A couple years back, the Times of London printed a great feature, excerpted from a book, entitled What scientists believe but can’t prove. A couple of sample answers: “I believe in the final triumph of the good guy.” “I believe but I cannot prove that God exists.” “I believe that Mozart was a better composer than Carl Stamitz, a lesser-known contemporary.”

I’m a few years late to the party and my entry will probably not surprise anyone who knows me, but I’ve been thinking about the question today because I just read this article about an appalling public health initiative in England:

Knives out for ‘death by fairy cake’ advert

> The Department of Health spent £500,000 on two advertisements aimed at mothers, and placed in women’s weekly magazines.

> One – which shows a picture of a young girl of healthy weight and appearance, biting into a fairy cake, and captioned: “Is a premature death so tempting?” – has provoked a backlash from parents, chefs and obesity experts.

(A fairy cake, in case anyone doesn’t know, is a cupcake.)

So, here is what I believe but cannot prove: **Health messages about food are hazardous to your health.** I mean this literally and I mean it emphatically. I believe we would all be better off with absolutely no guidance on what to eat other than tradition and our taste buds, and I believe that health messages about food literally cause health problems.

Someone pointed out after my recent post about calorie counts on menus that I didn’t mention perhaps the worst thing about posting calories on menus: it makes life hell for people with anorexia, people for whom counting calories is pathological and harmful and who have to learn not to do it in order to heal.

So it goes for all of us. Health messages about food are usually wrong (which of the popular ones today will go the way of margarine and low-fat? All of them, I bet) and they screw with our enjoyment of food. I call bullshit. I’m eating a cupcake for my English homies.

Forgive me if I say anything silly here, because I know almost nothing about manga. While researching an upcoming column about sake, however, I punched the word “sake” into my local library catalog and came up with a few guides to sake (of which the best is [The Sake Handbook](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0804834253/?tag=mamstesgrubshack) and something called [Oishinbo A La Carte: Sake](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1421521407/?tag=mamstesgrubshack).

Oishinbo is a Japanese comic series about a newspaper food writer named Shiro Yamaoka. To celebrate its 100th anniversary, his paper is putting together the ultimate menu of Japanese cuisine, and Yamaoka is in charge of the project.

Yamaoka is a total hothead, driven to tantrums by food snobs and bad food alike. At one point in the first book, he impresses a visiting Japanese-American US senator by serving him a simple cup of cold-brewed [gyokuro](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyokuro). While reading this, I happened to be drinking a glass of cold-brewed gyokuro. Really.

Two Oishinbo anthologies have been released in new English editions so far. The first is about [Japanese cuisine in general](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1421521393/?tag=mamstesgrubshack) (but especially sashimi and dashi), the second about [sake, shochu, and other spirits](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1421521407/?tag=mamstesgrubshack). The third, and I cannot wait, is about [ramen and gyoza](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1421521415/?tag=mamstesgrubshack).

The story of Oishinbo (Yamaoka is always butting heads with his estranged father) is secondary to Yamaoka’s informative tantrums (this supermarket is storing its sake incorrectly!!!). I have a feeling more than a few of my readers are intolerant of bad food and in love with Japanese food. You are going to love these books.

Rhubarb season is back, and I went to Pike Place Market this afternoon for the makings of a [crumble](https://www.rootsandgrubs.com/2006/04/23/be-a-rube/) and a batch of [compote](http://phatduck.blogspot.com/2006/05/softer-side-of-rhubarb.html). I also stopped at Delaurenti for one of their chocolate chip cookies, which I learned about in a recent issue of Seattle Magazine and which I am forced to admit are better than mine.

On my way out, I passed by Left Bank Books and heard a very familiar lyric float by. “Like a rock / Like a planet / Like a fucking atom bomb…” One of my favorite songs (Bad Religion’s “[Generator](http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?i=271935582&id=271935554&s=143441)”), performed live in two-part harmony by two women, one of whom was playing an accordion.

This was a hundred times cooler than anything I expected to see at Pike Place Market on a Saturday afternoon, and I gave accordingly.

It would not be entirely true to say that I am, like Roger Ebert and Andy Ihnatko, a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. But my most recent [Culinate](http://culinate.com) column, about potato hash, was reprinted in the Sun-Times this week:

[Leftover meat, poultry? Think hash!](http://www.suntimes.com/lifestyles/food/1514848,FOO-News-hash08.article)

It ran in the print edition on Wednesday as well as the web site. This is part of a new partnership between Culinate and the Sun-Times, so my next column (which is about a popular beverage made from rice) might well appear there, too.

The Sun-Times is a great paper and I’m proud to be in it. I hope this entitles me to the key to the city and free hot dogs. If you live in the Chicago area, am I the talk of the town?

For a while I’ve had a box of [Vermont Curry](http://importfood.com/rtvc4401.html) sitting on the shelf. “I thought it was a decoration,” said Laurie.

What is Vermont Curry? It’s Japanese curry in a box. I assume they call it Vermont Curry because Phish and Ben & Jerry’s are really big in Japan. (Okay, it probably predates that.)

I’ve been fond of Japanese curry ever since I was a kid and my mom used to buy S&B Golden Curry and serve it with chicken and noodles. Sometimes I go to [Hana Sushi](http://www.urbanspoon.com/r/1/1305/restaurant/Capitol-Hill/Hana-Restaurant-Seattle) on Broadway and get the katsu curry rice, which consists of a bowl of rice topped with a sliced fried pork cutlet and a sea of spicy brown curry sauce.

Anyway, this week I finally cracked the box open and used it to make curry udon from the new book [Takashi’s Noodles](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1580089658/?tag=mamstesgrubshack), a spectacular Japanese noodle cookbook by a Chicago chef whose restaurant I’d never heard of but which I’m now dying to try. His curry udon recipe calls for boxed curry, plus a bit of curry powder, dashi, soy sauce, beef, onions, and, uh, salsify.

For some reason I didn’t have a pound of salsify lying around, so I substituted carrots. And I went with pork instead of beef because it was on sale (I used Takashi’s braised pork belly recipe, streamlined and with pork shoulder instead of belly.) Despite my tinkering, this was a fabulously warming and slippery bowl of noodles, especially nice since spring is not really interested in Seattle this year.

Now I’m looking forward to making Takashi’s soba, his ramen, his rice noodles with corned beef (really!).

Oh, one other thing you should know about Vermont Curry: the spiciness scale ranges from mild to hot, but “hot” by Japanese standards is the same as, well, Vermont standards. I used the Hot, and Laurie and I could not detect the slightest hint of chile heat. Really, nada.

*I got my copy of Takashi’s Noodles free from Ten Speed Press.*