I went to a great new restaurant with some friends, The Owl House. It’s downtown in a refurbished house. We started with Organic Ginger-Lime Edamame and Rosemary & Cracked Black Pepper Fries (with homemade ketchup), and then I got the Saigon sandwich: House Smoked Tofu, Pickled Cucumber & Carrot, Baby Arugula, Cilantro-Lime Marmalade, Roasted Garlic Vegenaise on a Baguette, with a field greens salad. There’s a picture of it at the web site (photo # 10) but I couldn’t grab it. All three of their desserts were vegan, and I went for the Chai Cheesecake.
They have clearly learned how to use adjectives to their advantage in their menus.
Everything tasted terrific, and the menu is so creative, and very vegan-friendly. The prices were reasonable and the service was excellent, too. My only complaint is that their web site stinks. I would rather just have the information I want without having to sit through the loading of a bunch of fancy graphics.
My parents came for dinner. We were just four tonight and I made Garlic and Greens Soup with turnip greens, sweet potato, and red beans. We also had tomatoes with salt and pepper and Rye Coils.
I used the rest of the tofu from dessert to make Green Goddess Dressing, which was an appetizer with sliced turnips and fresh green beans.
Dessert was Strawberry Pudding. I’m not sure I’ve ever had fruit pudding, and if I did it was surely artificial. This was very good.
For dinner I stuck a bag of Seeds of Change Arroz Hispaniola (which also included beans) in the microwave. When I bought it I didn’t notice that the rice is already cooked, so it didn’t make very much; three of us just got a little taste. But it was good, and seemed pretty healthy – organic whole food. With this we had steamed Swiss chard with balsamic vinegar and tomatoes with pepper. The chard was beautiful, organic from the farmer’s market, and the tomatoes are organic from my garden.
Every five seconds a child under ten dies of starvation. A child that dies of starvation is in effect murdered.
-Jean Ziegler, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food
I just watched “We Feed the World,” a documentary about the globalized food industry. A quote on the front cover uses the word “absurdities” and I think that’s an apt description. The first segment, showing how difficult it is for farmers trying to make a living growing wheat, which sells for a lower price than road salt, ends by showing enormous quantities of two-day-old bread being discarded; I’m talking a mountain of bread dumped by the truckload, while mentioned several times during the film is the fact that 100,000 people die of starvation every day.
I had a little trouble relating to this Austrian film with English subtitles. Quantities were often metric, currency was in euros, and most of the complaints were about the new E.U. laws. In a way I found it comforting that America doesn’t have the only stupid food system, but of course there is real suffering involved here.
After seeing how poorly this industry is working for so many farmers and consumers (can we call starving people consumers?), the filmmaker makes a visit to Nestle for an interview with the CEO, Peter Brabeck. I don’t think I agreed with a single thing he said, and of course ending the movie with his out-of-touch words is the whole point. I don’t often talk back to movies, but I gave Peter Brabeck a piece of my mind when he called the notion that people have a public right to water “extreme.”
Other topics covered in the documentary are large-scale fishing, hybrid seeds, rainforest deforestation for soybeans for animal feeds (“chickens eating the rainforest”), broiler chicken production, and greenhouse vegetables.
My parents came for dinner and we had Pacific Low-Sodium Creamy Butternut Squash Soup, which was very good, pretty much as though I had made it myself. It was sweet, and I didn’t notice the missing sodium at all.
I just watched the movie Killer at Large – Why Obesity is America’s Greatest Threat. This documentary is a collection of interviews and clips from journalists, researchers, doctors, and public health figures regarding the obesity epidemic. I must warn you that it inexplicably opens with graphic footage of an obese 12-year-old girl getting lipsuction. I made the mistake of sitting down with my lunch to watch, and I don’t recommend that. I think this scene would have been better later on in the movie, or perhaps not at all – I’m not sure what function it served.
However, once past that the movie was very good. It returned frequently to the point first made in the film by Surgeon General Richard Carmona: people are frantic about terrorism, but obesity is much more dangerous.
The movie covers schools, and I enjoyed hearing what the vending machine rep said to a gym teacher who was trying to get vending machines out of his school. The dire consequences of this act would be that 1. kids would get in their cars to drive to a store to buy the item they could no longer get in school. On the way they would be killed in a car accident, and that would be on the gym teacher’s head. Dire consequence number 2. was that instead of soda bottles with bottlecaps, the kids would have soda cups with lids, and the soda would spill all over the carpets. I guess the gym teacher would have to live with that, too. So, every kid in school would die and they’d have a whopper of a carpet cleaning bill. Ultimately, money won out and the school would not give up the $1,000 that the kids were feeding into the machines.
Absolutely astonishing was footage of parents outraged that junk food was being removed from schools. They staged demonstrations where they passed junk food in through the schoolyard fence to kids who were being deprived.
Other parents demonstrated against Sesame Street when Cookie Monster told kids that cookies were a sometimes treat and they should eat their veggies. Parents and children marched with placards showing “C is for cookie, not carrots!” More signs said “No carrots!” or showed carrots with the circle and line X-ing them out. Of course, parents were handing out cookies to the kids as they all marched around. ????
I loved the segment regarding the Shrek “Get out and play an hour a day” public service ad. The documentary shows representatives from 8-10 processed food companies together with George Bush and the head of Human Services meeting to try to take some action on this obesity thing. Did the representatives have any suggestions regarding improving the nutrition of their products? Not that I could discern. The outcome of the meeting was apparently the Shrek public service announcement, the industry’s typical shunting of blame to the exercise side of the obesity equation, to avoid any embarrassing scrutiny of the diet side. Steven Colbert takes over from there, and I’ll leave you with him: Clip
I just finished the book Living Large, by Michael S. Berman. I’ve been learning about obesity thanks to a free online Yale university class I just finished, and while Professor Brownell did an excellent job of conveying why people nowadays, especially children and the poor, are particularly vulnerable to obesity, I didn’t feel like I understood why a comfortable, educated adult would have trouble maintaining a healthy weight. Mr. Berman, a lawyer who has ricocheted between 220 and 330 his entire adult life, has done his best to explain his perspective on that, though he freely admits he doesn’t completely understand it either.
Michael Berman
What he has entirely succeeded at, in my opinion, is to give the reader a glimpse of what it is like to be obese for 60 years. He explains what cravings feel like, and how pervasive they are – he thinks about food almost every moment of the day. He simply cannot stop himself from finishing a too-large portion. He continues to hide food, even when it’s not necessary.
This book is not a pity party. Mr. Berman, a public figure involved for decades behind-the-scenes in many Democratic party elections, courageously exposes almost 10 years of psychotherapy, his deepest feelings about being bullied, and many humiliations and personal failures. And yet the story is positive, of a man finding happiness while battling a chronic disease, and ultimately, cautiously, finding a balancing point where he could feel healthy and maintain his weight more narrowly.
This is an incredibly honest book which can blast our biases wide open. It would be difficult to read this book without gaining a deeper compassion for people who struggle with serious weight problems.
QUESTION: What information do you have regarding Jane Plant’s book [Understanding, Preventing, and Overcoming Breast Cancer]? Is dairy-free really a miracle cure?
ANSWER: The dairy-free diet is intriguing, but it’s certainly not a miracle cure. It’s true that cows are sometimes fed lots of hormones to increase their milk production, as well as antibiotics, and that the grass or hay they eat may contain some pesticides. Toxins do tend to be stored in fats or “hang out” in fat. Dairy products tend to be full of fats. Cheese, for example, is basically concentrated animal (cow) fat (and very delicious! — I can’t live without blue cheese myself). So if it’s true that fat isn’t good for you because of the possible toxins in them, and because they can increase blood cholesterol, etc., then a diet that limits dairy fats is probably a good idea. Having said that, it’s important to keep things in perspective. Non-fat organic dairy products can be very healthy and tasty. Keep in mind that life is meant to be enjoyed. Organic regular cheese can be an occasional special treat. And a nice bowl of ice cream every once in a while is a great way to celebrate a good day or a wonderful moment.
—Marisa Weiss, M.D.
You don’t have to be a doctor or know anything about this book to break down this Q&A:
Q: Will eating less dairy prevent or stop breast cancer?
A: I don’t actually know but I’m going to begin by stating that it won’t. The idea makes a lot of sense because hormones and antibiotics are normally stored in fat and dairy tends to have a lot of fat, which also can raise your cholesterol. But it tastes good.
Dr. Weiss, tasting good does not change its effect on cancer and is irrelevant to the question.
My daughter had a few friends over for her birthday. We made Berry Ink and wrote with bamboo pens, which was a tremendous hit among 8-year-old girls. (I noticed the ink didn’t hold its color well as it dried, though. Raspberry red ended up purple-black.)
Lunch was a salad bar with lettuce, cucumber, tomatoes, portobello mushrooms, olives, sunflower seeds, Orange Balsamic Dressing, Italian Dressing, and canned peaches.
French Rolls
There were also French Rolls and whole wheat farfalle with tomato sauce.
It was all very popular – I would definitely do this again for a birthday party. This is what my plate looked like –>
For dinner we took takeout pizza to my parents house. For myself I brought a Helen’s Kitchen frozen entree. It was some pasta meal that I can’t find anywhere on the internet. It was so-so. I wouldn’t buy it again. For my daughter I brought a Lasagna Rollup, whole wheat farfalle and frozen peas.
Dessert for the family birthday party was a two-layer Vanilla Cake with more of the same frosting. Also my dad had So Delicious ice cream, mint chocolate swirl I think.
I went to a great new restaurant with some friends, The Owl House. It’s downtown in a refurbished house. We started with Organic Ginger-Lime Edamame and Rosemary & Cracked Black Pepper Fries (with homemade ketchup), and then I got the Saigon sandwich: House Smoked Tofu, Pickled Cucumber & Carrot, Baby Arugula, Cilantro-Lime Marmalade, Roasted Garlic Vegenaise on a Baguette, with a field greens salad. There’s a picture of it at the web site (photo # 10) but I couldn’t grab it. All three of their desserts were vegan, and I went for the Chai Cheesecake.
Dessert was 
I just finished the book 
Dessert for the family birthday party was a two-layer 
