Tagged: Food

My boyfriend Max and I met in college where we had been close friends. We started dating shortly after graduation and he moved from Massachusetts to Charlotte in January of 2011- just before our first Valentine’s Day.

We wanted to come up with a cute and easy V-Day tradition. It seems all of our relationship “holidays” hit around the same time, so we wanted to find a way to recognize it without going overboard financially.

My story begins in 1999, when I was a freshman at St. Olaf College. I had just started seeing a girl, and I decided to cook her Valentine’s dinner. I selected one of my mom’s go-to dishes, a stir-fry, for which I thought (incorrectly) the recipe included only soy sauce and dry sherry, thickened with corn starch. I wasn't sure of the proportions or if there were any other ingredients, the importance of which later became very apparent.

Salt, sugar and fat. These are a few of Americans' favorite things and the "holy grail" for the processed-food industry according to our guest, investigative reporter of the New York Times, Michael Moss. These ingredients are added to packaged foods in such large quantities that we have become addicted to them and our tastes have changed to prefer foods with salt, sugar and fat in higher amounts. Americans no doubt struggle with this as evidenced by the growing obesity epidemic, but so does the processed foods industry. In his new book, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, Moss goes inside the industry to see how it's dealing with the issues of obesity and diabetes and says industry officials themselves are alarmed by the effects of their own products. What started as a market boon for food giants like Kraft and Nabisco, General Mills and Coca-Cola has created a monster - us. Dealing in salt, sugar and fat, when Charlotte Talks.

  Charlotte’s Eastside hosts an amazing diversity of cuisines from Somali to Syrian, and Serbian to Southern. Wondering what to order at the Bosnian café? Not sure how to navigate a Mexican panaderia (bakery)? Shy about visiting a business where you’re not sure your English will be understood? CharlotteEast.com can help.

Pat FitzGerald's story is a winner of our WFAEats Valentine's contest, where we asked for your best food-themed Valentine's story.

In 2002 I brought my 89-year-old mother home from a long illness in California. I placed her in a lovely retirement community where she was happy, made new friends.

Then, Valentine's Day emerged and she remembered her husband who had died last year.

"Gosh," said my husband, Fitz. "Grams seems sad without Don and his Valentine corsage. Why not have a dinner party for her? We could invite our friends who lost spouses."