Food

Remember the oat bran craze? In the late 1980s, several published studies touting the benefits of oat bran for lowering cholesterol had health professionals singing its praises. Food companies were only too happy to accommodate the newfound demand, trotting out oat bran garlic bread, oat bran muffins, oat bran animal cookies, oat bran brownies, even oat bran-dusted potato chips and doughnuts.

NOW that sushi has become as predictable as guacamole at cocktail parties, the last word in small bites is overdue for discovery. Zakuski, a Russian tradition dating from Tolstoy's time, is food made for drinkers, although teetotalers would have a hard time resisting temptation.

"A little madness in the spring is wholesome even for the king!" said no less an authority than Emily Dickinson. That's license for gourmands with pockets as deep as royalty's to pack an extravagant picnic and head for the beach. We asked Norbert Wabnig, right, owner of the Cheese Store of Beverly Hills, for a few pointers on how to put together an over-the-top basket of afternoon snacks. His shop, a fixture since 1967, carries 500 to 600 varieties of cheese.

A portion is a portion is a portion -- unless, that is, it's a giant, super, king or grande portion, in which case it's probably trouble. Over the last 30 years, portions have grown by heaps and mounds in restaurants across the country and in many homes as well. During that same time, the waistlines of Americans consuming those mega-meals have grown more and more generous too -- to the point that now two-thirds of American adults are considered overweight.

THE braised lamb is redolent of pomegranates and cumin. The chicken dumpling soup is fragrant with Persian limes and cardamom. Pan-seared potato gnocchi are laced with dried porcini, mesquite-grilled salmon is sauced with harissa and a flourless chocolate cake is crowned with Gaviota strawberries, picked from a nearby field. You can trace chef Todd Aarons' personal odyssey on every plate of his Passover feast.

Taco truck owners vowed to ignore a law passed by Los Angeles County supervisors Tuesday making it a misdemeanor crime -- punishable by fines and jail -- to stay parked in one place for more than an hour. "They can try to move us, but we're not going to go," said Aleida De La Cruz, whose taco truck has been a family business for 20 years. "What are they going to do, take us all to jail?"

All over the world, prices for basic foods -- barley for beer, milk for cheese, corn for tortillas, and the rice that serves as a staple for more than half the world's population -- are soaring. But farmers aren't rushing to cash in on the boom by planting more of the crops. The amount of corn planted in the U.S. is expected to dip this year. Rice acreage in California, which sells as much as half its crop overseas, is predicted to increase by only a small amount.

SOMETIMES A sauce is more than, well, just a sauce. Discovered for the first time -- on the menu of a restaurant, amid the pages of a cookbook -- it looks ordinary enough. But in one bite such a sauce transforms the dish, then the meal, then the diner. If you think I'm overstating (food is not always alchemy; sometimes, as Michael Pollan has famously observed, it's not even food) then you've never experienced a good romesco sauce.

MOST people who maintain a substantial weight loss work to keep their calories low -- between 1,200 and 1,700 a day for women, and 1,800 to 2,200 for men (depending on factors such as metabolism and amounts of exercise). That's far fewer calories than the amount consumed by most people who have never lost a great deal of weight. So what does a 1,600-calorie diet look like compared with what can be a typical day's worth of food?

Americans love eating out -- and that affection for restaurant food is growing. Restaurant industry sales were $379 billion in 2000, reaching an estimated $558 billion in 2008, according to the National Restaurant Assn. But there's a price to pay beyond the tab -- thicker waistlines. Many restaurant items are laden with fat and calories, far more than most people would estimate. But eating out doesn't have to be unhealthful.