How do mothers find affordable, healthy food to feed their families? Early this century American social scientists studied food access for low-income families. They adopted the term, ‘food desert,’ as “an area that does not have a supply of healthy foods, such as fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats.” Their solution to eliminating food deserts was a supermarket. In urban settings one must be within a … Continue reading Are food deserts real?

Do economic circumstances affect our concept of a healthy diet? Do personal economics make it difficult to stay on a healthy diet? In How the Other Half Eats Priya Fielding-Singh suggests most of us have a clear concept of a healthy diet. Poverty affects the ability to maintain that diet. Note the subtitle, The Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America. It helps us … Continue reading How wealth and poverty affect the healthiness of the American diet  

Summary: The cause of poor weight management leading to obesity is excess calories. Excess body fat, adipose tissue, resulting from the consumption of excess calories, is the body’s organ causing the advancement of many metabolic diseases.  In offering a perspective dealing with health, disease, and processed foods, there must be compromises or “tradeoffs”. There is no perfect “tradeoff” for any individual to maintain their health. … Continue reading Tradeoffs: Health, Disease and Processed Foods by Dennis T. Gordon

As I sit in my comfortable home, it is difficult to write a blog on food while war rages on in Ukraine. The brutality of the fighting and the flight of refugees flicker across my screen. Food and water shortages along with mounting death tolls capture my attention. Concerns about what we eat seem trivial. How little I knew about Ukraine! Chernobyl and The Fiddler … Continue reading War in Ukraine affects world food supply, confusion over processed food, obesity, sugar inflammation and more  

Processed food is addictive—as addictive as crack cocaine! Or so we read on the net. Is it really? Or are these stories only click bait? Do they represent serious journalism? Or have we lost all sense of proportion? Hooked by Michael Moss and The End of Craving by Mark Schatzker are popular versions of the idea. A recent scientific book, Processed Food Addiction, edited by … Continue reading What is the difference between a food addiction and an eating addiction? Why does it matter?  

by Linn Steward, RDN Mark Schatzker’s most recent book proposes a theoretical answer to a question. Why over the last 40 years do we keep getting fatter? And the answer is, in the words of the author,  that “… the obesity epidemic is being fueled by advancements in food technology that have disrupted the brain’s ability to sense nutrients, altered eating behavior, and given food … Continue reading The End of Craving from a different point of view  

Mark Schatzker’s latest book is The End of Craving: Recovering the Lost Wisdom of Eating Well. He strings together disparate perspectives into a theory on obesity. He tells us what causes it, and how to overcome it. The idea he presents is so simple and yet so profound. Could he have uncovered the magic formula for success? It is a solution that has evaded so … Continue reading Why are we so fat* and Italians so skinny?  

No, not that kind of free food! Not the kind that students and instructors seek out at opportunities across campus. Nor the free samples distributed on the floor of the IFT and similar Expos. I refer to foods missing a key ingredient or feature that is unacceptable to a segment of the population. Gluten free, lactose free, and sugar free are three of the most … Continue reading Free food  

In a recent article Giselle Castro-Sloboda urged us to purge eight health buzzwords from our vocabulary. Turns out that I have mentioned seven of the eight buzzwords on this site. To users of these buzzwords I have some questions: To stay healthy do we need to rely on superfoods, or would it be better to eat a balanced diet? Should we eat clean and live … Continue reading Pejorative food buzzwords and the message that they send  

. . . to open up Pandora’s Lunchbox. They decided to respond to some of the questions raised in last week’s blog. We welcome your responses. For more details on the process, scroll to the bottom of the post. Cast of Characters: Culinary nutritionist: Linn Steward, RDN. trained in the culinary arts with degree in Nutrition and Comparative Literature form Berkeley. She also is the … Continue reading A culinary nutritionist, a food ingredient marketer, and a food science professor walk into a bar . . .