Baby food, dog food, cat food - why pay these crazy food manufacturers to make poor quality food for loved ones when everything you need is in your kitchen. Remember scraps?

Our national nutrition and food politics maven, Marion Nestle PhD, tackled this topic in her just-out-today book Feed Your Pet Right.  Thank you Marion!  Ms. Nestle reveals some of the secrets behind the pet food industry in a fair and even way.  Amazon description says, “A comprehensive and objective look at the science behind pet food, it tells a fascinating story while evaluating the range of products available and examining the booming pet food industry and its marketing practices.”  Plus there is a section on alternative ways to feed pets.  Here here.

I mean kibble is kibble, right?  Super-dried nuggets of stuff that was once living food.  One morning when I was speaking to a small crowd of parents at a K-3 school, questioning the ritual of feeding kids dry cereal for breakfast, a dad piped in to comment that the only difference between most kid’s cereals and dog food is that the cereal has sugar.  Ha.  The whole room got quiet because there was truth in his glib appraisal.

When I tell people that I have always fed my dog real food, they often roll their eyes.  How could I possibly know what I’m doing?  Trust me, Purina does not have your dog’s health and longevity as first priority. Why would I take the time? Honest it’s not  hard.   I just pick up a pack of raw meat each time I do my grocery shopping.  I chop extra parsley or cilantro or grate some extra carrot when I’m cooking and store it in a container.  There’s a battle about whether grains are right for dogs.  Certainly bio-engineered corn might not promote health but I have found that adding some freshly cooked brown rice to the food works well for my pets.  Eggs, bits of cooked fish or chicken scraps, vegetable leavings from making soup - all foods regularly used in the kitchen, nutritious for doggie.

Should we do a video on this?

The American Dairy Association (ADA) has had its udders rooted in the USDA’s dietary recommendations for many decades.  A week ago I was going over the history of the USDA’s colorful charts depicting what Americans are supposed to eat.  One of my favorites, penned in 1943, gives us the Seven Food Groups.  Milk has its own group, so does Butter.  But dairy finds its way into the Meat Cheese Fish Poultry group and surprisingly shows up in the Cereal and Bread group too where the claim is that “Added milk improves nutritional values”.  Wow.  Four out of seven.  Impressive.  If you believe that is an accident, or meant to improve health, think again.  Politics abound as nutrition maven Marion Nestle is quick to write a tome on (Food Politics).  All this to remind you of the powerful, government-backed organization  dairy farmers have profited from for many many moons.

This week the ADA announced its “Raise Your Hands for Chocolate Milk” campaign in an effort to promote school sales of sugary flavored milks.  They claim that if kids skip chocolate milk, they will choose fruit juice or soda and miss out on all those important nutrients that they are not getting in their macaroni and cheese, cheese pizza, ice cream, smoothies and yo-yo yogurt cups.  How much dairy does a child need? Or more precisely – how much calcium?

Cow’s milk is designed to quadruple a calf’s bone structure in six months.  At no point in a human’s life do we lay down that much bone.  Yet recommendations from the nutrition party line would have us believe that we can never eat enough.  The United States has one of the highest intakes of calcium in the world and simultaneously one of the highest rates of osteoporosis.  What gives?

I’m not anti-milk, not at all anti-dairy but I’m strongly in the court of “more is not better.”  Dairy foods can be difficult for a lot of people to digest.  Many kids have dairy allergies or dairy sensitivities.  Traditional wisdom teaches us that culturing dairy (adding probiotics or allowing it to sour) breaks down the pesky lactose and casein that many people to have trouble digesting past the age of weaning.  Shouldn’t we make sure that each child is sporting a healthy digestive system by getting enough fiber, vitamins, minerals and probiotics before we coerce them to raise their hands for chocolate milk?

Being pro or con chocolate milk once again loses sight of the common sense big picture.  Why fill kids up on sugar and milk and leave no room for the nutrients they are NOT getting enough of on their school lunch tray?

Stirring Literature

New Good Food is a great candidate for a whole foods reference book to keep around the house for answering such questions as: What is that green spiky fruit and what do I do with it? How much gluten does spelt flour contain and what’s the best use for it? What fruits and vegetables are in season right now? Margaret Wittenberg has a great background in food, from owning and running a natural foods store in the late 70’s to working for Whole Foods in almost every capacity up to global vice president, to sitting on the USDA National Organic Standards Board when the standards were being created. She was also awarded the Rachel Carson Award for her work in organic agriculture, sustainability and the environment. Marion Nestle says this book is “an extraordinarily comprehensive guide to foods, ingredients, and their handling.” If you can’t trust Marion, who can you trust?

Carol White

Stirring Literature

I really enjoy checking in on Marion Nestle’s blog Food Politics.  Marion is our champion of level-headed thinking when it comes to the whole food business.

She revealed a lot of depressing information about just how political our food system is in her book Food Politics and woke us all up.  She followed that with the book What to Eat – a very practical guide about how to shop in the grocery store without getting dizzy trying to understand all the labeling.  She writes frequent posts on her Food Politics blog so those who want to keep in the know about food policy, food news, and how the big corporations are reacting to all of it might want to bookmark.  I’m just sayin’.

When I am teaching and lecturing there are often questions about milk.  Many people believe it is better to drink soy milk. Is it?  Lots of parents worry about giving their kids whole milk fearing weight gain.  Most believe milk is a necessity.  I sort of like Marion Nestle’s (What to Eat) take on milk – it’s just a food.  Not magical or better than other foods, not worse or more evil than other foods.  When I express this point of view at parent groups I invariably get a sad face exclaiming, “But what will my kids eat on my cereal?”.  I respond with another question - “Why are you eating cold cereal? More importantly why is it a staple for your children?”  It is, after all, refined, manufactured, usually sugarcoated, mostly empty carbohydrates.  The lifeless stuff does not resemble its once-alive natural source (compare oat groats to Cheerios). And it’s dry - can’t be choked down without something wet on it.  Once when I was talking to a grade school parent group a large serious man raised his hand and said – the difference between dog food and cereal is that the cereal has sugar.  That was funny.  And pretty close to the truth.  Are you cuckoo for cocoa puffs?