healthy food

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:

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.

I'm sure I've never looked forward to a doctor visit. Maybe it's because I've never hit my ideal weight (or my doctors' ideal weight for me), so I expect a talking to each time I go. Maybe it's because I passed out one time when I gave blood in high school, and the idea of my doctor's office taking blood is too close to the idea of giving blood for comfort. More likely, I've never looked forward to going to the doctor because nobody looks forward to going to the doctor. What's to look forward to?

Namedropping Michael Pollan isn't likely to bring you much insider food cred these days. If you think about good, real, local, organic, sustainable, fresh, tasty, whole food - heck, if you've watched "Oprah" lately - then you've probably already heard the name Michael Pollan more times just this week than you can count. When "The Omnivore's Dilemma" was published in 2006, many of us were just starting to think about the amount of corn we were consuming.

Would you laugh if I told you the key to human potential is a bowl of vegetable soup? Or a plate of meat loaf? A chocolate chip cookie? If the food is part of a delivery from Open Arms of Minnesota, then it is indeed key to someone’s independent and meaningful life.

Since 1986, Open Arms of Minnesota has run a meal delivery program for Twin Cities residents living with, and affected by, chronic progressive illnesses. (Full disclosure: I’ve volunteered in their kitchen for close to twelve years.) Its largest and original client population is people living with HIV and AIDS. Open Arms also serves people with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), MS, breast cancer, and similar illnesses. The meals can be the difference between staying healthy and spiraling into disability. For many, this means living at home instead of going to a hospital or nursing home.

We're excited to announce the launch of a brand new club in town - ours! Simple, Good, and Tasty - in partnership with the good folks at Mississippi Market Co-op in St. Paul, MN - is launching a book club focused on local, organic, sustainable, fair trade, healthy food books (we can think of about a thousand to start). We think a book club and discussion is a fantastic way to engage the community and get people talking about food in our families, our culture, our homes, and our markets.

Who out there is undertaking a January detox this year? I know I am, for the 4th time in about 2 ½ years. Somewhere in our collective consciousness, the detox has become a fairly commonplace practice, giving our bodies a clean slate on which to scribe the new year. But what about the rest of your surroundings? I don’t know about you, but once I start this ritualistic stripping away of toxic baddies and enriching my diet with all of this fabulously healthy local and organic food, I wonder what else around here needs to be buffed up. A detox for the home? You know, that sounds pretty sensible. But where on earth to start?

What a year it's been! Between our first post - proudly proclaiming that we joined a CSA - and our recent letter to Santa Claus, we've grown gardens, pickled dilly beans, and made lifelong friends. Here are just a few highlights from 2009:

I've long been a fan of meeting people where they are. It's a strategy that offers a nice complement to "hitting them over the head," and is often perceived as more agreeable than "bowling them over with the hard truth." I'm not saying those techniques don't have a place - it's hard to care about real food (or anything!) and not get angry about it once in a while. Still, one must acknowledge that fast food isn't going away anytime soon, and - as a result - those who produce it in a mindful way can do the world some good. Which brings me to Chipotle.

On my friend and neighbor Kathy's advice, I just re-read Michael Pollan's outstanding letter to our nation's "Farmer in Chief," first published in the NY Times on the eve of Barack Obama's