02-08-08 do beans count?

What is a vegetable, anyway?

Recently, this question has been asked me in so many ways, I thought it would be good to discuss this substance I repeatedly suggest we all eat.

Botanists and chefs don’t really agree. To a cook, if it’s an edible part of a plant, and not “sweet,” it’s a vegetable. To a scientist, vegetable classification has everything to do with plant sex: where are those seeds, anyway? Veggies, for the most part, do not have seeds in or around them. Think of a carrot or broccoli verses a cherry. (There was the big tomato brouhaha of 1893, where the definition discrepancy engaged the Supreme Court, but that was over tariffs. In the end, the wisdom of the United States Supreme Court determined that the tomato, for taxing purposes, is a vegetable.)

Exceptions buck the rules, of course, like the avocado and, Supreme Court notwithstanding, the tomato. As a cook, a mother, and an educator, I don’t really care. Fruits AND vegetables are filled with fiber, anti-oxidants, nutrients, and micro-nutrients galore…Fruits just typically have more “plant sugar.” The best balance would ideally include more veggies a day than fruit--our kids get “sweet” from plenty of sources these days! For my kids, I’d like it to be 6 veggie servings to 4 fruits a day, but unless I start early with veggies, it usually ends up in a 50-50 tie.

Where does that leave beans (this is my most frequent veggie inquiry), since they ARE the seeds of the plant? Well, technically speaking, the bean pod is a fruit, so the diddy about beans being the musical fruit is at least half right. I prefer to call beans the “magical” fruit, and here’s why: they’re pretty much always “in season;” they have TONS of anti-oxidants (some beans rival the revered blueberry in terms of their anti-oxidant power!); they are kid-friendly; they are very inexpensive; and you can’t beat a bean for fiber! How’s that for magical?

So, when mothers ask if the beans their kids ate for dinner count as a vegetable, I consider the realm of synthetic options they could have eaten, what a scientist would say, and how our bodies respond to them, and I answer, “Yes, beans are a vegetable, too!”

02-01-08 How do I love thee?

The other night, my second grader announced that a friend’s mother must surely love her children better than I love mine. Candy ubiquity and the presence of every toy in the universe informed him so. And the blatant commutation of cookies over vegetables proved his point beyond a doubt.

My son is of an age now when outside influences are starting to penetrate. Living in a house with customs largely counter to his peers, the differences are magnified. Every time a young friend comes over who has never eaten “real” pancakes, or goes into convulsions at the thought of fruit as an after school snack (“Don’t you have any candy bars?”), my healthiness protectorate zone contracts.

I understand this.

I’ve tried to make up for our “deviations” in the short term, by pouring extra (real) syrup on the slumber-party-er’s pancakes, and in the long-run by creating healthy recipes that emulate the taste bud preferences of my son’s peers. I have tried to plan ahead, accommodate, and accept. (My husband will attest that my flexibility factor has expanded since the arrival of our amazing children.)

But the love = junkfood conclusion through me for a loop.

Immediate protestations filled my braincells. “But look how fat the children are!” “And the youngest daughter has behavior issues that even a casual onlooker could attribute—at least partially—to the child’s constantly reloaded sugar burden.”

But, because every mother knows force creates resistance, and as my braincell-vocal chord connection is still intact (on most days), I did not audibly criticize his friends. (Plus, my goal personally and in my business, is to not point fingers, or make anyone else “wrong.”) I said, calmly, that I believe we are all in each other’s lives to help one another learn more about love. That he’s helped me learn about love beyond my wildest dreams, and I hope I am helping him in that department, as well. One of the ways I show my family love is to offer them foods filled with brain-building, strong-body-making ingredients. “The Jones Family” must have different things to learn together, and their path must be perfect for them. (OK, I did add that if Mrs. Jones knew as much as I do about healthiness, she’d surely be feeding her children the same types of foods that I feed my own treasures…And I believe that’s true…)

We talked some more, but that conversation didn’t—couldn’t—change the fact that our family will never accede to the same popular diet that has pushed American children into the realm of record-breaking illnesses. I’ve witnessed the power of healthy food too many times to accept lesser alternatives for my children on a regular basis.

I don’t know everything about food. I probably know even less about love. And it turns out, dinners of white rice, frosted cookies, and cinnamon buns for dessert may actually be the way I express how much I love my children...by NOT serving these things to them!

01-25-08 attack of the clones

Last week, the FDA decided to let cloned meat and milk loose on the market. They asked the cloning companies to voluntarily hold back a while, until we, the public, decide cloned foods are fabulous eating options.

But I won’t eat cloned food, nor will I feed it to my children, who are not Guinea Pigs. I have nothing against technology. My second, miraculous child would not be here if not for the gift of modern science. However, testing thus far on cloned animals isn’t rigorous enough to warrant mass, unlabeled release into the food supply. And who did the testing? The companies selling the technology, as far as I’ve been able to tell.

Why are cloned animals so likely to die prior to complete gestation, or soon thereafter? And what could the birth defect predilection, obscured deeply within the genes of a future Dolly, do to my children’s own genetic integrity? Last year, Science magazine printed an article in which two of the biggest guns at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) discussed the impact of environmental factors (what we eat, chemical exposure, etc.) on human disease. They basically said that genes aren’t the whole story: what washes over and interweaves with our DNA throughout our life has an impact about which science understands relatively little.

Then there is the basic Constitutional issue of my right to know what I’m eating. The FDA has deemed cloned meat and milk “safe” so that they require no process-tracking or labeling of cloned foods (or the offspring thereof). Given the recent salvo of drugs recalled due to their previously undiscovered/undisclosed dangers, I don’t particularly want the FDA acting as the sole arbiter of what is “safe” for my family. (Wasn’t Zetia—and its dangers—in the news the same day the FDA proclaimed cloned meat perfectly safe? And what about the over-the-counter cold medicines the FDA once said were so “safe?” The FDA has documented 54 known deaths of children from those medicines!) A label, at the very least, should be my tax-paying prerogative.

I’ve seen very little reference to food security in this debate, either. If a danger is discovered among the unlabeled clones, how will that effect the rest of the meat and dairy supply?

That our DNA may not define our fate is an idea I can accept. That the FDA may define our fate—without long-term testing or acknowledging our legal preferences—is an idea I can not support. So, I will be calling my representatives in D.C. to urge them to back the Cloned Food Labeling Act (S.414 and H.R. 992). I hope you do, too!

01-22-08 sensationalism and solutions

An interesting article in my local paper highlighted plastic’s hormone disruptors as potential “fat-us” contributors. Having monished my concerns about Bisphenol-A (BPA) and its compatriots practically to the point of embarrassment (well, certain family members’ eye-rolling embarrassment), I was thankful to the Boston Globe’s Beth Daley for offering her well-articulated insights. Information sanctioned by the authority of newsprint is bound to get a lot of attention. And this did! (Not as many people have contacted me about this as when Jessica Seinfeld used her food processor on Oprah to get kids to eat veggies, but still…) I definitely recommend reading this “enlightening” article. (Also, Dr. Paula Baillie-Hamilton has written a great book identifying chemicals/hormone disruptors as fat-makers, among other things.)

The Thin Factor might be just be THE habit changer we needed. For years, experts have been linking plastics and plasticizers to fertility issues, cancer, a surprising number of other illnesses, but babies still drink out of plastic bottles (though thankfully, my darling neighbor, Grace, now uses glass bottles with silicon nipples ) and kids’ sandwiches attend school enveloped in potentially carcinogenic film. If Americans—who are predicted to spend $54 BILLION!!! on diet products in 2009—think plastic makes us fat, maybe we’ll stop using so much. That would be good for our health (since, in 2009, some 70% of us are likely to be overweight or obese) and fabulous for the environment.

Some of the easiest ways to avoid the possibility of obesity-by-plastic are:

• Store foods in glass
• Drink your water from a stainless steel bottle
• Use cast iron pots and pans, rather than plastic-lined non-stick pans (They even have cast iron waffle irons now! and to season it, just follow these directions.
• Watch more Smart Foods videos!