Sunday, September 26, 2010

Baby carrots as junk food?

Oh please, do we really have to lower the bar to that level? According to a recent article in the New York Times, apparently "Eat 'em like junk food(tm)" is the next approach to entice people to increase their vegetable intake. Sigh.............I am not often speechless.

I only read about 20 of the comments. I just don't have it in me this morning to formulate a response.

I expect that most of my readers are vegetable lovers and eaters, but please feel free to chime in with your thoughts, no matter where on the spectrum they fall.

"Cultivate your life - you are what you grow - inch by inch, row by row"

Diana Dyer, MS, RD

Addendum: I am still distraught and speechless, but I recommend reading the following blog post interviewing Mark Bittman, cookbook author and columnist for the New York Times. The last line in this interview says it all; somehow cooking needs to become the norm again, and I agree with Mark that means ordinary people cooking ordinary, healthy foods (like vegetables!) to eat every day. The cooking standards should not be fancy foods, time-consuming or fancy preparation, fancy dinners (ok - once in a while, but not every night), and definitely not fancy TV chefs. I am resurrecting my crockpot to solve my own "time" problem while we juggle the farm and two houses along with always, always, always cooking in bulk.

Please share your thoughts and tips about how you manage to cook and eat healthy foods in spite of all the pressures not to do so that our society presents!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Please share your thoughts and tips about how you manage to cook and eat healthy foods in spite of all the pressures not to do so that our society presents!"

I use your breast cancer "diet" as a guideline (I don't see it as a diet, but healthy food). My favorite cookbook is my great aunts homemaking and cookbook from 1908. The recipes (if you can call them that) are basic and with few ingredients. I do a weekly menu which includes 2 fish nights (salmon, tuna etc), 2 vegetarian nights and 2 pork, beef etc nights (but I get all my meat from an organic farm in Middleville, MI) and consider what is in season and pick it up Sat. am at the farmers market or co-op as well as what veggies I need to use out of my garden. I have taken SEVERAL classes from the farm here in Grand Rapids where I get raw milk (seeds, gardening, dairy...learnt how to make butter, creme fraiche, ice cream, yoghurt, drying and lacto fermentation, canning and freezing...and what I HAVE learned is that people generally are in 2 camps now a days, they either are so anal retentive that they can no longer just "throw a few ingredients together" and feel they need to rely on intense recipes OR (I love to see what people put in their shopping cart) they buy most of their food in the frozen food or packaged food aisles. People look at me like I am crazy, but I figure I am a "healthy" crazy. It's a shame, but they need to "reinstate" good old fashioned "home ec" in the schools again just to get people back to the basics. Take care

Rhonda

Diana Dyer said...

Thanks for your thoughtful comment, Rhonda. How about re-instating both 'home ec' and 'shop' but for both boys and girls? :-) Wonder what the odds are for doing that?
Diana

Cynthia said...

My kids have both had "life skills" class in middle school that was co-ed. They learned cooking and sewing skills. So home ec isn't gone from the schools. No shop class, though. That is replaced by Tech Ed, which is a computer class.