Hurricanes, Earthquakes: Stocking Delicious Real Foods, Not Fake Foods

Planning for natural disasters, such as hurricanes and earthquakes, forces us to focus on real foods, not fake foods. Nonperishable foods that will satisfy and nourish us and our loved ones, sometimes for seven days or longer. 

But what real foods should we buy that will strengthen us, not spoil, and yet not taste like over-priced sawdust or freeze-dried shoe leather?

 Here are suggestions for easily-found staples to get your family through the worst of days without power or transportation:

Beverages- Stock-up on bottled water. Two cases, maybe three. And how about extra for a neighbor? Also individual boxed fruit and veggie juices.

Canned beans - A terrific source of protein, fiber, other nutrients, and most don't taste half-bad. Think kidney, cannellini, garbanzo, and black beans. Caution: avoid salt-drenched pork-and-beans and chili beans in sauce. Salty foods induce extra thirst, creating an unpleasant cycle in confined conditions.

Canned meats - Tuna in either oil or water. Other canned meats or fish, to taste, but most are highly processed and often ghastly. 

Peanut butter and jelly - Yummy anytime, but a real treat in power-free times. Enjoy on crackers, preferably low-salt. Buy jellies in smaller containers or those little restaurant servings. 

Canned fruits - In their own juices rather than heavy syrup. The healthier, the better. You'll feel better. Save sugar highs for an occasional candy bar. 

Canned veggies - Some aren't detestable. Look again at the market, and you'll see what I mean. Buy low-salt canned veggies for all times, not just for earthquakes and hurricanes. 

Nuts, granolas, and nut/granola bars - These are never detestable, but one can't live on semi-candy bars and high-carb granolas forever. Or even for seven days. But such goodies do make time go by faster. And nuts galore... high protein, good taste. What's not to like? Low-salt, though, or unsalted if you can bear it.

Dried fruits - Apricots, raisins, cranberries, banana chips, pineapple spears, mango slices. Take a stroll down Trader Joe's dried fruit aisle. But remember to save them for emergencies. 

If you have several days notice before a natural disaster, indulge your household with:

Fresh fruits - Apples, oranges, tangerines, pomegranates, other delicious fruits unlikely to spoil after a week without refrigeration.

Breads - Breadsticks, too. I'm not a believer in breads laden with preservatives. But shelf-life takes precedent over taste, texture, and aesthetics in emergency conditions. 

Others - Stock canned milk for those who require dairy on a daily basis, and pre-mixed formula for babies.  Don't forget salt, pepper, sugars, cinnamon, and other spices and herbs.  

And yes, tuck-away surprise treats to bring smiles to sullen faces... jelly beans, M & Ms, favorite candy bars, and bags of kettle corn. 

Then again, you could simply store what a former boss of mine kept in his desk drawer should an earthquake have trapped him in our downtown Los Angeles high-rise for three days: a bottle of whiskey, a deck of cards, and poker chips. 

Obama School Lunches Leaving Kids Hungry

Kids of all ages are going hungry at school, thanks to the newly-implemented Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010. And ironically for the federal school lunch program, kids from the lowest-income families are suffering the most. 

Intentions were terrific behind this initiative led by First Lady Michelle Obama: a healthy, balanced lunch for every child, regardless of family income.  The goals are to serve less salt and fat, and more fresh produce and whole grains. 

The bill, the first school lunch overhaul in 15 years,  thankfully corrected egregious food choices foisted on kids by past federal  lunch programs, including mystery meats, highly-processed goops, and a dearth of fresh produce. 

(Remember when President Reagan's 1982 budget classified such fake foods as catsup and pickle relish as vegetables?) 

But as so often happens when government tries to regulate private behavior, the Obama administration went too far. Way too far. And kids across the nation are going hungry at school as a result.  The bill overreaches by setting very restrictive lunch rules, including:

Caloric  ceilings: 650 for elementary school, 700 for middle school, 850 for high school.

First Long-Term Study of GMO Corn Points to Cancer

The first tests longer than 90 days of genetically modified corn are in, and well... the results may cause you to newly support clear labeling of genetically modified foods. (See GMO Foods: Do Americans Have the Right to Know What They Eat?)

Corn and soy beans comprise a very large portion of GMO produce sold in the United States. About 85% of all corn now sold in the U.S. is genetically modified. 

A report released last month by Food and Toxicology Journal, a respected, peer-reviewed scientific journal, disclosed the results of an extensive, $4.1-million, two-year study of rats fed:

• Monsanto's NK603 corn, which is modified to be resistant to the corporation's Roundup herbicide, which kills weeds
• Roundup herbicide
• One of the above, but not both

The control group of rats was fed corn in its natural unmodified state and plain water, also over two years. (The study was timed to mime the lifespan of a rat, which is typically two to three years.)

The results, per Reuters:

"Gilles-Eric Seralini of the University of Caen and colleagues said rats fed on a diet containing NK603 - a seed variety made tolerant to dousings of Roundup - or given water containing Roundup at levels permitted in the United States died earlier than those on a standard diet.

"The animals on the GM diet suffered mammary tumours, as well as severe liver and kidney damage.  The researchers said 50 percent of males and 70 percent of females died prematurely, compared with only 30 percent and 20 percent in the control group."

Study authors reported that all three test groups of rats "experienced adverse health effects and died earlier than rats in the control group." 

"The results were really alarming" commented Dr. Seralini of test group rats. "Mammary tumors began to appear in females after 4 months, and after one year there was a high increase of a number of (kinds of) tumors." Concluded the report:

McDonald's McRib: Delayed Because of Pink Slime-Like Fears?

McDonald's McRib was slated to temporarily reappear (again) in late October 2012. 

But this week, the world's largest fast-food corporation curiously, and quietly, delayed the return of its popular gooey, tasty pork sandwich for two months, until the indulgent Christmas season. When Americans are busily distracted from fake food matters... 

The question occurs to me... in this year of heightened food-awareness and pink-slime outrage,  could McDonald's fear the public taking fresh appraisal of their ribless McRib? Of asking, "What exactly IS this heavily slathered, pork-like 'patty" on a fluffy white bun?"

GMO Foods: Do Americans Have the Right to Know What They Eat?

Do you have the right to know what's in your food, and how it's been processed or grown? Do you have a right to info to make religious and ethical decisions about your meals? Decisions about your health?

More than 100 countries agreed in 2011 to label foods that contain genetically modified organisms.  In 2012, 50 countries have mandated labeling of GMO foods. 

The United States is not one of those countries. Observes one U.S. lawmaker:

"Unlike people in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Ireland, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Brazil, China, Russia, New Zealand and other countries where labels are required, Americans don't know if the food they eat has been genetically altered."

In November, Californians will vote to decide on a law that "requires labeling on raw or processed food offered for sale to consumers if made from plants or animals with genetic material changed in specified ways."  If Proposition 37 passes, California will become the first state to require manufacturer labeling of foods containing GMO ingredients. As California goes, so usually goes the nation... 

Dissecting Wendy's Baconator Burger at International Bacon Day

To mark International Bacon Day, September 18th, Wendy's exuded via email this week:

"Celebrate International Bacon Day with the spokescheeseburger for bacon, Wendy's Baconator. And to make things extra festive, Wendy's is kicking things off with our new collection of bacon-themed desktop, mobile and tablet wallpapers. Download one now!

"... check out the all-new Baconator fan page on Facebook. Who better to recognize bacon greatness than the Wendy's Baconator with its six strips of Applewood Smoked Bacon?"

Never one to miss a sacred, food-related holiday,  I thought I'd learn more about what one enthusiast dubbed "the tastiest sandwich known to man."   After all, the vibrant, healthy actors in Wendy's commercials make savoring the Baconator seem like a hoot-and-a-half to snack on (up to midnight!):



Ingredients of Wendy International's profitable pride and U.S. fast-food joy, the Baconator Double, are:

• Two quarter pound beef patties (seasoned with salt)
• Six slices of bacon (cured with  water, salt, sugar, sodium phosphates, sodium erythorbate, sodium nitrite)
• A "premium buttered, toasted" white bread bun 
• Two slices of American cheese (includes sodium citrate, salt, sodium phosphate, artificial color)
• Mayonnaise (includes high fructose corn syrup, distilled vinegar, salt, calcium disodium EDTA)
• Catsup (includes high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, salt)

The white-bread bun boasts a long, long list of chemical mystery ingredients. Optionals include the healthier stuff: tomato, lettuce, red onion, and crinkle-cut pickles (preserved in salt, vinegar, lactic acid, sodium benzoate, natural flavors, polysorbate 80). 

Nutritional count for Wendy's Baconator Double is:

• 970 calories (more than two deep-fried Twinkies)
• 570 calories from fat
• 210 mgs of cholestrol (equal to four cups of ice cream)
• 40 grams of carbs
• 2,020 mgs of sodium, which is salt (more than two large tubs of popcorn at Regal movie theaters) 

Hmmmm..... never mind! 

It's well-known that I love scrumptious food. And I love a celebration... any fun, life-affirming celebration.   But I'd also like to live a long, healthy life. 

Too many Baconators, and the only healthy result would be the fat corporate coffers of Wendy's International, Inc., parent company of Wendy's and Arby's, a modern industrial corporation that sold $3.4 billion of fast food in 2010. 

I think I'll mark International Bacon Day with a delicious strip or two of bacon on a salad, instead.

Obama Burying Food Safety Rules for Political Gain?

Election year politics are suspected of playing serious havoc with food safety, and putting public health at risk, per The Center for Food Safety and the Center for Environmental Health.

And the Centers are putting might behind their fighting words. 

This week, the non-profits filed a law suit against two federal agencies... the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)... for failure to implement many vital mandates of the Food Safety and Modernization Act (FSMA), signed into law by President Obama on January 4, 2011.  In their legal filing, the Centers explain:

"FSMA is the first major piece of federal legislation to overhaul food safety since 1938. Continuous high profile outbreaks related to various foods, ranging from spinach to peanut products to eggs, underscored the need for serious legislative and regulatory reform.

"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that every year, as a result of foodborne diseases, 48 million people (1 in 6 Americans) get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die.

"... FSMA enables FDA to better protect public health by strengthening its ability to regulate and granting the agency enhanced preventative and mandate authority. The law also provides FDA with new enforcement capacity, such as mandatory recall authority, and the ability to require that imported foods comply with U.S. inspection and preventive safety standards.

" ... FDA has missed not one, not two, but seven critical deadlines, and counting, in failing to implement FSMA's major food safety regulations."

Both the Washington Post and New York Times have openly urged President Obama's White House to move forward to stop burying food safety measures in the depths of bureaucratic muck. 

Fake Food Fears, Circa 1965: Sound Familiar?

"The multibillion-dollar refined-food industry has gained such power that it keeps people in ignorance and literally controls the health of our nation.  Its relentless radio, television, newspaper, and magazine advertising reaches like the life-crushing tentacles of an octopus into every home.

"Half the space in our beautiful markets is given to health-destroying products which fill shoppers' baskets to a frightening degree. Hundreds of magazines and newspapers, depending on advertising income from the foodless food industry, have carried articles and syndicated columns --- clever mixtures of truth, misinformation, and propaganda--- particularly designed to prevent the slightest interest in nutrition from interfering with enormous profits.

"The refined-food industry, by giving untold million, also controls a vast amount of nutritional research. Much of it is valuable, indeed, but information that might harm sales goes unreported and problems whose solutions could decrease profits remain uninvestigated...

Ensure Drink: Sugary Fake Food Pseudo-Wonder Tonic by Vicodin Maker

Meet Ensure "nutrition shakes," one of the most spectacularly selling fake foods in America. $1 billion in sales in 2009, and growing. 

Bought by seniors in the millions as meal replacements. Used to supplement the diets of picky children. Hawked as a solution to build muscles, meet nutritional needs, fortify calcium, restore vigor, aid recovery from illness and surgery. 

The sapphire-and-navy plastic 8-oz bottle of vanilla Ensure Nutrition Shake (which retails for an exorbitant $1.33 per bottle!) here on my desk lures on the label:

• complete, balanced nutrition
• to help get strong on the inside
• #1 doctor recommended brand

"Ready to take charge of your health? Check out how Ensure ready-to-drink shakes and drinks can help you reach your goal," exhorts Abbott Nutrition, part of Big Pharma corporate giant Abbott Laboratories on their website. (Abbott Labs, the maker of addictive painkiller Vicodin and dozens of other highly profitable drugs...)

Problem is...

Frozen Waffles: Folly, Fun and Fake Food Ingredients

I get it. I get why health-conscious Americans sometimes serve fake food at home. I get it, because I did it.

I confess: I served frozen generic toaster waffles to our two young grandchildren for breakfast last weekend slathered, ironically,  with trans-fat free yogurt-based spread and USDA-certified organic maple agave syrup blend. 
An industrial-manufactured fake food of the first order doused in pretentious products of smug Whole Foods purists.

Frozen waffles doused and drenched but not disguised. Our seven-year-old pronounced them  "Awesome. Really awesome!"

My excuse? I was in a hurry at the market, and besides, I knew the kids couldn't wait the time it takes to properly mix and make waffles from scratch. They have fun things to do, favorite places to go, and they'd be hungry. 

At the market, I hid the frozen waffle box, fearing disapproval of fellow shoppers. What if I ran into friends or neighbors? What would they think?  That I feed fake industrial-made foods to my family? That I secretly binge on fake foods? They know I blog to expose the worst of modern industrial fake foods. Will they brand me a health hypocrite? 

Embarrassed, I slid the bright gold box under a sheath of red-leaf romaine lettuce, heirloom tomatoes, organic apricot-plum hybrids, and a loaf of cracked wheat sunflower-seed dill bread in an artisan-baker bag made of crinkly recycled paper.  I made it home, my food crime undetected. 

U.S. Food Supply Injures More Americans than Gun Violence Each Year

It's puzzling: Colorado-grown cantaloupes killed  more innocents in 2011 than did the recent murderous shooting-spree in a Colorado movie theater, yet no one seems to give a damn. 

Each year, preventable foodborne illness strikes 48 million Americans, hospitalizing a hundred thousand and killing thousands. Each year! 

 In 2011, 36 people died because they ate cantaloupe grown at Jensen Farms in Holly, Colorado. The melons were bought at WalMart, Krogers and other trusted neighborhood grocers.

Cantaloupes that looked, felt, and smelled ripe and healthy. Cantaloupes that were infected, though, with deadly Listeria bacteria. Infected cantaloupes that should have been detected by internal, third-party, or FDA-mandated inspections.    CNN investigated for months:

"... CNN has found serious gaps in the federal food safety net meant to protect American consumers of fresh produce, a system that results in few or no government inspections of farms and with only voluntary guidelines of how fresh produce can be kept safe...

" The 2011 listeriosis outbreak... should not have happened, and it could have been prevented, according to numerous food safety experts and federal health officials.

 "... the story of what happened at Jensen Farms, and why no one stopped the sale and shipments of the cantaloupes... sheds light on serious problems in the nation's fresh produce food safety net, and a voluntary system created by businesses to ensure a quality product, known as third-party audits."

In all, 36 men, women and children suffered painful deaths and 146 others became quite ill because inspection procedures failed to detect  poisoned cantaloupes sold in U.S. supermarkets in May, June and July 2011. 

Tragically, this massacre is not an isolated incident in U.S. modern industrialized food:  

Gigantic-Portion Restaurants: Corporate Profits at What Public Cost?

Decadent, monstrous-sized servings were first a 1970s fad among restaurants, designed to entice and entertain Americans with chocolate cake slices the size of a human head, mountains of golden french fries, and burgers stacked taller than a small pet.  It was great, unexpected fun 40 years ago. 

In 2012, rage-against-the-nutrition-machine propels Americans to eateries that serve gigantic portions of deeply satisfying comfort-food chocked with fats, sugars, and forbidden carbs.  Rebelling against the nanny state never felt so freeing or acceptably naughty. 

Problem is... these eateries do it solely for the profit. And just like Big Tobacco, they don't give a damn about your health or public health. Or the health of our great nation. 

Heart Attack Restaurants
The infamous Heart Attack Grill, now in Las Vegas, is an easy nutritional target, with its Quadruple Bypass Burgers (up to 8,000 calories), all-you-can-eat Flatliner Friers (fried in lard), and Butter-Fat Shakes (triple butterfat in strawberry, chocolate, vanilla). Click here for a YouTube of a guy eating the butter pooled in a butterfat shake.  

The Coconut Water Fad: Hucksterism, Health Elixir or Quasi Fraud?

Coconut water is one of the hottest health food trends, with more than $400 million in U.S. sales in 2011. Sales have doubled each year since, 2005, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Touted by Barbados-born rock-star Rihanna, endorsed by baseball superstars Josh Hamilton and Dustin Pedroia and world surfing champ Kelly Slater, invested in by film stars Demi Moore and Matthew McConaughey, TV star Kelly Ripa, and supermodel Gisele Bundchen ... the modern industrial beverage industry is banking heavily on coconut water as the next big profit-rich thing. 

But is coconut water the perfect-food elixir touted by its celebrity backers, or the newest blip in health food hucksterism? Or are boasts about coconut water the stuff of quasi-fraud baloney, like past food-fads acai berry and raspberry ketones? 

(Read HERE for Raspberry Ketones: Another Industrial Food Quasi-Scam?)

I recently bought a plethora of coconut water products and brands in cans, bottles, boxes... and my appraisal of the lot brought more questions than answers, and found more clever ambiguities and suspiciously slick marketing ploys than clear or verifiable facts.

And despite adorable "cute discovery" stories on the websites of entrepreneurs of these home-grown enterprises, I uncovered deep-pocketed connections to the largest U.S. industrial beverage corporations. Connections not revealed to the consumer on lushly alluring but largely fact-free packaging or on corporate websites. 

Silly Food Fascism: Big Gulp Not Part of Big Apple Soft Drink Ban

Hypocrisy, thy name is Food Fascism in 2012.

New York Mayor Bloomberg's edict banning large-size soft drinks is a classic case of arbitrary bureaucratic silliness, and of health-conscious thinking gone inconsistently awry. 

The Mayor wants to make it a minor crime for restaurants,  theaters, sports venues, fast-food purveyors, even food carts and kiosks to sell sugar-laced drinks... soft drinks, sports and energy beverages... in containers larger than 16 ounces. 

But Mr. Bloomberg provides a plethora of bewildering exceptions, including: 

Contaminated Meats in Grocery Markets Grow Due to Gag Laws

The beef, pork, and poultry you buy at the market is more likely from a diseased animal because of laws in five states severely restricting free speech about meat-industry factory farms. 

Iowa, Utah, North Dakota, Montana, and Kansas legislatures have all passed "ag-gag laws," a moniker earned because of extreme pressure from agriculture industry ("Big Ag") lobbyists to pass such statutes. 

And Big Ag, via politicians receiving Big Ag donations, has proposed ag-gag laws in more states, including Missouri, Minnesota, Nebraska, Indiana, Tennessee, Florida, Illinois and New York. 

State ag-gag laws and penalties vary, but per Food Safety News, mandate:

"In North Dakota, it is a class B misdemeanor to enter an animal facility and use or attempt to use a camera, video recorder, or any other video or audio recording device... Violators face jail terms of 30 days."