I may be an aspiring foodie, but I'm intrigued with the idea of Cap'n Crunch Chicken, so long as it doesn't rough up the inside of my mouth like it did when I was wee.

It's really amazing that so many people fall for this.

I dont' want to be a food snob, it's not my intention, but when are people going to realize that whole natural foods is where it's at? Maybe not in my lifetime.

Aside from the political, it is really interesting to read what people eat.

Your post here is a quickly-drafted, incomplete critique based on the promotional recipe, the color of the book, and its colloquial style. Had you dug deeper, you might have learned a few "tips and tricks" for your own eating.

Hungry Girl isn't a quick fix for what ails America. It's not a "diet plan". What it is is a good source of inspiration for people, who due to busy lives and expanding waistlines, need some help getting out of their food rut. It gets them back into the kitchen and out of the drive-thru. And it talks to many women in a language they understand.

Yes, Hungry Girl does rely on processed food in many of her recipes. This is what makes them accessible to the non-foodie who wouldn't know how to make homemade breadcrumbs from yesterday's high fiber, organic, all-natural bread. But fresh veggies and dry beans can easily substitute for canned, and anyone who has 15 minutes and a knack for separating egg whites can make enough egg beaters to last for weeks. I make a number of these easy substitutions, knowing that I have issues with sodium.

Some of these recipes have given me new ideas for familiar foods ("fried" zucchini, oat pizza crust), prompted me to tackle hard-to-handle foods (butternut squash fries), and gave me a reason to never buy veggie patties from the store again. I've never had whole wheat flour in my pantry before, and I certainly didn't eat noodles made from yam flour. I even splurge occasionally on some (uncured, local) turkey bacon because Hungry Girl has so many good recipes calling for it.

I'd love to eat nothing but "real food", but grilled chicken over a bed of spinach gets old after awhile. I'm sure a number of time-crunched, professional women would agree. These recipes take the guesswork out of how to make tasty food fit within a healthy lifestyle for the majority of people who just can't stop at one tiny portion of "real food".

I've been at it ever since I was born. Yeah, I have the occasional fast-food meal when I am traveling and real food is not easily available, but that's the only exception. What's so hard about it? All of the meals I know how to cook take less than 20 minutes to make.

Interestingly, if you compare the two stereotypes of the "snobbish foodies" and the "average Americans" - which stereotype has a weight problem? Not the snobbish foodies. The best way to lose weight is to eat real food.

The "hungry girl" approach, by the way, sounds like a damn good way to gain weight - and lots of it. Slow down your metabolism by starving yourself so you lose muscle mass, give your body lots and lots of fake sugars (shown to cause weight gain), and fail to give yourself any real nutrition (so you will set off food cravings). Ah well - anything that sells more diet books, right?

THAT'S what's B.S. I was raised on good meals, largely home grown vegetables, REAL food. I didn't start eating the processed stuff till I went to college. Afterwards when I had a kitchen and a refridgerator, I just went back to the way I was raised. It's what feels normal, and it really DOES taste better, no snobbishness to it.

Famine (yes, the rider of the Apocalypse) had a plan that sounds an awful lot like Hungry Girl's, and the end result was supposed to be that "if you ate enough MEALS^TM you would a) get very fat, and b) die of malnutrition."

Isn't it ironic that we didn't need any help from a mythical malevolent creature to be heading down the exact same path?

For the phrase "pink freneticism" alone, Marion Nestle deserves to be worshipped. That she gives completely sound nutritional advice is merely icing on the cake, if you'll pardon the phrase. This sounds like just another low-cal trip into the high-sodium, Nutrasweet-saturated heartland currently populated by Sandra Lee and her "tablescapes." Why do people continue to fall for the old saw that the average person "can't" eat in a healthy way and actually enjoy it?

I meant that title to say "Going in the [type of book that men during the Renaissance carried in which they wrote down thoughts/quotes/facts/etc.], but I'll be darned if I can't remember what that type of book is called. I'm looking at you, Nutrasweet!

I'm just glad the low-self-esteem spiral keeps winding on, so my son can enjoy all the pleasures of a bang-maid, at his beck and call, willing to please his every whim.

"Food snobs?" Everyone on Salon is a snob, in one way or another. That's the whole point, isn't it? Political snob, exercise snob, travel snob, literature snob, film snob (oops, I almost said "movie!" Yikes!), history snob, spiritual snob, yada yada yada.

I mean, the ad with the guy in suspenders says I can win all my arguments by quoting Salon. I don't come here to expand my horizons, or enlighten myself with different points of view. I come here to reinforce how better I am than fly-over country.

I picked up the Hungry Girl book a few months ago at the library, having no idea who the author was, or anything about her website. I was horrified. This is garbage that makes a trip to MacDonald's seem like dining at Alice Water's Chez Panisse.

Basically, the message of Hungry Girl is to recreate the worst sort of junky fast food or supermarket processed crap, and to do it "low-cal" by removing everything of nutritional value, and substituting other junk foods and so-called "diet foods", especially low-fat products (created in some Frankenstein lab out of scary ingredients) and the almighty sugar substitutes, like aspartame and Splenda.

I wasn't nuts enough to actually cook any of these, but they sounded awful, especially recipes calling for ground All-Bran cereal as an all-purpose breading for faux fried food. Fresh and natural items are nearly all missing; the POINT of "Hungry Girl" is that you can recreate the awful junky supermarket/fast food items you crave so badly, only in low-cal versions. This isn't about health or about nutrition. It's about eating fewer calories but maintaining the junk food habit.

There isn't a smidgen of suggestion that MAYBE just maybe you'd be better off cultivating a tolerance for fresh food, for vegetables and fruit, for unprocessed foods or for learning how to cook these items. It's a given in the book that what you want -- what WOMEN want -- is junk food, sweets, chocolate, and deep fried stuff. Oh -- and loads of sodium.

This ties in neatly with our cultural desire for WOMEN to have thin bodies, and the hell with what they put into them. After all, "we all know" that thin is healthier than fat, so if you have a thin woman (who eats junk food, Frankenstein foods, and smokes), she is AUTOMATICALLY healthier than a fat woman who eats natural foods (but perhaps more than she should), works out, and doesn't smoke. Because APPEARANCE trumps actual healthy behavior every time. And there are no other indicators of health, fitness and well-being other than slenderness.

I don't know a thing about author Lisa Lillien, except she's got a very sick attitude towards food. It would be interesting to know what her own history is -- her body image, her weight struggles, her attitude towards healthy eating. But the book is a pretty straight forward recipe book; it's not a confessional.

I imagine she's a young woman, and I wish I could take her by the shoulders and shake her...and tell her what repercussions are likely when you have such a sick, hateful attitude towards eating, towards food, towards your own natural female body. That if it's thinness you want, you are more likely to achieve it by obsessing less, and by learning to cook, and learning to develop a taste for unprocessed foods. I also think the best way to break your dependency on fast food is to quit it cold turkey (not unlike smoking); it's a wretched habit we've gotten into, eating this kind of processed swill and allowing it to become a craving that we feel we have to satisfy.

But even fast food would be preferable to awful synthetic, nutrient-free rubbish that Ms. Lillien has concocted. I've honestly NEVER read worse recipes ever anyplace -- not even in other diet screeds. "Hungry Girl" displays nothing more or less than an absolute hatred of food, and a sense of self-hatred and disgust for the female body.