California Pizza Kitchen menu now calorie free

Diners at California Pizza Kitchen last week found some enticing new offerings, such as white chocolate strawberry cheesecake, Baja-style tacos with sautéed mahi-mahi, and a Moroccan-spiced chicken breast salad. But gone from the menu are those often-revealing calorie counts that the restaurant had listed for each item since July 1.

The Los Angeles-based pizza-and-pasta chain dropped that data when it printed new menus last week, in part because customers just didn't like it much.

"You have to look at the restaurant business as entertainment. Why make the customer feel guilty?" said Larry Flax, co-chief executive at CPK. "People kept getting mad,"  he said.

For more click here.

-- Jerry Hirsch

On Twitter @LATimesJerry

Photo: Rick Rosenfield, left, and Larry Flax are co-chief executives of California Pizza Kitchen. Their chain of pizza-and-pasta restaurants recently dropped calorie counts from their menus, although state law will require them in 2011. Credit: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times

Making kitchen a classroom for kids

In the movie "Ratatouille," the terrifying food critic, Anton Ego, transforms into a lovable human with one glorious taste of a Provençal tian, or casserole, from his childhood — zucchini, eggplant, tomato, thyme and cheese.

Good food, Ego discovers, excites our taste buds and our hearts.

For most American children, the equivalent taste memory will be grease-soaked chicken nuggets and French fries. New York-based registered dietitian Elisa Zied understands this. Her own childhood memories are connected to fast food as a treat — including her grandmother sneaking Whoppers with cheese to Zied while she was at sleep-away camp.

"You have to teach children from very early on to enjoy healthy food," says Zied, who changed her own eating habits as an adult and has written several books about healthy eating for families. "Changing a culture is not an easy thing to do."

But due in part to an alarming increase in childhood obesity, diabetes and other junk-food-related illnesses, healthy food movements targeting kids are sprouting all over the United States. From kids’ cooking classes to angry mothers demanding healthier food in cafeterias to vegetable gardens at schools, more people are looking to improve their families’ eating habits. Read more here:

Photo credit: Ariel Skelley / PR Newswire

Food may be cheap, but is it a bargain?

There’s been a lot of talk lately about how cheap our food is, what with “value meals” and discounts galore. I recently spotted a 5-pound container of peeled garlic from China for $7.99; at a farmers market a few days later, garlic was $1 a bulb -- and I had to peel it myself!

Similarly, almonds were about $8 a pound from the farmers market, $3.49 at Super King Markets.

If you’ve got teenagers at home, you might be spending a small country’s GNP on food, but even considering last year’s food price increases, Americans spend less of their disposable income on food, about 6%, than the citizens of other countries. Considered another way, we spent 18% less on food in 2007 than in the 1970s, Ellen Ruppel Shell writes in her new book, “Cheap,” which looks at the cost of consumer goods.

But is cheap food the bargain it seems? Naturally, it's a complicated question.

For all too many of us, all that cheap food is making us fat -- and obesity is no bargain. Estimates are that obesity and its attendant diseases will cost more than $100 billion a year.

But many people have come to consider high-quality fruits and vegetables fancy, elite products available at Whole Foods or farmers markets at high prices, Shell said. “What’s gotten lost” is nutritious food at affordable prices.

Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, noted that over the last quarter-century, fast-food prices have decreased while produce prices have increased -- at comparable levels. “There’s no question that they are relatively more expensive,” and so people with less money buy food that’s less nutritious, she said.

And if Americans are growing increasingly uncomfortable in their jeans, some people are as uncomfortable with the state of our food affairs.

“Food is too cheap. But it depends. If you are a poor guy in a Bombay slum, it’s too expensive,” said Hans Herren, president of the Arlington, Va.-based Millennium Institute, which promotes sustainability and issued a report this year on the state of agriculture.

Cheap food has a “huge environmental cost that everyone has to pay for,” including polluted wells and dead rivers, Herren said in a telephone interview from Northern California, where he was vacationing.

Mustard, relish ... and cancer warning labels?

 

The nonprofit Cancer Project filed a lawsuit today to compel companies to place cancer-risk warning labels on hot dog packages sold in New Jersey. The suit, by a group that promotes a meat-free diet, seeks to require cancer-risk labels on processed meats. Nutrition experts say foods that go along with the hot dog may be more dangerous.

 

Photo: Stefano Paltera / For The Times

Sampler Platter: Grilled chicken wars, cheeseburgers & nutrition labeling [Updated]

Catching up on end-of-the-week food news, from tapeworms in salmon to Coke Zero in Venezuela...

• Venezuela bans Coke Zero. Will Hugo Chavez stop at nothing?! Los Angeles Times
• Chain restaurants, senators agree on nutrition labeling law. Bloomberg
• The grilled chicken wars continue. El Pollo Loco to KFC: There's beef in your chicken.  Los Angeles Times
• Phoenix chef turns 5,000 pounds of liver into a supposedly tasty meal for prison inmates. ABC15
• Ethiopian-born scientist and Purdue University Professor Gebisa Ejeta wins 2009 World Food Prize for his research on sorghum. Kansas City Info Zine
• La Grande Orange Santa Monica has great cheeseburgers, says A Hamburger Today.
• Even after all those food contamination scandals, the CDC says food-borne illnesses are still under-reported. WebMD

[Updated, 7:40 p.m.: This post – and its headline -- earlier referred to a Chicago Sun-Times story about a man who claimed a restaurant's undercooked salmon gave him a 9-foot tapeworm. It turns out that the story was from 2008 and  it is  unclear from follow-up reports what became of his claim.]

--Elina Shatkin

Photo: Calf's liver and onions balsamic. Credit: Lori Shepler / Los Angeles Times