FOR THE LOVE OF FOOD: Your “organic” milk may not be, boxed mac n’cheese contains banned chemicals, and sugar in pregnancy linked to allergies
by Darya Rose | Jul 14, 2017
Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.
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This week your “organic” milk may not be, boxed mac n’cheese contains banned chemicals, and sugar in pregnancy linked to allergies.
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Links of the week
- Flacking for GMOs: How the Biotech Industry Cultivates Positive Media—and Discourages Criticism – I often hear fellow scientists mock critics of GMO and food biotech in the same breath as anti-vaccine advocates and climate change deniers. This is unfortunate, because there are plenty of valid reasons to be critical of industrial food technologies and most of them are ignored by the media who focus almost exclusively on the food safety issues (there really are none innate to GMO technology itself). Why does this misdirection happen? Follow the money. (Progressive)
- The Chemicals in Your Mac and Cheese – In case you need another reason to stop eating crap, boxed mac n’ cheeses (yes, all of them) are filled with banned toxic chemicals. Boxes of powdered cheese don’t even taste good, spend your empty calories on something actually worth it. (NY Times)
- A GRAIN OF WHEAT – A beautiful essay by Hank Shaw on the value of a real grains. My personal favorite article from this week’s list. (Hunter, Angler, Gardner, Cook)
- Amish farmers square off against Big Organic in milk battle – Your “organic” milk might not actually be organic, which is a real bummer since the USDA Organics label has traditionally been very reliable. As a shopper I would avoid organic labels from big ticket stores like Costco or Walmart until this gets less suspicious. (Washington Post)
- The 10 ways recipes are undermining your cooking – LOVE it. This really gets to the core of why recipes are such a problem for new cooks, and why teaching real cooking skills like we do in Foodist Kitchen is a much better approach. (The Guardian)
- A leading happiness researcher says we’re giving our kids bad advice about how to succeed in life – It isn’t just kids who need to learn this. It’s the same advice I give to most of my (adult) coaching clients. Culturally we have a lot of this stuff backwards. (Quartz)
- Scans suggest food is a form of escape from self-critical thoughts – This research is specifically about people with bulimia, but I’d be willing to bet the pattern of experiential avoidance leading to overeating works more generally for a much bigger population. (ScienceDaily)
- Sugar intake during pregnancy is associated with allergy and allergic asthma in children – This is kind of amazing when you think about it. (ScienceDaily)
- A US senator is worried that “snortable chocolate” is basically “cocaine on training wheels” – Just WOW. (Quartz)
- Roasted Corn & Chicken Salad with Avocado – All my favorite summer flavors. (Foraged Dish)
The bulimia study is very interesting. No doubt food becomes a both coping mechanism, but also a punishment mechanism. Bulimics tend to already have a negative idea of themselves and therefore may be “drowning” out self-reflection during eating/bingeing, but that self-reflection does return in a more perverse, negative fashion during and after purging.
As the the Quartz article on what to teach our children about being happy: While I agree with most of the explanations in the article, I strongly disagree that the positive lessons she poses are not being taught by parents. The lessons she presents as exclusive of one another do coexist in the world, and in the lives of happy people. For example: I believe many parents teach their children to not only consider their futures, but also appreciate living in the moment; or to look out for oneself, while also having compassion. The article creates a number of “straw-man” arguments, and contributes to the already over-practiced and unkind trend of criticizing parents in the media, especially online.
Good stuff. The guardian one especially rings true! I’m loving the new instagram trend of giving people really easy and compelling reasons and things to cook. They’ll post simple directions right under a mouth watering photo of brussels sprouts, and show a simple meal idea. Love it.
Wondering – have you changed your diet at all during your pregnancy, or really have been religious about things like sugar? I wonder how I would eat if I were to be in the same spot one day!
Thanks for great post. Good resource 🙂