The Idiotic New Food Pyramid

By erika on 7/29/10 1:42pm
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As much as I disliked the old governmentally prescribed food pyramid, at least it made a kind of sense.  The new food pyramid (I'm inclined to put it in "scare quotes" and call it a "pyramid," but I shall refrain) is so clearly the work of a bureaucrat, it makes me want to bury my head in my hands.  It's so bad, it should come with its own Powerpoint presentation.

For one thing, the original food pyramid WAS a pyramid.  You had different sizes of blocks which stacked on top of each other.  To make a pyramid.  It made logical sense, and visual sense as well.  

Okay, so the base of the pyramid was this gigantic slab of grains.  Which was sacrilege to the carb-haters.   But what would you expect from the United States Department of AGRICULTURE?  That's what they're for - to get you to eat plants.


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10 Things to Do with Blueberries

By sarajean on 7/15/10 3:45pm
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July is National Blueberry Month, and for good reason: blueberries are in season all across the country, ripe and fresh and on sale. The foods are considered one of nature’s biggest superfoods, filled with antioxidant super-ninja powers—or, at least, plenty of nutrients. To incorporate blueberries into your summer meals, here are ten things to do with the small blue fruits.

10. Add Them to Cold Foods

What better way to cool off during the summer than by adding blueberries to your cold foods like ice cream, yogurt, or iced fruit drinks?

9. Freeze Them in Ice Cubes

For a festive summer look as well as a surprise taste when your cubes start to melt, freeze some blueberries in your ice cube trays. One or two per cube should work fine.

8. Stick to Your Diet

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Free-Range Eggs Less Healthy Than Battery Cage?

By erika on 7/1/10 1:59pm
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You may have seen the headlines.  "Free-Range Eggs May Be Less Healthy Than Regular Eggs."  Oh, the news loves a good "man bites dog" story.  Much less one which seems to puncture what so many see as the smug hypocrisy of the organic food movement.  

My first quibble with this title is the use of the phrase "regular eggs."  I think we should just be honest about it and call them "battery cage eggs."  After all, that is what "regular eggs" really are.  You should see people's faces fall when I point out that all eggs are from hens living in battery cages, unless otherwise specified.   A lot of people don't realize the truth about eggs.  Pretty terrible, right?  

(In case you were wondering, I don't buy eggs - I have pet chickens.  When I do buy eggs, I'm lucky enough to be able to buy them from a local chicken farm which has been Certified Humane.  But I digress.)


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Big Cheap Food: Mesh Sack of Potatoes

By erika on 6/14/10 8:03pm
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Have you ever actually priced out the cost of those plastic mesh sacks of potatoes?  They  usually end up all stacked together in the farthest corner of the produce department, somewhere near the onions and yams.  The sacks don't look very appealing, particularly not compared to the delicious bins of loose potatoes.  But check out those prices!


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Health Benefits of Watermelon

By sarajean on 6/12/10 7:20am
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The other day I read that watermelon is a better source of lycopene than tomatoes—which is really awesome for me, since I don’t like tomatoes but I love watermelon. It got me thinking: other than freezing the thing and filling it with vodka for a good time, eating its sweet juicy goodness to cool off, throwing a seed-spitting contest, making cool fruit baskets, and this new lycopene revelation, what else is a watermelon good for?

It turns out that there are plenty of health benefits to be had from eating watermelon. Here are just a few highlights.

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Cheap Good Food: A Head Of Lettuce

By erika on 6/2/10 1:47pm
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A caveat up front: this one depends entirely upon the season, and even the year.  A few years back we had a bad season for lettuce, which drove prices up to almost $5 a head for some of the fancier varieties.  


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Cheap Good Food: Sack 'O Apples

By erika on 5/30/10 1:09pm
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Eating healthy is more than buying fresh organic grass feed free range beef.  It's also about making the best of a bad situation.  We can't all afford to shop at Whole Foods, and sometimes the paycheck runs thin.  This series will explore ways to eat well even when you're on a really tight budget.  

There is an interesting intersection between "frugal" and "healthy."  In America, a lot of very poor people are also eating very unhealthy diets.  There are two big reasons for this:


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Are You Getting Enough Fiber?

By erika on 5/20/10 12:10pm
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Let's face it: Probably not! The USDA recommendation for fiber is a lot more than most of us get in the course of a day.  Unless you take a product like Metamucil (the results of which can be… undesirably dramatic) it can seem like it's not easy to bulk up your diet.  But it really is!


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When Is Organic Food Not Organic?

By erika on 5/10/10 2:16pm
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When it's grown in China, apparently.  A local news team in Arlington, VA has done some crackerjack work tracking down the truth about a lot of the so-called "organic" food which is sold by Whole Foods.


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Really, KFC?

By sarajean on 4/30/10 4:40pm
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When I saw the new pink buckets of chicken from Kentucky Fried Chicken, I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, break something, call Congress, or make a Colonel Sanders voodoo doll (which, we all know, wouldn’t do much good, anyway). These “Buckets for the Cure” will be donating portions of their profits to raise awareness and funds for breast cancer.

Their sale, of course, will lead to breast cancer.

Most people are aware that obesity, which comes from eating lots of very fatty, nasty fried food—like the Colonel sells—leads to cancer. Multiple cancers, in fact, though breast cancer is prominently there on the list. So we’re all going to go buy a bucket of chicken… to help raise money to fight the disease we might get from eating the chicken?

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