Bento boxes are simple food such as rice and vegetables made beautiful by art. I’ve talked about them before here:
Kawaii Crafter made a Halloween Bento box just in time for the holiday:
If you have ever played with your food as a child, bento box making might be the hobby (and lunch choice) for you.
Books like The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids Favorite Meals suggest you should sneak vegetables into your child’s diet by pureeing them and adding them to their favorites. Mimi Sheraton thinks that’s wrong:
Aside from being deceptive and breeding distrust, she asks a more important question?
In the end, I suppose one has to ask an even more basic question: Do vegetables treated as prescribed and in the amounts indicated by Seinfeld-the-Deceptive and Lapine-the-Sneak really add enough nutrients to a child’s diet to make the plotting and pureeing worthwhile? How valuable can one half-cup of spinach puree and one half-cup of carrot puree be when they are first cooked, then are again subjected to the heat of baking, finally to be divided among 12 brownies? And can there be any meaningful nutrition from a quarter-cup each of carrot and sweet potato puree divided amongst 10 portions of soup?
I sought the advice of Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University and the author of What To Eat. “Philosophically and practically, this is not really an effective approach,” she said. “It will not develop an appreciation of the flavors, textures, and interests of various vegetables, which is what you should try to do by introducing them over and over again until they catch on.”
The way I look at it, what if you ALWAYS put pureed carrots into macaroni and cheese? You tell the children about it and they watch you make the recipe that way. Would it make your mac and cheese a little healthier? Yeah, a little… Would it be deceptive? Not if you’re up front about it.
All kids go through phases where they just won’t eat certain foods. I’ve heard that it’s because their taste buds are more sensitive to the bitterness that accompanies many vegetables. Masking that flavor is one option to get them to eat their vegetables, but more importantly, providing a good example is FAR more powerful.
If YOU eat your vegetables, you do more than all the blenders in the world could accomplish.
John Is Fit is an avid runner on the Runner+ Challenges. I clicked over to his site to read what he was talking about there. He wrote this entry about bread:
One of his readers, Jan B, said this about bread:
I cut out bread a couple of months ago when I started realizing that I was using it more as a handle for food than anything else. Now I use a fork. How many calories does a fork have??
Now, I don’t believe that bread is all that bad, but the idea of bread as a “handle for food” surprised me. Jan’s right. A sandwich uses bread as a convenient way to hold meat and cheese and lettuce. Are there other foods that are merely a handle? How many calories am I eating when I should just use a fork instead?
Eating is about sustenance and pleasure. If you eat only for sustenance, you won’t be able to maintain your weight loss. You have to be able to eat the foods that you love.
If you love bread, DO NOT cut it out of your diet. Choose freshly baked bread that is delicious instead of the foam rubber that passes for “diet” bread. Find ways to work it into your diet and cut out things that you don’t like.
If you don’t like bread, STOP using it as a handle for food.
If you have ever tried natural peanut butter, like Adams, then you’ve probably been confronted with the inch-thick peanut oil at the top of the bottle. Gordon Luk gives us some pointers on what to do with it:
First off, to get a good initial spread, it’s really important to thoroughly mix the peanut butter paste with the oil. I usually jab downwards with a knife to the bottom of the jar, which allows the oil to seep down into the paste. After doing that for a while, it lowers the oil level somewhat so that you can move on to jabbing downwards then pushing around the jar. Since the paste is normally pretty hard, it’s easier to do this once the oil loosens up the spread a bit. After that, it’s a simple matter of stirring.
DO NOT pour out the oil thinking that you’ll save calories that way. You will be left with brick-hard peanut paste that will NEVER spread and you might as well just throw away the bottle.
I really HATE natural peanut butter sold in bottles at stores. They fill it so full that there is hardly any room to stir in the oil, even when you follow Gordon’s excellent advice.
Instead, I make my own peanut butter and almond butter at the health food store. There is a big ‘ole machine there that will grind the nuts up for me fresh. Since I’m paying by the pound instead of by the container, I will only grind enough to last me a week. Since it doesn’t have preservatives, I really should keep it in the fridge because bacteria can grow easily in peanut butter. I store it in the cupboard and if it gets older than a week, I throw it out.
Peanut butter is very high in calories, so I rarely eat it, but when I do, I make sure I have the best and grind my own. No mixing, no preservatives and I get to use a big noisy machine to make it! What else could I want?
There has been a big push to “Buy Local” food. I was told that it’s better for the environment because it costs so much fuel to ship food. It turns out that might not be true. According to this article from Financial Times, the cost of growing the food far outstrips the cost of shipping it.
They explain the theory behind eating locally:
Today, of course, the “question of transportation” has become caught up in worries about the quantities of carbon dioxide being generated by an increasingly mobile food supply. The further our food travels, so the theory goes, the more damage it does to the climate through transport-related carbon dioxide emissions. In short, globetrotting food stands accused of helping destroy the planet.
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple:
“Transport has been taken out and highlighted,” says Rebecca White, a researcher at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute (ECI). “But you can’t single out one part [of the food system] and say something that’s come from thousands of miles away is automatically less sustainable – it’s much more complicated than that.”
Ken Green headed a team of researchers at the Manchester Business School. They were hired by Great Britain’s Defra (Department of Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs) to determine whether transportation is a factor in the environment:
After 199 pages of detail on everything from automatic picking machines to consumer packaging, the researchers find no strong evidence that locally sourced foods are better, in environmental terms at least, than global produce – and in some cases the opposite is true.
In fact, WE have more of an impact than how far away food is shipped:
And it turns out our own part in the chain is often the most damaging, since when we drive to the supermarket, we might come back with only a few of bags of food in the car boot. Such a trip is far less fuel efficient than the one taken by that same food on its way to the supermarket in a truck packed with the assistance of load-optimisation software, which determines how to stack cargo so that barely an inch of empty space is left in the back of the vehicle.
In the end, “Buy Local” has less impact on the environment than we thought. Now it seems to be solely an economic entreaty.
Via: Determining the amount of energy it takes to bring food from… (kottke.org)
According to The Institute of Food Technologists, organic food is no healthier than conventionally grown foods. They published their study here:
They admit that there are differences in the levels of pesticide residue and natural toxins, but there is no scientific evidence that these levels can harm humans.
“While many studies demonstrate . . . qualitative differences between organic and conventional foods, it is premature to conclude that either food system is superior to the other with respect to safety or nutritional composition. Pesticide residues, naturally occurring toxins, nitrates, and polyphenolic compounds exert their health risks or benefits on a dose-related basis, and data do not yet exist to ascertain whether the differences in the levels of such chemicals between organic foods and conventional foods are of biological significance.”
Considering organically grown food can cost more than twice conventionally grown food, it looks like the only bastion for organic food is taste. Sometimes, organic food has tasted better to me, but now I’m wondering if that was just me trying to convince myself that it was worth the extra cost.
As it is, the health benefits of organic food have evaporated under scientific scrutiny.
This commercial is brilliant.
If you missed the joke, watch it again.
If you think it’s hard to eat healthy when you’re dieting, just imagine how hard it would be to eat healthy on $3 a day. What can you eat for a buck a meal? The food stamp program in the U.S. was meant as a supplement, but there are those who survive on their food stamps. How do they do it?
Here is a radio interview with a food critic who took the Food Stamp Diet Challenge:
You can read his editorial here:
If you would like to try to take the Food Stamp Diet Challenge yourself (as was done by many politicians) to see what it would be like to live on $3 a day, there is a detailed PDF that you can download from this site.
Is this a good weight loss technique? No, but it’s an inspiring way to teach compassion for those who are in a bad situation. No one would willingly choose to live like this.
On the comments for Little Black Book to Keep Track of Yourself, Misty asked a question:
I’m sure you might have already talked about this…
What do you do with your folded up paper? Do you transfer it to your journal via transcribing at the end of the day? And then, what? Do you review how you did last month? Or is it a day by day thing?
I think part of why I have a hard time recording my food and exercise is that it seems pointless. So what if I ate too much yesterday? It’s done. If I record it, am I supposed to go back to it and make use out of it?
Misty
Misty,
Because I attend Weight Watchers every week, I keep a really detailed list of everything that I eat. Part of the reason I do it is because it’s the “rules” and I like to follow rules. It’s a way for me to feel good about myself. Even if I binge, if I write down every morsel of food that goes into my mouth, I can still feel a little better about myself.
Secondly, I keep track because I’m forgetful. If I don’t write it down, I usually forget I ate it, so I think I have more points than I really have at the end of the day. The journal keeps me more honest about how much I really eat.
Lastly, I keep track of my food because I know if I have trouble losing weight, my Weight Watcher teacher will ask to see my food journals for the last few weeks to get an idea of WHY I’m not losing anymore. I have had my leader do that for me before and it really helped that I kept such good track.
Thanks for commenting, Misty!
Laura
If you aren’t the sort of person who obsesses with Excel spreadsheets every time she tracks her food like I do, then you might be interested in this pretty and convenient book for tracking your food and exercise.
These kinds of products can be cool or totally lame and that depends on two things: how good are the forms and can you get more forms when you’ve used up all you have. Fortunately, the Little Black Book works out pretty well on both accounts. Here is a photo of the form:
As you can see, they assume you’re counting calories, but you can use this form to track your Weight Watchers Points, your carbohydrates or protein. Whatever you are tracking, it looks like this form would be pretty versatile.
At the bottom of the form there is a spot to check off Dairy, Protein, Grains, Veggies, and Water intake. It also has a useful spot to check off whether you’ve taken your vitamins, supplements or whatever other medication you may need to track.
The back of the sheets are blank, you you can use them to track your emotions or anything else you may want to keep a record of in relation to your eating habits.
Now, can you get more forms when you use all the ones that come with your book? Yes, you can. The book itself costs $20 and will last you three months. A 3-Pack refill costs $20 and should last you almost a year. So, yes, as long as Little Black Book is still in business, you can get refills.
Does this book work for me? No. Right now, I’m keeping track of my points on a piece of paper that is folded up small. It’s discreet and I can put it into my wallet. I print these up myself using Excel. I realize, however, that not everyone can do that, so Little Black Book is great for those who don’t want to bother printing up their own forms.
The people at Little Black Book were nice enough to send me one to evaluate it, so I don’t know how efficient the ordering process is. If you have had experience with them, please leave a comment and tell us how you were treated.
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