Meatless Monday Musings as a New Year Begins

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At a weekly address in June of last year Pope Francis berated our “culture of waste” and urged us to follow the example of our grandparents stating, "Our grandparents used to make a point of not throwing away leftover food. Consumerism has made us accustomed to wasting food daily and we are unable to see its real value…Throwing away food is like stealing from the table of those who are poor and hungry."

Anyone who reads this blog will know how much these words resonated with me. But let’s take this one step further. When food is discarded it is a waste not only of the food itself but also of all the resources and energy that went into growing it, harvesting it, transporting it, and preparing it. 

Our American food system is only one of the factors contributing to the increase in greenhouse gases. But changing the way we eat is one of the easiest actions we can take as individuals to help heal our planet, while making ourselves healthier as well This is why I will continue to be a Meatless Monday blogger during the coming year. 

It is my intention to get back to the basics in my posts this year, with recipes geared to eating lower on the food chain, saving resources, and also saving money [who couldn’t use a bit of that right now?]. There will be also be tips to help ensure culinary success, product reviews, food news, and suggestions for further reading.

I don’t have a recipe today, but I do have a great link to share.

One of the most prolific writers on the topic of “Eating Well” is Michael Pollan. The recently released PBS documentary, In Defense of Food, produced by Kikim Media, is based on Pollan’s 2008 book with the same name. You don’t want to miss this opportunity to accompany author/narrator  Pollan on his fascinating journey around the world to answer the question: “What should I eat?” The documentary first aired at the end of December; you can watch it for free here until January 28.

I attended a Michael Pollan talk and book signing in 2008, shortly after In Defense of Food’s release. His inspirational words that day changed how I thought about shopping and eating and were a big factor in my starting this blog.

Perhaps he will motivate you as well. I suggest his small volume Food Rules to get you started on your Michael Pollan reading list.

That’s it for today. I hope that as I continue writing in the new year that you will continue reading.

Happy Meatless Monday. Have a great week!

On Mondays I often blog on food, food issues, or gardening in support of Meatless Monday, one of several programs developed in the Healthy Monday project, founded in 2003 in association with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. Meatless Monday’s goal is “to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal health and the health of our planet.”

Meatless Monday: GMO Round-Up

Updates on GMO Food Labeling 

California Proposition 37 which would have required labels on genetically engineered food sold in that state did NOT pass in November. Voters defeated the proposition  53.1% to 46.9%. Considering that the No Campaign, led by corporate giant Monsanto, spent $46 million opposing the measure,  while the Yes Campaign spent $ 9 million  supporting it,  the vote was surprisingly close. The Cornucopia Institute prepared this graphic clearly illustrating those for and against the measure. 

The measure passed in most of California's coastal and border counties (except to the west); support for the Prop 37 was particularly high in the mid-coastal region.  You can view county by county voting results here. 

Food activist Michael Pollan was one of Prop 37’s most vocal supporters. After the measure’s defeat, San Francisco’s Grub Street solicited Pollan’s thoughts. In short, Pollan expressed the view that although Prop 37 was defeated, the fight for good labeling would continue, “…Big Food is playing whac-a-mole with these initiatives all over the country, and it will continue and get very expensive…” Big Food is "feeling beleaguered by its increasingly skeptical and skittish consumers."

The next battleground state for GMO labeling is Washington where proponents of initiative I-522, The People's Right To Know Genetically Engineered Food Act, are working to gather the 241,153 valid signatures required to petition the state legislature to put the measure on the November 2013 ballot.

National coalition Just Label It! continues its efforts to get the Food and Drug Administration involved in this issue.

Finally, according to the Organic Consumers Organization, some 30 states are currently  working to require GMO labels.

Although the Prop 37 battle was lost, the war is clearly not over.

Happy Monday! Thanks for reading.

I often blog on food or food issues on Monday in support of Meatless Monday, one of several programs developed in the Healthy Monday project, founded in 2003 in association with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. Meatless Monday’s goal is “to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal health and the health of our planet.”

Meatless Monday: The "Incredible, Edible, Egg"

The original campaign logo

Back in the late ’70s the American Egg Board (the US egg industry’s promotional arm) launched its “Incredible, Edible, Egg” campaign. The campaign was brought back in 2007, and has very recently been revived with the launch of a new, easy to navigate site, full of recipes, celebrity chef endorsements, egg facts, up-to-date information on egg safety, and videos about family egg farmers and how the egg gets to your table. The Egg Board’s good works are prominently displayed, and the site does its best to rekindle consumer confidence in the American egg industry—no easy task.


One can’t really talk about eggs without mentioning chickens (or ducks, or geese, or some other species of fowl). So even though it’s Meatless Monday, I start my post by talking about the domestication of chickens.

Humans have a long history with chickens. According to about.com, recent research suggests multiple origins for the first domesticated chickens (Gallus domesticus), in distinct areas of South and Southeast Asia around 8,000 years ago. It had long been assumed that Europeans brought the first chickens to the Americas, but it may have been prehistoric Polynesians, according to research from The University of Auckland’s Department of Anthropology published in 2007. DNA analysis was performed on chicken bones discovered at an archeological site in Chile, and the evidence found conclusively that the bones followed the same DNA sequence as that of prehistoric chickens in Polynesia. The Chilean chicken bone is estimated to date from 1321-1407 AD, at least 100 years before Europeans set foot on South America.

Why are chickens (and their eggs) such a big deal? Chickens can be raised in a small space and their requirements for food and water are minimal when compared to other farm animals. With a good flock, nutritious food is always available, and any extra eggs can be bartered or sold for other items a family needs. “Egg money” kept many families afloat during the Great Depression.

The beauty of having one’s own flock of laying hens has driven both the urban chicken movement and the survivalists, who believe that every family should own at least four laying hens. The idea is catching on everywhere. Cities and towns alike have been passing ordinances making chickens legal (subject to certain restrictions). The family who owns the cottage colony in which I stay on Cape Cod even had a flock this year. A search online for egg bartering will show you that in these tough economic times eggs are being traded for all kinds of goods and services. A failed senate candidate in Nevada's plan for bartering chickens as a better alternative to the new health care legislation was highly publicized and much spoofed. 

From a human point of view, eggs really are an excellent and convenient food. Eggs are rich in protein as well as choline, which has been linked with preserving memory, and lutein and zeaxanthin, which may protect against vision loss. The egg’s high cholesterol count is no longer the worry it was a decade ago: most doctors now say an egg a day is fine for most people. Eggs have a long shelf life, are relatively inexpensive, and can be turned into a meal in almost no time at all. Anyone can cook a scrambled egg! 

Around mid-century, the small flock on the iconic family farm was replaced as the main source of this country’s eggs. After World War II, with the introduction of antibiotics and vitamins, chickens became the first domesticated animals to be factory-farmed, in small operations throughout the country. Today, however, these have become huge enterprises, with chickens packed into overcrowded cages in a few centralized locations. To give you an idea of the scale of today’s farms, this past Spring, a warehouse in Ohio caught fire, and a quarter of a million hens lost their lives. To viewers of Food Inc. these horrific conditions are all too familiar.

Animal rights activists have been lobbying to improve conditions for some time. On July 6, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed landmark legislation that requires that all shelled (whole) eggs sold in California come from hens able to stand up, fully extend their limbs, lie down and spread their wings without touching each other or the sides of their enclosure, thus requiring cage-free conditions for the birds. Things seemed to be looking up, since this law pertains to all eggs sold in the state, whether or not they were produced within its borders.

Then came the most recent salmonella outbreak at the DeCoster-affiliated egg farms in Iowa (discussed in my blogs of September 14 and 30) and the subsequent massive egg recall. The people at Slow Food USA graphically connect the salmonella outbreak and the “life” in factory egg operations in this short video urging citizens to demand that Congress pass a new Food Safety bill that will crack down on “corporate bad actors” (like DeCoster) while at the same time not hurting small farms.

After watching this video, it’s hard not to experience both fear and loathing. What’s an egg lover to do?

There are several choices.

1. You can try to shop responsibly at your grocery store. Read the egg carton for the source of the eggs and how they were raised. A guide to what the labels mean is available here.
2. Shop at your farmers market or local farm stand. Since the egg recall, egg sales at farmers markets have skyrocketed.
3. If you have the space, raise your own. Many cities and suburbs have recently passed legislation permitting small flocks as long as certain requirements are met.
4. See if there is a small farmer in your vicinity willing to trade or sell some extra eggs. You might be surprised if you look online.
5. Consider trying some egg substitutes. I do love the taste of an egg, and I have to admit I have not tried this myself— yet. But I will. And I will get back to you when I do. 
6. Vote with your fork, as Michael Pollan would say, but also follow current events and lobby your legislators for change. Check out Slow Food USA and Food Democracy Now. Both groups lobby for food safety. Or the Humane Society. No animals should have to “live” under these conditions. And these conditions jeopardize the health of us all. 

I often blog on food or food issues on Monday in support of Meatless Monday, one of several programs developed in the Healthy Monday project, founded in 2003 in association with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. Meatless Monday’s goal is “to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal health and the health of our planet.”

Shopping to Save the Earth??????

This is not now nor will it ever be a site that encourages wanton shopping. But there are occasions when we just have to shop. With Spring and Summer weddings coming up fast, it’s Shower Season—gifts needed.

The Environmental Task Force (ETF) of the United Church on the Green in New Haven recently put together some “Green Living Bags” for an Earth Day Silent Auction (proceeds to buy a new, energy-efficient dishwasher and some stainless so we can forgo paper and plastic at church events). These bags include a number of our “small steps best in show” discoveries of the past year.

It struck me that these bags could be an inspiration for do-it-yourself shower gifts.

The Green Living Bag pictured here (total value $45) contains:

• One reusable shopping bag (from Whole Foods)
• Two heavy-duty spray bottles filled with green cleaners (made by the ETF) + recipe so the recipient can make his or her own refills. Get the most durable bottles you can find. These came from Home Depot.
• One, two-pound box baking soda (a main ingredient in many do-it-yourself cleaners)
• One can Bon Ami polishing cleanser (found at the supermarket in the cleanser section)

• One dishwashing brush (from IKEA)
• One pack Super Amazing Kitchen Cloths (found at Trader Joe’s)
• Two books:
      • Green Cleaning for Dummies
      • Food Rules, by Michael Pollan
• One, two-pack 11 watt CFL lightbulbs (from IKEA)

This bag is a great base, but you might want to add a few more things or mix it up for a shower gift.

Here are some useful tips:

• Consider the recipient (s). Do they cook, for example?
• Be mindful of your budget.
• Try to give useful things, and if at all possible, include at least one something that will last for years. I have been married for a long time and can still recall those who gave me some of my most treasured wedding gifts.

The following suggestions are all in the “affordable” range.

• You might consider this cute product I have only seen online. The original Spaghetti Scrub is partially fabricated from recycled materials and comes in course (corn cobs) and gentle (peach pits). It is available in some stores, but none local to me. The quick-drying scrub will last 3-6 months and can be sanitized in the microwave. It just has that wedding shower look.

• Or an elegant Italian water bottle with a swing stopper for the dining table.

• Or a cast iron pan (see my post of February 21.)

• Or a cookbook. Cooking in Season is a great one that not everyone knows.

• Or a pepper mill from William Bounds, Ltd. Made in Torrance, CA, these mills  have an “innovative mechanism" that functions by crushing, rather than by grinding the peppercorns. They have a lifetime guarantee and are a thing of beauty.

The possibilities are endless. Have some fun thinking of ways to encourage the new couple to join you On the Road to Greenness.

Food Rules

Many of us in the US are eating large quantities of food which has traveled many miles to get to our tables, most of it highly processed and overly-packaged. There is little dispute that how we eat in in this country is making us unhealthy. And it’s also not very Green.

Several years ago, Michael Pollan set out to discover exactly what we should eat to be healthy. He came up with a succinct seven word formula: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

He elaborated on this answer in the best-selling In Defense of Food, in which he contends that “most of the nutritional advice we’ve received over the last half century…has actually made us less healthy and considerably fatter.” In this book Pollan also delved into the history of the Western diet and the diseases of civilization, and concluded with a guide to healthier and happier eating.  

For those of you short on time but still wanting to eat well, let me recommend Pollan’s newest offering, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, a handy pocket guide for which no knowledge of science is required, a perfect companion to In Defense of Food.  In this slim volume, he presents 64 simple rules on how to eat well (more than seven words, but still easy to manage.)

Some of my favorite rules include: Rule 13: “Eat only foods that will eventually rot;” Rule 20: “It’s not food if it arrived through the window of you car;”  and Rule 64: “Break the rules once in a while.”

To find material for this guide Pollan solicited help from a number of sources, including the readers of Tara Parker-Pope’s New York Times online blog Well. In response to the words: “I’d like your help gathering some rules for eating well.” (posted on Well on March 9, 2009), he received 2,791 comments. (I am comment No. 2201 on page 89 of the blog.)  He acknowledges that this “overwhelming response enriched the project immeasurably” and thanks us all (as a group) in both the introduction and the credits.

I don’t want to spoil the book for you, so I will just mention one more rule — 52: “Buy smaller plates and glasses. The bigger the portion, the more we will eat —upward of 30% more.”

Coincidentally, portion size was much in the news last week. In a paper published in the Obesity Journal on March 23, Brian Wansink, a food behavior scientist at Cornell University, and his brother, Craig Wansink, professor of religious studies at the Virginia Wesleyan College and an ordained Presbyterian minister, announced the results of their study of 52 Last Supper paintings made between the years 1000 and 1800. The results are summarized by Dave Itzkoff in his Arts Beat blog (New York Times online March 23). “After the sizes of the food in the art works were indexed against the average size of the disciples’ heads (which can vary from painting to painting), the study found that the main courses grew by 69 percent, the plates grew by 66 percent and the size of the bread grew by 23 percent.” If art mirrors life, then this study confirms that we have indeed been upping our serving sizes for far more years than we had realized (and if Michael Pollan is correct, the amount of food we consume).

Also in the news is Britain’s Jamie Oliver, aka The Naked Chef, who has been taking on the lunch ladies of Huntington, West Virginia (dubbed the unhealthiest metropolitan area in America) on primetime TV in the hopes of reforming their school lunch program. I am pretty sure Huntington hasn’t heard about Meatless Monday or Food Rules. If you watch the show, you will learn that some of the school children can’t recognize a potato, let alone a beet or a tomato. Jamie is doing his best to get the children to eat more plants, but he has a difficult road ahead. You can follow the saga on Friday nights on ABC for the next few weeks.

Let me urge you once again to check out Food Rules and to share its wisdom with those you love. It is a quick and entertaining read. The rules are simple and painless, and by following them you will be making yourself, those you feed, and the planet healthier.