Opry Waste Land

I’ve stowed away on a business trip with my hubby to Nashville. Having a blast – cowboys who play guitars are my thing. When not frequenting the Honky Tonks on Broadway, I’ve been using the time to write. I’m finding a quiet hotel room divinely inspirational, especially when I didn’t pay for it. Getting some good stuff written and catching up on all the blogs I profess to follow.

It’s all good, but I must say that I’m horrified at the collective waste of the average American traveler. That would be me this morning. The picture posted shows our breakfast table. By-passing the fancy dining room (the bill might give away my stowaway status on the T&E report), we opted for breakfast at the hotel coffee bar. I did carry in my own tea made in the room (with no option other than a paper cup because my travel mug is too big for the one cup machine), but there was no way around the rest of the plastic and paper waste if we wanted to eat.

We each ordered a little egg mcmuffin-like sandwich. Both came thoroughly over-microwaved in their own plastic encasement that could have held six mcmuffins rather than just the weenie one. We also ordered some fresh fruit to share. It came with a huge plastic coffin too. Add to that the plastic water bottle for the water my hubby ordered, the paper napkins, and then the biggest waste of all – a thick cardboard tray to carry our delicacies the twenty feet or so to our table.

All that crazy waste and I’m just one unofficial resident at the hotel. The other seven thousand or so (we’re staying at Gaylord Opryland – it is HUGE), certainly created plenty of waste themselves. And beyond that number are all the other hotels in Nashville and beyond. Why are we allowed to do this? When the majority of the earth’s population struggle to put food on the table, we throw away what must be hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of containers, plastic utensils, paper cups, and napkins just for breakfast! The magnitude of this waste overwhelms me this morning. 

Look at Those Bubbles Hon!

There’s beer brewing in my mud room. You can hear the occasional “burp” and just in case you don’t, my husband will drag you in there to witness the bubbles escaping the tube coming from the giant glass container of murky brown liquid sitting on the work table next to the sink. This is his first batch in 12 years. That’s the same age as our daughter, whose creation halted his brewing efforts because the smell of fermenting hops made my pregnant self ill.

As the familiar scent wafted through our kitchen on Saturday, I had only a few uncomfortable moments. I had to take my lunch elsewhere. I’m happy to see him back at his craft and we’ve had more than a few chuckles reading through his notes from his brewing past. “Remember the disaster batch with the old bay?”

Coincidentally, I was also fermenting something new this week. I made sour dough starter. It was so easy I have to wonder what has kept me from the task for so long. I utilized my bread maker, but I’m not sure it’s necessary. The starter is made of water, flour, sugar and yeast. It sat on my counter for 7 days under a swath of plastic with some holes punched in it, not unlike the firefly containers of summer. Being a lazy cook, I hadn’t read the entire directions, and didn’t realize until day 5 that I was supposed to stir the concoction 2-3 times a day. Guess it isn’t critical because when I finally baked the sour dough bread on Sunday it was a HUGE HIT. Everyone loved it. No more paying $5 for a loaf at the store. I’ve got a new batch of starter going on the counter as I write this.

All this fermenting got me to thinking – what else is fermented and is it good for your health? Turns out we already eat lots of fermented stuff (pretty much every civilization depended on it for survival). I realize I ferment my yogurt each week when it sits on the counter for 24 hours in the yogurt maker at so low a temperature the stink bugs aren’t afraid to crawl over the cover (yes – they’re still here!). And the cow we buy is “dry-aged” which is a nice way of saying it hangs around in an unrefrigerated barn for 3 weeks before the butcher cuts off all the nasty fuzz that grows on it, and slices it up for us. Obviously wine is fermented, and I definitely appreciate that. Bread, coffee, and chocolate are also fermented products. What’s not to love?

Fermentation is the breakdown of carbohydrates and proteins by microorganisms such as bacteria, yeasts, and mold creating lactic acid (and alcohol in some cases). It may sound nasty, but it’s actually great for your health. Eating fermented food aids in digestion by promoting growth of friendly intestinal bacteria. It also supports immune function and introduces extra vitamins. “Live food” (or today’s buzzword, probiotics) are also believed to protect against and fight certain types of cancers. There is plenty of research that indicates our health truly benefits from fermented foods, possibly some of the increase in illnesses in the past 50 years are due to the fact that so few of us eat fermented foods anymore.

There was a time when we all ate plenty of fermented food, but these days not so much. Fermentation is more an art than a science and that doesn’t play well in mass production. Hence, most of our modern products that started out being fermented are highly processed using high-heat pasteurization which kills the good bacteria along with the bad. Vinegar and sugar are added in such high quantities that they also defeat the fermentation process.

In turning to the internet I read about lots of “crazy” people who are seriously in to fermented food (road-kill, anyone?). There were also quite a few scholarly articles agreeing that eating probiotics or “live” food (food that has been fermented) is good for your health.

Probiotics are all the rage, but they are nothing new. They are simply the result of fermentation. Sauerkraut, relishes, yogurts, and cheeses made traditionally are packed with probiotics naturally. But the probiotic yogurt you see in the grocery store is so loaded with sugar, you might want to call it probiotic pudding with an emphasis on pudding.

I won’t tell you not to eat store-bought probiotics, after all, a little bacteria is better than none at all. But I will tell you to save your money and ferment something yourself. Fermentation is probably the least labor intensive cooking method around. I’m doing it right now as I write. Stop by and see it for yourself. “Wow…look at those bubbles, Hon!”

Food For Thought (and Health)

What to Eat? This is not only a question every person asks themselves every day, it’s also the title of a wonderful book I’ve been reading. It was a gift from my oldest son. He of the inquisitive mind must have been intrigued by the questions that pepper the cover. Questions like,

“Is organic always more nutritious? How fair is fair trade coffee? Farmed fish or wild fish? White, whole wheat, or multigrain? Are there pesticides on that apple? Are vitamin supplements safe?”

Or maybe he was just responding to his father’s nudge, “Your mom would really like that book,” when they were out Christmas shopping on a crowded afternoon and he was in a hurry to get home to his friends.

Either way, love the book. It asks all the questions I ask and some I never thought to ask. Marion Nestle is a nutrition professor, and author of two other books (soon to grace my shelves or my kindle) – Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health and Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism.

In her book, What to Eat, Marion addresses the things that plagued the concerned parent when she or he enters a grocery store. How do you sort through all the confusing messages and buy what’s best for your family and your health? The book literally takes a tour of the grocery store expounding on every aisle with helpful, clear information.

I want to share some excellent ideas I found in the introduction. All of us struggle with the immense amount of information and the almost daily new studies that tell us what we should and shouldn’t eat to avoid health issues like cancer and heart disease, have more energy, live longer, and maintain a healthy weight. Although I’m certain there are a few factors out of our control (heredity and all the stuff we already ate that we shouldn’t have before we knew better), Marion’s simple directions make sense -

Eat less, move more, eat lots of fruits & vegetables, and go easy on the junk food.

This is a mantra we can all embrace. If we keep it in mind as we make our food and activity choices each day we can feel we’ve done all we should. Sure, the details like organic, fair-trade, GMO, locally grown, sustainably-harvested will play in to your choices, but bottom line start by eating right before you stress the rest.

Another point Marion makes in the introduction is that it’s very easy to be overcome by the marketing of food. Companies, grocery stores, and even our own government encourage us to eat things that are not good for us. As Marion points out,

“The produce industry does not advertise fruits and vegetables much because its profit margins are low and its constituents are fragmented and competitive (broccoli growers versus carrot farmers, etc.). …the government does not subsidize fruit and vegetable production the way it supports corn, soybeans, sugarcane, and sugar beets….the lack of profit means that less effort goes into making sure these foods are as fresh, tasty, well prepared, and easy to use as they might be.”

I want to share one last powerful point Marion makes. It’s been darting around my mind ever since I read it. She asks the reader to consider this question:

“What industry or professional organization might benefit if you ate more healthfully?”

Like Marion, I struggle to come up with even one. I want to say the government, because then it wouldn’t have to spend nearly as much on medicare and Medicaid. But that’s a stretch, huh? In my fantasy world I would also say the government because it wants what’s best for the people. But I still reside in the real world.

Here are the industries she lists that benefit from all the confusion and bad decisions we make about nutrition and health: food, restaurant, fast-food, diet, health club, drug, and health care industries.

Food for thought. Be aware of the motivation behind the claims. And remember: eat less, move more, eat lots of fruits & veggies, and go easy on the junk food. Words to live by. Literally.

What's For Dinner?

What’s for dinner tonight? Are you sick of that question? I certainly am. I believe it might be the most challenging question for any parent. Coming up with healthy dinners seven days a week, 52 weeks a year can make a person nuts. Or maybe it just makes me nuts.

My repertoire is fairly extensive. Even so, I’ve grown tired of it. So this year I’ve challenged myself to expand it. Instead of making one of my tried and true meals, or slapping together something from what’s lurking in my pantry and then being pleasantly surprised (or disappointed) in the result, this year I’m going to try at least 100 new recipes.

100 seems daunting until you break it down to 2 new recipes a week. I’m just finishing my fourth week of the new year and have already nailed down 10 recipes, so I’m ahead of the game. Would you like to join me in the challenge? How about just 50 new recipes?

My shelves groan with the weight of cookbooks I just had to have (or someone just had to give me!). My desk is scattered with recipes torn from magazines, and the cubby in my kitchen is jammed with index cards, papers, and pamphlets full of recipes. I have the best intentions, but the untold potential was beginning to weigh on me. So I collected as many as I could in a 3-ring binder and piled the dog-eared books on the corner of my counter. I’m ready. I can do this.

So far, we’ve all been enjoying the new venture. The Chia Pancakes made the blog a few weeks ago, and were requested a second time (heavens no!) this past weekend. The Balsamic-Roasted Sweet Potatoes resulted in zero leftovers. The grapefruit cake was a monster hit. But my favorite is the Pear-Celery salad. I’ve made a batch each week since I discovered it. I will confess to altering the original recipe quite a bit, but it’s still delicious and super healthy, so it’ll do.

Eating healthy doesn’t have to be boring. My kids are in on my challenge. My oldest son just started a course on Food Management at the high school, which I’m certain will provide endless fodder for our dinner table (and this blog!). I’m thrilled at the idea of someone else teaching him his way around a kitchen. Maybe he’ll realize I’m not the crazy loon he imagines me to be. As he’s gotten older, he’s begun trying more of my creations. I can't wait to try his!

I’m planning on adding a current recipe challenge count on the blog front page to keep myself accountable, but I’d love for you to join me. If you need some recipe ideas, I’ll pass one along right now –

Winter Celery-Pear Salad

2 cups chopped celery

1 cup chopped pear

¼ cup crumbled blue cheese

¼ cup walnut pieces

1 Tablespoon dressing

Cara’s “house” dressing:

½ cup roasted garlic grapeseed oil (or good canola or grapeseed oil, plus 1 t finely minced garlic)

½ cup good vinegar (this week it’s half balsamic fig vinegar and half white wine balsamic vinegar)

¼ t salt

½ t pepper

Happy cooking!

It's Not What You Eat, But What You Eat Ate!

Meat eating has come under scrutiny at our household of late. Partly due to my daughter’s desire to be a vegetarian (which might work out if she could bring herself to eat beans and stop eating steak), and partly because my mother-in-law is visiting. Although, my MIL is just about the most flexible and reasonable vegetarian I know, it has created a bit of a puzzle at dinner time. She’s fine with our carnivorous habits and is happy to find herself something to eat when we indulge, but I like to include everyone at our table so I seek out meals that work for all of us. I can usually come up with a week’s worth, but this visit she’s gracing us with her presence for two weeks so it’s requiring a little extra thinking.

I asked her about her reasons for her long-time vegetarianism and her reasons are complex and deep-rooted. (Unlike my daughter who I think is just looking for an excuse not to eat what I’m serving!) This conversation led me to think about why I eat meat, beyond the fact that I like the taste of it. Michael Pollan’s book Omnivore’s Dilemma gives some excellent data to explain why most people like the taste of meat. We’re hard-wired to eat meat. And not just any meat. Grass fed meat.

He goes further to challenge the fish vs meat debate by saying it’s not just what you eat but what you eat ate. Think about that one. A grass fed cow is better for you than a farm-raised salmon. At least in terms of omega 3’s and 6’s and many of the vital nutrients you find in grass fed meats like beta-carotene and CLA. The body of research verifying the higher nutrient value of grass-fed meats (and dairy products) versus grain-fed grows all the time. But you don’t need a microscope and a fancy degree to know that the food that went in to the cow you are eating for dinner defines the nutrient value of what you are eating. Common sense can tell you that.

Animals have been eating grass since there were grass and animals. It’s only been in the last hundred years or so that we’ve started feeding cows, pigs, chickens, and other meat animals exclusively on grain and corn. In fact, cows have been selectively bred to survive on corn, something they are not biologically engineered to digest. (Hence the incredible amounts of gas spewed forth from cows living in feedlots.) Feeding corn and grain to fish is even more farfetched. Yet, that is the brilliant idea for cheaply growing fish on farms.

Pollan’s argument for why this food is better for us goes back to the time when we were hunter-gatherers. Our bodies are designed to eat the food of wild animals and plants. Grass-fed animals best mimic those meats. Again, common sense.

So my desire to eat meat isn’t so much the result of my upbringing, although I’ll allow that it plays in to it. Especially since I still can’t stomach fish or beans, two foods I forced down so that I could leave the table when I was young. My body is hard-wired to eat meat. Guess that means my ancestors come from a hunting clan. Maybe that means my mother-in-law’s ancestors are from a clan that survived more on gathering. Who’s to say?

Listening to our bodies is a habit that has fallen by the way-side for most of us. I’ve only recently begun to respond to the foods my body craves. Probably because for many years I craved the foods the media had taught me to crave. Just the other night while watching the NFL play-offs my kids learned about another food they should crave. McDonalds created a new idea with their commercial about McMuffins. “What’s a McMuffin?” asked my nine-year-old after watching scene after scene of happy people comparing McMuffins to the best kind of apartment, boyfriend, automobiles, etc.

If you ask someone what their favorite food is, they don’t generally say, “grass-fed beef”. More often you hear, “chocolate,” or “pizza”. But is that really what our bodies want? I think if we could truly listen to our own bodies, we might hear something different. My daughter has been eating lots of nuts lately. While I’m thrilled at her healthy choice, I do think it’s her body telling her what she needs. Lacking any discernable form of protein beyond the occasional egg, her body demanded something of substance. Since her mind was saying “I’m a vegetarian,” and her stubbornness was saying “I hate beans,” nuts were the perfect fill in.

Trusting our bodies to tell us we need is a novel concept, but one worth thinking about. As is considering what you eat ate. Grass fed meat and dairy products may cost more than traditional products, but the nutritional disparity is even greater. Beyond that, we need to vote with our pocketbooks and support farmers who are raising their animals on grass instead of feedlots. Your health and your children’s health are worth a few more bucks per pound, don’t ya think? 

Selling Out Again

“I’m buying today!” announced my youngest son when he stumbled down the stairs for breakfast. Buying, as in buying that salt-laden, sugar-laden, fat-laden, excuse-for-food school lunch. No veggies to be seen. Oh, excuse me, I forgot! There will be French fries – that counts doesn’t it? According to our Congress, who take their marching orders from the processed food industry’s powerful lobbyists, pizza sauce counts too. Sorry, climbing on my soap box much too early today, but it can’t be helped. 

I’ve been stewing on this news since last November when the USDA backed down from their assertion that school lunches contain vegetables. Actually they didn’t back down so much as sell out by reclassifying French fries and pizza sauce as “vegetables” much the same way they declared ketchup a vegetable during the Reagan years. It garnered a few comments from sarcastic columnists and cartoonists, but for the most part, everyone sort of chuckled and let it drop. That’s the problem with this country! It seems we really don’t care. Or maybe we care, but we’re just too busy to do anything about it. Or we don’t know how to do anything about it. Or we think nothing we do will change anything.

That’s what the food manufacturers and lobbyists who fought Congress on the USDA standards count on. How dare we insist that food for our children be healthy?? School meals are subsidized by the federal government, so the government has the final say on what is or isn’t on your child’s lunch tray. This means the government has the power to make the options healthier. Only they don’t. Because they are beholden to multi-million dollar businesses that fund their campaigns. And we aren't nearly as vocal.

The schools, for their part, don’t put up much of a fight. How can they? Bottom line: It costs much more to feed children healthy food. Their budgets are beyond tight as it is. When they are making decisions between baby lettuce and classroom size, they make the only choice there is. Why do we put them in this position?

And when you really get down to it, what kids will eat those vegetables anyway? No actual kid will enjoy soggy, salt-laden green beans or stinky lima beans or canned asparagus. I don't actually know what veggies the kids are turning their noses up these days, but those are the ones I threw out in my own school years. Odds are the menu hasn't changed all that much. Why is that? I'm sure the congressional lunchroom serves up some very nice healthy food. In fact, I know the government is capable of offering healthy food because my husband and sons had a nice, reasonably priced, somewhat nutritious (at least better than the average school cafeteria) lunch at the Supreme Court Building while touring DC.

How is it that our congress can lament the cost of childhood obesity and yet, do nothing to fight it? The first line of defense is the cost of healthy food. It’s within their power to subsidize broccoli instead of corn, spinach instead of soybeans. If our government really wanted to change the way our nation eats, they could do it. They already did it once. That’s how we got in this predicament in the first place.

Back in the 70’s, in the name of feeding our country cheaply, the government convinced farmers to forego diversified crops and plant only corn and soybeans. In the end, instead of meeting a need, we have a surplus. So what do you do with a surplus? You find ways to use it. Enter High FructoseCorn Syrup. The rest is history. And we all know this. So does the government. So why does it continue? That’s my question.

Is it because they don’t care? Is it because they’re too busy doing other things? They don’t know how to fix this? Is it because they are powerless to make this change (and lose all those campaign contributions)?

I have an idea. I think they do nothing about it because they think it’s too hard. It would be incredibly difficult to re-train farmers, re-educate the general public, and re-tool the food industry. And that would probably cost a little money. Yes it would. But it’s not impossible.

It’s human nature to avoid the hard stuff. It’s the same reason my kids don’t vacuum anywhere but the center of their rooms. It’s too hard to deal with the rest of the mess. It’s the same reason we don’t demand that our government enable our schools to feed our kids healthy food. It would take a lot of work to make that happen.

Here’s my great fear – we’re going to let our aversion to hard work and difficult tasks turn us in to selfish people. We need to do something. But where do we begin?  We can start by asking questions – of our school boards, of our elected representatives, of the USDA. We can contact organizations that are already actively campaigning for change, like Food Democracy Now , Slow Food USA, Healthy School Lunches, and The Lunch Box. There are plenty of other organizations out there too who need your support to bring change.

Here’s some inspiration to make you reach for the phone or the keyboard from two of my favorite guys -

“Start by doing what's necessary, then what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” 

–St. Francis of Assisi

Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.
Martin Luther King, Jr.