For The Love Of Food

For The Love of Food
Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.
This week I found an exceptional number of articles supporting the value of minimally processed foods (shhh, even the one that tried to argue the opposite). Also some useful tips on juicing and weight lifting (not together, of course).
I’m also happy to tell you that the print buttons are working again 🙂
I read many more wonderful articles than I post here each week. If you’d like to see more or just don’t want to wait until Friday, be sure to follow me on Twitter (@summertomato) or the Summer Tomato Facebook fan page. For a complete reading list join me on the new Digg or StumbleUpon. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you.
Links of the week
- Choose foods, not nutrients <<Awesome message here. This is the essence of what I was getting at in my superfoods article this week. Foods are what bring health, not single nutrients. (Los Angeles Times)
- First Signs of Puberty Seen in Younger Girls <<This may not affect you directly, but scientists suspect obesity and environmental chemical exposure as the culprits. Canary in a coal mine for the need to buy organic produce? (New York Times)
- In Praise of Fast Food <<I really didn’t want to make this my BS of the week, but unfortunately it is. Instead of explaining that we have in fact evolved to eat grains (a point where the paleo folks and I disagree), she argues that slow foodies are Luddites. That’s right, this scientist blogger supposedly hates technology. The author misses the point of slow food entirely, making this 5 page article not even worth arguing against. (UTNE Reader)
- Why you should buy heirloom varieties <<In case you need further explanation of why the above article is idiotic. As Homer Simpson would say, “Hello!! Taste?!” (Food Blogga)
- What To Do If Your Study Contradicts Conventional Wisdom <<Cool study looking at how both high and low fat diets are healthy so long as they aren’t processed. (Nutrition and Physical Regeneration)
- Building Muscle Doesn’t Require Lifting Heavy Weights, Study Shows <<Love me some good mythbusting. Workout until fatigue and you’re good. (ScienceDaily)
- What am I missing by juicing my vegetables? <<I get a lot of questions about juicing. I’m not a fan, but if you are this is some useful info. (Nutrition Data)
- Do your civic duty: Eat this fish! <<There are too many lion fish, please eat some. (MSNBC)
- The fatter we get, the less we seem to notice <<Shall we call this reverse anorexia? It’s a serious problem, and far more common. (Obesity Panacea)
- Green Bean Salad <<Beautiful, seasonal, simple recipe. And lovely photography. (Chez Us)
What inspired you this week?
“In Praise of Fast Food” was very confusing. How are traditional preservation methods (salt, vinegar, fermentation, etc.) comparable to the use of artificial ingredients in processed food today? Because no “real food” or “traditional food” or “local food” person I know thinks it’s bad to preserve food – it’s the modern methods of production that we dislike.
I did appreciate what she was saying about our lifestyle offering more options because we’re free to choose something other than labor in the fields or over the metate, but she doesn’t bring that circle back around to consider that the fast food she wishes to praise is very much a reflection of those old systems. Modern wage slavery isn’t that much different from peasantry or serfdom, and fast food is responsible for much enslaving degradation in countries where indigenous people are removed from land that is subsequently razed to grow industrial beef, or example, or wheat for burger buns.
Okay, off my soapbox. Thanks for sharing such intriguing links!
You are awesome. Thanks 🙂
In Praise of Fast Food: “When the ancient Greeks took it as a sign of bad times if people were driven to eat greens and root vegetables, they were rehearsing common wisdom. Happiness was not a verdant Garden of Eden abounding in fresh fruits, but a securely locked storehouse jammed with preserved, processed foods.”
WTF??? That is where I stopped reading.
She’s not arguing that greens are bad! She just wants us to understand that traditionally, good, fresh greens were a rarity. Most societies didn’t have a Golden Age where the majority subsisted on tasty fresh vegetables.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to create that Golden Age, of course we should. But we should understand that making fresh vegetables affordable for all has not been the norm, will be challenging, and appreciate what industrial food can offer us as we plan.
Darya, thanks for the shout-out. That salad was amazing, so amazing we ate three times that week. Wait until you see what we do with White Corn this week! 🙂
Hi Darya, with regards to “First Signs of Puberty Seen in Younger Girls,” do you know of any studies that look at the effects of either obesity or estrogen mimicking environmental chemicals in boys?
Yes, obesity definitely raises estrogen in all people. Also, I’ve seen a study that lavender extract can mimic estrogen in boys. It effects me, so I imagine the reports are probably true, at least in some people. Also, it is possible that too much soy could have this effect, though the data is less conclusive.