Do this right as you are thinking of it (!) If you keep a grocery shopping list, put a note to get double of one of your favorite items and give the second to a food bank. If you don't use a shopping list, especially you young people who don't do a regular housekeeping type shop, put a reminder on your mobile device, or hand written in your wallet with your money or your charge card, to remind yourself to buy double of what you are buying and give the second to a local food bank or pantry.
Here's what you need to remember: it's a favorite thing, a "special" thing for the holidays, but still a routine usable item. Too many people think of just buying canned goods like beans and soup for pantries. Those are great and don't stop doing them, but raise it up a notch recognizing the poor and disadvantaged like and miss the same items you do. The example I most use is coffee. Instead of a can of beans think how much a can of coffee would bring joy and help a poor family's budget (and watch for the sales, Wal Mart recently had a great price for large coffee and if I'd had money I'd have bought some for pantries). Check with your local pantry if you want to be sure of what they need (everything) and if they can take refrigerated items too but remember they tend to "ask down" also, afraid to ask for too many more costly or "frivolous" items.
Nothing is frivolous during Christmas and Hanukkah. For example, buy bagged candy that you like and get a second one for the pantry, cuz remember that kids in poor families or those who have lost their jobs etc will still love candy for the holidays that their parents can give them via these pantries.
This is a great way to keep pantries better stocked year around, if every time a person shops they buy two of one of their own items. But my focus is really on the holidays now where as those with funds are able to buy nice things for themselves, buy a second one of something you love and give it to a pantry or food bank. Start this week because this is the crunch time as pantries have to build up and dispense supplies throughout the month.
Showing posts with label Food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Food. Show all posts
Monday, November 30, 2009
Monday, January 19, 2009
Tea
I love to tea, to drink, not to read about. That sounds obvious but it is not. I'm into the beverage, not the tea party magazines or the reading about the health benefits, if you know what I mean. Tea literature is too moon calf in tone, unlike coffee literature which is actually quite interesting. People who write about tea, at least modern people, are too ridiculously self declared "zen." That bores me. People who write about growing, harvesting and roasting coffee are realistic, that interests me.
I was neither a coffee nor a tea drinker until college, mostly because I was raised as many children of that time to stick with milk (as did many adults). The first tea I drank regularly was Constant Comment and Red Zinger, since that's what a friend introduced me to in college. Plantation Mint is, however, probably my longest favorite, drank from college until present time.
I don't like sugar, lemon or, heaven forbid, milk in my tea. That is because I have a palate for the tea flavor itself, not the enhancing or masking additives. Living in the South, though, I will drink sweet tea but view it as a soda pop substitute rather than a proper tea.
My favorite teas include Earl Grey, Oolong Souchong, Lapsang Souchong (once in a while as it is quite smoky and intense), Jasmine, English Breakfast, Darjeeling, Lipton, and the more traditional Green teas.
I like fruit flavored teas and fruit infusions but only once in a while. Once people know that I drink it once in a while they flood me with gifts of that type of tea when I'd rather have a regular tea. I used to grow my own lemon balm when I had a home and garden and make tea from it. I tell everyone who feels they are coming down with a cold to make and drink an entire pot of hot Peppermint tea and it will not only relieve symptoms but often curtail the length of one's illness.
I rarely bother to boil water or even heat my tea. I put a bag in a glass of distilled water and let it seep until ready.
I am a fan of the Japanese tea ceremony as a ritual to promote good will, friendship, and to make amends: the actual ceremony, not reading about it.
I was neither a coffee nor a tea drinker until college, mostly because I was raised as many children of that time to stick with milk (as did many adults). The first tea I drank regularly was Constant Comment and Red Zinger, since that's what a friend introduced me to in college. Plantation Mint is, however, probably my longest favorite, drank from college until present time.
I don't like sugar, lemon or, heaven forbid, milk in my tea. That is because I have a palate for the tea flavor itself, not the enhancing or masking additives. Living in the South, though, I will drink sweet tea but view it as a soda pop substitute rather than a proper tea.
My favorite teas include Earl Grey, Oolong Souchong, Lapsang Souchong (once in a while as it is quite smoky and intense), Jasmine, English Breakfast, Darjeeling, Lipton, and the more traditional Green teas.
I like fruit flavored teas and fruit infusions but only once in a while. Once people know that I drink it once in a while they flood me with gifts of that type of tea when I'd rather have a regular tea. I used to grow my own lemon balm when I had a home and garden and make tea from it. I tell everyone who feels they are coming down with a cold to make and drink an entire pot of hot Peppermint tea and it will not only relieve symptoms but often curtail the length of one's illness.
I rarely bother to boil water or even heat my tea. I put a bag in a glass of distilled water and let it seep until ready.
I am a fan of the Japanese tea ceremony as a ritual to promote good will, friendship, and to make amends: the actual ceremony, not reading about it.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Capitalism/financial crisis trade/purity issue
I do not understand why "free market" advocates constantly push for more trade without saying one word about how to not only maintain but increase testing and guarantee of any imported product, especially food, medicine and toys, safety and quality.
Sorry to be blunt, but someone has to be. Just as ethics have degraded in the USA, foreign developing countries have companies that often never had ethics in the first place. The obvious example is what has happened in China about the melamine in milk, but the purpose of this post is to explain to you that this has been a trusting and naive generation in the USA, used to putting anything in your mouth or your children's without giving a thought to deliberate poisoners on the other end. Read this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7750464.stm
snip
Nigeria's food and drug agency says that 25 children aged between three months and four years have died after taking a contaminated teething syrup.
The National Agency for Food, Drug Administration and Control said it had shut down the Lagos-based manufacturer, Barewa Pharmaceuticals.
It said the syrup, called My Pikin, had been tainted with diethylene glycol.
The substance, used in engine coolant and anti-freeze, triggered kidney failure in the children, it said.
The children died at three hospitals in Lagos, Ibadan and Zaria.
At least 10 other children are reported to have been brought to hospital.
The NAFDAC said symptoms among the children who had taken the syrup included diarrhoea, vomiting, fever and convulsions, and that they had not been able to pass urine for several days.
The agency said it had first received reports of possible contamination on 19 November and had begun to confiscate the syrup two days later.
"NAFDAC officers nationwide have been directed to mop up all batches of the offending drug from circulation," the agency's head, Dora Akunyili, was quoted as saying.
She also appealed to mothers to stop using the medicine on their children.
Now here is my point. Both the left and the right in economic and trade policy have been asleep at the wheel. The left thinks it is all enlightened and groovy to stimulate the economies of poor countries by importing their goods to the USA. The right thinks this is the "competitive free market at its best," since of course goods from developing countries are cheap. But look, here is another example where obviously some people don't mind putting a deadly chemical in baby teething formula for their own country's children!
How does this stuff get in these products? Greed is the reason whether an accidental contamination or deliberate. If it is an accident that means they cut corners on cleanliness and purity in the factory. If it is deliberate then they are substituting industrial chemicals for the more costly active food or medical ingredients. Either way the reason is to be cheap and thus greedy.
So I do not understand why there are less resources in the United States who work full time at not only testing all products before they enter but are part of the initial trade negotiation process. "If I were in charge" I would never sign a trade agreement without US inspectors not only doing initial inspections of all likely import products (to gain background information on how the goods that might enter the USA are being made, and create a database in advance) but also there should be an incremental addition to the FDA, customs and other inspecting organizations at the time any new trade agreement is signed. They should be "specialists," then, for the products that the new trade agreement proposes to allow into the country.
This is part of our horrible financial and economic meltdown, just as much as the mortgage problem, because it reflects the breakdown of standards of quality and due diligence on behalf of the American public.
Somehow American governments, agencies, and corporations, pushed by both the left and the right, think that just because the USA has a friendly relationship with a country, and wishes to do good by opening trade, that automatically like magic dust that means that all of the product suppliers and manufacturers in that country are well educated and ethical folks, and that their product can be swapped as "just as good but cheaper" as anything that had been previously grown or made in the USA. That is one of the most incredibly naive views of both greed and "culture" that I've seen in the past several decades. Our parents and grandparents used to be suspicious of imported aka "foreign" goods for a reason, not because they are prejudiced dolts, but many of them know that things are not too nice and clean, and anything will be done for a buck, in many of these places. But that knowledge has been dismissed as being old fuddy duddies who are prejudiced. Anyone with a lick of common sense and world experience, though, knows that "any thing goes" in most of the developing country marketplaces, including deliberately putting poisonous industrial chemicals in products for babies.
WISE UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I would not sign a single trade agreement, no matter how "nice" the country or how "worthy" the desire for mutual benefit and trade without some sort of advance product vetting by legitimate and beefed up USA agencies. A database should be established in advance so that if any problem does arise, Washington is not scratching their arses wondering "where did those tomatos or chiles come from?" Sheesh.
Sorry to be blunt, but someone has to be. Just as ethics have degraded in the USA, foreign developing countries have companies that often never had ethics in the first place. The obvious example is what has happened in China about the melamine in milk, but the purpose of this post is to explain to you that this has been a trusting and naive generation in the USA, used to putting anything in your mouth or your children's without giving a thought to deliberate poisoners on the other end. Read this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7750464.stm
snip
Nigeria's food and drug agency says that 25 children aged between three months and four years have died after taking a contaminated teething syrup.
The National Agency for Food, Drug Administration and Control said it had shut down the Lagos-based manufacturer, Barewa Pharmaceuticals.
It said the syrup, called My Pikin, had been tainted with diethylene glycol.
The substance, used in engine coolant and anti-freeze, triggered kidney failure in the children, it said.
The children died at three hospitals in Lagos, Ibadan and Zaria.
At least 10 other children are reported to have been brought to hospital.
The NAFDAC said symptoms among the children who had taken the syrup included diarrhoea, vomiting, fever and convulsions, and that they had not been able to pass urine for several days.
The agency said it had first received reports of possible contamination on 19 November and had begun to confiscate the syrup two days later.
"NAFDAC officers nationwide have been directed to mop up all batches of the offending drug from circulation," the agency's head, Dora Akunyili, was quoted as saying.
She also appealed to mothers to stop using the medicine on their children.
Now here is my point. Both the left and the right in economic and trade policy have been asleep at the wheel. The left thinks it is all enlightened and groovy to stimulate the economies of poor countries by importing their goods to the USA. The right thinks this is the "competitive free market at its best," since of course goods from developing countries are cheap. But look, here is another example where obviously some people don't mind putting a deadly chemical in baby teething formula for their own country's children!
How does this stuff get in these products? Greed is the reason whether an accidental contamination or deliberate. If it is an accident that means they cut corners on cleanliness and purity in the factory. If it is deliberate then they are substituting industrial chemicals for the more costly active food or medical ingredients. Either way the reason is to be cheap and thus greedy.
So I do not understand why there are less resources in the United States who work full time at not only testing all products before they enter but are part of the initial trade negotiation process. "If I were in charge" I would never sign a trade agreement without US inspectors not only doing initial inspections of all likely import products (to gain background information on how the goods that might enter the USA are being made, and create a database in advance) but also there should be an incremental addition to the FDA, customs and other inspecting organizations at the time any new trade agreement is signed. They should be "specialists," then, for the products that the new trade agreement proposes to allow into the country.
This is part of our horrible financial and economic meltdown, just as much as the mortgage problem, because it reflects the breakdown of standards of quality and due diligence on behalf of the American public.
Somehow American governments, agencies, and corporations, pushed by both the left and the right, think that just because the USA has a friendly relationship with a country, and wishes to do good by opening trade, that automatically like magic dust that means that all of the product suppliers and manufacturers in that country are well educated and ethical folks, and that their product can be swapped as "just as good but cheaper" as anything that had been previously grown or made in the USA. That is one of the most incredibly naive views of both greed and "culture" that I've seen in the past several decades. Our parents and grandparents used to be suspicious of imported aka "foreign" goods for a reason, not because they are prejudiced dolts, but many of them know that things are not too nice and clean, and anything will be done for a buck, in many of these places. But that knowledge has been dismissed as being old fuddy duddies who are prejudiced. Anyone with a lick of common sense and world experience, though, knows that "any thing goes" in most of the developing country marketplaces, including deliberately putting poisonous industrial chemicals in products for babies.
WISE UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I would not sign a single trade agreement, no matter how "nice" the country or how "worthy" the desire for mutual benefit and trade without some sort of advance product vetting by legitimate and beefed up USA agencies. A database should be established in advance so that if any problem does arise, Washington is not scratching their arses wondering "where did those tomatos or chiles come from?" Sheesh.
Saturday, August 9, 2008
More about food and nutrition "back then"
I think it helps young people when I explain how average life was fifty years ago, because it gives them more perspective and context about societal and health issues that you face today. So here is some more rambling thoughts about the topic of food. I'm going to describe small town perspectives (in contrast to farm life where food was at least partially self supplied).
There were no large box supermarkets in the 1950's at all. Each town or village tended to have a grocer. In the 1960's you started to see the beginning of the local grocer close down and the box supermarket open (we were excited by a Loblaws that opened, and that's where we shopped in the 1960's). But in the 1950's you had home delivery of milk (yes, the milk truck with the milk bottles brought early morning to your door and placed in your metal milk box) and the small local grocer.
Everyone drank milk, including tough grown men. Just read the Nero Wolfe mysteries and you'll see that the private detective Archie routinely orders milk in restaurants and buys it when shopping for him and Wolfe. Ordering a soda such as Coca Cola when eating out was unheard of, because having a soda was usually the objective of going out with friends or on a date. When families ate out, or when adults had work time lunch or dinner, they all drank milk. That's one reason so many people have wisdom teeth when previous generations did not, because milk being affordable and common was something that our ancestors did not have, and lacking milk inhibited growth of bone and muscle. So the number one item that virtually everyone had at every meal was a glass of milk.
Fruit juice was expensive so that is the reason that antique and vintage "juice glasses" are so small. In a way that was a good thing because as I've explained in other posts, there's a lot of calories in juice and people used to eat the fruit itself, not have a concentrated extract in the form of juice. Orange juice became common in the morning because eating a whole orange was slower work. But it was very common for kids to get a small orange juice in the morning and a whole orange as an after school snack, or in your lunch bag. Adults often opted for tomato juice or prune juice (there was not the sniggering that there is about prune juice today). Most adults during the 1950's were only one generation away from the farm. Potty humor just wasn't their thing. They had dietary habits that had formed by knowing what was healthy and what was available.
Kid's snacks were mostly fruit. A kid got an apple or a banana, plum, bowl of berries or small box of raisins as their snack and they loved it. It was not at all hard to get kids to eat healthy fruit. It was more seasonal than today (before foods were transported cross country) and so when fresh fruit seasons diminished families started using canned fruits, especially canned peaches, pears and the ubiquitous "fruit cocktails."
Speaking of kid's snacks, having a candy bar was very rare. What usually happened is that kids would stop at the small grocery walking home from school and buy one candy type of treat out of one's allowance. Sometimes this would be a candy bar, but usually it was more of a candy type of treat (like hard candy or soft candy), bubblegum or something silly and fun, like licorice or edible wax candy. As I got older and realized that I easily gain weight, I switched all on my own from buying candy after school to buying a fruit, like a plum (it took a little doing to convince the grocer so sell me one plum!) So I lost childhood "chubby" weight by switching to fruit from candy when I went to the store after school with my friends (yeah, I had friends).
Potato chips existed but they were not snack food. I know that sounds strange so that's why it's helpful for you to hear about "how it was." Potato chips were viewed as a "side dish" for summer or party food. For example, if a family was having hot dogs or hamburgers, potato chips were viewed as one of the side dishes rather than a snack food that was around the house all the time to nosh on. That's another HUGE difference between now and then.
Likewise cheese was not really a regular part of meals except in the form of cottage cheese. Many people (again, including adult men) regularly ate cottage cheese. It was not viewed as the "dieters food" until much later. So between being regular milk drinkers and eating cottage cheese (yogurt did not exist at all), people had a very good dairy intake.
People had pretty much stopped eating home made bread and had gone to store bought loafs, but those loafs often came from local factories. For example, as a child we took a field trip to the factory nearby where they made "Wonder bread" loafs. We each received a loaf to take home! It smelled so great in there.
People ate a lot of bread, toast in the morning, sandwiches at lunch, and often a slice of bread as a side to dinner. The average person did not have "dinner rolls" at home, which were viewed as upper class party food. They used the same bread they had all day, having a slice as a side to their dinner. So people LOVED having dinner rolls with pats of butter served to them at diners. No one except those with "extra money to spend" bought hot dog buns; we all used slices of regular bread.
I remember frozen foods as they were gradually introduced. I know, it is strange to imagine, but frozen foods were very rare in the 1950's. First of all, they were more expensive than canned foods or home made. In my town I remember that my friends who were lower class like me but had a bit more money might have a few frozen foods on their weekly shopping lists, but people all thought they were throwing away their money for what they could get cheaper as fresh or canned. When Sara Lee frozen desserts came out they were viewed as treats for "those with extra money to spend." My mom would roll her eyes whenever we walked past the frozen food aisle and she saw anyone in there (that was in the 1950's and trust me, she's living off of frozen foods now, ha). But back then people had to shop thrifty, and they always opted for fresh if possible.
I remember many years of 39 cents a pound chicken. 'Nuf said!
The standard expectation at dinner was meat and potatoes. And trust me, that was not boring. Everyone loved home made mashed potatoes and men relied on the protein of meat because many worked in blue collar jobs. So the typical household would cycle through "types of meat" in a typical week, such as several types of beef cut prepared different ways, pork chops, hot dogs or kielbasa, fish on Fridays with either boiled potatoes or mashed. There was no real desire for "ethnic" food variety. We all got to taste good home cooked ethnic food at Polish or Italian neighbors, friends or relatives. So an Italian household, for example, would not have as much of the meat and potato regime as others, but they did so more than one might expect. Ethnic cooking was viewed again, as I've mentioned before, as more of treat food than regular food. For example, my mother was a German cook but we rarely had German food. Ethnic food was made more for family celebrations, as treat food or as mainstreamed standard dishes.
Relish dishes of raw carrots, celery and olives were common and both adults and kids regularly munched on them with meals and as snacks.
I remember the first fast food restaurant (a Burger King I think) opening in "the city," about ten miles from our home. I didn't get to go because like I said, it was more of a date kind of thing, so my older brother checked it out with his date. So I remember when both going out for a soda and going to a fast food restaurant was a "special" activity like a date. Kids of my generation went to fast food restaurants at most a dozen times in their life before they were in high school. Imagine that. They really were different times.
By the way, I am not a reflex fast food restaurant basher at all. I think you can see why after reading this. I grew up in times where what one ate really was a matter of having time to prepare the food and economics (what you could afford). If people are not providing affordable home cooked meals then people have to eat somewhere, and I understand that. I'm just trying to share with you what it was like when everyone really cooked their own food and when choices were fewer but people actually ate much healthier and enjoyed what they had.
I hope you found this interesting even though its not about the great events of the century, LOL, but it is a small illustration of how things have changed.
There were no large box supermarkets in the 1950's at all. Each town or village tended to have a grocer. In the 1960's you started to see the beginning of the local grocer close down and the box supermarket open (we were excited by a Loblaws that opened, and that's where we shopped in the 1960's). But in the 1950's you had home delivery of milk (yes, the milk truck with the milk bottles brought early morning to your door and placed in your metal milk box) and the small local grocer.
Everyone drank milk, including tough grown men. Just read the Nero Wolfe mysteries and you'll see that the private detective Archie routinely orders milk in restaurants and buys it when shopping for him and Wolfe. Ordering a soda such as Coca Cola when eating out was unheard of, because having a soda was usually the objective of going out with friends or on a date. When families ate out, or when adults had work time lunch or dinner, they all drank milk. That's one reason so many people have wisdom teeth when previous generations did not, because milk being affordable and common was something that our ancestors did not have, and lacking milk inhibited growth of bone and muscle. So the number one item that virtually everyone had at every meal was a glass of milk.
Fruit juice was expensive so that is the reason that antique and vintage "juice glasses" are so small. In a way that was a good thing because as I've explained in other posts, there's a lot of calories in juice and people used to eat the fruit itself, not have a concentrated extract in the form of juice. Orange juice became common in the morning because eating a whole orange was slower work. But it was very common for kids to get a small orange juice in the morning and a whole orange as an after school snack, or in your lunch bag. Adults often opted for tomato juice or prune juice (there was not the sniggering that there is about prune juice today). Most adults during the 1950's were only one generation away from the farm. Potty humor just wasn't their thing. They had dietary habits that had formed by knowing what was healthy and what was available.
Kid's snacks were mostly fruit. A kid got an apple or a banana, plum, bowl of berries or small box of raisins as their snack and they loved it. It was not at all hard to get kids to eat healthy fruit. It was more seasonal than today (before foods were transported cross country) and so when fresh fruit seasons diminished families started using canned fruits, especially canned peaches, pears and the ubiquitous "fruit cocktails."
Speaking of kid's snacks, having a candy bar was very rare. What usually happened is that kids would stop at the small grocery walking home from school and buy one candy type of treat out of one's allowance. Sometimes this would be a candy bar, but usually it was more of a candy type of treat (like hard candy or soft candy), bubblegum or something silly and fun, like licorice or edible wax candy. As I got older and realized that I easily gain weight, I switched all on my own from buying candy after school to buying a fruit, like a plum (it took a little doing to convince the grocer so sell me one plum!) So I lost childhood "chubby" weight by switching to fruit from candy when I went to the store after school with my friends (yeah, I had friends).
Potato chips existed but they were not snack food. I know that sounds strange so that's why it's helpful for you to hear about "how it was." Potato chips were viewed as a "side dish" for summer or party food. For example, if a family was having hot dogs or hamburgers, potato chips were viewed as one of the side dishes rather than a snack food that was around the house all the time to nosh on. That's another HUGE difference between now and then.
Likewise cheese was not really a regular part of meals except in the form of cottage cheese. Many people (again, including adult men) regularly ate cottage cheese. It was not viewed as the "dieters food" until much later. So between being regular milk drinkers and eating cottage cheese (yogurt did not exist at all), people had a very good dairy intake.
People had pretty much stopped eating home made bread and had gone to store bought loafs, but those loafs often came from local factories. For example, as a child we took a field trip to the factory nearby where they made "Wonder bread" loafs. We each received a loaf to take home! It smelled so great in there.
People ate a lot of bread, toast in the morning, sandwiches at lunch, and often a slice of bread as a side to dinner. The average person did not have "dinner rolls" at home, which were viewed as upper class party food. They used the same bread they had all day, having a slice as a side to their dinner. So people LOVED having dinner rolls with pats of butter served to them at diners. No one except those with "extra money to spend" bought hot dog buns; we all used slices of regular bread.
I remember frozen foods as they were gradually introduced. I know, it is strange to imagine, but frozen foods were very rare in the 1950's. First of all, they were more expensive than canned foods or home made. In my town I remember that my friends who were lower class like me but had a bit more money might have a few frozen foods on their weekly shopping lists, but people all thought they were throwing away their money for what they could get cheaper as fresh or canned. When Sara Lee frozen desserts came out they were viewed as treats for "those with extra money to spend." My mom would roll her eyes whenever we walked past the frozen food aisle and she saw anyone in there (that was in the 1950's and trust me, she's living off of frozen foods now, ha). But back then people had to shop thrifty, and they always opted for fresh if possible.
I remember many years of 39 cents a pound chicken. 'Nuf said!
The standard expectation at dinner was meat and potatoes. And trust me, that was not boring. Everyone loved home made mashed potatoes and men relied on the protein of meat because many worked in blue collar jobs. So the typical household would cycle through "types of meat" in a typical week, such as several types of beef cut prepared different ways, pork chops, hot dogs or kielbasa, fish on Fridays with either boiled potatoes or mashed. There was no real desire for "ethnic" food variety. We all got to taste good home cooked ethnic food at Polish or Italian neighbors, friends or relatives. So an Italian household, for example, would not have as much of the meat and potato regime as others, but they did so more than one might expect. Ethnic cooking was viewed again, as I've mentioned before, as more of treat food than regular food. For example, my mother was a German cook but we rarely had German food. Ethnic food was made more for family celebrations, as treat food or as mainstreamed standard dishes.
Relish dishes of raw carrots, celery and olives were common and both adults and kids regularly munched on them with meals and as snacks.
I remember the first fast food restaurant (a Burger King I think) opening in "the city," about ten miles from our home. I didn't get to go because like I said, it was more of a date kind of thing, so my older brother checked it out with his date. So I remember when both going out for a soda and going to a fast food restaurant was a "special" activity like a date. Kids of my generation went to fast food restaurants at most a dozen times in their life before they were in high school. Imagine that. They really were different times.
By the way, I am not a reflex fast food restaurant basher at all. I think you can see why after reading this. I grew up in times where what one ate really was a matter of having time to prepare the food and economics (what you could afford). If people are not providing affordable home cooked meals then people have to eat somewhere, and I understand that. I'm just trying to share with you what it was like when everyone really cooked their own food and when choices were fewer but people actually ate much healthier and enjoyed what they had.
I hope you found this interesting even though its not about the great events of the century, LOL, but it is a small illustration of how things have changed.
Tips to encourage healthy vegetables eating
When I was a kid, I watched the "Popeye" cartoons. Popeye, a cartoon sailor, got great strength to do good and fight evil when he ate a can of spinach. Well, so as a pre-school girl, probably when I was around four years old, I asked my mom to get some spinach. Amazed she bought fresh spinach, cooked it into a hot green goo, and served it to me. As you can imagine I took one bite and said, "Yuck." It was many years before I ate spinach again! She was very annoyed (though not as much as usual) that she had bought a huge bag of spinach and gone through all the preparing and cooking (this was in the 1950's when things still took a lot of time to prepare). This is one reason why I became a very cautious eater and was not "adventurous" in trying out new foods. It's another difference between older generations and the new. When we were growing up mothers who cooked had to spend hours preparing things that people today just pop purchased from the store into the microwave. So people were more cautious about requesting food that they might not like (especially if dad got ticked off at spending his hard earned money on something "new" and mom had to do all the preparation and cooking). So there is a reason that older generations were more cautious in things that younger generations take for granted, and it's not because we were too dumb or lacked sophisticated taste!
Fast forward decades and I am a busy commuter in Manhattan. I'm in Penn Station and starved, so I look for a slice of pizza, but all they have left is spinach pizza. I buy one and to my amazement find I loved it. I reconnected with spinach and now will select it for a variety of dishes. The same with mushrooms. I really disliked them in my youth (partly because of the way they were prepared) and again, I was introduced to them via pizza topping and eventually use and enjoy them in all forms.
Parents need to remember this and be creative in adding vegetables to favorite foods while children are young. Do not introduce vegetables to them as goo or lumps of "healthy but not tasty." Adults develop a taste for vegetables, but children need help with continuity from when they are babies and will eat pureed vegetables, through the solid food stage, and yes, most definitely, as children and teenagers.
So be sure to add spinach, mushrooms, squash slices and other good vegetables to favorite foods from the very beginning so that kids develop a liking for their combined flavors. Spinach sauteed in olive oil and spooned onto pizza is a healthy way to get both spinach and olive oil into a pizza lover's dietary intake.
The second tip is to add cheese. Just about everyone loves cheese. Some years ago a cheese industry advert correctly showed that kids love even "healthy foods like vegetables" when they are topped with cheese. Also, real cheese (not pseudo cheese product) is a valuable source of daily and nutrients, especially as kids AND adults do not drink enough milk. So you can cultivate a liking for vegetables as a side dish for your children by slicing or shredding cheese over the prepared vegetable. Mozzarella in particular enhances the flavor of vegetables for children.
Fast forward decades and I am a busy commuter in Manhattan. I'm in Penn Station and starved, so I look for a slice of pizza, but all they have left is spinach pizza. I buy one and to my amazement find I loved it. I reconnected with spinach and now will select it for a variety of dishes. The same with mushrooms. I really disliked them in my youth (partly because of the way they were prepared) and again, I was introduced to them via pizza topping and eventually use and enjoy them in all forms.
Parents need to remember this and be creative in adding vegetables to favorite foods while children are young. Do not introduce vegetables to them as goo or lumps of "healthy but not tasty." Adults develop a taste for vegetables, but children need help with continuity from when they are babies and will eat pureed vegetables, through the solid food stage, and yes, most definitely, as children and teenagers.
So be sure to add spinach, mushrooms, squash slices and other good vegetables to favorite foods from the very beginning so that kids develop a liking for their combined flavors. Spinach sauteed in olive oil and spooned onto pizza is a healthy way to get both spinach and olive oil into a pizza lover's dietary intake.
The second tip is to add cheese. Just about everyone loves cheese. Some years ago a cheese industry advert correctly showed that kids love even "healthy foods like vegetables" when they are topped with cheese. Also, real cheese (not pseudo cheese product) is a valuable source of daily and nutrients, especially as kids AND adults do not drink enough milk. So you can cultivate a liking for vegetables as a side dish for your children by slicing or shredding cheese over the prepared vegetable. Mozzarella in particular enhances the flavor of vegetables for children.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Urban and personal gardens - love it!
I love reading how more and more people are growing their own food in "kitchen gardens," whether in urban areas or in the suburbs where they have space for a personal garden. This is a subject that has always been near and dear to my heart. I think more and more people should try this out and see how it transforms not only one's eatting habits and health, but also provides real positive activity for the spirit.
http://www.latimes.com/features/home/la-hm-lyons19-2008jun19,0,7442391.story
http://www.latimes.com/features/home/la-hm-lyons19-2008jun19,0,7442391.story
Friday, May 30, 2008
Iran press report of mango grower saves species
The Iranian press has this article about a man in India who uses a mango tree to support the continuation of 300 species of mango fruit, some of which are endangered or no longer found outside of his tree. So many times saving a crucial part of the environment falls on a single man or woman's shoulders. What a great story and I hope he finds much success.
http://www2.irna.ir/en/news/view/line-22/0805300168201932.htm
http://www2.irna.ir/en/news/view/line-22/0805300168201932.htm
Friday, April 25, 2008
Corrections about body image, fasting, spirit
I'm reading a book, "Wisdom from the Monastery," edited by Peter Sewald (who is known as the interviewer of Pope Benedict XVI when he was still a Cardinal). I'm enjoying the book and think it's quite good. But I'm commenting early, even though I'm just part way through the first third, because I see a repeat of a great error that has crept into the whole concept of humankind's body image and the benefits of fasting.
First of all, remember that the human body is made in God's image and that it is the temple for each person's soul as it sojourns in life until returning to God, either in eternal reward or outside of God's salvation and into hell. So the body is fine the way it is; there is no reason to have all of the self loathing that has taken over the sanity of much modern day society. I do not need to go into detail, you are all aware of how many ways Western humans hate their own body images and functions.
I have been boggled by the extremes of this self loathing, with colonic and "toxic cleansers" being one of the most startling modern addictions and distortions that I've observed. This is why I am distressed by what I read in the book; much discussion about the fantasy that fasting and toxic "cleansers" are performing some sort of good or necessary "cleaning" of the body. That's crazy talk!
Um, read the Bible. Who was it who lived for hundreds of years, even as Methuselah? The early fathers and Bible people who were close to God, just as they were, and not using toxic cleansers. The body is fine the way it is, assuming that you are eating a normal unpolluted diet. This stuff about "toxins" "clinging to the intestines" and so forth is crazy talk that is more about human self loathing than biology, nutrition or science. In fact, one of the problems in the 1950's was that people discovered that as food became increasingly refined (white bread instead of whole wheat, for example), that people did not consume enough roughage, which is all that intestines need for good health. So those of you too young to remember, this is why in the 1960's there was a big return to less processed and more natural food, for "roughage." People ate only highly processed white bread, mashed potatoes, pureed vegetables and so forth. They then noticed not only irregularity problems in bowel movements, but also the beginning of so many polyps being discovered. "Rough" food "scours" intestines, and that is the only "cleansing" the body needs.
This is not to say that fasting is not a great and spiritual thing. It is, but it is a spiritual thing, not a health thing. Even modern monks have grown up to lose their perspective. For example, this idea of toxic waste relieved by fasting is pushed very much in this book by the religious practitioners. Just because you are a monk does not mean you are correct! Here is the specific deviation. The monk who is quoted in the book explains that because in medieval times food was unreliable according to harvest, some gorged on food, including supposedly holy people, becoming real gluttons. This is true and shows some sense of history and understanding of culture and life pressures. But by only thinking of fasting in terms of a "too much" or "not enough" quantity and cleansing aid, these same monks are not as well formed in understanding the true roots of the fasting's spirituality. They got tantalizingly close to explaining it a few times, but then veered off into the self loathing/dirty body brainwashing that so much in the past thirty years have absorbed from poor formation and pop culture.
Much of the Old Testament is about how God instructs humans to perform burnt sacrifices to him of animals and food. I've written about this most recently as I educate people about how the Catholic Mass is a continuation of God's requirement for sacrifice. Why did God require food sacrifice to him? Notice he did not say, take one fourth of what you would have eaten today and sacrifice it to me. He's not giving people dietary implications, only spiritual. God required animal and plant sacrifices to him for two reasons. One is that food was the single most important quantity in a human's life, and it is God given. The only way humans can truly remember and appreciate God is to take a percentage of what they rely on for life, and give the finest part of it back to God in acknowledgement and worship. God is not taking food out of someones' mouth, nor is he hinting that fasting or dieting is a good thing. To the contrary, the poor are able to sacrifice just a few grains of wheat, or a bit of oil that they can afford. God does not cause hunger (or dieting) by anything he mandated for the sacrifice. By offering sacrifice humans remained mindful of the proper priorities and order of their life on earth.
The second reason God stipulated sacrifice is that he wanted humans to cultivate the habit of trying for the very best in animals and plants. Remember, God is a gardener in addition to being a carpenter! By stipulating the purity of the hair color, or of the age or bodily health of the animal that would be sacrificed to him, God is subtly also teaching humans to DEVELOP THE BEST out of the best that God has given to humans. By offering the best to God humans pull themselves up in developing the gifts of animals and plants that God has graced humans with. It is a discipline that lifts people up to be good stewards of plants and animals. Everyone benefited from the knowledge and cleanliness that went into breeding or providing the best for sacrifice to God, because this knowledge applied to giving humans the best nutrition too.
So, think about it. Food is the greatest gift to humans from God because it is the day to day source of life. (Air is really something that is taken for granted, and you can't control having air or not. The same with water, which is either drinkable and available or not). But food is something that is extraordinary in grace. It has to be sought out, yet it is given by God freely.
God points out that because of original sin, humans are cast out of the Garden and have to "toil" for their food. But at the same time, Jesus reminds people that the lilies of the field do not spin flax, and the birds on the wing do not toil for their food. Food is the great gift and mystery of God, because it is freely given, but also must be toiled for and sought by humans.
Therefore fasting was understood by the earliest practitioners to be the willful giving up of God's greatest gift. It was viewed as "one step beyond offering food sacrifice to God," in a manner of speaking. Fasting was viewed by the earliest practitioners as the ultimate act of faith in God, because they are forgoing in total, for the fasting period of time, the very thing that they must, through human's own disobedience, toil to obtain, but also, through God's grace, have available in abundance through the natural order of life. It was this that drove the first who fasted to do so as a spiritual statement. It was later that practitioners noticed general health benefits from fasting along with the spiritual. They discovered real benefits (for example, soothing the system by having, for example, easy to digest bread or water fasts... I like rice fast days myself). But they also developed "theories" as they speculated, through their lack of understanding of the biology of the body, about purities and impurities.
When the body suffers during a fast it is not because of the "toxins." It is because the body is saying, "Hey, stupid, you haven't eaten."
The body has what scientists today well understand as an kind of "emergency plan" that it puts into effect when people stop eating. First it sends all the signals that you should eat (stomach growls, cravings, pain, etc.) The body fully expects you to respond by eating. When you don't eat the body goes into a mini crisis mode. That's when your failure to consume the calories that you need starts to affect your ability to move, think, and be at ease. You've cut off your calorie supply. So once the body "realizes" that you are "seriously" not getting enough food calories, it goes into what it thinks of as "starvation mode." To the regret of dieters scientists have in the past few years measured how rather than dieting have immediate effects, the body falls back on the ancient primitive ability that all animals share, which is to go into a "starvation" plan, meant to keep them alive on what little they are consuming. It varies from person to person and animal to animal, but some people can stick in "starvation mode" for quite a while and actually not lose weight if they are not exercising. Eventually the body must keep you alive by going into your fat reserves. So this is when the body starts to burn fat, even if you are not exercising, to keep you alive. If you still do not eat, then the body goes into it's last ditch plan, which is to burn your actual muscles when it has run out of fat to use. This is when people, and animals, reach the point of no return and starve. So the unpleasantness that you feel through a fast is nothing to do with "eliminating toxins," duh. It is the pain of the body increasing the severity of its survival mode response over time.
Repeat fasters do not experience ease because they've "gotten rid of the toxins." They experience subsequent ease because the body has adjusted to the types of fast you do and "knows what to expect." The only way "toxins" come into the picture is that if you have eliminated your varied sources of food in order to fast on one food, you can give your body a break from more complicated processing of varied foods (which is not a bad thing unless you have been ingesting a food with pollution). But remember that bodies evolved over millions of years to DO "hard work" of "digesting" a wide variety of food. This is why humans are called "omnivores." Humans eat both plants and animals. "Herbivores" are animals that eat only plants. (No, "herb" does not mean weed, for all you dope heads). "Carnivores" are animals that eat other animals. Being an omnivore is considered a great survival and evolutionary gift because it means that a wide variety of foods will sustain you. It's not an example of poor poor little old tum tum and poo poo being strained by the awful hard work of digesting all those big mean old complicated yum yums. *Sigh* In fact, to get serious for a moment again, one of the things that the nutritionists who discovered the starvation mode that frustrates dieters also determined was that eating "hard to digest" food like celery is a good thing to do, because it actually is a form of beneficial calorie burning exercise, just this act of digesting. That was pretty common knowledge in my college days, but I guess it took until recently for people to find some way to measure its effect and therefore consider it to be real.
Who would have thought that "modern" society would demonize the body, its functions, its self image and also apply "magical thinking" to the eating of food? God got people off to such a good start and they just don't seem to want to keep things simple and good.
I hope this helps.
First of all, remember that the human body is made in God's image and that it is the temple for each person's soul as it sojourns in life until returning to God, either in eternal reward or outside of God's salvation and into hell. So the body is fine the way it is; there is no reason to have all of the self loathing that has taken over the sanity of much modern day society. I do not need to go into detail, you are all aware of how many ways Western humans hate their own body images and functions.
I have been boggled by the extremes of this self loathing, with colonic and "toxic cleansers" being one of the most startling modern addictions and distortions that I've observed. This is why I am distressed by what I read in the book; much discussion about the fantasy that fasting and toxic "cleansers" are performing some sort of good or necessary "cleaning" of the body. That's crazy talk!
Um, read the Bible. Who was it who lived for hundreds of years, even as Methuselah? The early fathers and Bible people who were close to God, just as they were, and not using toxic cleansers. The body is fine the way it is, assuming that you are eating a normal unpolluted diet. This stuff about "toxins" "clinging to the intestines" and so forth is crazy talk that is more about human self loathing than biology, nutrition or science. In fact, one of the problems in the 1950's was that people discovered that as food became increasingly refined (white bread instead of whole wheat, for example), that people did not consume enough roughage, which is all that intestines need for good health. So those of you too young to remember, this is why in the 1960's there was a big return to less processed and more natural food, for "roughage." People ate only highly processed white bread, mashed potatoes, pureed vegetables and so forth. They then noticed not only irregularity problems in bowel movements, but also the beginning of so many polyps being discovered. "Rough" food "scours" intestines, and that is the only "cleansing" the body needs.
This is not to say that fasting is not a great and spiritual thing. It is, but it is a spiritual thing, not a health thing. Even modern monks have grown up to lose their perspective. For example, this idea of toxic waste relieved by fasting is pushed very much in this book by the religious practitioners. Just because you are a monk does not mean you are correct! Here is the specific deviation. The monk who is quoted in the book explains that because in medieval times food was unreliable according to harvest, some gorged on food, including supposedly holy people, becoming real gluttons. This is true and shows some sense of history and understanding of culture and life pressures. But by only thinking of fasting in terms of a "too much" or "not enough" quantity and cleansing aid, these same monks are not as well formed in understanding the true roots of the fasting's spirituality. They got tantalizingly close to explaining it a few times, but then veered off into the self loathing/dirty body brainwashing that so much in the past thirty years have absorbed from poor formation and pop culture.
Much of the Old Testament is about how God instructs humans to perform burnt sacrifices to him of animals and food. I've written about this most recently as I educate people about how the Catholic Mass is a continuation of God's requirement for sacrifice. Why did God require food sacrifice to him? Notice he did not say, take one fourth of what you would have eaten today and sacrifice it to me. He's not giving people dietary implications, only spiritual. God required animal and plant sacrifices to him for two reasons. One is that food was the single most important quantity in a human's life, and it is God given. The only way humans can truly remember and appreciate God is to take a percentage of what they rely on for life, and give the finest part of it back to God in acknowledgement and worship. God is not taking food out of someones' mouth, nor is he hinting that fasting or dieting is a good thing. To the contrary, the poor are able to sacrifice just a few grains of wheat, or a bit of oil that they can afford. God does not cause hunger (or dieting) by anything he mandated for the sacrifice. By offering sacrifice humans remained mindful of the proper priorities and order of their life on earth.
The second reason God stipulated sacrifice is that he wanted humans to cultivate the habit of trying for the very best in animals and plants. Remember, God is a gardener in addition to being a carpenter! By stipulating the purity of the hair color, or of the age or bodily health of the animal that would be sacrificed to him, God is subtly also teaching humans to DEVELOP THE BEST out of the best that God has given to humans. By offering the best to God humans pull themselves up in developing the gifts of animals and plants that God has graced humans with. It is a discipline that lifts people up to be good stewards of plants and animals. Everyone benefited from the knowledge and cleanliness that went into breeding or providing the best for sacrifice to God, because this knowledge applied to giving humans the best nutrition too.
So, think about it. Food is the greatest gift to humans from God because it is the day to day source of life. (Air is really something that is taken for granted, and you can't control having air or not. The same with water, which is either drinkable and available or not). But food is something that is extraordinary in grace. It has to be sought out, yet it is given by God freely.
God points out that because of original sin, humans are cast out of the Garden and have to "toil" for their food. But at the same time, Jesus reminds people that the lilies of the field do not spin flax, and the birds on the wing do not toil for their food. Food is the great gift and mystery of God, because it is freely given, but also must be toiled for and sought by humans.
Therefore fasting was understood by the earliest practitioners to be the willful giving up of God's greatest gift. It was viewed as "one step beyond offering food sacrifice to God," in a manner of speaking. Fasting was viewed by the earliest practitioners as the ultimate act of faith in God, because they are forgoing in total, for the fasting period of time, the very thing that they must, through human's own disobedience, toil to obtain, but also, through God's grace, have available in abundance through the natural order of life. It was this that drove the first who fasted to do so as a spiritual statement. It was later that practitioners noticed general health benefits from fasting along with the spiritual. They discovered real benefits (for example, soothing the system by having, for example, easy to digest bread or water fasts... I like rice fast days myself). But they also developed "theories" as they speculated, through their lack of understanding of the biology of the body, about purities and impurities.
When the body suffers during a fast it is not because of the "toxins." It is because the body is saying, "Hey, stupid, you haven't eaten."
The body has what scientists today well understand as an kind of "emergency plan" that it puts into effect when people stop eating. First it sends all the signals that you should eat (stomach growls, cravings, pain, etc.) The body fully expects you to respond by eating. When you don't eat the body goes into a mini crisis mode. That's when your failure to consume the calories that you need starts to affect your ability to move, think, and be at ease. You've cut off your calorie supply. So once the body "realizes" that you are "seriously" not getting enough food calories, it goes into what it thinks of as "starvation mode." To the regret of dieters scientists have in the past few years measured how rather than dieting have immediate effects, the body falls back on the ancient primitive ability that all animals share, which is to go into a "starvation" plan, meant to keep them alive on what little they are consuming. It varies from person to person and animal to animal, but some people can stick in "starvation mode" for quite a while and actually not lose weight if they are not exercising. Eventually the body must keep you alive by going into your fat reserves. So this is when the body starts to burn fat, even if you are not exercising, to keep you alive. If you still do not eat, then the body goes into it's last ditch plan, which is to burn your actual muscles when it has run out of fat to use. This is when people, and animals, reach the point of no return and starve. So the unpleasantness that you feel through a fast is nothing to do with "eliminating toxins," duh. It is the pain of the body increasing the severity of its survival mode response over time.
Repeat fasters do not experience ease because they've "gotten rid of the toxins." They experience subsequent ease because the body has adjusted to the types of fast you do and "knows what to expect." The only way "toxins" come into the picture is that if you have eliminated your varied sources of food in order to fast on one food, you can give your body a break from more complicated processing of varied foods (which is not a bad thing unless you have been ingesting a food with pollution). But remember that bodies evolved over millions of years to DO "hard work" of "digesting" a wide variety of food. This is why humans are called "omnivores." Humans eat both plants and animals. "Herbivores" are animals that eat only plants. (No, "herb" does not mean weed, for all you dope heads). "Carnivores" are animals that eat other animals. Being an omnivore is considered a great survival and evolutionary gift because it means that a wide variety of foods will sustain you. It's not an example of poor poor little old tum tum and poo poo being strained by the awful hard work of digesting all those big mean old complicated yum yums. *Sigh* In fact, to get serious for a moment again, one of the things that the nutritionists who discovered the starvation mode that frustrates dieters also determined was that eating "hard to digest" food like celery is a good thing to do, because it actually is a form of beneficial calorie burning exercise, just this act of digesting. That was pretty common knowledge in my college days, but I guess it took until recently for people to find some way to measure its effect and therefore consider it to be real.
Who would have thought that "modern" society would demonize the body, its functions, its self image and also apply "magical thinking" to the eating of food? God got people off to such a good start and they just don't seem to want to keep things simple and good.
I hope this helps.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
food talk: advice about emergency storage/hoards
I’ve heard a lot of interest in emergency food storage, modernly known as “food hoarding.” It’s a subject I have great interest in because it is a traditional skill that home providers grew up being very familiar with in previous generations. Here’s some quick background before my advice.
For all generations of humanity, until the past two generations, people generated much of their own food by farming, raising livestock, gathering, or buying in open air farmers markets. You need to realize that fields of vegetables, for example, only yield food during a very short time of the year. This is called the “harvest” time. It is the same with livestock. Most people kept livestock for the continuing giving of milk and chickens for eggs, and one or two animals would be a personal supply of the family’s meat. Obviously it takes years to have what would be a once or twice a year slaughter of an animal, and then the preparation of meat for both day to day eating and also for storage (such as salted meat, or sausages that are highly spiced for their preserving). So there is a time each year, or season, that certain foods become available, it becomes harvested, and then it is prepared so that it can last the family until the next harvest of that food. Potatoes and apples were prized, for example, because they could last up to a year in what was called “root cellars,” which were stone and dirt cool temperature cellars.
Every family who participated in its own food generation had someone who knew how to can food. While it’s called “cans” back then (and now) the cans are actually glass containers. Look up Ball containers on the web and you can see what they look like. I used to grow my own food and can it, just as my grandparents did. (It skipped a generation because my parents lived during the transition from living off their parents’ canned goods to finding all that they need in the grocery store). But I wanted to can goods so that I could have fresh, year around, access to food that I had grown myself. I made strawberry jam by picking strawberries at “pick yourself” farms. I grew tomatoes and canned them whole. I grew squash and learned how to can it, but typically kept it in frozen containers in the fridge for better flavor and freshness. I also made fantastic Concord grape chutney. Chutney is like a relish but with large chunks of fruit and vegetables. I also canned pickles from food I had grown. I even grew the dill that gives the dill flavor to the pickles. I also grew “cutting flowers” for having daily cut flowers for the table’s decoration. If you are going to have a food garden it’s a shame not to also have a cut flower garden in the same space. You learn to plant flowers that like your food come continually to bloom so you have a continual supply to harvest through each growing season. (And even during the winter I cut branches from evergreens and holly, or other ornamental plants).
The reason I describe my experience and how food storage traditionally worked is so that you can understand the reasoning behind the tips that I give, and how to adapt them to your own food storage or emergency hoarding endeavors.
1. Store food that is the exact same food that you would want to eat anyway. Do not waste your money on panic buying of either specialized “survival” food or on food that your family would enjoy eating only if they had a gun to their head. So do not buy green beans if everyone hates green beans. Buy what you would eat anyway.
2. Then, arrange your pantry or storage space so that you put the most recently bought food of each type toward one end, and the oldest stored food on the other end. So for example, if you buy tuna fish cans, you get in the habit of stocking the tuna in order that you buy it in a row along the shelf. This way you know at a glance for each food when you bought it and what it’s “shelf life” is, because you have it arranged from freshly bought to oldest bought.
3. Then, use your emergency food for day to day cooking, taking from the oldest bought end. This ensures that you are cycling through the emergency food and keeping it fresh, and not wasting your money on food that will rot in the basement if, God willing, the emergency that you are planning for never comes. This is why I tell you to buy only, for the most part, food that you would use in your regular cooking anyway. So whenever you make a tuna dish, you take the oldest can from your emergency supply and then make a note to buy a replacement can when you are next at the store doing your weekly grocery shopping. This is how people learned over thousands of years to provide for themselves and their families. When women canned food and when the men smoked the meat or harvested the food for storage, they arranged it in “oldest to most recent” order also, and women marked the actual dates with ink on the lids of the canning jars. I would eat the frozen or canned food that I had prepared also in order of eating the older food first.
4. You can involve the kids, and it’s a positive learning experience that is not like showing them a video tape of the world being destroyed by an asteroid and telling them that is “disaster preparation.” This is good stewardship and home making skills, and how to be a good provider. So when the kids are eating from their jars of peanut butter and jelly in their normal day to day lives, they learn how you took those jars from the supply, put on your shopping list to replace it, have them help you find the replacement jars in the store, buy them, and then put them in the right place in the pantry or storage shelves. There is an abundance of good learning and fun when kids learn to “keep part of the pantry stocked.”
If you are blessed to be someone with a great income and a generous heart, you could cycle your emergency food storage through your local food pantry. So instead of eating the food you have stored in your regular meals, you periodically take the older stored items to the food bank and replace the items through your personal shopping.
5. When selecting food that your family likes for inclusion in your pantry or hoard, remember that electricity and clean water may be a shortage during whatever emergency that you are planning for. Many people think that just stocking lots of water is the solution, but if you cannot heat the food in cooking, like bring water to a boil, it takes hours if not days to prepare some foods, even if you have filled water bottles. So my advice is to plan for foods that come in their own water, oil, syrup or other fluid and consider that part of your balanced diet (as you should anyway). For example, canned corn comes in nutritious storage water. If you are in an emergency, when you eat the canned corn be sure to also drink the water that it came canned in, because must nutrition is in the water anyway. The same with canned tuna. If you are in the actual emergency you will want to use the oil or water that the tuna is canned in also, and not drain and throw it away. Canned fruits, such as peaches, come in syrup that is good emergency “fruit juice” along with the eating of the actual canned food product. Soup is the obvious example, and chicken soup should be a “must have” for any emergency pantry.
6. Make sure that your emergency pantry has bags of salted chips and nuts and also cookies with real sugar. When you are in an emergency that is the time to forget about crazy diet schemes. Salt and sugar are essential to have in larger supplies than normal when under stress in an emergency.
7. If you have infants or young children, while you should of course store baby food and other food that is appropriate to their normal diet (and like I said, rotate the emergency food through your normal cooking cycle), think ahead of the adult foods that you have and how easy that, in emergency, you could prepare for infant or child appropriate food. It never hurts to research ahead of time (and even to test) how easy it would be to hand mash canned peaches, for example, if you had to provide adult food in an emergency to an infant. Read up on the Internet how people make their own baby food, not because you, God willing, need to do that on your own, but because it gives you rehearsal tips and tools that you might want to include in your pantry. For example, few homes have what every home used to have at least one of, and sometimes two or three of, which is a hand potato masher. People have food processors but no longer have the non electric hand kitchen utensils that every kitchen used to have. So if you imagine different scenarios, such as having to mash adult food into infant sized pieces or puree, and imagine having no electricity, you can think ahead to what utensils would be of great assistance. Most people bump into this problem when they have cans and no hand operated can opener, LOL. But if you want a real food hoarding and pantry system, you need to imagine a number of food provision scenarios and what kitchen utensils or tools you would need for each situation. Even if you don’t have an infant or child, what if your extended family or neighbors had to rely on your supply and then have one or more infants or children? Men and women of our previous generations knew how to handle each of those situations through experience, family lore, and planning.
8. Invest in sets of those ubiquitous home storage plastic containers with lids. But before you spend your money, think ahead of various uses. What if you have to leave your house and take your car to move your family and food to another location? Get storage containers that fit well in your fully loaded car, and practice in advance learning how much food you can pack in each one. If you really want to get organized, when you test what you can load into each container, keep a list that you write of type and quantity of each food and leave it in the storage container. Thus you will know in advance of the emergency that say 30 cans of tuna, 12 jars of peanut butter, 10 jelly jars, etc fits in say an 85 quart size container or whatever. So if you have to leave in a hurry, you open the plastic container and there is your checklist already inside of what would fit in it. Backpacks are great, especially if you imagine “being on foot running for the hills,” which is all very modern and science fiction, but it is easy to forget the baby food or pet food, or some other essential, if you are leaving because of fire, earthquake, natural disaster and so forth where you have time to organize but must move pretty rapidly. Some art supply containers are plastic, like giant shoe box sized, with handles. Those are great for the “backpack” scenario. One reason I prefer plastic boxes to back packs is that they can be floatation devices, while a backpack pulls you down, should you have to encounter water. So sure, have backpacks, but also have a plastic container for each member of the family.
9. I don’t want to jump ahead to non-food articles, but I would be remiss to not mention that each container should have a bottle of aspirin (whether you can tolerate it or not, other people will need it) and chewable Pepto-Bismol tablets. Pain relief (especially the anti-fever capabilities of aspirin) and diarrheal relief are essential to plan for in advance. When you have stress, a sudden change in food source and water, and possible contamination, fever and diarrhea are real possibilities and are more than just inconvenient. If you have children ask your pediatrician in advance that in a civil emergency, what dose of aspirin or Pepto-Bismol you could give to your under 12 child in such a scenario. If they have trouble imagining giving you open ended advice, give them the Katrina scenario. For example, say, “What if my family was one of the ones trapped for 5 days before rescue and my child got diarrhea? What dosage of Pepto-Bismol could I have given him or her in such a scenario where no medical aid is available?”
I could write a book, LOL, but I hope this is a good start for you. You are not crazy or paranoid to want to provide for your family and have an emergency supply. It is actually what homemakers used to do as part of their routine family life. But you need to plan for realistic scenarios and not for fantasy sci-fi hero scenarios, which, God willing, will not be required. And if they are, trust me; this country has not seen what war and panic will do to even the most well stocked family with food and guns. Dudes and chicks like to imagine that they can hole up in their house and fend off looters, but that’s just not what has happened throughout history. As Ben Franklin said, we stick together or hang separately. I think Katrina is a reasonable model for the type of situation that every family should plan for. It has both elements of possibly having to hold out without food or water in your home for weeks, or the possibility of having to leave home in a hurry in a survival type of mode. So while I’m not saying everyone should plan for a hurricane, I’m saying the Katrina model is a good imaginary template that includes lots of the scenarios that some genuine natural or civil emergency would contain.
For all generations of humanity, until the past two generations, people generated much of their own food by farming, raising livestock, gathering, or buying in open air farmers markets. You need to realize that fields of vegetables, for example, only yield food during a very short time of the year. This is called the “harvest” time. It is the same with livestock. Most people kept livestock for the continuing giving of milk and chickens for eggs, and one or two animals would be a personal supply of the family’s meat. Obviously it takes years to have what would be a once or twice a year slaughter of an animal, and then the preparation of meat for both day to day eating and also for storage (such as salted meat, or sausages that are highly spiced for their preserving). So there is a time each year, or season, that certain foods become available, it becomes harvested, and then it is prepared so that it can last the family until the next harvest of that food. Potatoes and apples were prized, for example, because they could last up to a year in what was called “root cellars,” which were stone and dirt cool temperature cellars.
Every family who participated in its own food generation had someone who knew how to can food. While it’s called “cans” back then (and now) the cans are actually glass containers. Look up Ball containers on the web and you can see what they look like. I used to grow my own food and can it, just as my grandparents did. (It skipped a generation because my parents lived during the transition from living off their parents’ canned goods to finding all that they need in the grocery store). But I wanted to can goods so that I could have fresh, year around, access to food that I had grown myself. I made strawberry jam by picking strawberries at “pick yourself” farms. I grew tomatoes and canned them whole. I grew squash and learned how to can it, but typically kept it in frozen containers in the fridge for better flavor and freshness. I also made fantastic Concord grape chutney. Chutney is like a relish but with large chunks of fruit and vegetables. I also canned pickles from food I had grown. I even grew the dill that gives the dill flavor to the pickles. I also grew “cutting flowers” for having daily cut flowers for the table’s decoration. If you are going to have a food garden it’s a shame not to also have a cut flower garden in the same space. You learn to plant flowers that like your food come continually to bloom so you have a continual supply to harvest through each growing season. (And even during the winter I cut branches from evergreens and holly, or other ornamental plants).
The reason I describe my experience and how food storage traditionally worked is so that you can understand the reasoning behind the tips that I give, and how to adapt them to your own food storage or emergency hoarding endeavors.
1. Store food that is the exact same food that you would want to eat anyway. Do not waste your money on panic buying of either specialized “survival” food or on food that your family would enjoy eating only if they had a gun to their head. So do not buy green beans if everyone hates green beans. Buy what you would eat anyway.
2. Then, arrange your pantry or storage space so that you put the most recently bought food of each type toward one end, and the oldest stored food on the other end. So for example, if you buy tuna fish cans, you get in the habit of stocking the tuna in order that you buy it in a row along the shelf. This way you know at a glance for each food when you bought it and what it’s “shelf life” is, because you have it arranged from freshly bought to oldest bought.
3. Then, use your emergency food for day to day cooking, taking from the oldest bought end. This ensures that you are cycling through the emergency food and keeping it fresh, and not wasting your money on food that will rot in the basement if, God willing, the emergency that you are planning for never comes. This is why I tell you to buy only, for the most part, food that you would use in your regular cooking anyway. So whenever you make a tuna dish, you take the oldest can from your emergency supply and then make a note to buy a replacement can when you are next at the store doing your weekly grocery shopping. This is how people learned over thousands of years to provide for themselves and their families. When women canned food and when the men smoked the meat or harvested the food for storage, they arranged it in “oldest to most recent” order also, and women marked the actual dates with ink on the lids of the canning jars. I would eat the frozen or canned food that I had prepared also in order of eating the older food first.
4. You can involve the kids, and it’s a positive learning experience that is not like showing them a video tape of the world being destroyed by an asteroid and telling them that is “disaster preparation.” This is good stewardship and home making skills, and how to be a good provider. So when the kids are eating from their jars of peanut butter and jelly in their normal day to day lives, they learn how you took those jars from the supply, put on your shopping list to replace it, have them help you find the replacement jars in the store, buy them, and then put them in the right place in the pantry or storage shelves. There is an abundance of good learning and fun when kids learn to “keep part of the pantry stocked.”
If you are blessed to be someone with a great income and a generous heart, you could cycle your emergency food storage through your local food pantry. So instead of eating the food you have stored in your regular meals, you periodically take the older stored items to the food bank and replace the items through your personal shopping.
5. When selecting food that your family likes for inclusion in your pantry or hoard, remember that electricity and clean water may be a shortage during whatever emergency that you are planning for. Many people think that just stocking lots of water is the solution, but if you cannot heat the food in cooking, like bring water to a boil, it takes hours if not days to prepare some foods, even if you have filled water bottles. So my advice is to plan for foods that come in their own water, oil, syrup or other fluid and consider that part of your balanced diet (as you should anyway). For example, canned corn comes in nutritious storage water. If you are in an emergency, when you eat the canned corn be sure to also drink the water that it came canned in, because must nutrition is in the water anyway. The same with canned tuna. If you are in the actual emergency you will want to use the oil or water that the tuna is canned in also, and not drain and throw it away. Canned fruits, such as peaches, come in syrup that is good emergency “fruit juice” along with the eating of the actual canned food product. Soup is the obvious example, and chicken soup should be a “must have” for any emergency pantry.
6. Make sure that your emergency pantry has bags of salted chips and nuts and also cookies with real sugar. When you are in an emergency that is the time to forget about crazy diet schemes. Salt and sugar are essential to have in larger supplies than normal when under stress in an emergency.
7. If you have infants or young children, while you should of course store baby food and other food that is appropriate to their normal diet (and like I said, rotate the emergency food through your normal cooking cycle), think ahead of the adult foods that you have and how easy that, in emergency, you could prepare for infant or child appropriate food. It never hurts to research ahead of time (and even to test) how easy it would be to hand mash canned peaches, for example, if you had to provide adult food in an emergency to an infant. Read up on the Internet how people make their own baby food, not because you, God willing, need to do that on your own, but because it gives you rehearsal tips and tools that you might want to include in your pantry. For example, few homes have what every home used to have at least one of, and sometimes two or three of, which is a hand potato masher. People have food processors but no longer have the non electric hand kitchen utensils that every kitchen used to have. So if you imagine different scenarios, such as having to mash adult food into infant sized pieces or puree, and imagine having no electricity, you can think ahead to what utensils would be of great assistance. Most people bump into this problem when they have cans and no hand operated can opener, LOL. But if you want a real food hoarding and pantry system, you need to imagine a number of food provision scenarios and what kitchen utensils or tools you would need for each situation. Even if you don’t have an infant or child, what if your extended family or neighbors had to rely on your supply and then have one or more infants or children? Men and women of our previous generations knew how to handle each of those situations through experience, family lore, and planning.
8. Invest in sets of those ubiquitous home storage plastic containers with lids. But before you spend your money, think ahead of various uses. What if you have to leave your house and take your car to move your family and food to another location? Get storage containers that fit well in your fully loaded car, and practice in advance learning how much food you can pack in each one. If you really want to get organized, when you test what you can load into each container, keep a list that you write of type and quantity of each food and leave it in the storage container. Thus you will know in advance of the emergency that say 30 cans of tuna, 12 jars of peanut butter, 10 jelly jars, etc fits in say an 85 quart size container or whatever. So if you have to leave in a hurry, you open the plastic container and there is your checklist already inside of what would fit in it. Backpacks are great, especially if you imagine “being on foot running for the hills,” which is all very modern and science fiction, but it is easy to forget the baby food or pet food, or some other essential, if you are leaving because of fire, earthquake, natural disaster and so forth where you have time to organize but must move pretty rapidly. Some art supply containers are plastic, like giant shoe box sized, with handles. Those are great for the “backpack” scenario. One reason I prefer plastic boxes to back packs is that they can be floatation devices, while a backpack pulls you down, should you have to encounter water. So sure, have backpacks, but also have a plastic container for each member of the family.
9. I don’t want to jump ahead to non-food articles, but I would be remiss to not mention that each container should have a bottle of aspirin (whether you can tolerate it or not, other people will need it) and chewable Pepto-Bismol tablets. Pain relief (especially the anti-fever capabilities of aspirin) and diarrheal relief are essential to plan for in advance. When you have stress, a sudden change in food source and water, and possible contamination, fever and diarrhea are real possibilities and are more than just inconvenient. If you have children ask your pediatrician in advance that in a civil emergency, what dose of aspirin or Pepto-Bismol you could give to your under 12 child in such a scenario. If they have trouble imagining giving you open ended advice, give them the Katrina scenario. For example, say, “What if my family was one of the ones trapped for 5 days before rescue and my child got diarrhea? What dosage of Pepto-Bismol could I have given him or her in such a scenario where no medical aid is available?”
I could write a book, LOL, but I hope this is a good start for you. You are not crazy or paranoid to want to provide for your family and have an emergency supply. It is actually what homemakers used to do as part of their routine family life. But you need to plan for realistic scenarios and not for fantasy sci-fi hero scenarios, which, God willing, will not be required. And if they are, trust me; this country has not seen what war and panic will do to even the most well stocked family with food and guns. Dudes and chicks like to imagine that they can hole up in their house and fend off looters, but that’s just not what has happened throughout history. As Ben Franklin said, we stick together or hang separately. I think Katrina is a reasonable model for the type of situation that every family should plan for. It has both elements of possibly having to hold out without food or water in your home for weeks, or the possibility of having to leave home in a hurry in a survival type of mode. So while I’m not saying everyone should plan for a hurricane, I’m saying the Katrina model is a good imaginary template that includes lots of the scenarios that some genuine natural or civil emergency would contain.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Food talk & some traditional good earth know how
It’s time for another blog post about good nutrition, and the wisdom about how to live a balanced life that has been lost, forgotten, or distorted over the past forty years. Here’s an example of how to view food AND what is good for the earth.
When I was growing up, if you went to the store to buy nuts to eat, they virtually all came with their shells on. People bought the traditional bag mix of almonds, hazel nuts, walnuts, pecans and Brazil nuts and then when they wanted a handful of nuts to eat as a snack, they sat there with a bowl with a nut cracker and picks. Shelled nuts such as cashews and macadamias were an exotic treat, and not found on every shelf like they are today. The Brazil nuts came from Brazil, and the almonds and hazel nuts were grown in the USA. I have this lesson in mind because last week I bought a bag of Brazil nuts at Wal-Mart for $3.69 and while I’ve been eating them I realize that knowledge I take for granted is no longer common. Here’s how I think when I buy them.
Nuts are one of THE most beneficial foods for humans. There is rarely a day that goes by that I don’t have nuts, often in the form of a handful of walnuts added to my cereal or oatmeal. If I don’t have cereal that day I will usually have a serving of nuts as they are. Sometimes I eat the walnuts but for variety I try to have other types in my pantry. Hence I bought the Brazil nuts. Now, nuts are healthy as they are raw. If they are cooked in oil they lose some nutrition but more important you gain all the calories and the possibly harmful ingredients of the oil, depending on the type and amount of oil used. So it is best to eat raw nuts but do not skip having nuts because of the oil used on some roasted nuts, just shop and consume wisely in that regard. So one reason I chose Brazil nuts for the pantry last week is that they are obviously raw and uncooked, being still in their shell.
Here is the second advantage of shells. People know that pesticides are a concern. Pesticides are a necessary tool, like it or not, for much of the world and many of the world’s crops. People alive today have forgotten what it is like to grow the food you depend on day to day (or starve otherwise) without pesticides. Billions of people are alive today because of pesticides. However, like all things with humans, the pendulum has swung too wildly in both directions. People demonize all pesticides (without actually rolling up their sleeves and picking worms off of crops of the poor people themselves) so that extreme is wrong, but of course the planet has become foolishly pesticide saturated, and that is the wrong extreme too. In the 1950’s-1960’s people started gaining wisdom on this problem by laying new insight about the worries of pesticides ON TOP OF the traditional wisdom about how to grow crops. Today there are VERY few people who have both insights, and that is a real worry. Both sides have been forced to polarize. Pesticide salespeople cannot be moderate because if they admit a problem the other side leaps on them as that argument being in support of no pesticides at all. And the anti pesticide people are so fearful and indignant about pesticide side effects that they lose their heads over the pesticides in total, not remembering that people still need to be fed with reliable food sources. When humans live all year off of the summer’s crops, a wave of pests can destroy in a matter of days a year’s worth of survival food for thousands of people. This is why people seem to “pour on” the pesticides “before they need to.” Once pests arrive the crop is ruined and destroyed and people starved. I remember those days very well, as does anyone of the World War II generation. So while I buy (expensive) organic when I can, I also am pragmatic that pesticides are going to be with humanity for a long, long time. So here is the nut lesson. When people use pesticides on vegetables, fruit and nuts, they usually use it early in the growth of the plant so the pesticide is not actually ON the food you are consuming. It was usually used on the young blooms or shoots. However, people know to wash all their foods before eating. Here is something, though, that environmentalists who were well rooted knew. If your food absorbed pesticides, the pesticides themselves tend to be concentrated in the skin, peel, rind or shell. So if you eat an apple that has been exposed to pesticides, peeling it makes you very safe from the effects, because if any pesticide residue was absorbed into the fruit, it tends to be concentrated in the peel, not in the interior. This is why I’ve made the decision to peel fruits that I have concern about. Now, there is a dilemma because the peel often contains the best nutrition, such as apples and potatoes. Yeah, think about it potato lovers, those great stuffed potatoes and potato skins. I’m not accusing (in fact, potatoes are quite safe regarding pesticides, unless things have changed since I last looked at it). I’m sharing with you the knowledge we all obtained in that generation, which is that pesticides, when present, tend to concentrate in the outer surface, being a rind, skin, peel or shell, and if removed you have a safe bet even if you don’t know the origins and treatment of the food regarding pesticides. So this is a long way of explaining that when I shell the Brazil nuts myself, I know that I am removing the surface that has been collecting “whatever” handling contaminants it received and I’m left with a relatively pure interior food. It’s not the same guarantee as getting pre-shelled nuts, since obviously you don’t know what standards of washing and so forth are used in the shelling and the mixing of the shelled with the pre-shelled.
So if you were reading my mind you’d not pick this up because it’s like brushing your teeth or washing your hands; you don’t think, “Now I pick up the toothbrush. Now I uncap the toothpaste. Wow I bought this toothpaste because it has this ingredient at that price. Now I use the tap water. I know the tap water has been purified to this or that degree.” You make lifestyle habits and choices based on your upbringing and your life education, and then you automatically and reflexively make wise choices without thinking about it. So when I buy a bag of unshelled nuts, part of it is the reflex of knowing that I am in control of the sanitation as best as I can because I will be removing the shells myself.
I also automatically think in terms of thrift, but not in the way that some today may think of it. I still think in terms of food benefit and cost per serving. I mentioned that the bag of Brazil nuts cost $3.69. The label indicates that there are about six servings of ten nuts each. Ten nuts is a filling and generous serving and gives you 200 calories. So if you get 6 servings out of a bag that means that healthy and clean Brazil nuts cost 62 cents a serving! That is not expensive at all. It’s less than a candy bar, and while it is generous in calories, it has fewer calories than a candy bar or chips snack AND the calories are all beneficial and helpful. Nuts, especially Brazil nuts, have a high percentage of fat, but this is the good fat that people need to have a healthy day. Fat provides slow burning and lasting nutrition that is for the long haul during the day, rather than a sugary carbohydrate boost. Now I eat lots of carbohydrates and sugars, so I’m not arguing against them. I’m just explaining how to get the balance right, instead of always glorifying or demonizing food groups and ingredients. It is wise to have one snack or meal serving that has nuts as its basis.
Brazil nuts are of course one of the fundamental ways out of poverty for their growers. It was one of the obvious way that young “environmentalists” in this country promoted being consumers of foods that helped poor agriculturalists around the world, and in this case Brazil. This was the fundamental thinking before the “fair trade” movement. Sometimes you need to go back and think about where your food comes from in the first place, and who you are supporting by virtue of your purchase, before you worry about the price. The price is important but this generation sees “fair trade” and they figure, wow, this is a good thing. But they don’t know if the crop itself is sustaining the local economy or individual farmers, just because the price is fair. Maybe “fair trade” locks them into growing a certain crop rather than something else. You just don’t know unless you take a look and have some education in these matters. Anyway, with Brazil nuts you KNOW that this is indigenous crop that benefits the Brazilian farmer and the grassroots economy.
So I grew up in a generation of kids that could wield nut crackers and thus put a little sweat equity in getting their own snack. Kids eat less if they are cracking each nut one at a time. They are also getting a little exercise, and I’m not being silly here. Well, maybe a little silly, but not too much. I laugh when yuppies do arm curls with expensive exercise gear but they would cry that they are deprived if they actually had to sit down with a basket and crack nuts for their snack, or shell the peas. People used to stay fit because they lived against a background of physical activity. Moms and dad used to sit with the kids and peel apples and cut them into slices for their kids. Kids would sit down and work their way through a bowl of nuts, doing the work of cracking the nuts open themselves. This is funny: recent health studies show that “fidgeting” is good because it burns off excess calories. Well, hello! With so much “convenience foods,” people are less and less active, and they fidget as they sit glued to their desk chairs, airplane seats, and couches in front of the computer or widescreen. Parents would actually stand in the kitchen for a half an hour or so preparing food, rather than drop it into a microwave and then flopping down in a chair again. So one of the “automatic” thoughts that I have when I buy something like Brazil nuts is satisfaction, not frustration, in the buying of a food that actually requires some activity to prepare. I never view peeling vegetables and so forth as a “waste of time” or a punishment. I view it as being a good cook who has good food quality and preparation control, and is staying active doing so. True it doesn’t give me “abs of steel,” but that sure ought to not be the point of having a bipolar existence of extreme activity with extreme inactivity.
Here’s another point about why it is important to eat nuts, and actually, this applies to all foods, including meat, vegetable, fruits, grains and beverages. A given food cannot be dissected down to its “healthy” and “unhealthy” components. I mean, yes, you do need to observe and discern based on the information on the label (protein, carbohydrates, fat, etc and vitamin/mineral composition). But it is the entire content of the food that is of benefit to humans, with many micro level ingredients that people are not even aware of nor realize their benefits. Yes, people have started to identify them, like antioxidants and riboflavin and so forth, but the usual result is to glom onto a “miracle ingredient” or “food” and hype the entire food based on that ingredient. Or worse, people try to extract the ingredient and think a pill contains the same benefit. Here’s an analogy of the healthy way to think. The food is the “piece de resistance,” the epitome of the animal or plant’s life force production. It is maximized to have beneficial ingredients, and has expelled all that is not good (obviously I’m talking about food fit for humans, not poisonous or tainted foods). As a rose is the culmination of the plant’s “beauty production,” so is the food the culmination of the plant’s “nutrition production.” All of the food is of benefit to the consumer in its totality. If scientists distilled the components of the rose flower into the chemicals that give it color, fragrance, and its form and then gave the viewer plates containing piles of those ingredients instead of the rose bloom itself, it would not be the same. Also, think of the wall of a house. A house wall contains the framework, the surface material, the interior material, and electrical outlets. If you bought a house, what if one wall was missing because the “electrical outlets” were the most “useful” part of it, so they did not bother giving you the rest of the wall, just the dangling wiring instead? That would be crazy. Well, this is how it is with healthy food and living. It is the wisdom to discern and select the “entire package” that is the epitome, the peak of goodness in total. So a Brazil nut is an example of a complete food selection and people do not need to concern themselves with extracting any further from it. Another example is how people call bananas the “perfect food,” because in total it contains so much of benefit.
Remember I mentioned how parents would take the time and sit to peel food for their kids, such as apples? Well, here is another thing I remember from those lost times. Parents would shell nuts and then show their children how to make toys out of the nut shells. When I was little the best thing one could strive for was to get a perfect walnut shell half, clear the inside out, and make of the hull a toy boat out of it. Parents would show their children how to crack the nut so that the shell would be as complete as possible (or do it for the kids) and how to put a toothpick in the center with cork and glue, making it a mast, and then preparing sails for the nut boat using tissues or paper. Kids would color and decorate the sails and the hulls themselves. This was back to when people didn’t buy plastic throw away toys, or put kids in front of the TV with videos. Parents actually showed children not only how to live but also how to learn and play. I used to make toy boats out of walnut shell halves and also tiny hazelnut halves. The maple tree out in front would shed winged seeds and I’d use them as sails too, and collect the beautiful pink seeds for decorations.
I hope that the juveniles and alien wannabes have been able to read this so far without going crazy over the use of favorite double entre words such as nuts and bananas. People would have starved to death and died out a long time ago (and maybe that would have been a good thing) if they lived on anagrams and double entendres like they do today. We want entrées to feed our children and ourselves, not double entendres. Also, kids were taught to use their imaginations and to learn crafts, such as the nut boats I describe, and not to sob into their beers thinking that they were interested in toy boats because they were “reincarnated from the Titanic.” Gosh, I wish I could speak to anyone sane and human without having to constantly include these mind freak disclaimers, but so far, obviously I can’t. I am hoping that my blog is read by people who are on their way back to sanity, though, and that I can share some of the learning and lore that the World War II generation had.
So I’m not trying to move the stock market or influence Brazil nut futures LOL. I could have written about my Zen about celery too (another double entendre food, oh no). But because I waste my time here actually trying to teach serious and real advice based on what I’m really doing and actually thinking, I thought it would be helpful to write about the Brazil nuts. I hope you find this helpful.
Food Caution:
As I've repeatedly told people, do not obsess with consuming a specific food, because anything (even water) is poisonous at worst or imbalanced at best if taken in extreme quantities. Here is a great website that contains a caution against excess consumption of Brazil nuts.
http://www.dolenutrition.com/articleDetails.aspx?RecId=158
It is exactly the presence of a needed and beneficial component, in this case selenium, that makes some people think, "if one is good then ten is better," which is a substance abuse or OCD mentality. Brazil nuts should be a part of an overall sensible balanced VARIED diet in moderate quantities of all foods. It should not be eaten "because of selenium" or avoided "because of selenium." Like the poor lady who died in the water drinking contest, people need to use common sense and not obsess. You cannot go wrong if you eat from all of the "food groups" a wide variety of specific foods with MODERATE PORTIONS.
Glimpse at my menu
For example, three days ago I had a generous handful of pistachios as my daily nut snack. Two days ago I had about eight Brazil nuts. Today I am eating my Fruit Loops cereal (yeah, I know) with a handful of walnuts added. This way I automatically have the "best of all worlds" by having a wide range of beneficial nuts, but not settling into overdoing one variety or the other and possibly causing an imbalance, allergy or dangerous accumulation of one nutrient or the other.
Developed countries are blessed with the ability to select among a wide variety of healthy foods every day. Poor folk have to eat the same food that they grow or can afford day after day, and therefore are vulnerable to repeat exposures to anything that might not be of constant benefit, to say nothing of growing in polluted areas.
The body is the soul's temple, and so people should be more mindful of what they eat. Mothers used to teach their children, "You are what you eat," which in more cynical times became the punchline of the obligatory jokes. But the basic message is that food is what you refresh and nourish your body with every day and therefore is worth much more consideration than it receives today, but not in the "magic thinking" that has permeated so much un-scientific and un-home making thinking that is rampant today. For example, I am all for identifying harmful human produced food additives, such as transfats, and making large scale decisions based on that. However, where people today get in trouble is that they try to do the same thing about natural foods (for example, warring against meat), which has no true scientific basis and veers very close to "magical thinking."
When I sold my house a few years ago the man who bought it is delightful. I liked him very much and was glad to sell the house to him and his son so that they could afford it, even though I lost money on the property. I joined his family that year for the holidays. But one odd thing stuck in my mind, which is not all that uncommon. He told me that he was moving toward a vegetarian diet. And his evidence for it's benefits? Um, not to be indelicate, but he noticed a nicer, um, odor of his output than when he ate meat. Um, if you study biology you will learn that the anal port is intended to expel the materials that the body cannot use from the food. The scent of the expelled matter is not an endorsement of the food that you have or have not consumed. But this is the type of thinking that infests the media and comes from poor science and home making formation. The body basically divides each piece of food into the "part it can use" and the "part it cannot use." Even the part it cannot use performs a valuable role, for example, fiber scours the lining of the intestines while it is "on its way out" and therefore is a natural cleanser and limits the growth of items such as polyps.
If you study biology and evolution you will remember one fundamental thing. Human life, as all life, started out as single cell organisms. One of the first huge steps of sophisticated life occurred over a billion years ago when single cell life organisms developed an anal port. If you look at microscopic photos of life at that time (as my science class did in college), you observe your basic blob of early life, a single cell, but one end has a dot or a gap in the cell wall that "takes in" the nutrition that it needs to survive and the other end has a dot or gap in the cell wall that "flushes out" the unusable part of the nutrition. It's simply a matter of what goes in, in total, is divided into the part the organism can use to survive and to grow, while the part that it cannot use is pushed out of an opening for that purpose. That was a HUGE development of life when it occurred. Goodness, the knowledge that people have at their fingertips and yet ignore or distort into magical thinking is so very sad and destructive.
When I was growing up, if you went to the store to buy nuts to eat, they virtually all came with their shells on. People bought the traditional bag mix of almonds, hazel nuts, walnuts, pecans and Brazil nuts and then when they wanted a handful of nuts to eat as a snack, they sat there with a bowl with a nut cracker and picks. Shelled nuts such as cashews and macadamias were an exotic treat, and not found on every shelf like they are today. The Brazil nuts came from Brazil, and the almonds and hazel nuts were grown in the USA. I have this lesson in mind because last week I bought a bag of Brazil nuts at Wal-Mart for $3.69 and while I’ve been eating them I realize that knowledge I take for granted is no longer common. Here’s how I think when I buy them.
Nuts are one of THE most beneficial foods for humans. There is rarely a day that goes by that I don’t have nuts, often in the form of a handful of walnuts added to my cereal or oatmeal. If I don’t have cereal that day I will usually have a serving of nuts as they are. Sometimes I eat the walnuts but for variety I try to have other types in my pantry. Hence I bought the Brazil nuts. Now, nuts are healthy as they are raw. If they are cooked in oil they lose some nutrition but more important you gain all the calories and the possibly harmful ingredients of the oil, depending on the type and amount of oil used. So it is best to eat raw nuts but do not skip having nuts because of the oil used on some roasted nuts, just shop and consume wisely in that regard. So one reason I chose Brazil nuts for the pantry last week is that they are obviously raw and uncooked, being still in their shell.
Here is the second advantage of shells. People know that pesticides are a concern. Pesticides are a necessary tool, like it or not, for much of the world and many of the world’s crops. People alive today have forgotten what it is like to grow the food you depend on day to day (or starve otherwise) without pesticides. Billions of people are alive today because of pesticides. However, like all things with humans, the pendulum has swung too wildly in both directions. People demonize all pesticides (without actually rolling up their sleeves and picking worms off of crops of the poor people themselves) so that extreme is wrong, but of course the planet has become foolishly pesticide saturated, and that is the wrong extreme too. In the 1950’s-1960’s people started gaining wisdom on this problem by laying new insight about the worries of pesticides ON TOP OF the traditional wisdom about how to grow crops. Today there are VERY few people who have both insights, and that is a real worry. Both sides have been forced to polarize. Pesticide salespeople cannot be moderate because if they admit a problem the other side leaps on them as that argument being in support of no pesticides at all. And the anti pesticide people are so fearful and indignant about pesticide side effects that they lose their heads over the pesticides in total, not remembering that people still need to be fed with reliable food sources. When humans live all year off of the summer’s crops, a wave of pests can destroy in a matter of days a year’s worth of survival food for thousands of people. This is why people seem to “pour on” the pesticides “before they need to.” Once pests arrive the crop is ruined and destroyed and people starved. I remember those days very well, as does anyone of the World War II generation. So while I buy (expensive) organic when I can, I also am pragmatic that pesticides are going to be with humanity for a long, long time. So here is the nut lesson. When people use pesticides on vegetables, fruit and nuts, they usually use it early in the growth of the plant so the pesticide is not actually ON the food you are consuming. It was usually used on the young blooms or shoots. However, people know to wash all their foods before eating. Here is something, though, that environmentalists who were well rooted knew. If your food absorbed pesticides, the pesticides themselves tend to be concentrated in the skin, peel, rind or shell. So if you eat an apple that has been exposed to pesticides, peeling it makes you very safe from the effects, because if any pesticide residue was absorbed into the fruit, it tends to be concentrated in the peel, not in the interior. This is why I’ve made the decision to peel fruits that I have concern about. Now, there is a dilemma because the peel often contains the best nutrition, such as apples and potatoes. Yeah, think about it potato lovers, those great stuffed potatoes and potato skins. I’m not accusing (in fact, potatoes are quite safe regarding pesticides, unless things have changed since I last looked at it). I’m sharing with you the knowledge we all obtained in that generation, which is that pesticides, when present, tend to concentrate in the outer surface, being a rind, skin, peel or shell, and if removed you have a safe bet even if you don’t know the origins and treatment of the food regarding pesticides. So this is a long way of explaining that when I shell the Brazil nuts myself, I know that I am removing the surface that has been collecting “whatever” handling contaminants it received and I’m left with a relatively pure interior food. It’s not the same guarantee as getting pre-shelled nuts, since obviously you don’t know what standards of washing and so forth are used in the shelling and the mixing of the shelled with the pre-shelled.
So if you were reading my mind you’d not pick this up because it’s like brushing your teeth or washing your hands; you don’t think, “Now I pick up the toothbrush. Now I uncap the toothpaste. Wow I bought this toothpaste because it has this ingredient at that price. Now I use the tap water. I know the tap water has been purified to this or that degree.” You make lifestyle habits and choices based on your upbringing and your life education, and then you automatically and reflexively make wise choices without thinking about it. So when I buy a bag of unshelled nuts, part of it is the reflex of knowing that I am in control of the sanitation as best as I can because I will be removing the shells myself.
I also automatically think in terms of thrift, but not in the way that some today may think of it. I still think in terms of food benefit and cost per serving. I mentioned that the bag of Brazil nuts cost $3.69. The label indicates that there are about six servings of ten nuts each. Ten nuts is a filling and generous serving and gives you 200 calories. So if you get 6 servings out of a bag that means that healthy and clean Brazil nuts cost 62 cents a serving! That is not expensive at all. It’s less than a candy bar, and while it is generous in calories, it has fewer calories than a candy bar or chips snack AND the calories are all beneficial and helpful. Nuts, especially Brazil nuts, have a high percentage of fat, but this is the good fat that people need to have a healthy day. Fat provides slow burning and lasting nutrition that is for the long haul during the day, rather than a sugary carbohydrate boost. Now I eat lots of carbohydrates and sugars, so I’m not arguing against them. I’m just explaining how to get the balance right, instead of always glorifying or demonizing food groups and ingredients. It is wise to have one snack or meal serving that has nuts as its basis.
Brazil nuts are of course one of the fundamental ways out of poverty for their growers. It was one of the obvious way that young “environmentalists” in this country promoted being consumers of foods that helped poor agriculturalists around the world, and in this case Brazil. This was the fundamental thinking before the “fair trade” movement. Sometimes you need to go back and think about where your food comes from in the first place, and who you are supporting by virtue of your purchase, before you worry about the price. The price is important but this generation sees “fair trade” and they figure, wow, this is a good thing. But they don’t know if the crop itself is sustaining the local economy or individual farmers, just because the price is fair. Maybe “fair trade” locks them into growing a certain crop rather than something else. You just don’t know unless you take a look and have some education in these matters. Anyway, with Brazil nuts you KNOW that this is indigenous crop that benefits the Brazilian farmer and the grassroots economy.
So I grew up in a generation of kids that could wield nut crackers and thus put a little sweat equity in getting their own snack. Kids eat less if they are cracking each nut one at a time. They are also getting a little exercise, and I’m not being silly here. Well, maybe a little silly, but not too much. I laugh when yuppies do arm curls with expensive exercise gear but they would cry that they are deprived if they actually had to sit down with a basket and crack nuts for their snack, or shell the peas. People used to stay fit because they lived against a background of physical activity. Moms and dad used to sit with the kids and peel apples and cut them into slices for their kids. Kids would sit down and work their way through a bowl of nuts, doing the work of cracking the nuts open themselves. This is funny: recent health studies show that “fidgeting” is good because it burns off excess calories. Well, hello! With so much “convenience foods,” people are less and less active, and they fidget as they sit glued to their desk chairs, airplane seats, and couches in front of the computer or widescreen. Parents would actually stand in the kitchen for a half an hour or so preparing food, rather than drop it into a microwave and then flopping down in a chair again. So one of the “automatic” thoughts that I have when I buy something like Brazil nuts is satisfaction, not frustration, in the buying of a food that actually requires some activity to prepare. I never view peeling vegetables and so forth as a “waste of time” or a punishment. I view it as being a good cook who has good food quality and preparation control, and is staying active doing so. True it doesn’t give me “abs of steel,” but that sure ought to not be the point of having a bipolar existence of extreme activity with extreme inactivity.
Here’s another point about why it is important to eat nuts, and actually, this applies to all foods, including meat, vegetable, fruits, grains and beverages. A given food cannot be dissected down to its “healthy” and “unhealthy” components. I mean, yes, you do need to observe and discern based on the information on the label (protein, carbohydrates, fat, etc and vitamin/mineral composition). But it is the entire content of the food that is of benefit to humans, with many micro level ingredients that people are not even aware of nor realize their benefits. Yes, people have started to identify them, like antioxidants and riboflavin and so forth, but the usual result is to glom onto a “miracle ingredient” or “food” and hype the entire food based on that ingredient. Or worse, people try to extract the ingredient and think a pill contains the same benefit. Here’s an analogy of the healthy way to think. The food is the “piece de resistance,” the epitome of the animal or plant’s life force production. It is maximized to have beneficial ingredients, and has expelled all that is not good (obviously I’m talking about food fit for humans, not poisonous or tainted foods). As a rose is the culmination of the plant’s “beauty production,” so is the food the culmination of the plant’s “nutrition production.” All of the food is of benefit to the consumer in its totality. If scientists distilled the components of the rose flower into the chemicals that give it color, fragrance, and its form and then gave the viewer plates containing piles of those ingredients instead of the rose bloom itself, it would not be the same. Also, think of the wall of a house. A house wall contains the framework, the surface material, the interior material, and electrical outlets. If you bought a house, what if one wall was missing because the “electrical outlets” were the most “useful” part of it, so they did not bother giving you the rest of the wall, just the dangling wiring instead? That would be crazy. Well, this is how it is with healthy food and living. It is the wisdom to discern and select the “entire package” that is the epitome, the peak of goodness in total. So a Brazil nut is an example of a complete food selection and people do not need to concern themselves with extracting any further from it. Another example is how people call bananas the “perfect food,” because in total it contains so much of benefit.
Remember I mentioned how parents would take the time and sit to peel food for their kids, such as apples? Well, here is another thing I remember from those lost times. Parents would shell nuts and then show their children how to make toys out of the nut shells. When I was little the best thing one could strive for was to get a perfect walnut shell half, clear the inside out, and make of the hull a toy boat out of it. Parents would show their children how to crack the nut so that the shell would be as complete as possible (or do it for the kids) and how to put a toothpick in the center with cork and glue, making it a mast, and then preparing sails for the nut boat using tissues or paper. Kids would color and decorate the sails and the hulls themselves. This was back to when people didn’t buy plastic throw away toys, or put kids in front of the TV with videos. Parents actually showed children not only how to live but also how to learn and play. I used to make toy boats out of walnut shell halves and also tiny hazelnut halves. The maple tree out in front would shed winged seeds and I’d use them as sails too, and collect the beautiful pink seeds for decorations.
I hope that the juveniles and alien wannabes have been able to read this so far without going crazy over the use of favorite double entre words such as nuts and bananas. People would have starved to death and died out a long time ago (and maybe that would have been a good thing) if they lived on anagrams and double entendres like they do today. We want entrées to feed our children and ourselves, not double entendres. Also, kids were taught to use their imaginations and to learn crafts, such as the nut boats I describe, and not to sob into their beers thinking that they were interested in toy boats because they were “reincarnated from the Titanic.” Gosh, I wish I could speak to anyone sane and human without having to constantly include these mind freak disclaimers, but so far, obviously I can’t. I am hoping that my blog is read by people who are on their way back to sanity, though, and that I can share some of the learning and lore that the World War II generation had.
So I’m not trying to move the stock market or influence Brazil nut futures LOL. I could have written about my Zen about celery too (another double entendre food, oh no). But because I waste my time here actually trying to teach serious and real advice based on what I’m really doing and actually thinking, I thought it would be helpful to write about the Brazil nuts. I hope you find this helpful.
Food Caution:
As I've repeatedly told people, do not obsess with consuming a specific food, because anything (even water) is poisonous at worst or imbalanced at best if taken in extreme quantities. Here is a great website that contains a caution against excess consumption of Brazil nuts.
http://www.dolenutrition.com/articleDetails.aspx?RecId=158
It is exactly the presence of a needed and beneficial component, in this case selenium, that makes some people think, "if one is good then ten is better," which is a substance abuse or OCD mentality. Brazil nuts should be a part of an overall sensible balanced VARIED diet in moderate quantities of all foods. It should not be eaten "because of selenium" or avoided "because of selenium." Like the poor lady who died in the water drinking contest, people need to use common sense and not obsess. You cannot go wrong if you eat from all of the "food groups" a wide variety of specific foods with MODERATE PORTIONS.
Glimpse at my menu
For example, three days ago I had a generous handful of pistachios as my daily nut snack. Two days ago I had about eight Brazil nuts. Today I am eating my Fruit Loops cereal (yeah, I know) with a handful of walnuts added. This way I automatically have the "best of all worlds" by having a wide range of beneficial nuts, but not settling into overdoing one variety or the other and possibly causing an imbalance, allergy or dangerous accumulation of one nutrient or the other.
Developed countries are blessed with the ability to select among a wide variety of healthy foods every day. Poor folk have to eat the same food that they grow or can afford day after day, and therefore are vulnerable to repeat exposures to anything that might not be of constant benefit, to say nothing of growing in polluted areas.
The body is the soul's temple, and so people should be more mindful of what they eat. Mothers used to teach their children, "You are what you eat," which in more cynical times became the punchline of the obligatory jokes. But the basic message is that food is what you refresh and nourish your body with every day and therefore is worth much more consideration than it receives today, but not in the "magic thinking" that has permeated so much un-scientific and un-home making thinking that is rampant today. For example, I am all for identifying harmful human produced food additives, such as transfats, and making large scale decisions based on that. However, where people today get in trouble is that they try to do the same thing about natural foods (for example, warring against meat), which has no true scientific basis and veers very close to "magical thinking."
When I sold my house a few years ago the man who bought it is delightful. I liked him very much and was glad to sell the house to him and his son so that they could afford it, even though I lost money on the property. I joined his family that year for the holidays. But one odd thing stuck in my mind, which is not all that uncommon. He told me that he was moving toward a vegetarian diet. And his evidence for it's benefits? Um, not to be indelicate, but he noticed a nicer, um, odor of his output than when he ate meat. Um, if you study biology you will learn that the anal port is intended to expel the materials that the body cannot use from the food. The scent of the expelled matter is not an endorsement of the food that you have or have not consumed. But this is the type of thinking that infests the media and comes from poor science and home making formation. The body basically divides each piece of food into the "part it can use" and the "part it cannot use." Even the part it cannot use performs a valuable role, for example, fiber scours the lining of the intestines while it is "on its way out" and therefore is a natural cleanser and limits the growth of items such as polyps.
If you study biology and evolution you will remember one fundamental thing. Human life, as all life, started out as single cell organisms. One of the first huge steps of sophisticated life occurred over a billion years ago when single cell life organisms developed an anal port. If you look at microscopic photos of life at that time (as my science class did in college), you observe your basic blob of early life, a single cell, but one end has a dot or a gap in the cell wall that "takes in" the nutrition that it needs to survive and the other end has a dot or gap in the cell wall that "flushes out" the unusable part of the nutrition. It's simply a matter of what goes in, in total, is divided into the part the organism can use to survive and to grow, while the part that it cannot use is pushed out of an opening for that purpose. That was a HUGE development of life when it occurred. Goodness, the knowledge that people have at their fingertips and yet ignore or distort into magical thinking is so very sad and destructive.
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Am eating some hearts of palm vegetable
I love hearts of palm. These two pieces I am having are from a jar, and the palm was grown in Costa Rica. It tastes great. I've read some greenies complain because palm trees are cut down and only the centers are harvested for the actual vegetable to eat. I mean, duh. You would think my ex-vegan and whatever friends would cheer whenever I eat a vegetable or fruit dish, which I do quite often. But no, they always have something to complain about. Here's a big secret: "Psst! Palm trees can be regrown just like heads of lettuce and bean sprouts! It just takes a lot longer so it has to be well planned, like with any tree farm! Duh!"
Someone I once knew emailed me to ask me if I was bothered by the fact he washed his hair with $300 shampoo. I think he was surprised (and probably did not believe me) when I had no problem with it. When I hear something like $300 bottles of shampoo I think two things: 1) obviously he can afford it financially and 2) how great that there are jobs that people have making this shampoo. It's probably all filled with natural ingredients and so forth, so I think of the farmers and the processors who earn a decent wage for their family because someone creates and supports this niche market. I have no problem with that at all.
So when I have a treat food like these hearts of palm I think about the farmers who grew and took care of the trees, part of which I am now eating. It makes me happy that I can buy a jar of heart of palm and know that farmers in Costa Rica have at least this means to support themselves and their families. I trust that they are able to manage their natural resources wisely and have no reason to believe otherwise. God bless them!
Someone I once knew emailed me to ask me if I was bothered by the fact he washed his hair with $300 shampoo. I think he was surprised (and probably did not believe me) when I had no problem with it. When I hear something like $300 bottles of shampoo I think two things: 1) obviously he can afford it financially and 2) how great that there are jobs that people have making this shampoo. It's probably all filled with natural ingredients and so forth, so I think of the farmers and the processors who earn a decent wage for their family because someone creates and supports this niche market. I have no problem with that at all.
So when I have a treat food like these hearts of palm I think about the farmers who grew and took care of the trees, part of which I am now eating. It makes me happy that I can buy a jar of heart of palm and know that farmers in Costa Rica have at least this means to support themselves and their families. I trust that they are able to manage their natural resources wisely and have no reason to believe otherwise. God bless them!
Thursday, September 6, 2007
Depression Advice - number four in series
Here is another suggestion in my series offering advice for people suffering from depression. I'm not giving medical advice or trying to replace your current medical regime, but I have treated people with depression when I was a psychiatric intern and so I have some experience with their suffering. In previous posts I've suggested that people with depression be sure to take a daily multivitamin (but not to mega-dose), that they replace one half hour a day of television or computer time with reading a non-fiction book on a favorite topic in a quiet space, and finding a particularly inspiring quote from the Bible or your personal holy book and referring to it often during the day. Here is my fourth suggestion.
I'd like you to replace several meals a week that are already prepared or fast food with a meal that you "home cook" yourself. I'm not talking about gourmet or expensive cooking here! :-) And it is not even necessarily a huge time consuming effort, especially once you get organized and get used to it (since there are two parts to it, the shopping and the preparation time). First I'll explain why I'm suggesting it. One reason is that you have total control over the ingredients that go into what you are eating, since you put it together from scratch yourself. You would be horrified to know how many chemicals are added to everything that you buy pre-made and packaged in order to "enhance color, flavor, preserve, emulsify..." etc. etc. There is an article in today's news, for example, demonstrating that food additives for ridiculous things like color are causing hyperactivity and behavior change in children, for example. I've spent time with my previous patients who had depression and seen that most of them did not know how to make a home cooked meal, and were at the mercy of additives that I could see have an effect on their mind set and behavior. So by home cooking at least a few meals, you are eliminating much of what is harmful that is sneaked into your food otherwise. The second reason is that home cooking, whether for yourself if you are alone, or for your family causes a natural feeling of optimism and well being. People who think that cooking is a waste of time have been brainwashed. Sure, there are times you have to hurry. But the vast majority of the time, you should feel good and have self esteem that you deserve a home cooked meal, an investment of quality and time, rather than sell yourself short. Even time spent on peeling or preparing fruit and vegetables should be experienced as a zen type of pleasure, where you are investing your time in preparing food for yourself and/or your family by your own hands and exactly the way that you like it, and knowing that it is healthy and tasty.
There are several ways you can go about this. One is to buy a simple cookbook and use it for meal planning and inspiration, and to learn the basics. I used to love my Betty Crocker cookbook that I got as a teenager, and it explained the basics of anything you needed to know, and had meals from absolute simple to elaborate. That was the pre-Internet and pre cooking show era. I would cook Sunday dinner while my parents were in church (they went to a different church than I did). I would make chicken paprika, beef stroganoff, and ground beef with noodles, for example. So I learned to anticipate what I wanted to cook on Sunday so that I made sure to buy the necessary ingredients during the week. One advantage to doing home cooking on Sunday is that you have leftovers during the week. When I was working as a counselor, and in jobs before that, I would cook a favorite meal on Sunday, in large quantities, so that I could bring the leftovers to work as my lunch. I saved money and ate well by not buying fast food types of lunches. I used to bake my own bread on Sundays too, but I'm not suggesting anything that complicated yet!
The other way to go about this is to get from friends and co-workers "favorite recipes." Not everyone has given up cooking! And this would be a great conversation maker and way to get to know another side of a person, plus a short cut to collecting simple tried and true recipes. Be sure to ask only sensible people, otherwise you'll get couscous and chutney veggie pate recipes ha. Seriously, depressed people are often vulnerable to food proselytizing, and end up being "vegetarian without a reason" or trying one fad diet after another, thinking it will help their condition. Actually, the narrower your eating habits the more it adds to depression, rather than mitigating it. The human body needs a variety of foods across the entire spectrum of possibilities in order to have optimal health. We evolved that way over millions of years for a reason. So ask your friends and colleagues for favorite home cooked meals, but filter them for being practical and basic.
I can also post some of my favorite home cooked meal recipes. Even if you don't share my taste you will see some useful and quick cooking tips and see how easy it is to prepare pure and good food with your own hands.
I'd like you to replace several meals a week that are already prepared or fast food with a meal that you "home cook" yourself. I'm not talking about gourmet or expensive cooking here! :-) And it is not even necessarily a huge time consuming effort, especially once you get organized and get used to it (since there are two parts to it, the shopping and the preparation time). First I'll explain why I'm suggesting it. One reason is that you have total control over the ingredients that go into what you are eating, since you put it together from scratch yourself. You would be horrified to know how many chemicals are added to everything that you buy pre-made and packaged in order to "enhance color, flavor, preserve, emulsify..." etc. etc. There is an article in today's news, for example, demonstrating that food additives for ridiculous things like color are causing hyperactivity and behavior change in children, for example. I've spent time with my previous patients who had depression and seen that most of them did not know how to make a home cooked meal, and were at the mercy of additives that I could see have an effect on their mind set and behavior. So by home cooking at least a few meals, you are eliminating much of what is harmful that is sneaked into your food otherwise. The second reason is that home cooking, whether for yourself if you are alone, or for your family causes a natural feeling of optimism and well being. People who think that cooking is a waste of time have been brainwashed. Sure, there are times you have to hurry. But the vast majority of the time, you should feel good and have self esteem that you deserve a home cooked meal, an investment of quality and time, rather than sell yourself short. Even time spent on peeling or preparing fruit and vegetables should be experienced as a zen type of pleasure, where you are investing your time in preparing food for yourself and/or your family by your own hands and exactly the way that you like it, and knowing that it is healthy and tasty.
There are several ways you can go about this. One is to buy a simple cookbook and use it for meal planning and inspiration, and to learn the basics. I used to love my Betty Crocker cookbook that I got as a teenager, and it explained the basics of anything you needed to know, and had meals from absolute simple to elaborate. That was the pre-Internet and pre cooking show era. I would cook Sunday dinner while my parents were in church (they went to a different church than I did). I would make chicken paprika, beef stroganoff, and ground beef with noodles, for example. So I learned to anticipate what I wanted to cook on Sunday so that I made sure to buy the necessary ingredients during the week. One advantage to doing home cooking on Sunday is that you have leftovers during the week. When I was working as a counselor, and in jobs before that, I would cook a favorite meal on Sunday, in large quantities, so that I could bring the leftovers to work as my lunch. I saved money and ate well by not buying fast food types of lunches. I used to bake my own bread on Sundays too, but I'm not suggesting anything that complicated yet!
The other way to go about this is to get from friends and co-workers "favorite recipes." Not everyone has given up cooking! And this would be a great conversation maker and way to get to know another side of a person, plus a short cut to collecting simple tried and true recipes. Be sure to ask only sensible people, otherwise you'll get couscous and chutney veggie pate recipes ha. Seriously, depressed people are often vulnerable to food proselytizing, and end up being "vegetarian without a reason" or trying one fad diet after another, thinking it will help their condition. Actually, the narrower your eating habits the more it adds to depression, rather than mitigating it. The human body needs a variety of foods across the entire spectrum of possibilities in order to have optimal health. We evolved that way over millions of years for a reason. So ask your friends and colleagues for favorite home cooked meals, but filter them for being practical and basic.
I can also post some of my favorite home cooked meal recipes. Even if you don't share my taste you will see some useful and quick cooking tips and see how easy it is to prepare pure and good food with your own hands.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
My grandparents' food and flower garden
My grandparents on my mother’s side were German, and lived in a small village on the outskirts of Berlin. So many people alive today never knew the kind of life my grandparents had, so I’d like to describe their house and their land. They had I’d guess about a half an acre, that was narrow across and ran so deep that from the house in the back you could not see the street. All the houses had high metal fences surrounding their property, with gates in the front, but this was by no means a gated community type thing. Rather it was an “old Europe” type thing where people could farm even within a somewhat urban setting. Not far down the road were golden wheat fields, with wonderful wild blue bachelor buttons (cornflowers) that would spring up within the fields.
My grandfather “Opa” was a carpenter. My grandmother “Oma” was the green thumb. Their half an acre was a veritable miniature garden of Eden. There were fruit and nut bearing trees throughout the property. They harvested for their own use and for sale on the market cherries, hazelnuts (filberts), plums, peaches, apples and others I probably didn’t notice as I was only there twice, both times during summers. There were fruit bushes everywhere, and I remember mostly the gooseberries and the currents. One of my jobs was to pick the currents each day to make bowls of them for dessert after dinner. We’d sprinkle them with sugar because they were tart. Their gooseberries were sweet, though you did not eat the skins, but you squeezed them out like grapes. There was a chicken coop with about six chickens, who were my playmates (until one of them ended up in the pot for dinner one night, ugh, the reality of pet vs. dinner ha ha.) The chickens went totally crazy for the white waxy berries from some sort of shrub that grew along one side of the property, so I’d pick those too for them as a treat. They also had two rabbits in a hutch. I liked to play with the chickens and the rabbits so much that Opa had to build a little chicken wire enclosure for me to sit in with my day’s playmates. The chickens were a rich brown color, and I still remember how soft and velvety their feathers felt. In the morning I’d go and collect any eggs that they laid. They ate a grain mix that had tiny bits of dried fish in it that they totally went berserk over… they loved those tiny bits of fish and would dive for them squawking and competing to get to the fish bits first whenever I scattered the grains for them. There was a potato patch in the front of the house, and a squash patch in the back, so I would dig for potatoes (and give away food to neighbors, to Oma’s irritation ha ha.) When the hazel nuts were harvested they filled one of those old fashioned wicker market baskets, and they’d last throughout the year, unless I was visiting, when they’d not likely make it through the summer as I munched on those highly favorite treats!
And every inch of the garden that was not used for food plants was filled with flowers. Until she became old and invalid, Oma just worked magic (the magic of hard work and a green thumb) on planting every type of beautiful flower. I remember mounds of orange and yellow nasturtiums. There were pink, white, yellow, orange, red and purple flowers everywhere. She had flowering bushes, mounds of flowering plants, and also individual flowers throughout, often planted among piled up rocks. She, like most farming families, had great “rock gardens” along the path that led from the road to the house. For those of you who haven’t had a farmer in the family, I’ll explain that the rocks come from preparing the ground for farming. When a farmer first marks out a plot of land to plant, he or she has to go through the property and remove the stones and boulders that would interfere with farming. That’s one reason why a lot of farm houses have stone fences, stone foundations to their barns and houses, and rock gardens. Throughout the centuries in every country where there is hard and stone filled soil, you can recognize just by looking where the first farmer’s “harvest” was stones, as they prepared their site for farming and building. As an aside, one of my favorite “chores” when I had my own house was to rebuild and repair the old stone border that created a gardened terrace in the backyard, but I claim no special talent or patience with its upkeep! It was fun when I actually motivated myself to do so, though it ended up being too big a job for just one person to do well. And I should have used some dabs of concrete as erosion made that whole area unstable.
Anyway, Opa and Oma’s garden was so full that there was only a tiny section of actual lawn! Just the portion of land right in front of the house was lawn, probably about 10 by 30 feet in size. Opa had a great little goldfish pond in a rock garden, where the pond was a galvanized tub sunk into the ground. Nothing fancy but it was one of the sweetest and most enjoyable sites. Thankfully Opa and Oma did not share the craze for garden gnomes, though they did have a couple. I don’t like them at all; I’m more a “statue of a deer in the front yard” kind of person. Or a pink flamingo. Definitely not gnomes! When we visited the gnome/garden shop I bought a glazed statue of a German shepherd. I still have it and love it.
And one of my total favorite things about the house was the backyard vineyard. It mostly consisted of a few rows, and also the vines that grew over the back of the house. The windows from my bedroom opened right in the middle of grape vines and I totally loved that. I had my Barbie dolls and would sit in the window and play with my dolls in the vines. My Barbie, Ken, and Skipper dolls had to learn how to up grape vines along trellises ha ha. I missed having dogs terribly both times I was there, but especially the second time when Oma was ill and surly, and my mother spent a lot of time seeking the fermented form of the grape vines in town, if you get my drift. My dad had died before our first trip to Germany, so I missed him a lot too. He was the dog guy in the family; he just was crazy over dogs. Not a cat guy, nor was I. So when I missed my dog (who was in the kennel in the US eating pounds of raw hamburger brought by a family friend) what did they do? Get me a cat, of course. It was handy to them because there was a litter nearby. But the cat was already grown up and not affectionate to me (or anyone) at all by the time they gave it to me. We had to establish the hierarchy (one swing of the cat around inside the chicken coop did that) because being scratched up by a cat who didn’t want to be adopted was hardly my idea of fixing a broken heart about my dad and my dog lol. The cat ended up staying on and kept Opa company after Oma died, so that was fine. Just don’t pretend someone is doing something for me when it’s not for me, if you know what I mean.
My stupid brother did the obligatory locking me into the chicken coop knowing I was afraid of the big black spider that was in there. That was the first and last time I ever entered anywhere without “securing my exit” and having recourse to a baseball bat. You military folks will know what I mean.
Anyway, I’ve never seen a yard and garden as fine as my grandparents’, since that time back in 1962. I got to see my mother and Opa on ladders harvest the cherries and take them to market (I didn’t get to go along though, drat) for extra money. I’ll tell you, there is nothing like eating fruit and vegetables every day that is grown by your own hand, or at least locally. A lot of people who grown their own tomatoes know what I mean. Later I would grow my own tomatoes, squash, dill, cucumbers, peas, beans, and cosmos (flowers) for the dinner table. Oma had a cellar full of her own canned goods. While I never went that far I did teach myself how to make strawberry jam, concord grape chutney, pickles, and canned whole tomatoes (yum.) Everyone ought to give it a try if you have a chance. There’s so much that is to be alarmed about with the dirty food that is being imported into our country, instead of being grown on its own. When I was growing up I’d walk in the fields and see the actual sweet corn that we’d eat in a few days. You knew where it came from and you knew what was put on it, or not. We have a crisis now in this country with having surrendered the cleanest and best food production system in the world to countries with low or no standards. For example, I love strawberries and always check that they are locally grown. The ones I buy here in Mississippi are grown in Louisiana. And you want to support your local countrymen and women, do you not? Up in New York state my brother has classmates that still operate their family farms. I’d stop by and buy their produce at their roadside stands. It’s healthier, tastier, and cleaner. Remember – you are what you eat!
My grandfather “Opa” was a carpenter. My grandmother “Oma” was the green thumb. Their half an acre was a veritable miniature garden of Eden. There were fruit and nut bearing trees throughout the property. They harvested for their own use and for sale on the market cherries, hazelnuts (filberts), plums, peaches, apples and others I probably didn’t notice as I was only there twice, both times during summers. There were fruit bushes everywhere, and I remember mostly the gooseberries and the currents. One of my jobs was to pick the currents each day to make bowls of them for dessert after dinner. We’d sprinkle them with sugar because they were tart. Their gooseberries were sweet, though you did not eat the skins, but you squeezed them out like grapes. There was a chicken coop with about six chickens, who were my playmates (until one of them ended up in the pot for dinner one night, ugh, the reality of pet vs. dinner ha ha.) The chickens went totally crazy for the white waxy berries from some sort of shrub that grew along one side of the property, so I’d pick those too for them as a treat. They also had two rabbits in a hutch. I liked to play with the chickens and the rabbits so much that Opa had to build a little chicken wire enclosure for me to sit in with my day’s playmates. The chickens were a rich brown color, and I still remember how soft and velvety their feathers felt. In the morning I’d go and collect any eggs that they laid. They ate a grain mix that had tiny bits of dried fish in it that they totally went berserk over… they loved those tiny bits of fish and would dive for them squawking and competing to get to the fish bits first whenever I scattered the grains for them. There was a potato patch in the front of the house, and a squash patch in the back, so I would dig for potatoes (and give away food to neighbors, to Oma’s irritation ha ha.) When the hazel nuts were harvested they filled one of those old fashioned wicker market baskets, and they’d last throughout the year, unless I was visiting, when they’d not likely make it through the summer as I munched on those highly favorite treats!
And every inch of the garden that was not used for food plants was filled with flowers. Until she became old and invalid, Oma just worked magic (the magic of hard work and a green thumb) on planting every type of beautiful flower. I remember mounds of orange and yellow nasturtiums. There were pink, white, yellow, orange, red and purple flowers everywhere. She had flowering bushes, mounds of flowering plants, and also individual flowers throughout, often planted among piled up rocks. She, like most farming families, had great “rock gardens” along the path that led from the road to the house. For those of you who haven’t had a farmer in the family, I’ll explain that the rocks come from preparing the ground for farming. When a farmer first marks out a plot of land to plant, he or she has to go through the property and remove the stones and boulders that would interfere with farming. That’s one reason why a lot of farm houses have stone fences, stone foundations to their barns and houses, and rock gardens. Throughout the centuries in every country where there is hard and stone filled soil, you can recognize just by looking where the first farmer’s “harvest” was stones, as they prepared their site for farming and building. As an aside, one of my favorite “chores” when I had my own house was to rebuild and repair the old stone border that created a gardened terrace in the backyard, but I claim no special talent or patience with its upkeep! It was fun when I actually motivated myself to do so, though it ended up being too big a job for just one person to do well. And I should have used some dabs of concrete as erosion made that whole area unstable.
Anyway, Opa and Oma’s garden was so full that there was only a tiny section of actual lawn! Just the portion of land right in front of the house was lawn, probably about 10 by 30 feet in size. Opa had a great little goldfish pond in a rock garden, where the pond was a galvanized tub sunk into the ground. Nothing fancy but it was one of the sweetest and most enjoyable sites. Thankfully Opa and Oma did not share the craze for garden gnomes, though they did have a couple. I don’t like them at all; I’m more a “statue of a deer in the front yard” kind of person. Or a pink flamingo. Definitely not gnomes! When we visited the gnome/garden shop I bought a glazed statue of a German shepherd. I still have it and love it.
And one of my total favorite things about the house was the backyard vineyard. It mostly consisted of a few rows, and also the vines that grew over the back of the house. The windows from my bedroom opened right in the middle of grape vines and I totally loved that. I had my Barbie dolls and would sit in the window and play with my dolls in the vines. My Barbie, Ken, and Skipper dolls had to learn how to up grape vines along trellises ha ha. I missed having dogs terribly both times I was there, but especially the second time when Oma was ill and surly, and my mother spent a lot of time seeking the fermented form of the grape vines in town, if you get my drift. My dad had died before our first trip to Germany, so I missed him a lot too. He was the dog guy in the family; he just was crazy over dogs. Not a cat guy, nor was I. So when I missed my dog (who was in the kennel in the US eating pounds of raw hamburger brought by a family friend) what did they do? Get me a cat, of course. It was handy to them because there was a litter nearby. But the cat was already grown up and not affectionate to me (or anyone) at all by the time they gave it to me. We had to establish the hierarchy (one swing of the cat around inside the chicken coop did that) because being scratched up by a cat who didn’t want to be adopted was hardly my idea of fixing a broken heart about my dad and my dog lol. The cat ended up staying on and kept Opa company after Oma died, so that was fine. Just don’t pretend someone is doing something for me when it’s not for me, if you know what I mean.
My stupid brother did the obligatory locking me into the chicken coop knowing I was afraid of the big black spider that was in there. That was the first and last time I ever entered anywhere without “securing my exit” and having recourse to a baseball bat. You military folks will know what I mean.
Anyway, I’ve never seen a yard and garden as fine as my grandparents’, since that time back in 1962. I got to see my mother and Opa on ladders harvest the cherries and take them to market (I didn’t get to go along though, drat) for extra money. I’ll tell you, there is nothing like eating fruit and vegetables every day that is grown by your own hand, or at least locally. A lot of people who grown their own tomatoes know what I mean. Later I would grow my own tomatoes, squash, dill, cucumbers, peas, beans, and cosmos (flowers) for the dinner table. Oma had a cellar full of her own canned goods. While I never went that far I did teach myself how to make strawberry jam, concord grape chutney, pickles, and canned whole tomatoes (yum.) Everyone ought to give it a try if you have a chance. There’s so much that is to be alarmed about with the dirty food that is being imported into our country, instead of being grown on its own. When I was growing up I’d walk in the fields and see the actual sweet corn that we’d eat in a few days. You knew where it came from and you knew what was put on it, or not. We have a crisis now in this country with having surrendered the cleanest and best food production system in the world to countries with low or no standards. For example, I love strawberries and always check that they are locally grown. The ones I buy here in Mississippi are grown in Louisiana. And you want to support your local countrymen and women, do you not? Up in New York state my brother has classmates that still operate their family farms. I’d stop by and buy their produce at their roadside stands. It’s healthier, tastier, and cleaner. Remember – you are what you eat!
Thursday, July 5, 2007
Refrigerator empty, so time to fantasize bout food.
Need to go shopping. About to prepare the last pieces of flounder that I had. So before I sign off for now I might as well fantasize about some favorite foods. I'm going to fry the flounder in olive oil (I only use olive oil, it's the best for taste and for health.)
Favorite fish: Salmon, trout, tuna (cooked, no sushi for me...)
Favorite meat: NY strip sirloin steak marinated in oil and minced garlic before barbecuing over charcoal. Really crispy fried chicken is a close second.
My specialities: Omelets with spontaneous adding of ingredients, usually diced meat, onions, and cheese. I also make great home style breaded pork chops. Beef stroganoff. Zucchini boats.
One of the top 5 best meals I ever ate: Hot buttered humus one night in an outdoor cafe in Ankara, Turkey.
Favorite health food tip: While it's important to maintain fluids, drinking only water is unhealthy because it is excessively "empty" in content. The body is not full of pure water, and it does not maintain itself on pure water alone. The best fluids are those that are obtained from natural foods (that is why chicken soup, fresh fruits, vegetables, and milk are so good for people.) Try to eat each day natural foods with lots of juice enough to substitute for one of those glasses of water you would have had.
Another favorite health food tip: Eat bread frequently. Humans evolved to benefit from ground grains in the form of bread. That's assuming you aren't one of those celiac sensitive people. Everyone else should eat lots of bread daily.
What I haven't had in a while and miss: Bento box with a great miso soup.
Favorite vegetables: Butternut squash (a super healthy food), tomatoes (yep, fruit or vegetable, whatever), butter beans, spinach salad, backyard vegetables grown by me (peas, beans), corn.
If you are trying to lose weight here is the best tip you will ever hear. Before each meal eat a piece of fruit in total first, before having your regular meal. For example, a banana, half an apple, half an orange, a plum, a bowl of fresh berries. Eat the fruit a good 10 minutes before your regular meal. You will eat less of what you normally have and enjoy it more. Whenever I'm serious about dieting (which has not been in a while) I do this and it always works. I've done this whenever needed since childhood.
Favorite fish: Salmon, trout, tuna (cooked, no sushi for me...)
Favorite meat: NY strip sirloin steak marinated in oil and minced garlic before barbecuing over charcoal. Really crispy fried chicken is a close second.
My specialities: Omelets with spontaneous adding of ingredients, usually diced meat, onions, and cheese. I also make great home style breaded pork chops. Beef stroganoff. Zucchini boats.
One of the top 5 best meals I ever ate: Hot buttered humus one night in an outdoor cafe in Ankara, Turkey.
Favorite health food tip: While it's important to maintain fluids, drinking only water is unhealthy because it is excessively "empty" in content. The body is not full of pure water, and it does not maintain itself on pure water alone. The best fluids are those that are obtained from natural foods (that is why chicken soup, fresh fruits, vegetables, and milk are so good for people.) Try to eat each day natural foods with lots of juice enough to substitute for one of those glasses of water you would have had.
Another favorite health food tip: Eat bread frequently. Humans evolved to benefit from ground grains in the form of bread. That's assuming you aren't one of those celiac sensitive people. Everyone else should eat lots of bread daily.
What I haven't had in a while and miss: Bento box with a great miso soup.
Favorite vegetables: Butternut squash (a super healthy food), tomatoes (yep, fruit or vegetable, whatever), butter beans, spinach salad, backyard vegetables grown by me (peas, beans), corn.
If you are trying to lose weight here is the best tip you will ever hear. Before each meal eat a piece of fruit in total first, before having your regular meal. For example, a banana, half an apple, half an orange, a plum, a bowl of fresh berries. Eat the fruit a good 10 minutes before your regular meal. You will eat less of what you normally have and enjoy it more. Whenever I'm serious about dieting (which has not been in a while) I do this and it always works. I've done this whenever needed since childhood.
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