Look before you eat

Dates are good to eat as they are, but when they come in syrup form, they are heavenly. As long as it is dates all the way with no mess-ups in the creation with added sugar or any other unnecessary ingredients, E or otherwise, then it’s absolutely yummy! Sweet, dark and thick, it is packed with iron and is considered a healthy treat for kids. Add it to milk or use as a topping on cereal, bread or pancakes, even oats…….the combinations are left to your imagination.

It is a reliable source of minerals and vitamins, energy enhancer, is a natural sweetener (can be used in cakes, and cookies too), and supposedly even enhances memory. I don’t’ know exactly how that happens, but I’ll take it!

Try baking this cookie:

One cup stone ground whole wheat flour, a hand full of oats, a hand full of cornflakes, no eggs needed, no baking soda either (!), a few raisins and loads of date syrup. A dollop of unsalted butter, some milk to make it easy to mix.

Add flour, oats, cornflakes, butter (slightly melted is good), date syrup….basically everything except the raisins and beat (in a blender if you wish). Once the mixture is smooth, throw in the raisins, mix with spatula and spread in greased pan (greased with butter). Place in pre-heated oven and leave it there for 20 minutes or so.

That’s your date with a real cookie. Enjoy!

Labels: cookie recipe, cookies, date syrup, dates

These innocent looking figs are not so innocent after all. When they first came off the tree, they were just figs. Now that they have been dried, they have also been slathered with preservative, sulphides, AKA (and not so fondly, mind you) E220.

Your figs will inherit a longer shelf life when coated with E220, and that’s it on the good side. But is that worthy enough a cause for you to swallow some sulphur dioxide on the side?

When I was researching the ill-effects of this preservative (because I bought dried fruit for my kids without checking the fine print) this is what I found on the UK food guide…

“A preservative derived from coal tar. Sulphur additives are toxic and in the United States of America, the Federal Drugs Administration have prohibited their use on raw fruit and vegetables.

Sulphur dioxide is produced by the combustion of sulphur or gypsum.

E220 is known to provoke asthma attacks and is difficult to metabolise for those with impaired kidney function. It also destroys vitamins B1 and E.

Typically found in beers, soft drinks, dried fruit, juices, cordials, wine, vinegar, and potato products.

Not recommended for consumption by children.”

I was horrified. I can’t go out and get some figs without being paranoid about whether it is really good to eat or not. I have to scour the supermarket-scape for figs (or indeed any dry fruit) that comes without this nasty piece of chemical attached to it. How depressing is that?

I don’t know if we can make them stop using chemicals to preserve our fruit and veg, but we sure can stop buying packets of artificially preserved fruit, for starters and switch to food that is preserved naturally.

I would love my figs without the coal tar, thank you very much. How about you?

Labels: E220, figs, preservatives in food, sulphur dioxide

"Organic" is the buzz-word these days where food, indeed even lifestyle, is concerned. There is a growing interest in organic food – essentially food produced without the use of chemical inputs, whatever they may be.

The Organic Food Blog puts it very succinctly:

“For crops organic means they were grown without the use of conventional pesticides, artificial fertilizers, human waste, or sewage sludge, and that they were processed without ionizing radiation or food additives. For animals, it means they were reared without the use of antibiotics or growth hormones and were genetically modified.”

With this in the backdrop, it is considered both hip and healthy to move with the organic food movement, what with celebrities endorsing it left, right and centre on the one hand and it being almost a necessity on the other hand. However, the deeper underpinnings of the organic food movement should be put in context, and so I have attempted to put it across in lay-people’s terms, just the way I understood it! In other words, I hope I am helping others like myself who want to know what "organic" really is in terms that are easy to comprehend and so easy to effect.

Here are some of organic farming's main features:

. Organic farming puts a ceiling on the use of man-made chemical fertilizers and pesticides

. Instead, the focus is on increasing the health and fertility of the soil and on growing a variety of crops on the same farm, to encourage diversity

. Animals are raised without drugs and antibiotics common in rigorous livestock farming

According The Soil Association:

“The word organic is defined by law. Any food labeled organic must meet a strict set of standards. Look for the Soil Association symbol for your guarantee of the highest organic standards. Find out whether what you're buying is really organic.”

Why organic?

• Tastes better

• Cleaner, safer

• Earth-friendly

• Strict adherence to animal welfare standards

That was clear and simple enough for me. Hope the same is true for you!

"Oganic" however is also mired in controversy. Is organic always better than buying locally produced fruit and veg that may not necessarily be organic? In other words, would you walk the ends of the earth (or make your strawberries walk the ends of the earth?!) in order to have organic or would you simply be happy with produce from a farm that is local, not necessarily organic, but is strict enough not to spray their produce? Do think about it because there are implications either way.

I came across something interesting during my research that i thought was worth sharing....
check this out sometime....

The Meatrix

* Watch the movie that started it all! The Meatrix spoofs The Matrix films and highlights the problems with factory farming. Join our heroes Moopehus, Leo, and Chickity as they help save family farms!

* Winner of the 2005 Webby Award and viewed by over 15 million people, The Meatrix will change the way you look at meat!

The Meatrix II: Revolting

* The Meatrix II: Revolting delivers even more action, adventure, and humor than the first Meatrix, as our heroes Moopehus, Chickity, and Leo plunge into the revolting reality of industrial dairy farming.

* The original Meatrix changed the way we look at meat. The sequel changed the way we feel about cheese. Watch The Meatrix II: Revolting!

The Meatrix II ½

* Taking the fast out of fast food! The action continues in award-winning Meatrix series with The Meatrix II ½, as our heroes Moopheus, Leo, and Chickity learn firsthand about the problems with meat processing.

* Picking up from their last adventure at a dairy farm, Leo and Chickity attempt to rescue Moopheus, who has been kidnapped and taken to a slaughterhouse. Watch The Meatrix II ½ to find out what happens!

blurb provided by http://themeatrix.com

Most of us think that little changes we make within our homes to make this world a greener place will have no impact anyway. But that is not true.

Consider this:
A simple decision to change the dish washing liquid you use everyday can have an impact. The Seventh Generation dish washing liquid has this printed on the label
“You are making a difference.

If every household in the US replaced just one bottle of 25 oz petroleum based dishwashing liquid with our 25 oz vegatable based product, we could save 81,000 barrels of oil, enough to heat and cool 4,600 US homes for a year!”

This natural dish liquid is non-toxic, biodegradable and hypo-allergenic. What is more, it is free and clear of perfumes and dyes, is very gentle on your hands and cleans your dishes to a shine. It does not stick to your dishes and so creep into your food. It washes off easily and leaves no lingering scent on the dish or ladle which could then get passed on to your food.

I strongly recommend this liquid. And no, seventh generation is not paying me for giving their product such a sparkling review, although they should!

For a list of nasty chemicals in your dish liquid, go here.

Labels: dish liquid, natural dish liquid, non-toxic cleaners, seventh generation

Microwave it and eat it. This must be the worst way to eat. Eating out of a packet that has been micro-waved. The reasons are many, the most obvious one being that the food is not freshly prepared, it is processed (that is not to say all processed food is bad, but some obviously are). The not so obvious reason is the more dangerous one and warrants serious consideration.

According to a report by Beatrice Trum Hunter (Consumers' Research Magazine v76 n12 p8(2) Dec93), in her article titled Dangers of packaging chemicals getting into food,micro-waveable food is packed in plastic wrapping which can transmit the chemicals during heating. According to this report also, something called "active packaging” is used inside the plastic food packaging – that is the thin layers of metallic heat receptors intended for the microwave. These heat receptors produce concentrated microwave radiation in order to make extremely hot surfaces (400[degrees]F to 500[degrees]F) within the package. At this high temperature, food can be browned, crisped, or popped – a thing not normally done in microwave cooking.

"At such high heat, substances such as polymers and their breakdown products, as well as adhesives and their components and other substances present in the plastic, can migrate into the food.”

Did you just vow never to buy microwaveable popcorn again?

Plastic food wraps are also a no-good packaging for microwaveable foods because compounds from the packaging can leak into the food when subjected to heat. If your food must be micro-waved, the least you can do is put it into a glass or ceramic bowl first.

Food packaging seems a necessary evil. But can consumers influence how the food is packaged in the future by making informed choices when shopping? Is it possible for us to stay away from food that is packaged with material with the potential to seriously impair health? For example, eggs still come packaged in thermacoal packing. They also come in containers made of cardboard. Ideally, the free-range organic egg in paper containers are best. But if that is not an option, then can we at least go for the egg in paper containers? Eggs that are stored in Styrofoam containers for more than a few days inherit some of the components of the packaging (which travel through the eggshells into edible parts of the egg) and thus make the eggs “contaminated”.

Cheese and meat or even bakery products wrapped in PVC film wrap (another example of food packaging gone wrong) are not safe to consume because the plastic supposedly interacts with the fat content in the foods being packed, releasing chemicals into the food, which are considered carcinogens.

Teflon is another major culprit on the loose. As stated in the Ohio Citizen report:

Most people know that Teflon chemicals are in cookware. However, chemical coatings used in food packaging have proven to break down into Teflon chemicals as well. Scientists are investigating human exposure from oil, stain, and grease repellent coatings on paper and cartons such as french fries boxes, sandwich wrappers, and microwave popcorn bags.

"According to 3M Company testing, Teflon chemicals are present in the blood of about 95% of people living in the United States. [PFOA or C8] linked to the coatings on take-out food cartons and raincoats is 'likely' to cause cancer in humans, according to a draft report by a panel of an independent advisory board to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Scientists are not sure how the chemical - perfluorooctanoic acid - is getting into people, but it is found widely in human blood throughout the United States. Some researchers say the source is the deterioration of water- and grease-repellant coatings used on carpets, raincoats and takeout-food boxes,” (Philadelphia Inquirer, June 29, 2005.)

And now, coming to the deadliest of them all – we are talking about Bisphenol A also known as BPA, found in plastic bottles and containers, especially in babies bottles. It is a chemical used extensively in food and beverage packaging. BPA has been linked to heart disease and diabetes and this chemical is found in your lunchbox and water bottle too! How ironic is that – you simply cannot assume that you are eating well just because you are eating home cooked food made with the best ingredients because, you know what, you are eating it out of your own BPA-encased lunchbox! So remember, the next time you buy a plastic container look for the number on it. If it says 7, you should know to put it right back where you took it from.

In a cross-sectional study (conducted by Dr Iain A. Lang and colleagues from the Peninsula Medical School, the Universities of Exeter and Plymouth, and the University Of Iowa College of Public Health, US) the authors studied the associations between levels of bisphenol A (BPA) in urine and adult health status. “The chemical has been shown to have adverse effects on animals and this has led to concern over long-term, low-level exposure in humans.”

BPA has even made medical research news. According to medical research, BPA has been shown to disrupt the development of breast tissue in mice, which according to scientists, could affect women exposed to this chemical as well because of its female-hormone mimicking tendency.

Now, plastic bottles are synonymous with BPA, so water tastes like plastic.
If you want to avoid buying plastic that’s not recycled, then go for the ones without BPA. Even recycled plastic is safe only in some cases. look for the sign that says “recycled”, but more importantly, look for the number inside the sign. 1,2,4 and 5 are supposedly the safest. And remember that plastic can be made without BPA, so chuck the bad plastic and when you do, remember that you are doing yourself and the earth a big favor.

If you thought your food could have chemicals in it only because of the way it is produced, then hopefully this article has knocked off that illusion. Your food can have chemical contaminants in it even from the packaging. What we need to do now is eliminate plastic from our diets. How crazy is that? And if that is not enough, your favorite canned soup has a load of BPA in it too. The liner of the canned soup or even canned baby food, for that matter, has enough to create serious damage.

According to tests conducted by the Environmental working group,

"Of all foods tested, chicken soup, infant formula, and ravioli had BPA levels of highest concern. Just one to three servings of foods with these concentrations could expose a woman or child to BPA at levels that caused serious adverse effects in animal tests.

For 1 in 10 cans of all food tested, and 1 in 3 cans of infant formula, a single serving contained enough BPA to expose a woman or infant to BPA levels more than 200 times the government's traditional safe level of exposure for industrial chemicals. The government typically mandates a 1,000- to 3,000-fold margin of safety between human exposures and levels found to harm lab animals, but these servings contained levels of BPA less than 5 times lower than doses that harmed lab animals”

“A recent study from the Centers for Disease Control tested a demographically diverse group of almost 400 Americans for evidence of exposure to BPA and found that 95% of study participants had the chemical in their urine (Calafate 2005; Wolff 2007). BPA has been linked to a variety of health outcomes which are prevalent and in many cases increasing in the United States and responsible for a major toll on our collective health. These include breast and prostate cancer, and infertility (Maffini 2006).
BPA's toxic effects in lab animals are on the rise and common in people”

The good news is Europe has banned the use of BPA in items made for children who are aged 3 or under and Health Canada has deemed it a toxic substance and put it on the suspect list.

Here's what you and I can do as consumers: we can start by making choices. “Go green”, as they say. It’s better for you and it’s better for the environment. But if all this information doesn’t make you sit up and attempt at changing your habits for your own sake, then do so for the planet. Eventually maybe it will trickle back to you because of how intrinsically the earth and you are linked.

After all, green is not a color, it is a state of mind, a way of life.

I have just returned after 6 days of loafing the streets of Versailles. This little town in France is absolutely beautiful, what with the autumn colors making it a sight to behold. I saw every hue of yellow and red imaginable over there and I say this at the cost of sounding hyperbolic but I do have to make my point. The point is, Versailles is gorgeous. What it is not, however, is interesting. Sorry. But you know what? It is such a boring town even the beauty starts to evade you after a while. For a place that is utterly European, with nothing predictable about the look of it, it has a ghostly predictability in the feel of it. My kids and I had very little to do and it drove us stark raving crazy. Even the food-scene was quite pathetic. For us anyway.

There are four streets in all of Versailles and those four streets are home to about 8 Indian restaurants. We love Indian food. We are Indian. But eating Indian food in France, made exclusively for the French palate was not exactly our cup of tea.....er, plate of food, I mean. It was merely the subject matter of curiosity for us, and nothing more. We did stray into an Indian place and found it to be less than ordinary.

They were passing off some naan breads and tandoori-ed meat (slathered with food coloring, because of course they dont have a real tandoori oven, but the meat's still got to come out a tandoori red, right?) and calling it Indian. The curries were nothing to write home about either, made with loads of tomato puree from a can and some curry powder to give it a curry flavor and feel. I'm not being overly critical, merely realistic. Indian food here is Btitain is much more authentic, although you could run into some pretty poor stuff just as easily.

My only complaint against Indian food in this part of the world (as elsewhere, outside of India, I presume) is that it is not properly represented. This same French-Indian eatery served lousy pakoras which were largely deep fried batter, hiding a measely string of aubergine somewhere inside. Over all, pretty poor - starters, main course, the whole deal, was poor, poor, poor. The only thing truly worthwhile was the red wine.

French food? I’m not sure I know what that is. Maybe 6 days aren't enough to find out, but there is plenty of great wine, loads of pasta, meat in every corner, especially the red variety and bread by the cartloads.

There is cuisine from other parts of the world too, but if you are vegetarian, then you can get stuck for decent food. Even a salad is not free of meat, served with bacon strips if you please and even if you don’t please.

Give me a vegetarian salad for tomates sake. And please be generous with the avocado.

And then you had the odd salad with fried potatoes thrown in for good measure! Lots of it. Whoever heard of salad with fried potato pieces in it. Even the lettuce in the salad was over kill. The salads have so much lettuce in them, you really start to feel like a goat at some point through the meal. If the menu says anything about a leaf salad, then better beware. You’ll be eating a lettuce patch.

Well, anyway. We got by with bread from the Boulangerie and pastries from the Patisserie, some Suma brand organic canned soup that I had packed in anticipation of starving and other sundries that I had kept aside for the kids – biscuits and stuff. Fruit was available too, in plenty, but my daughter declared that it was too cold to eat fruit. Apples however were welcome any day with both the kids. Cheese (especially the vitamin rich goat cheese) and yogurt were also considered treats and they were quite easy to find too. French coffee was alright, but the good old croissant made it worthwhile. Frankly, I drink much better coffee out here in England, with or without our pastry friend.

Overall, it was a pleasant few days, wandering about beautiful alleys and streets lined with lovely buildings, searching from time to time, for a decent place to eat, or a garden to wander into…or even someone to talk to (who spoke a few words of English or was willing to play dumb charades).

I would go back. Don’t know what I’d do there though other than saunter back into idyllic quiet and write my next piece in my head while I do that…..

Labels: food, french wine, salad, salade, tomates, versailles