Soylent Green is people and chile comes in condiment packets.

Like many people, I spend hours upon hours each day plopped in front of a screen, smearing my ass into the shape of a chair, while I could be harvesting ingredients, hunting down recipes, making proper stock and planning ridiculous meals.

New York pizza is just the shadow of classic Neapolitan pizza in my book, and it doesn’t interest me as a distinct geo-cultural cuisine. What I like about pizza in New York is that it’s available on almost every block and, consequently, there’s enough competition to ensure that it’s generally quite good.

To hell with the breakfast burrito—the congee at Mu Du Noodles’ Sunday brunch is sumptuous enough to make me lie in print about giving up the tortilla-wrapped goodness for good. It’s like a plate of migas crashed into a bowl of miso in a display case full of fine spices and landed in a gift basket of Asian delicacies.

The Kitchen is a kind of fantasy restaurant: It’s a melding of classic European eateries that faded away 100 years ago and casual mom ’n’ pop operations that throw out “gone fishin’” signs when they don’t feel like cooking, all with contemporary food, conservation and community sensibilities.

Even the best-prepared meals can suffer from poor beverage choices. You may make a mean turkey or be expert at cracking a can of cranberry but, unless you happen to excel at enology, choosing the right wine can be a daunting prospect in a store packed with pretenders and cheap tricks.

The hot dog is the lowest form of sausage. So one has to ask, is it a back-handed compliment to suggest that Santa Fe turns out a better Chicago Dog than Chicago itself?

The dark, chilly days of winter and the often attendant desire to remain inside belong to those of us who know that settling in with a good book or staying in bed are the best plans. Of course, those leisurely, lingering activities come with a de facto pit stop: the indulgent break for needed sustenance, the winter snack.

A lot of people are up in arms, having recently realized, through Jonathan Safran Foer’s book, Eating Animals, that factory-farmed meat is the nastiest possible activity. But hough Safran Foer himself is a committed vegetarian, he’s too well-informed to paint all meat production and eating with the same brush.

The elegant little building, situated at the corner of Alameda and Galisteo streets, once contained the fledgling promise of the Mediterranean Café. It has spent the last several years drooping from a gem into a degenerate gangster bar and then a rug shop and, finally, a sad, empty building in need of genuine metamorphosis. The building was a cockroach, but it woke up recently to find it had transformed into Louie’s Corner Café.