways to hunt animals and chop them into bits to eat easier! That is how the theory goes from Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist.

However, that theory is not for fellow anthropologist, Richard Wrangham. He feels that is not enough to explain the new mental power we have gained through evolution. He cites a study where people lost weight and had chronic energy deficits while on raw food diet. He believes that it was actually cooking that made us smarter. By cooking things, their make-up changes, making it easier to digest.

Whatever the reason we are smarter it sure tastes great to me . . . . now where’s the beef?