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A friend sent this link to me and it is absolutely worth re-posting. I will say it just one more time: If we stopped pay­ing farm­ers to grow corn with our tax money, they would grow some­thing much bet­ter than corn. Any­thing would be bet­ter for that mat­ter. Okay, well maybe not Soy either. No soy and no corn would be bet­ter. I will stop now.

The Real Rea­son Why Poor Peo­ple Are Fat

Warn­ing: The sec­ond pic­ture in the post is going to catch you by surprise.

I recently read the results of a study that was con­ducted to deter­mine the pos­si­ble health effects of the com­mon every day food dye referred to as Red #40. Like so many of the count­less reports pro­duced to scare us into some type of mass pho­bia about the foods we eat, this one is no dif­fer­ent. This study, in which rats were fed a diet con­sist­ing of up to 10% Red 40 for two weeks, concluded

Red-40 sig­nif­i­cantly reduced repro­duc­tive suc­cess, parental and off­spring weight, brain weight, sur­vival, and female vagi­nal patency devel­op­ment. Behav­iorally, R40 pro­duced sub­stan­tially decreased run­ning wheel activ­ity, and slightly increased post­wean­ing open-field rear­ing activ­ity. Over­all, R40 pro­duced evi­dence of both phys­i­cal and behav­ioral tox­i­c­ity in devel­op­ing rats at doses of up to 10% of the diet.

Once again it seems we are fed infor­ma­tion from a half baked study from some fly by night orga­ni­za­tion called the Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Med­i­cine, in an effort to scare us. We have been eat­ing this stuff for years. For that mat­ter I am sure many peo­ple con­sume more than the pre­scribed 10% noted in the study with rats. I have per­son­ally been con­sum­ing foods with things like red 40 since I was a kid and I am still breath­ing.  Big deal, so what if it is red. Besides I am not a rat!

That, was the old me talk­ing. The “me” that existed less than a decade ago. The one that often let reports about things like food dyes, go in one ear and con­tinue reading…

Do your home­work.  If you are crazy for bananas do some price com­par­isons from your avail­able sup­pli­ers includ­ing com­pet­ing gro­cery stores or prefer­ably the local farm­ers mar­ket. When con­sid­er­ing costs try to esti­mate what your weekly usage will be, how much dis­tance will be trav­eled to get them (fuel & time), and how long they will keep before going bad. Some­times when you weigh all three of those points together, cheaper doesn’t always mean its a sav­ings. Buy­ing them for .39 cents per lb doesn’t do any good if they are already turn­ing black before you pay for them. It also doesn’t pay off if you have to drive 25 miles each way to buy them.

We can wipe out some bananas with a fam­ily of four in no time. We learned to buy a large por­tion of them while they are still green. This helps sig­nif­i­cantly reduce re-stocking trips and fuel to the mar­ket or store. They ripen in no time (usu­ally) so that we have a new batch ready to eat just about every day. This is a skill to be learned through prac­tice. “peel on, peel off Danielsan”

BTW: This is another one you could get away with buy­ing con­ven­tional if you had to. You are going to peel it any­way so dont go broke if organic is too high for your bud­get right now. All in good time.  Organic is always best, but you have to make choices some­times and this is one where you can cut corners.

Lastly look into Fair Trade prod­ucts when­ever you can. You should be will­ing to spend a fair price for a fair prod­uct. The low­est price guar­an­tee always comes at the expense of some­thing, or more often then not,  some­one else..

There is so much good info in this movie. Corn is in every­thing and it is genet­i­cally mod­i­fied to boot! If there were two movies I could give to every­one for free, this would be one of them. Food, Inc. would be the other. This DVD is avail­able through the “Stuff We Like” page. Rent it, buy it, just make sure you do get the chance to see it.

If you have ever won­dered what those four or five digit num­bers on fruits and veg­eta­bles are for you are not alone. They actu­ally do serve a higher pur­pose beyond dri­ving busy cashiers every­where mad. Those num­bers can tell you a great num­ber of things about your favorite golden deli­cious or zuc­chini squash. Things you really should know.

Most impor­tantly these num­bers can tell us one of three things. They can tell us if our pro­duce is:

Con­ven­tion­ally Grown – This means that one or more of the fol­low­ing may have been used:

• Syn­thetic pesticides
• Fer­til­iz­ers made with syn­thetic ingre­di­ents or sewage sludge
• Syn­thetic herbicides
• Antibi­otics
• Bio­engi­neer­ing
• Added hor­mones
• Ion­iz­ing radiation

Organ­i­cally Grown — This means that the pro­duce is one that was grown with­out the above listed items for con­ven­tion­ally grown produce.

Accord­ing to United States Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture (USDA) “organic food is pro­duced by farm­ers who empha­size the use of renew­able resources and the con­ser­va­tion of soil and water to enhance envi­ron­men­tal qual­ity for future generations.”

(GMO) — Genet­i­cally Mod­i­fied Organ­ism – This means that the pro­duce has had spe­cific changes intro­duced into its DNA by genetic engi­neer­ing. con­tinue reading…

If you are read­ing this you likely already know that “con­ven­tion­ally grown” pro­duce is not good a thing because pes­ti­cides and chem­i­cals in and on the food you eat is bad. (click here if you are not sure if you have been eat­ing con­ven­tional, GMO, or organic) I am amazed that so many peo­ple still choose to ignore this, espe­cially when they go to the gro­cery store. To be fair, I too once let the pretty arrange­ments of pro­duce  intox­i­cate my senses when shop­ping.  All that  unnat­u­rally pretty, oddly col­or­ful,  and uni­formly shaped pro­duce looks appeal­ing. This com­bined with a naive sense of faith in “the pow­ers that be”  also helped me to ignore the obvi­ous. If I ever did let my mind wan­der to images of rat poi­son and the like, I quickly dis­missed those unpleas­ant thoughts. It was eas­ier to believe that that the gov­ern­ment (and even their gro­cer) had my back on this issue. They wouldn’t allow  any­thing on the food that wasn’t well tested and safe for my fam­ily and I to eat right? This is eas­ier to  believe because if you choose not to, you will be forced to ques­tion other things. That is unset­tling for many peo­ple and a lot of work too. con­tinue reading…

Find your local farm­ers market.

If you have a local farm­ers mar­ket this is one of the best places for inex­pen­sive fresh pro­duce. They are almost always less expen­sive than the gro­cery chains but I am sure this can vary. We have found that not only is our local farm­ers mar­ket less expen­sive, the pro­duce lasts longer. It is also impor­tant to sup­port local grow­ers and the local econ­omy. This in turn reduces emis­sions. No need to ship pears from Ecuador and warm the planet  in the process.

Buy organic, but don’t break the bank either. con­tinue reading…

This was a very rel­e­vant ques­tion wor­thy of a post all by itself. It is also very rel­e­vant as I will be post­ing some­thing related about sub­si­dized crops later this week­end.  In short, gov­ern­ment sub­si­dies for corn, soy, and wheat make it pos­si­ble for com­pa­nies to pro­duce foods, with lots of chem­i­cally com­plex ingre­di­ents, that are cheaper to buy than foods that actu­ally are ingre­di­ents. How sad is that? Check back soon for that post.

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“Hey Jeff I think this is great. I don’t know how you put it all together. I’d really like our fam­ily to get a start on this. I know it will be hard. Please keep it up. I do have a ques­tion. What is your gro­cery bill like for a week. I know for us the bet­ter you try to eat the more it costs.“
–Thanks Heather

Heather – I am excited to hear you are ready for some fam­ily wide changes. What a great way to raise the next gen­er­a­tion so they don’t think twice about the choice between a pop tart or a banana when they are adults.

The gro­cery bill ques­tion is one that we get a lot from par­ents and a valid one to ask. con­tinue reading…

Grape Tomato & Avo­cado Salad

This one is awe­some if you like avo­cado. Best part about it is there is no cook­ing involved. Funny thing, I never did until about 6 months ago. Now it is one of my favorites!

Enjoy!!

For break­fast some days we do an alter­na­tive  full veg­e­tar­ian meal with these and lots of fresh organic fruits. The pro­tein in the nuts helps to carry the meal much fur­ther than fruits alone. With­out them I get hun­gry about an hour after we eat. I do still enjoy my egg and spinach scram­ble but this is a nice change once in while. I must admit that I do feel a bit like a squir­rel sometimes.…

This will last us about two weeks. Well, maybe just a bit more… I will post a fol­low up when the last nut has been consumed.