The New Year (weekly menu 15)

Welcome to 2010.

To begin this new year with a healthy start, I am excited to embrace a new cookbook in our collection. This year for my birthday I received a copy of Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats. Like many others, I hope to improve my health this year by eating more nutritious foods. Almost a cult classic, Fallon’s cookbook is the one to have if you are ready to challenge the mainstream interpretations of nutrition. You may have begun this journey if you read Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: And Eater’s Manifesto. While this relatively short book examines the history of nutritionism in America, Pollan also argues that we must revert to a more simple and wholesome diet – one consisting of more whole foods and pastured animal meat. To meet this goal, I highly suggest Fallon’s cookbook. It is the cornerstone of revitalizing traditional foods in the modern home.
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Death to Canned Foods?!

The hidden cost of convenience strikes again! As I have come to realize, all forms of convenience come at a deep and widespread cost. Plastic, the modern day “metal” may be highly resourceful but is very dangerous to our health and our planet. The general environmental concerns with plastic – requiring petroleum to produce and rarely being biodegradable – are just the tip of the iceberg. Though, as a blog concerned with food and its corrupted industries, let’s focus on the ‘nutritional’ implications of plastic. Specifically, I want to discuss the latest controversy in food safety, the breakthrough study that found measurable levels of Bisphenol A (BPA) in 19 common food containers.
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Breakfast – what to eat, what to eat?

This morning I faced the feeling I get every morning at the kitchen table – what am I going to eat for breakfast?
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The 100-Mile Diet vs. World Hunger (part 2)

When we talk about ‘health’ we consider a number of key factors: diet, physical movement (exercise), stress (mental health), hygiene and  access to medical care, to name a few. The health of an individual is relative to that person’s social and biological circumstances, and therefore it is difficult to prescribe universal expectations to his or hers health. This is not to say that we do not need health standards. Instead, when we discuss the health of an individual or population, we must identify the main factors and restrain the tendency to make broad claims or general assumptions. That said, in my experience, diet, exercise and stress have impacted my sense of healthiness. In this second installment of “the 100-mile diet vs. world hunger,” let’s examine the nutritional argument against the 100-mile diet.
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The 100-Mile Diet vs. World Hunger (part 1)

In the last post, “Seasonality saves cost,” I discussed the economic and environmental benefits of eating within the seasons. I wanted to share this perspective to highlight an important piece to meal planning and eating locally grown foods. Today I want to further examine the complexity of eating locally-sourced, seasonal foods. The impetus for today’s discussion grows out of a response I received from a friend on this post (via Facebook):
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