Category Archives: food

PB & Yum

The March 2007 issue of body+soul magazine has the winners of a taste-test of organic peanut butters in honor of National Peanut Butter Month. The top three winners were Santa Cruz Organic, MaraNatha Organic, and Smucker’s Organic.

The Husband and I bought MaraNatha creamy peanut butter on our last trip to Wild Oats, and I have to say it wins top honors from me, too! It has a wonderful, rich roasted peanut flavor. It’s so interesting getting used to natural peanut butter after eating Skippy and Jif for so long, but it’s a good transition. I also love that if you give it a good stir before putting it in the fridge the first time, it doesn’t separate!

Don’t Count Your Eggs

Cage free, free-range, organic, vegetarian, white, brown, fertile –– and those are just the kinds of eggs you can get at Super Target!

When the Husband and I made the decision to try to buy organic, one of the most confusing choices was when it came to eggs. Which were better? What’s the difference between cage-free and free-range, anyway?

By chance we hit on Cyd’s Nest Fresh Eggs and later, discovered that they are not only free-range, vegetarian, organic, and humanely harvested eggs, they’re also local! Many in the new food revolution are coming to believe that local trumps organic, and as these are produced right in our hometown, we can’t get much more local without putting a chicken coop out on our balcony!

In researching Cyd’s, I came across their FAQ page, which is a great resource for understanding the differences in the eggs on the market.

According to Cyd, “Cage free or Free-roaming birds are kept in large barns where they can move about freely and lay their eggs in dark, quiet nests. They are free to participate in their chicken behaviors and pecking orders. Free range chickens have all the benefits of cage free and free roaming chickens, but also have access to the outside.”

It also tells us that brown eggs and white eggs are nutritionally indistinguishable. White eggs come from white chickens, and brown eggs come from brown chickens.

Good to know!

Costco

The Husband and I sneaked into Costco this morning.  We didn’t want to buy anything, but it’s been years since either of us has been into a Costco, and it seemed like a fun thing to do.

Once inside, it was easy to be tempted.  Brita water filters for less than $4 apiece!  Slabs of fresh salmon for less than $6 a pound!  Laughing Cow cheeses for less than $1 apiece!  And samples at the end of ever aisle coaxing us to try General Tso’s Chicken Meal, raspberry chipoltle dip, dried mango slices, teryaki chicken bowls.  All this could be ours, we thought, for a mere $50/year membership fee.  Why, we’d easily save $50 in a year of shopping at Costco!

Plus, we were pleasantly surprised by the number of organic options.  No Whole Foods-like selection, to be sure, but good deals on diced organic canned tomatoes, organic pastas, three-packs of organic milk, local eggs, organic cheese, etc.

The problem is that I doubt very seriously if we would be able to limit ourselves to those organic options.  Most of the foods sold were processed beyond recognition.  On the whole, we don’t have a great track record of self-control when it comes to buying things, which is why we’ve been shopping at Wild Oats instead of trying to pick and choose the organic options at Safeway or Super Target.  Costco makes it all to easy to  rationalize impulse buys — in fact, it’s their business model.

So, not having a membership card or the $50 to put down for one, we managed to escape Costco without buying a single thing — though we did end up sampling quite a bit.

Corn in your Car

NPR did an interesting piece on ethanol this afternoon on “All Things Considered.”  They mentioned the fact that increasing demand for ethanol is driving up prices for corn, and the farmer they interviewed was concerned that the rising price of corn would impact his animal feed (pig and chicken) customers.

Here’s what I’m thinking: if the price of corn continues to rise because of the demand for ethanol, maybe it will encourage the pig and chicken (and cow) producers to seek out more economical ways of feeding their stocks, namely GRASS; a return to a more natural food chain.

Unfortunately, ethanol probably uses just as much petroleum to produce it as the industrial feed lots use to feed the chickens and pork and beef.  It will probably have just as much negative impact on the atmosphere as burning petroleum products.  Or, the government, in its infinite wisdom, will step in and subsidize the corn so that the pig and chicken and cow farmers can continue producing industrial meat even cheaper than they already are.

Still, a girl can dream.

~*~

I inquired with a small organic farm in Boulder about the CSA program they’re starting this year.  I’d love to be able to support them, especially because they already have a good reputation at the local farmer’s market in Boulder.  I’m supposed to get more info in a week or two.

Why NOT to Eat a Twinkie: Reason No. 32

From Twinkie, Deconstructed by Steve Ettlinger (via body+soul magazine):

Ethylene oxide [part of Polysorbate 60, a Twinkie ingredient] is an excellent but entirely unlikely food chemical, seeing as it is highly explosive (it was used in tunnel-busting shells during the Vietnam War), a known human carcinogen, and a respiratory, skin, and eye irritant.

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A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I’m apalled and astounded at how little I know about the food that’s been going into my body for the last 25 years.  Do you know what goes into a chicken McNugget? A plethora of ingredients, most of which are NOT chicken.

And do you know that they spray butane (or a form of butane, anyway) on the nuggets and/or box for freshness?  As little as a gram of this stuff can kill you, but they spray it on the faux chicken bits so they don’t go off.

I think E. coli is the least of our worries when eating at fast food restaurants.

The Grocery Game

So, over the weekend, the Husband and I made a trip to Wild Oats for our weekly groceries.  Our goal was two-fold.  First, as I’ve mentioned, we are operating on limited funds, so we’ve switched over to the envelope method of budgeting for things like groceries; we pulled out $300 at the beginning of the month for groceries, and we’ll only be using that cash to pay for our groceries.

Second, we wanted to shop at Wild Oats because, after both reading Pollan’s article, we were ready to take the plunge into buying more healthful, organic foods.

It was an interesting experience to say the least.  My husband had a piece of paper and a pen and kept a running tally of everything we put in the cart.  The hardest part was figuring out fractions of a pound in the produce section — next time we’re bringing a calculator!  (Oh, rusty math skills!  How you haunt me!)  We made it through the store and realized we’d forgotten the turkey for a stew we were planning to make — but we were already at our weekly budget.  It was a really interesting exercise, going through the cart and putting back some of the things we’d picked up that weren’t on the list, like ranch dressing, ready-made soup, sour cream.

It was also really challenging to only pick out foods that had only five ingredients or fewer.  I found an organic raspberry jam with only five ingredients, and though the ranch dressing (that we eventually put back) had more than five ingredients, they were mostly spices.  But that rule definitely ruled out a lot of things for us.

Overall, we spent just over $60 for a week’s worth of food for two people, and I would estimate that 90% of it was organic whole foods: fruits, vegetables, meat, and milk.

This is actually a food revolution for me in and of itself.  As soon as I start thinking about being frugal and keeping to a budget, my mind immediately turns to coupons and cheaper foodstuffs, but the whole idea of our new ethical eating is to eat better foods, and in this society, better means more expensive.   It seems counterintuitive that we should be trying this now, at face value.

On the other hand, how long can we afford to eat the way we have been eating?  Maybe the costs of that won’t catch up to us for ten or even twenty years, but they will catch up.

We managed just fine on our self-imposed budget, and we got much better quality for our money.  Better food, better health, better life.  On a budget!

You Say You Want A Revolution

I’ve undergone several food revolutions in my life — periods that completely changed the way I look at, think about, and consume food. Food Revolution Number One: Slim Fast.  When I moved into my first apartment in college, I realized that I finally had complete control over the food I ate.  I knew I needed to lose weight, and so I went with Slim Fast as my diet plan.  It worked — boy, did it work!  I lost 35 pounds in about six months between the Slim Fast and taking up swimming several times a week.  For the first time in my life, I was happy with the way I looked.

But I wasn’t happy with the way I was eating.  Those Slim Fast shakes were driving me up the wall.  I convinced myself that I was ready for real food.  I went off the shakes and, lo and behold, the weight started to come back.  Thankfully, I didn’t let it get too far before I underwent Food Revolution Number Two: Weight Watchers.

Weight Watchers appealed to me because they claim to be all about real food, and after six months of chocolate milk, real food was all I craved.  Nothing is off limits, they proclaim!  And to a certain extent, that’s true.  The ideas behind WW are sound: good nutrition, moderate exercise, and keeping track of what you eat.

But counting points got to be a major drag for me after a while.  I lost ten of the pounds I had gained back after the Slim Fast and hit a wall.  No matter how hard I tried, my weight never seemed to dip much lower, and when it did manage to go down, it came right back up again.  I was beating myself (emotionally) black and blue over each little point, each bite of food, analyzing and re-analyzing and then binging when I got too depressed to care any more.  I had hit a plateau.

And I’m still there — more or less.  The more is that I’ve finally realized that I won’t lose any more weight without a) seriously starving myself or b) seriously increasing my workouts.  The less is that I find myself feeling less and less negative about the woman I see in the mirror; sure, she has a few extra pounds, but she is so much fitter and healthier than she has ever been.  I’m ready to celebrate that victory instead of bemoaning those last 5-10 pounds.

So, I think it was kismet that Michael Pollan’s article came out when it did, because I think I am finally ready for Food Revolution Number Three: Ethical Eating.

I mean two things by Ethical Eating.  First, in the more traditional sense; just in reading the first chapter of Pollan’s book, I am appalled by the condition of the American industrial food chain, and I find I’m not willing to support it any more than I have to.  I’m ready to change the kinds of foods — and thereby the policies — I support by changing what I purchase.  I may not be ready to become a complete vegetarian, but I am ready to start insisting that the chickens and eggs I consume be vegetarian fed and free range, and that the beef I consume live out its life in an open pasture, rather than a crowded feed lot.

In the second sense, I am ready to treat my body more ethically.  It is shameful how little I know and understand about the food I’m putting into my body, the food I’m asking my Husband to consume.  Is it any wonder that our bodies are rebelling with weight gain and disease when we nourish ourselves with nothing but synthetic chemicals and artificial flavors?  I thought we were eating fairly healthfully — until I started looking at the labels on the foods in our cupboards.

For me, being healthy is an important part of living a whole life.  Treating my body with respect and care is a whole new challenge for me.  I only get one body, and if I intend for my best life to be a long one, I need to start taking better care post haste.

Next: The Grocery Game

Eat Food

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Sounds pretty easy, right? Wrong.

I’m still trying to digest all the information presented in Michael Pollan’s fascinating article Unhappy Meals from Sunday’s NY Times Magazine. The article is hard to summarize, because there’s so much pertinent information contained therein, but Pollan’s main recommendation is to stop fixating on nutrients and focus our diets more on whole foods.

But that’s a lot easier said than done, at least for me.

Some people are super conscious of their appearance, always influenced by the latest fashion magazines and celebrities; I’m hyper-conscious of food, influenced by lifestyle magazines and celebrity chefs. I’m always thinking about food, reading about it, worrying about it, or eating it.

When I started this obsession, it was to facilitate a much-needed weight loss. I still struggle with those 10-15 pounds that I never seem to be able to get rid of, but I am much healthier than I was at the start of my journey, and a lot of that is because of my dedication to the cult of food.

What to do, then, when Mr. Pollan tells me to stop worrying about getting enough protein with my carbs? To stop multiplying calories by grams of fiber? To toss my multi-vitamins?

Frankly, I would love to give up all these silly food affectations and obsessions that I’ve acquired over the years and return to a simpler lifestyle eating more healthful, whole foods. I tell myself this, and yet, I keep coming up against mental blocks when trying to implement it.  (Am I really supposed to go back to full-fat butter instead of margerine???  It contradicts everything I’ve ever known!)  Old habits die hard.
I’m not at a point in my life where I can go through my kitchen and throw away anything with more than five ingredients, but even thinking about some of Pollan’s assertions has me changing the way I’m thinking about food.

It may be a long row to hoe, getting to a place where I am truly living his mantra to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” but I think it’s an important step in my life. Maybe I’m past the point when I need to analyze every single calorie that goes into my mouth. Maybe I’m coming to a place where the whole should be more important than the sum of its parts; rather than allowing it to be my whole life, maybe it’s time to let food in general become just another part of the whole.

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My dear friend Cate is sending me Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which we both plan to read, so expect more musings to come.