In lieu of a real post (though I’ve got one in the works regarding iron intake and pregnancy), these are my personal all-time favorite books that I’ve been thinking about rereading or reading more thoroughly over the summer — I want to post personal reviews that will convince you how important these books are too!
This is the first time that Greg and I have ever started going to the farmers market so early in the year. In years past, we loved going, but went sporadically, only remembering to go mid-summer, when more crops were already going strong, usually coming home with more vegetables than we were ever going to eat. This year will be a learning experience. I look forward to seeing the market change week by week as the season moves forward.
Right now the market is not as exciting as late summer, of course, but there’s still a lot of good stuff to get. Here’s an awkward photograph of Greg happily stuffing a huge head of lettuce ($2) into a bag:
Aside from various types of lettuce, at our market right now you mainly find leeks, Italian kale, chard, spinach, bok choy, carrots, herbs (especially cilantro), and A LOT of starter plants for kitchen gardeners.
Over at one of our favorite blogs, Addicted to Veggies, Sarahfaé is doing a weekly project highlighting one vegetable each week and showing off her amazing recipes that use each vegetable. For her first week, she chose leeks, which is a great seasonal choice! Find her here, or on her twitter where she posts her “daily fix” of her weekly veggie.
I’m thinking I should’ve picked up some potatoes at market today too. Our CSA’s booth had a basket of them. I could really go for some potato leek soup tonight (but add some of the kale we got today into the blend)!
I’ll leave you with this thought today, straight from the heart of Arcata, California, on the base of our lovely statue of President McKinley (whose thumb was once stolen):
Running for an hour was hard work. But, recovering this week was exceptionally brutal. My running streak was broken, but not before I got in one last mile run hobble on Monday night. I expected my recovery to be harder than average, because my right leg is an inch and a half shorter than my left. I have Cerebral Palsy. I’ve had it all my life. In fact, doctors once told my parents that they shouldn’t let me run or play outside with friends because I might injure myself. I still want to punch that doctor in the face. Who tells a kid not to play? What that doctor should have told my parents was to sign me up for weight lifting and track and field.
Cerebral Palsy (CP) is a physical disability caused at birth that affects 800,000 people in the United States. Cerebral Palsy is a broad term applied to anyone with a wide swath of motor skill problems. Some people with CP have difficulty speaking, which makes communication difficult. Many mentally impaired people also have Cerebral Palsy, but most people with CP are not mentally impaired. Even in 2010, Wikipedia has difficulty keeping the two straight giving the impression that people with CP are intellectually challenged.
This post will serve as a “sneeze page” or table of contents for inspiring people with Cerebral Palsy. Those of us lucky enough to have a mild impairment often go unnoticed, and can accomplish some pretty amazing things. As I write more about each of these people I will fill out this list with stories that I hope will hope inspire the abled as well as the disabled.
Over the next week, I’ll be writing about each of these inspiring people as well as sharing exercise tips that took me from couch potato at 24 to athlete at 30.
My father always says there’s “no such thing as can’t.” So, why can’t you run a marathon? The next time you’re feeling too lazy to take advantage of the marvelous gift and ability you have, remember to cherish your gifts and look forward to the rewards provided by vigorous exercise. Don’t let your body go to waste.
If you find this inspiring, and want to make a difference, take a minute to link to me or, share this post with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail. If someone had told me when I was 8 that I could be running in a marathon at 30, it would have changed my life.
I’ve been really into tofu lately. My pregnant body needs a lot of iron, and since soybeans are the beans highest in iron content, tofu is a great way to add iron into my diet. Tofu is also rich in calcium, magnesium, omega-3 fatty acids, and of course, protein. (If you are feeling a little iffy about soy in general because of all the conflicting things you’ve read about it, I suggest you read this article about soy written by John Robbins.)
Thinking of new ways to eat soy at home, I wanted to experiment with some tofu noodle comfort soup. I started out boiling enough water for my intended allotment of rice noodles and tofu with a shredded carrot, 2 low-sodium veggie bouillon cubes, a bit of onion powder, a pinch of nutritional yeast, a large dash of soy sauce, a tablespoon of white vinegar, maybe 1 tablespoon of sesame oil (though it could’ve stood more), and a very small pinch of salt (tasted it all to make sure it was working – as I was just digging through the cabinets to find things on-hand) — then I added the rice noodles and a couple of minutes later a generous helping of baby spinach and an entire container of tofu. I let that cook for only a few minutes more until the rice noodles were done (which only take like 4-5 minutes total) and voila. Yum. I served myself a bunch of noodles so the broth is barely visible, but it was so tasty. Total comfort soup.
I woke up last night thinking about a few things that bothered me about yesterday’s post. I know that I have been living in a special place with special opportunities for food. It wasn’t too long ago that Greg and I were living in Chicago, and for as large as Chicago is, it doesn’t even have a place like the Co-op here, I’m assuming because larger corporations like Whole Foods make it impossible in some ways. There are smaller stores that have this and that great thing, and I did see small start-up organic grocers pop up in different neighborhoods, but I always found myself doing the shopping at four different locations to even *find* what I was looking for, let alone save money on items. In another small town, or a strange town, or a town that is so small that it’s actually just a census-designated area, ahem, you get the idea, options will obviously be much fewer and farther between.
So I’ve added two more ideas to the saving money on organic food list:
- Ask your grocery store to supply certain products (like bulk organic beans) and get your friends to too. – Grocery stores sell what their customers want, and at a certain point, they’ll have to listen. When we were in Chicago, we frequented a very non-organic friendly grocer for our produce. Don’t get me wrong, the place had good produce, and lots of variety too. They still had the best looking peppers and tomatillos I’ve yet to see. As the neighborhood economy changed over the years that we were living there, the grocery started to change too. They restocked their shelves with more and more organic selections. I would find good deals on bags of organic apples or a huge box of organic spinach.
But write to your grocer about non-produce items especially, because these products get overlooked. Maybe your bulk section doesn’t have a single organic item in it! Maybe you’d love to eat tofu or soy milk, but you can only find non-organic brands that are loaded up with weirdness. Maybe you’d really love to replace the oatmeal you eat every single morning with organic oats and your grocer is going to miss out on your patronage because you might take the next thing I write seriously.
- Order online. I really hate this advice. I do. It’s not a green way to go, of course. There’s a lot of shipping waste and petroleum involved in this process. But if you are in the middle of nowhere and you demand organic flaxseed meal
It’s not uncommon these days for people to sit down with their friends to watch movies like Food Inc. or King Corn and realize with some horror that they would prefer to be feeding their families and loved ones food that isn’t laden with agro-industrial waste and pesticides, & that they would like most of all to be eating organic food. But the biggest obstacle for most people is cost. How does one switch their food choices to organic food without breaking their tight food budgets?
Greg and I went vegan before we considered concentrating on organic. I figured without the biological magnification of pesticides through meat-eating, we were already quite a bit safer. We actually started eating mostly-organic produce kind of accidentally and then just got used to it. The last time we were in a store where things were markedly cheaper in the produces aisles but also non-organic, I found myself being very picky about what to buy when I normally would’ve gone a little crazy and piled veggies into our cart left and right. In our situation, it happened because we moved to a town that is pretty organized around the idea of organic food. It’s fairly important here. One of the three large grocery stores in town is a Co-op that has a produce section that is almost exclusively organic.
One of the jewels of my food existence has been the Co-op’s “discount rack,” which is a small and almost unnoticeable rack in the midst of their produce where they mark down items that are beaten up a bit too much for normal sale or items that are taken off the shelf because while they look and taste great, won’t last as long as the freshly-stocked produce. Last week I came home with 17 perfect and crispy orange & yellow organic bell peppers for $6, which in my clumsy estimation is 35 cents a bell pepper. Pretty darn cheap.
But let’s look at a list of ways that anyone can save when switching over to eating organic. Start slow and integrate organic foods into your life bit by bit. There tends to be a fatalistic approach to things like this, an all-or-nothing feeling, but starting out piecemeal is worth your time and advantageous to your health!
- Buy produce that researchers say is important to buy organic. Corn and soy are where Greg and I adamantly started, because some huge percentage of these crops are genetically-modified (GMO) in the USA. Certified organic food is non-GMO. Other produce can be categorized by amount of pesticide found on the product. Big ones to watch out for are peaches, berries, bell peppers, & celery. But the list goes on.
- Go vegan/vegetarian. There’s really no two ways about it. Organic dry beans are cheaper than organic meat. Get your good fats from avocados (which are very low on the important-to-buy-organic list), tree nuts, and flax seed. Get your good proteins and fiber and vitamins and minerals from beans, tofu, and whole grains like brown rice, quinoa, oats & whole wheat. Feel better, live longer, and spend less — what’s not to like?
- Buy produce in-season. Produce that is in-season is obviously going to be cheaper, even when organic. Also, this increases the likelihood that you will be able to buy local produce as well. Tailor your eating around the seasons. If you aren’t sure what’s in-season, guess by the low prices or ask your friendly grocer! I know that in April asparagus and greens are good buys. Even in the winter there are in-season buys: cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cabbage get sweeter after the frost starts and who could forget a winter clementine once they’ve eaten one (or an entire box). Some staple produce is available all year round and is inexpensive, organic or not, because it’s shipped in from the south — bananas, onions, potatoes, etc.
- Buy in the bulk section of a natural food store. You will find good deals. It’s also fun. Dried fruit, whole grains, beans, flours, nuts, nutritional yeast, peanut butter, oils, pasta, corn meal, herbs. So much stuff to find there.
- Cut out junk food & processed foods. Similar to the previous advice — buying processed food not only adds a lot of weird ingredients to your life, even weird organic ingredients, but it adds a lot of packaging material to be dealt with and a lot of cost. You generally do not get the same quantity of food for your $1 when you buy processed foods, and that’s pretty important to consider when you are buying food for a family of several people.
- Eat out less often. That pizza you just ordered = lots of organic food from the grocery store. Eat from your kitchen, and take your lunch to work! Take several pieces of fresh fruit, leftover rice, a bag of almonds, even a can of beans to throw on a whole wheat tortilla with some spinach and hummus. So many options. Get creative. Save money.
- Farmers’ markets. I could rave about farmers’ markets, but I think this is self-explanatory. Direct consumerism cuts out extra costs. Good seasonal deals. Local. Usually a lot of organic stuff, but depends on location.
- Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA). Joining a CSA costs somewhere around $25-35 per week and should feed your family its week’s worth of produce, if not more, depending on what kind of eaters you are.
- Look for deals. Maybe your local Co-op or natural food store has a discount rack in the produce aisle, or in another aisle. Leaf through the store’s newsletter before you shop to see what’s on sale. Join the Co-op for a moderate fee and take advantage of the deals that they offer members. (Our Co-op offers 10% off everything in the store one Wednesday a month.)
- Start a garden. ‘Nuff said! You know it will be organic! Get involved in a community garden if you don’t have a yard.
- Get rid of your car. Honestly, I kind of think this is the most important advice, but I also know a lot of people who don’t have a car and still look for ways to afford organic food. If you have a car, and this is even a remote possibility for you, I don’t think I need to tell you the ridiculous amounts of money you will save by not owning a car. You can get the coolest bike in the world and still have tons of extra money to buy organic food. You can put a trailer on the back of your bike to haul the groceries and the kids. You will be my hero. (Check out my sister’s sweet ride here.)
If you have a goal for your health and family, you will find ways to accommodate that goal without compromising the overall balance of your life. If eating organic food is important to you, then sit with it & think about the ideas in this post and come up with your own. Maybe you will find aspects of your life that you can prioritize and you can make organic food more important on your budget. Maybe your community is a terrible place for getting affordable organic food, but maybe you’re the person who will change that!
Streak running is a task in insanity. I first heard of the idea from the second part of pod cast from The Story called Running Together where a son and his mother run every single day for 2 years straight. I then looked into the idea and found the United States Streak Running Association where runners have been running daily for 30+ years!
The rules of a streak are simple. Run at least 1 continuous mile every single day. A writer for the New York Times did a piece on her father who has run 2+ miles daily for 30 years. He apparently has a strange gait, and runs pretty slowly now, but he’s no worse for wear.
I’ve been on my first running streak for 8 days now. But, today on the 8th day of my streak, I participated in the 6 Rivers Running Club hour long race. The race was held at the HSU track where I run several times a week already. How could I not participate? Yes, I could have run slower, and not as far… But, with an amazing 10 year old runner named RJ running a sub 6 minute mile, how could I slack off?
I ate oatmeal with lots of fruit and flax this morning, and brought some sweet orange bell peppers, an orange, and some almonds to the race. I kept two almonds for luck, but can’t remember when I ate them. I was surprised no one gave me weird looks for eating a whole pepper like an apple, but they are so good. After the race I immediately devoured the orange, and tried not to be rude as I turned down cookies three times. Since I eat so little processed foods and don’t use salt, I get very little sodium. I’ve salted my dinner tonight, but it covers up the marvelous flavor of these orange peppers.
The first lap was a lot of fun, everyone was chatty and friendly. I was running too fast, but everyone else seemed so strong and fast. I was floating. My first three miles were too fast. I was nervous, but everyone around me was running so fast, it was hard to slow down. Going past 3 miles was strange…. The fastest I’d ever taken a treadmill was 7.0 and that was hard. And, I ran faster than that for 5+ miles before my mind started to shut down. By the end of the 7th mile I was dead. One of the fast runners who lapped me many times held up 3 fingers and shouted, 3 minutes left! So, I ran a lap and a half in three minutes.
Nothing hurt. I couldn’t breath, but I felt great.
When I stopped running I was actually surprised to notice the people in front of me weren’t running anymore, and I was hit with a wall of pain almost instantly, my left thigh was on fire and I could barely stand on my calves, let alone walk!
RJ passing people who both out ran me
The good news is I can still walk, the bad news is, tomorrow’s run is going to be extra, extra hard. I’m still questioning my sanity on this streak business. To make matters worse, the Avenue of the Giants Marathon is in 3 weeks. I was hoping to complete my first marathon, but with all this streak running, I’m probably going to compete in the half marathon or 5k instead.
The beauty of a running streak is that you never have to ask yourself if your going to run today. The answer is always an unquestionable yes! I’ve never run more than 5 days in a week before, so we will see how this goes. Next time, I’ll best 8 miles.
I am celebrating Easter mostly by eating a lot of fruit and beans, reading Howard Zinn, and enjoying the strange coastal winter storm we’re having. Er, we’re not really followers of any tradition around here. So, while I was slicing up an avocado in the skin and squeezing out the contents onto a dish (very mess-free way of preparing an avocado), I decided to have a full serving of the taste combination I had had a hint of the night before by accident.
Now, Frank’s Red Hot Original Cayenne Pepper Sauce has all kinds of recommendations for things to pair the sauce with — chicken & eggs and the like. There’s a recipe for buffalo wings on the label, which of course calls for butter as Frank’s itself only has 5 ingredients: cayenne pepper, vinegar, water, salt, & garlic powder. Frank’s plus that buttery addition is the flavor that everyone comes to recognize as classic hot wing material. Well, take the naturally-buttery and slightly greasy consistency of avocado and put it together with Frank’s right out of the bottle, and you’ve got yourself a dish that mimics the tender portions of hot wings in a way that Greg says is “creepy.” For someone attempting to approximate a well-known meat dish, this combo blows soy products out of the water and is about 8 million times better for you, and doesn’t require frying to boot. It’s also just a really interesting way to consume a whole avocado and everyone could use more avocado in his or her life!
(Turns out Frank’s is pretty tasty on mangos too.)
a new study sheds light on the honesty of scientific research on stroke medications. The study found that up to 33% of research results have been absconded. It’s well known that much research in this country on strokes is paid for by the large drug corporations. They fund the research, they approve the results. If you don’t discover what they want to read, your research can simply be ignored.
This manifests itself not in false studies, but in missing studies. When you’re studying a new stroke medication on animals and your research fails to prove the drug has any benefits, your work is simply forgotten, ignored, or lost.
Thankfully in 2007 the major medical journals have required registration BEFORE you start a study. This means that you can’t cheat and simply ignore results that don’t agree with the desired corporate outcome. However, that also means for the past 80-90 years it was acceptable to bias your research by making sure no one read studies your benefactor didn’t agree with.
Hopefully, enough people will care about this to demand registration for ALL peer-reviewed published research.
Once an onion sprouts, Greg has a hard time cutting into it (like, emotionally). This is our onion (one of many as we love onions around here) last spring. We put it in some dirt and let it grow for awhile, harvesting some of its shoots now and then. It grew very tall in our front window and produced an interesting flowertop!
a community farm in autumn
The farmers’ markets are opening up next month and I’m really looking forward to not only mingling with the veggie-eaters and growers of the community, but also having access to the wide range of plants available as the local growing season progresses. Greg and I usually take about $40 to the market, can’t resist spending it all, and come home with our reusable bags heavy with produce (especially when we go for the cruciferous sort – cabbage & cauliflower, so heavy!). But this year, we’re going try a new route to fresh vegetables, one that takes less time and less money overall ($24/week), our local community farm, or CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture), which will prepare a box of seasonal veggies for us every week for pick-up.
Over the past two years, it seems like more and more people I know are signing up for these programs — And I know this because they are always giving me the extra vegetables that they can’t eat in one week when I tell them how much I like veggies. Even in large cities like Chicago farms outside of the city provide locally-grown, organic produce for city denizens for pick-up at a designated spot in the city. Greg and I realized that since moving to California, we now live very close to our CSA, just right down the street, closer than our grocery store, and I never would’ve realized that this farm existed if it weren’t for that casual google search investigating local CSAs. For someone who will be 9 months pregnant in June (me!), this is going to be ideal. But if I’m the one to pick up the box, I might accidentally eat all the fresh strawberries on the way home!!
Buying produce directly from farmers at the market or at a community farm is an easy way to support your community and your planet! (Just think about how much less fuel it took for those veggies to get to your table.) Your fruits and vegetables are so much fresher and more delicious — really, you won’t believe how much flavor can be packed in a sweet pepper or a handful of cherry tomatoes, or how visually-pleasing food can be… I’m drooling just thinking about summer eating!
Eating junk food makes you sick. As soon as you finish off a plate of french fries or a pizza, you know you’ve done it to yourself. The stomach pains, lethargy, and digestion problems are just beginning. Most people eat junk food multiple times a day, and they eat it so often they lose touch with their body’s signals. When you eat too much junk you no longer feel the stomach pain and discomfort. A new study on rats may help explain why*.
I’ve been guilty of a french fry bender, but now instead of repeating the behavior when I’m sick the next day, I strive to eat as much healthy food as I can.
Even worse than no longer feeling the negative signals from your body, you also lose touch with the reward signals in your brain! Just like a drug addict, pleasurable foods are no longer as good. Eating fresh, warm, ripe strawberries on a summer’s day is marvelous. However, if you eat junk food constantly, your experience of strawberries is greatly diminished.
Rats fed a high fat, junk food diet for 40 days not only ended up fat, but they also had a greatly diminished reward mechanism. The study actually found that rats would ignore pain to continue eating junk food in the same way that cocaine addicted rats will.
Eating a wholesome plant-based diet not only tastes delicious, but it helps you lose weight, regain energy, and feel marvelous.
*note: I disagree with most uses of animals for research, but I won’t ignore the findings. This study in particular was one that could have been done on humans, it would just have taken more effort.
Paying bills is always a chore. If I manage to get a check off before a bill is late, that’s a big success. I hate paying bills to faceless corporations that espouse values I don’t support. However, my water bill actually makes me happy to pay because I believe everyone should pay for their impact on the environment. This belief most especially applies to corporations.
Big corporations have a blank check from the government to consume, abuse, and destroy the environment without paying a single dime for the resources they squander. When I pay for my family water use, I’m paying for the resources I consumed. When my water bill goes up, I have no complaints.
Today was the first time since moving back to California that I actually read the bill.
Last month I used 3000 gallons of water!
Water is so cheap I’ve never noticed the shocking volume of water I’m using. Water in California costs me about 1.4 cents per gallon. That’s about 5-6 cents to flush a toilet. This month, I’m going to make more of an effort to stop wasting so much clean, fresh water.
This is where you come in, I could look up government statistics on the Internet, but I’d really like to know how much water like-minded folks use. I have a family size of 2 and we used 2992 gallons last month. Post a comment and share your numbers if you can find them. If you’re like me and you have no idea how much you use, please post that!
John Robbins is one of my heroes. He’s just a guy. But, he’s a guy willing to stand up and fight for something he knows is true. The way corporations treat animals in this country is appalling. He first wrote about food in a book called Diet for a New America in the 80′s, and his book Food Revolution helped me to become a better, healthier person. It’s a challenge to find video of John that isn’t hard to watch, because many contain animal abuse footage spliced in, but this one has no dramatic editing. This is a very powerful speech that doesn’t need editing.
If you’re looking to improve your health, looking for the courage to make a change, or just interested in the way food is produced in this country, you should read Food Revolution. You can find it at your library, in used book stores, or if you must, on amazon.
I was looking up hummus recipes… every recipes website on the first page of Google is terrible. They are full of foods that better taste good because they will kill you. The worst part is most the sites are just search results of other sites, and they all steal recipes from each other! So, you get the same recipe over and over again. However, tonight I found something truly interesting. I was on All Recipes and I noticed in the footer that they have the website in different languages I saw SE Asian and thought, wait what language could they possibly use??
It turns out the SE Asia version is in English, yet all the dishes are completely different from the U.S. recipes site! The American version is full of cup cakes, but the “.Asia” version has all sorts of yummy veggie dishes I’ve never tried. One of the downsides to the lack of an American culture is not only are most of the foods I know from childhood bland and boring, they are terrible for my health. It’s a shame I can’t read Japanese because some of these recipe pictures look amazing!
