June 2010

Summer’s here, and along with the sweltering heat, ice cold lemonade, and flowers in bloom comes a plethora of opportunities to do good around your community. Here are just a few ideas you might wish to use in your volunteering adventures this summer.

Indulge in passion fruit—or make fruit your passion! Open up a lemonade stand for a cause (such as Alex’s Lemonade Stand) with a twist: offer fruit juices or smoothies with real sliced fruit. People may pay extra for these sweet indulgences, especially in the heat.

Cool people off. Hold a fun water day for kids with disabilities or the local hospice, if possible. Bring a sprinkler, a slide, and some water guns. Or simply make some sweet, cool treats to give out if playing in the water isn’t possible.

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The commercially-presented version of the "Mediterranean diet" does not, alas, mean "eat all the Mediterranean food you want," but rather, it's based on some assumptions about why people whose diets feature olive oil, yogurt, feta, fresh vegetables and fruit, whole grains, red wine in moderation, fresh fish, and low amounts of salt, processed foods and sugars, and red meat tend to have better overall health, particularly in terms of lower rates of obesity and diabetes. A lot of the positive effects are attributed to the low saturated fat percentage in terms total calories consumed, largely because of the emphasis on olive oil, and the high percentage of fruits and vegetables.

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Australia's Black Dog Institute, a non-profit educational and research institute with interest and expertise in the treatment and diagnosis of depression and bipolar disorder, has, via a study of 3,000 people, made a revolutionary discovery. Sort of. Of those in the study (all of whom demonstrated various symptoms associated with depression) 45% craved chocolate. The fact that women all over the world have known about chocolate staving off some of the symptoms of depression since some time in the mid-eighteenth century in no way diminishes the value of the study. Particularly because of that 45% who craved chocolate, 60% found that chocolate improved their mood if they indulged while depressed (that's 27% of the overall study participants, for those eating chocolate at home).

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It’s one thing when a new pesticide, herbicide, or other chemical treatment has just been approved and people start using it. You don’t really know its side effects, you don’t know how harmful it is, but you go ahead anyway to only discover that it makes babies develop a third leg or lose an ear in the womb. Hey, nobody’s perfect; in this case, the blame is on sheer ignorance. Sure, the chemicals should’ve been fully tested before being used on anything in contact with humans, but we are human, and we do make mistakes. Big ones.

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Is it a cookbook in the sense that it has recipes with amounts measured out and instructions on how to make dishes? No. But to cook you need ingredients, and to cook well you need good ingredients. The beauty of this book is that it doesn’t tell you what to make, it simply tells you what to use whenever you make whatever you make. That’s valuable. You’ve probably heard of Michael Pollan by now, the journalist who has become somewhat famous for his books about our food system, leading to a set of speaking engagements where he has become a leader in the slow food and organic movements.

On the very top of the cover, it reads: “Absolutely Indispensable.” – Michael Pollan.

So, there’s that.

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Right now, I am a sucker for anything with Princess Fiona from Shrek on it. I’ve always been a Fiona fan anyway, but since she ended up being even more badass than she was in the original Shrek film in Shrek Forever After—complete with a warrior costume, gear, and awesome Amazonian hair—I totally want her on everything from my folders to my journal, a la seventh grade.

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