Jerald was on the train heading into the office one morning, holding a nice cup of coffee that he had picked up at a local coffee shop as well as a sunny side up egg nestled snugly in a warm croissant.
Continue reading → The Never Ending Train Ride: Ten Sentence Story #161
As a child I read pretty much every book written by Beverly Cleary that I could find at the library. In one of the books I recall reading a side storyline about how there was advertising on television for something for children, and how much the television advertising directly influenced the requests that the children made for products at the local store. The more junk that gets peddled to kids, the more they want. If there were advertisements for only healthy food on the channels they watched, they would not be so driven toward the junk food. Seems like a far fetched fantasy, doesn’t it? Now the Walt Disney company is going to be making that dream a reality.
I have my eye on you, high fructose corn syrup. I have seen the way that you have infiltrated our world and invaded so many of our food products from soda to bread. Bread! I had to throw out a half loaf of bread when I discovered that one of the ingredients was switched up on me from sugar to high fructose corn syrup. How dare you make the claim in your ads that you can enjoy it in moderation when it is in so many products?
“Obesogenic” means “tending to cause obesity” and the new “Obesogen Theory” strikes a new argument against many food goods because there are undisclosed chemicals and additives in those packages that can actually make us gain, and not lose, weight.
There are many aspects in life in which I have become increasingly sensitive since my wife and I brought our beautiful baby Chaim Yosef into the world. One of those things is the ever important nutrition of our son. In more recent times it has become less of an issue as he is normally very happy to take milk from a sippy cup (soy, almond, or otherwise) as well as a number of extremely healthy solid foods but for the first nine months of his life he relied on breast milk as a means of sustenance.
When I was younger, I once asked my father why in the supermarket certain jars of peanut butter cost so much more than others. He pointed out to me that the cheaper jars of peanut butter used filler ingredients — peanuts are more expensive than sugar and corn syrup, and so the more filler there is in a jar of peanut butter, the less it costs the manufacturer per jar. Similarly, when you are dealing with vegetable oils, the way it should work is that you pay more for pure olive oil than you do for a blend of olive oil and other oils because pure olive oil is more expensive. Moreover, extra virgin olive oil (referring to the oil that comes from the first cold pressing of the olives) is even more expensive because of the quality of the oil that comes from doing this first cold pressing versus the subsequent oil that comes from further pressings and extraction methods.
Continue reading → The Extra Virgin Olive Oil Blend Controversy
Every day, anywhere from three to five times per day, we make important choices about the foods we choose to consume. What is going to fill our plates and bowls — beyond meeting the need to keep our bellies full and our nutritional needs met, is anything else important? I would certainly say so, given how much of the food that gets sold ends up in its tidy packaging on the store shelf.
In grade school we at one point watched the film version of the classic play Arsenic and Old Lace, a rather macabre tale about two quaint older women who poison old homeless men that have no family to ease their suffering. Their poison of choice is arsenic, and the old men are buried in the basement.
The commercials for the original Bullet food processing system all are about the same. They show you over and over again how it helps you make food in a matter of seconds — from preparing an omelete to helping you make a fantastic margarita. Whenever Elizabeth said that she wanted one, I pointed out that we already had a perfectly functional food processor that was already taking up space in our not so large Kew Gardens co-op apartment. She would relent, conceding this point to be quite right — when you live in a large multi-room house you can have as many appliances as you want that do only one thing and do them well. When you live in New York and aren’t wealthy, you need to have a few appliances that each do many things, even if it doesn’t do those things fantastically.
There is a new icon here to help Americans choose what food to put on their plate, and while it took me awhile to realize its true beauty, it finally struck me recently that the guide is both more helpful to people looking to improve their diet than previous graphics published by the government but it also in a way legitimizes both vegetarian and vegan diets.
Continue reading → The Impact of the New Shaped Food Guide on Vegan and Vegetarian Diets
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