nina planck

Onward and upward!  Are you ready for another dose of book club?  We sure are! 

As the Simple, Good, and Tasty club continues, we're looking forward to tonight's discussion about Real Food: What to Eat and Why. Where do you stand on full-fat or raw milk? Organic over local? Check out our proposed discussion questions, grab the book (or not -- you know, getting all the way through the reading isn't as important as checking in and participating), and swing on over.

July’s book club selection continues our education in and understanding of our favorite thing here at Simple, Good and Tasty: FOOD! As we all know, there are many real and complex issues surrounding the way we get food to our mouths these days. And there are trade-offs that need to be made. But what’s better? And how do you decide? 

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.

This 6 minute video, filmed in 2007, features the terrific Nina Planck describing her relationship with food, the science behind dietary advice, and why it's better to eat real food than poor imitations. Planck is practical and personable. I'm a big fan of her approach.

As a kid, I spent countless hours, days, weeks, months - heck, even years - thinking of nothing but baseball. With 2 brothers and 3 step-brothers in my family hanging around each summer, it was easy to get a game going any time, and each night was spent in front of the TV, watching our beloved Yankees (I'm from New York) attempt to destroy the competition. My brothers and I developed special cheers for Don Mattingly, Ricky Henderson, Dave Righetti, and the rest of the team. When I moved to Minnesota, I helped my family adjust to the idea by telling them that Dave Winfield was born in St. Paul.

Okay, okay - it's organic food labeling that we need help with - not the food itself. The food itself? I'll let the excellent book Real Food by Nina Planck describe it:

Organic means food was produced without synthetic fertilizer, antibiotics, hormones, pesticides, genetically engineered ingredients, and irradiation.

Seems like every few days I'm approached by someone with a local food focused business idea. Distribution is broken! We need a year round farmers market! CSAs are not the answer! Here's what I say: Yes. I've seen King Corn, FRESH, The Future of Food, and others.