Flickr/Bitman

Just look at all those nutritious veggies!

Those Democrats. They just won't drop that ridiculous "pizza is not a vegetable" thing. Fox News reports that Rep. Jared Polis, a Democrat from Colorado, has proposed legislation that would stop pizza being counted as a vegetable in public school lunches. The SLICE (School Lunch Improvements for Children's Education) Act also would allow the federal government to set nutritional standards for school lunches.

Last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture proposed a similar rule that would have prevented pizza from being counted as a vegetable in meals, but Congress succumbed to lobbying from the frozen-food industry and blocked it. As a result, frozen-pizza manufacturers are still able to have their product counted as a "vegetable" in public school lunches because it contains tomato paste. (See also: "ketchup is a vegetable," from the Ronald Reagan days.)

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G. Snyder

"Kimmmbap, ba-duba-dop kimbap"

Forget Lunchables -- the real cool kids in grade school were the ones had kimbap in their brown bags. Those loosely wrapped rice and seaweed rolls stuffed with this and that, a close cousin of Japanese futomaki, are one of the favorite mobile lunches in Korea. You can find packages of kimbap in the deli section of pretty much every Koreatown supermarket, as well as a surprisingly tasty triangular version in the cafeteria of L.A. City College.

For restaurant kimbap there was School Food, a hip K-pop café on the top floor of the ultra-modern GCV Cinema complex. Their neat little rolls, shaped and stacked like miniature film canisters, were pretty good, though it always felt like the equivalent of traveling to Mendocino Farms for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Imagine our elation, then, when we found out about Caju Naneng Myon, a bustling bunshik shop just a few steps down from the Wiltern. Bunshik refers to a casual kind of snack shop in Korea where you can drop in for a quick plate of ddukboki , those oblong rice cakes that vaguely resemble Korean gnocchi, or a personal-sized bowl of hot stone bibimbap.

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Muy Yum/Flickr

Huckleberry's fried egg sandwich

If you're an hourly employee who works more than five hours a day, you are entitled to a 30-minute lunch break -- but, as the California Supreme Court just ruled, it's up to you to make sure you exercise your legal right to do so.

The state Supreme Court's unanimous decision is a culmination of nine long years of litigation against defendant Brinker International, which owns and operates several major restaurant chains, including Chili's. The plaintiffs were or are hourly employees at various Brinker restaurants; they filed suit almost a decade ago, alleging that the company violated a number of California labor laws, including a failure to ensure employees stopped working during their mealtime breaks. Brinker, however, responded that its legal obligation was only to make such breaks available to employees. In a ruling issued yesterday, the California Supreme Court sided with Brinker.

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Screenshot of Alton Brown's Twitter page

Pink slime before it is mixed in with hamburger

Remember pink goo? Let us refresh your memory. Pink goo, aka pink slime, is scraps of meat and connective tissue swept up from slaughterhouse floors that are doused with a pink chemical to kill dangerous pathogens -- since they've been, you know, on the floor -- then blended together into a substance that looks like strawberry fro-yo. That chemical is ammonium hydroxide, also used in wood stains, window cleaners, Pine-Sol and Pledge. We'll give you a moment to let that settle in.

Pink slime has been used in ground beef products sold commercially since the 1990s -- the processed meat reportedly accounts for 70 percent of all ground beef consumed in the U.S. (Where's Upton Sinclair when you need him?) It's also widely used as a leavener in bread and cake products. It's regulated by the U.S. Agriculture Department, which classifies it as "generally recognized as safe." Faint praise?

A brouhaha is currently brewing because the USDA sends the stuff to public schools, and currently is planning to ship out another 7 million pounds of pink goo for children to consume. (School cafeterias nationwide receive part of the ground beef they serve from the USDA.) Even McDonald's says it won't use the stuff anymore.
We'd wager even Jane Eyre didn't have to choke down chemical-tainted offal like that at Lowood Institution.

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webjapanese.com

The term "bento" gets tossed around on many Japanese menus in Los Angeles, where it often refers to those oversized cafeteria platters filled with sauce-slicked bits of chicken teriyaki, udon noodle bowls and stacks of tempura fortified with a California roll or two -- call it the "super combo meal" of Japanese dining.

There is, however, a different side to the world of bento: the stripped-down, utilitarian to-go boxes called hokaben, a conceptual equivalent of those sandwich/apple/cookie grab bags given out at cheap company picnics. In Japan, hokaben are common fixtures at railway stations, convenience stores and takeout shops: portable plastic containers filled with a few small bites of katsu, tamgoyaki or broiled unagi, served with a side of steamed rice and pickles. It's the ideal inexpensive meal for the working man or woman on a tight schedule.

You can find old-school, freshly made hokaben bento at a handful of shops in Los Angeles, most of which prepare a set number of boxes just before lunch and sell them until they're gone. Most range anywhere between $5-$10, which makes them a satisfying yet spendthrift choice on those days that brown-bagging it just won't suffice. Here are three of our favorites:

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R.E.~/Flickr

American workers spend about $1,000 a year on coffee

If one of your resolutions this year is to save more money, you might want to start with your coffee budget. Staffing firm Accounting Principals surveyed 1,000 employed Americans about their work-related spending habits and found that almost half regularly buy coffee while they're at work -- spending about $1,092 a year, in fact, or more than $20 a week.

And that's only the beginning: in addition to buying coffee, two-thirds of those surveyed buy their lunches rather than packing last night's leftovers, spending about $37 per week, or nearly $2,000 annually. That's a total of about $3,000 on coffee and lunch, some of which was well-spent and some of which probably could have been better spent on rent and vacations and pets and other things that make happy, productive employees.

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Rob and Ben Kimmel/Wandermonster

"What Happens When You Bury a Toy?"

This week, most Los Angeles-area kids return to school -- back to assigned seats, over-stuffed backpacks, and 30-minute lunch periods. Those whirlwind lunches are particularly hard on those who don't bring food from home. They stand in line for half the period, obtain a tray brimming with beiges and browns and squeeze into a dirty, grease-slicked table to pick at whatever they can stand the smell of. Even kids who pack a lunch often have to put up with cold, congealed leftovers.

To sweeten the midday charade, one Western Massachusetts-based dad and his precocious son have turned school lunch into a time for bonding and collaboration. Each morning, Pratt Institute graphic design professor Rob Kimmel draws half a comic on a sticky note affixed to the inside of his son Ben's lunchbox. At school, in between bites, Ben completes the comic and shows it to his father in the afternoon.

Compiled on the site Wandermonster, the comics are clever and whimsical, shot through with the sort of goofy, perfect logic only children really possess.

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F. Friesema

Jonagold apples

A fine restaurant, we all know, requires a chef to put it together; a greasy spoon needs a gifted cook. But a good sandwich shop, especially a good sandwich shop in a business district, can more properly be the domain of a curator: somebody with an iron hand on the meats and cheeses, who knows how to keep the dining room comfortable enough to visit every day but brusque enough to encourage quick turnover, who gets the coffee right, the bread right and, if the shop is also open for breakfast, perhaps some decent baked goods. No matter how many people are crowded in around you, no matter how fervently the woman in the bob is hoping you will finish your lemonade so that she can sit down, the sandwich shop feels like yours.

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Guzzle & Nosh

Puffed rice from Street.

April is National Grilled Cheese Month and National Poetry Month, but it's also a month of evil. It's tax month. To help, here are a few tax day and, in some cases, tax month, deals. (BTW the last date to file taxes this year is April 18th.)

Every day during the month of April, Street is offering a Tax Relief Lunch from noon to 3 p.m.: every item costs $11 or less -- even the brioche cheeseburger. It culminates on April 18th with an all-day "Unhappy Hour." Street will extend its happy hour from opening to closing, serving bar food for $5 or less alongside strong drinks.

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