My Food Ideals

My personal food guidelines are:
  • Eat lots of fruits and vegetables
  • Eat mostly (if not only) whole grains
  • Eat real, whole, natural, unprocessed, chemical-free foods
I follow the slow food movement which supports good, clean, and fair food. I try to buy local and organic food whenever possible. When I bake, I use only whole, all-natural ingredients.

The basis of my food ideals is Michael Pollan's Food Rules. It's a very simple, $6 book that everybody should read. Pollan presents 64 straight forward ideas about how we should eat in a very simple, easy-to-understand format. Some of my favorites include:

#2 Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food
#22 Eat mostly plants, especially leaves
#43 Have a glass of wine with dinner.

His "rules" make sense and, if you're committed to a healthy lifestyle, are quite easy to follow.

In order to eat with the seasons, we subscribe to a community supported agriculture produce delivery service, New Roots Organics. We get a huge box of local fruits and veggies delivered to our doorstep every other week. The flavor of fresh produce is unbelievable, and having the box come to our door keeps us eating our daily dose of veggies and has encouraged us to discover interesting produce. It has also inspired some of the recipes you'll see on this blog, and many recipes I sell in my bakery. When we lived in California, we got the small mixed box from Farm Fresh To You. I compared the prices of our very first box to the prices of the same produce at Safeway. Our $25 veggie box (all local and organic, and delivered right to our doorstep) would have cost $30 at Safeway, or $21 had we chosen non-organic. A win-win all around!

Why buy local?

Eating in accordance with what's in season in your particular region has many advantages. "The closer we eat to the source, and the less processing and shipping, the more nutritional value we can access. And there is less risk of contamination, less fuel used, and less waste in the environment." says Terry Walters, author of the seasonal cookbook Clean Food. Seasonal eating offers health benefits as well. The body naturally needs different foods during specific times of the year - foods that protect you from the effects of seasonal changes.

Foods I avoid when baking:

Bleached flour is mixed with a bleaching agent to give it a whiter appearance, and to oxidize the surface of the flour grains. Known bleaching agents include benzoyl peroxide, calcium peroxide, nitrogen dioxide, and chlorine dioxide (which, incidentally, produces alloxan, a contaminant that has been identified as a possible cause of type 1 diabetes). 

Margarine is a chemically-produced substance that was originally full of trans fats created through hydrogenation. Now that people have realized the negative effects of trans fats, manufacturers have created non-hydrogenated margarine by adding a small amount of modified palm oil to enhance the spreadability. So, they basically took a modified, chemically-produced, food-like substance, and modified it even more, to make it spreadable. My butter comes from a cow and spreads just fine, thank you very much. 

Canola Oil is derived from a modified version of the rapeseed plant. The plant is modified because it contains high amounts of erucic acid, which has been associated with causing Keshan's disease. The word "canola" is short for "Canada Oil", because "rape oil" just wasn't cutting it. Although Canola oil is low in "bad" fat, and high in "good" fat, it is highly processed, and the process of making it involves scary ingredients like hexane, an ingredient in gasoline. Also, Canola oil undergoes bleaching, degumming, deodorizing and refining before it's bottled for public use. 


Pollan, Michael. (2009). Food Rules, An Eater's Manuel. New York, NY: Penguin Books.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Katie,

    Your mom shared this recipe with our office (I was lucky enough to sample one. It was sooooo good!)Thanks also for posting the nutritional info. I'm doing Weight Watchers, and found it to be very helpful!

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  2. The above comment is actually about the Vegan Chai Latte cupcakes. Check them out! http://grainexpectations.blogspot.com/2010/07/vegan-chai-latte-cupcakes.html

    ReplyDelete