Eating Animals Part Deux

My friend, Ruth, just finished reading Eating Animals and has written a great article on her blog about the book. It's much more complete and informative than my previous review. Please go check it out HERE.

Plus, here's a great video with the author Jonathan Safran Foer about the book. There are lots of interviews on YouTube with him that I loved watching. I love him!



I'll be back soon with some actual food posts!

Why Aren’t G.M.O. Foods Labeled?

Please read this excellent article on GMOs by Mark Bittman:

I am so frustrated about this whole issue. :(

Also, Mark Bittman has a book called How to Cook Everything Vegetarian that I can not wait to check out! I hope to do that soon and I'll report back with a review.

Quinoa With Roasted Veg

Now this is an especially bad photo, but it's of something incredibly delicious, so I'm going to pretend that makes up for it.

I had tons of root vegetables on hand one night and had to come up with something to do with them. And so I made this. And it was so tasty. It's a very loose recipe, you can do almost anything, but this is what I did:

Quinoa, cooked in salted water (follow package's directions)

Carrots
Turnips
Parsnips
Butternut squash
Red onion
Garlic
(You could also do potatoes or rutabaga. Basically anything you want to roast, I would think.)

Chop the veg into uniform pieces so they cook evenly. Toss to coat with olive oil, salt, pepper, rosemary or thyme or whatever your favorite herbs are. Roast for 30-45 minutes at 350 degrees.

Add a sprinkle of good parmesan and a tad bit of lemon juice to the quinoa and serve with the veggies. It is SO GOOD. And quinoa is a good source of protein, so bonus! You should probably serve this with a green salad with maybe a little cheese (feta would go great I think), but I was lazy that night and we just had this one dish. It's a favorite.

And a Happy Valentine's Day, if you celebrate that kind of thing. :)

A Couple Favorite Blogs +

Delicious foods from Joan's on Third in LA. Spinach mushroom quiche, curried
chickpeas, farrow salad and a brussel sprout salad. It was off the hook!

Healthy Green Kitchen is one of my absolute favorites right now. I love that she includes so much information about nutrition along with lovely photos and recipes using homegrown and local ingredients. She also is mostly gluten-free. This endive and satsuma mandarin salad makes me so hungry! And, with my current quinoa obsession, this curried quinoa salad is something I must make asap.

I can't remember if I've shared this blog before (though I know many of you who read this blog found me through it) -- my friend Sheena is my hero. She blogs at In The Little Red House. She posts lots of great recipes and I especially like the series she's been doing right now about health and nutrition and how to start making changes in how we eat and feed our families. Go HERE to read all of her posts in the series so far. Plus, she's gorgeous, has the cutest family you've ever seen, and her photography is beautiful.

Lastly, I have to share some interesting things I've read lately. Saturday is the pick-up day for our CSA box and in the box is a weekly newsletter from the farmer who runs and set up our co-op. He's not much of a writer, but he is so knowledgeable and I always learn something from the newsletter. With the news of Supreme Court lifting the ban on genetically modified alfalfa (hay) recently, there's been a lot of talk again about how GMO crops are going to have an affect on the food industry. This is what Uncle Vern (our farmer -- haha!) had to say last week and this week about it:

"What they've been able to accomplish through gene splicing is phenomenal taken by itself. They an isolate a trait from one organism and splice it into the DNA of another. Not just within the same species but actually from animals or bacteria to plants or fish and vice versa. Now that's some crazy stuff right there.

There are tons of potential applications for this technology, but right now, the biggest inroads have come from DuPont, Syngenta and Monsanto in just a few basic areas; herbicide resistance, and pesticide production. Basically, they can create crops that make their own pesticide so when bugs eat em, they die, or, you can spry the field with a particular herbicide and the crop isn't affected, but the weeds die. I told you it was crazy.

Practically all the non organic corn, soybeans and cotton in the US have thus been modified, so, pretty much EVERYTHING you eat or drink that's processed and not 100% organic is made from GMO's, because practically EVERYTHING processed is made from or sweetened by GM corn or soy and of course all non-organic animals are fed GM corn and soy.

You've heard my story before of cocci (diarrhea) in our conventional chickens that never happened in the organic chickens and I believe in large part that's because the conventional chickens are fed GM corn and soy but it's only an observation from this farmer.

On the plus side, these traits initially reduce tillage costs and pesticide usage, making farmers more profitable. I have a good friend who's a career Monsanto guy. We have some healthy discussions as you might imagine and next week I'll share some of em with you..."

and from this week

"Our goal is to restore the connection to a healthy level again so we can be on the same team, working together to provide healthy food from California. Agriculture, not strip malls or Hollywood is still the largest industry in the golden state.

Remember, that it's quite rare that any one producer controls even 10% of any commodity. Farming is incredibly competitive at the production level. I can also tell you that at the production level, conventional or organic; you'll never find a more trustworthy group of business professionals than CA farmers. We are optimistic survivors.

Keep that in mind as we continue our talk on Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) because if given a chance, farmers will produce exactly what folks are willing to pay for (not what they say they're willing to pay for).

Okay, so genetic modification involves taking genes (not chromosomes) from one species and inserting them into another to create herbicide resistance for example so now a conventional farmer can spray the weeds and the corn with say Round-up and only the weeds die. That same corn can also make its own pesticide so that when the corn worm eat it, he dies. Now the conventional farmer doesn't have to spray for worms. When they put both traits into one plant like that it's called "staking". I ask my friend the Monsanto guy, "If you guys come-up with patented seed technology that will save a farmer $100.00 how much more will you charge for the seed?" His sheepish response was "$85 bucks."

My 1st point is this. If the argument is: we need to do this to remain economically competitive, how do we justify even the economics when only 15% is transferring to the bottom line. Here we are, messing around with nature, creating stuff that has natural barriers (normally you can't cross a firefly with a guppy etc.) and stealthily feeding it to Americans. Now fifteen dollars cannot be ignored by your average corn farmer playing his intense pennies game, but not even the economic benefits are aiding the farmer nor the consumer to any meaningful extent."

That's it for today. I promise less talk and more photos and recipes for yummy food soon.

Eating Animals

Sorry for the long absence. But I'm back!

And the big news is...that I'm going vegetarian. The catalyst for this decision was primarily this book...

Eating Animals was written by one of my very favorite authors of all time (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Everything Is Illuminated) and this was his first non-novel. His writing always touches me on an extremely deep level and this book was no exception. He explores the moral, environmental and social implications of eating factory farmed meat and by the end of it, I felt I could not justify being a part of it any longer.

One of the great things about this book is that it's not just a hard-sell for vegetarianism. Foer is not trying to scare you into not eating meat. He explores family farms quite extensively and completely supports what they're doing -- giving animals the best life possible and a humane death before being turned into food.

I recommend this book to anyone seriously researching where our food comes from. While most of the information regarding factory farming is not going to be new to anyone who's read anything by Michael Pollan, the moral and nearly spiritual reasons to not eat meat are presented in a way I had never considered. Add in the facts regarding the environmental havoc we're causing (particularly the fishing industry), and you're left with a lot to think about.

So, with all of that said, I'm back to blogging and will hopefully have lots of amazing vegetarian dishes to share with you as I continue my quest into eating healthfully and wholefully (that should so be a word). I'll apologize in advance for the quality of my photos -- I know we're all used to excellence around here. My husband has been doing it all for me, but the truth is, he's way too busy with actual things than being bothered by me about a silly blog. So as long as you're cool with that, I'll see you back here soon.

Cheers.