Eat Like a Superhero: Foods for a Super-Strong, Super-Long, Super-Healthy Life

This summer camp course is organized around Michael Pollan’s (author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food, and Food Rules) advice for healthy eating: “Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants.” 

Eat food:  Are Cheetos food?  How about Pop-Tarts?  The food we should eat most often is “whole” food, and we will learn about and learn to eat the “whole” thing.

Not too much: "I had six doughnuts for breakfast.  Why am I still hungry?"  The sugar-fat-salt conundrum.

Mostly plants:  Eat your broccoli and love it!  Really!  Fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes, grains and seeds are magic foods, and can be great fun to cook with and eat.

We will learn how to choose real, whole food over processed and packaged food, how to eat what our bodies want and in the quantities that will make us satisfied and healthy, and how to happily “eat plants” like fruits, vegetables and grains.  Your instructor loves to cook and to eat, and we will not be forbidding foods or going on diets!  Rather, students will cook and eat something wonderful every day of the week, will play games designed to educate and intrigue, and will leave with plenty of resources to enjoy great food for a strong, long, healthy life.  Maybe they will be able to teach their parents something too!  (Note: Please let us know if your child has a food allergy.  We can work around it, but will definitely want to know before we start cooking!)

About your instructor:

Dr. Mandyck's first paid job was making spinach quiche for The Cheese Cupboard, a gourmet food shop in Atlanta.  She has also worked "on the inside" at Arby's and McDonald's, volunteered in dietary services at St. Joseph's Hospital, and worked in the dining hall at the University of Notre Dame while an undergraduate there.  Dr. Mandyck reads widely on the subject of nutrition, and cooking and eating good food is a lifelong interest.  She is excited about sharing her knowledge and experience with students to help them "eat like superheroes!"

What we ate!

Day One:  Popcorn (not microwave--here's why)
Day Two:  Crocodile Crunch
Day Three:  Homemade Whole Wheat Bread, Homemade Quick Brownies
Day Four: Salad with Homemade Honey Mustard Salad Dressing, Grilled Cheese Sandwiches, Soup (we had Muir Glen Organic Tomato Basil)
Day Five: Homemade French Vanilla Ice Cream with Homemade Dark Chocolate Sauce (recipe to come!)

Core Principles

1. Eat food (real food, whole food, homemade food).

2. Not too much.

3. Mostly plants.

4. Eat a fruit or vegetable or both at EVERY meal.  Also for snacks!

5. Watch out for SUGAR.  Americans now eat 156 pounds of sugar a year, and it lurks in almost all packaged and processed foods. Avoid High Fructose Corn Syrup.  Read labels and aim for 3 grams of sugar or less per serving.  If there is more than that, read the ingredients: is it added sugar or natural, like in fruit or milk?  Natural is okay, in moderation.

6.  Live by the 5 ingredient rule as much as possible. 

7.  Have dessert or a treat sometimes...but make it homemade, and eat your healthy food first!

8. Avoid low-fat, no-fat and "lite"foods.

9. Avoid foods pretending to be something they are not.

10. Eat WHOLE grains.  Read the label: wheat is not whole wheat unless it says WHOLE wheat.

11.  Drink water.  Do not drink soda.  Do NOT drink soda.  DO NOT DRINK SODA. Don't drink diet soda either.

12. Eat slowly.

13.  Eat real food 80% of the time at least.

14.  Cook for yourself.

15.  Plan for leftovers (always make an extra salad).

16.  Have a "fallback" meal (scrambled eggs with veggies and cheese, for example).

17.  Take the meat out of the middle of your plate--have a vegetarian meal!

18.  Make a salad that includes every food group!

19.  Make your own salad dressing.

20.  If you don't like a food cooked, try it raw.  If you don't like it raw, try it cooked.  If you don't like it now (while you are young), try it later (when you are older).  Your tastebuds will change.

  

Resources

 ChooseMyPlate.gov--The website of the United States Department of Agriculture provides dietary guidelines.  Instead of the old food pyramid, we now have My Plate!

100 Days of Real Food--Website created and maintained by Lisa Leake, whose family of 4 swore off processed foods and refined sugar for 100 days!  Even if you don't intend to try such a thing, there is great information here.  Here are the Real Food Rules.

Jamie Oliver's TED Talk--Jamie Oliver is a chef who has started a Food Revolution.  His goal: "To create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity."  And here is the Real Food Family on Jamie Oliver!  Woo hoo! 







BrainPop Nutrition Video

BOOKS FOR ADULTS:

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver (2007)
This is the book that changed my life--and my eating habits--for good.  It chronicles the year that Barbara Kingsolver, along with her husband and two daughters, made a commitment to become locavores—those who eat only locally grown foods.  This wonderfully readable book will inform you about the environmental, human and animal cost of the Standard American Diet.  Great family stories and fabulous recipes throughout.  NOT just for the aspiring locavore, but pretty much for everyone who eats! 

Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes by Mark Bittman (2008)

From the award-winning champion of culinary simplicity who gave us the bestselling How to Cook Everything and How to Cook Everything Vegetarian comes Food Matters, a plan for responsible eating that's as good for the planet as it is for your weight and your health.  Bittman offers a no-nonsense rundown on how government policy, big business marketing, and global economics influence what we choose to put on the table each evening.  Flexible, simple, and non-doctrinaire, the plan is based on hard science but gives you plenty of leeway to tailor your food choices to your lifestyle, schedule, and level of commitment.  If you can only read one book about food, read this one.

In Defense of Food:  An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan (2009)   
In Defense of Food shows us how, despite the daunting dietary landscape Americans confront in the modern supermarket, we can escape the Western diet and, by doing so, most of the chronic diseases that diet causes.  We can relearn which foods are healthy, develop simple ways to moderate our appetites, and return eating to its proper context— out of the car and back to the table.  

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan (2006)

What should we have for dinner? Today, buffeted by one food fad after another, America is suffering from a national eating disorder. As the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous landscape, what’s at stake becomes not only our own and our children’s health, but the health of the environment that sustains life on earth.  The surprising answers Pollan offers have profound political, economic, psychological, and even moral implications for all of us.  Meticulously researched, and beautifully written. 

FOR YOUNG READERS: 

Chew On This: Everything You Don’t Want to Know about Fast Food by Eric Schlosser (2006) 

In the New York Times bestseller Chew on This, Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson unwrap the fast-food industry to bring you a behind-the-scenes look at a business that both feeds and feeds off the young. Find out what really goes on at your favorite restaurants—and what lurks between those sesame seed buns.  Having all the facts about fast food helps young people make healthy decisions about what they eat. Chew On This shows them that they can change the world by changing what they eat.

Don’t Eat This Book: Fast Food and the Supersizing of America by Morgan Spurlock (2005)

For thirty days, Morgan Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald's as part of an investigation into the effects of fast food on American health. The resulting documentary, Super Size Me, earned him an Academy Award nomination and broke box-office records worldwide. But there's more to the story, and in Don't Eat This Book, Spurlock examines everything from school lunch programs and the marketing of fast food to the decline of physical education. He looks at why fast food is so tasty, cheap, and ultimately seductive, and interviews experts from surgeons general and kids to marketing gurus and lawmakers, who share their research and opinions on what we can do to offset a health crisis of supersized proportions.

Food Rules: An Eater's Manual by Michael Pollan (2009)
Keep this one in the kitchen and read aloud at random! Pollan offers great advice about healthy eating in a series of short, sometimes funny rules (i.e. "Don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk, " and "It's not food if it arrived through the window of your car.").  There is wisdom here. 

The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Secrets Behind What You Eat (Young Reader's Edition) by Michael Pollan, adapted by Richie Chevat (2009)
From fast food and big organic to small farms and old-fashioned hunting and gathering, this young reader's adaptation of Pollan's famous food-chain exploration encourages kids to consider the personal and global health implications of their food choices. In a smart, compelling format with updated facts, plenty of photos, graphs, and visuals, as well as a new afterword and backmatter, The Omnivore's Dilemma serves up a bold message to the generation that needs it most: it's time to take charge of our national eating habits, and it starts with you. 

FILMS: 

Forks Over Knives

Fresh

Super Size Me  (We watched a version adapted for young people.)

RECIPES AND MEAL IDEAS: 

100 Days of Real Food

Bethenny Frankel

Care's Kitchen

Cheeky Kitchen

Deliciously Organic

Eating Well 

Kitchen Simplicity

Nourishing Gourmet

Prevention 

Savvy Vegetarian 

Simply Recipes

Vegetarian Times 

Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.

I'm thinking of getting an inspirational Michael Pollan poster for my kitchen.  I assume there is such a thing, the foodie equivalent of a kitten dangling from a branch with the caption "Hang in there."  My Pollan poster would say, as Michael does, "Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants."


Simple to the point of smugness, right?  But this slogan has become a touchstone for me.  I hear it in my head and sometimes even say it out loud while I am cooking.  I didn't previously think of food as plants, or plants as food.  Plants were the African violets in pots on the windowsill, and food was meat, vegetables, fruit, or worse, fat grams and carbohydrates.  A tragedy to reduce bread and pasta and similar wonders to mere "carbs" and a nice, oily vinaigrette to fat.  But now I realize (duh) that spinach is a plant, eggplant is a plant, wheat is a plant, beans are a plant, soy is a plant, even olive oil is a plant.  Everything that I heap on my plate now, where the meat used to be, is a plant.

Last night I made one of my favorite things, a White Bean Jumble from my beloved little orange guide, The Student's Vegetarian Cookbook by Carole Raymond.  I love this cookbook.  Every recipe in it is easy, serves one or two, and features real food, mostly plants.  The White Bean Jumble is composed of potatoes, white or red, cut in chunks and steamed until tender, onions and garlic sauteed in olive oil, one tomato chopped, and whatever green vegetable you have on hand.  The recipe calls for kale, which I love but do not always have in the fridge, so spinach (raw) or broccoli (steamed) would be good additions.  This time, I used Brussels sprouts.

I am a Brussels sprouts convert.  As a child, I would have endured torture before voluntarily consuming a Brussels sprout, although I was a pretty good, non-picky eater for the most part.  Even as an adult, I had avoided Brussels sprouts, partly because they were linked for a time in my mind with a man I dated.  We'll call him Mark, and he lived in a church home (that is, he was one of several boarders in the house that his minister owned; my roommate and I called it the Reformed Presbyterian Home for Wayward Boys), and on Wednesday nights, everyone belonging to the church (some 12 people--it was a small sect) would attend a prayer meeting and then eat Brussels sprouts.  Not quite like that, of course, there were other foods on the table, brought by well-meaning souls, but the most earnest of all of the offerings were the Brussels sprouts, a big bowl of shiny, cabbagey-smelling, boiled Brussels sprouts.  I stuck instead to the mac and cheese, which in the South counts as a vegetable anyway.  

Now, though, I love Brussels sprouts, and also turnip and collard greens and many other foods which I previously disdained.  How does this happen?  My boyfriend's tastes were mostly set, and in stone, in childhood, which is why he will still eat Fruity Pebbles and beef jerky, and also McDonald's, which I think I am off now for good.  Several of our friends agree that a McDonald's hamburger and fries "tastes like childhood" to them, which is an alarming commentary on American childhood, although I have no right to judge: my childhood tasted like Krystal's cheeseburgers and Arby's Jamocha shakes.  My adulthood tastes, though, have evolved, maybe because I have not in adulthood been confined to the dinner table and ordered to finish my peas.  I also eat fresh food, prepared differently than it was in the 1960s and '70s (I still can't eat canned spinach, for example).  But for whatever reason, I am now a huge fan of Brussels sprouts, and especially love them oiled, salted and roasted, or steamed lightly and tossed into the jumble.

White Bean Jumble

2 large red or white potatoes
1 cup chopped firmly packed kale leaves, with stems removed OR 1-2 cups of brussel sprouts, quartered
2 - 4 teaspoons olive oil
1/2 cup chopped onion
1 clove garlic, chopped
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1 tomato, chopped
1/2 - 1 cup canned white beans, rinsed and drained
Salt and pepper

1. Wash the potatoes, cut them into 1/2-inch chunks and steam until tender, about ten minutes.  If using Brussels sprouts or broccoli, steam with the potatoes.

2. Heat oil over medium heat.  Add the onions, garlic and thyme.  Saute until the onion softens, about three minutes.  Add green vegetable and tomato and saute 1-2 minutes more.  Add potatoes and beans and heat through.  Salt and pepper to taste.

I sprinkled with fresh grated parmesan and served with Country Cornbread (whole wheat flour along with the corn meal makes it "country," and very good), also from the Raymond cookbook.  And there was my meal, real food, not too much, mostly plants.

And then I had a cream cheese bar (familiarly known to some as Ooey Gooey Butter Bars) with homemade vanilla ice cream and a splash of lemon liqueur.  But hey, I used organic dairy products, it's still vegetarian, and I am still vegetarian (mostly) and feeling good.

Dinner with the Girls and a Butternut Squash

So, I am planning a dinner party, very casual (which is to say that I will vacuum but probably won't dust or mop), with some girlfriends on Saturday night.  No boys will be present, so I can serve vegetables as the main course.  That's unfair, probably, to suggest that all boys dislike vegetables just because my boy does.  But it does seem that men need, or think they need, meat in a way that women just don't.  When I was a child, whenever my father traveled for work, Mom and I had meatless meals like cheese souffle or waffles for supper, and it seemed a particular treat to skip the pork chop, the steak, the meatloaf.  How backwards this is from the olden times when meat was scarce--because animals were hard to catch or expensive to raise--and people lived a plant-based diet by default.   Now, meat is easier (at least easier on the consumer, still pretty hard on the animals) than vegetables.  I could buy a piece of meat in a plastic tray covered with cellophane, throw it in a hot pan, and there's dinner (for a man, anyway).

Instead, for the girls I am going to make Butternut Squash and Parmesan Bread Pudding, and it will be a bit more work, mostly because of the squash itself.  For me, butternut squash falls into the category of how-did-anyone-think-to-eat-this foods.  Oysters are another obvious example.  In fact, how did anyone ever think to eat animals in the first place?  Probably by watching other animals, I suppose.  I realize that predation is a fact of life.  But if I had been the first human in charge of finding food, meat would not have been on the menu.  Not just because I am soft-hearted and squeamish (which I am) but because I lack that particular kind of imagination.  If I didn't know about meat, I simply would not look at a cow in a field and think "food."  I might wonder if the cow would mind if I joined her in the field for foraging.  Perhaps there would be berries or edible flowers out there.  And I am observant enough to see that cows produce milk, and it would occur to me, I am pretty sure, to drink the milk.  I might even make the leap to butter and cheese, and thank goodness that someone did, I love butter and cheese.

But it is not in my nature to think, "You know, that big hairy animal out there, if I cut its throat with a knife, and then skinned it, and disposed of the feet and the horns and any other pointy parts or potentially squishy inside bits, then carved it into large chunks and heated those chunks over fire...well, that might be dinner."  It is enough for me that I can take a squash, the impervious butternut squash, and make it a meal.  But I can, no one has to get hurt (at least if I carve carefully, no one does), and it is a delicious and healthy supper.

Here is the recipe for Butternut Squash and Parmesan Bread Pudding, from my wonderful Cooking Light Complete Cookbook (2006), which has a good Meatless Main Dishes section.  You should totally serve this with kale. 

• 3 cups (1/2-inch) cubed peeled butternut squash  (Click here for tips on how to cut the darn thing.)
• Cooking spray 
• 1/2 teaspoon salt, divided
• 1 teaspoon olive oil 
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• 1 cup chopped onion 
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• 2 cups 1% low-fat milk (I use whole milk, more on which later)
• 1 cup (4 ounces) grated fresh Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, divided
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper 
• 1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 3 large eggs 
• 2 large egg whites (Or just use 4 - 5 whole eggs)
• 8 ounces (1-inch) cubed day-old French bread, about 9 cups.  I used up bread that I had in the house, some of which was whole grain.  I think it made the pudding heartier and tastier than just French bread would have.   

Preparation

• Preheat oven to 400°.
• Arrange squash in a single layer on a jelly-roll pan coated with cooking spray. Sprinkle with 1/4 teaspoon salt. Bake at 400° for 12 minutes or until tender. Remove from oven; reduce oven temperature to 350°.
• Heat oil in a medium nonstick skillet over medium-high heat.  (Use more oil if you need it; olive oil is a healthy fat!) Add onion; sauté 5 minutes or until tender. Add garlic, and sauté 1 minute. Remove from heat; cool slightly.
• Combine remaining 1/4 teaspoon salt, milk, 1/2 cup cheese, pepper, nutmeg, eggs, and egg whites in a large bowl, stirring with a whisk. Stir in squash and onion mixture. Add bread, and stir gently to combine. Let stand 10 minutes. Spoon into a 2-quart baking dish coated with cooking spray. Sprinkle with remaining 1/2 cup cheese. Bake at 350° for 45 minutes or until pudding is set and lightly browned.

Marie Simmons, Cooking Light
OCTOBER 2004

Infuriating Newseek article, on the so-called "Dinner Divide"

Dear Lisa Miller, author of "The Dinner Divide: How Our Foodie Obsession Is Driving Americans Apart,"

An apple that has not been poisoned with chemical fertilizers and pesticides is not a "delicacy." 

This is how far off the rails we are in this country, that the choice to eat healthy food can be described--and dismissed--in a national news magazine as somehow precious and self-indulgent at best, and as insensitive to the food-insecure poor at worst.  My letter to Newsweek follows, although I don't notice that the magazine even includes a Letters to the Editor section any more, hmm.

Dear Editor,

The recent cover story on "The Dinner Divide: How Our Food Obsession Is Driving Americans Apart" is badly misguided.  The author, Lisa Miller, suggests a cause and effect relationship between organic eating and food insecurity, as if everyone who chooses to eat healthy whole foods that have not been poisoned with chemical fertilizers and pesticides, or meat that has not been tainted with steroids and antibiotics (and the threat, ever-present on overcrowded feed lots, of E. coli) is taking the bread from the mouths of the poor.  While she repeatedly refers to the "obsessive concerns of the foodies" in her circle, nowhere does she mention Big Food, the handful of companies that dominate the food industry and who have processed our food beyond recognition and healthfulness, and who are getting rich by getting Americans hooked on cheap, empty calories.  Nor does she mention the unholy alliance between those industries and our own government, which has been subsidizing farmers to grow corn and soybeans almost exclusively for the past 20 years.  All that corn has to go somewhere, and it goes into our food as high fructose corn syrup and other manufactured substances that make us fat and sick.  And don't even get me started on fast food...

We have convinced ourselves (or more accurately, have been convinced by the millions of dollars spent every year in this country on food advertising) that our choices are more narrow than they really are, that it is always a choice between the $1 menu at McDonald's and an "overpriced" bunch of arugula.  In fact, it is not hard or prohibitively expensive to eat better, but it does require buying real food and cooking it at home from scratch most of the time.  Sustainably and humanely raised meat IS expensive, so I eat meat very rarely now, at one meal a week at most, but the local farmer's market is selling broccoli at 75 cents a head this week, and a bag of brown rice costs less than $2.00.  You can throw away $1.50 on two liters of soda and ingest an excess of sugar, dyes and chemicals, or you can spend $3.00 on the same amount of farm fresh milk and get Vitamins A and D, Omega-3 fatty acids, calcium and phosphorus.  We do have choices, and the organic movement, if that's what it is, and its leading spokespeople like Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, Marion Nestle and also documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock and chef Jamie Oliver, have done us a tremendous favor that Miller should acknowledge.  They are having to teach us all over again the primal essential skill of how to eat.  I am grateful for them.  I guess that makes me a "foodie," but I am a healthy and happy one.

Sincerely,

Maura Mandyck