Have you ever heard anyone say that all you have to do to have a more nutritious diet is to stop eating white flour and sugar? That seems pretty radical to most people. What’s the point? What’s wrong with white flour and sugar? And what would such a change accomplish? Simply put, why?
By now, if you’ve been following the blog regularly, you probably know me well enough to know that I’m not going to say you can never eat white flour and sugar. I’ll never say never — moderation is my motto. I think that most people can tolerate a little bit of most things now and then. But that’s not what’s happening. Let’s look at what the standard American day looks like, food-wise.
The raid on the kosher meat-processing plant in Postville, Iowa, threw us a bone in the shape of a vigorous new debateon whether it is fitting and proper to designate as “kosher” products made without regard for animal welfare, fair wages,and the environment. To these I would add human health. What does it mean to approve the manufacture and distribution of products that are known to compromise the health of those who consume them? Is there a distinction to be made between contaminantsthat do their work quickly, like salmonella, and those whose destructive effects are slow and cumulative, like trans fats?
Good news for all you justice-seeking java-lovers and chocoholics! AJWS has teamed up with Equal Exchange and formed Better Beans – a new initiative to sell and distribute fairly traded, kosher coffee and chocolate. Better Beans products allow congregations, community organizations and individuals to order high-quality coffee and chocolate while supporting farmers and community cooperatives in the developing world.
Ever-sensitive to appearances of Jewish references in popular culture, I was a bit surprised to read Maureen Dowd’s headline in the New York Times on Sunday, July 19, 2009: “Pharisees on the Potomac”
I did not see any mention of late antiquity in her column and it was not until a number of hours later that I realized she had used the Christian allusion to Pharisees as hypocrites! Shame on her and shame on her editors (I wonder if William Safire saw the column). As the Wikipedia makes quite clear:
Welcome to Part II of the “Worm Diaries: Chronicles of an Apartment-dwelling Vermicomposter.” In the last episode, I wondered whether putting bread in my worm bin rendered it as chametz for Passover. (Click here for the answer.)
Thanks to Dvora Meyers for this great cross-post from her blog Unorthodox Gymnastics. Dvora is a student/writer/gymnastics addict/b-girl wannabe living in New York City and the youngest child so she craves attention.
The other night after breaking practice, I went with my fellow b-people [break dancers] to eat some dinner. We ended up at Nussbaum & Wu, a bakery that serves basic, American cuisine, or as a Korean-American bgirl called it as she headed to an Asian store- “white people food.” Perhaps the bakery also serves non-white people food, but I didn’t make it over to the Wu side of the business. On the Nussbaum end, I ordered a toasted cinnamon raisin bagel with cream cheese. (Chosen not because it was the Jewiest thing in the store but for reasons of thrift- I had already spent four dollars on my lunch and this meal pushed me just slightly over my five dollar food per diem. Actually, now that I think about it, cheapness is just as culturally Semitic as a bagel.)
Are you at the edge of your seat yet? I know that a carb loaded dinner after an exhausting workout is hardly noteworthy, blogworthy or even Twitter worthy. But it was actually very thrilling, at least for me. I don’t get out much.
As I ate my bagel, alternating between listening and jumping into the conversational fray and in general , I kept flashing back to similar scenes from Dvora: the College Years.
My family makes Passover a week of fresh veggies, but most of my friends will be filling up on meats and sweets and thus eating more fat, salt, sugar and cholesterol than usual. Here are some tips on lowering the fat and cholesterol in your own recipes, as well as two recipes of my own for which I reduce the amount of unhealthy ingredients.
In the field of calorie and fat reduction (the work I do for Rhode Island’s Public School System) we follow a four step system to make recipes healthier. Remember it is not necessary to eliminate all of the ingredients considered harmful. Small amounts of fat, sugar, salt, and cholesterol can actually be good for your system, so we are just looking to decrease the amounts of each, not remove them completely.
Yosh and I got a worm composter for our wedding – it’s true, we are just that dorky! For the last week or so (yes, we got married in November, but the composter arrived in mid-February, and I finally got around to getting the worms last week), I’ve been the proud mom of a brood of about 1,000 wriggling, very hungry worms.
They live in the Worm Factory, pictured above (p.s. definitely not our kitchen), and I couldn’t be more excited. Yosh on the other hand, is a bit more squeamish about the whole thing, though I can’t blame him. He suffered through a bit of worm trauma when his last roommate neglected to properly feed worms, and the bin quickly self destructed.
But aside from the nachas I feel over the little munchies - which was a definitely surprise – I was certainly not counting on our compost bin bringing up halachic (Jewish law) questions. Then Passover entered the horizon.
I know, I know, you were out late tonight. Fully costumed. Dancing in circles. Taking shots. Forgetting the difference between Haman and Mordechai.
And now you’ve got a headache like a chorus of groggers spinning between your temples, a stomach ache like an overstuffed poppyseed hamantashen and even though its still Purim, you’ve got to go to work!
With your troubles in mind, I present to you the following five food ideas for curing a killer Purim hangover. Though there is certainly some debate as to whether these foods will actually work, I doubt you have much to lose in trying.
I LOVE lattes, so I pay $3.50+ for coffee and soy milk way too often. Starbucks is often my latte-provider of choice. I do love independent coffee shops (not necessarily for the coffee), but for a quick in-and-out, it’s Starbucks. I often take my own travel mug with me. But until my collection of travel mugs was augmented by the Hazon Food Conference mug, the only one I had was often in the wrong location (at home when I needed it at work, in DC when I needed it in NYC…)–which means that I have used more than my fair share of disposable cups and their sleeves.
In two months, eight hermaphroditic redworms will reproduce to a community of 1500 and will be well on their way to transforming your coffee grounds, egg shells and vegetable scraps into nitrogen rich compost, all without stinking up your kitchen.
Master composter Adam Edell showed participants how to make worm bins for their home composting use, using red worms, a kind of worm that lives in the litter above the dirt, as opposed to the deeper layers of soil. Their shallow lifestyle makes redworms perfect for breaking up kitchen scraps in dark, aerated plastic bins, but to get going in their new habitat they need a three inch bedding of shredded newspaper. Adam suggests papers like the Times, that use soy-based ink instead of chemical, and that you avoid glossy pages and rich, dark inks all together. Check out the video below for his rip, fluff, dip, squeeze, fluff, toss method of preparation in the video below.
Coffee has been a staple of my diet since I was 14, and as much as possible I like to buy certified fair trade and organic coffee. Yes, it’s usually pricier, but I’m willing to pay a little more to invest in something I really believe in.
A friend recently turned me on to a coffee that’s not only organic, kosher and free trade, but it’s grown by a cooperative of Jews, Christians and Muslims in Uganda. The co-op is called Mirembe Kawomera, which means Delicious Peace in Luganda. You can buy the coffee off their website, for $10.50 for 12 oz. which comes out to almost ten cents less per ounce than some blends at Starbucks. And if you can arrange a big order for your community (20 lbs or more), prices go down even further, to $8.00 for 12 oz. Coffee that saves me money, is free trade, organic, kosher, and part of a project that promotes peace and interfaith initiatives? The only way it could get any better would be if it found me a boyfriend and cleaned the cat litter.
The shuk in Tel Aviv that so many travelers love — the idyllic market which people see as representative of the simpler way vegetables and other foodstuffs were once sold — is actually the source of so much frustration for me. Aside from the problem that all of the produce is fully conventional, I spend most of my time there yelling at vendors, being bumped (and bumping back) and trying my best not to be cheated.
While my blood pressure rises and I suffer the consequences of a thick American accent, I wax nostalgic about the farmers markets I frequented in Providence, Rhode Island, before I moved to Tel Aviv. Now those are markets. The vendors are usually the farmers themselves or their workers (or the people they hire to sell their stuff), and people are nice to you. They even smile. In fact, rather than the dog eat dog milieu of the shuk, the farmers market represents an eating community where people all respect each other for their role in this chain, from the grower to the cook to the consumer, etc. In so many ways I saw the shuk as a symbol of Israel, with all its frustrations, and the farmers market a symbol of my beloved America, in all its splendor, and in comparing the two I observed just how irreconcilable they were.
Then, on behalf of the Jewish harvest festival, Shavuot, Tel Aviv had to go ahead and start a Slow Food inspired farmers market…and further confound my already uncertain identity issues around food in Israel.
I’ll admit, I’m pretty neutral when it comes to the Rachael Ray divide. I’ve seen her show, sure, and have been annoyed by her “Yum-O!” as much as everyone else, but when you don’t have a lot of time to spend in the kitchen, I can think of a lot worse things than using pre-made ravioli in a recipe.
