Food for Health

It’s cold and damp outside and time to eat foods that make you feel warm. Cocoa, obviously, is a good choice. Iced tea and lemonade, obviously bad choices. Ice cream? No.

Lentils? Yes, especially if you eat them when they are warm (as opposed to cold, on a salad, which is also very yummy but not particularly warming).

All warm foods, obviously, are warming (hello). Lentils are doubly warming, however; they are also included in the list of Traditional Chinese Medicine’s warming foods (I think it has something to do with the qi or air flow in your body).

It never ends, the revision of our favorite food myths. Now it turns out that carrots aren’t actually very good for your eyesight. Bugs Bunny, where are you? Will we learn next that spinach doesn’t give us super-strength equal to that of Popeye the Sailor Man?

This is one of those common-sense moments. If you picked up the Sunday New York Times recently and read the story in the magazine about breakfast, you might have come away with the impression that eating breakfast isn’t as important as everyone says it is.

The part of the study that is cited in the magazine article relates only to one question: Does skipping breakfast lead to obesity?

The answer is a fairly resounding, “We don’t know but it’s possible.”

In my childhood, I knew a man from Georgia. He was tall — taller than tall — and wide. His voice boomed, in a syrupy southern drawl: “It ain’t summer until there’s peach juice running down your arm.”

I was already convinced. Of all the summer fruits, peaches are the lightest, the sweetest and the most fragrant. They are one of the few fruits that may be truly described as “floral.”

When they’re good, that is.

As much as I love the fruit, peaches are fickle products, and I was never lenient. When I was younger, I used to rank my peaches on a scale of 1 to 10.