ColumnIf you eat well, does it mean you’re part of the one percent?

A comment that I get a lot in response to writing about eating locally and eating seasonally is that doing so is only doable for a small percentage of people; those with money. I have been told that it must be nice to be “picky” about what I eat. I have been reminded time and time and again that those who have a finite amount of money don’t always have the luxury of choosing real food.

But do we have to be well off to eat well?

It’s a question that I am constantly asking myself, particularly in a world of the one percent and the haves and have nots.

First of all, what we eat isn’t all about income. Part of what dictates what you eat is your location. If you live in a city that has committed to hosting local markets, chances are it’s easy to buy local and seasonal produce. But that’s not everyone. According to the USDA, 23.5 million people live in food deserts.

I have the luxury of living in a place where I have a lot of choice about what I eat, and that choice is reasonably priced. Assuming that you do live in an area where you do have access to real food, then what? Is choosing real food over packaged, fast food an activity of the one percent?

As Mark Bittman once said, “The “fact” that junk food is cheaper than real food has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are overweight, particularly those with lower incomes. I frequently read confident statements like, ‘when a bag of chips is cheaper than a head of broccoli …’ or ‘it’s more affordable to feed a family of four at McDonald’s than to cook a healthy meal for them at home.’ This is just plain wrong.”

I read a column written by Tom Philpott last week that showed that those on food stamps actually make healthier choices at the grocery store than those who aren’t on food stamps. According to Philpott, “a 2015 USDA study concluded that, adjusting for demographic differences, people who take SNAP benefits don’t consume any more sugary drinks than their low-income peers who aren’t in the program.”

In other words, it’s not necessarily the bottom economic category that is eating poorly, it’s the middle one. The one that could choose differently. In fact, the middle class are the big consumers of junk food, not the poor.

There’s another issue at play as well: the percentage that Americans spend on food as a part of their overall income is actually quite small. Food made up about 6.4 percent of annual household expenditures in the U.S. in 2012. In France it’s 13.2 percent, Spain spends 14 percent, Germany spends 10.9 percent and even Canada comes in higher than Americans at 9.6 percent.

Americans literally haven’t put a value on eating well. And I don’t mean “eating well” in the five-star restaurant sense. I mean eating well as in giving your body the real food that it needs to thrive. If you owned an expensive, high performance sports car, would you skimp on gas to save cash and buy the cheap stuff? No, you fill it with the ultra performance fuel that would keep it running well.

And yet when it comes to our own bodies, the only thing that we are obligated to keep running every single day, we fuel ourselves with all the bad stuff, and expect high performance anyway.

There are people struggling to put food on the table–about one in six Americans have that problem every single day. And we should work hard to deal with that insecurity. But then there is that larger category of people that aren’t extremely well off, but still use the “eating well is expensive.”

Now certainly, a $6 cold pressed juice isn’t affordable for everyone. I can’t afford that. An apple however? A lot of people can buy an apple, and you don’t even have to deal with the problem of disposable packaging that comes with the bottled juice. The problem is that when we have come to think of “healthy foods” we think of all the trendy, branded healthy foods. But all you need to do to eat real food is go to the grocery store and go to the produce section.

You don’t have to be rich to eat real food, but you do have to be willing to make the choice to buy whole products over processed and to take the time to make them. Maybe you will spend a little extra on some products, and less on other, but overall, the investment on food is an investment in your personal health, that of the community and that of the environment’s.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: kiwithing

The post Do You Have to Be Well Off to Eat Well? Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

Column What if we didn’t invest in food replacements like Soylent, but real food instead?

Unless you somehow missed what Soylent is, it’s an attempt at providing people with all the nutritional elements that a healthy diet would give them in one single drink.

The brainchild behind it is a 20-something tech guy named Rob Rhinehart, who we can only assume was so busy coding that he was annoyed at the idea of having to waste time on cooking and eating. Wouldn’t it just be better if you could drink a smoothie and call it a day?

The tech world has followed suite, and Rhinehart has charmed enough people that he has managed to get a heavy amount of investment in his product. Just last week it was announced that he had secured an additional $20 million in funding.

$20 million.

In a food replacement product.

Here are 20 other things that the $20 million could have been spent on, all that have nothing to do with food replacement, and good ol’ real food instead:

1. School garden programs.

2. Farmers market matching programs, where people using food stamps to buy fresh produce double the amount they have to shop with.

3. An anti-McDonald’s advertising campaign.

4. Supporting independent food journalism.

5. Food hubs that help serve as a link between regional and small-scale farmers and the retail sector.

6. Seed banks, to help protect biodiversity and our food system.

7. An anti Monsanto campaign.

8. Figuring out how to get fresh produce sold at every single gas station in America.

9. Start-up capital for zero waste restaurants.

10. Rooftop gardens.

11. Funding every single project on FarmRaiser.

12. Cooking classes for schools.

13. Community gardening programs.

14. A couple of food documentaries.

15. Food banks.

16. Urban farms.

17. Saving honey bees.

18. Eliminating the high fructose syrup industry.

19. Research about the link between cancer and pesticides.

20. Municipal composting programs.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: Dennis van Zuijlekom

The post 20 Other Things the $20 Million for Soylent Could Have Gone To: Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnMcDonald’s does not have your best interest at heart.

I saw a video last week from a new McDonald’s advertising and marketing campaign. It irked me. No, it pissed me off. Not because the video showed some super sized glossy burger with comments like “vegetarians, foodies, and gastronauts kindly avert your eyes” and “you can’t get juiciness like this from soy or quinoa.”

I couldn’t care less that McDonald’s is coyly trying to offend me. Making fun of foodies isn’t evil in any sense of the word, even if you spat out your chia seed smoothie in disgust.

No, what pissed me off is that McDonald’s gets to continue serving up terrible food that keeps workers underpaid, continue to contribute to a host of environmental and health problems and continue to ensure that millions and millions of people keep consuming junk that’s getting worse and worse for them without having to pay any consequences.

The video in question is an attempt at reminding eaters that McDonald’s is not some pretentious, foodie haven. That the fast food chain is in some way the “people’s” restaurant. It takes a crack at what the world of good food has become: elitist.

But if there ever were a restaurant that had the good of the general people in mind, it certainly isn’t McDonald’s. While the burgers may be cheap, the company is as much out to make a profit as anyone making kale chips. It’s not out of kindness or charity that it hawks its  Dollar Menu. It’s to bring in more customers to build its global empire.

How a company is allowed to continue in this way, when we know all the harm that it does to our health, is beyond me.

As one blogger wrote, “For those of us brave enough to continue watching, we’re treated to extreme close-ups of a perfectly styled burger, and I gotta hand it to them, it made me want that decidedly not vegetarian, not foodie-endorsed Big Mac.”

I mean, really? Knowing what you know, you still want that burger? If that’s the case, then McDonald’s advertising really is effective. I watch that video and feel dirty afterwards. We all should. This isn’t about real food. It’s about food products that make us sick.

Liking kale, or Brussels sprouts, or cauliflower, or whatever else the Internet determines is the food of the moment doesn’t make you pretentious. It makes you a person who eats real food.

But we also need more restaurants and people in the food world that can help do democratize real food, so that McDonald’s doesn’t keep getting away with what it does. Good food doesn’t have to be expensive, and no, it doesn’t need to be infused with anything. Want proof? Try this Real Food for the Broke, a meal plan comes out at $.95 per person per meal. And it doesn’t come with a side of diabetes or heart disease.

Let’s all get back to basics. Let’s cook more, and use more real ingredients. Let’s make sure that McDonald’s and all its nasty counterparts don’t continue to get away with all the harm that they do.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

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The post McDonald’s New Advertising Proves the Fast Food Chain Really is Evil (And Not Because It Hates Kale): Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnThe Fight for 15 is a reminder that the question of food is also a question of economics.

Cheap burgers and fries produced in mass quantities can only mean one thing: cheap wages. While American society continues to suffer the health consequences of our fast food nation, its workers continue to struggle with the fact that they can barely make ends meet. The average American fast food worker earns around $8.90 an hour. That’s $356 per week, and around $1400 per month.

Wages are so low, that according to one study, half of America’s fast food workers depend on some form of public assistance.

This dismal state of affairs has spurred the “Fight for 15” movement. In the last two years the campaign for fast-food workers to earn $15 an hour has grown, and continues to gain momentum as more and more people stand up for their right to a livable wage. In fact, the New York Times last year called living wages for fast food workers a “rarity” – if you were in that boat, you would fight too.

Fight for 15 is now growing beyond food, adding new sectors to its list of supporters. “The fact of the matter is, it’s not just fast food where you’re being treated a certain way,” 23-year-old RaAnah Killebrew told the Washington Post. “It’s retail, it’s security, it’s hospitals, it’s everywhere, where you’re not making the money you need to make to maintain.”

As the Post highlights, with workers from BP to Shell to Dollar Tree, “nearly every truly low-wage job in America is represented.”

It’s a good reminder that our broken food system isn’t just about access to food, it’s about poverty, and the inability for many families to make ends meet. In a developed country, shouldn’t everyone have the right to be able to make ends meet? In this country we’re good at turning a blind eye to poverty, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Fight for 15’s cause is all the more poignant when we consider recent figures from the country’s food pantries. According to Maura Daly, a spokesperson for Feeding America, because of last year’s cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, food banks are “feeding more people than ever before.” According to Daly, 60 percent of more than 60,000 food pantries have seen an increase in demand this year, and 36 percent say they don’t have enough food to serve the people that come to them for help.

When it comes to food, we often talk about the problem of access, but it’s important to remember that in a world of low wages and poverty, we also need to be talking about the systemic forces at play that make it so that people can’t afford to eat well. It’s a matter of not only ensuring people have access to good food, but that they can afford it as well.

As the International Business Times reports, “While metropolitan areas such as New York are densely populated with large numbers of people without food, the struggle is sometimes harder far from cities, where good food is more expensive and harder to access. She says more than half of the counties with the highest rates of food insecurity are rural.”

Low wages for fast food chain workers allows us to keep serving food whose costs are externalized, it also allows the system to continue to keep workers in poverty, unable to buy the sustenance that they need.

It’s not only our food system that’s broken, it’s the entire system that’s making a bigger and bigger gap between the rich and the poor. There are many programs popping up around the country that are trying to deal with this exact problem; Zenger farm in Portland is a great example. But we need more of this.

Everyone has the right to eat real food. Let’s keep fighting for it.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: Anette Bernhardt

The post The Fight for 15, Poverty and Our Broken Food and Economic Systems: Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

Column Good food doesn’t have to be perfect, just real.

When it comes to food, what is perfection?

Is it a perfectly formed pie, free of burnt spots because the crust wasn’t rolled out evenly? Is it a plate covered with the ideal ratio of starches to proteins? Is it an apple free from blemishes?

Whatever “perfection” is when it comes to food, in today’s society, we’re obsessed with it.

With headlines like “Can Science Perfect Food?” we’re often on the search for the things that will make our food better. We want to control all of the variables, be exactly sure what we get out. This article in question discusses Japanese chefs and scientists deconstructing traditional cooking methods to find the best way to prepare foods.

As the article states, “Knowing the science behind a dish reinforces the techniques used to create it. And, in the eyes of this group of scientists and chefs, this science can lead to a more perfect plate of food.”

This is true. To make good food you have to know how it all works, and why certain ingredients interact the way they do.

Cooking and baking is in fact a way of controlling food; you add a little of this and a little of that, and in the end, you create something completely different than what you started with. As the cook, you decide what happens in the kitchen. The zucchinis don’t magically turn themselves into zucchini bread, now do they?

But does a plate of food need to be “perfect”?

Because we always want society’s version of perfect, and as such, we search for control, we so often turn to mechanization. A bread machine that knows exactly what heat and what time the loaf of bread needs. A coffee machine that merely takes the push of a button to pull an espresso shot. A stand mixer that miraculously whips ingredients together.

Standardization, however, isn’t necessarily the indicator of a good thing.

It’s common to hear of good bakers insisting that their staff learn how to perfect breads by hand before turning to the help of machines in order to assist them in producing larger quantities. That’s because machines can’t do everything; you have to feel, smell and learn your way to good food, that in itself is the perfection, not what the end product may or may not look like.

Cooking and baking is an art, but if we get caught up in too many of the technicalities, we’ll quickly lose that art in our own kitchens.  And if we install too many machines that can do things “perfectly” we’ll lose the knowledge that made us culinary masters in the first place.

This idea of perfection doesn’t just apply to the finished product of our cooking efforts. It also applies to the ingredients themselves. Take a look at the produce section of your local grocery store. See any apples with spots on them? See any misshapen vegetables? Of course not, because they don’t sell as well. In an attempt to cut down on food waste, in France a supermarket chain had to launch an advertising campaign to get people buying “ugly” fruits and vegetables.

Good food isn’t perfect. Dinners aren’t always Instagram-worthy, but that doesn’t mean they’re any less delicious. Fruits aren’t always perfectly symmetrical and perfectly colored, that’s what makes them beautiful. Your picnic sandwiches are rarely (if ever) wrapped in paper and twine and a sprig of rosemary.

When it comes to the kitchen, good food is so often about serendipity. A dish is made delicious thanks to the ingredients you have on hand, not because you followed a recipe like a religion. Sometimes it’s more about the imperfections than the perfections.

We should embrace imperfections. We should embrace ugly foods. Why? Because real food is far from perfect. It’s just food. And it keeps us fueled and happy no matter what it looks like.

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The post Good Food Isn’t Perfect: Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnThe beauty of real food boiled down into simple words.

Eat real food, and eat well.

Usually Foodie Underground is a lengthy column about some version of the six words above. Sometimes I feel that every week I am just trying to find a new and creative way to say the exact same thing: eat real food. One week it can be an argument for buying dirty vegetables, another a dive into the world of direct trade coffee. But ultimately, the message remains the same. And when you write the same message all the time, you have to learn how to switch it up.

So this week, I figured that I should try a different spin on it. Yes, today’s column is all about real food, just as usual, except today it’s not a column; it’s a collection of haikus.

Why haikus? Because like real food, haikus are simple. They get to the essence of things in just a few syllables. What better way to talk about the simplicity and beauty of real food than this?

With that, here are 10 haikus all about good, simple food and eating well.

Autumn always brings

Another harvest season

Ripe for the taking

Food on the table

Drink poured into every glass

Is this not living?

Easy, simple, fast

Is there better happiness

Than fridge leftovers?

If you cannot pick

What stares at you from the plate

Cannot be real food

Dirt on your fingers

Smell of rain permeating

This is how food grows

It begins a seed

Growing into mighty plant

Cut for sustenance

We were all seeds once

This we share with food we eat

Born from Mother Earth

War is waged daily

McDonalds, Burger King

Food battles we fight

Orange, red, yellow

Exploding from the table

Colorful season

We must breath and eat

Good food sustains the good life

Take time to enjoy

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: Anna Brones

The post 10 Haikus About Real Food: Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnDo we really have to care about real food all the time?

Let’s be 100 percent honest with each other: sometimes eating well is a pain. It’s time consuming. It’s exhausting. So many choices to make, so many things to pay attention to and sometimes you just want to buy a damn pineapple even though you know it crossed half the world to get to you.

In these moments it’s so easy to ask oneself, “does it really matter what I eat?”

Deep down, you know the short answer to that question. Between a diet of fast food and a diet of brown rice and greens, you know which one to choose. But those are two extremes. In between is the everyday routine where real life often gets in the way of aspirational eating. Sure, you want to bake your own bread, your own yogurt and your own granola bars, but sometimes you just want to stuff your face with a butter, gluten-loaded brownie, now don’t you?

First things first: eating real food is about eating, not about eliminating. So often we focus on what we can’t or shouldn’t eat, that we forget to embrace all that we can eat. A sustainable approach to food is about appreciating food. That’s the only way that you make healthy eating a part of an everyday lifestyle.

Does it really matter what you eat? Yes, but that doesn’t mean that you need to calorie-count and drive yourself crazy with it. It just means focusing on real food, and cutting out all the junk little by little. An imported banana every once in awhile isn’t going to kill you. Packaged foods however, will.

Besides maybe providing shelter for ourselves, eating is the most important thing we do in a day. Of course it matters what we eat.

The problem with food is that we so often take an all or nothing approach. But eating isn’t about all or nothing. It’s about balance. It’s about enjoying food. It’s about founding a happy medium where you make time to cook and eat, and don’t feel like it’s taking over your life. It’s about savoring those cherry tomatoes at the end of summer, and saying no to the red produce in the middle of January, when it will bland and mealy. It’s about gathering around a table and enjoying a meal with friends.

In order to eat well, we have to prioritize. Yes, it may take longer to prepare your own food, but think about what you would be spending that time on otherwise. The average American watches 5 hours of television a day. Think if just one of those hours went to hanging out in the kitchen or around a table.

It does matter what you eat, and committing to a lifestyle where you eat well isn’t just about your personal health. It’s about the people around you; when we eat better, so do our friends, so just like you should surround yourself with good food, you should surround yourself with people that believe in good food top. It’s also about your community, about supporting the producers in your local area that are working hard to bring food to your table. It’s also about the environment; our modern day agricultural system has serious impacts around the world.

Eating real food should be empowering, not overwhelming. You have the chance to make positive change every time you grocery shop and every time you eat. Doesn’t that feel like a choice that you want to make?

Go out and eat well my friends, it’s very much worth it.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

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The post The Question of Real Food: Does it Really Matter What You Eat? Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnReal food isn’t a lifestyle accessory; it’s a necessity.

I was scrolling through Instagram the other day, you know, as you do. I follow a lot of people that are into food. Big surprise there. A lot of them are health focused in some way, shape or form, their focus being on eating whole foods and eating well. All things I can get behind. On the day in question, it occurred to me how “tropical” these feeds felt. A coconut milk smoothie here, a banana ice cream there. Sure there were more local summer berries and greens, but it felt like every recipe or dish I came across had a “zinger” ingredient; the thing that popped out as the “look at me I am a wonderfood! Aren’t I amazing?!” And these were not people living on tropical islands where they could walk out the door and go get all said ingredients.

I like coconut milk. I like ice cream made from bananas (sidenote: the process of making vegan ice cream with a frozen banana is kind of amazing). I like chia seeds. But all of these ingredients are sexy and exotic. Yes, they’re healthy and good for us (we do love the big ole S word, now don’t we?), but so are flaxseeds and a multitude of other really boring foods. Those don’t get the attention they deserve, because we’re busy focused on the more entertaining, flashy stuff.

That’s because food has become fashionable, particularly in the world of the internet. No, your breakfast did not wake up like that.

There was a day and age when all we had were cookbooks, and a cookbook was a collection of words and measurements and not much else. Then came the camera and the proliferation of food magazines and soon we were drooling over appetizing images of foods we dreamed of making. We would probably never get around to most of them, but with the magazine in front of us, we could at least believe that we would. Lifestyle porn at its best (or should I say, worst?).

Nowadays it has all gotten a whole lot worse, most of us obsessed with how things look as opposed to what’s actually in them. But food isn’t a lifestyle accessory; it’s a necessity.

We need to eat to live, but in modern society for so many of us, food has become fashionable. A bottle of cold-pressed juice in your hand is just as much an accessory as the bracelet you put on before you went out the door. It says something about you. It makes a statement.

There are plenty of people who can’t afford real food. Then there are those of us who can, and we’re focused on dousing everything in coconut milk, forgetting how far that can had to travel to get to us. We become blinded by the popularity of certain foods that we forget their ultimate impact. We eat because it’s trendy, not because it’s what sustains us.

I was flipping through a magazine the other day and there was a sidebar on the benefits of eating local foods, right next to a recipe for some mango, lime, passion fruit concoction. The irony was not beside me.

Can we all commit to not being seduced by all the sexy and exotic foods? Use a few exotic ingredients here and there, but turn the focus back to what’s around you.

Because we really do need to get back to the real foods that come from nearby, not just for the environmental carbon footprint argument, but because food grounds us, it gives us a sense of place. Stand in an orchard and eat an apple off the tree and you’ll know what I am talking about.

It may be fashionable to throw in a trendy ingredient, but that doesn’t make it real food. That just makes it something that’s Instagram-worthy.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: Stacy Spensley

The post Real Food Shouldn’t Be Fashionable: Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnForget the trendy foods, we need all the boring real foods back in our lives.

Pro tip: if you want to eat well you do not need to buy all of the trendy health foods at the store. Sparkly probiotic drinks, omega 3-antioxidant infused vegan ice creams, supercharged gluten-free miracle cookies? You need none of it. You need real food. The boring stuff. The stuff that doesn’t have a marketing campaign behind it, or its own blog or Twitter feed.

We’ve come to a day and age where food trends win out over real foods, even in the health food department, and in turn we put some foods on a pedestal and forget a whole lot of other ones. That’s a shame, because there’s a lot of good food out there. A lot of good real food that’s easy to prepare and good for the budget.

I keep thinking of my friend Amy and her tried and true cookbook “Ecological Cooking” that has been on her shelf for years. With recipes like Carrot Rice Loaf, you could say that the book is the definition of simple, budget-friendly foods that are sort of boring and unfashionable.

But that’s exactly what we need.

We do not need the new cupcake. We need a resurrection of the foods that are good for us, and easy to cook. And not all of them are sexy, or cool or trendy. That’s ok. Eat them anyway.

1. Beans

Black beans, pinto beans, navy beans; who cares as long as you are eating legumes. Ok, so black beans are sort of popular because of tacos, but for the most part beans are definitely in the boring real food category. But white beans make for an easy dip, and you can in fact make brownies out of black beans.

2. Buckwheat

No, it’s not a grain, buckwheat is actually a seed, which means that it’s gluten-free. You can use it to make hot cereals and you can grind buckwheat down into a flour, that’s got an earthy, nutty flavor to it, perfect for dense breads.

3. Cabbage

Kale is hot, cabbage is not. Which is weird considering they are in the same damn family. Ferment it, grate it, cook it, steam it, use it to wrap things. Become the cabbage lover you always wanted to be.

4. Flaxseeds

Embrace the flaxseeds. Love the flaxseeds. Grind them up and add a little warm water and you get a vegan egg replacement. Grind up even more and you can use flaxseed meal as a replacement for flour. Who knew seeds could be so versatile?

5. Millet

Most people equate millet with birdseed, but it’s actually a very nutritious grain that’s drought tolerant and can compete with the best of the trendy grains, like quinoa. You can even pop it like popcorn. Heidi Swanson of 101 Cookbooks even uses raw millet thrown into a muffin recipe to add a little extra crunch. I can get behind that.

6. Oats

Oatmeal is not the sexiest of breakfasts. Unless of course you make a savory one with pesto and put a poached egg on top. But while oats are on the bottom of the list of exciting grains, they deserve some respect. You can grind oats into flour, and even make milk out of them. And who doesn’t love a good berry oat crumble or a classic oatmeal cookie?

7. Sprouts

I grew up with sandwiches that had sprouts hanging out the edges. I was of course slightly embarrassed, but ate them anyway. And thank god my mother fed me sprouts, they’re healthy and easy to make at home. Lentils, chickpeas, alfalfa, mung beans – they can all be turned into sprouts, and to do so it’s as easy as growing them in a jar. How much simpler does it get?

8. Turnips

Of all the root vegetables, I think turnips don’t get a whole lot of love. Maybe simply because we don’t know what to do with them. But it has been used for human consumption since prehistoric times, so it has to have something going for it. You can roast them, and you can even sauté up the greens, which makes for whole vegetable cooking. Or you can turn it into a soup or a creative mash.

9. Yogurt

No, not the cute packaged version that’s full of “fruit.” (Hint: it’s not fruit, it’s sugar.) I mean good old plain yogurt. It’s a fermented food, so it’s full of probiotics. You can cook with it. You can make sauces out of it. You can eat it with homemade granola.

10. Water

Yes, water. Not coconut water. Not an overly priced raw juice. Just water. From the tap. Into your reusable bottle. It’s free and nutritious!

Now, with our boring pantries stocked, let’s start the real food revolution.

Related on EcoSalon

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: Nick Saltmarsh

The post 10 Boring Real Foods That Should Be Trendy: Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnIf we don’t have an appreciation for good food, we can’t live a healthy lifestyle.

Last week I devoured a burrito. And when I say devoured, I mean devoured. It was a breakfast burrito, and at the time it was the best breakfast burrito I had ever tasted. Why? It could have been because it had farm fresh eggs, spinach and sunflower sprouts in it, but mostly it was because I had just gone on an 8-mile trail run.

Sometimes the taste of our food doesn’t really have any relation to the actual food, it’s all about how much our body craves it. Whether it’s a burrito, a bowl of granola or a handful of almonds, if you’re hungry, your body craves it, and that makes it tastes exponentially better.

I was discussing this exact concept with my friend Hilary, and she told me about a recent article she had read called “Is Spinning Making You Fat?”

As active women that are hyper-conscious about body image, the influence of the media, and women’s issues in general we sat and fumed about it. As women, we’re now afraid of workouts because they will make us look fat? Note that “fat” in this case means muscular butts and thighs. Apparently not something to aspire to if you are to believe the mass media.

But then it got worse. Hilary pointed out that the article mentioned a celebrity trainer forbid his models from going to spin class because it made them hungry.

Hilary and I fumed some more. I thought about that tasty burrito I had eaten in my activity-induced state of hunger. This got me thinking about the extremes of our relationships to food.

On one end we have the problem of overeating. Mass consumption of processed food that leads to obesity. Then we have the other end of the spectrum, where the eaters are hyper aware of every single nutrient, every single calorie, every single carb. While they seem so very opposite, they are in fact one in the same, both an indicator of a lack of appreciation of food.

We are meant to eat. We are meant to be hungry when we exert energy. Hunger is a natural state of being. Overeating, however, is not, and either is starving yourself, or choosing your activities based upon how well they allow you to avoid hunger.

If we are to live truly healthy lifestyles we have to find a healthy balance. Eating is fun. Good food is delicious, a way to bring people together. Enjoying it, if we are privileged enough to do so, is a part of life. Not allowing ourselves the pleasure of food is as bad as eating too much of it.

While it’s easy to demonize one extreme and idolize the other – we abhor anything that might make us “fat” in the eyes of society, yet we put those people who stick to extreme workout routines on a pedestal – they are exactly the same thing. We can’t demonize real food. Humans eat. Humans look like humans when they live healthy lifestyles, not like stick, thin runway models. Ever tried to live on a diet of cotton balls like some of those models do? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

We have to appreciate food for food’s sake, because being afraid of it is just as detrimental as enjoying it too much. Mindless eating isn’t good for your health or your soul, and either is being on a strict regime of water and diet pills.

Embrace real, good food and a healthy lifestyle. Find balance. And if your thighs get bigger because you’re doing spin workouts or going on trail runs, then get yourself a breakfast burrito as a reward for being a healthy, active individual.

Related on EcoSalon

The Beauty of a Post-Workout Meal: Foodie Underground

The Thigh Gap: An Unfortunate Body Image Trend

Women on Film: Body Snark as Universal Women Speak 

This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: Jonathan Lin

The post Eat Good Food and Don’t Feel Guilty About It: Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.