Food

Book Review: The Third Plate, by Dan Barber

I start with the premise that nature is smarter than I am and try to let nature teach me how reality Works. Ray dalio, principles

Feed the soil, and let the soil feed the plants. Dan Barber, The Third Plate

Dan Barber is a chef in New York. He owns 2 restaurants, Blue Hill, in Manhattan and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a working four-season farm and educational center, 30 minutes north of Manhattan.

I watched one of Dan Barber’s TED talks a few years ago and it struck a chord in me. He talks about a fish farm in Spain that raises amazingly tasty fish and cleans the surrounding ocean in the process. The talk and the farm gave me hope that we can not only live sustainably, but can live in a way that benefits each other and the environment.

Recently I checked out Barber’s book, The Third Plate, because I wanted to learn more about sustainability in our food system. Is Barber’s book, he writes at length about mono-culture farming. This is the most common current practice in American farming: Massive farms that plant fields and fields of one crop, which depletes the soil of nutrients, then rely on chemical ferti

lizers and pesticides to maintain plant health.

Industrial farming is not a sustainable system. We’ve known this for a while, but keep using more chemicals instead of looking to nature and past practices for solutions. Barber talks about “dead zones” in our oceans, whole areas where no fish or plant life can live because of the pollutants in the water.

In traditional farming, farmers learn what a crop takes from the soil, and what a crop feeds the soil and rotate crops to continually nurture the soil. Just like we exhale carbon dioxide and inhale oxygen, while plants do the opposite in the beautiful give and take of nature, certain crops will support each other and soil life if we learn about crop rotation.

We hear, “you are what you eat,” but Barber says, we are what our food eats. We get minerals from the minerals in the soil that our vegetables grow in. Dan Barber is the chaser of delicious food and believes that the tastiest food is also the healthiest food. He says, “Truly delicious food is contingent on an entire system of agriculture.” Barber quotes his farmer,

“The development of the flavor, and the health of the plant, are the same freaking thing. You don’t get one without the other”. Farmer Jack in Dan Barber’s

So what can we do? What can I do? Start small, start with one change, and then make another. Support your farmer’s markets. Learn about and stop supporting industrial farming as much as you can. I have a microscopic garden plot that I ignore most years, but this year, I’m going to learn to garden and to enrich the soil first Plant a small garden and learn how to feed the soil.

Because our planet’s health is our health.

Food

Bloodsugar: A story of fainting spells and an emergency call

I used to be the fainting type. I remember fainting at least twice as a child and once when I was in college. The two childhood episodes were due to stupidity, not low blood sugar. One time my older sister, Hannah had a neighbor friend over named Sherry and they were leaving to go somewhere fun, I’m sure. I remember asking them if I could go along and them telling me I couldn’t. I remember trying to persuade them to let me go. I’m sure I had turned on the charm as I tried to convince them. We went out the front door and I was walking backwards in front of them, making my case. As I backed off my front lawn onto the sidewalk, I tripped backwards over a stroller that was folded up and strewn across my path. The next thing I knew, I woke up to my sister and Sherry kneeling over me with worried expressions on their faces and Sherry comforting my sister that I was going to be OK.

The next time I fainted, it was a Sunday evening and the same sister and I were in our bedroom hitting each other over the head with rolled up sleeping bags. These were not the 1 pound, rated for 30 degrees below zero bags that REI now carries. These were heavy sleeping bags from the early 80s with stars and stripes patterns on them. I started feeling heat on the back of my neck, so I walked to the bathroom across the hall to get a cold washcloth from for my neck. Which is when I apparently fainted and woke, again surrounded this time by my mom, who, I’m told, was slapping me in the face to try to wake me, and my sister was in the bedroom crying out of concern for me.

I have no explanation of why I fainted in college other than low blood sugar.

I think every woman suffers from low blood sugar to some degree. I think the Standard American Diet (SAD) has a big role in this. A lot of carbs do not make for a well balanced diet, and tends to spike and then plummet our blood sugar.

I was a poor college student, and for a while, lived in the basement of a small, in-home assisted living center. In exchange for free rent, I fed 4 elderly ladies their dinner and helped them to bed. I had one roommate, and we would alternate nights. Life was pretty good.

The basement of this house was expansive. It had a huge main room, a large, sunny bathroom that had more of a bedroom closet with side by side hanging doors on sliders, and 2 bedrooms. One morning, I had showered and was doing hair and makeup in the bathroom. I think I started to get a little light headed, which happens to me sometimes if I stand up too fast, but I’m usually fine if I get low to the ground. This time, though, I must have blacked out completely because my roommate found me lying face down in the closet. She shook me awake, but my forehead had been resting on a metal pipe in the back of the closet and I had been there long enough that my forehead had the indentation from the pipe for the next few hours. I can’t imagine how that must have been for my roommate to walk in on a body strewn across the bathroom floor like that. She helped me sit up and lean against the back of the closet. My world was still very fuzzy, and my roommate kept saying things to me like, “It’s Ok, Rachel, don’t give up on life,” and I thought to myself, I just need to sit here for a minute, and I need to get this girl out of my face, so I asked her if she would go get me a glass of water.

She left me alone, which was a relief, and I sat in the back of the closet for I don’t know how long waiting for my vision to clear. Meanwhile, my roommate called the owner of the assisted living center, and she called an ambulance. The paramedics show up, and I reassured them as best I could that I was fine. After they left, the owner started questioning me. I told her this fainting thing was unusual and that she really hadn’t needed to call the paramedics. She asked me what I had for breakfast, and I said I had a poptart. She told me that a poptart does not count as breakfast and that I needed to start eating better.

No Sugar in the morning

Learning to eat right, and especially learning to manage my hypoglycemia well has been a lifelong journey, one I’m still learning. I feel I can still take my health and well being to the next level. I’ve cut some things from my regular diet that I didn’t even know were unhealthy. My college fair consisted of eggo waffles, canned soup, and my favorite wheat crackers. As an adult, I used to eat toast every morning for breakfast, and a ham sandwich most days for lunch. Switching those 2 things out for high protein meals has made all the difference for my hypoglycemia.

I used to get Hangry, with a capital H. I couldn’t stand for long periods of time without needing to sit down. Can you imagine if that was your normal? And I was young, this was while I was growing up and as a young adult. I’m so glad I don’t deal with that anymore.

One of the biggest tricks for managing my low blood sugar is making sure I don’t eat sugar in the morning. Sugar in the morning knocks me out. You may as well lie on the couch and cover me with a blanket if I eat a big pancake breakfast, because I’ll be there until noon. But if I eat protein in the morning, I have great energy. I can stand and not sit, and be productive.

I’ve watched kids react the same way to sugar in the morning. I used to work in a daycare, and the little babies would come in smelling like maple syrup. I’m just as guilty. I didn’t feed my kids pancakes or waffles every morning, but I did feed them instant oatmeal laden with maple syrup, which is just as bad! What if we never fed our kids sugar? What if we didn’t start them so young on this obsession for sugar?

My nephew, who was the sweetest kid, used to tip the scales when his blood sugar got too low. He was inconsolable. Only his mom could get him to drink a glass of milk to get some protien into him. Years later, I was with a friend and her young kids when her son started acting similarly. She handled it the best she could but started telling me that she thinks he might have low blood sugar, and she didn’t quite know how to manage it. I advised, no more sugar in the morning. Start the day with protein, and your days will go so much smoother.

These hacks have helped me stabilize my blood sugar. I feel more even keel instead of having to manage highs and lows. I have more energy and don’t have to eat to prevent breaking into a hungry sweat or having wild mood swings. And I’m no longer the fainting type.

Food, Health

Got spidey senses? How clean eating can heighten your sense of taste and hearing

Get ready, because in this post, I’m going to teach you how to develop a heightened sense of taste and hearing.

Heighten your sense of taste

I took my young’uns on a 13 hour road trip to see family. Before the trip I packed a cooler full of good, healthy things to eat. Yogurts, veggies and fruits, meat and cheese for sandwiches, and a yummy trail mix for snacking. It was pretty awesome. We would eat the snacks on the road and stop when people wanted a meal. We’d sit with the back door of the minivan open and eat our food.

After a fun and exhausting week of visiting family, it was time to make the trip home. I didn’t have the energy or time to do the same preparation for the return trip, so we ate fast food at every stop.

I rarely eat fast food, like hardly ever. But on this trip, I ate fast food 3 times that day, and when I got home my tongue was swollen from all the salt in the food I had eaten. I couldn’t taste food for the next 3 days. I couldn’t taste the subtle flavors in my normal fare, and I started to worry that I would never be able to taste food again.

I was relieved that after a few days my spidey sense of taste returned, and I could once again enjoy the delicate flavors in food, like the sweetness of fruit or the earthiness of vegetables.

Heighten your sense of hearing

At work, I hire folks who have to answer the phones, and a lot of them can’t hear on the phone. They don’t take accurate messages and have trouble taking orders because they can’t hear what people say. They turn the volume on the handset up as high as it will go. This surprises me because I have to turn the volume down to the lowest setting or I feel like customers are yelling in my ear. We have a small staff, and I’ve had 3 people with this problem.

I’m not a doctor, and I don’t play one on the Internet, but I would venture to say that some food we eat, my suspicion is dairy products, mess with our hearing.

Your other senses

I haven’t noticed a heightened sense of sight, touch or smell, but if I’ll let you know if I do. And if you want to develop your spidey senses, start by eating clean.

Take action

Eating salt and grease laden food is a downward spiral. It’s like we’re building a tolerance to salt/grease and will need more and more to even be able to taste our food. We’ve all seen the guy who salts his food until he can see the salt. That ain’t healthy.

If you want your kids to enjoy fruits and veggies, don’t feed them fast food, because afterward, they might not even be able to taste the vegetables.

Knowing what foods to eat can be overwhelming, but this is a great place to start. If you haven’t already, stop eating fast food. I promise, you’ll enjoy the other food in your life more.