healthy food

Eat Local, Fund Local: Four tasty Kickstarter campaigns bring more flavor to the Cities

Mmm, pizza

Kickstarter has been a boon to an array of creative businesses, from small arts organizations to dance troupes to filmmakers — recently, it expanded to include more categories, such as food businesses and farming enterprises, and the result is delicious. 

 

Started in 2009, the site is a crowdfunding platform where funders pledge to support a specific project within a certain timeframe. The fledgling enterprises set the dollar goal, and if pledges meet that amount by the deadline, they get the funds. If not, the venture goes unfunded. 

 

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Good Food for Everyone!

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

- Confucius

I live in Minneapolis, where eating lots of local food is not at all strange. Many of my neighbors are CSA members, and we have been known to share ingredients, recipes, and restaurant recommendations. On my block, nearly everyone seems to know how to cook kale and how to grow tomatoes. It's easy for me to think that this is normal. It isn't.

In the past two weeks, I've had the opportunity to attend two events focused on good food. Both were excellent, and left lasting impressions.

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Lessons Learned From My Paleo Diet Experience

In my previous post, I wrote briefly about the Whole30 and some of the reasons to (temporarily) adopt a very strict version of the Paleo diet. After 30 days, I came to several realizations that I feel would apply to anyone trying to stick to food guidelines for various reasons -- be they Paleo, gluten-free, vegetarian, or local. Here’s what I learned:

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Getting Good Food on the Table -- on a Weeknight

Alas, Pete Wells’ “Cooking with Dexter” series in the New York Times is going the way of Mark Bittman’s “The Minimalist.” (For the record, NYT, I still miss the “Eat, Memory” series, too.) I always enjoyed Wells’ tales of cooking with and for his sons -- a glimpse into another family’s food life that was inspiring, fascinating, and amusing. Like Wells, I enjoy cooking with and for my daughter, exploring various ways to work together in the kitchen.

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Happy Birthday to Us! Reflections on Turning Two

It's hard to believe it's been just two years since my first post, a "golly gee whiz" piece about joining a CSA for the first time. There's a fine line between being excited and being naive, and I'm proud to run a site that continues to walk that line -- as we have since day one.

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Beet Borscht: A Recipe for Traditional, Healthy Food

I don’t think I’d ever so much as looked at a beet until after college, when I had houseguests who were passing through town. They had learned how to make borscht while serving as missionaries in Russia, and I came home from a long day at work to a simmering pot of the root soup that they’d thoughtfully prepared. I’ll admit that I was a bit nervous at first, but was relieved to find it both delicious and nourishing.

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Getting to Know "For the Health of It" Columnist Jill Grunewald

We at Simple, Good, and Tasty write, think, talk, and meet with people about local, sustainable, organic, good food all the time.

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Support Fair Trade Month with Halloween Treats that are Easy to Stomach

For us at Simple, Good, and Tasty, Halloween turns out to be a little bit problematic.

Most of the reasons for this are pretty obvious: most candy isn't local, isn't healthy, and isn't fair trade. Last year's post about fair trade chocolate and reverse trick-or-treating elicited strong response from readers who wanted to enjoy their treats without feeling guilty about it.

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School Lunch Contest: Eat Lunch With Your Kids, Send Us the Pictures, Win Prizes!

Last week's school lunch post, our "Open Letter to Our Children," was a direct response to the sixth graders at Minneapolis' Sanford Middle School who I'd met with the month before. Their question was simple and heartbreaking: if our communities love us, why do they knowingly feed us this junk?

The response to this post was fantastic. Many of you provided explanations, made suggestions, and shared your own views, and we at SGT were reminded once again of how much we love this community. For example, Laura wrote:

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An Open Letter to Our Children: We're Sorry About School Lunch

I recently had the chance to sit down with a handful of sixth graders at Sanford Middle School in Minneapolis. The students had been complaining that the lunches they were being served tasted bad and made them feel sick, and their teacher asked me to come answer questions, provide context, and make suggestions.

For an hour, these thoughtful students and I discussed healthy food choices, growing a garden, being pressed for time (a 12 year old girl told me she didn't have time to put an apple in her backpack in the morning), eating on a budget, and how to affect change. I've been thinking about the discussion ever since.

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