So far, over 3500 people have signed up. That’s quite a bit of label reading starting Monday. Andrew at Eating Rules has posted several FAQ answers (and a handy PDF guide!) that get into the nitty gritty of what passes what he calls the “kitchen test.”

Essentially, the kitchen test asks whether an individual in a home kitchen could make a certain ingredient or product with items available for consumer purchase. For example, if you were to acquire a hive of bees, you could procure your own raw honey. But regular sugar is a different story. Making it requires centrifuges and (if it’s bleached) sulfur dioxide. Not exactly things you can pick up at Kitchen Kaboodle, so regular sugar does not pass the kitchen test.

Of course, you’re free to define processed for yourself. If you want to draw the line at high fructose corn syrup, go right ahead. The important part is that you see where things are lurking in the food you eat. Here’s my own twist on the regular sugar thing: you don’t have to eliminate regular sugar, but I dare you to try and only eat sugar you yourself add to your food. Instead of a flavored latte, get a regular coffee and add your own cream and sugar; you’re not going to add as much sugar as is in the syrup. This gives you both control and awareness; no food company is going to sneak the sweet stuff by you. And if you do that for a while, I suspect you’ll become aware of just how sweet a lot of food items are.

Change doesn’t happen overnight. And it doesn’t have to be all at once. October Unprocessed is about becoming aware of what you’re eating and aiming to make an improvement. Think of it as a step in the right direction.

Much of what he talked about is familiar: industrial agriculture, our growing global demand for meat and the like. But I was shocked by one piece of information that was new to me: only one in four meals eaten in the US contain an unprocessed fruit or vegetable. Even more disturbing is that this portion would be one in five if the lettuce on hamburgers weren’t counted as a vegetable. Fruits and vegetables should make up the majority of what we eat, and they don’t show up once a day in most Americans’s diets. If you ask me, this is Halloween come early.

A big topic of discussion was food marketing, particularly to children. This isn’t an especially enthralling food topic to me, maybe because I don’t have kids, but it’s easy to view obesity as a symptom of our environment, which is heavily influenced by advertising. Children are especially vulnerable, and with no regulation on Internet marketing to kids, the situation is ripe with opportunities. Food manufacturers seize this opportunity by creating online games for children with the goal being the collection and consumption of nutritionally void “food.” Bittman was right to point this out as a major hurdle to a healthy food environment, and frankly we should all view this as the second coming of Joe Camel.

When he was asked about the Stanford study, which concluded organic food is not more nutritious than conventional, he had several points to make. First, that the concept of organic has never been about increasing nutrient loads; it’s about environmental health and reducing chemical exposure. Second, he hopes that we can move beyond the current definition of organic to a more sustainable and just method of bringing food to market. Finally, asked his opinion on Walmart’s role in the spread of organics, he raised the pointed notion that Walmart’s embrace of the organic market cheapens the whole concept of organic food.

Given all these areas that need huge improvements to provide a healthy food environment, it’s important to look at positive things that are happening. The first and biggest is Prop 37 on the November ballot in California. Prop 37 would require the labeling of any product containing GMOs. This would include the vast majority of all processed foods. Food companies are fighting it tooth and nail, but they would likely just reformulate to exclude GMOs nationwide if the proposition passes. Needless to say, Monsanto and its ilk would take a huge financial hit if this were the case. The other glimmering hope for food sanity is a city soda tax in Richmond, CA. Soda companies have dumped a lot of money into the fight against this, despite its being for one city. It’d be a slippery slope once such a tax funneled money into the city’s coffers while obesity and related diseases were reduced. Other cities and states would follow suit and before you know it, the soda companies’ profits would drop.

So, even though there’s so much room for improvement, and we are so far from what Bittman calls “sane eating,” there’s hope for all of us. Californians have the chance to stand up to companies that manipulate nature in pursuit of profits. We all have the choice to eat better for our selves and our planet. We should take the chance to do it now and by choice, because as Bittman said in opening, a hundred years from now we’ll be eating a more local and plant based diet. We can either move toward that future gracefully or we’ll be forced to it by disaster and necessity. The choice, for the time being, is ours.

I see recipes like this all the time. Ingredient lists run long enough to make anyone say “screw this, I’m getting Chinese.” Now, if you’re cooking a new dish for a dinner party by all means stick to a fancy recipe. But the rest of the time—when you just want to be fed sometime after your evening commute, but before the Daily Show is on, take these complex recipes and start crossing out ingredients with a Sharpie. Saving a boatload of money and cupboard space are bonuses.

Here’s what I did to this recipe:

Baguette: had none, didn’t want to buy one, so I peeled half a leftover eggplant and cooked it lightly
White wine: fresh out, skip it
Champagne or sherry vinegar: thought I had some red wine vinegar…I didn’t, so I used a splash of white balsamic
Melon: this I kept…this was sort of the point
Tomatoes: also kept these, though there was no measuring involved
Shallot: I didn’t have one at home; intended to get one, but onions are, like, 1/5 the price
Chives: used a tiny pinch because my chives are growing painfully slow
Basil: got a bunch of this at the market and used a fraction of it; the rest went into the freezer to make pesto later
Olive oil: used it
Bay leaves: ??? um, no
Sage: not something I keep
Celery salt: also, no.
Salt & pepper: I used these, plus I added in a tiny bit of a “mild” pepper from the market.
Walnut oil: pshhh!
Ice cubes: would have used these if I’d been short on time, but I wasn’t, so I just put my gazpacho in the fridge

Out of 15 ingredients, I used six that were called for, substituted three and omitted six.

Dressed up with some basil, it’s still pretty fancy.

Know what happened? It turned out fantastic. Everything went into my Cuisinart and came out refreshing, delicious gazpacho. Was it as complex as it would have been? I’m sure it wasn’t, but who cares? It was tasty, it was easy, it was fairly cheap to make. On a day to day basis, that’s what cooking is about: keeping yourself happily fed and on a reasonable budget. So the next time to see a recipe you’d like to try, piled up with expensive ingredients you don’t want to buy, make it anyway. Dinner is not a televised cooking competition. Keep a tasting spoon with you and everything will be fine.

However those years ended up, fall is a great time to reexamine our habits and selves to see if anything needs to be tweaked or totally reinvented. What better time to take on a new challenge to change or at least learn more about what we eat?

Enter October Unprocessed 2012. It’s an annual event—this year is its third—created by Andrew Wilder, the blogger behind Eating Rules. He has an interesting personal story and an upbeat attitude, so his blog is one I frequent. Also, he has well researched posts answering reader questions and general information about eating well.

Anyway, the idea behind this challenge is finding out what would happen if you avoided all processed food for a month; BUT if a month is a bit much to bite off at once, taking the challenge for a day or a week is perfectly acceptable.

While more energy, feeling better and dropping a pound or two are great, the bigger win is knowledge and awareness. The official threshold for an unprocessed food is one that could be prepared in a regular kitchen, with a little cooking skill and ingredients you could buy yourself. It’s a pretty simple distinction between those things and anything that contains chemistry-set sounding ingredients. That means you have to pay attention to everything you’re going to eat. The awareness of what’s in your food is such an important take-away, it’s worth it to challenge yourself just for that knowledge.

So, who’s in? I’ve taken the pledge and plan to do the whole month. All recipes on Everyday Eats menus, of course, meet the standard of being unprocessed, so we can help you make this happen. We’ll also share helpful hints on what to look for on ingredient labels, unprocessed alternatives to your favorite snacks and treats, plus some bonus recipes to keep away highly processed Halloween candy while still getting a sweet fix.

Here’s what happened: in an internal newsletter about being environmentally friendly, there’s a snippet about participating in Meatless Monday (it’s on page 3). Meatless Monday, in case you haven’t heard of it, is a campaign to reduce meat consumption for health and the environment by going vegetarian one day per week. We’re talking about two paragraphs that briefly describe the resource intensiveness of producing meat and that excessive consumption can be detrimental to health. This information was intended for USDA employees, and probably would have solicited no more than some nods and “hmm”s had it not been for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.

In the ensuing brouhaha, the Cattlemen’s Association made a big stink about the USDA’s mission being to keep farmers and ranchers in business, and the USDA, in a move that reveals who it really answers to, backpedaled without a fight, coming right out and saying that it does not support Meatless Mondays (their Tweet is toward the end of the article).

Now, the USDA having a mission to safeguard the interests of farmers is fine, but they’re also supposed to protect health and the environment and promote nutrition. I feel bad for the USDA: everything it does is a conflict of interests. It also happens to be the organization that publishes dietary recommendations. Take another look at MyPlate and consider the strong-arming that went into the “protein” and “dairy” sections. If the Cattlemen’s Association is willing to make this big of a deal over such an innocuous piece of internal advice, just imagine what they did behind the scenes over something that is supposed to be public, and, you know, actually important.

Unfortunately, food consumers—that means all of us—are up against big corporate food lobbyists for the USDA’s attention. There is some evidence that the USDA does try to do right by consumers, and good for them. But that part of the USDA needs to be independent from the part that answers to the Cattlemen’s Association so that it can honestly and unapologetically protect the health and well being of individuals. Nothing written in the newsletter blurb is controversial. Industrial meat production as it is widely done today is unbelievably taxing to the environment. Too much of it is also bad for your health. There is ample evidence to support both statements.

For me, the whole mess is a very public demonstration of the fact that though the USDA is supposed to protect consumers and producers, consumers end up getting the short end of the stick. We need an independent entity looking out for consumer health and safety that is not also beholden to big food interests.

We were out of town last week, and I came home to find the three teeny bell peppers on our

Welcome to the bell pepper forest.

plants had become seventeen! I picked the first two the other day, and while they weren’t as juicy and sweet as market ones, they weren’t bad. I’m going to wait on the others to see if they bulk up a bit. Speaking of waiting on things, the carrots have gotten to be a decent size, and I munched on a few of them with homemade baba ganoush this week.

The green beans have also yielded a few snacks, though the leaves are now almost totally yellow and I haven’t figured out what the problem is. Overwatering seems the most likely culprit.

A pleasant surprise for me is that our strawberries have started to set fruit. I really wasn’t expecting that given that they were an inch tall when strawberries started flooding the farmer’s market. I had planned on letting them mature until next year. Now I’m figuring out what to do with the runners they’re sending all over the deck.

Some of the lettuce slowed down last month and looked like it was about to bolt, so I pulled it. Soon it’ll be time to sow more seeds to get going in the fall. My plan is to start more leafy greens, carrots and roots in September after the weather is reliably cooler. I have succession plans for most of the containers to keep them producing right through the winter. Even though the garden is only making a small dent in our grocery bills, it gives us some variety we wouldn’t otherwise have, and that’s fabulous.

Having all that stashed away made winter immeasurably more tolerable. It’s much easier to dress up your third cauliflower dish this week if you have tomatoes on hand. And simple there’s-nothing-in-the-kitchen sandwiches feel way fancier with a side of dill pickled green beans. If you prefer to eat things grown in your native hemisphere, putting up is arguably essential—and it used to be what everyone did every year in every kitchen in America.

The day I opened the last jar of stewed tomatoes I had canned last September, Evan and I looked at each other in crestfallen surprise. We knew the day was coming, but this was so cruelly soon. “How many months until they’re back in season?” Evan asked. “Five? Maybe four? We have a long way to go,” I replied. It was early February. To be honest, I won’t can any tomatoes until late September.

So this year I’ve got a huge jump on where I was last year. I’ve started things off with jam,

Left to right: rhubarb vanilla jam, brandied cherries, blackberry syrup, blueberries, dill pickles.

berries in syrup, brandied cherries and blackberry syrup (which is delightful in lemonade, by the way). I don’t want our tomato supply to run dry again, so I’m debating how many tomatoes I’ll blanch, peel, stew and can this year. 50 pounds? 75? Green beans are still a bit pricey for canning, but my eyes are open at every market for a “10 pounds $10” kind of deal. I spent part of a morning at a u-pick berry farm (Baggenstos to be precise) bringing in 17 pounds of blueberries, some of which are now canned, and many of which I froze.

My plan is to head back out for berry picking once the blackberries really start to fly, then head for a u-pick apple orchard that I just learned has Gravenstein apples. That’s the variety my mom always used for applesauce, so what I think of as applesauce is homemade from Gravensteins.

It’s plenty of work doing all this, and yes, you have to boil several gallons of water when it’s 80 and sunny outside. Papers near the kitchen curl from the steam even with the front door and windows open and the stove fan going day and night. But this is the season of plenty and nothing you buy in other seasons is going to stack up by comparison. So if you have some time and the materials, or even if you just have a little extra space in your freezer, go out and pick up some of the wonderful things summer brings and squirrel it away for a rainy, cold day. You’ll thank yourself in December!

One of my favorite responses to the mayor’s proposal was Mark Bittman’s column on the subject. He comes right out and says what some (myself included) have been thinking for a while: added sugar is the tobacco of the 21^st century. Laugh that off if you like, but the fact’s time is coming. One soda or candy bar won’t kill you the same way one cigarette won’t kill you. I’m sure people will debate the consequences of regular versus diet sodas for years to come, and I don’t know how that will shake out. But, the average American drinks 53 gallons of soda a year, which is more than enough to fill a bathtub.

The beverage industry, of course, has plenty to say about restricting large sodas—Marion Nestle has a great chronology of the debate on her blog. Detractors have called the proposal a ban in order to frame it as an infringement on personal freedoms. It’s really not. The proposal, should it be enacted, applies only to restaurants, sports venues, movie theaters and delis. So you can ignore all the headlines and puns about Big Gulps, because the proposal completely ignores convenience stores. And vending machines, grocery stores and milk-based drinks, so your venti Frappuccinos are safe too.

One of the industry’s claims to harmlessness is that sugar-sweetened beverages make up “only” 7% of the average diet. In saying 7% of the diet, I’m guessing they mean 7% of calories, though I can’t find that in writing. If you eat a 2000-calorie diet, that means the average is 140 calories from sugar-sweetened beverages daily. That translates to about one 12-ounce regular soda with 8 teaspoons of sugar a day, which is close to the maximum recommended by the American Heart Association. In other words, the average person consumes all the added sugars he or she should have in a day from sugary beverages. That’s before you count desserts, snacks and all the added sugars hiding out in processed foods. Every day.

My own take on Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal is that limiting soda size may not be the best way to discourage consumption, because it can be called paternalistic. However, I’d also say taxing soda would be the fairest way to reduce consumption (though it would disproportionally affect the poor), but the beverage industry has ensured a number of such proposals at many levels of government have fallen flat. Short of taxing soda across the board, perhaps SNAP benefits should cover things like a hot rotisserie chicken and not sodas. They currently do the opposite. When you’re working against many multi-billion dollar companies, any change is going to be a slow, uphill, perhaps futile battle.

Sounds like something you could say about tobacco companies half a century ago.

Amazing Veggie Burgers
2 carrots
2 stalks celery
1 onion
1/2 red bell pepper
3 cloves garlic

Dice everything finely and sautee over high heat until tender. Add:

1 1/2 cups cooked green lentils
2 tsp oregano
8 oz. firm tofu, rinsed, squished and drained (it crumbles to a ground meat consistency)
2 small sweet potatoes, baked well, then peeled and mashed

Mash all the above ingredients together in a bowl and add:

1-2 Tbsp soy sauce
2-3 Tbsp ketchup
1 1/2 cups rolled oats
4 Tbsp ground flax or chia seeds
¼ c whole wheat flour

Refrigerate for one hour then form into patties. Grill on aluminum foil. Makes about 12 patties.

Have a very happy and safe Fourth of July!

First, the FDA. In the past few years, high fructose corn syrup has gotten a lot of undesirable attention and has passed from an unknown, scientific-sounding ingredient to something that a lot of consumers seek to avoid. Unsurprisingly, the Corn Refiners Association isn’t happy about the shift in public opinion and so launched a massive advertising campaign to make their bread-and-butter substance look better to the public. They also petitioned the FDA to change the name on ingredients lists from “high fructose corn syrup” to “corn sugar.” And the FDA told them no. Cue cheers and applause.

The FDA’s reasoning is succinctly summarized on Marion Nestle’s blog. This is kind of a slap in the face to the Corn Refiners Association, but they are trying to confuse people into consuming something they don’t want. The FDA decided not to go along with them, though the industry has indicated that it plans to use the term “corn sugar” regardless of the FDA’s decision. Wouldn’t it be nice if these companies could be fined for violating the FDA’s ruling? But kudos to the FDA for a decision that is in the best interest of consumers rather than companies with millions in lobbying cash.

Second, there’s the Disney Company. I was beyond surprised to hear that Disney just announced it will not allow certain junk foods to be advertised during programs aimed at kids under 12 on its TV channels. The company made clear they feel this is in their best business interests, but they’re making a huge statement by telling food companies they cannot promote their worst items to children using their media outlets.

I took a look at Disney’s Nutritional Guidelines and they’re not bad in terms of what they allow. For example, a complete meal for a child cannot exceed 600 calories and cannot have more than 1.1 grams of saturated fat or 2.5 grams of added sugars per 100 calories. They require 3 food groups to be present and there must be at least one fruit or vegetable. By my calculation, most Lunchables would not be allowed under these guidelines.

Some other highlights are an emphasis on whole grains and the fact that Disney is using reasonably sized servings. Each food category has an upper limit for sugar either per 100 calories or per ounce. And everything is laid out in an easy-to-read chart. I checked out the nutrition facts for Lucky Charms and Gogurt and found that they may be able to squeak by in their current formulations, but both companies probably have some sweating executives today.

All this and I haven’t even mentioned New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s soda proposal (which I’ll revisit soon) or the open letter to Congress about the Farm Bill signed by dozens of food authors and academics.

In all, it’s been a great week for good food. I think these stories all show that people are paying attention to the work that needs to be done to improve our food environment. So vote with your dollars to support healthy, local food!