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“In defense of food” is a best-selling book that makes an exceptionally strong case for eating real foods (as opposed to processed stuff), and for eating less of it, and largely (but not totally) avoiding meat.
Michael Pollan, the author, did his homework, and turns what might otherwise be dry and sterile material into easily-digested chapters put together in a conversational, readable effort.

The problem, though, is that he’s mostly preaching to the Choir. He makes a lot of noise about eating locally-grown food, consuming less meat, and increasing the amount of plant material in our diets. He’s got the “why” down to a science (literally), and his case is airtight; but when it comes to the “how”, he chokes. Check out this passage from an earlier essay (preceding the book):

Pay more, eat less. The American food system has for a century devoted its energies and policies to increasing quantity and reducing price, not to improving quality.

That’s where he lost me, as I’d rather not pay more, thank you very much. Sure, I get that Americans pay less for food than we did decades ago. And I get that a reasonable person could argue that the decline in the quality of food has a relationship to the reduced prices. But if he’s suggesting that the American public (or the World, for that matter) is going to voluntarily start spending more money just to get organic broccoli and apples, he’s nuts.

I would humbly suggest that we might benefit from solutions more realistic in nature. But that’s just my take on the matter. Comments?

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What would it look like to take a year–an entire year–and walk away from processed foods, supermarkets and the like, focusing instead on growing your own food, and eating (mostly) only what you can grow or farm?

Barbara Kingsolver did it. And the surprising part is that her family bought in to it, and went along for the ride. Her book: “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” is getting some pretty good reviews. But more importantly, it’s making the right noises about how we all should try harder to eat stuff that’s grown or raised locally. Check it out, if you get a chance.

We hate to say we told you so, but, well, you know. Check out this article.
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Confirming what we’ve suspected: the numbers on fast food salads. Well written. Give it a look.
And here’s another article, making many of the same noises.

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Because evidently, there is, like, huge demand among the Nation’s sports fans, for healthy eating alternatives. We don’t think that computes, though. One doesn’t attend a baseball game with the notion of filling up on veggies and arugula. Nope. It’s all about the hot dogs and beer. We remain purists.

We have a plan. A good one. Mostly, we think that it’s a good one because we’ve never really had a plan before, and so we don’t have much in the way of yardsticks with which we can measure. But we’ll cover that matter another time.

Our plan is simple: We are reducing the amount of meat that we consume. There you have it. That’s our plan. Read the rest of this entry »

In the mood for one of those “‘let’s cover everything we can think of” kind of articles? Good. Us too. That’s why we put a link to this one, an interesting article about, uh, salad dressing. Here is the link:
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There are two types of people in the world: those that really, really like shopping at Whole Foods, and those who hate those shoppers. We “get” the whole duality of this; we are both types, at the same time. Anyway, Columnist Mark Morford nails it, in this piece.