h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/12/140512fa_fact_widdicombe
The end of food

Well, not exactly. I had a similar idea years ago, but rather than getting the chemicals and mixing them in a blender, I went to my Neal's Yard Cookbook. There's a section at the front of the book with information about all kinds of foods, broken down into sections such as pulses, grains, dairy, vegetables etc. In each of those sections there's a table listing the nutritional value of each of the different foods described, broken down by vitamin and mineral content, and in each table the food with the highest content of each vitamin and mineral is highlighted in bold print.

Did you know, for instance, that if you think of parsley as a vegetable it has twice as much iron as the vegetable with the second-highest iron content (and yes, it's spinach, according to this book), and that the third highest vegetable is radish?

That guavas have five times as much vitamin C as oranges? Oranges are sixth in this list.

Or that molasses contains a ridiculously huge amount of calcium?

*Disclaimer: I make no claims for the accuracy of these numbers, not being a trained nutritionist, and the since the book was published almost 30 years ago knowledge about these things may well have improved since then. It also doesn't go into an aspect of nutrition we now think about a lot about in certain foods - their ability (oats, for instance) to prevent or protect against heart attacks, strokes, cancer etc.

Any road up.

Cooking has never come easy to me and for most of my life I've seen it as a chore rather than a pleasure, so I had the idea, a long time ago, to go through these tables (which also list the recommended daily allowance for each food) and pick out the one or two foodstuffs from each category that had the highest content for each vitamin and mineral, and build a diet-of-minimal-cooking-and-preparation.

It kind of works, in that you can eat nuts, fruit and some vegetables raw, you can buy wholemeal bread, and it turns out that drying fruit concentrates the vitamin and mineral content substantially (and I love dried apricots). Eggs, cheese and yoghurt are useful, obviously, and both wheat bran and wheatgerm are virtual superfoods (as are soya beans), and what could be easier than drinking a spoonful of each mixed into some yoghurt .

And let's face it, frying a pork chop is hardly rocket surgery.

I never really took it any further than thinking about it but I might look into this again after reading the article. This struck a chord with me:
"And physically, he wrote, "I feel like the six million dollar man. My physique has noticeably improved, my skin is clearer, my teeth whiter, my hair thicker and my dandruff gone." He concluded, "I haven’t eaten a bite of food in thirty days, and it’s changed my life."

That makes sense to me, in that he's eliminated a lot of stuff from his diet that is unnecessary in terms of actual nutrition, and is possibly allergenic. He's fasting, in a sense, and people who fast, or cut their food intake down, will often say how much better they feel, how the weight drops off, how they can think more clearly, all kinds of beneficial things... including cheaper food bills and less washing up

Cheese is a superfood Chillis are a very good source of vitamin C (I think..../seem to recall/convinced myself)
I feel a whole lot 'better' in the last couple months, as I've suddenly started eating lots and lots of salady things, now we're getting into the warmer weather here though I probably eat far too much empty nutritional junk too in the course of an average week I stuffed myself so silly with black pudding for lunch/breakfast yesterday, that by the evening, I was still not very hungry, so just ended up having salad, with a few bits, and no carbs which is somwhat unusual for me

Reminds me of the CHON food in the Gateway books of Frederick Pohl. CHON is completely synthetic food made from mined Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen. It was textured and mixed up a bit to simulate traditional foods like steak but was not completely convincing.

Why is there no more qotd? There are some gems in this thread.

I have no idea.
However, I have my suspescions.

You'll no doubt all recall, that in 1983, August the 5th to be precise, a boring aeroplain left H London airport, and onboard that plan, was the infamous 'briefcase no 3', which, was, as I'm sure we all know, the summation of the preceding two briefcases, that also left London airport, in each of the two preceding years.

These briefcases; destined, ultimately, by a somewhat insane route, to end up in Stokholm, were, as we now know, containing the pieces of paper, which when put togehter, gave the ultimate formular, for a strawberry milkshake.

Obviously, it was a small step from this, throughout the next few decades, to see, and experience, teh full force of the interent, as it blossomed, helped, in no small part, by this strawberry milkshake recipie; Bill Gates himself, circa 1999, held it, solely responsible for the incident at the Scarburgh sealife center, in 1989, which gave him the inspiration for Windows XP; though, due to certain copyright problems, involving seabass and some particularly reluctant flounders, at Scarburgh sealife center, this took severl years to matterialise; all teh time, being facilitated by the sctrawberry milkshake, and a few pounds or so of raw sheeps liver, harvested from the one and only, origional harvester, in Bolton.

Of course, it is therefore only a small lemming of a leap of faith, to see, how, from London airport, through to Bill gates, Windows XP and indeed the flounder and seabass, that, ultimately, somewhere along the lines, QOTD was infilatrated by FBI agents involved in teh over up of the abduction of Princess Diana by Elvis , and her abduction to the secret hideout of the loch ness monster. Visa, tehrefore, ultimately, the strawberry milkshake has, of course, been responsible for both the assignation of Tony blair, and the missing QUOTD... Or. so my grandmother said. actually, I'm sure she mentioned Eels too, but I can't really remember.