Sparks in the Soil

6 Non-Extreme Healthy Food Strategies

Reader John asks a great question: what's in the shopping cart of someone who's making healthier food choices but isn't about to join a CSA or start drinking wheat grass juice?

Here are 6 easy first steps for a smarter, healthier shopping cart--without, as he says, "going so far as to claim that tofu with cottage cheese and salsa is a legitimate substitute for chicken Parmesan."

1. Eat Real Food

Michael Pollan wisely advises us not to "eat anything your great-great-great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food."  Things that might make that list are margarine (the kind that's full of hydrogenated oil, aka trans-fats), cheese-dusted crunchy snack foods, and candies whose first ingredient is a form of high-fructose corn syrup. Try choosing just one of these to skip at the market this week. Substitute real popcorn, high-quality (dark) chocolate, or even (gasp!) butter for the food-impostor.

2. Ratio Your Plate

When you think about your week's meals, think of the plate-proportioning system known as the Idaho Plate Method (IPM), where your dinner plate is filled 1/4 with protein (meat/fish/cheese/eggs), 1/4 starch or grains, and 1/2 vegetables (and the meal is supplemented with fruits and dairy). 

Peek into your cart: does its contents make this ratio even remotely possible?  The IPM is meant for diabetes management (check out this CDC study vouching for its efficacy), but is also a smart nutritional guideline for non-diabetics who want to stay that way.

3. Respect the Dirty Dozen

Organics aren't always worth the extra money, so if you're taking steps toward a greener lifestyle, start with "the dirty dozen," those foods that are most vulnerable to pesticides, hormones, and chemical fertilizers. The Environmental Working Group has a cute downloadable pamphlet so you can keep the list in your wallet and glance it in the produce aisle!  To get you started: choose only organic stone fruits (peaches, plums), lettuce, and potatoes. Don't worry about buying organic onions, avocados, or bananas.

Fun Facts About Sweet Potatoes

When I cut into a yam for last night's dinner, a white liquid oozed out of the root. I'd seen it before, but what was it?  I decided to find out.  It turns out that the white liquid is sap (probably mostly water and starch) that's stored in the yam from when it was harvested. 

When the green top of a sweet potato dies off due to frost, the root begins to convert starch to sugar, which is a) what puts the distinctive "sweet" in sweet potatoes and b) why yams and all their relatives are tastiest in the late fall and early winter. 

For more sweet potato botanical facts, check out this article from Soil and Health Library (which is located in Tasmania!).

I'm toying with the idea of trying to grow potatoes this year (incidentally, sweet potatoes are more closely related to morning glory vines than the veggies we think of as "potatoes").  I think I'll try some tiny red and white taters and see how that goes. 

Advice welcome!

Eggs and the Birds that Make Them

Last night, I went to Stir, a fabulous demonstration kitchen that's part of the innovative, exciting, and ever-growing No. 9 Group here in Boston.  The kitchen, which is a replica of No. 9 founder Barbara Lynch's home kitchen, features all kinds of wonderful gadgets, including a thermo-circulator that keeps water moving at a perfectly precise temperature, cooking foods consistently and beautifully.  But I wasn't there to experience gadget-y bliss, I was there to experience a true wonder-food: the egg.

It happens that also attending last night's class was Terry Golson, a quirky, fun lady who lives even further from downtown than I do.  She raises chickens (stop whatever you're doing and check out her "hen-cam" right now!), and had lots to add to the chefs' delicious demonstrations.

I can't possibly describe the heaven that was Brendan's duck egg cooked for an hour in the thermo-circulator until it was a transluscent, quivering, just-cooked beauty resting on a bed of Savoy cabbage.  Ok, so I can try to describe it.  What I meant was, I can't replicate it at home without a thermo-circulator.

But what I can do is share with you some things I learned about eggs and the birds that make them.  Some tasty tidbits:

• If you want to know if an egg is fresh, place it in a bowl of water.  A fresh egg will sink to the bottom, while an older egg will float.

• Never hard-cook a fresh egg; wait a week.  A fresh egg's membrane won't detach from its shell enough for you to be able to peel it cleanly.

• Supermarket eggs are allowed by law to be sold 10 weeks after they're laid.  If you're able, find an actual person who owns actual chickens, and buy from them (I buy from Backyard Birds in Concord and feel like a lucky duck, to mix a metaphor, every time I grab a dozen).

• Season scrambled eggs when they first hit the pan as well as afterwards - salt breaks down the barrier between white and yolk and allows better incorporation in a soft scramble.

• Duck eggs are twice as big as chicken eggs!  This may be common knowledge, but it was new to me.  In my mind, ducks are smaller than chickens, but apparently I don't know my chickens!

Maybe Terry will let me met her hens one of these days, but until then, I'm enjoying watching her hen-cam and knowing that even though they're slowed down in winter, those cluckers are putting forth a product that is so simple, so perfect, so malleable, and so accessible.  Don't tell my husband, but I harbor secret dreams of having chickens one day. 

The Corn Syrup Lobby

The high-fructose corn syrup lobby is working hard to counter all those pesky notions floating out there suggesting that high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is generally not a great thing, that its production is killing the American farmer, and the soil that farmer farms, and that it is the cornerstone of a system of synthetic nutrition that has led to epidemics in obesity, diabetes, and more.

In the commercials (click here to view), the hapless corn-syrup detractors have no idea what they're talking about, only stammering, "well, you know what they say about it...."  The "educated" pro-syrup person in the ad, however, is always smug, armed, and ready to gently chide and convince the person to take a bite - two! - of a Popsicle, or help themselves to a mug of fruit punch at the kids' party.

One fact that's mentioned in every ad is that high-fructose corn syrup is "fine in moderation."  I don't disagree with that, actually, in theory.  But in reality there's nothing about HFCS that actually reflects the concept of "moderation."  I read in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle that we consume 54.8 gallons of soda per person per year in America.  CNN has reported that soda makes up 10% of American food calories. The consumption of HFCS doubled from 1980 to 2004, to 78 pounds per capita in '04.

Where's the moderation there? 

And that doesn't even touch the production side, where farmland is crowded with genetically-modified corn plants that are made for processing, not nourishing.  Fine in moderation.  In theory, maybe.

What's your view of HFCS?  Do you avoid it religiously, or try to steer clear of it when you can?  For my part, I cut out soda from my diet a few years ago and don't regret that at all.  Like everything else in my eating life, I am trying to be faithful to a true concept of "everything in moderation."  That's why the corn syrup lobby ads bother me so much. 

In the spirit of moderation, meanwhile, David Lebovitz has a fantastic post that explains when to use corn syrup in baking (it's an "invert sugar," meaning it keeps crystals from forming, a great thing when you're making shiny, smooth things like caramels or chocolate sauces).  The Karo syrup that's used in baking, though, is not "high-fructose," it's important to note. And often there are more natural substitutes (like honey in caramels) that can stand in for corn syrup.  Often, but not always.  Moderation.

Half-Finished Food, Yum?

I've noticed a trend in food magazines over the past year - they are illustrating their articles with plates of half-finished food, food that's in the process of being eaten.  A broken-open muffin.  The last drops of soup at the bottom of a bowl.  And, in the recent issue of Fine Cooking (my favorite food mag of all time), the bones, crumpled carrot remains, and streaks of sauce left over after the editor ate the cover recipe, a previously luscious-looking coq au vin.

Examples like that last one really bother me.  They seem to me to be saying, "We've run out of ways to show you a beautiful chicken dish, so let's show you that we liked it so much all that's left are the bones."  It shuts down my imagination about what the dish will be like to eat, and gives me that "sigh, well, I guess it's time to do the dishes" feeling.

But not all food-in-process photography is so irksome.  This piece of pie from Gourmet is the trend at its best.  It looks like a real person has helped themselves and is about to take a bite - but unlike the chicken example, I want to hip-check that person out of their chair and take up their fork for myself.  It's appetizing, even if it's not "neat" in the traditional food magazine style.  It invites action, chiefly the instinct to swipe up those almond-y crumbs with my finger, and it highlights the colors textures of the dish.

I think there might be another angle to this trend, one that connects with the whole locovore/Omnivore's Dilemma movement.  Food magazines are picking up on the growing number of Americans whose chief criteria for good food is that it is real, genuine, and looks like it actually came from somewhere you could visit.  Never forget that the chicken you're braising is an animal, complete with bones.  The fruit in that pie came from a tree and was gently cooked down into a sweet, gelatinized filling.  It's not only food you actually want to make, but food you can imagine yourself sitting down and tucking into, leisurely, at a table.  Eating is, perhaps, coming back into vogue.  Or at least Gourmet.

Have you noticed the magazine trend?  What do you think of it?