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One year ago, on November 21, a blog was born here at Smithsonian.com. A FAT little blog, you might say.

But let’s leave the baby metaphor behind, shall we? Because it’s going to get kind of weird if we tell you to eat our baby. Think of FAT more as a friendly cafe, or maybe a street cart, serving up heaping helpings of food news, science and culture. (Hey, that’s catchy. We should use that as a tagline or something.)

We’ve prepared a special birthday menu of past posts to peruse. We hope you enjoy the feast, and as always, we welcome your feedback! (Not your food back. That could be gross.)

Bite-Sized Food History

Bagels

The Potato

Hamburger

Caesar Salad

Chocolate

Chewing Gum

Drinks

Hallucinogenic Coffee

Hungarian Wine

Vintage Violet Cocktails

Beer Behemoths

The First Margarita

Ernest Hemingway’s Favorite Cocktails

Healthy Stuff

Quinoa, the mother of grains

Cinnamon on the brain

Should sugar be a controlled substance?

Is eating red meat dangerous to your health?

Is your food safe?

Dieting through the ages

Five Ways to Eat

Figs

Apples

Beets

Winter Squash

Brussels Sprouts

Tomatoes

Seafood and Poultry

A Taste of Geoduck

Sustainable Seafood

Cracking Into Crabs

The Best Fish & Chips in Ireland

How The Turkey Got Its Name

The Flap Over Foie Gras

Asides

What was manna?

What is American food?

What the heck is breadfruit?

Why does nothing rhyme with orange?

What would you choose for your very last meal?

Sweet Treats

Cider Donuts

Gingerbread History

All You Ever Wanted to Know About Chocolate

Ice Creams for the Savory-Toothed

Sugar on Snow

Oh, No Dessert For Me, I’m Just Looking

‘Tis the season for the trend prophets to release their forecasts for the upcoming year. Last week restaurant consultants Baum & Whiteman, the Nostradamuses of the food world, announced their annual list of 12 food and dining trends for 2010 (pdf). In a word, it’s going to be offal. (I didn’t just write that, did I? I should be pun-ished. Can one’s journalism degree be revoked?)

A unifying theme was that people are paring down in response to the economic climate (the list itself seemed to be following its own prediction—there was one fewer trend than last year). People’s priorities are shifting to the more personal, and they are looking for comfort and a connection with others—what the consultants call, metaphorically, the “campfire experience.”

I have already noticed some restaurants moving in the direction of the second item on the list—a greater emphasis on small plates, different portion-size options, and plates for sharing—which they call “putting the focus on the left side of the menu.” I heartily welcome the shift to smaller portions; I can rarely finish what’s on my plate when I eat out, and I don’t always want to carry around leftovers. Why should I pay for $25 worth of food when I’m only hungry for $15?

I’m also happy to note that, according to the list, our palates are becoming more attuned to tartness. Like Michele Hume, who wrote “What’s Wrong With Chocolate” at the Atlantic Food Channel, I almost always prefer a tangy lemon dessert to a chocolate one, and I add lemon juice to everything from vegetables to chicken soup. Although the publishers and devotees of the recently rejuvenated bestseller Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child might disagree, I concur with the consultants’ reasoning that “classic French cookery, based on excesses of butter and cream, is in decline because it puts the taste buds into snooze mode…. We’re all getting older and we need more zing in our food.” Hear, hear!

And, yes, there was a reason (though probably not a good one) for the offal pun. Baum & Whiteman predict that tongue, trotters, gizzards and other spare animal parts will be showing up on more menus to augment downsized portions of prime meats. This, I assume, has the double benefit of lowering food costs while making diners feel adventurous and in-the-know. I suppose it also cuts down on wastefulness, which is good. I still don’t think I can bring myself to eat it, though. When I was about 6, my grandmother, a big fan of tongue, once fed it to me without my knowledge. I liked it—until I found out what it was and couldn’t stop picturing myself biting my own tongue.

If organ meat isn’t scary enough, the list warns hotels and restaurants that they “no longer control what’s said about them.”  The old “Voices of Authority,” such as Gourmet magazine, are disappearing in favor of the “Instant Opinion Makers”: bloggers, Twitterers, Facebookers and their ilk, who “broadcast ‘buzz’ and bad news to a million gullible people in the blink of the eye.” I started to feel the slightest bit guilty about the role of blogs such as this one in the demise of quality food magazines, but then I got over myself. First of all, I don’t think the editors of Gourmet would agree that they ever allowed restaurants to control what was said about them. And, while I regret the decline of print journalism in general (which, after all, provides the bulk of my livelihood), I don’t think what we’re doing here at Food & Think is a replacement for the restaurant reviews, recipes and beautiful food photography that such magazines offer.

I’ve never been a milk drinker. From the very moment I had any control over my diet, I stopped drinking it, unless a hearty squeeze of Hershey’s syrup was involved. Now, I use it merely for the occasional bowl of cereal.

When I decided to forego milk as a child, good old cow’s milk was really the only option. But that was then, and this is now. Consumers have more choices than ever about which type of milk to drink. The list now includes cow, goat, soy, almond, rice, hemp and even camel.

I have tried soy milk, but so far, that’s my only foray into the non-bovine milk world. Each alternative has pros and cons. My younger brother single-handedly drinks one gallon of 2% cow’s milk a week. He’s 20; he can handle all the calories (1,920) and fat (72 grams) included with that. I had a roommate who swore by soy milk until her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. (She had heard that the high levels of estrogen in soy can increase the risk of breast cancer. Recent studies, however, suggest that soy can actually prevent breast cancer.)

The LA Times recently investigated the different choices of milk out there. The story included a nifty graphic to help you compare the milk choices side by side. I’m especially intrigued by the concept of almond and hemp milks.

According to the article, almond milk has no cholesterol, saturated fats or lactose. It has less calories and total fat than health food favorite soy milk. But, it has significantly less protein than cow, goat and soy milk: a mere 1 gram compared to 7-8.7 grams. The calcium in almond milk depends on the brand. Some provide 20% of your daily value (10% less than cow, goat and soy), but others provide no calcium at all. Looks like the benefit of almond milk is the lack of fat and cholesterol:

“With almond milk, it’s more about what you don’t get” than what you do, says Sam Cunningham, an independent food scientist and consultant specializing in nuts, who helped develop almond milk for Sacramento-based Blue Diamond Growers as an employee of the almond processor in the 1990s.

Hemp milk contains just as many calories as soy milk but has 50 percent more fat. Don’t toss it aside yet, though. The fats in hemp milk are mostly omega-3 and omega-6 essential fatty acids, which promote nervous system function and healthy skin and hair. And, because most hemp milks are fortified, they can provide more calcium than traditional cow’s milk.

I don’t think I’ll become a milk drinker, even almond or hemp, but I might pick up some almond milk at the store, just to try it out.

– Written by Smithsonian intern Abby Callard

As bad as the economy seems right now, it’s been worse—much worse. As in, ketchup-soup-for-dinner worse. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, although few people were outright starving, filling the belly sometimes called for resourcefulness.

Some people took to riding the rails in search of work, and scraping up whatever food they could. One account by a former hobo described a typical meal, “Mulligan’s Stew”:

One ‘bo has an onion, he pinched from a fruit market; another has several potatoes and an ear of corn leased from a farmer’s field. Edible greens are gathered and contributed to the pottage: Dandelions and sour dock; wild leeks and onions. Sometimes pigweed is found in abundance.

Some bits and pieces of meat. A handful of navy beans carried in a pocket for a month. Cast every bean into the pot, along with a smattering of Bull Durham tobacco and lint.

It reminds me of one of my favorite books as a child, my mother’s copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith, about a girl named Francie growing up in poverty during the early 1900s. Although it takes place before the Depression, the creative ways Francie’s mother turned scraps into sustaining meals was similar to what many people did then:

She’d take a loaf of stale bread, pour boiling water over it, work it up into a paste, flavor it with salt, pepper, thyme, minced onion and an egg (if eggs were cheap), and bake it in the oven. When it was good and brown, she made a sauce from half a cup of ketchup, two cups of boiling water, seasoning, a dash of strong coffee, thickened it with flour and poured it over the baked stuff. It was good, hot, tasty and staying. What was left over, was sliced thin the next day and fried in hot bacon fat.

Another dish that was popularized during the Depression was Mock Apple Pie, made with Ritz crackers instead of apples, which must have been expensive at the time. I have tasted it, and it really does taste like apple pie, if the apples were cooked to a mush. The pie actually originated with pioneers who traveled west in the 1800s and couldn’t find apples; it was made with soda crackers then. Saveur magazine has an interesting article explaining the science of such palate trickery.

The current interest in learning about the Depression has made an online sensation of the YouTube series “Great Depression Cooking With Clara,” by a filmmaker named Christopher Cannucciari. He filmed his charming nonagenarian grandma cooking dishes such as Egg Drop Soup and telling stories from the era.

It inspired me to call up my own 90-year-old granny to find out what she ate as a little girl in Chicago, but she couldn’t remember—though she can still recite the one phrase in Bohemian she learned back then, meaning, “Today we go mushroom hunting.”

Maybe you’ll have better luck getting your parents or grandparents to reminisce about Depression dining. If you do, leave a comment letting us know what you’ve learned.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, the one day of the year when eating your greens can mean cupcakes, beer, even bacon.

It’s oddly appropriate that we celebrate our country’s Irish heritage by binging on fatty food and drink; after all, Ireland is the home of the fry-up, a typical breakfast consisting of fried eggs, bacon (rashers), sausages and black pudding (made from pig’s blood), with a few other fried things thrown in for good measure. Not surprisingly, Ireland’s also near the top of the list of countries with the highest heart disease death rates.

But there is some good health-related news on the Irish front: You know those charming old Guinness beer ads that proclaim it to be good for you? Turns out, they might be right—though not for the reasons originally thought.

Back in the 1920s, when the “Guinness is Good for You” slogan was introduced, the claim was based on market research that found that people felt good after they drank a pint of the dark and foamy stout. Um, duh.

This flimsy claim was eventually bolstered by the fact that Guinness contains iron. Pregnant women were even advised to have an occasional pint. Of course, it would take something like a dozen pints a day for a woman to get her recommended daily allowance of iron, in which case the alcohol and calories would cause more harm than good.

But another health benefit was discovered in 2003: stout beer like Guinness (as opposed to lager and other light beer) is high in the antioxidant compounds called flavonoids—similar to those found in red wine, tea and chocolate—that can reduce the risk of heart attack from blood clotting. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin carried out laboratory tests on dogs (Irish setters, I wonder?) with clogged arteries, comparing the effects of Guinness and Heineken. Only those dogs fed Guinness had reduced clotting.

In the interest of having a heart-healthy St. Pat’s Day, I decided to double my antioxidant dose by baking a Chocolate Guinness Cake. A little tip from this novice baker: measure the amount of Guinness carefully. I lost track of how much I put in, and ended up with a cake batter volcano in my oven. Luckily, I was able to scoop out about a 1/3 of the batter and bake the remainder. I doubt it came out the way it was supposed to, but it was still pretty delicious—moist and flavorful.

And one last interesting fact I learned about Guinness—it isn’t vegan; it (and some other beers) contains isinglass, a fish product used in the clarifying process to get rid of excess yeast. Be sure to share that little nugget of wisdom at the pub tonight.

Now, get out there and celebrate.