Real Food is Good Food

Categories: In the News , Cookbooks

With killer spinach dominating headlines,  reconsidering your food sources may not be such a bad idea. 

Nina Planck was a toddler when her parents abandoned the city for rural Virginia and the arduous life of farming.  Growing up eating abundant fresh vegetables, eggs from the farm's free ranging chickens and cream and milk from their own cow, she was not introduced to processed food in any great amount until she was in college.

In Real Food: What to Eat and Why, Planck explores how processed foods have come to dominate the American food industry and how we can eat more healthfully and with greater satisfaction by rejecting modern food.

Plank contends that our ancestors ate better and more nutritious food such as butter, eggs, whole milk and (gasp!) lard and suffered no ill effects.   According to Plank, animals raised on corn rather than natural grass have weakened the health benefits of meat, and don't get her started on what's been done to chickens!

Basically she advocates avoiding sugar, and eating food that has had the least intervention by modern means, so get your salmon freshly frozen off the Alaskan fishing boat or buy farm fresh eggs from suppliers who let their chicks run loose eating yummy grubs and worms.  And try to buy produce that is unsprayed and grown as close to home as possible, preferably in your own backyard.

While what she says certainly isn't new, (Adelle Davis was preaching this years ago and Planck pays her due homage) Real Food presents it all in a nice, tidy book that will leave you thinking about what you eat and why.  Pass the butter, please.