Wimbledon: No. 1 Iga Swiatek falls apart in third round

• July 6, 2024

LONDON — No. 1-ranked Iga Swiatek again faltered at Wimbledon, losing in the third round to Yulia Putintseva 3-6, 6-1, 6-2 on Saturday.

The result ended a 21-match winning streak for Swiatek. She is a five-time Grand Slam champion, including four titles on the red clay at the French Open — most recently last month — and one on the hard courts at the U.S. Open.

The All England Club’s grass has always given her the most trouble as a pro at any major tournament, although the 23-year-old from Poland did win the junior trophy as a teenager.

Swiatek has only once been as far as the quarterfinals at Wimbledon; that was last year, when she lost at that stage. In 2022, her 37-match unbeaten run ended with a third-round loss to Alize Cornet at the All England Club.

Swiatek has talked about looking forward to improving on grass, but she decided to withdraw last month from the only tuneup event that was originally on her schedule before Wimbledon.

The 35th-ranked Putintseva now has an eight-match run of her own, all on grass, including a title at Birmingham before arriving in London. Still, this is the first time in 10 appearances at Wimbledon that the 29-year-old from Kazakhstan made it past the second round.

Her best showing at any Slam was getting to the quarterfinals at the French Open twice and U.S. Open once.

This result also was unexpected because Swiatek not only won all four previous meetings against Putintseva, but also claimed every set they had played.

Asked during a postmatch interview on No. 1 Court how she managed to emerge with the victory, the often-animated Putintseva replied: “I don’t know. Really, I don’t.”

Well, here is at least one key part of what happened: Swiatek looked very little like someone who has led the WTA rankings for nearly every week since April 2022 and is assured of remaining there no matter what happens the rest of the way at Wimbledon.

She kept making mistakes, particularly over the last two sets, when Putintseva did not even try to put balls away and instead was happy to allow Swiatek to help her.

When Putintseva was building a 4-0 lead in the last set by grabbing 16 of its first 19 points, she only needed to produce two winners. That’s because her other 14 points were all gained thanks to either unforced errors (seven) or forced errors (seven) off Swiatek’s racket.

After one miss into the net, Swiatek muttered to herself. After another point went awry, she placed her hand over her mouth. Generally, she looked as flustered as she ever does during a match. By the end, she had accumulated 38 unforced errors, more than twice as many as her opponent’s 15.

​ Orange County Register 

Why these plants might be robust possibilities for a shade garden

• July 6, 2024

Each member of the Acanthus family of plants (Acanthaceaae) has a unique style that makes it hard to forget. 

Acanthus comes from the Greek word for thorn but most of the plants in question are hardly thorny. The family name is taken from Acanthus (one of its genera), some of whose species have spiny leaves. 

Yet the most commonly encountered Acanthus ornamental is bear’s breech, whose Latin name of Acanthus mollis literally means “soft thorns,” in reference to the fact that its deeply lobed leaves — while technically prickly — have the softest prickles imaginable. The ancient Greeks considered Acanthus leaves, reaching two feet in length while deeply lobed and crisply cut, to be the most ornamental in the plant kingdom and carved them into the tops of Corinthian columns. 

If you are looking for a background plant for a shade garden, Acanthus mollie is the one to choose since it reaches a height of five feet. Leaves are the lushest emerald green and the plant spreads thanks to its tuberous roots. These roots allow it to withstand long periods of drought where all the leaves may die back but the moment it is given water, it speedily returns to its former leafy beauty. It also sends up spikes up to four feet tall featuring white flowers hooded by protective bracts that have hints of purple, pink, green, and gray. 

Bush violet (Barleria obtusa) is a robust shrub in the Acanthus family that grows three feet tall by five feet wide. It may expand its reach considerably due to the fact that wherever its stems touch the ground, they take root. Masses of violet blooms that attract birds, bees, and butterflies appear on stem ends in fall and winter. Firecracker plant (Dicliptera squarrosa/suberecta) has fiery orange-red blooms and fuzzy gray foliage, growing two feet tall by three feet wide. This plant is extremely drought-tolerant and is at the very top of the list of plants that attract hummingbirds. Ribbon bush (Hypoestes aristata) flowers magnificently and abundantly in fall and winter, showing off lavender-pink blooms so numerous that its foliage is virtually hidden. All of the above can be found at nurseries supplied by San Marcos Growers (smgrowers.com).

There are several distinctive indoor plants in the Acanthus family. Aphelandra squarrosa has large yellow flowers and leaves with fluorescent white veins. Fittonia, known as the nerve plant, has smaller leaves with finer white veins. Both Pseuderanthemum atropurpureum var.Tricolor and Hemigraphis alternata sport foliage that is displayed in various combinations of pink, cream and purple. Finally, the polka dot plant (Hypoestes phyllostachya) has green leaves with white, pink, or red dots and splotches.

Here, I must confess my inspiration for writing about the Acanthus family of plants came from an email I received from Matthew Hunt, who gardens in San Clemente, and regaled his Mexican petunia (Ruellia brittoniana) experience. Mexican petunia is a distinguished member of the Acanthus family. The scientific name of Ruellia honors a 16th-century French physician-horticulturist named Jean Ruelle. 

Mexican petunia grows in sunny to partial shade exposures — flowering more in the sun — and is tolerant of a wide range of soil conditions, from dry to boggy. So if you have a pond and want something to plant on the wet ground around it, choose Mexican petunia. Yet if you have a garden that you never water more than twice a week – even in the hottest weather – you can plant it there too, as well as in containers.

Unrelated to the true petunia, Mexican petunia’s gramophone-shaped lavender-blue flowers suggest affinity with the petunia species. This is truly a delightful plant owing to its carefree growth habit and prolific flowering throughout the summer and fall. It grows in clumps that are three feet tall and half as wide but will increase its girth vegetatively, especially when soil is kept moist, through underground root-thickenings known as rhizomes. It will also expand its garden presence through self-sowing. Finally, its semi-succulent stems are an invitation to propagate it in the simplest possible way. Take six to eight-inch cuttings, remove the bottom leaves, and place in a vase holding a few inches of water. Soon you will see roots emerge from the cuttings and, after two to three weeks, you can plant them. There is some complaint that Mexican petunia seeds too freely and may become weedy. I have never found this to be the case but if you are concerned about this possibility, plant Purple Showers, a sterile variety.

Hunt is growing Southern Star Pink, a dwarf Ruellia variety that reaches one foot in height. Blue and white flowered dwarfs are also available. “The stuff breaks really easily,” he writes. “When someone brings a dog over to visit mine, you can see the trails they’ve run through since it snaps off so easily. But it grows back with a vengeance.  Even snapped-off pieces will start to root. In our yard, my wife usually snaps it all off to the ground in March, and in a few months it looks great. But out in the yard, it’s two to three feet tall because she didn’t prune it back this year.” Although promoted as staying one foot tall, the dwarf types may grow taller, especially when the plants in question sprout on site from seeds dropped by mother plants. What grows from a seed is never entirely predictable and often a surprise.

California native of the week: Matthew Hunt also grows and extols Ruellia californica. It’s a shrub with a height and girth, at maturity, of four feet. It is more drought tolerant than the commonly seen species described above. Funnel-shaped flowers of this plant bloom year-round when the soil is given occasional water, although this plant can subsist on winter rain alone. All Ruellias are powerfully magnetic to butterflies and hummingbirds. I checked the native plant nurseries in our area and was unable to locate Ruellia californica. Perhaps it is overlooked since its habitat does not cross the border from Baja California Sur (south) into Baja California Norte (north), the latter being part of the California Floristic Province. In any case, if anyone knows of a local source for Ruellia californica or the closely related and larger-flowered Ruellia peninsularis, please advise.

Please send questions and comments to joshua@perfectplants.com.

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​ Orange County Register 

Orange County restaurants shut down by health inspectors (June 27-July 4)

• July 6, 2024

Restaurants and other food vendors ordered to close and allowed to reopen by Orange County health inspectors from June 27 to July 4.

Bagel Me!, 13682 Newport Ave., Tustin

Closed: July 2
Reason: Cockroach infestation
Reopened: July 3

Koko Chicken & B.B.Q, 9732 Garden Grove Blvd., Suite 2, Garden Grove

Closed: July 1
Reason: Cockroach infestation
Reopened: July 3

Round Table Pizza, 25290 Marguerite Parkway, Suite C-D, Mission Viejo

Closed: July 1
Reason: Rodent infestation
Reopened: July 2

Tacos & Co., 6620 Irvine Center Drive, Irvine

Closed: July 1
Reason: None provided
Reopened: July 2

Kitchen at Aliso Viejo Country Club, 33 Santa Barbara Drive, Aliso Viejo

Closed: July 1
Reason: Rodent infestation

Ostioneria Bahia, 144 S. Tustin St., Orange

Closed: June 27
Reason: Cockroach infestation
Reopened: June 27

Updates since last week’s list:

Cho Cu Bakery at 14520 Magnolia St., Suite B, Westminster, which was ordered closed June 26 because of a cockroach infestation, was allowed to reopen June 28.

This list is published weekly with closures since the previous week’s list. Status updates are published in the following week’s list. Source: OC Health Care Agency database.

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​ Orange County Register 

Busy Fourth of July holiday for county animal shelter

• July 6, 2024

The county’s animal shelter has taken in 20 dogs the past couple of days and more are expected to arrive as Independence Day celebrations come to a close.

The loud noises, crowds and more people coming and going over the Fourth of July holiday can cause dogs to be frightened more easily and “look for places to run and hide,” OC Animal Care spokesperson Alexa Pratt said. And that means the holiday is the shelter’s busiest time of year.

Ten dogs were taken into the shelter just on Friday morning.

“When animals don’t have that comfort present around large groups of people or loud noises, they look for it whether that be in your home or out of your home, looking for places to escape,” Pratt said. “A lot of times, unfortunately, this is how the animals get out of the home and get out of the yard.”

If your pet escaped over the holiday, Pratt said call OC Animal Care’s office at 714-935-6848 or try the “lost and found” tab on ocpetinfo.com, OC Animal Care’s website. There, pet owners can check if their lost animal wound up at the county shelter or if it has been found by community members. OC Animal Care serves much of Orange County, but also check which shelter your city contracts with.

Pets that are brought into the shelter are examined by a vet, vaccinated and placed in one of the shelter’s kennels. Lost pets are held for their owners to claim them for four to 10 days, depending on which city they were found in and whether they had any form of identification, according to OC Animal Care’s website.

Pet owners are also encouraged to search through their neighborhood and tap resources such as social media groups, local veterinarians and posting flyers.

The Mission Viejo Animal Shelter, which provides services to several of its neighboring cities, had an “unusually” slow holiday this year, only taking in two stray animals as of Friday afternoon, spokesperson Brynn Lavison said, calling it a “good thing.”

To prepare for the anxiety that comes with loud holidays, Pratt suggests creating a “comfortable corner in the house full of blankets” to calm the animals down. Playing music or white noise in the room can also cancel out some of the loud fireworks sounds.

Additionally, getting your pet microchipped and ensuring the contact information associated with the microchip is updated is the best way to add extra security for your precious pets, Pratt said.

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“When a dog comes into our shelter, the first thing that we do is check for a microchip and if we find one, we can call,” Pratt said. “We try to get the animal and its family reunited as quickly as possible before the dog or cat even comes into the shelter.”

​ Orange County Register 

Two SCOTUS cases show how an unaccountable administrative state hurts ordinary people

• July 6, 2024

After the U.S. Supreme Court curtailed the powers of federal agencies in two cases last week, progressive critics predictably complained that the decisions favored “big business,” “corporate interests” and “the wealthy and powerful.” That gloss overlooked the reality that people with little wealth or power frequently are forced to contend with overweening bureaucrats who invent their own authority and play by their own rules.

In the more consequential case, the court repudiated the Chevron doctrine, which required that judges defer to a federal agency’s “permissible” interpretation of an “ambiguous” statute. The majority said that rule, which the court established in 1984, was unworkable, creating “an eternal fog of uncertainty” about what the law allows or requires, and fundamentally misguided, allowing the executive branch to usurp a judicial function.

Although People for the American Way perceived a win for “the corporate interests that have been itching to gut the power of federal agencies to protect our health and welfare,” the dispute at the center of the case complicates that picture. Two family-owned fishing operations objected to onerous regulatory fees they said had never been authorized by Congress.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch noted other examples of vulnerable supplicants who suffer when agencies are free to rewrite the laws under which they operate. He cited cases involving a veteran seeking disability benefits and an immigrant fighting to remain in the country.

Because of an arbitrary rule the Department of Veterans Affairs invented for its own convenience, Thomas Buffington lost three years of disability benefits the government owed him. Alfonzo De Niz Robles faced deportation and separation from his American wife and children after the Board of Immigration Appeals overturned a judicial precedent on which he and many other immigrants had relied for relief.

“Sophisticated entities and their lawyers may be able to keep pace with rule changes affecting their rights and responsibilities,” Gorsuch noted. They can lobby for “reasonable” agency interpretations and “even capture the agencies that issue them.”

By contrast, Gorsuch added, “ordinary people can do none of those things. They are the ones who suffer the worst kind of regulatory whiplash” when the law changes according to bureaucratic whims.

In another case, the court ruled that the Seventh Amendment requires jury trials for people accused of securities fraud. The majority said the Securities and Exchange Commission had violated that right by imposing civil penalties via internal proceedings in which the agency itself served as investigator, prosecutor and judge, with only minimal independent review after the fact.

The petitioner in that case was a hedge fund manager accused of lying to clients and inflating his fees. The progressive outlet Common Dreams decried a “victory for the wealthy and powerful.” But the SEC’s rigged process, in which the agency almost always prevailed, also affected people of modest means facing more dubious allegations.

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Consider accountant Michelle Cochran, a single mother of two who was hit with a $22,500 fine and a five-year ban on practicing before the SEC after in-house proceedings in which she represented herself. When the agency investigated her former employer, it concluded that she had “failed to complete auditing checklists,” leaving some sections blank, although there was “no evidence” that the incomplete paperwork had caused “monetary harm to clients or investors.”

The SEC, Gorsuch noted, sought to “penalize citizens without a jury, without an independent judge, and under procedures foreign to our courts.” That approach, he said, violated constitutional constraints that “ensure even the least popular among us has an independent judge and a jury of his peers resolve his case under procedures designed to ensure a fair trial in a fair forum.”

Defenders of the administrative state seem to assume that federal agencies inerrantly target greedy villains who bilk the unwary, undermine public safety or threaten the environment. But “while incursions on old rights may begin in cases against the unpopular,” Gorsuch observed, “they rarely end there.”

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine. Follow him on Twitter: @jacobsullum.

​ Orange County Register 

Murder by suicide: Linda Cummings’ brother asks for ‘small act of decency’

• July 6, 2024

Paul Broadway credits Linda Cummings, his older half-sister, with making him a kind, loving and responsible adult. We stayed in touch after he wrote me a sweet thank you card after I wrote a series in The Register in 2005 about her case.

Editor’s note

Former Orange County Register reporter Larry Welborn covered Linda Cummings’ story from 1974 until his retirement in 2014 and still pursued the truth in the following years. He wrote about it in the new book “Murder by Suicide: A reporter unravels a true case of rape, betrayal and lies,” which is available on Amazon. This is part six of a seven-part series.

Part one: 50 years ago, Linda Cummings died and the pursuit of the truth started

Part two: Search for evidence leads to more heartbreak

Part three: After 31 years, an arrest is made

Part four: Judge’s ruling a ‘gut-punch’

Part five: Serial killer and a book raise questions

Part seven: Coming Sunday

In late 2019, I phoned Paul to ask if her misleading death certificate bothered him as much as it bothered me.

“Hell, yeah, it does!”

At my suggestion, Paul contacted Irvine attorney Michael L. Fell, Orange County’s foremost legal expert on victims’ rights. Mike spent 18 years as a prosecutor before starting his own criminal defense firm in 2009.

He is also a rarity in the defense bar because he will not take on cases of would-be clients accused of violent crimes against others, no matter how much they offer to pay.

Fell was perfect to help Paul Broadway restore his sister’s legacy.

“I’ll help you in any way I can,” Fell vowed when we all met in his office.

Fell harvested my “murder book” for documentation and support in preparing his arguments. He noted that Stevens told detectives during a 2006 interview that he would reclassify the death certificate to homicide on the “slightest (new) evidence” that Linda Cummings was murdered.

Well, together, we identified 17 reasons why he had no doubt Linda was murdered, each reason sufficient on its own to satisfy the “slightest evidence” threshold.

“The current determination of ‘undetermined’ is a vague word written by an indecisive man and it clearly does not define or do justice to what really happened … in Apartment 8 of The Aladdin,” Fell wrote in a letter to Dr. Anthony Juguilon, the chief forensic pathologist of Orange County.

The letter appealing for an official reclassification of Linda’s cause of death to “homicide” was dated Jan. 31, 2020 – almost to the day 46 years after Linda Cummings was found dead.

The heart of Fell’s formal request was provided in a letter from Paul attached to the lawyerly appeal:

“My sister Linda did nothing to deserve the way her life ended in that dingy apartment on 17th Street in Santa Ana,” Paul wrote.

“She does not deserve to have her legacy denigrated by the false narrative of being officially accused of taking her own life on her death certificate. She deserves to have the record corrected to have the real cause of death.”

He called such an official change a “small act of decency” that must be done “because she was robbed of everything else.”

“Linda was a loving and caring person. She was loved by her friends, family and workmates. She was young, attractive, and she had a bright future ahead of her. The future was a shared future with our family.”

But “that future was cut short,” he said in his letter, “by a monster who took her dignity and life” and then spread the Big Lie that she took her own life.

“She was raped, hung nude and then misrepresented by a monster who had no empathy or appreciation for how good she was.

“She will never have any children to love as she loved me. She will never find her great love and get married. She will never live up to the great things that she was striving for. She deserves so much better.

“The line on her death certificate (stamped) ‘undetermined’ is a personal affront.”

He concluded: “Please give Linda the decency of having the correct cause of death on her death certificate, and not the false and demeaning determination that was engineered by her killer.”

•••

The COVID-19 pandemic closed or slowed government operations for the next few months, leaving us in suspense about how a review committee would respond. It appeared there was no precedent anywhere in the region for changing a death certificate that had been issued nearly a half-century earlier.

But then in April 2020, Jugilon convened a panel of vested detectives and prosecutors.

A sheriff’s official described the stark facts: a naked young woman, hanging in a noose with a non-slip knot behind her neck and tied off on opposite sides of the room. Senior Deputy District Attorney Steve McGreevy, the head of the homicide prosecution unit, noted that the coroner’s investigator in 1974 had relied on misinformation provided by the killer that the victim had been suicidal and was treated for mental problems – all of it part of an elaborate lie.

Dr. Juguilon called the evidence overwhelming. Linda Cummings was a homicide victim, he said, and her death certificate would be changed to so reflect.

“We righted a wrong,” he told me when I interviewed him later, underscoring that the revision was an easy call. “I hope this brings Linda’s family some peace, because I know it’s been haunting them for a while.”

I was with Mike Fell in his Irvine law office when he called Paul to break the news “One of the best calls I’ve ever made in my life,” Fell said.

Paul Broadway was elated, calling it “the best thing to happen to this family in 50 years.”

One of the best days in a journalist’s life, too.

Coming Sunday, part seven: A gathering to commemorate some justice for Linda Cummings.

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​ Orange County Register 

When your garden produces a bounty of produce, consider dehydrating some

• July 6, 2024

For those of us who grow fruit, herbs, and vegetables, summer and early fall can become overwhelming when the garden is in full production. It’s nice to have an abundance of produce, but after a while you can get tired of eating it, no matter how good it is. Fruit trees tend to give their fruit all at once, so you could harvest many pounds of high-quality fruit that won’t stay good for very long. Our first apricot tree gave us over 75 pounds of apricots, all perfectly ripe at the same time! We often have a kitchen counter full of a variety of ripe tomatoes waiting to be eaten fresh or processed.

Fruit can be turned into jams and jellies, but each recipe only uses 5-10 pounds of fruit. Of course, you can make multiple recipes, but how much jam and jelly will your family consume? Tomatoes can be made into salsa, pasta sauce, barbeque sauce, catsup, or canned whole. These are all delicious but involve many hours in the kitchen working over a hot stove.

Dehydrating can be an easier way to deal with a sudden glut of produce that’s too good to compost. Drying can reduce the volume by 90%, making storage much easier. Preparing food for dehydration is relatively quick, and generally doesn’t involve heating up your kitchen.

Fruit such as apricots, apples, peaches, nectarines, pears, berries, grapes, and most plums dehydrate well. For stone fruits, simply cut in half to remove the pit and, if possible, invert the fruit by pressing to turn it “inside-out.” This flattens the fruit half and allows it to dry quickly. Plums with tart skin should not be dehydrated since the tartness will intensify as the fruit dries. Most Japanese plums fall into this category. With that exception, flavor and sweetness will intensify with drying.

Most vegetables can be dehydrated as well. Tomatoes, peppers (sweet and hot), herbs, string beans, leafy cooking greens, carrots, celery, and squash can be sliced or cut up and dried to make soup mix or snacks. If they are dried to the point of crispness, they can be pulverized in a food processor and made into flavored powder. I like to save tomato skins that have been removed in blanching, dry, and grind them into powder.

Electric dehydrators come in two basic designs. The less expensive models have a fan and heating element on the bottom with moveable trays that stack. This type of dehydrator is less effective since the trays need to be rotated frequently to allow the food to dry reasonably quickly and evenly. The more expensive type of dehydrator has the heating element and fan in the back and blows the warm air over all the trays evenly. The trays need to be rotated as well, but not as frequently. Electric dehydrators can often be purchased at garage sales or secondhand stores. After the finished product has been vacuum sealed, it can be stored in the freezer indefinitely.

Los Angeles County

mglosangeleshelpline@ucdavis.edu; 626-586-1988; http://celosangeles.ucanr.edu/UC_Master_Gardener_Program/

Orange County

ucceocmghotline@ucanr.edu; http://mgorange.ucanr.edu/

Riverside County

anrmgriverside@ucanr.edu; https://ucanr.edu/sites/RiversideMG/

San Bernardino County

mgsanbern@ucanr.edu; 909-387-2182; http://mgsb.ucanr.edu

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Column: How can we get people to eat vegetables? Denmark has a way

• July 6, 2024

Howard Chua-Eoan | Bloomberg Opinion (TNS)

One of the most traumatic moments in my life was being forced to eat a tangle of bean sprouts. These were not mung beans: They were thicker and twisted ominously out of their crunchy yellow seeds, looking like imploding tribbles from the classic Star Trek episode. They also gave off sulfuric fumes that made all the kids gag. But there was no escape.

“You can’t leave the table until you have this,” my uncle declared. It was 1979. My family had just immigrated to California and was staying with him and my aunt. That evening, he was in charge of feeding me, my siblings and his own kids because mom and her sister — the usual and very accomplished cooks — were away. If the smell was bad, it was worse going down. We ate these during the war, he said sternly. That made us feel worse: thinking about all the starving children in Japanese-occupied Asia who had nothing else on the menu.

I’d always been more of a carnivore, and those sprouts didn’t convince me to give up on chops and steaks. In the ensuing years, a generation of vegan and vegetarian activists didn’t sit well with me either. They were well-meaning with their catalogs of nutritious facts and save-the-planet statistics. But they often ended up strident, talking down to meat eaters as if we were pre-sapiens and then literally offering us pablum. “Would it kill you to have vegetables?” they’d say. I’d respond: “Maybe not, but that thing you put on my plate just might.”

So I was intrigued by a new initiative being introduced in Denmark to promote vegetables among a population that prefers meat and fish (and deep-fried camembert!). What’s fascinating, as my Bloomberg News colleague Sanne Wass says in her deliciously reported story, is that the literature being distributed by the Plant Fund avoids words like “vegetarian” and “vegan” — and it hasn’t set numerical or statistical targets. Instead, its $100 million in government funds are being directed at encouragement and nudging and the difficult art of convincing people that ingesting a few more greens actually enhances your gastronomic experience. No one is demanding that you give up meat — just to vary your diet. As Sanne says, “Getting people in high-income countries to eat less meat has been singled out as a key way to help the planet. Swapping out beef for a single meal can almost halve a person’s carbon footprint for that day.”

That uncoercive, flavor-forward approach to vegetables is completely preferable to the doctrinaire. The example of India comes to mind where religious groups are trying to force vegan menus on public school children, who are already among the least nourished in the world. An egg is the most efficient way to get protein into growing kids, but that’s forbidden in many parts of the country. Ironically, India also has the largest population of cattle in the world because the animal is considered sacred and allowed to wander freely everywhere. Cows produce a large part of livestock’s 14.5% share of global greenhouse gas emissions.

In Denmark, the Plant Fund is using food festivals and chef training to help increase the presence of vegetables on the national dinner table. Some of the most prominent and critically acclaimed Danish restaurants have been at the forefront of this, notably Rene Redzepi’s Noma (which holds an annual vegetable season that I will savor once more in a couple of weeks); and Geranium, which Sanne cites in her piece. But perhaps the key restaurant in the slow pivot to eating vegetables is Blue Hill at Stone Barns in New York. I used to hate carrots until chef Dan Barber served me a single, tiny carrot from his upstate farm. It was like candy — a sweetness all its own and unlike any other carrot I’ve had. That was about 20 years ago. I still approach carrots with some trepidation but no longer with outright loathing — and I am always overjoyed when Barber sends them out to me. Blue Hill raises (and serves) its own animals too. But the vegetables are outrageously good.

London has its cutting-edge vegetarian restaurants as well. I had the opportunity to sample the fare at Plates, a new spot by Kirk Haworth, who was crowned “champion of champions” in the latest iteration of the BBC’s Great British Menu. The menu isn’t vegan but almost completely plant-based (with a house ricotta the closest reference to animal protein). Even the butter that comes with an astonishing laminated bread is concocted from spirulina algae. It is green but absolutely winning. The restaurant has just opened, but it’s already booked up for months.

I’m not giving up meat, but my vegetable love should grow vaster, to steal a line from Andrew Marvell. As chefs turn their talents toward plants, more of my meals will be vegetarian — without feeling I’ve sacrificed enjoyment. I can have my steak, and eat it too. Just less often.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Howard Chua-Eoan is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion covering culture and business. He previously served as Bloomberg Opinion’s international editor and is a former news director at Time magazine.

©2024 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com/opinion. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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