On Comfort Food

Introducing: Comfort Food!
In case you haven't heard, I've just launched a new podcast with my best friend (and fellow food-obsessive) Amy Palanjian of the wildly popular blog Yummy Toddler Food.

Comfort Food is about the joys (and meltdowns!) of feeding our families and ourselves. It’s about dealing with picky eaters. It’s about fighting back against diet culture. It’s about food — and that means it’s also about feminism, families and life.

We launched our first six episodes over the summer and the response has been great — my favorite iTunes reviewer said "anyone who has to feed other humans should listen to this podcast!" If you haven't checked it out, subscribe and listen (for free!) in iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, TuneIn Radio, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're new to podcasts, Amy has a great tutorial to help you figure it all out. (It's so easy. And, again, free!)

PS. If you like what you hear, please rate and review us on your podcast app — just scroll down till you see the stars and tap. It's so easy and super critical for helping us find our audience. Thanks, friends!

My new feature, 50/50 Parenting. For Real, about parents who actually do share the mental load (and the chores) of raising kids and running a house is out now in the September issue of Parents Magazine, or at parents.com. I think it's one of my favorite pieces ever — and full of useful tips on how you can make the split more equitable at your house.

Some bits and pieces I've been collecting from around the Interweb:

The Carnivore Diet is the Latest Fad to Ignore that Food Does More Than Just Feed Us. Oh man, everything about this piece is so great. Especially:

After 13 days of the carnivore diet, I realized that focusing on physiology fails to capture what makes carnivory so extreme. One valuable lesson of the diet is that human bodies are remarkably resilient: You can shit without fiber and avoid scurvy without vegetables! But reducing food to physiology is as shallow as reducing culture to biology. It’s hard to overstate the sociocultural importance of culinary traditions. Breaking bread. “Comfort food.” Grandma’s recipe. Potlatchs. Wedding toasts. Birthday cake. Thanksgiving dinner. You don’t have to be a foodie for food to be meaningful—you just have to be a human being.

(Alan Levinovitz/Tonic)

Here’s why it’s impossible to get reliable diet advice from the news. Wonky but fascinating. (Emily Oster/Slate)

The moral panic around obesity is evident in eating disorder research — and that’s a big problem. (Gotovac et al/Health Journal)

How do we look at fat bodies? (Leehr et al/Obesity Facts)

More good food reads here.

Speaking of food reads...

The Eating Instinct is getting some great early press!

Publisher's Weekly called it a "deeply personal and well-researched indictment of American diet culture."

Kirkus Reviews describes it as "a worthwhile read for anyone with anxieties about food."

And speaking of the book...

We're a little over two months away from my book launch. Which means we're about six weeks away from Sh*t Gets Real promotion time. If you'd be game to get a few extra emails from me in the 2-3 weeks before my book launch, hit reply and say "put me on Team VA!" (It will be stuff like "hey can you tweet this" and "what if you posted this cute picture of the book on Instagram." I promise I'll make it easy and fun and not spam-y. And there may even be chocolate involved.)