Jill, Welcome to the Lake.

Toby, Thank you for Hosting today’s Book Salon.

Afternoon folks –

Afternoon Jill.

Two Words: “Whole Foods”

Comment?

I don’t know if Jill is on yet, but I’d like to say that this book is a very accessible distillation of an amazing number of different topics which all revolve around one thing: The health of America and America’s children is NOT going to get any better if we continue to have the food system we have right now.

Welcome to the Lake Jill,

What Jill has found and has written about in her book will confound, enrage, and enlighten readers.

What enrages you the most?

Toby,
after reading her book, have you made any changes in your eating/buying/growing habits?

Well, you are asking Jill, but I’ll answer for myself. Jill writes on p.49:
“..in short, industrialized agriculture privatizes the commons.” What we consider ‘agriculture’ in the US today basically strips air, water, biodiversity, fertility from the soil, creates dead zones in places like the Gulf. In other words, large, conventional farms and livestock operations take the position that these parts of the ecology, which really belong to us all (’the commons’), are theirs for the taking and ruining.

Well, we are pretty well locked into a ‘what we can’t grow ourselves, we get from local farmers’ thing here, but it certainly has made me a lot more vocal about talking to people about what the system is doing to people in large cities, fishermen on the Gulf and so on. It’s also made me much more aware of asking why we are allowing junk to even be IN school buildings.

The lack of a Free Food and Drug Administration is vexing.

yes, yes that is enraging.

It helps to inform consumers so they can change their ways; for instance, little black marks on orange skins, thrip bites, aren’t the end of the world. The perfect no-blemish orange comes at a hefty price to the environment and the future.

you want free food and free drugs? ;)

Jill’s book has a whole chapter called “Yes, I’ve Heard About Whole Paycheck” regarding places like Whole Foods and Trader Joes.She worked in the baker at the Whole Foods in San Diego. Her tale is quite eye opening

Omnivore’s Dilemma Author Michael Pollan has decided to weigh in on the Whole Foods health care fight, stating he will not boycott the company.

fwiw

Welcome Jill, fellow late nite lobbyist report fanatic (Jill and I have spent one too may nights til 3am downloading lobbyist reports, building googgle spreadsheets and pinging each other in gchat).

Congratulations on the new book. You do great work. Getting health care coverage is only a part of the task before us — rates of cancer in the country are skyrocketing due to environmental factors, and no bandaid applied by the medical industrial complex can fix that.

Thanks for all you do.

Jill,

I’ve come to believe a good diet and a good exercise plan go together.

If I’m right, doesn’t that mean the schools should have well-designed and implemented P.E. programs — in addition to ridding their cafeterias and corridors of junk food?

It is not just cosmetic blemishes – American’s really believe the mythology of ‘cheap food’ – they don’t realize a) that through their taxes, they have paid several times over for the food and that their tax money is actually going to support huge corporate interests and b)that because of that, they really do not have a good grasp of what food actually costs to bring from the field to the table. They don’t want to think about, for example, how much the farm workers make(or don’t), how many of them are treated and so on.

I know the problems with Whole Foods but I guess I don’t know about Trader Joe’s. Please tell me.

Not to digress, but whatever PE requirements school districts have are dictated by their state ed dept., but the schools DO have control over whether or not they sign contracts with people like Pepsi, FritoLay and so on. There are groups working with school districts to try to get more local foods and more fresh foods into schools – instead of schools using prepackaged items like chicken nuggets and so on. It is a labor cost issue, but needs to be done.

and weren’t some of those school contracts with the soda companies contingent on pushing milk out of the vending machines? At least initially?

As Jill outlines in her book – when you go to the farmers market, you are dealing direct. You can ask the farmer face to face – “how were these grown? What do you do to prevent bug damage” and so on. With organizations like Trader Joes and Whole Foods, it is very difficult to know where in a range of sustainability or organic method the individual producers are falling. These are enormous organizations – we won’t even discuss WalMart’s claims to having organic foods in their stores.

If Pollan really favors local food and is against big monopolies, he should support a boycott of Whole Foods, as Mackey’s longstanding goal has been to put every other healthy-food seller in America out of business. He wants to be the Wal-Mart of natural foods, pure and simple. But I suspect that Pollan doesn’t want to be dissing a guy that he’s made nicey-nicey with lately.

Some – but in some school districts (and colleges too for that matter), you have soda and snack food companies (and of course some of the soda companies OWN snack food companies as well) which dangle such amazing incentives that it is really quite difficult for school districts to say ‘no’. They are under such pressure – all they have for revenues are taxes on real estate and residents are being squeezed also – so having revenue sources is extremely important to them to be able to do a lot of things – in some cases, this money is directly being used in education budget – we are not talking about supporting sports teams with this.

Here in PA, we’re having fights about sludge as fertilizer.

Pennsylvania Sludge Busters How Porter Township Set New Rules for Corporations

Across the country, rural communities face a dangerous predator—giant agribusiness corporations of a scale unseen before the age of industrial food production. The agribusiness assault comes in many forms, including 10,000 head hog farms and mountains of toxic sludge that are spread on farm fields, placing people in harm’s way. Following the death of two children from exposure to sludge, several townships in Pennsylvania decided to restrict waste corporations’ activities. In doing so, they discovered that corporations had a “secret weapon”—the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees big business the same rights as people. But one community, Porter Township, determined that in their town, the citizens, not corporations, would govern, setting in motion a new organizing model for communities nationwide.

locally we had a case of a young child dying of a nasty bacterial infection, lived across the street from a sludged farm, and had played in the dirty soil.

- Jill is not here – she was feeling ill on Friday. Toby, Thank you very much for Hosting this Salon and answering questions – bev

verry interesting!

Another topic that Jill’s book takes on in a lot of detail is the whole issue of ‘urban food access’ – how in many urban areas, a true grocery store is just not available. How, if people want to be able to have access to fresh fruits and vegetables, or food at decent prices at all, they need to travel quite a distance to get to one, usually in an outlying area. Of course, for the poor, we are talking not only a price issue, we are also talking a travel time and distance issue, where just going grocery shopping requires a long time, perhaps several transfers on public transportation — so it becomes a case of requiring half a day to do a shop…or running down to the minimart for cereal, chips and if you are lucky, a quart of milk. Mike Bloomburg in NY instituted a program of green carts throughout the city, esp in the northern parts of the city, because he felt that they needed more access to fruits and veggies.

Ellie – sludge should not be used – there is the whole heavy metals thing as well.

Yeah, man. Me and the Firesign Theater, both.

My big question about these enormous corporations making the claim that they are providing organic is that there is no way for them to control the flow. They have purchasing depts that are making calls all over the country to get stuff – so we have the same sustainable issues in terms of huge travel costs, etc. at the retail end for customers. Of course, a lot of people can pat themselves on the back with the delusion that they are fulfilling their moral obligation or that what they are buying is more ‘healthy’ but I think it is almost impossible to know.

locally we had a case of a young child dying of a nasty bacterial infection, lived across the street from a sludged farm, and had played in the dirty soil.

Kids play where they can (I developed a case of Histoplasmosis after having played around a chicken coop when I was seven)

HEY – me too, but mine was from thousands of grackles roosting in the trees around my elementary school playground.

In my nearby city, there USED to be a farmer’s market in town, but no more. And there are no regular grocery stores available to the residents for fresh produce. Like you say, they are stuck with quickie marts — not much of a selection topped with high prices.

Toby at 18,

I understand your legal argument. I’m a lawyer.

I also understand problem solving: I’m an engineer.

We need both in the schools: good food, good P.E.

Here is a list of blogs that people might want to cue in on:
http://www.lavidalocavore.org
http://www.foodpolitics.com
http://www.ethicurean.com
obamafoodorama.blogspot.com
usfoodpolicy.blogspot.com
http://www.liveablefutureblog.com
civileats.com
http://www.fooducate.com/blog
http://www.consumersunion.org/blogs/nimf
food.change.org
http://www.frist.org/kingdom/food
blog.eatwellguide.org
http://www.takeabite.cc/blog

The Birds!

You might be able to find all you need to start a farmer’s market in an urban area at the website justfood.org

ART – one of these days, you and I will electronically sit down and discuss this – my theory is that childhood obesity started to take off when schools were moved outside of communities, centralized and kids became ‘delivered’ to school by bus or family car. But for the moment, I’d like to stick with America’s broken food delivery system, ok?

Of all the things to have a deja vu over, I had one with post #27. I suppose this thread might have some importance for me or perhaps I’m just really mundane.

All I can suggest is to call your county Cooperative Extension – that’s how my eldest daughter got involved in creating a new farmers market in a county park.

Is anyone else seeing new or unique foods being offered at their farmers markets – I think our local farmers are now realizing that just having the standards is not enough – this year, I’m seeing kale, kohlrabi, golden zucchini, and yesterday I saw ground cherries.

I have been reading “The Schwarzbein Principle” relating to eating to heal your metabolism. She is an endocrinologist and explains how the body works in a very logical way. This easily ties in with the food system. Shop around the outside of the store and buy natural things. Protein is important for breakfast to start metabolism. Balance is important. Very interesting book.

Hi, I’m here. My apologies. I was planning to be here 5pm PACIFIC, not Eastern! But you’ll like where I was – I was at Rep. Bob Filner’s birthday party.

Toby, Speaking of county Cooperative Extensions – is the 4H still active. I remember Mom being part of one in Iowa when she grew up.

Yesterday was the first I heard of that, but a friend lost nearly 30 lbs using that diet.

YAY!!

I went to the NY State Fair today and it’s HUGE. They had to add a tent for the dairy goats in addition to the space they usually have.

Whole Foods isn’t the answer for sustainable food, but it’s better than other grocery stores and places like Wal-Mart or Sams. Here’s what I say for getting food:

1. Grow it yourself or forage
2. Buy from a farmer directly
3. Buy from a co-op
4. If you can’t do any of those things and you need to eat, Whole Foods isn’t a bad choice.

Re: the health care thing… John Mackey’s a nut, he won’t change. I think he’s getting what he deserves with the boycott, but he can’t give us health care. We need to put that pressure on Congress.

Jill – let’s start with how you got into doing this research – was this just for your own personal interest or?

Hi Jill, welcome to the Lake

What enrages me the most? The lack of equality in our system. Those with more money are more equal. We have a system set up by those with a lot of money and power to give them more money and power. Every person who is a stakeholder in our food system should have a right to be heard – farmers, eaters, etc etc. Yet far too often that is not the case.

Breads, cheeses, and tomatillos are on offer in our farmer’s market in Brooklyn.

How I started? Well there were kind of 2 starts. One was a start in researching how I could personally eat well, and that was just for me. The second happened the winter of 2006, when I started researching why we had an epidemic of diet-related health problems. It made no sense that it happened NOW… something had to cause it, and I wanted to know what that was. There was a lot of finger pointing in different directions between the government, farmers, food companies, and individuals, and it wasn’t clear how it had happened.

Jill – How can individuals get more involved in food policy? Is it all at the federal level? What about state agricultural depts.?

Yes, schools of course should have recess and PE. However, I think we need to examine diet and exercise separately. They are BOTH important parts of a healthy lifestyle. The food companies prefer to talk about “energy balance” which means (roughly) “It’s OK to eat 7 Big Macs so long as you run a marathon afterwards.” There’s more to it than calories in-calories out though. That might do the trick for weight loss, but our goal is HEALTH, not weight loss. Both a good diet AND exercise are necessary for health.

Sure.

Walk into a modern supermarket.

Thousands of choices.

The state level is important as well as the federal level. It’s hard to keep track of what all 50 states are up to at once, but there are significant things going on in various states. There are some BPA bans (bans on an endocrine disruptor called bisphenol A used in can linings and baby bottles), antibiotics in livestock bans (I think that bill is dead in CA but it was debated earlier this year), local control over factory farms (a major issue in Iowa), Massachusetts had a bill to get marketing out of schools, Oregon and Washington have had good bills on school lunch related issues I think, Illinois just did something good on local food, so there’s a LOT to follow at the state level. I write on my blog about it when I find out about things, and I encourage others to do so as well, as several posters do.

OK..so it is definitely worth getting after our state level folks and representatives in terms of making real change happen at the local level. It’s not JUST the Farm Bill.

What was the primary cause of why it happened now? or was it happening and no one “reported” it?

I would add to that: Often getting something done at the federal level requires victories at the state level first. We’ve got a few states and cities that passed menu labeling bills (NYC, California, Portland, Seattle), and now there’s a national bill in Congress. The restaurants actually tried to argue that calorie labeling on menus would make people eat MORE calories, and then they sued NYC (and lost) and last I heard they were suing San Francisco over it. But once you get something like that enacted in a state or city, then you can study the results, prove whether or not it works, and you’ve got more ammunition to pass it nationally.

It’s a complex bunch of reasons. Here are some:

- More households with 2 parents working & nobody at home to cook
- Advances in marketing, learning how to get people to eat more
- Subsidy policy, making the least healthiest foods the cheapest
- California’s Prop 13 and similar state measures that limit school budgets, which shorten lunch periods and cut out kitchens and lunch ladies, so the kids are served less-healthy food than in previous decades + less kids get PE
- A deregulatory environment in our government since Reagan, allowing (for example) more and more outrageous labeling claims.

Does high-fructose corn syrup have anything to do with it?

Jill – do we know how many school districts have gone to a central kitchen/delivery system? i think you can bet that these folks are running on chicken nuggets and prepackaged/precooked junk.

No. The farm bill IS big but its going to be a beast to get any substantive changes into. And it’s every 5 years. There’s definitely no reason to sit around and twiddle our thumbs til 2012. On the federal level right now there is:

1. The Child Nutrition Reauthorization (school lunch)
2. Louise Slaughter’s bill on antibiotics in livestock
3. BPA ban bills in both chambers
4. A food safety bill (passed the House, not started in the Senate)
5. A menu calorie labeling bill.

And then of course there’s more at state levels.

Advances in marketing, learning how to get people to eat more

I dunno. A lot of us managed to convince our parents (at least occasionally) that Sugar Pops were really good for us just because we would eat more.

Nutritional education is missing. I am shocked at the number of educated adults I run into who don’t know good eating from bad eating. Where do we teach kids about how to eat healthy? My own nutrition education started in *gasp* 7th grade Home Ec! But only for us girls. The guys were in shop.

I think it does, in the sense that it’s cheaper than sugar, so they can make foods sweeter for cheaper. But a 12 oz soda made with sugar isn’t health food either. It’s still empty calories, just slightly more expensive empty calories.

If schools in California are giving naming rights to their buildings, for funding, it is far behind for the school to sell and a food company to pick up the lunch program?

There’s specific research on this, actually. They engineer every aspect of the food, including how many times you have to chew it, to make sure you’ll eat more. A major innovation was made by McDonalds, who discovered that you won’t buy 2 small fries because that makes you feel like a pig, but if they give you an enormous thing of fries, you’ll eat the whole thing.

Of course if you read Jerome Robbins I think in the Diet for a New America (bad memory here) you understand that we slaughter billions of animals which are brought into a life of suffering to be slaughtered stuffed with drugs and then “processed” into food. This process causes enormous pollution wastes enormous amount of land for feed lots and the food is neither healthy or safe.

We turned food into the food industrial complex and get no benefit from this at all. And now they are into genetically modified foods. YIKES.

There are so many reasons not to eat anything with a label on it coming from one of the companies. YUCK.

Gnome – it isn’t just ‘eating healthy’ – a lot of people have complete ‘kitchen illiteracy’ these days..couldn’t cook an egg if they wanted to do so. We have a complete disconnect between where food comes from, how to prepare and serve. And with so many people working, I don’t know that this will change any time soon.

Starting some time this fall I get fresh eggs delivered to me by my homeschooling hippie-chick friend and her daughters who are starting up an egg business. I can’t wait.

Oh are you kidding? Pouring rights have been going on for years, which is basically that. A school or district signs a contract with a soda company to only sell that company’s beverages (not just soda but juice, sports drinks, and water), and then the school gets kickbacks for selling more drinks to the kids.

I guess it’s no help that agribusineess has corrupted the House & Senate
(Take Grassley, please!)

And it was obvious to anyone who knew a little about agriculture that going whole hog into corn for ethanol was NOT going to turn out well.

Oh, right…The Pepsico School Nutrition Program…I can see it now.

Agreed about nutrition education. But I don’t think schools should stop at the food pyramid in a textbook. That education gets totally negated if you serve the kids corn dogs and tater tots for lunch. The BEST nutrition education is a healthy school lunch.

Also, our government’s idea of “nutrition” education is totally corrupted by all of the various lobbies who influence the advice we get. The USDA never wants to tell us to “eat less” of anything. You’ll notice that instead they say “Choose wisely.”

that’s fascinating; I heard a news story the other day about research that shows that the more an item is processed (easier to chew, flavored,etc.), not only do we eat more of it, but we get more ’stuff’ out of it, our bodies absorb more out of it and we get more calories out of it. Think of the difference between eating cooked carrots vs. fresh carrots – whole lot more chewing going on with the fresh ones.

You may be joking but I’m sure McDonalds would gladly offer up Ronald McDonald to any school in the country to teach kids about nutrition.

Jill, what good news is there for us?

Where are we making progress?

Even doctors know little about nutrition and the so called food pyramid is absurd.

Small correction there:

http://www.frist.org/kingdom/food should be
http://www.grist.org/kingdom/food

“..going whole hog into corn for ethanol” hehehe…Ellie – one of the reasons why Cincinnati in the 19th Century was the center of hog butchering is because it was a bigger money maker to turn corn into pork than it was to ship corn to turn it into corn meal. You skipped hog to corn to ethanol!

The best news is that the #2 person at the USDA is Kathleen Merrigan, who is FOR sustainable agriculture. She’s AWESOME. At her hearings, Saxby Chambliss complained that she liked organics too much.

then you can buy fiber additives to fulfill your diet (and tummy)!

woops…I was trying to type fast there…considering how boneheaded Dr. Frist is, I would never direct anyone to him for any nutritional info.

But it probably wouldn’t make any difference whether the soda was sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup unless you consumed large amounts daily for many years, would it?

Hts diss is good enough for me. GO Merrigan!

Michelle Obama did a great thing starting her organic garden, remember the guff she got from the agrichems?

There are ways to prepare food to get more nutrients out of it… I’m a fan of the book Superfoods Rx myself. He often recommends eating BOTH cooked and raw of a vegetable (like spinach). And sometimes it’s best to eat foods with at least a little bit of fat because sometimes that’s necessary to absorb the nutrients. But I’d much prefer food I cooked myself (like cooked carrots, as you mention) to something that was prepared god-knows-how by some company, and then frozen in plastic wrap for me to re-heat.

Right now I’m reading David Kessler’s book The End of Overeating and it’s just shocking what they do to foods they serve at chain restaurants. You assume that they cook them the same ways you do at home but it’s not even close.

http://www.gourmet.com/foodpol…..n-merrigan

“Unlike Vilsack, Merrigan was one of the “Sustainable Dozen.” She comes from the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, in Boston, where she is the director of the Center on Agriculture, Food and Environment. She has also worked in government, as head of the Agricultural Marketing Service at the USDA, as a consultant to the Food and Agriculture Organization at the United Nations, and as staff to the Senate Committee on Agriculture. She even worked for Texas populist Jim Hightower at the Texas Department of Agriculture in the late 1980s. She knows how things work, and she knows where power lies in the food industry. But that’s not what makes Kathleen Merrigan a provocative choice to lead the USDA.

Tom Dobbs, professor emeritus of agricultural economics at South Dakota State University, explains, “For the first time, an advocate of sustainable and organic agriculture will be in the highest-level meetings with the Secretary. She’ll be right there, at his side.”

Merrigan is widely seen as the moving force behind the development of federal organic standards, and she’s the author of the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990. She is an outspoken advocate of moving federal farm policies toward conservation and sustainable land use.”

Yeah, Michelle Obama is great!! And as much as Barack likes building consensus and bipartisanship and all, the fact that the garden is organic really angered the biotech/pesticide industries. But she needs to put her money where her mouth is now. The child nutrition reauthorization is coming up in the next few months and it’d be great to see real White House leadership to improve school lunches. If Obama’s performance fighting for the public option in health care is an indication of what he’s gonna do then I’m not thrilled about it.

Jill, I can’t put my finger on the quote at the moment regarding high fructose corn syrup, but what’s the percentage of corn acreage that is devoted to growing corn for just that?

I don’t know, honestly, what differences go on in your body whether you drink soda with sugar or HFCS. The bottom line is that either one is bad for you. If you choose to drink it, that’s your business, but neither one is good for you in any way.

I just returned from a very frustrating visit with my sister and her family. They eat more processed food than any family I know. My sister commented on me buying expensive minimally processed ham (prosciutto) to go with the farmer’s market bought melons we bought because I do not have much money at the moment. Instead I should have eaten the Hormel crap in her fridge. I will not eat rather than eat crap. I can taste the chemicals and feed lot in that stuff.

define “large amounts daily” – It probably varies from the person who has one soda a week and thinks two are too many to the folks who drink a six pack of soda before lunch (and they are all over the place)

Last I saw I think it was 4.1% of our corn goes to make HFCS. And 30% of our cropland acreage (approx) goes for corn. So a little over 1% of our cropland is for growing HFCS. I think it was 1.2%? Which is really sad considering that fruits and veg are each at about 1.5% or so.

oo, wonderful!

Gnome – you’re pretty familiar with how I feel about food – the closer it is to how it started, the better it is for us. Less higher quality food is better than more junk. My two cents.

Good point. As for my friend who was on the Schwarzbein diet, what really made the difference in his weightloss was his cutback from several Cokes a day to 1-2 a week.

And considering what a ‘hungry’ crop corn is (which is one of the reasons we do NOT grow it at Chez Siberia), the amount of fertilizers and petroleum that is going into it as well is just horrifying.

It’s not just that we pay for our food through our taxes (in subsidies). We also pay through our health care and lost quality of life. And that’s a much higher cost to pay.

I’ve been a fan of Jill’s for awhile.

My own nutrition education started in *gasp* 7th grade Home Ec! But only for us girls. The guys were in shop. Gnome de Plume

What I know is that that Big Food like to insert themselves in the food “nutrition” process and they have been for years. It is hard to battle it, especially when it is tied to getting money. The folks who push these kind of deals like to think, ‘And the schools win too’ but it is really about how they win. My sister, the grade school teacher, told me about these deals and I was disgusted.

I didn’t have any home-ec (Heck I didn’t even have shop!) but thanks to being educated by people like Frances Moore Lappe who wrote Diet for a Small Planet, I started my cooking tied to food issues. That helped a lot.

Also I remember the first time I ate a real orange. I was in my 40s (!) and I finally had an organic one from Whole Foods. I was blown away. It was intensely flavorful. I had been eating “oranges” that were designed for transport and not for flavor. The combination of understanding food issues with flavor and cooking helps.

Exactly. It’d be one thing if it were nourished via cover crops and crop rotation, but it’s not. This week we found out that the EPA had failed to tell the American people that 4 midwestern states had levels of Atrazine (an herbicide used on corn) above the legal levels in their drinking water. And then there’s the freaking dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Thank you, corn!

http://newsburglar.com/2008/01/17/sugar-can-coke/

There are 40.5 grams of sugar in a 12 oz can of Coke.

* Forty grams of sugar is the equivalent of 10 teaspoons of sugar.
# Drinking one Coke a day for a year results in the consumption of 32 pounds of sugar.
# Drinking one Coke a day, instead of an equivalent amount of tap water, for a full year would cause you to gain 18 pounds.

I make no claims to eating a particularly healthy diet, but I did kick my six pack a day Coke habit (I’m not a coffee drinker). I felt a lot better leaving that habit behind.

I’m sitting next to someone who does know. She certainly agrees with you about not drinking soda, particularly if you’re a women hoping to stave off osteoporosis, but she doesn’t think that HFCS is all that much worse than any other form of concentrated sugar excessively consumed. Over decades HFCS will probably result in a higher incidence of diabetes, but any high-sugar consumption is ultimately unhealthy.

I know! It destroys the soil, for starters.

I have a few friends who are registered dietitians. You should hear what they say about the ADA. To find their stuff, look for Ashley on the blog US Food Policy and then look for Melinda who had a column called “The Food Sleuth” and now does a radio show. They can comment on it far better than I can, but it’s eye opening to see what the mainstream nutrition community thinks is OK to eat.

She’s a wise one, all that phosphorus really is really bad for you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hfcs

The process by which HFCS is produced was first developed by Richard Off. Marshalle and Earl P. Kooi in 1957.[5] The industrial production process was refined by Dr. Y. Takasaki at Agency of Industrial Science and Technology of Ministry of International Trade and Industry of Japan in 1965–1970. HFCS was rapidly introduced to many processed foods and soft drinks in the U.S. from about 1975 to 1985.

Let’s see now…shall we try to make a connection between when high fructose corn syrup entered the US food chain and obesity and vast increase in diabetes?

Foraging in LA means going through garbage cans.
Nice list, but a little uppity.
No offense. There’s the little people to think of.

And just an FYI, the American Heart Association just came out with a statement that women should limit sugar intake to 6 teaspoons a day, men to 9 teaspoons. That means nobody should be drinking an entire can of coke in a day.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories…..8819.shtml

I won’t feel bad about the single packet of sugar I use per 16oz mug of coffee then.

First off… a friend just took me foraging in Central Park, in Manhattan. there was a shocking amount of food – for free – in Central Park. So it’s not as crazy an idea as I would have once thought.

Second… I consider myself part of the food justice movement. That means instead of telling people to buy organic, we need to find a way to make sure all people have access to healthy food. And honestly, if you cant get local or organic or whatever, eating SOME vegetables is better than eating NO vegetables, ditto on fruit.

Jill – so, what’s the one thing any of us can implement this next week that will help us?

Debating How Much Weed Killer Is Safe in Your Water Glass

Here’s the map of atrazine use in the US (1997)

Yes..Mike Bloomburg’s ‘green cart’ movement in areas of NYC that have no grocery stores has been, from what I have read, a huge success. The convenience stores in those areas are NOT happy, but people are coming out and, as they did in the first half of the 20th Century, bought off the pushcarts, fruit and veggies. Also…I just read that the food service at Yankee Stadium has put in a new place to buy fresh fruits.

Cool on the free food in Central Park. That doesn’t happen where I live. And, no offense, some people who work all day don’t have that kind of time. I put a garden in my back yard and we are enjoying some “free” and “healthy” food. Good for us.
Just saying, different folks have different access to “foraging” and other stuff. I think threads like this are important, and it works better if more of us can relate to the options.
Thanks to Toby and you, btw.

One thing to do in the next week? See if your Congressperson or Senator has any events in your district and attend them if they are. If not, write or call their district offices, or see if you can have a meeting with someone at their district offices. If that’s too intimidating, just send an email. Do what you can.

For the Senate: Ask them to pass food safety legislation, but tell them that it needs MORE protection for small producers/organic farmers than the House version of the bill.

For the House: Ask your member of Congress to co-sponsor Louise Slaughter’s bill the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act.

School lunch is also a good topic but it seems a bit early yet to really take action on that. But it won’t hurt to speak up about it, for sure.

hmmm, that map is just wonderful..the highest use, in red, is right around the drainage area for all the major rivers in the Upper Midwest going into the Mississippi..and out into the Gulf. dead zone city.

We can and should, but that’s just one factor.

Actually, speaking of Dead Zones..that means that corn farmers in the Upper Midwest are really stealing the livelihoods from the Gulf fishermen, right Jill?

No worries. Honestly, I listed it as an option only because for some people it is. Not for all people. If that’s not you no big deal.

As for the time aspect, again, I was SHOCKED at how many edible plants were in a small area in Central Park. It wouldn’t take time at all. You didn’t even have to walk and look for stuff, there was an abundance of edible plants all over the place. You could literally just stand in one spot and eat.

I don’t know how to do that on the west coast, and clearly it’s not an option for everyone. If a grocery store is all you’ve got, then it’s all you’ve got. I was mostly listing those options as things I consider as better than Whole Foods. I still consider Whole Foods (if you can afford it – a big IF of course) as better than regular grocery stores, because of the long list of artificial ingredients that the store refuses to carry in any of its products.

I don’t have specific stats or numbers, but that’s certainly what I presume.

The only thing I’d worry about in terms of foraging is not knowing whether or not some municipality had sprayed the area…

No worries? Good. I’m not worried either.
There’s a disconnect here, I think.

As we come to the end of this Book Salon,

Jill, Thank you for stopping by the Lake and spending the afternoon with us, discussing your new book and America’s food system.

Toby, Thank You very much for Hosting today’s Book Salon.

Everyone, if you haven’t bought Jill’s book yet, it is an excellent book, here is a link.

Thanks all.

I honestly don’t interpret it as that. John Mackey can’t give us health care. I’m kind of agnostic about the boycott. There are other reasons to be pissed off at Whole Foods (like anti-unionization tactics) but I’m not sure it’s enough to make me hate Whole Foods, even if their CEO is a nut. I think Mackey is getting what he deserves with the boycott, but I also wish that all of this energy towards the boycott was channeled towards Congress, and towards attending town hall meetings and demanding health care.

A dentist friend of mine gives her young patients a pulled tooth to take home. She tells them to put it in a glass, pour either Coke or Dr. Pepper in the glass, let it sit over night and then check on the tooth the next morning. A lot of kids stop drinking the stuff when they wake up to find that the tooth is gone and that it was not taken by the Tooth Fairy.

Of course, totally good call. There’s a big controversy here in CA about the state spraying for the light brown apple moth. I am, of course, NOT for spraying.

Holy shit. I might try that on my boyfriend’s daughter. Gross!

Do the people who create these pigs and chickens care about their health? No. In 2007 when melamine contaminated pet food was recalled, the food that killed over 4,000 cats and dogs was sold to be fed to chickens and pigs.

Over 20,000,000 chickens and 56,000 hogs were fed this recalled pet food. When some of us complained the FDA (via pressure from Big Pig and Big Chicken) issued a document saying that the same stuff that killed and sickened thousands of kitties and puppies would not hurt the humans who ate the pigs and chickens who ate the tainted pet food. Why? The “dilution effect”. All of this was designed so that the processor of the chickens and the pigs would not have to cull them. They put pressure on the USDA to give them permission to let these tainted chickens and pigs to humans. It worked.

All of this is infuriating, but what also pissed me off is that the FDA would NOT name the name of the chicken and pig processor that fed the tainted food to the pigs and chickens. The press asked and they were told that it wasn’t any of their business and wasn’t important.

I found out who it was but didn’t publish it because I didn’t want to get sued like Oprah for food disparagement laws. They would rather people die from eating their food than have to cull 20 million chickens and 56,000 hogs. This was the reason the USDA was created, but they are so controlled by their need to protect the industry they put the safety of the people last. And many of you remember that the same melamine that killed over 4,000 cats and dogs in the US killed children in China. So it’s not as if this wouldn’t have had an impact.

THAT is the power of Big Pig and Big Chicken.

If anyone wants to know the name of the processor that fed the tainted feed to the Chickens and Pigs drop me a line.

Thank you very much, and thanks to everyone. I’ll stick around a bit since I was late, in case there’s anything else folks want to talk about.

In one night? Really? I’m feeling skeptical about that story.

Jill — thank you so much.

Nope. My daughter was one of the patients. I saw it with my own eyes. It is the phosphoric acid in the drinks that does it, not the sugar.

Thanks Jill, good luck with your book, may it make change

And thanks so much Aunt Toby, you’re the bees knees. You too Bev.

Oh, my father, the metallurgist, used to tell me Coke would eat through steel!!

And there are all those uses for it, like cleaning the toilet.

Skeptical or not, I don’t drink many soft drinks. Mostly water anyway.

You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
For some, it doesn’t require a book to tell you how to do it. F me. I’m just saying. Too many books being written. People who don’t get It, aren’t going to go out and buy a book. Best of luck, anyway. Sorry, I just don’t pander.

A neighbor told me about his Korean daughter-in-law who saw a large-leafed weed growing in his yard and picked all she could, and that was their green vegetable for dinner. He said she fried it with garlic. (Well he didn’t eat it, he’s 82 and strictly meat-and-potatoes.)

Wow, fascinating! Another great use for un-used veggies is in kimchi or sauerkraut. (For example, you can put the leaves from a broccoli plant that we normally don’t eat into your sauerkraut)

I thought frying was the worst you could do to be healthy. I choose to steam or broil. Just me.
Ewwww. I think I’d prefer to fast for that, and I’m not a meat and potatoes person.

Jill do you have any opinion about Splenda, or other artificial sweetners?

Jill may not be around anymore, but I keep hearing people saying how Splenda isn’t the same as the other sweetners. I won’t touch any. They give me migraines and other internal problems. I have had both a pediatrician and a vetinarian tell me they would not let their children touch the stuff.

when i re-registered my car, the woman at the AAA office saw the battery acid corrosion under my hood and told me to pour some coke on it, would clean it up nice and tidy.

Well, I’m not a dietitian AT ALL, nor am I a scientist, so this is a very unscientific point of view… but I figure that our bodies evolved together with the foods that were available in nature, so I don’t go in for the artificial stuff like Splenda.

Yeah, that’s kind of what I figured, never used any artificial stuff until the last 4 years. Probably time to go back to sugar.

A dietician just told me about that book, The End of Overeating. Now I have to read it.

I remember watching a PBS program waay back in the early 70’s about how they make those pepperoni sticks and beef jerky that you find at convenience stores: Not an ounce of real food in any of ‘em. It’s all chemicals mixed in vats and put through extruders.

Chickens were fed arsenic to plump ‘em up, maybe still are. The law allowed it up until 6 months of age but then they were supposed to stop because it took several months to work it out of their systems. Tests showed they didn’t. This is still a big source my aversion to chicken.

A town near me just started a produce exchange. Bring your backyard-grown veggies and take what you need. There’s also a process to buy if you have no back yard. Whatever is left at the end of the Saturday is taken to the Foothill Unity Center for their soup line.

Have you tried Stevia? It’s a plant and minimally processed, or so they say.

The first time I heard that was from a Coke delivery truck driver. She also said she never touches the stuff herself.

My favorite story about food is “tissue from ground bone”. The manufacturers grind up the bones and extrude them through a mesh, and the product is sold as meat. Flecks of bone and cartilage “the size of a flake of dandruff” are allowed by FDA rule.

Oh, gahhkkk. Are they labeled as such? How does one avoid these nasty things?

I’m late to this party, but just wanted to tell Jill that I was already following her on Twitter… which is where you find all of the really cutting-edge food conversations, links to blog posts and info about all kinds of dietary restrictions, as well as info for those who can enjoy all of the abundance available. Food rules on Twitter!