[book] The Gluten Lie

Most people will think Alan Levinovitz, a Professor of Religion, an unlikely author of a diet book, particularly one like this that refutes many of the most popular diet fads. But in fact it’s one of the best health books I know. Nobody should read a diet or health book without reading this one first.

In my half-century of life, I can remember science being applied to so many different health claims that I’ve forgotten all the now-discredited ones that were once popular, but Levinovitz provides some reminders. Take MSG, for example, which began its road to public vilification with a letter to the editor of New England Journal of Medicine by a doctor who had a bad experience at a Chinese restaurant. Throughout the 1970s it was implicated as the cause of so many ailments that it became the subject of much serious scientific inquiry that all turned up negative. To this day, many people are convinced MSG causes headaches, yet no well-designed study has ever found any difference between MSG and a placebo.

MSG, like gluten and most of the other substances that have come and gone in the public favor, is a nocebo, an inert substance that causes harm because of the expectation of harm, not from anything real. On and on it goes with many other embattled foods. Wheat gluten is just the latest, most popular example, following in the footsteps of a whole line of defamed foods: salt, cholesterol, red meat, soy, and on and on.

Part of the problem is that, for many substances, there really are some people who are negatively affected. Celiac Disease is real for some people, just as sugar is a problem for diabetics and lactose causes stomach distress for many. But just because something negatively affects some people doesn’t mean it’s bad for the rest of us.

Levinovitz’ religious studies background makes him uniquely qualified to see the parallels between various health claims and religious belief. Claims about food are often couched in terms that, with a slight tweak of terminology, would be entirely appropriate coming from a church pulpit. Here are some examples:

You are what you eat: this idea can be traced to Galen, but it’s still in us. It’s why it’s so easy to sell the American public on the idea that eating fat makes you fat. Similarly, it’s not hard to convince some people that meat-eating, and its association with killing of animals, will make you more likely to be cruel to other humans.

If it tastes good it must be bad. It’s not hard to see the Puritan streak in much of the American discussion of the dangers of processed foods. We like the taste of sugar too much, leaving us at the mercy of Evil Corporations (Satan) who exploit our innocent addictions (The Fall) in order to make Big Profits. The truth, unfortunately, it more complex.

The monotonic mind. Religious people are comfortable with black and white conditions. To an Orthodox Jew, pork is 100% bad. The only optimal amount of coffee to a Mormon is zero. But with health, the rules are more complex. A glass of wine at a meal can be healthy for many people, but any positives go away quickly if you drink too much. Food is rarely if ever a black and white health vs unhealthy situation. The dose makes the poison. 

Levinovitz gives many more interesting examples, including critical comments about Bulletproof’s David Asprey, Chris Kresser, and even Gary Taubes. Few diets or diet gurus are 100% bad, of course, and that’s why many will find the book frustratingly difficult to pin down. There’s a little something critical for everyone.

The most entertaining part of the book was the final two chapters, helpfully printed on darker paper to make it stand out. Levinovitz invents an entirely new diet fad, written uncritically in the first part, and then overwritten with his own comments in the second. At first, you’ll be tempted to think Levinovitz’ book is just like so many other diet books, which go into detail taking down other ways of eating, only to return with the One True Diet. But that’s why the second part is so interesting: as he might do with religious commentary, Levinovitz picks apart each of his own dietary claims to show how deceptive they are, how they fit into well-worn patterns, and why you shouldn’t be fooled.

That said, the book does offer one piece of dietary wisdom, but sadly it’s not the one most people are primed to hear. Moderation.  Period. Don’t eat too much.

Perhaps not a satisfying conclusion to some people, but perhaps that’s to be expected when you take all the religion out of eating.

Are potatoes good for you?

Diabetics, and anyone watching the glycemic load from their food knows that potatoes, with their large amount of starch, raise blood sugar levels. The otherwise high nutrient value of a potato, then, must be balanced against the body’s ability to supply the insulin necessary to stabilize the amount of glucose running around.

Look at this chart, from nutrition expert G. Douglas Andersen: 

Test Meal	Glycemic Index
1. Microwaved russet potatoes	76 ± 8.7
2. Instant mashed potatoes	87.7 ± 8
3. Oven-roasted white potatoes	73 ± 8.2
4. Microwaved white potatoes	72 ± 4.5
5. Boiled red potatoes	89 ± 7.2
6. Boiled red potatoes, refrigerated, and consumed cold	56 ± 5.2
7. French fries	63 ± 5.5

 The way it was cooked makes a huge difference.  The starches in the potato break down and change when cooked and stored cold. The affect on glycemic load is even greater if you mix the potatoes with vinegar.

I’m not saying anything original here — diabetics and others have known this for a long time — but it’s interesting to me because it shows again how limiting it is to look simply at out-of-the-box nutrition labels if you want to know whether something is good for you.

 

 

[book] All Natural

The subtitle of this book by Nathanael Johnson explains why I read it: "a skeptic's quest to discover if the natural approach to diet, childbirth, healing, and the environment really keeps us healthier and happier.”   I’m a skeptic (check),interested in diet (check), healing (check) and the environment (check).  (I’m interested in childbirth too, but frankly any opinions there belong to my wife, not me).

Johnson is such a nice writer, giving such good weight to all the evidence, that the book can be an unsatisfying read. A good summary would be "Hmm, there might be something to these all-natural lifestyles, but there's something to the mainstream way too."

I liked his concise description of three assumptions behind all “mainstream” nutrition:

1. Molecules matter, food is irrelevant.
2. Everyone is the same.
3. Institutions, not individuals, should be in charge of diet

As a raw milk fan, I agree with these points, so I especially enjoyed the book’s discussions about the discoveries of people like Bruce German,  food chemist at UC-Davis who studies bifidobacterium infantis, the only microbe that thrives on oligosaccharides. These make up the bulk of human milk but can't be digested in the stomach without a bacterium. Turns out  we need these microbes to allow milk to go through a nipple and turn into a solid inside the stomach again — another instance of germs that are essential for health.

Also, did you know that kids who drink raw milk for the first time have no adaptation to Campylobacter jejuni, a pathogen in raw milk? According to Johnson, (p. 97) "Just about everyone injured by milk has been a child or an immune-compromised adult”.

There’s much more to like about this book, including the conclusions, which like adult life itself, are frustratingly lacking in black and white answers.  All the more reason that individuals should be in charge of their own choices.

 

Sauerkraut (Take 2)

It’s been a year, but finally I get over my laziness and have the time to attempt another batch of homemade sauerkraut. The probiotics fad is pushing fermented food everywhere: small craft vendors at local farmers markets (like Britt’s Pickles), a new section in the grocery store, and last week I even saw batches at Costco. But all of these craft-made, non-industrialized products has one thing in common: they’re all expensive, on the order of a few dollars per cup. Why not do it myself?

Doing it yourself is a hassle only if you let it. Two weeks ago, I decided to figure out a way to make my sauerkraut as easily and quickly as possible. Here are my instructions:

1. Buy a head of cabbage and chop it into long pieces. A food grater would work too, but I don’t have one, and didn’t want that to get in my way. I just used a regular knife.
2. Stuff the chopped cabbage a little at a time into a cheap ceramic pot. Sprinkle a little salt on every layer.
3. Squish everything into the pot as compactly as you can. It’s important that you see liquid coming out of the cabbage, ideally bubbling up enough that it covers the top layer.
4. Find something to keep the cabbage squished into the pot. I used a small plastic sandwich bag filled with water, which works nicely because you can adjust the size as needed.
5. Cover the pot with a lid that can keep everything inside, but will release slightly as the fermentation begins. There will be carbon dioxide gases rising from the fermenting cabbage and you don’t want the lid to explode off.
6. Wait a week or two.

That’s it! The entire process, of setting up the crock with the chopped cabbage, then putting it in the garage took under an hour — maybe half an hour. Now, two weeks later, here’s what I have:

Served in a nice sandwich:

So easy! 

Is grape juice bad for you?

Our kids love grape juice, but there’s some controversy in our household whether we should indulge their taste or steer them to lower-sugar fruit juices instead. After all, a single cup contains a heaping 36g of sugar, and while the glycemic load of 12 may be low compared to some foods, it’s much higher than apple juice (6) or orange juice (9).

Still, while it's true that we shouldn’t overdose on sugar, I think it's dangerous to lump all the complexity of nature into that single term "sugar", as if all sweet-tasting drinks are biologically equivalent, or that the number of calories in a food is the most important determinant of health.

Nutrition scientists at Purdue University ran a double-blind placebo study of 76 slightly overweight people that concluded that grape juice doesn't cause changes in appetite and, in overweight people, may actually help with waist circumference.  The study was financed partly by Welch's, so you can argue that it may be biased, but that’s true of any study. I prefer to look carefully at a broad set of data points before making up my mind.

And there is intriguing evidence that grape juice, like other berries, may have a positive affect on brain aging. One double-blind three month study on older adults showed a nice bump in some cognitive function, though the small sample size makes it very hard to draw conclusions.

Of course, rather than look at broad studies, what I really want is something that will measure the affect on me. N=1. I could very well be an outlier, but that’s true about most things worth studying. Maybe I’ll add grape juice to my self-testing and see.

Break out the sriracha

Seth Roberts often came up with hunches, reasonable hypotheses, about various foods or habits. But don’t pick the hypotheses randomly; base it on something, make sure it fits a bigger theory about the world, and then devise experiments to prove the hunch wrong.  My hunch is that hot, spicy foods are good for you and that adding even a small amount to any food helps make it more nutritious.  Here’s the new one I’m going to try: sriracha sauce.
My reasons:

• Highest rating by Cooks Illustrated. (btw, Tabasco sauce is “not recommended”)
• Simple ingredients: red chilis, garlic, vinegar (though note: 1g of sugar / tsp)
• It tastes good!

The web site Thatsnerdilicious claims it’s even the “cure to all your problems”!  What’s not to like?

How accurate are food labels?

We take for granted that a label printed with calorie and other nutrition information is accurate, but is that true?

A short 6-minute documentary and editorial published last year in the New York Times shows how wrong labels can be. Casey Neistat took normal foods and ran them through an expensive calorimeter — the gold standard to see how many calories an item contains -- to check the accuracy of the labels. In his random sample, he found the discrepancies between the labels and actual calories added up to 500+ calories in a typical day’s eating — the equivalent of a missing Big Mac or a couple of snickers bars.  This, on “normal” foods like a sandwich from Subway, a yogurt muffin at a convenience store, a Chipotle burrito, a vegan deli sandwich.


In NYC, and soon everywhere in the US, calorie labels are mandatory, but how will that help if the labels are wrong?

Incidentally, I think this applies not just to calories but to virtually anything relating to nutrition: vitamins, carbohydrates, fat, protein. The active nutritional content of something like broccoli, for example, degrades quickly after it’s been picked. The way it was prepared, the other foods consumed at the same time, the microbes in its surface — there are so many variables that often matter just as much as whatever is on the label. I wonder what the point is.

The solution, of course, is better sensors: handheld, pocket devices that can test the food right before you eat it. We’re still a few years from that becoming ubiquitous and cheap enough for everyday use, but there are early prototypes: the $200 SCiO, for example, the $200 TellSpec, or the 6SensorLabs Canary gluten detector (though it’s difficult to tell yet how accurate these are).  Microsoft, working with the EE Department at the University of Washington has a simple, cheap sensor that can detect the type of beverage you're drinking. Alexander Scheeline, a chemist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, teaches how to make a cheap, cellphone-based spectrometer (see Wired) that may someday be able to tell if your food has mercury in it, for example.

Until those cheap sensors are widely available, though, I’m afraid it’s hard to rely on labels alone.

Call it processed milk

Our middle schooler came home from school yesterday and noticed for the first time that our family drinks whole milk, not the skim milk that her teacher had just recommended as the “healthier choice.” Delighted to have learned something at school that could immediately benefit the family, she suggested we switch.  Uh, not so fast.

Turns out there is no evidence that skim or low-fat milk is better for you than whole milk. In fact, a large five-year study of 12,000 middle schoolers found that kids who drink skim milk actually gain weight. A later study among two year olds found the same thing. So did another one, conducted on 10,000 kids published last year.

The American Academy of Pediatrics specifically recommends low-fat milk for all kids over 2. So does the official Kids Eat Right web site of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. None of the web sites gives sources for their recommendations, but I assume they are simply following the decades of research that pretty conclusively shows a link between high cholesterol and heart disease. Whole milk has more fat, which means more cholesterol, which means more heart disease. Right?

Well, that sounds good in theory, but it appears to be based on research into a key component of milk (the fat), not milk itself. The best of science knows so little about how food reacts in the presence of other foods; it's not surprising that large studies often appear to disprove the received wisdom about something that seemed sound in theory. It could be that fat, by itself, causes high cholesterol and heart disease, but that fat consumed as part of a dairy product is good. In fact, I think that’s likely.

My opinion is converging on something that I first saw articulated by Michael Pollan (“eat food” — i.e. things your grandmother would recognize) and of course by many others in the natural food as well as ancestral health movements. Get as close to nature as you can.  When food is processed, it changes; whether that’s good or bad  — well, it depends. After all, heating something (aka “cooking”) is just a form of processing food. Salt is a type of rock, a mineral that you wouldn’t normally just go eat; but it can be a perfectly safe and healthy food additive. It depends. Still, when in doubt it pays to go back to basics. You step away from tradition at your peril. Thousands of years of dairy tradition — especially it’s associated with your genetic heritage — are not something to lightly deny. 

Bleeding out a natural component of cow’s milk (the fat) is a recent addition to the set of food choices we can make. Do you really know what you’re doing when you deprive your body of something that nature intended?

Is there such a thing as a "generic" apple?

When you eat any food, shouldn't you care more about the particular piece you are eating, rather than the generic values listed in an app or book about calorie counting or nutrition?  The nutritional value of something as plain as an apple will depend on:  its variety (Gala? Fuji? McIntosh?), size, harvest date, length and conditions of storage, which parts you eat (peel? seeds?), and even what other items you may eat along with it.

Ultimately, the real value is whatever nutrition your body absorbs from it after your internal microbes pick it apart, and once the rest of your meal and environment are taken into account. In fact, there is such a wide variation in nutritional value that [I bet] some of the apples you might eat are actually less nutritious than foods we normally think of as “bad”.

I have a deeper appreciation for these importance nutritional differences, and the subtleties missing from nutrition labels after reading a new book by Jo Robinson: Eating on the Wild Side- The Missing Link to Optimum Health. It’s chock full of practical advice like:

• Slice/chop/press garlic, then let it rest for ten minutes before cooking to boost its nutrition.
• Cooked carrots have 2x the beta carotene of raw carrots.  Cut your own sticks for carrots; the baby kind are much less nutritious.  Then eat them mixed with fat (e.g. butter) to amplify the nutrition.
• Red cherry tomatoes have 12x more lycopene than red beefsteak tomatoes
• Canned artichoke hearts are among the most nutritious vegetables in the supermarket.
• Same with canned beans: which are healthier than fresh, and have more oxygen radical absorption than red wine or blackberries.
• Broccoli loses half its nutrition when you nuke it. Much better to steam for 4 minutes, or sauté in olive oil and garlic.

There are many, many more tips like this, backed by with tons of references from years of reading medical and nutrition journals. It’s changed the way I think about food, and made me look at apples much less generically.

 

The Post-Pasteurian world

As a long-time fan of food writer Michael Pollan (read more here and here), it was inevitable that I’d read his latest, Cooked- A Natural History of Transformation (short summary: it’s great) and while there I stumbled upon an excellent paper in Cultural Anthropology by MIT scientist Heather Paxon that describes a viewpoint that is becoming more persuasive the more I understand it: the bacteria and microbes that surround us are nearly all friendly.

A tiny, tiny number of microbes are unfriendly (and make no mistake, a bacterium like Listeria monocytogenes, is extremely unfriendly), but the entire national regulatory system tries to kill these small bugs, at the expense of the vast majority of microbes that are friendly – and necessary.

Whereas Pasteurianism creates in citizens expectations that the state will ensure a safe food supply, such that “food panics” throw into doubt “the state’s ability to regulate business and bodies” (Dunn 2007:36), post-Pasteurianism questions whether state regulators have only the interests of citizen-consumers at heart.

Your body was designed to live among many different microbes. The friendly ones, in fact, are partly responsible for protecting us against the unfriendly ones. When you kill every microbe, with scorched-earth tactics like broad spectrum antibiotics or even with pasteurization, something else is lost too, and it’s important not to forget that.

Homemade sauerkraut

As already noted, I’ve become interested in the role of microbes in our bodies, including the value of fermented foods.  First yogurt (which I still make regularly), then cheese. Now I’ve decided to try sauerkraut.

This was a bit more complicated and time-consuming, though still pretty easy. Like most processes, if you do it a few times it becomes second nature and takes under an hour, total, to prepare.  You can find recipes all over the internet, but I followed the directions from famous fermentation expert Sandor Katz, whose book Wild Fermentation I highly recommend.  The excellent web store Cultures for Health has great information too, including a series of free ebooks with hundreds of detailed pages about everything you need to know. Their Lacto-Fermentation ebook is particularly good for sauerkraut.

Basically, you just chop up some cabbage, add lots of salt, and place it tightly in a covered container for a few weeks.  I did it using an old, heavy ceramic pot we have around the house, but if you don’t mind spending $150, you’d probably do best by ordering a Harsch Gairtopf Fermenting Crock Pot, which is specially designed for this.

I left mine sit for about 4 weeks and here’s what it looks like.  Seems pretty good, huh?

Actually, that’s after I carefully scraped away a ton of mold that had accumulated on the top.  See that whitish-gray stuff below?   Supposedly it’s technically a layer of kahm yeast, which is different from mold and apparently harmless.

Peel it off and you get this:

To be honest, whether it’s harmful or not, the layer on top was gross enough that it has me wondering if it’s okay to eat. All the books and websites assure me that it’s okay as long as it smells and looks like sauerkraut, which it sort of does. It’s not super-tangy or especially sweet-smelling.  I try a spoonful and it tastes very salty.

My Lithuanian farmer grandmother used to make and serve sauerkraut all the time, so I assume I’m just following the family tradition.  Should I eat the rest?

A Bite of China

After months of recommendations, I finally watched my first episode of the CCTV documentary A Bite of China (舌尖上的中国) and I was not disappointed. It’s a well-produced, professionally filmed tour of Chinese food.  There are seven one-hour episodes, each going into rich detail about various aspects of the cuisine from harvest to table.

One of the first things a serious China visitor learns is the incredible diversity of Chinese cuisine, with in reality bears no resemblance to the “sweet and sour pork” dishes you’ll find in most restaurants in America. This documentary isn’t a substitute for actually trying the wonderful flavors, but it’s a must-see for any foodie.

All episodes are now available dubbed in English, viewable free in HDTV. My favorite segment from  Episode 1: “Gifts From Nature” was the discussion of salt-cured Nuodeng ham from Dali.[start at the 18:00 mark]. The special salt used, high in potassium, has been harvested there for more than a thousand years and results in a rich flavor that puts Jamón ibérico to shame.

You can watch the whole series on Youtube, but you might have a better experience streaming directly from CCTV (in English) site.  Chowhound publishes links to all the English stream locations, and there's even a Wikipedia entry with more references and links.

Highly recommended.

Easy homemade yogurt

Among the many important aspects of health that science can’t yet explain is the role of microbes, zillions of them in every part of your body, with far more varieties of DNA than you have in your own cells.

Something so abundant and variable from person to person must have an important function, so for the past few months and thanks to Seth Roberts I’ve become interested in fermented foods.

I considered buying a yogurt maker. At $50 and less, they’re not too expensive. But the last thing I need is more junk around the house, so finally last night I thought why not just make it myself using stuff we already have lying around.

It was unbelievably easy!  In fact, I’m not sure why I didn’t try this years ago.  Here’s what I did:

Equipment

• Ordinary 4-cup glass container with a rubber top.
• Heating pad and towel
• Saucepan for heating milk
• Any large bowl big enough to hold the glass container.
• Two cups of whole milk
• Half a tablespoon of plain yogurt. It’s important not to use too much. This is the “starter”, with live microbes.

Recipe

1. Boil some water and use it to sterilize the glass container. (I bet this step is optional)
2. Boil two cups of milk. Well, not quite boil, but heat it till it starts to get steamy. 
3. Pour cold water into the large bowl. Leave it half-full in the sink.
4. Pour the hot milk into the glass container and set the whole thing into the large bowl of water. (Don’t let water get into the milk)
5. Stir the milk until the temperature is about 110 degrees. I use my trusty latte thermometer, but you could probably also just do it by feel. Wait till it’s warm – warmer than your body’s 98.6 degrees, but well short of feeling hot.
6. Stir the yogurt into the milk and mix well.
7. Cover the container and put it on top of the heating pad.
8. Place the large bowl upside down on top of the container and heating pad.
9. Set heating pad to “medium”
10. Cover everything with a towel and leave it overnight.

Eight or so hours later, open it all up and find this:

I was surprised how thick it was, but the perfect, tangy smell was the giveaway: the best yogurt ever.

Purple toes in Zillah

There are no wine lovers in the San Francisco Bay Area (or in Seattle for that matter) who haven’t been to Napa Valley.  But comparatively few people know about a  similar wine-growing region just two hours east of Mercer Island (over the soon-to-be-tolled I-90 bridge), in the Rattlesnake Hills area of the Yakima Valley.  We spent our weekend there, where some good friends are getting started with their own winery.

First, we picked some grapes:

then we crushed them:

and now look at the toes on my 6-year-old:

You should go too!  Best place to stay in Zillah is the Comfort Inn, for about $100/night, including a big breakfast, a pool, and free use of their grill!

Last day this year for Farmers Market

The Mercer Island Farmers Market closes for the winter after today, so my six-year-old and I rode our bikes there one last time to stock up on fresh butter from Golden Glen Creamery,  just-picked apples from Jones Creek Farms and (my daughter’s favorite) pluots from Tiny’s Organic.

She took the photos this time.  Can’t wait till it opens again next Summer.

Finally, sun at the farmers market

My 6-year-old and I biked this afternoon to the Mercer Island Farmers Market, taking advantage of today's unusual sunny weather to stock up on fresh fruit and more.  My favorite stand is this one from Tiny's Organic, with their nice assortment of different fruits: mix and match what you want for $4/pound.

The Farmers Market organizers were doing a survey of attendees.  Looks like the vast majority of shoppers are locals, which explains why we kept bumping into people we know.

I love what they have here already, but you know what I hope they do next?  More places selling hot meals.  The one pizza place is yummy, but too much of a line.  I bet there are more people like me who would have stayed longer if we could have easily grabbed some lunch.

Bad year for blackberries

The empty lot near my house is always chock full of invasive Himalayan blackberry bushes, and each August my kids and I enjoy picking bucketful after bucketful without really trying.  But for some reason, this year doesn't seem nearly as bountiful, with smaller berries and long thorny branches.  We went to Luther Burbank park this afternoon and even there, the bushes didn't seem as loaded as the last few years. It's late in the season, so I expect the crop to have dwindled, but earlier in August wasn't all that much better.  

I'm not sure what to blame:  global warming, George Bush, the unseasonably cool summer, my imagination?

Mercer Island Farmers Market: The Video

It's finally here!  I was out of town during last week's opening day, but the first thing I did upon arriving back was to head over to Mercerdale park (across from the post office) to check out the new Mercer Island Farmers Market.  The Mercer Island blog, Surrounded By Water, wrote a nice description of it last weekend, so I was already prepared to be impressed but it was even better than I'd hoped.

Main thing I liked?  Variety.  The organizers focused on variety in vendors, not just quantity, so you can find a little bit of everything, from  River Valley Cheese to soup to Humingbird Hill sodas to Pure Passion Desserts to Wild Alaska salmon from Two If By Seafood.  Even the produce wasn't just the same-old-same-old:  Kittitas Valley Greenhouse must have been selling a dozen different varieties of tomatoes (I bought the Amish ones: very very tasty!)

By the way, it's the taste and variety that make the prices reasonable to me. Sure, you can buy cardboard-tasting, pesticide-soaked vegetables on sale at the supermarket for much less money, and there is a dollar menu at the fine McDonalds just down the street.  But this is America and you deserve to eat well, not just cheap.

Of course the other nice thing is just getting out into the community and bumping into friends.  I was too busy talking and didn't film as much as I'd hoped, but here's a 2-minute video of what I saw:

[book] Fast Food Nation

 

I liked this book, which gives a nice behind-the-scenes overview of the conditions under which we get much of our food. It's not nearly as important a read as anything by Michael Pollan, but if you know how to read past the obvious errors in his anti-market biases, you'll learn something. I'm much more skeptical now of the food I eat after reading what really happens in those feedlots where my non-organic meals are grown.

But the best, certainly the wisest, words in this entire book are in the last two paragraphs:

Nobody in the United States is forced to buy fast food. The first step toward meaningful change is by far the easiest: stop buying it. The executives who run the fast food industry are not bad men. They are businessmen. They will sell free-range, organic, grass-fed hamburgers if you demand it. They will sell whatever sells at a profit.

I wish the author, Eric Schlosser, had noticed that the same thing does not apply to any of the government fixes he proposes. Once the USDA or FDA create a rule, you are forced to go along, whether it makes sense or not, and there are no competitors out there threatening the enforcing bureaucrats with unemployment if they fail.

Who do you trust more: Whole Foods or the government? Personally I have far greater faith in anything sold under the Whole Foods brand name than anything that says "USDA approved". And you won't change my mind even if you add the zillions of expensive inspectors that Schlosser would like to see. When Whole Foods screws up and sells something unhealthy, they know I'll go elsewhere and never give them another chance--so they have far, far more incentives to maintain quality than the government does.

From Kurtwood cow to me

Nothing beats the taste and nutritional value of raw milk:  fresh, not cooked unpasteurized, from cows grazing on real pasture -- the kind I drank as a kid, the kind your ancestors drank for thousands of years.  While visiting Vashon Island this weekend, we finally had the chance to stop at Kurtwood Farms, to see real cows and drink real milk.

Kurt Timmermeister was kind enough to show us the pasture, let us touch the cows, and of course buy some of the fresh, clean milk, which he hand-pours into bottles each day -- about 15 gallons worth, from four cows -- a herd he has been raising for the past few years on a small farm in the middle of the island, right there with pigs, sheep, and a field of corn.

He is obsessed with quality and cleanliness. He follows all the regulations, of course, but talking with him I got the sense that he is a meticulous guy anyway, doing this for fun and for the thrill of making a high-quality product.

If you think good food only comes from Whole Foods or gourmet restaurants, there's nothing like a visit to a farm to help you understand what your ancestors knew, that real food comes from sun, water, air, and lots of labor.  I am extremely grateful for the wonderful variety and low costs possible by specialization and industrial scale agriculture and food processing -- that's why I'm not a locavore -- but I think everyone should spend the extra money and indulge now and then in the really good stuff.

Yummy!