Honkman

The Neapolitan pizza in two different pizzerias in Naples wouldn't be the same

It's not scientists or people of the region or Nathan who ultimate define what a product is called but ultimately whoever makes the dish. It is the same discussion as with "authentic" dishes - what you define as authentic might not be the same what I define as authentic and we are both right. Where you are fundamentally wrong (even beyond just food) is " You're mistakingly assuming that there's multiple routes to the same destination" - yes, there are always multiple routes to the same destination outside of food, within food and also Neapolitan pizza. It's quite preposterous to believe there is only one way to make Neapolitan pizza and every other approach in the future can only lead to inferior results.

As a scientist I care about the progress of science and don't ever believe that most things can't be improved with "newer" science - same with Neapolitan pizza - just because there is a "great deal of wisdom and science" in the making of this style of pizza doesn't mean you shouldn't utilize the progress of science over time to change/improve the making of Neapolitan pizza (and still call it a Neapolitan pizza).

Prager Brothers are for us by a very large margin the best bakery in SD - never really understood the love for B&C in SD.

I am surprised they let you photograph your food - they are normally known for a strict no photo policy

There are a few recipes in the book which are from J&I but yes, it is more towards the home cook. (J&I is the one restaurant we miss from San Diego now that we live in Boston. It was our weekly ritual to have dinner there and at the end we knew many of their cooks/chefs/servers quite well and had some nice surprises during our last few visits)

I have only looked at "On Vegetables" in the bookstore but there is no doubt that I will buy it soon as it is written by Fox which has shown with Ubuntu years ago (some of the best meals for us) that he is very unique in creating vegetable-based dishes using unique flavors, thoughts, ideas. It is definitely not your next "standard" vegetable book

Your list covers already some good restaurants - a more unusual one is Ma Maison from Chef Quenioux. Chef had for some time a great restaurant with Bistro LQ in LA which was sometimes too far out and too creative for many people. But after he closed it he it started to have dinners at his house now. Bistro LQ was unbelievable creative cooking on a three star level with a very small kitchen crew (2-3 people). For more than two years we drove on very regular basis from San Diego to LA to have great tasting menus at Bistro LQ. He continuous these tasting menus in his home with produce from his garden or foraged from the neighborhood incorporating influences from all over the world. Here is a link to his FB page with future dates - highly recommended https://m.facebook.com/lquenioux/

I don't know but just because you had some crap (Kraft cheese is really awful "food") as a small child doesn't mean you can't grow up and have real food/parmesan

My main issue with Kraft "Parmesan" cheese is not the cellulose but that it tasted horrible and has nothing to do with Parmesan cheese. The production of the "Parmesan cheese" at Kraft has nothing to do with the production of real Parmesan cheese and in Europe Kraft is actually not allowed to sell their green boxes of grates "cheese product" with Parmesan mentioned anywhere on the box

As someone who likes to drink cocktails in bars but haven't really dived deeply into the world of making cocktails myself at home I always read with interest thr discussions here on eG about the different cocktail books, e.g. Death & Co etc. One thing I always wondered is that obviously if you don't work in a cocktail bar you most likely won't have such a broad selection of different spirits that you can make most recipes out of a book without relying on substitutions. But how do you decide what to use for a substitution ? If for example a cocktail recipe calls for an obscure/rare gin how do you decide what to use from your home collection, assuming you don't have only one gin at home. How do you know that your substitution is at least reasonable close in terms of flavor profile to the original choice in the recipe ? Is it just experience from tasting so many over the years (but do you really keep track if those flavor profiles) or are there webpage which have good overviews or do you don't care if your substitution is close in flavor profile and just see if the final product tastes good or not regardless how close the overall flavor is to the one from the book ?

Nowhere in the paper are they declaring a definite causal relationship - they only describe an percentage increase of possible cancer when eating certain amounts of certain meats. They just describe the correlation but don't imply absolute causality. That's all what meta analyses are about. Have you actually read the original paper ?

There is a difference between negative results in lab or in "clinical" relevant studies - there is no doubt that in particular negative lab experiments are not often reported (even though this is too much of a generalization and has to be looked on from case to case or which scientific field we are talking about). Negative "clinical" data is often reported, especially from academic groups (which has also to do with their funding/grants) and to a certain degree even from industry studies. I know that in my field (drug discovery) there is a lot of reporting of negative results and if you look on some of the studies used in the meta analysis of the red meat paper some of them showed negative results/no correlations. I think that meta analyses are very helpful and relevant to find clear trends (like in the one published), the exact percentage of correlations is often questionable due to selection of studies used in the analysis

This is simply not true. There are many studies (actually the majority of studies (clinical or not)) don't show significant results or don't see a correlation between to variables (food or otherwise). Therefore your further conclusions in your post "It is the statistical equivalent to surrounding yourself with people who have the same view as you and then saying that everyone you asked agreed with you so you must be right." is completely wrong and shows that you didn't understand the statistics

Just checked it on Amazon and it looks interesting as it covers cuisines which are often not covered in other vegetarian cookbooks

Vegetarian Cooking for Everybody (with Plenty and Plenty More) are our some of our vegetarian cookbooks at home but Passionate Vegetarian sounds quite interesting

There are some older discussions but I am always looking for more vegetarian cookbooks. So it would be interesting to hear some favorites (old and new) covering all types of cuisines (and I am actually also interested in the more unknown/obscure ones, e.g. in a recent discussion on another board I read for the first time about "Madhur Jaffrey's World-of-the-E​ast Vegetarian Cooking" which wasn't really on my radar but after reading about it seems to be very interesting.)

If you read the twitter (and other social media accounts) of Kenji you get the impression that he thinks his recipes are the be-all-and-end-all versions (Must be the ATK influence)

Nobody disputes that one of the roles of the immune systems is eliminating potential tumor cells but it is by far not the only role - and a enzyme pathway which is turned on to react beneficial on a potential tumorous cell might have detrimental effects on another type of cells in the body at the same time. I don't have an agenda but simply work in this field and always interested in a scientific discussion - but I think people tend to try to simplify too much and so there is no answer to the question " is it really the bacon" - or the only answer (as shown in the original paper) bacon (and other processed meats) seem to increase the changes of getting cancer to a certain percentage statistically. "Odd, though, that fiber is associated with lower mortality" - Again, correlation doesn't imply causation

Your view on the human body and its functions are too simplistic - for example to describe the immune system's role as to "to clean up damaged cells" is way too limited. And this complexity of the role of the immune system (with its many feedback loops etc) make it very unlikely that one factor, e.g. fiber (or any other factor) is THE factor to have such an impact you are implying. Also correlation doesn't imply causation.

I think literature shows a relatively high likelihood that bacon (or other processed or smoked meats) have a correlation with certain types of cancers with nitrosamines a possible reason (but nitrosamines also occure in other types of food like beer.)

They welcome challenging scientific hypotheses but not ignoring science completely

I am always amazed how ignorant people can be about science. (Just curious, do you believe in evolution ?)

If you would actually read the Lancet article (have you done it ?) they describe in a scientific way the issues without arguing that we all should drop meat immediately. If people would take a little bit more time and effort to understand scientific manuscripts they wouldn't be scared away but would actually understand what was written (and it is not the job of scientists to write in "plain English" but in a scientific way even though it might be too much for some people with a short attention span). And your comments seems to imply that you don't really understand what a meta analysis is if you are asking for "personal" implications and that not "everyone will get cancer". And no, this manuscript shouldn't be buried in an "obscure journal" but it is important that the WHO brings it to everybody's attention because even though the risk effect might be small for the individual the risk factors in this studies have a tremendous effect on a society in terms of health care cost etc (and that's one of the main reasons to run meta analyses). By your argument it would have been better to bury the studies which showed a strong correlation between smoking and lung cancer in some "obscure journal" because they don't have a hug impact on the personal level (I hope we can agree that that your argument is rather ridiculous)

Your comment reminded me of people who still don't believe in global warming (because science is "complicated" and "always wrong") or people who don't want to here anything which they don't like and just brush over it with general disparaging comments which don't actual add anything to the topic. There are obviously many useless studies on food which try to link many things but at the same time just saying every study is useless similarly is pointless. In this case it is not even a study but a meta analysis which takes a statistical look at a number of fairly established studies and tries to find possible correlation/risk analysis. Nowhere in the article are the authors suggesting that you should avoid any food completely (and if your doctor is doing it, it might be a good time to consider changing to a better qualified one) but they are just describing statistical possibilities of certain food having an impact on the likelihood to get cancer.