Archives for 2009

GMOs and Pharmaceuticals

They call it “pharming.” It’s the use of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) to manufacture pharmaceutical compounds.

Most scientists cheer the effort on, particularly when pharming animals. After all, you can get as much antithrombin (a protein found in human blood plasma and now manufactured into the milk of GMO goats) from a single GMO goat in a year as can be derived from 90,000 blood donations.

When you’re talking about a single, well-protected herd of 200 goats producing the equivalent amounts of pharmaceutical proteins as 18 MILLION blood donations, the risks seem minimal.

Michael Pollan On Marketing Food

The headline intrigued me: “Omnivore

Fight Back Fridays May 15th

Well, fellow Food Renegades, it’s that time of the week yet again! We are bringing together another collection of recipes, tips, anecdotes, and testimonies — each from a lover of Real Food.
Who are the members of the Real Food Revolution? Why, they’re the Food Renegades. You know who you are — lovers of SOLE (Sustainable, Organic, Local, and Ethical) food, traditional food, primal food, the list goes on. I believe that by joining together, our influence can grow, and we can change the way America (and the industrialized world) eats! So, let’s have some fun.

Top Four Thursdays — The Recipe Edition

Because these Thursday posts weren’t particularly popular, I’ve taken a couple of weeks off of the series. But today I’m back. Why? Because over the last couple of weeks I have seen some mind-blowing Real Food recipes online. What better way to share them with you?

What Are Superfoods?

As a lover of Real Food, I’m no fan of supplements. I believe that if you can find food grown in naturally nutrient-rich soil (or meat from animals fed their natural diets), you are pretty much guaranteed to have the right balance of vitamins and minerals to not just survive, but thrive.

But let’s be honest. How many of us are able to stick to that diet perfectly? Furthermore, how many of us can say with certainty that our food isn’t grown in depleted soil (even if it’s certified “organic”)?

Soaked Zucchini Bread Recipe

Ah, the wonders of summer. (Sorry, but when it’s 90+ degrees out for days on end, it’s summer already!) With summer comes zucchini. And with zucchini comes lots of …

You guessed it! Zucchini bread.

This recipe uses soaked, freshly milled whole wheat flour, yogurt, eggs from pastured hens, and locally-raised raw honey. It’s not a dessert bread by any means. It’s both mildly sour and sweet, with enough cinnamon to make your house smell like heaven.

NuVal Nutritional Scores At The Grocery Store

As if all the conflicting nutritional advice the public gets wasn’t enough, a new nutritional scoring system for supermarket foods has been implemented in grocery stores across the nation (including Meijer and Price Chopper).

It’s called NuVal. Naturally, the system is based on the advice of the diet dictocrats — the people who gave us the food pyramid responsible for making us all fat (or at least chained to our treadmills).

You can tell how I feel about this already, can’t you?

Fight Back Fridays May 8th

Well, fellow Food Renegades, it’s that time of the week yet again! We are bringing together another collection of recipes, tips, anecdotes, and testimonies — each from a lover of Real Food. It’s my personal hope that Fight Back Fridays will continue to unite many of us coming from within different circles of the Real Food Revolution.

Who are the members of the Real Food Revolution? Why, they’re the Food Renegades. You know who you are — lovers of SOLE (Sustainable, Organic, Local, and Ethical) food, traditional food, primal food, the list goes on. I believe that by joining together, our influence can grow, and we can change the way America (and the industrialized world) eats!

So, let’s have some fun.

Fourth Graders Boycott School Lunch

And it’s about time! (Seriously, when bloggers start asking whether or not we feed children like pigs, you know that something is dangeroulsy wrong with the U.S. school lunch program.)

In Madison, WI last week, a group of fourth graders who’d been learning about the Children’s Crusade and Martin Luther King decided to stage a peaceful protest.

What were the protesting?

Unhealthy and “gross” school lunches.

Meet An Organic Dairy Farmer

There was a time, just a few generations ago, when all food was local and organic. In the videos below, shared by the team at Cooking Up A Story, a third generation organic dairy farmer named Jon Bansen tells about how his grandfather did business. This was before pesticides & fertilizers, before milking machines & hormones & antibiotics.

Years later, modern day industrialized agriculture had taken over his farm. In the second video, Jon shares about his own journey towards transitioning to an organic dairy and producing real milk.