Single Dad Is Champion of Real Food

NINA is 'the antidote to the faddists and kooks who all too often dominate American food discourse.' That's David Kamp, author of The United States of Arugula, talking. (His new book, The Food Snob's Dictionary, is a bluffer's guide to terms like grass-fed and pastured and other things I'm always wittering on about. Acquire the lingo, and laugh while you're at it.) I'm a nutrition geek, a local food entrepreneur, and a monomaniac about the operations of farmers markets. The daughter of working farmers, I grew up in Virginia, selling our ecological vegetables at farmers markets. After some years as a vegan and vegetarian, I now eat beef, eggs, butter, raw milk - the foods I grew up on - with impunity. In Real Food, I explain why they're good for you. (So are fish, olive oil, and vegetables.) Mark Bittman called Real Food 'compellingly smart' and Michael Pollan said it was 'persuasive and invigorating.'

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single dad is champion of real food

Deidre Currie, a champion of raw milk and real food, was in love, recently married, and pregnant with Jack when she died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism. Even though she was weeks short of forty weeks, she was strong enough to deliver Jack, a healthy boy. Jack's father Archie is putting on a real food conference in Ann Arbor on September 13. It will honor Jack's mother, who not only ate real food herself, but turned her life around to bring real food to mothers in Michigan and everywhere.

Attend the Deidre Curry Festival and learn all about real food for mother and baby - and for everyone else. All proceeds benefit Jack. If you go, say hi to Jack for me. When I saw him at six months, he was thriving on real food: donated breast milk. His mother's memory lives on in so many ways. Read Jack's story and tell your friends what breast milk can do. www.DeidreCurrieFestival.com.

better food & less of it

I call it conscientious carnivory, or sometimes, moderate omnivory. It means eating better food and not too much of it. We always eat fruit and vegetables in abundance, whether or not they are local, seasonal, and ecological, but for meat, 'better' means grass-fed, pastured, hormone- and antibiotic-free, and humane. If you're willing to eat frozen meat - and we are - you can eat better meat year-round. Really good vegetables are another story.

Here in New York City, summer came at last. I find I have a lighter appetite, and for even better food. Althought I cannot give up treats like chocolate, actual junk food has ever-smaller appeal. Nor am I hungry for our winter weeknight supper of grass-fed beef stew (made with chuck the day before) with a side of carrots braised in cider or mashed potatoes with milk and butter.

Instead I ordered great heaps of wild salmon as I do every season. Most of it comes frozen, and it's in great shape, rock-solid, when it arrives. This time we also got some short-season, fresh King salmon. On balance, I'm happier with the frozen. If it's wrapped properly, it keeps well in a home freezer, and I can't tell the difference, taste- or quality-wise. There is a great fuss made of of salmon species. I've now tasted the rarest King (aka Chinook), Silver (aka Coho), and Sockeye (aka reds), side by side many times. READ ON.

Dessert these days is good ice cream, which means good milk, not much sugar, and good ingredients. If you live in NYC or Greenwich, CT, Van Leeuwen is the
one.

VAN LEEUWEN ICE CREAM

Around the corner from my SoHo office, at Prince and Greene Streets, there parks a yellow ice cream truck selling awesome ice cream. The vanilla is rich (in vanilla) and light (in sugar). The chocolate is fifth-grade chocolate. I mean it's not the intense, super-dark kind, which is in fashion now, thanks to bitter chocolate nuts like you-know-who. (The chocolate is bitter, not me.) Instead, it has the perfect flavor of a good milk chocolate bar or a good milkshake. The other flavors, from hazelnut to strawberry to mint chocolate chip, are subtle and perfect. By subtle I mean (for example) that the mint chocolate chip doesn't taste like mouthwash. Nor is it green. These flavors don't try too hard to be gourmet, thank goodness. They don't stray too far from classic, either, but they are far from ordinary. The toppings,too, are top: wild American walnuts, cacao nibs, real whipped cream, and a home-made fudge sauce which 'We probably don't even make a profit on,' says Dan, 'cuz we spend so much on the ingredients.'

I don't intend to start reviewing New York City street food - and my apologies for your time, if you can't get Van Leeuwen in your town. Proper food bloggers are better equipped, palate- and pen-wise. I only wish to encourage new small ice cream makers to follow suit with the right milk and (crucially) the right amount of sugar, which ain't much. As my mother says of good desserts, if you taste sugar on the first bite, it will be cloying by the last. Not so with Van Leeuwen - it's perfect that way. The single scoop, incidentally, is quite generous by mincy New York City standards. Perhaps they'll add a kid size for us waist-watchers. (I can only eat so much real food.) I'm also clamoring for an insulated bag for the hand-packed, take-home pints and a lid that stays on while you walk home. Details.

Meanwhile, every American city and town could support a dozen Van Leeuwens and keep another pack of pasture-based dairy farms in business, so they don't go broke selling milk to corrupt co-ops at commodity prices to make more crappy dairy-like foods. Ice cream should be small-batch and local. Good milk and cream - the foundation of good ice cream - is like a ripe peach. It doesn't travel well.

PARADE MAGAZINE ASKED ME FOR SIX SUPERFOOds

Read all about it. 'Superfood' is a bit overused, but that's what they wanted and I'm glad to see real red meat and supersaturated coconut oil mentioned in the health pages. It is fun to watch people catch on to real food instead of imitation this and that. Sometimes they make it only halfway. The other day a whipped topping company wrote me. They were keen to show me that the competitor doesn't much resemble Jersey cream, or cream from any cow, for that matter. It contains water, flavorings, corn syrup, hydrogenated coconut oil, polysorbate, sorbitan monostearate, xanthan and guar gums, and sodium caseinate, a protein derived from cow milk that makes oil and water do what they don't like to do: mix. And to promote their own, er, whipped product, which contains real cream, along with a lot of other nonsense you don't need, including non-fat milk, corn syrup, flavorings, and the stuff that makes it stay fluffy forever. Remember the real food rule: Eat foods that spoil, but eat them before they do. In this case, buy heavy cream, get out the hand mixer, and enjoy the real thing instead. Fresh. Simple. Good for you.

vegetarian pregnancy and insulin-resistant kids

Researchers found that largely vegetarian women consuming high levels of folate (from leafy greens and beans) and low levels of vitamin B-12 produced children who were small but fat and insulin-resistant at age six. This has interesting implications for vegetarian pregnancies. Lots of folate is good, of course. Don't stop eating leafy greens. But don't rely on beans and rice for protein. Vegans and vegetarians are likely to lack adequate B12, which is found only in animal foods.

Allow me to quote the UK Vegan Society on B12. 'It is exclusively synthesised by bacteria and is found primarily in meat, eggs and dairy products. There has been considerable research into proposed plant sources of vitamin B12. Fermented soya products, seaweeds, and algae such as spirulina have all been suggested as containing significant B12. However, the present consensus is that any B12 present in plant foods is likely to be unavailable to humans and so these foods should not be relied upon as safe sources.'

If you're pregnant or planning to be, eat plenty of grass-fed beef, pastured pork and poultry, and clean wild fish for adequate B12, protein, iron, and zinc.

back on the real food road

This spring I'll be speaking here and there about Real Food. Find out whether I'm coming to your town.

eat well when you're not cooking

Too busy to cook? Industrial food used to be the only option. Not anymore. See my brand-new, highly-selective, national list of real food caterers. And send suggestions! Traditional foods only, of course: no vegan, low-fat, low-cholesterol, or low-saturated fat menus. We also want chefs who use ecological ingredients from independent, local farms.

raw milk at london farmers' markets

I envy the eaters at my farmers' markets in London, where it's legal to sell untreated milk. Read all about it. See my SHOPPING LIST to get your own.

thanks, michael pollan

Michael Pollan's new book, In Defense of Food, picks up some themes from Real Food, including: the more Americans think about nutrition, the worse our health becomes (I called this Amerexia Nervosa, our national eating disorder); eat foods your great-grandmother would recognize as food; real food (like yogurt) is conservative; it hasn't changed in thousands of years; Weston Price was right: any traditional diet is good for you. Thanks, Michael, for citing Real Food several times!

ON THE JANUARY BLOG: eat more eggs

Why eggs are good for nursing mothers and sad news about pasteurized milk.

more fat skeptics - at the american heart association, no less

Gary Taubes and Ronald Krauss of the AHA discuss the changing understanding of heart disease. It's striking how open Krauss is to the challenges Taubes outlines in Good Calories, Bad Calories. Listen to the interview.

short films introduce the real food hypothesis

How did the misguided advice to avoid butter come about? Two short films, called Big Fat Lies and The McGovern Report, explain. Thanks, YouTube.

mothers + babies

Things we like.

real food babies

Are you starting to feed your baby real food? From seven to ten months, Julian ate all kinds of things, including raw cream with banana and cinnamon, eggs, spicy Italian sausage from Flying Pigs Farm, guacamole, tomato salad with garlic yogurt dressing, pesto, and German potato salad with mustard and capers, along with heap plenty fruit and vegetables. And some 70% or even 85% chocolate.