Archive for 2015

During last week’s nut-filled episode, I made a BIG announcement. Do you remember that, in the beginning of the show? What was it? Anyone? Bueller?

Well, I announced that I’m embarking on a new quest, a new mission, so to speak. I’m going on a worldwide (well, nationwide really) search for something. Like Don Draper at the end of this week’s Mad Men. Driving across Wisconsin, picking up hitchhiking hippies. He’s on a quest too, he’s had it with advertising…he’s hitting the road to find himself. He even mentioned Kerouac to his hallucinated vision of Bert Cooper. That’s not what I’m doing, I don’t need to find me, I’m right here. I have a pretty, pretty, pretty (thanks, Larry David) good sense of myself.

No. What I’m setting off to find, isn’t me. It’s the thing that I hope will solve most of my problems, at least my nutritional ones. Actually I don’t really have nutritional problems, I eat extremely well; lots of leafy greens, lentils, oily fish, yogurt, lamb, apples, eggplant….what am I, Greek? Sounds like it. No, no nutritional issues for me, what I do have are snacking problems. Not that I snack too much, I do sometimes, I’m American, its my birthright, but more that I can’t find the right snack. The snack that will solve all my hunger issues, my blood sugar issues, my pre or post workout issues, to see if that snack product actually exists. I’m looking for…my perfect snack.

So I’m setting out on a journey of snacking, to see if there’s anything out there that passes my test. Anything I can keep in my backpack and take out after or before working out, or while hiking, or if I get stuck between meals and get hungry and don’t want to buy an $8 salad or whatever and use a fork. To find a snack that’s convenient, shelf-stable (meaning no refrigeration needed), isn’t sweet and therefore not full of sugar, has protein (not from effing soy) and is made of real food. It also should be reasonably priced.

A long shot? I think so. Wishful thinking, oh yes, for sure. But I’m going into this with an open mind, or at least as open of a mind as someone like me can muster up. I’m ready, I’ve got my plan set.

I’ve got my protective gear, I’ve got my phone charger and I’ve got a bag of almonds, just in case. I’m going virtually spelunking in the unexplored, subterranean caves of the foodiness™ world. Places no enlightened, real food eater has ever seen. Where the normally brightly-orange goldfish crackers are blind and albino because they’ve never seen the light of day, where nothing grows green and everything lasts forever.

I’m going deep, deep down the Foodiness™ rabbit hole to see that if maybe, just maybe in the past three years that I’ve done this show, maybe I missed something? Or maybe things have really changed? Have Foodiness™ Inc. and even Food Inc. finally caught on? Have they been listening to people like me, and our raging against their corn-slurry feed machines? Have they finally come up with something I can accept, nee even embrace? Something I can proudly hold up, triumphantly, right before I eat it and pronounce, deem, crown, the PERFECT snack?

You know sometimes it can get a little lonely, down here in the Foodiness™ Fallout Shelter…fighting the good fight for REAL from way down here, it can be a little isolating. With the twins, Lexi and Hampton (remember them? I barely do…) off at reeducation camp after they tried to hide those gummy vitamins in their underwear drawer over Christmas break, and the Fallout Shelter team off Mormon-style Anti-Foodiness missions around the globe, I’m all by myself down here. It can make a person a little nutty…

So, I’ve decided it’s time to start having some guests pop in for a chat ’round the fire. We don’t really have a fire, but you can smell the pizza oven from Roberta’s, so it’s close enough.

To stave off the nuttiness that the loneliness of fighting Foodiness™ can create, who better to visit with than the misses Tannenbaum and Tutunjan, aka Cara and Andrea, the co-authors of “In A Nutshell; Cooking and Baking with Nuts and Seeds”? Not only did they write THE book on the subject, but I’ve known them forever. And if there were ever an LGR approved, Foodiness-fightin’ food(s), it’s NUTS AND SEEDS!

Oh and also we’ll discuss the FDA’s ridiculous removal of the word HEALTHY from the label of Kind Bars…for one of the dumbest, most outdated reasons ever.

I heard these sports radio guys recently discussing something called “The Over-Under”. Actually, it was more like the “Ovuh-Unduh”, this being NYC sports radio and all. I’m not a sports fan, so my husband explained to me that the ovuh-unduh is something about a team’s record for the season, and wins, and betting…and blah blah blah, it was like the teacher in a Charlie Brown special to me. I don’t really care what it means, so it didn’t stick. I’ve heard the explanation at least 3 or 4 times again, since, I even asked him about it yesterday as I was writing this episode. But it didn’t stick because I don’t care about what it really means, I just like the way it sounds, the ovuh-unduh, and to me, the ovuh-unduh is not a term about sports, it’s a term that sums up American culture. Specifically, our culture and its relationship to food and Foodiness and everything else! We are ovuh-unduh America. We INVENTED the ovuh-unduh.

After the industrial revolution and the mechanization and centralization of farming and the invention of post-war chemical fertilizing and the subsequent government subsidizing of commodity grains and then the subsequent shift in out diets to a corn and soybean orgy of grain and grain fed products, we are all now LIVING the ovuh-unduh. Feast or famine? Well, we’ve got both. Only here in America is it possible to be both fat and malnourished at the same time! You can gorge on shitty, processed, nutrition-less food, weigh 300 pounds, and still suffer the diseases of malnutrition. That’s the REAL ovuh-unduh. You can go to a restaurant and order a meal that has more calories in just the entrée than most people’s great-grandma ate in an entire day, that’s the ovuh-unduh too. And at that same restaurant you can have a slab of cheesecake that doubles that number of calories again, but wash it down with 48 ounces of a beverage that has zero calories, that you’re PAYING for, that you are paying a company money for, and that may just kill you, and that’s the ovuh-unduh, too!

Or, the fact that we produce more food on this planet that we can every consume, more than double the daily caloric needs of every human and animal in this country, and yet we throw away almost 40% of it, whether through rejecting it in the fields for not being perfect, or producing it so cheaply that there are no buyers so its dumped before leaving the factory, or in transit when systems fail, or in supermarkets when they trash thousands of pounds of food simply because of an arbitrary date stamped on it that has no legal bearing or meaning, or in your fridge as it slowly goes bad because you’re too spoiled to feel compelled to use up what you buy…that’s the big ovuh-unduh too. America. Land of the free, home of the big Over-Under.

We produce so much food, so quickly and efficiently, that we then have to reject much of it because our system of using it, distributing it is designed to scare us into thinking that 5 minutes out of refrigeration, or 12 hours past an expiration date, and we’re dead.

I’ve discussed food waste here before, multiple times, but last night I was lucky enough to be invited to a screening of a new documentary called “Just Eat It, a food waste story”.

It’ll be airing on msnbc on April 22 at 10pm EST and I implore everyone to tell everyone they know to watch it. I thought I had a handle on the amounts of food waste, but even I was shocked! The couple who made the film lived on scavenged food for 6 months, and between them collected $20,000 worth of food. That’s only what two people taking perfectly good stuff out of dumpsters behind stores collected. 20k.’s worth! That doesn’t even take into consideration all the waste that happens before the food is even harvested or produced. It was really horrifying. I feel like I do a pretty good job of not wasting food, and you know I love the discount produce shelf, but even I can only eat so many overripe pears. It’s time to dump the ovuh-unduh and start thinking like your great-grandma!