Natural Food

I'm impatiently waiting for "In Defense of Food" by Michael Pollan to get to my local library branch so I can finally read it. I've seen Pollan interviewed on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report and I can't wait to dive into it. The basis of the book and Pollan's new book "Food Rules" is that we don't really eat food anymore, and instead we consume food-like products. Dr. Oz basically says the same thing. Your body doesn't know what to do margarine (which is like, three molecules away from being plastic... or something like that) but it does know what to do with butter, which is the fat from cream which is the heaviest part of milk which comes from a cow which eats grass which grows in the ground...

Which got me thinking, you really shouldn't eat anything unless you know the basic story behind it. Like, mayo is a blend of oil and eggs, oil is pressed from olives and eggs are laid by a chicken. Miracle Whip is...????

Try it with your lunch today. I'm having sweet potato fries and spinach salad. Sweet potatoes grow from the ground and spinach does too! Feta is a cheese that is made from milk which comes from a cow. Raspberry vinaigrette is made from raspberry vinegar which is fermented from raspberry juice which is pressed from raspberries which grow on a bush.

I think you get the picture.

For bread and other products that you don't completely make at home, do the same thing for each ingredient. If you get to something you don't recognize, put the item down and find a version that all the ingredients are recognizable.

happy hunting!

In defense of butter

Butter is one of those divine gifts from nature that cannot be duplicated, no matter how much we try. There's been this war against butter for as long as I can remember (which is going on 24 years) and long past that. Humans have tried to recreate the goodness of butter in margarine and shortening, naming products "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" and the like, but there is no way to duplicate it's wonderful properties.

What is margarine or Crisco, anyway? Can you make it in your kitchen? Nope, didn't think so! To make butter you milk a cow, let the milk sit and the cream rise, skim the cream off the milk, shake the cream until the fat clumps together and forms butter. It's that simple! Of course, most of us don't have a milch cow in their backyard, but the same results come from a store-bought carton of heavy whipping cream. Margarine and Crisco take some sort of scientific process to make.

As for a spread, the new butters that have been blended with (natural) canola oil or olive oil are great and smooth and natural.

I say fuck calorie count for natural food. Our health problems haven't spread out of no where, and part of the problem is all of this food product we eat. Fake, low-calorie food can't hold a candle to natural veggies and fruit and pasta and meat and dairy. Just watch your portions and enjoy REAL food... including BUTTER!