San Francisco Food Blog

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Meat cutters: At Civil Eats, Lena Brook probes hospital proteins. Sounds vaguely nauseating, like something cultivated in a Petri dish. In fact, it's the drive to get hospitals to serve smaller portions of meat and chicken -- you know, for the health of patients? Cooked up by a Bay Area physician group, the Balanced Menus Challenge seeks to cut the flesh served up on patient trays and in hospital cafeterias by 20 percent. The problem, according to Brook:

Americans eat an average of eight ounces of meat daily, roughly twice the global average. Hospital food service operations often mirror this trend, offering sizable servings of meat several meals per day. High consumption of conventionally produced meat and processed meat contributes to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, dementia, and some kinds of cancer.