It's been quite a few Januarys since SFoodie has heard our friends talk about making year-long resolutions. Perhaps they've lost their idealism, or just their will to commit. Short term self-improvement projects seem to be everywhere, however. January has become Lent for agnostics.
Take the cleanse, which seems to have replaced the word "diet" in common parlance. On BonAppetit.com, food writer Sara Dickerman and dietitian Marissa Lappert have developed a two-week food-lover's cleanse. Rather than a five-day juice fast ― SFoodie once attempted that for eight hours until our body committed mutiny ― the Bon Appetit cleanse incorporates recipes from blogs and contemporary cookbooks such as Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table and David Tanis's Heart of the Artichoke. It looks more like two weeks of healthful cooking (dare we call it a diet?) than a radical detox program.
Does cooking three meals a day seem like too much work? Last week, over on 7x7's food blog, Sara Deseran test-drove a three-day juice fast ($190, including delivery) from CAN CAN Cleanse,
a new business run by local nutritionist Teresa Piro. Piro drops off
jars of things like dandelion tea and winter orange soup, and all you
have to do is keep from drinking them all at once.
For a number of years, SFoodie has followed a month of holiday parties and intensive baking with our own neo-Lenten ritual ― a few weeks' abstinence from booze, our favorite source of empty calories. A few days ago, the Seattle Times profiled a former coworker of ours who does the same thing. Now she's campaigning to make "Dry January" a movement ― or at least a Facebook group.
