News & Views

Image Credit: Kate SommersHas there ever been a food more perfect than the carrot? Delicious raw or cooked, skinned or peeled, if I edited the dictionary, there'd be a carrot next to the word "superfood" (if I edited the dictionary, the word "superfood" would be included, yes). The picture would show those lovely orange roots (with green tops, of course) in my 7-year old boy's just-washed hands.

The fall recreational soccer leagues are now behind us. And with them, the nutritional pitfalls of post-soccer snacks.

If you’re a parent with a kid who plays some kind of sport, chances are you know what I’m talking about. For some reason, snacks have become such a ubiquitous part of recreational sports that questioning their necessity is met with the same disdain as, say, suggesting that our children play their next game with their hands tied behind their backs.

Not that I’ve ever suggested such a thing – kids playing with their hands tied behind their backs, I mean. But I have, on several occasions, tried to gently convince whomever will listen that the post-game goodie grabs do more harm than good.

Susan Powers of RawmazingThis article was written by Susan Powers, owner of Rawmazing, a Twin Cities-based raw food business that teaches people to prepare and enjoy raw foods. (You can see Rawmazing's class schedule here.) We're thrilled to have Susan write this article for us.

Let’s say you’re the CEO of a factory pork producer. Your top priority is squeezing profits out of pigs. But there’s a downturn in the market. There’s more supply than demand for pork products, which means prices have fallen so low that you can’t charge enough to make the profit you promised your board of directors and shareholders.

Is it time to worry?
Sign FDN's petition and help stop government pork for factory pork
Not likely. Because under the current system, sanctioned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there are two things you can do to boost your business:

"The Feast," by SubwayHere’s what I’m dealing with. I’ve got these 2 boys, 7 and 11 years old (yeah, yeah, just like “7-11”), and they always seem to take forever to get going in the morning. Like this morning they woke up at 7 am, and they took about 20 minutes to get dressed. I was totally annoyed. I mean, the boys took so long we didn’t even have time to let them eat their cereal in front of the TV. We basically had to rush them out the door as soon as their coats were on, which meant that - again - they’d be eating breakfast bars in the car in the way to school.

Just last week, Congress voted its support for the current agricultural appropriations bill, HR 2997, reauthorizing, among other things, funding for school lunch programs.

I supported the bill because, as I was told by the head of nutrition for my kids’ school district, the lunches served in school cafeterias are the only daily meal that millions of American children can count on.

Every Tuesday morning, the supplier, under cover of pre-dawn darkness, packs up his truck in rural Minnesota to make his weekly delivery. His drop-off site is a nondescript, middle-class home in a Minneapolis suburb, where his regular customers begin to converge around 8:00 a.m. They drive up, park, pick up their orders, leave cash, then return to their everyday lives.

What they’re doing is illegal, but the contraband isn’t cocaine, krugerrands or even Cuban cigars.

It’s milk. Straight from the cow. Whole, non-pasteurized, non-homogenized, non-industrialized, raw milk.

Photo by Tim Morris, Wired MagazineSeptember's Wired Magazine features one of the scariest technology articles I've ever read. It's not a look at how our government plans to train digital video cameras on our every move. It's not a piece on robots that are smarter than us, or small kids who can see into the future. It's not about aliens or even Silicon Valley VCs. The article I'm referring to, written, by Patrick di Justo, is much scarier than any of those things. It's called:

People who love to eat typically love to try new food—and for good reason! Exploring the world of flavor isn’t just a hobby. It’s a way of life. Are you a food adventurer?

Great Reason Number 1: It’s easy to start!

My six-year-old nephew won’t eat anything he hasn’t already tried. (He doesn’t have an allergy. He’s just picky.) If this is the rule that guides his choices for life, then when he is thirty he will only have eaten macaroni and cheese, toast with peanut butter, purple grapes, and milk.

Here's a video of New York Times food writer Mark Bittman speaking at the TED conference in 2008. Mark is as compelling a speaker as he is a writer. And I can't think of another time someone used the phrase "cow farts" in a presentation and it wasn't even a little bit funny. Here's what the good folks at TED wrote by way of introduction:

In this fiery and funny talk, New York Times food writer Mark Bittman weighs in on what's wrong with the way we eat now (too much meat, too few plants; too much fast food, too little home cooking), and why it's putting the entire planet at risk.

Take a look: