Vegetating with Leslie: Love in a Cookie Jar (Not)

My Arkansas grandmother died at age 65 from colon cancer.  I was 21 years old at the time and very close to her.  I lived with her and cared for her at various times during her illness, which was brutal.  Some people who lose someone they love seek answers in medicine and may become doctors.  My intuition turned me toward food and the environment.

When I became pregnant 3 years later in 1971, I began to read everything I could find on food and nutrition and organic gardening.  I became deeply distrustful of what had become the American diet, in particular the commercialization of the food supply.

Three issues stood out to me at the time as being deeply implicated in my grandmother's illness and death: lack of fiber in her diet, rampant pesticide use and chemical additives in commercial foods.  I planted a large organic garden and learned by trial and error how to tend it.  I made almost everything that we ate in our home myself including whole grain breads.

Fifteen years ago a friend of mine was diagnosed with diabetes.  We are both interested in wellness, and our conversations often turned to natural health and diet.  She explained to me that some things we had always considered part of a healthy diet were no longer part of her new regimen as a diabetic.

I was interested in learning more about what she was doing and started reading about the glycemic index and what we now call "non-inflammatory" ways of eating.  Over the last fifteen years I have become convinced that abuse of sugar in the way we eat was the missing piece in the puzzle I have been trying to work out ever since my grandmother died in 1968.

Of course I understand that cancer is a complex disease and eating 100% whole foods and avoiding sugar will not put an end to it.  I believe, though, that eating whole foods, high in fiber, can be an important part of fighting cancer and may well be a key to preventing much of it.

Not only cancer but diabetes, heart disease, stroke and Alzheimer's (which is now called Type III Diabetes) are all on the rise.  A new category of sickness called "metabolic syndrome" is a diet-induced set of issues that is often associated with these specific diseases.  Something changed somewhere along the way that caused these diseases to become epidemic.  I believe that something is food and the environment.

I have personally experienced the power of changing my diet.  There are certain issues I remember having as a teenager that I no longer had once I changed my eating style to rely on whole foods, freshly made.  I didn't initially attribute those issues to diet but now do.  Those issues included severe stomach cramping, depression and skin irregularities.  More recently I have had dramatic results from eliminating all forms of added sugar from my diet.

Some studies have suggested direct links between our high levels of sugar consumption and specific types of cancer.  While these initial studies are not yet definitive, they catch my attention.

In addition, I note that a growing field of immunology is cancer immunology, an attempt to discover immunotherapies to treat and slow progression of the disease.  We know that sugar suppresses the immune system.  In my opinion, it follows that reducing or eliminating sugar consumption, particularly through processed foods, can only have a beneficial effect in the fight against cancer. A stronger immune system is better able to fight cancer cell growth.

Finally, it seems to me that eating in such a way as to maintain blood sugar at a healthy, stable level reduces the energy our bodies put into warding off chronic disease and increases the energy available for fighting abnormal cell growth or better, maintaining wellness.

I am very cautious about eliminating foods from my diet.  As a vegetarian, I have eliminated meat.  Recognizing the importance of fiber, I avoid reduced food products -- things that were originally food but have had the fiber and important nutrients removed.  Now I have eliminated added sugar.

My focus is on whole foods with all their fiber.  That includes sweets - ok with me when they arrive in their own fiber package, like a whole date or dried apricot.  I favor the Mediterranean diet, which expresses a joy in life through its whole foods and beautiful colors.  Sadly Middle Easterners have gotten away from it these days as they have moved to white Pita and commercial products and as a result suffer one of the highest diabetes rates in the world.

I am passionate about my eating style.  Yes, it hurts me to see people I love eating in a way that I know causes damage and heartache, but it is not just a personal issue.  Making whole foods (and wholesome foods) accessible and meaningful has become my mode of social action and protest.

In addition to my work through my Cafe, I have become involved with the Food Shed Coop, an effort to create a McHenry County food coop.  The name suggests that this cooperative will be part of a food system, one that includes local farmers, local farmers markets and local consumers.  I am very excited about this project and hope you will become part of it with me. Please learn more and find out how you can support this effort at foodshed.coop.

Here is a simple little treat you can prepare for those you love when you'd like to sweeten their lives. My partner, Laura, made these for a recent event:

Filled Dates

Ingredients
Whole dates
Dried apricots
Walnuts
Labne (a Middle Eastern yogurt) - for a second version

Preparation

• If the dates are not pitted, use a small knife to make a slit on one side. Remove the pit.
• Place equal parts apricots and walnuts in the processor and pulse until you have a coarse mixture. You may have add a few drops of fruit juice if mixture seems too dry.
• Fill the pitted dates with some of the walnut-apricot mixture, mounding it attractively.
• The walnut-apricot filling can be varied with a labne filling. Fill the dates with Labne, which is cream cheese consistency. Top with a half walnut piece.
• Arrange finished dates on serving platter with orange slices for decoration.

Vegetating with Leslie: Oh the weather outside is frightful...

Just a few days ago the Groundhog saw his shadow.  Easy for him to do.  He went back to his burrow.  I, on the other hand, have to leave mine every day, and I'm freezing!  I seem to have lost the ability to keep myself warm no matter how many layers I pull on before I brave the cold and wind and snow.

I decided it's time to become proactive.  The last time I made this decision was in the winter of 1982/83.  In that year, as in this one, wind chills plunged to 40-60 degrees below zero.  I found myself never wanting to leave my burrow . . . that is, my home . . . and specifically, my fireplace.  I needed to take action, so I bought a winter camping tent and a sleeping bag designed for use in the most frigid climes and went winter camping to toughen up.

That worked pretty well.  It carried me through a few years.  But this is 22 years later, and my tent and I are a little older and worn.  My thoughts turn to other solutions. Here is a question that bubbled up: could I raise my body temperature with food?  It seems logical that I could, so I began to do some research. Here is what I found:

YES!

"How?" is another question. I found several answers.  I chose those that made sense to me based on this thought process: It requires energy (expressed as heat) to process food.  In fact, food processing may warm your body as much as two degrees (every degree counts in this weather)!  The more energy a food requires for processing, the more likely it is to heat your body.

So which foods require more energy for processing?  One estimate is fats require 3%, carbohydrates require 7%, and proteins require 20% of the energy (calories) they supply for processing.  I would therefore expect that protein is most likely to heat your body and complex carbohydrates next most likely.  Fats are least likely.  But does that correspond to the reality?

Turns out it does!  Lean protein tops most lists of warming foods, followed by complex high fiber carbohydrates like whole grain breads, brown rice, oatmeal, beans, almonds and apples. Root veggies like sweet potatoes, Idaho potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, and ginger require more energy to digest than above-ground veggies.  Above ground veggies recognized for their thermogenic properties include cabbage, kale, and Brussels sprouts.  Spices and spicy foods like cayenne, peppers, salsa, chili and mustard stimulate metabolism by as much as 20% or more and can also warm you.

OK, so now I needed to apply that to my vegetarian lifestyle, all-carb all the time.  Beans, grains and nuts top my list because in addition to the fact that they are high fiber complex carbs, they are a great protein group with complimentary amino acids.  Isn't it interesting that the veggies most effective at raising body temperature are also the most readily available during winter and are, in fact, considered winter veggies?  So winter veggie stews . . . bring them on!  And be sure to make mine spicy!

It turns out that warming the body is really about exercising the metabolism and giving it a boost, so the same diet should be great for weight maintenance as well.  Indeed it is!  Just be sure to include good fats in your winter warming project for satisfaction and to help you avoid craving sweets (which are not warming, just inflammatory . . . and that's a whole different story).

In the final analysis, keeping warm is all about making your body work, whether it's camping in frigid weather or exercising in the cold with light clothing or making your metabolism pump harder.  This year I'm opting for exercising indoors in my fleece and enjoying some hearty, spicy veggie stews.

Butternut Squash and Carrot Stew with Quinoa
This is one of my favorite Middle Eastern style recipes.  I love the warm, golden color from the butternut squash, carrots, paprika, and tumeric.

Stew
2-4 TB extra virgin olive oil
1 cup chopped onion
3 garlic cloves, chopped
2 tsp Hungarian sweet paprika
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground black pepper
1/2 tsp ground coriander
1/2 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp peeled, minced ginger
1/2-1 tsp Hungarian hot paprika
6 plum tomatoes, petite diced
2 TB fresh lemon juice
3 cups 1-inch cubes peeled butternut squash
2 cups 1-inch cubes carrots

Quinoa
2 TB olive oil
1/2 cup finely chopped onion
1/4 cup slivered almonds
1/4 cup finely chopped peeled carrot
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp turmeric
1 cup quinoa
2 cups water
1 bunch fresh cilantro
2 bunch fresh mint

Stew
Cover the bottom of a pan with extra virgin olive oil.  Add chopped onion, garlic and ginger.  Saute briefly.  Add plum tomatoes and juice of two lemons. Bring to a simmer.  Add remaining seasonings.  Simmer briefly.  Add peeled and cubed butternut squash and carrot pieces.  Stir, and place a tight lid over the pot to steam the mixture until squash and carrot are fork tender but not mushy. Check periodically for moisture content, adding a bit of water if necessary.

Quinoa
Cover the bottom of a small sauce pan with extra virgin olive oil.  Add chopped onion, minced garlic and slivered almonds.  Saute briefly.  Add chopped carrots and remaining seasonings with 1 cup quinoa and 2 cups water, stir, cover tightly and cook until done (10-15 minutes).  Chop the mint and cilantro together.  Add half to the stew. Reserve the other half as garnish.

A nice way to serve this beautiful meal is to place a portion of stew on a plate, leaving an opening in the middle.  Place an ice cream scoop (1/2 cup) of quinoa in the middle of the stew.  Garnish with remaining mint and cilantro.

Happy, healthy eating!

Vegetating with Leslie: LESS IS MORE - But for whom?

As the only vegetarian cafe in the area, I have many health-conscious customers.  Increasingly they ask for gluten-free products.  Most of my food is, in fact, gluten free naturally.  For those who want some kind of bread with their meal, though, I stock gluten free crackers.

Last week we ran out of our regular product and I had to run to a local store to pick up a substitute:  $7.00 for a small box of rice crackers with just enough in it to provide a few small crackers to four customers.  $7.00 for a product that has little nutrition, no fiber and is high on the glycemic index.  This same $7.00 would buy me seven bags of whole wheat pita, each with 10 "loaves" of six inch pitas, from a small bakery in Chicago that makes the bread fresh on their premises.  Enough for 70 customers.  Wheat with protein, vitamins B1, B2, B3, E, folic acid, calcium, phosphorus, zinc, copper, iron, and good fiber content.  Why does it cost so much more to get so much less?  This question aggravated me all week.

I understand some of us need gluten free products -- yet I cannot help but feel we are being duped by a food industry that creates a health problem and then offers "solutions" from which it profits enormously.  Gluten-free sales reached more than $2.6 billion by the end of 2010 and are now expected to exceed more than $5 billion by 2015. (Source: Packaged Facts, 2011).  On the other hand, I wonder if many of us go gluten-free thinking it's healthier but choose "substitutes" that are not only more expensive but nutritionally inferior.

Two years ago I first heard the term "value added product."  I wasn't familiar with this term so did a little research. "Value added" refers to any step in the production process that improves the product for the customer and results in a higher net worth.  I suspect the operative words are "production process," which in my experience results not in added value for the customer, where value should be defined as enhancing health, but for the food industry, where value is defined as profit.

Those rice crackers I bought might be considered "value added".  They are simple grains of rice subjected to a series of steps involving water, heat, expensive machinery and sprayed on seasoning.  Chicken McNuggets would also be an example of a "value added product."  A few weeks ago, a report revealed the real content of a Chicken McNugget, renaming it "Chicken Little."  The Nuggets turn out to be no more than half chicken "meat" and the rest fat, cartilage, bone, blood vessels and nerves.

While the real content of Chicken McNuggets may disgust some of us, there is nothing inherently wrong with using otherwise unusable parts of a chicken to create tasty food.  People have always found ingenious ways to make the inedible edible: witness chit'lins (chitterlings) and gribenes.  Chit'lins are the intestines of a pig, stewed for several hours and sometimes fried into what some consider a delicious treat.  Gribenes are a by-product of schmaltz making.  Excess chicken skin is cut into small pieces and sautéed in a pan until the schmaltz (fat) is rendered.  The "cracklings" are removed, and caramelized onions and seasonings added for a treat that in pre-low-fat diet days was well-loved by many Jews.  Now that we know that fat, even animal fat, is not the cause of weight gain, diabetes and sickness in our American diet, who knows? These items may become popular once again.  Coming soon to a summer near you: Gribenes and chit'lin stands!

What we do know is that when a "value added" product comes to us via the food industry, we can assume the way the product was turned into something that will "add value" for the industry probably decreases value for us.  We can expect the raw food is subjected to heat and/or speedy, mechanized processes that result in undesirable changes in the food product (from the health standpoint), or cheap oils high in omega 6s are used or sugar or undesirable chemicals are added.

A real value-added product is one made from scratch with the best, whole food ingredients. An example is "Fatoush," a way that Middle Eastern cooks found to use up stale pita.  For a gluten free version, leave out the pita.  Although delicious with it, it is substantial, satisfying and delicious without it.  A few chickpeas thrown in will replace the protein and B vitamins of the wheat, some avocado or olives will add fat, and walnuts will add crunch.  No designer gluten-free products needed, just real food!

FATOUSH - Fatoush means "crushed" or "broken" and refers to the Pita croutons that are a prominent feature of this salad.

Romaine 1 "head"
Spinach 1 quart
Radicchio 1/2 "head"
Plum Tomato 4 large
Cucumber 1 large or 2 small
Green Onions 1 bunch
Radishes 5-6
Mint 4-6 sprigs (1/4 cup chopped)
Garlic 1-2 cloves crushed
Lebanese Pita 1 quart pita strips
Extra Virgin Olive Oil 1/4 - 1/2 cup
Lemon Juice of 1/2 - 1
Sumac 1 TB
Salt To taste

Cut 2 Lebanese pitas into 2" x 1/2" strips and toast lightly or dry in oven.  Set aside.  Shred (slice thinly) the Romaine, spinach and radicchio.  All greens should be in 2" x 1/4" strips.  Deseed tomatoes and cucumbers.  Petite dice (1/4"-1/2" dice) radishes, tomatoes and cucumbers.  Chop green onions and mint.  Crush garlic.   Toss the veggies, garlic and pita croutons together gently with the sumac.  Toss again with extra virgin olive oil, freshly squeezed lemon juice and salt to taste.  Gluten-free: leave out pita and add chickpeas, avocado, olives and/or walnuts.

Happy, healthy eating!