Amazon Food, Lawn Food, Rap Food

Another Monday. You're poised for another white-knuckle adventure through the work week. What's new in the world of food and health? Here are some under-the-radar fun bits.

Amazon is going to start selling food.

Amazon is considering rolling out this new logo.

Not content to put bookstores and other, non-book stores out of business by delivering affordable goods anywhere there are roads, Amazon announced today that it would start selling food. A few in-house "brands" will sell baby food, diapers, coffee, tea, and spices, according to Vanity Fair. The service will only be available to Amazon Prime members. You'll have to pay for the privilege of shopping with them.

There is already a bevy of food-to-your-door companies, delivering curated snack boxes, exotic beef jerky, and whole meals worth of preparable ingredients. Perhaps those niche providers will never even get the chance to threaten their brick and mortar counterparts before the Amazonian colossus eats them all. Grocery is brutal.

Gardens are being repackaged as innovative, human interest story. 

I'll come right out and say it: I hate lawns. They look nice enough, but I despise the amount and regularity of labor involved. I loathe the implicit pressure to be laboring away at my lawn, lest the proverbial Joneses raise their eyebrows at my lack of investment in close-shaving the earth. I can't even find a colorful enough verb to illustrate how I feel about being solicited by TruGreen salesmen. And the chorus of mowers, all summer long... So if we need to make gardens a "new and exciting trend in environmentally conscious micro-farming," so be it. I'd rather see turnips everywhere than platonically ideal lawns, whatever you want to call it.

As this NPR.com story explains, a guy named Chris Castro has convinced 10 of his neighbors to abandon their joyless, purposeless lawns in favor of growing greens and such. I must say, having lived in Florida, and knowing the way that the average suburban Floridian derives great daily meaning from curating their lawn, this is impressive. 

Castro is the founder of Fleet Farming, and his goal is use the legal limit--60%--of his neighbors' yards for growing vegetables. His company is powered entirely by volunteers who ride bicycles. They gather up the produce and sell it at the local farmers market.

As the Fleet Farming website points out, a lot of pollution comes from all the transportation necessary to sustain our food systems. (This is one of the many reasons Foods For Living is committed to bringing so many local and Michigan-made products to our store.) If you care about the earth and don't have a lawn, or even if you care about the earth AND have a lawn, or maybe don't care one hoot about the earth and have an immaculate lawn, or...all I'm saying is you can't do much better than getting your (100% organic) produce from us.

That said, do you think your community could benefit from lawn-farming like this?

Food Competition based on Rap Lyrics

A young Brooklyn woman named Syreeta Gates is hosting her second annual Stay Hungry cooking competition. (No, it doesn't involve a bakeoff where Twisted Sister plays Stay Hungry in its glorious entirety.) The event is a culinary arts competition for high school students in Brooklyn, where dishes draw inspiration from hip hop lyrics. As you probably know, rap and food are no strangers. Many MCs lamenting their hardscrabble early years in song tell us the sad fare that was their lot, usually before contrasting it with the fine dining they now consume like every day. Because there's a broad spectrum of food lyrics to draw from, the Stay Hungry competition should include everything from fettuccine to steak to grilled cheese. No word on whether there will be gin, but juice is confirmed.  

Stop back soon for another smorgasbord  of tasty food news morsels.

The Food of Saints and Slavers: St.Patty's Cuisine

Little Pádraig was sixteen when the ruffians fell upon him. They were slavers, from the wild island to the west. They smelled of salt and fish and sheep. Pádraig's people made canoes that could be carried on the back, or rafts of wicker. But the slavers' vessel was something else. Even in his terror, Pádraig marveled at their ship. It had space for two dozen men, barrels of food, and even places to sleep. It also had chains for youth snatched from the English coast. 

Over the next six years, Pádraig tended the slavers' sheep. He was fortunate to be captive in a land of surpassing beauty. As the young slave-shepard roamed the rolling green with his flock, visions and prayer came often. At the age of twenty, he found the courage to flee. 

After two hundred miles of shivering under the stars and eating what he could find, Pádraig landed in a port town. Finding a ship, he convinced the captain to take him on board and away from the beautiful island that had been his prison for six years. 

The ship made landfall at a place unknown to the crew. Their journey inland quickly became a wilderness meander. Morale and supplies grew slim. A month later, and they were still in the wild. Pádraig urged the men to put their faith in God, as he had during his servitude; shortly thereafter, the men encountered a herd of wild boar, and gave thanks. The strange boy among them seemed to have the ear of God. 

This was the unforgiving, often brutal milieu that gave us St. Patrick. (Perhaps. We are taking his word for it. Many scholars insist that this is Patrick's own mythology, and he was simply a disaffected teen who fled England to avoid inheriting a job as a tax collector from his father.) Some 1500 years later, day-drunks young and old would stumble down the streets of Anytown, USA in emerald chintz, toasting his name. Imagine trying to explain such a thing to that boy lost in the English wilderness in the company of unsavory men. St. Patrick's Day would become, like every other holiday, a day about having plenty of fun and plenty of food. 

The Food of St. Patrick's Era

The food of St. Patrick's day is Irish, of course: corned beef, cabbage, and for many, plenty of stout. But the origins of this Irish cuisine we consume on St. Patrick's day stand in stark contrast to what the man himself would have eaten. 

For one thing, our young Pádraig's family lived in Britain during the Roman Empire's occupation, meaning that they were culturally more Roman than British, and nothing like contemporary "Irish." (In fact, St. Patrick's own family also owned slaves, probably.) His father was an agent of the Empire, as I mentioned above. As cultural Romans, they were enjoying the fruits (and vegetables) of Roman imperialism. 

The Romans did a lot for British cuisine: along with conquest, they brought onions, garlic, leeks, cabbages, shallots, peas, celery, radishes, turnips, asparagus, rosemary, thyme, bay, basil, mint, walnuts, chestnuts, and many other comestibles. Many of these Roman introductions are considered quintessentially "British" today, but they were unknown in the isles before the uppity Empire showed up. Besides bringing these foods to Britain, Rome also taught the natives agriculture, so that their native apples, for instance, could flourish in orchards. Cattle, chickens, and rabbits also came along for the ride. 

If Patrick was indeed a slave, he would have subsisted on oat gruels, muesli, and some wheat bread, with some game meat if it was available. After that phase of his life, though, his options would have opened up considerably. 

British-Roman stores and restaurants had bacon, fermented fish sauce, wine, spices, boar kabobs...the culinary scene in 4th century Britain was more lively than you might think; the groundwork for modern Irish food has been in place for almost two thousand years. 

So where do we get the modern St. Patty's fare of beef, cabbage, and potatoes? (The booze is a broad matter, and justifies its own separate future entry.)

"Irish Food"

The potato was introduced to Ireland in the 1500s. As an extremely efficient, hearty crop, the potato found quick favor with the poor. It also produced a high yield, meaning that poor farmers could pay their land rent with the crop and still have something left to eat. Within decades, the potato had achieved staple status. That created major complications later, but the potato kept Ireland fed for many years, and became an intrinsic part of its history and culture. 

Corned beef came along in earnest during the next century. Under English rule, cattle-rich Ireland exported plenty of beef. (The Cattle Acts of the 1660s prevented export of live cattle). Ireland was also salt-rich, and its salt tax was a fraction of England's. For trade and military supply, many English used Ireland as a beef-production house. Fresh beef was salted for the long journey overseas, or for simple preservation. The crystals of salt used in preservation were as large as corn kernels—hence, "corned beef." To this day, corned beef remains an Irish cultural export: Irish-Americans eat corned beef, but the Irish can usually be found eating ham and bacon on St. Patrick's (or any other) day.

Cabbage, too, is nutrient-rich and resistant to the unfriendly growing climate of Ireland. Like the potato, it could provide enough for those locked in the feudal system to pay rent and eat in the same week. For these reasons, the cabbage never left.

Like many places, Ireland's culinary history is bound up with slavery, famine, a brutal feudal system, and the vicissitudes of Nature itself. When you look at all those St. Patrick's Day leftovers in the fridge, spare a thought for the staggering plight of those anonymous masses who built the only culinary tradition available to them. It's all right to shake your head at the majesty and horror of the human experience, even if you're wearing a glittering green top hat. The Irish are also known for their sense of humor.   



  

Imaginary Food (with Recipes!)

As a child, there was one part of Ghostbusters that terrified me above all others. Unsurprisingly, it's the same part that terrifies me above all others as an adult: the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. It wasn't chubby white visage that kept me awake in bed long after the credits rolled. It wasn't his status as a avatar of the Sumerian god Gozer, or his indiscriminate trampling of the urban landscape. It was the concept behind his conjuring: Stay Puft existed because the Ghostbusters couldn't control their own thoughts.

Gozer tells the gang that the next thing they think of will be the form that destroys their world. While the majority of the 'Busters evidently blank their minds (an incredibly impressive and unlikely feat under the circumstances), Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) thinks instead of something "harmless": the Bibendum/Pillsbury Dough Boy hybrid face of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Corporation.

To this day, I think about the impossibility of thinking about "nothing" every time I see a package of marshmallows. That's why I love fictional foods—they remind me we are slaves to our own consciousness rekindle the wonder of childhood.

Marketers realized, at some point, that nostalgia and imagination sell. Cue the parade of fictional-food-made-real. Some of the creations below, however, are just too fantastic to make it to our reality yet. Let's take a look at some other, less-neurosis-inducing fictional fare.


Butter Beer

If you're looking to take the edge off after a long day of outrunning Death Eaters and such, a butterbeer is just the ticket. (If you're not passingly familiar with the Harry Potter universe, that was total nonsense.)

The fictional beverage is served in the Three Broomsticks and The Hog's Head both, and you can drink it chilled or in hot foaming tankards. It is a mild intoxicant: the drink's alcohol content is established in the novels, as references to acting under its influence are made in the text, but the version served at Universal Studios is kid-friendly.

While Butterbeer is not real (excepting the Universal Studios cream soda concoction), "buttered beer" is indeed a real medieval recipe:

2 oz. beer 
1 egg yolk 
1/4 cup sugar 
1/16 tsp. nutmeg 
1/16 tsp. cloves 
1/16 tsp. ginger 
2 Tbsp. butter 

Put the egg yolk into a saucepan and slowly whisk in beer. Add sugar and spices and heat over medium-high heat until mixture just starts to come to a boil. Remove from heat, add butter, and whisk until mixed. Serve hot.

The above recipe is taken from a cookbook called "The Good Housewife's Jewell," written in 1585. 1585! 

Lembas Bread

Remember the epic and moving scene in Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, when the elves give the Fellowship that leaf-wrap of Lembas bread? No, you don't, because it was cut from the movie. However, if you like seeing baked goods changing hands between species as much as I do, you'll want to watch the extended version, where Lembas bread has its moment.

Lembas bread is an elven bread, almost supernaturally satiating, and sweet to boot. Says an elf, "...we call it 'lembas' or waybread, and it is more strengthening than any food by men, and it is more pleasant than cram, by all accounts." (Cram is a sort of fantasy hard tack, it would seem.) 

Do you want to marshall the majesty of the elves for your very own ends? Bah! As if! But here's a recipe for a human attempt at Lembas, from Amalia at vomitingchicken.com: 

Author: Amalia from vomitingchicken.com

Recipe type: bread(ish)

Cuisine: elven

Prep time:  10 mins

Cook time:  25 mins

Total time:  35 mins

Serves: 6

 

Just a few ingredients and a few minutes of your time to mix them together, and you'll please any Lord of the Ring fans with these tasty breads!

Ingredients

• 1 cup butter
• ½ cup brown sugar or ¼ cup honey
• 2 cups unbleached flour

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
2. Cream together the butter and sugar or honey. Add the flour and mix until thoroughly incorporated. Put out on suitable surface and knead until quite smooth, about 5 minutes, adding a bit of flour if necessary to keep dough from sticking.
3. Roll out to about ¼ inch thickness and cut into 3" to 4" squares, scoring with a knife halfway through each square with a butter knife. Place on buttered cookie sheet and bake for about 20 to 25 minutes, or until lightly golden brown.

Green Eggs and Ham

It's Dr. Seuss Month, if you didn't know. It's time to celebrate or lament the existence of Seuss and his supremely weird style of humor. For millions of Americans, this means making Green Eggs and Ham, after the book of the same name. 

While you can simply procure some ham and eggs and let them sit for a few weeks at room temperature, this is ill-advised from a health standpoint. The easiest way to have a breakfast that would repel Sam is to wear some tinted glasses. If that's still not good enough, you could always use Martha Stewart's recipe. She eschews the food coloring used in low-class GEAH recipes for greens and pesto: 

DIRECTIONS

1. Place arugula, parsley, basil, and cheese in the bowl of a food processor; with the machine running, slowly add olive oil until a smooth paste forms. Season with salt and pepper and set pesto aside.
2. In a large bowl, whisk together eggs with 1/4 cup pesto, saving any remaining pesto for another use. Season egg mixture with salt and pepper.
3. Melt butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Using a heatproof rubber spatula, gently pull the eggs from the side of the skillet. As the eggs start to set, stir them gently until curds form. Serve immediately with ham.

(Above is lifted from http://www.marthastewart.com/893674/green-eggs-and-ham)


Of course, this list is only scratching the surface of imaginary edibles. How could we forget the Wonka Bar, the Klingon delicacy "gagh," the Pan-Galactic Gargleblaster, or the spice melange? 

But our time together is at an end this week—I have fears to conquer marshmallows to eat. 

Who Cares About Fake Honey, Anyway?

A social media firestorm erupted earlier this week when Foods For Living posted that they were carrying a new honey alternative called "Bee Free." (By "social media firestorm," I mean the post garnered a few comments, and some people had some opinions. In modern vernacular, this is a "social media firestorm," as far as I can tell.)

I'll confess straightaway that an alternative, apple-based honey is unlikely to rouse either ire or excitement in me. But I do see the opportunity to talk a bit about bees and their place in the world, naturally and agriculturally.

Some fun facts about bees:

90% of bees are solitary bees. These cat ladies of the insect world burrow into the ground, dead tree trunks, and hollow twigs hidden by homemade leaf camouflage (in the case of the leafcutter bee), creating a space to live out their days all alone. Some of these bees build solitary nests near each other, but rarely interact, and are still considered solitary. (Like people living the good life in a cul-de-sac.)

Solitary bees do not have a queen, produce little to no honey, and don't produce wax. They do not swarm, and in fact are not aggressive at all. They also lack a pollen basket, which means that they are actually much more efficient pollinators than honey bees.

In other words, 90% of bees defy the common archetype of the bee in many significant ways.

Honey is not made from pollen. Perhaps you already knew that, but many people don't. Honey is made from nectar, which is the sugar water plants make to attract pollinators. Pollinating insects, like honey bees, gather this sugar water and jam it into their crop, or honey stomach. Enzymatic action takes over, just like it does when we swallow anything. A forager bee with a full crop returns to home base (the hive) and promplty vomits. I don't say this to be crass--this is quite literally what happens. A house bee then takes this proto-honey and continues ingesting and vomiting it for something like 20 minutes. At that point, the house bee stores the product in a cell inside the hive. He proudly beats his wings a lot, too, so the honey dries out faster. After it's sufficiently dry, a wax seal goes over the honey to store it for the long haul.

Stinging. Honey bees die after they sting. They are fearless in service to their hive. Solitary bees do not die upon stinging, but they are also loners, with no reason to sacrifice themselves when they could just move on--they're much less likely to sting. A bumblebee does not have a barbed stinger like a honey bee, and can sting you like a maniac without fear of de-gutting herself. That said, she probably won't, unless you wander near her home and don't leave. A wasp will definitely sting you, but...

A wasp is not a bee. While they evolved from the same taxonomic order, wasps and bees are only cousins now. The bee decided to go the way of the gatherer, the wasp the way of the hunter. Bees are herbivores, wasps will come for your picnic. (Unless you count licking sweat as carnivorous, then sweat bees don't make the herbivore cut.)

There are approximately 4,000 species of bees in the United States. Most of them are natives, while the honey bee is an import.

Most bees live from three to six weeks. There are exceptions: carpenter bees can live up to two years, and queen bees live about a year.


So, now, about Bee Free Honee:

When the FFL Facebook page posted that they were carrying this new (non)honey, and quipped that "no bees were harmed in the making [of it]," I can only assume this was an allusion to the ubiquitous disclaimer that graces every movie credits sequence now: "No animals were harmed in the making of this production." This is a widespread cultural artifact—so much so that it's been parodied countless times. Everyone knows that honey bees make honey, and harvesting it doesn't hurt them. Moreover, they're insects, so even many staunch vegetarians have no problem with bee labor. I haven't asked, but I don't think anyone at FFL or anywhere else thinks that beekeeping involves hurting bees.

"So what's the point of the fake honey!?" ask dozens of people.

1) Well, it does taste good. Sometimes a new variety of a familiar product doesn't need much justification to exist. Sorghum beer? Coconut butter? Flax oil? We can take or leave them, but each offers a unique taste/texture/nutrient combination, so calling them "fake" is weird. (Except in the case of sorghum beer, which is disgusting.) Perhaps Bee Free is opening themselves to criticism by calling their product "honey." It's hard to imagine people rolling their eyes at apple butter or pear jelly. Again, I don't have any special love or loathing for what's essentially a viscous apple jelly.

2) All is not well in the land of bees. Sure, an individual beekeeper doesn't hurt bees. But it's important to understand that an individual local beekeeper selling her honey at the farmer's market has as much to do with the industrial scale migratory beekeeping as your local butcher does with Tyson Brands. The migratory beekeeping industry is facing many unforeseen problems—the sort that crop up when you deal with astronomical numbers. As that link from Scientific American will tell you, each of the 90 million almond trees in California's almond acreage needs help from bees to fully flower. That demand is beyond the reach of local bees by many orders of magnitude, so about 31 billion bees are imported into California each almond season. These bees are brought on trucks from across the country to trade mites and illnesses  meet the colossal demand, and then they're trucked off to their next pollination stop.

Because demand is so high, the bees do not get a chance to hibernate. Their health suffers, and many of them die—many more than in ages past. Many beekeepers lose half of their bees each winter. In fact, many sources have been claiming there is a full-on honey bee crisis happening, (though some claim* that this is not the case) and the agricultural implications are dire:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/honey-bee-crisis/

http://www.mainebee.com/articles/crisis.php

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130510-honeybee-bee-science-european-union-pesticides-colony-collapse-epa-science/

http://www.ars.usda.gov/News/docs.htm?docid=15572

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/sustainable-agriculture/save-the-bees/

To be clear, the concern for bees is not rooted in concern for the lives or comfort for specific, individual insects, but rather for our agricultural way of life. It is with this in mind that Bee Free is making alternative honey. Whether you consider their product a tasty curiosity, a waste of shelf space, or an agricultural salvation, you can go forward knowing why some people are concerned with alternatives to honey.

*Think tanks with vested interests

17 Surprising Things That Make You Happier (and 4 that Don't)

A NEW STUDY finds that...ready? "Living near a bar makes you happier." The study was funded by the "Campaign for Real Ale." (This is like an umbrella manufacturer funding a study about whether people enjoy getting rained on.) As someone with a personal and professional interest in the roots of happiness and satisfaction, I constantly come across tips, life hacks, studies, and anecdotes about how to wring every last drop of joy from existence.

Most of these sources are trying to sell something. Sometimes they're just trying to sell themselves on the validity of their choices. ("I spent $400 on a gym membership, because then I have to get in shape.")

The other species of happiness reporting is the NEW STUDY. There is a hint of desperation in the ceaseless drip of studies proclaiming chocolate and red wine are keeping us young and smart and happy. But...being a regular at a local bar? Seriously?

This made me wonder if there was anything for which I could not find a happiness hype man. Armed with a Google, I bravely looked high and low for happiness. After I headed to the local bar, I saw some of my friends.

Did it make me happier? Yes, and that is consistent with a study that says having friends makes you happier. The linked article (and study) are careful, however, to make it clear that having friends does NOT make you live longer. In fact, seeing your family and friends could lessen your lifespan, according to the article.

Thinking about how simply knowing my family is a slow leak in my well-being, I had a sip of beer. Enough to make me happy? Yes, all it takes is a sip, according to this study. I've been doing it wrong all these years.

So living in an episode of Cheers can make you happier. But what about watching an episode of Cheers? Of course! Watching TV makes you happier! (According to that article.)

Looking this stuff up is fun, I must admit. In a way, it's making me...happy. Is this normal? Yes! Browsing the web makes you happier, according to this article from Psychcentral!

It's making me happy to find a study or pop-psyche article confirming that nearly everything makes you happy. Blogging about it is satisfying. But is blogging itself satisfying? Of course, and you can read all about it in this article about how blogging can make you happier.

But most of my readers are not bloggers. They come from all walks of life, with the unifying fact that they shop at East Lansing's favorite natural food store, Foods For Living. Does that mean you're left out of this endless parade of joy? No! Because...

Grocery shopping makes you happier!

Shangri-la

Although you might not need the happiness boost so evident when breezing down the aisles. If you're shopping at Foods For Living, you're in East Lansing, and guess what?

East Lansing makes you happier! Yes, ole EL's aura has been slowly leaching into your soul over the years, subtly improving your quality of life, according to the Movoto Real Estate Blog. In fact, it's the second best small city to live in, after some place in Pennsylvania.

This had me wondering if there was anything that, under certain circumstances, couldn't make you happier. I took to the Internet with total abandon.

Downhill skiing? Happier!

Video games? Happier! (Somewhere, a senator, or maybe Tipper Gore, is also trying to prove that video games make you into a psycho killer, too—just like how all that Farmville caused all those career people to upend their lives and take up farming, bringing our economy to its knees.)

Music? Happier. Unless you're in a compound and the FBI is blasting some ironic tunes at you.

Chocolate? Well, would it even matter? Do we really need another study telling us about the health and emotional benefits of chocolate? Probably not. But here's one.

What about clouds? Happier! Yes, even the icon of dreariness itself can make you happier, apparently.

Clouds may make you happier, but they're only a symbol. Your own "dark clouds" can't possibly make you happier, right? After all, "dark clouds" is a metaphor for unhappiness...wrong! "How owning your dark clouds can actually make you happier," for your edification.


So, seriously...is there anything that is actually just, well, bad? Something that refuses to make you happier, no matter the spin? Yes, yes there is.

The news.

Lovin' life.

The news does not make you happier. In fact, the opposite is so conclusively the case that simply trying to find any evidence of a happiness-news connection is enough to summon an avalanche of cautionary articles about keeping up with current events. (I read the news every day. It's best to stay miserably informed, I guess.)

Also, dentists. People uniformly hate dentists. Just ask this dentist.

And divorce. People also don't like getting divorced, even if they are admittedly happier afterward sometimes.

And this particular McDonald's mascot. People really hated that, and it did not make them happy.

But most everything else makes people happier, somehow. Being late? Check. Cold showers? Yes, obviously.

Certain temperatures? Yes indeed.

Being Voldemort? Well, that question is a bit more difficult... Can you be the modern embodiment of pure cunning and evil, and still be happy? I'll let you be the judge.

Taking the Mystery Out of Listeria

There's little that's less fun than foodborne illness. In case you missed it, a listeria outbreak is making headlines, getting people sick (and worse), and turning people away from salad. As always, knowledge is our ally here, so I thought it prudent to cover some basics about both the outbreak and listeria generally.

Let's get this out of the way:

It's still safe to buy and eat salad from Foods For Living. 

Foods For Living doesn't sell any of the brands that were affected by the outbreak, so there's nothing to worry about here.

As noted at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention website, the affected brands are:

• Dole
• Fresh Selections
• Simple Truth
• Marketside
• The Little Salad Bar
• President's Choice Organics

These brands are all packaged at multiple facilities. It seems that the listeria outbreak originated at a Dole packaging facility in Springfield, Ohio. (Springfield was also the home of 4H founder Albert Belmont Graham, and the first U.S. city with an African American mayor, so don't let this listeria thing tarnish your impression.) 

Packaged foods usually bear a manufacturing code that indicates their origins, for precisely times like this. 

The manufacturing code for the Springfield Dole plant begins with "A." If you have salads from the above brands, and they have codes beginning with "A," you should throw them away. You should wash the refrigerator drawer/area that held the salad thoroughly. You should also wash cutting boards, bowls, and anything else that may have contacted contaminated salad. 

How bad is listeria?

As these things go, not too bad. Don't get me wrong—it can make you sick, and even kill you, but your experience with it depends on your immune system. And it's not ebola. As with many bacterial infections, the young, elderly, and pregnant mothers are most at risk. Sadly, there has been a death associated with this outbreak in Michigan. That said, you are more likely to have severe digestive issues and fever symptoms than anything. Listeria is a bacterium, so an infection can become invasive; that is, it can move from an initial infection site (such as the GI tract) to other systems (such as the blood). If you suspect you may have listeria, you should certainly see your doctor immediately. A blood test is usually conclusive.

Is this outbreak unusual?

Listeria outbreaks happen every year, but not often. Each one is considered a serious public issue, and investigated by the CDC. About 1,600 people get listeria each year; an average of 240 people die from it. Last year, Karoun Dairies and Blue Bell Creamery both had listeria issues. One or two big outbreaks each year is par for the course. 

How can you prevent getting listeria? 

I'll list the CDC's guidelines here verbatim:

• Rinse raw produce, such as fruits and vegetables, thoroughly under running tap water before eating, cutting, or cooking. Even if the produce will be peeled, it should still be washed first.
• Scrub firm produce, such as melons and cucumbers, with a clean produce brush.
• Dry the produce with a clean cloth or paper towel.
• Separate uncooked meats and poultry from vegetables, cooked foods, and ready-to-eat foods.

Special consideration should be given to things like liquid from hot dog packages that spills into the refrigerator. No one likes to puncture a dog, but don't let the shame keep you from using hot water and soap on the area after you spill. 

Is anyone doing anything about this?

There has been a recall, of course. You should still be vigilant and ensure that the salad you're buying didn't get missed. 

Besides that, there is always an investigation from the FDA and CDC with a listeria outbreak. Though we don't know how this will proceed in the case of Dole, we can assume it will be similar to the process initiated in the Karoun case. 

What now?

Wash your produce, clean your meat spills, check your salad packages for the "A," and shop without worry at Foods For Living. Next week we can talk about something more fun!

Come On, Just Read This Thing About Sugar

People understand that killing the messenger is wrong; that's why the phrase exists. It's an enduring idiom, with versions of the notion present in the records of ancient China, ancient Rome, and Shakespeare. It endures for the dismalest of reasons, namely, that people want to kill the messenger and must be cautioned against it.

All I'm saying is that I want you to give up candy and sweets because I care about you, and I don't want you to murder me for saying so. (I don't really think you'll murder me, but if pageviews are any indicator, you don't want to hear bad news or even think about sugar.) I understand that life can be hard, or boring, and that jamming straight crystallized happiness into your brain can be the only redeeming aspect of some overcast days. That's essentially why so many of our troops became addicted to heroin in Vietnam.

Heroin and sugar both target the nucleus accumbens, which is the reward center of the brain. (So do exercise and correctly answering Jeopardy "answers," so this could be misleading without context.) The problem is that drugs and sugar both bypass the whole "doing-stuff-in-life-to-get-chemical-rewards-in-your-brain" thing, and just give you the rewards, no questions asked. It's like having a key to the back door of the Staples Reward Center, instead of earning enough points on every eligible purchase to get that "free" Lion King mousepad like an upright citizen.

You probably don't do heroin for a number of reasons. I can make this assumption, in part, because people doing heroin tend to have minimal interest in reading nutrition blogs. It's statistically likely that you don't smoke cigarettes, either, for similar reasons. Those habits are costly, dangerous, and frowned upon by a majority of the population. This creates a culturally-constructed bulwark against getting involved with junk and cigs alike.

In other words, you don't have to think very hard or exercise much self control to never begin injecting smack or suffering through your first pack of Kool Milds. Your culture is helping you avoid those choices at every step of the way.

Enter sugar.

You wake up, and you want to eat. Something sweet? Sure. Or something savory, like bread, injected with high fructose corn syrup. Wait, what? Maybe just some fruit juice and a "natural" granola bar with some sugar not added, exactly, but rather present in the things the manufacturer included because they naturally contain sugar. Regardless, after you eat breakfast, you've probably had your daily allotment of sugar. But you're just getting started.

At this point, many people know that sugar is in nearly everything we consume. The reason is simple: it is delicious and addictive, and those are properties you want products to have if you make consumable products for a living. So what's the big deal?

When you consume fructose (in honey, fruit, berries, root vegetables, or nearly any processed food) your body uses the liver to metabolize it. Your liver will try and keep up with the demand of the 130 pounds of sugar (on average) you'll consumer this year, but it will ultimately fail. Then what?

The extra sugar is converted into fat within the liver. This is bad. Diabetes bad. The extra fat also spills into your bloodstream, which is also bad.

All this is metabolically inevitable when you consumer a high-sugar diet, which you'll want to do because... sugar also impacts that nucleus accumbens, remember? So the opioid receptors that make drug addicts such unpredictable roommates are working overtime in your own brain to keep you coming back to the sugar which is ruining your liver and blood.

None of this is "natural," because technology and industrial food production and marketing trends evolve much more quickly than human biology. Historically, it would be hard to get diabetes: you would only have an ounce of sugar when your tribe finds some berries, for instance.

So how can you keep your blood clean and not live some kind of fructose-induced Trainspotting nightmare? There is a solution that's not entirely depressing.

Eat more savory and sugarless and low-sugar snacks! Yes, the solution can still involve eating! Isn't this great? Don't reward the messenger; that would be equally unfair.

A recent study by Robert H. Lustig et al. showed that replacing sugary calories with other (delicious) calories, like those you'd find in a bagel, can reduce the destructive effects of sugar in children.

It's easy to say that moderation is key, and one can simply exercise discipline in regard to the cultural onslaught of sugar. The problem is that "moderation" relative to modern sugar levels is not true moderation. Our diet is so sugar-slanted that we are always grading on a curve, even when we think we are being "moderate" in our sugar intake.

The bottom line: don't forget that the first word in "junk food" is "junk." To put it another way, sugar gets diplomatic immunity in your brain, and sometimes you need to treat it like that guy who claims diplomatic immunity at the end of Lethal Weapon 2.  Got it? Maybe a rewatching is in your future. Cue that bad boy up, grab a bagel and a water, and relax.

Be well!