I'm not much on raving about new places to eat, but I just had arguably the best lunch I've had in years.

The Plymouth Coffee Bean (aka The Bean), a humble coffee shop in downtown Plymouth, just started offering crépes of all sorts.  To my knowledge, they are the best crépes in Michigan, and they're better than the fancy, foofy gourmet crépes I had while skiing in Colorado a few years back.  Come to think of it, they're the best I've ever had.

Simply put: they are awesome, full-stop.  If you live in Michigan and are anywhere near (and by near I mean anywhere within a 30 minute drive) Plymouth, you need to make the drive to The Bean.  It's more than worth your time.

So what are my recommendations?

For lunch, try the bean burger, pepperjack, hummus, tomato, onion and spinach crépe.  For dessert -- and you have to get dessert -- get the chocolate chip, peanut butter and banana.  Trust me on these.  Each crépe is big enough to be a meal unto itself, but you'd be cheating yourself if you went there and didn't at least try one of the dessert crépes.

If my recommendations don't sound like your thing, no worries: you can choose whatever ingredients you want from their picklist, and they cook it right in front of you.  As simple or foody as you like -- you create it, they make it.

I can't recommend them enough.  It's hard to find crépes period, but it's nigh impossible to find truly excellent ones.  I just had one for lunch, and already I'm wishing I got one to go for a box dinner.  Serious.

(If you're on Facebook, you can find The Bean's page here.)

Some pics snapped before they called security on me:

 

Salon's Andrew Leonard:

It's amazing the effect Wal-Mart can have on entire industries.  And headlines like this one, among many others, are why I will only eat fresh caught/wild salmon.  I won't touch the farmed stuff.

Dr. Jonny Bowden, one of my favorite authors on the subject of nutrition, provides another datapoint for something I’ve telling anyone who will listen:

A landmark research study by Dr. Michael Shechter of Tel Aviv University’s Sackler School of Medicine and the Heart Institute of Sheba Medical Center, with collaboration of the Endocrinology Institute, shows exactly how high carbohydrate foods increase the risk for heart problems. Researchers looked at four groups of volunteers who were given different breakfasts:

• cornflake mush mixed with milk- not unlike the typical American breakfast
• a pure sugar mixture
• bran flakes
• a placebo (water).

Over four weeks, Dr. Shechter applied a test that allows researchers to visualize how the arteries are functioning. It’s called “brachial reactive testing” and it uses a cuff on the arm, like those used to measure blood pressure, which can visualize arterial function in real time.

The results were dramatic. Before any of the patients ate, arterial function was essentially the same. After eating, except for the placebo group (who drank water), all had reduced functioning. Enormous peaks indicating arterial stress were found in the high glycemic index groups: the cornflakes and sugar group.

Nearly everything we eat originates from corn, but Corn Flakes is so heavily processed and denatured that - like the study shows - it’s literally like eating a bowl of sugar.  Don’t let the texture and ingredients fool you: from your metabolism’s perspective, you’re eating refined sugar.  And your resulting biochemistry proves it.

This is the movie I've been waiting for. As an avid fan of the works of Michael Pollan (The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto), Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Alice Waters (The Art of Simple Food), Dr. Mark Hyman (UltraPrevention, UltraMetabolism, UltraMind) and Marion Nestle (What to Eat), Food, Inc. is the movie that attempts to wrap up the main points from all these authors into a single documentary. I've had more than my share of people who guffaw at the notion that our food is making us sick, but the facts are in: as a nation, we're getting sicker and fatter quicker than ever before, despite the preponderance of "healthy foods" folded into every supermarket aisle at exactly the right shelf height. Kids are obese, we're all rapidly becoming pre-diabetic with metabolic syndrome, and heart disease is through the roof (and it's not because of butter). Kids and adults are on levels of prescription drugs never before seen in America, and we're intent on masking symptom after symptom. We're a mess. And the root cause isn't pretty. Every meme has a tipping point, and I can only hope that Food, Inc. helps accelerate the one that will help people realize that we're eating mainly biomass-based engineered food items instead of real food. Here's the movie trailer. Food, Inc. opens on June 12. (Via kottke)

Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, offers a compelling interview with AlterNet's Amy Goodman on what we should be eating:

Goodman: Shouldn't people be concerned, for example, about cholesterol? Pollan: No. Cholesterol in the diet is actually only very mildly related to cholesterol in the blood. It was a -- that was a scientific error, basically. We were sold a bill of goods that we should really worry about the cholesterol in our food, basically because cholesterol is one of the few things we could measure that was linked to heart disease, so there was this kind of obsessive focus on cholesterol. But, you know, the egg has been rehabilitated. You know, the egg is very high in cholesterol, and now we're told it's actually a perfectly good, healthy food. So there's only a very tangential relationship between the cholesterol you eat and the cholesterol levels in your blood.

It's a long read, but a mini-education in 10 minutes. We'd all be better served heeding Pollan's advice. Link [via Lifehacker]

Let's just put it this way: I've been really fucking this up my entire life. I mean, I haven't even been close. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bc6v8IUe_0g]

I thought I found Nirvana with Smucker's Natural Peanut Butter with Honey, but apparently there's one more to try:

Parkers Family Farms Peanut Butter is the best peanut butter in the world. It’s all natural. But wait. Don’t squirm. I am not going for health here. I am not talking to the parental, or nurturing or healthful, caring, responsible person inside you. I am talking to the dirty, nasty, caution to the wind you. The one who came home a little too buzzed, got rid of the baby-sitter, put the wife to bed and sat down in front of the TiVo with a joint, a boda bag of Don Julio and six hours until daylight. Parkers Farms Peanut Butter is all natural, yes. But it’s also in your refrigerated section so it requires no stirring (an accomplishment that is right up there with the invention of the phone, the printing press, the original Mosaic web browser and at most one notch below fire and the wheel). Is this sinking in? The best taste. All natural. And no stirring, bitch.

Sigh. It really never is the destination; it's the journey. Link [Via DF]

Serious Eats' Ed Levine posts his thoughts on food/culinary trends that are welcome to stay and those that could go off a cliff. I'm especially in favor of restaurants dressing down and continued efforts to promote local food sourcing and sustainable agriculture, but almost everything Levine likes is right up my alley (especially the idea of serious pizza joints opening up across the nation).