A Penny for Your Foods

Why is healthy food so expensive? I don't mean "health food." I mean real, live, down to earth healthy food. Yes, a banana at 50 cents at your local fruit stand is no bank breaker. But think about it like this:

1 bagel = 1 dollar, 300 calories (guesstimate) and limited nutritional value
1 banana = 50 cents, 100 calories, and a plethora of nutrients

To get the same amount of straight-up energy, you'd have to spend 50% more on the healthy food (bananas) than on the less-healthy option (a bagel).

This is obviously a very basic, overly simplified algorithm. Less healthy things like croissants and muffins are usually more expensive than something like a bagel. But then again, more elaborate (the reason croissants are so expensive - and delicious) or "exotic" fruits are more expensive. Silly little containers of fruit salad that consist mostly of days-old, over- or under-ripe honeydew generally run between three and five dollars. For the same price, you can get a small soup (which is of course fairly healthy, depending). But you can also get at least two muffins or three to five bagels! And this is all so far without taking into account fast food, where at McDonald's one can partake of a Sausage Egg McMuffin for a mere 450 calories - running only a couple of dollars.

No wonder this society is so unhealthy. When you can get a more filling (or disgusting...), higher energy meal for a roughly equivalent price, it's only logical to choose that option when eating based on financial reasons alone.

But I wonder why this is the case. I don't think I need to argue that a Sausage Egg McMuffin, or even a croissant, muffin, or bagel takes more time and money to produce. Aside from shipping costs, which make tropical and exotic fruits legitimately more expensive (but really, the "sausage" in the McMuffin did NOT come from the pigs next door), it has got to be cheaper to get an apple on the shelf for consumption than it does a baked good or especially something involving meat. That doesn't even take into account the costs - financially, agriculturally, and otherwise - of raising animals for slaughter or making muffins. (I'm probably being a bit hard on muffins...)

Yes, fruit is perishable. Yes, some of it comes from far away. But meat is perishable too, and I don't even want to know how long some of that McDonald's stuff has been sitting around. Plus, that meat had to travel, too. Here's where I think the difference lies: fruit is unprocessed. Thus, because processing involves labor and therefore wages, as well as machinery and factories and therefore huge amounts of energy, foods that are processed should by all rights cost MORE than unprocessed foods in equivalent quantities based on caloric content and nutritional value (better should be cheaper - deterrent!).

Then there's the whole issue of how you can't find fruit anywhere hardly. (Restaurants, coffee shops...)

....Don't get me started on vegetables.

Why Capitalism is Bad for Food

"People are starving in Africa so that American politicians can court votes in farm states."

It makes you think about what kind of world we really live in. Food, like water, is a necessity for life. But both resources have turned into profit-driven corporate machines. Why should people all over the world be starving, without access to water? The world couldn't always have been this way. People just don't live where they can't get water. It's that simple.

Water should be free, with unlimited access for everyone, everywhere, all the time. At the risk of being too political, only a hard-hearted hard-core capitalist could disagree with that.

But food is a tougher question. People have been trading in food for millenia, but somehow these days entire countries are full of starving populations. Why is this? Oh, the people we could blame. Colonists and colonialists, the industrial revolution, subsidies... the list goes on. Yes, these are sources of the problem but the real problem here is not what happened back then but why it isn't working now. And why isn't it working? Like Krugman says, it's because of the cost of raw materials and basic foodstuffs. And who's to blame? The American system, oil, biofuel, and the Chinese.

Top Food Myths, Facts, and Contradictions (Do you know the truth?)

1. Bananas are binding.
2. Red wine prevents cancer.
3. Dietary cholesterol is bad for you.
4. An apple a day keeps the doctor away.
5. Chocolate is good for you.
6. Chocolate causes pimples.
7. Bread crusts make your hair curl.
8. The Food Pyramid.
9. White bread.
10. Soy products.
11. Beans, beans, are good for your heart…
12. McDonald’s salads.
13. Menstruating women crave chocolate.
14. Diet soda.
15. Celery is negative calories.
16. No red wine with white fish.
17. No cheese with seafood.
18. Goat cheese is lactose free.
19. Caffeine is dehydrating.
20. got milk?

Tough Love

It's been a long time...

I've now been trying this pledge thing for a couple weeks, and let me tell you, it's TOUGH.
How can you avoid refined ingredients and sugar and soy and dairy and non-local eggs? It's really hard. Finally I've kind of figured it out, though. At least I hope so. I'm eating a lot of fruits and vegetables, pretty much abstaining from carbohydrates when I eat out of my house because it's so hard to find 'healthy' stuff. It's sort of turning into a whole foods-esque thing, although I don't think the raw food thing is really anywhere I want to go with this.



The tempting vice aspect of the things I'm avoiding is also hard. One thing I have discovered is Alternative Baking Co.'s 100% Vegan cookies. They're pretty good, actually, except for the fact that they're packaged so I now know how many calories are in a giant cookie. It's a lot...yikes.

It's a hard "diet" (although I don't like to use that word - maybe lifestyle?) to follow, but every day I figure out something new that makes it easier and better. And it's worth it - I feel generally healthier and no longer get that gross feeling you get when you eat too many nasties. All in all so far a success, we'll see if it lasts.

A Promise

This is my pledge:

To be a “fair-weather” vegan, in the following manner:

I will not eat dairy because I am lactose intolerant.

I will not eat meat unless it was killed by a hunter, and killed and butchered by the same person or someone they know. Read The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine if you have any questions.

I will not eat fish unless it was caught locally by a small-time fisherman. We’re talking in the morning, off the pier type of fish-purchasing here. No tuna nets for me.

I will not eat eggs unless they are from a family farm or personal chickens, and preferably raised organically. There is a reason egg baskets exist, after all.

I will not eat highly refined food products if avoidable, with the exception of maybe sugar because it’s really hard to get around.

This might not sound like veganism, but when you’re stuck in a city with extremely limited access to farms and local sustainable agriculture, it might as well be. I want my food to have a personal connection to the earth, to where we all come from. I believe that is the socially and environmentally responsible and sustainable way to eat and consume.

You can hold me to it.

Strawraspraisinana Oatmeal. What?

First of all, I need to start out by saying I hereby rescind all previous oatmeal-hating sentiments previous espoused. I am a convert. No thanks to Cereality. I have now mastered its preparation and oatmeal with a banana, maybe some strawberries, cinnamon, and brown sugar is now a necessary part of my morning routine.

Today was no ordinary day, however. Instead of staring my day with oatmeal, I am ending it with oatmeal. I have crafted, from the depths of my shelves and freezer, a decadent yet nutritious (unfortunately) dessert oatmeal. A handful of frozen raspberries, a handful of frozen strawberries, a small handful of raisins, and the better part of a banana makes up the fruit quotient. Then there’s the oatmeal. Oh, and then my secret ingredients: a seriously generous “dash” (and I use the term quite liberally) of cinnamon, nutmeg as I like it, and – to mix it up a little – cardamom! At first I hesitated over the addition of the cardamom, but then I realized that I love cardamom strawberry shortcake, and I figured since there were strawberries in my oatmeal, why not add cardamom? Then of course, the requisite spoonfuls of brown sugar on top … mix it all together … and voilà!

Seriously pink and full of complex flavors - the cardamom really came through – this dessert oatmeal is one for the ages. Although there’s no reason why it couldn’t be for breakfast. I just happen to be eating it at night.

And in the Morning, I'm Makin' Waffles!

I experienced a heartbreaking culinary disaster yesterday.

I really wanted waffles, because it was Saturday, which is clearly a weekend breakfast kind of day. I have a fancy-pants Belgian Waffle maker from Williams-Sonoma and it came with a booklet that has some waffle recipes, so I figured I would try one of those instead of doing what I usually do, which is make it up as I go. (Although in my defense, that tends to work out pretty well.)

So this recipe was one of those annoying ones where you have to whip your egg whites until they’re stiff. And being the lazy personal that I am, I decide I don’t want to dirty my hand mixer so I opt to whip them by hand. BIG MISTAKE. Yeah, I got them to whip up, but they weren’t exactly stiff or firm. They were more of what we in the business (ha) might call soft peaks. But my arm was tired, so I stopped. My other problem was that I tried to combine water with melted butter, and when I realized the idiocy of this I attempted to rectify my mistake by adding milk. But that didn’t really work either. Anyway, I decided to just go for it and mixed it all together.

When I poured the batter into the hot waffle iron, it rose immediately, like it was supposed to, but then after a couple of minutes of cooking it collapsed. I guess my waffle iron was too heavy for the not-quite-stiff-enough egg whites. I figured I should probably just let it keep going. I wasn’t about to start cooking a whole second breakfast at this point, after all. After a few more minutes, I started to smell burning, so I peeked (oops). It was getting a little burned, but it also looked a little uncooked – so I took a little piece and lo and behold, the insides were totally wet! I let it finish its cooking cycle and smothered it in brown sugar and fresh banana slices to try to mask the mushiness of its innards, and it kind of worked.

It didn’t taste terrible, it actually was pretty good, it just didn’t exactly work out the way it was supposed to. Alas, now I know for next time. I am just better at experiments than I am at recipes, at least in the morning when I am tired.