According to a NYT article, kindergarten and 1st grade kids put on body mass two to three times faster during the summer, compared to the school year. Some of that has to do with the lack of scheduled eating and activity enforced by schools, some has to do with sitting around watching TV and playing video games. Sadly, kids who need to gain weight also did better during the school year, putting on more mass, likely thanks to the almost-guaranteed offer of two-to-three squares a day from the government.

School cafeteria food may not be ideal, but Sarasota has the right attitude to help kids with nutrition. Pinellas and Hillsborough are a little behind the curve.

Check the recipes — and the Sterlings’ comments about the healthful nature of the dishes — after the break.
Grass Root Organic Restaurant

A Simple Banana Smoothie

• 1 cup of Living Harvest hemp milk
• 1 organic banana and ½ cup of organic strawberries
• Raw agave nectar or honey to taste, 1 tablespoon is a good start.
• ½ cup of ice

Blend all of the ingredients together until smooth and all fruit and ice have been blended well. Serve and enjoy immediately. Delicious and nutritious hemp milk and fresh organic fruits will make this the easiest breakfast smoothie ever. Children will love this smoothie. Agave nectar is a raw natural sweetener this is low glycemic and suitable for diabetics. Some vegans do not agree with the use of honey.

Tofu Scramble

• 1 pack of non-GMO organic firm tofu in water
• 2-3 tablespoons of cold pressed extra virgin olive oil
• 1 teaspoon of turmeric powder
• ¼ teaspoon of curry powder
• 4 cloves of garlic
• ½ medium size onion (red is my favorite)
• ¼ teaspoon thyme
• Sea salt to taste
• Black pepper to taste
• Organic garlic powder and onion powder may also be used in this recipe
• Cayenne pepper is also a wonderful addition to this recipe. Although cayenne is good for circulation, it is very spicy. It should be introduced to the palate gradually and will add a little kick to this vegan favorite.

Purchase firm tofu in the pack with water. It must be non-GMO tofu. Remove the tofu from the pack and discard the water. Place tofu on a paper towel. Grab a small handful and squeeze it until what ever water you can squeeze out is gone. Place the tofu in a bowl and repeat the last step until all of the tofu is in the bowl. Do not leave big chunks of tofu. Crumble with your hand until there are no big chunks.

Lightly cover the bottom of a frying pan with the oil and sauté the onions and garlic very lightly, stop when garlic begins to brown. Add the tofu to the pan and stir lightly. Add tofu scramble pack and stir well. Add black pepper, salt, and cayenne pepper. Add turmeric, curry and stir until mixed well. If the tofu begins to stick, add two tablespoons of water. The color should be even. Tofu scramble may be enjoyed for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Ezekiel Toast with Fruit Spread or Apple Butter

Ezekiel bread starts off with the advantage over other bread, because it is made with sprouted grains. off with all sprout grains. For you this means better nutrition and rich taste. Lightly toast a few slices of Ezekiel Cinnamon Raisin Bread which can be found in the freezer section of any health food store. Dress this with vegan butter or 100% fruit spread. Apple Butter is also a great spread. All can be found at your local health food store.

• Living Harvest hemp milk $3.50
• Firm organic tofu $1.50
• Tofu scramble $2.50
• Ezekiel Bread Cinnamon Raisin $4.50
• Fruit Spread (ingredients should read: fruit) $3.00
• Ripe organic banana $.50
• Fresh ripe organic strawberries $4.50

This price list is pretty accurate. You pay either way. You can pay now and get prganic healthy foods or you can pay later in the nursing home or hospital. We choose the power of now!

With energy,

Spencer and Sabrina

That’s not stopping raw food impressario and culinary hottie Matthew Kenney from transplanting himself from progressive New York City to the most dreadful city in Florida. Yep, he’s opening a raw restaurant in Orlando called Cafe 118 (referring to the max temperature it’s food will reach). The place isn’t open yet, but the website already features a link for anyone interested in franchise opportunities. Before you jump on the burgeoning raw food bandwagon and start shelling out your uncooked dough, be forewarned that one of the reasons Kenney may be expanding out of his home base in NYC involves litigation and bankruptcy relating to some of his previous businesses. Whatever, Florida is all about second chances, right?

• “April 12th’s Saturday Night Live featured three clips of Ashton Kutcher dressed up as a giant chocolate bar with a killer instinct, cute mime clown face and all.” (Thanks Serious Eats)

• “What was supposed to be a temporary financial safety net for imperiled family farmers has become a huge boondoggle for a fraction of wealthy farmers, including landowners who’ve never gotten close enough to a barn to slip on the manure.” (Thanks PBS.org)

• “A simulated outbreak of the disease — part of an earlier U.S. government exercise called “Crimson Sky” — ended with fictional riots in the streets after the simulation’s National Guardsmen were ordered to kill tens of millions of farm animals, so many that troops ran out of bullets.” (Thanks AP)

• “Planners couldn’t come up with enough organic or sustainably grown food from Georgia to nourish just 600 people over two days.” Hmm, maybe I’ll have to start giving back to my alma mater. (Thanks AJC)

• “Smart owners, of course, have always carefully watched their costs, but when every bill comes with a “gasoline-price surcharge” and fewer people are walking through the door, it’s hocus-pocus time.” (Thanks WP)

• WORLD FOOD CRISIS UPDATE: “Cropland is suddenly in heavy demand, a situation that is fraying old alliances, inspiring new ones and putting pressure on the Agriculture Department, which is being lobbied directly by all sides without managing to satisfy any of them.” (Thanks NYT)

• WORLD FOOD CRISIS UPDATE: “When millions of people are going hungry, it’s a crime against humanity that food should be diverted to biofuels,” said India’s finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, in an interview.” (Thanks WSJ)

• WORLD FOOD CRISIS UPDATE: “As we know in the past, sometimes those questions lead to war,” he said. “We now need to devote 100 percent of our time to these questions.” (Thanks NYT)

Lately, local food and health advocates have stapled a silver lining onto the recession by claiming that higher prices of industrially-produced corn, meat and soy – caused by elevated oil prices, among a bevy of other factors – means that people will be eating more fruits and vegetables from local farms, since those prices have stayed largely stable. That’s good for the environment, public health and the local economy. The NYT had a piece about this today, featuring quotes and wishful thinking from luminaries like Michael Pollan and Alica Waters.

The problem is, prices for local and organic fruits and vegetables are only “bargains” in relation to those industrial products’ increased prices. That’s great for the environmental- and health-conscious middle and upper classes who already seek out better foods. But, mass-produced food is still less expensive and easier to obtain, especially for lower-income families, which means the unhealthiest, most inexpensive commercial foods might see as big a jump in consumption as local and organic products.

Burger King CEO John Chidsey nailed that problem in a Wall Street Journal Q & A last week: “It’s very hard for me to imagine that the economy could ever get so bad that somebody could not afford to go buy a Double Cheeseburger from McDonald’s or a Whopper Jr. from us for $1. If you go to the grocery store, I really challenge you to find something for under $1.”

When I tried the Food Stamp Challenge last year, I experienced those same issues. Making the best out of a small budget and and healthy desires takes precious time that the working poor don’t usually have in abundance. When money is tight, really tight, healthy eating falls quickly to the convenience of a cheap and filling fast food meal.

This week, Men’s Health released their annual list of the worst foods in America. For them, “worst” is more a calculation of fat and calories than overall taste, but several items could qualify in both respects. Their targets are big national chains, with McDonalds, Chilis, Chipotle and Macaroni Grill making the list for egregious concoctions designed more for small villages or Dom Deluise look-a-like conventions than the single servings they purport to be.

Topping the list is the Bay area’s own Outback Steakhouse, with their “Aussie cheese fries with ranch dressing.” 2900 calories. 182 grams of fat. It’s nice to know that, yet again, Tampa is leading the way when it comes to dining.

This comes on the heels of another recent study that tracked 9500 adults for nine years to find underlying conditions that contribute to heart disease, diabetes, obesity and other conditions commonly referred to as “metabolic syndrome.” No surprise that Michael Pollan’s dreaded “Western diet” accounts for much of the increased problems, but diet soda is the biggest villain in the story. People who drink one diet soda a day have a 34% higher risk of developing the syndrome than people who drink no diet soda.

Looks like I’ll be getting a packet from the Calorie Control Council soon, just like the info from the fine people at Big Corn.

In December, the USDA changed its mind. Next month, states will implement an addition to the program that provides a whopping $8 to each WIC recipient for the purchase of fruits and vegetables. Not much, to be sure, but most WIC participants also get benefits from other programs, like Food Stamps.

Around these parts, that $8 will have to spent at the supermarket.

You see, there is already a WIC program in place — the Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program — that provides money to moms and kids to be used at farmers’ markets for the purchase of locally grown fruits and vegetables, but Florida isn’t pushing participation. In 2007 we received less federal money for the program than 22 other states and districts, including places like Washington, D.C. and Iowa. The FMNP coupons Florida does distribute are only authorized for use in 17 out of 67 Florida counties. Hillsborough, Pinellas, Sarasota and Manatee are not on the list.

All of this comes on the heels of a UCLA study that followed two groups of WIC participants — one given an extra $10 in coupons for local farmers’ markets and one given $10 for fruits and vegetables at the supermarket. After 6 months, the farmers markets group consumed almost twice as many extra daily servings of fruits and vegetables than the supermarket group.

Now that’s an efficient way to promote nutrition.

This space is usually devoted to appraising the kinds of food that we eat pretty much every day, served by people who devote their lives and livelihoods to its preparation. Rarely do I delve into the nitty-gritty of America’s relationship with food. It’s a complex subject, easy to ignore in the face of so many damn fine things to eat.

In some ways, 2006’s Omnivore’s Dilemma — arguably the best food book of the decade — changed all of that, at least for me. In Omnivore, author Michael Pollan broadly set the scene for dietary self-examination, detailing the history of our unhealthy relationship with corn and soy and lamenting the distance (both physical and psychological) between our plates and the sources of our food. In the process, he fleetingly raises a couple of troublesome questions: Why do we eat what we eat? And, perhaps more important: What should we eat?

In Defense of Food, Pollan’s latest book, is his answer.

The response to Omnivore was mixed. There were accolades galore, to be sure, but also a shit-storm of criticism. His uncompromising critique of industrial meat production, factory farming and processed foods came across as elitist to many; others thought it didn’t go far enough: Reviewer and Atlantic editor B.R. Myers called it “a record of the gourmet’s ongoing failure to think in moral terms.”

Pollan’s aim in that book was to follow the “natural history of four meals” — not to examine the overall American diet. He focused on the ingredients of those meals, although his digressions into the production and culture of food proved to be the more intriguing parts of the narrative. What Myers, and many other critics, disliked was that he failed to take a stand about our diet.

That is not a failing of In Defense of Food. From the beginning pages, Pollan’s goal is to convince the reader, and society by transmission, to change the way they eat. And from the get-go, it’s persuasive.

First come the body blows aimed more at the why than the what of eating, beginning with a trend started around the turn of the 20th century (and adopted wholeheartedly by the government in the 1970s) that reduced the study of food and diets to component nutrients. So the discussion changed from meat and bread to protein and carbohydrates.

According to Pollan, this “nutritionism” gave free reign to the food industry, diet gurus and, ahem, food journalists to replace Western society’s traditional eating habits with dietary crusades and nutrients of the week. Food, it turns out, is more complicated than we thought. And Pollan has a convincing argument that science isn’t up to the task of figuring it out.

His most striking example is the war against fat that has had America by the gullet for decades. Rising rates of heart disease prompted the government to step in and tell people to eat more low-fat foods 40 years ago. Simple, decent advice. We followed it a bit too well.

Now, we’re still eating about the same amount of fat as in the ’70s (albeit less of it saturated) and, following the letter of that government dictum, we eat a lot more low-fat foods, resulting in an average consumption of 300 more daily calories than four decades ago. Most of that comes from simple, processed carbohydrates and sugar. On average, Americans now get more than 20 percent of their calories from soy oil and 10 percent from corn-based sweeteners.

Know when obesity levels started their inexorable rise to present-day crisis levels? Yep, the ’70s. And recent research indicates that low-fat diets don’t necessarily combat heart disease. Food, as Pollan continually stresses, is complicated.

His antidote is straightforward enough to placate some of his critics and confound others. In fact, the first few sentences lay out the manifesto’s mantra: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

The crux of the Defense “diet” lies in the author’s definition of food. Products that contain ingredients that are unfamiliar, unpronounceable, more than five in number or which include high-fructose corn syrup don’t make the grade. That leaves the products populating the interior aisles of Publix pretty much off limits.

“Mostly plants” is largely self-explanatory, although Pollan stresses that a widely varied diet of plants is vitally important to maximize the healthful aspects of, for instance, anti-oxidants, which spur the body to clean out toxins.

Along with this comes a lot of homey, practical advice that has a point while bordering on motherly henpecking. Drink wine with dinner; don’t eat at the gas station; try to meet the folks who raise your food. It’s all so obvious that it’s easy to ignore, no matter how valuable. Then again, maybe that’s just my modern, dysfunctional attitude, looking for a panacea to fix my diet when common sense should suffice.

Criticism — especially of those folksy aphorisms — will still roll in from both sides of the debate. By Pollan’s own admission, this style of eating is tough for everyone and even tougher for people who have less time or money to devote to the procurement and cooking of food, let alone visiting farmer’s markets or planting a home garden.

And those who wanted Pollan to rally the troops for a fight against big agro-business will find that In Defense of Food is more a plea for self-improvement than a cry for political action. He also still shies away from drawing moral judgments about food, disregarding the nigh-religious beliefs of food cults from vegetarianism to locavores, preferring to deal solely with the practical effect of those diets.

Although no dietary magic bullet, In Defense of Food is like the first blast of a defibrillator, shocking our diseased food culture — which has drowned for a hundred years in corn syrup and white flour — back to life. It’s not going to cure any longstanding ills, but for some people the shock will be enough to spur a little personal change.

Only in Japan would they spike your cookies with “breast enhancing herbs.” Each cookie has 50mg of the magical boobie herb, Pueraria Mirifica. (According to Peuraria corporate press: “As miracle herb has been proved its efficacy of “high Content of Active Ingredients” for building up confidence among women to be more Perfect! Lady.” Lady, indeed!) The text is Japanese, but these graphics tell the tale.

Brings new meaning to Two-a-Day!

(Sorry Jaden, couldn’t resist adding some stuff! -BR)