Annie’s Healthy Weight & Eating Blog

Green is definitely the new black. But is going green a shopping fad or the seed of a deepening conscious movement? SUV hybrids? In my mind, it’s all good - the more people become aware of the issues and alternatives, the more people will realize that every choice they make initiates a ripple ’round the world. There are a growing number of high quality and inspirational sources for those who love great food but wonder if the American food-industrial-complex is the chemical cocktail it at times appears.

For starters, if you haven’t seen films, take a look. A funny, goofy presentation of an underlying truth in our modern food system. In addition to the films, they’ll link you in to resources for finding sustainable meats and other foods in your community through the Eating Well Guide, a comprehensive listing of sources for sustainable whole foods suppliers, chefs, restaurants, and farms.

What’s in that blue pill, anyway?

May you be healthy, happy and stand in the light of your own truest self.

Annie

This year I hit on a quick and easy recipe that did the trick for me. Through my 2-week cleanse this spring I had at least one of these Asian slaw-salads most every day. It’s rekindled my love of cabbage – which, being in the brassica family (with broccoli and onions), is a phytochemical-packed cleansing powerhouse.

Asian Slaw-Salad

What you’ll need:

• A good chef’s knife
• A clean cutting board
• 5 minutes

Ingredients:

• ½ c Savoy cabbage sliced thin
• ½ c Red cabbage sliced thin
• 1 slice fresh ginger, diced with skin trimmed
• ¼ c diced red pepper
• 1 medium carrot, diced
• 1 Tbsp fresh cilantro if available
• 2 Tbsp Asian salad dressing or
• 2 tsp sesame oil
• 2 tsp rice wine vinegar

Putting it together:

Toss everything together and eat.

I got into the ritual of making this in a beautiful bowl that I love to eat out of. This slaw-salad has been a mainstay of my 3pm-give-me-carbs attack. It usually worked, and when I still craved something starchier, a few crackers didn’t turn into a box of crackers after having a bowl of slaw. Sometimes I double the recipe, and sometime I have two. It’s very low in calories and nutritionally dense, and has lots of fiber, the secret weapon of the weight-conscious.

Let me know how you like it.

Annie

I’ve been fortunate to have experienced lots of great vegetarian cookbooks this winter. The raw-foods movement has fascinated me, and there are flurry of beautiful books that inspire. I also love books by dietitians. RDs, in my opinion are well-educated and underappreciated, and while our professional organization tends to sell our collective souls too easily to the processed food industry and big pharma, please don’t let that detract from the wisdom you’ll often find among this crew - like anything, you need to find the good eggs. With RDs, they’re are lots of them.

One good egg I’ve been blessed with connecting with this winter is Jill Nussinow, MS RD, “The Veggie Queen”. She’s a California-based nutritionist, and I’ve found her cookbook an inspiring one for the everyday cook (which, for the most part, I am). Jill is a fan of mushrooms, as am I, and she’s into her pressure-cooker. The appeal of a 12-minute soup, or 5-minute mashed potatoes tell me that last year when someone left this cute little pressure-cooker in our house (long story) that I was right to keep it. Now I have some coaching about how to use it and why to pull it out from the back of that bottom kitchen drawer. Her cookbooks is lovely to hold, and features culinary tips as well as a view into her Farmer’s market lifestyle. Jill illustrates, I think, the degree to which sustainable eating really is a lifestyle.

Find out more about Jill and her book The Veggie Queen, at www.theveggiequeen.com.

Another recent entree in the vegan cookbook genre that I’ve been having a good time with this winter is Blossoming Lotus’ World Fusion Cookbook. This is another beautiful book - this one in full Technicolor, high production value loveliness. Healthy cats in Kauai know Blossoming Lotus well - and if you ever make it to the north shore here, a meal at the restaurant is a must. It’s a great place to bring your non-veggie friends to see just how delicious and refined vegan cuisine can be.

So I’ve been cooking from this book through the winter, and the one drawback for really wide appeal is that it’s very Hawaii-centric. Many ingredients just aren’t available or as good off-island. And, the secret to many BL dishes is pureed macadamia nuts! Heavy cream it isn’t, and I suppose if you are living the vegan lifestyle you can boost the healthy fat a bit, but for those who must be weight conscious, just know that you’ll need to be conscious of how much of those fab rich sauces you slather on you veggies.
Another small detraction is the cutesy recipe names. Now, just being in Hawaii tends to make the most hard-nosed Easterner a little whimsical. But I think the book would be stronger if it settled down in that area a bit.

Overall, it’s an inspiration. A beautiful book to hold, and some great ideas that really could be modified to accommodate the possibility that not everyone can live in paradise.

Find out more about the book and their very cool scene at www.blossominglotus.com/about_book.htm
Happy healthy eating.

Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals”, wrote one of the better digestions of the whole spinach problem in last weekend’s NYTimes Magazine. You can read the article on his website.

In “The Vegetable-Industrial Complex”, Pollen hits on the big problem - that, as poet-farmer (and underappreciated American treasure) Wendell Berry points out, when we took animals off farms and put them into feedlots, we had, in effect, taken one elegant solution - where crops feed animals and animals’ waste feeds crops - and created two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution problem on the feedlot.

It’s the American way to then address these problems with everymore technically complex solutions (Pollen says look for a call to irradiate all fruit and vegetables..), rather than waking up to the simple reality that, as far as food goes, the simple old way may be better.

You’re worth the time and energy.

Our food supply is getting more centralized and more processed by the day. What can you do? Eat local and get to know the farmer that grows your food whenever you can. If it interests you, read about the issue in the growing number of books exploring food quality. A few fascinating reads to start with include Fast Food Nation, Food Politics, (look them up on Amazon) and Pollen’s book.

What a sad state that organic spinach was the source of the latest break of e-coli. While we may never know the root cause of the outbreak, the government got decent grades for their quick response.

The USDA and the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) both suggest that we refrain from eating fresh packaged spinach until the investigation has been completed. In the meantime, it’s a great time to remember again to buy local, throughouly wash all produce, and peel it when you can, cook it when you can. Would these steps have prevented the outbreak? Cooking would have, but the others, its still hard to say.

To hear more about what CSPI has to say about the outbreak, check www.cspinet.org