Archive for the ‘from our team monday’ Category

Realwashing

Monday, May 14th, 2012

from our team monday

After years of “functional food” being popular – people are rightly becoming increasingly skeptical of food being designed by scientists to be healthy.  More and more evidence is coming out supporting the idea that the body is incredibly sophisticated at picking out nutrients and vitamins.  No longer is a vitamin pill equal to an apple – in fact, the human body is specifically designed to absorb the vitamins from whole food, rather than from the isolates that are stuck together with additives and flavors.  Evolution has ensured that the thousands of years of people eating whole food grown in nature has trained the body appropriately.  It’s becoming clear that not all vitamins, fiber, and protein is the same.  All those years scientists wasted extracting and isolating the very best parts of fiber from the grain and the protein from soy, and spraying food with vitamins.

Here comes the real food revolution.  Well, sort of.

In response to the trend of consumers demanding real food – food scientists and marketers have responded by making food real again!  Are you skeptical?  You should be.

Expect more food with long shelf lives that is marketed as simple, wholesome, and real.  We’re already seeing aseptic looking white packaging with Helvetica font featuring once big branded food that is now “simple”.  Foods are being reformulated to remove High Fructose Corn Syrup, substituted with something called evaporated cane juice – which sounds a lot more real than sugar, which is what it is.  Products are being fairy dusted with whole wheat flour, or something called wheat flour, which is actually just white flour.  Natural flavors which are scientific concoctions barely understandable by the people that make them, are flavoring our foods – instead of the ingredients themselves.  Pictures of farmers are shown in commercials growing things like potatoes and vegetables – clearly leaving out pictures of the corporate offices and lobbyists doing most of the work.  More and more growth is coming from organic – yet, quite a bit of those products are being imported from places with different organic standards than the United States.  People are fighting for GMO labeling, yet the government insists that there is no difference between genetically modified and “real”.  Meat is being reformulated to remove pink slime, yet the antibiotics and corn pellet diets remain.  Farmed salmon is injected with dye to give it its “real” pink color.

Call it the real food revolution.

Or just realwashing.

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Daniel

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Getting Nourished & Introducing a Whole Grain Brunch

Monday, May 7th, 2012

from our team monday

Erewhon cereal at Gluten Free Allergy Free Expo

I have the sincere pleasure of getting to chat with our customers and some days quite a few of them. After a while, you can sometimes find patterns in the types of questions asked and I can tell you, I’ve heard some great stories of our customers introduction to our foods as well as recipe ideas. One thing I appreciate and have learned from our customers who have food allergies or are calling / emailing on behalf of a family member with food allergies is to read the ingredient label, to ask questions about production and ultimately to be your own advocate.

Silvana-Nardone-Cybele-Pascal

Most of America could learn from this approach to eating mindfully- in a different way. And yet, I recognize that for those with food allergies, they are thrust into it one day without a manual of where to start, only a goal of what to eliminate and thus they begin the question-asking process. I’ve talked to customers recently diagnosed with gluten intolerance as well to mothers with kids that have a litany of allergies who are feeling a bit beaten down. I like to give them something to smile about, something that’s nourishing to their spirits.

Love for Attune Foods at Nourished Food Bloggers Conference

Nourished Food Bloggers Conference took place in the suburbs of Chicago in mid-April and we happily sponsored this convergence of niche food bloggers. Many of them I’d read their blogs and seen such innovative, fun recipe ideas but there were a bunch of new faces too. I met Nom Yum Free as she toted around her baby girl during the one day conference and learned of her daughter’s food allergies and her new list of foods to avoid. After hearing the list I promised her a box of Rice Twice which I read from a blog post she tweeted this last week she ate “by the handful.”

Attune Foods at Nourished Food Bloggers Conference

I canoodled with old friends and got to see what the ladies of Easy Eats good to be gluten free magazine and then celebrated finding camaraderie and kinship with the lovely folks from Living Without magazine. Our friends from Pacific Foods joined us to pour non-dairy milks and offer a sweet giveaway during the Gluten Free / Allergen Free Expo.

Charissa Luke and the ladies from Crave Bakeshop

Throughout the entire weekend, I would have been sunk had it not been for sidekick extraordinaire, Charissa of local Bay Area gluten free Zest Bakery. She helped me serve our No-Bake Gluten Free Date Bars at the closing cocktail party and provide recipe tips at the corresponding next two days of the Gluten Free / Allergen Free Expo. We even got to see fireworks light up the evening sky one night as a wedding party perched on the balcony of our conference hotel.

fireworks at Nourished Food Bloggers Conference

Community- it’s something I believe in, noted by my company title of Online Community Manager. Bringing people together, playing off of each other’s strengths for the purpose of building each other up are things that get me up every morning and keep me going late into the night.

Annelies from Attune Foods at Nourished Food Bloggers Conference

During the month of May, we are partnering with our friends at Bob’s Red Mill to bring you a Whole Grain Brunch. We challenged eight bloggers to bake or cook up a healthy brunch recipe using one Bob’s Red Mill product and one Attune Foods product. Tune in here each Monday and Friday to see that week’s featured bloggers and what they’ve cooked up. There’s nothing more communal than the table. Won’t you join us during May for a Whole Grain Brunch? Stay tuned later today for our first featured blogger.

No-Bake Date Walnut Bars at Nourished Food Bloggers Conference

 

With thanks and attribution of all photos by the fabulous Charissa of Zest Gluten Free Bakery.

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Food Preservation as a Way of Simple Living

Monday, April 30th, 2012

from our team monday
getting ready to make sauerkraut

If you count off what you need to survive, it’s pretty simple.

Water, food and shelter come to mind.

Recently, at the airport, I flashed my driver’s license through the security line and caught a glimpse of a red card that serves as a bona fide certification of my status as a Californian. Gilt with gold ink in the shape of a condor and my best attempt at a serious smile, that card verifies that I am part of the San Francisco Neighborhood Emergency Response Team.

Six weeks of evenings spent with San Francisco firefighters, a group of us developed earthquake eyes. We learned emergency medicine and even tried our hand at triage exercises as well as search and rescue. The understanding here is that when we have our next big earthquake, the neighborhoods will be called into action to help assess the neighborhoods and communicate the walking wounded from those needing immediate care to a stretched fire department.

One of the assignments during the series of classes is still in process of being finished. We have been working on putting together our 72 hour kit, gathering the jugs of water (5 gallons per person and only 1 gallon per day per person), putting together our grab and go emergency bags- for a just in case kind of scenario.

Years ago, my 72 hour kit consisted of primarily processed foods. There were those packs of crackers with something that resembles peanut butter sandwiching them. Cans of tuna and fruit cups lined the inside of a plastic tub we kept in our garage.

In my experimentation and growing interest with food preservation though, I have come to understand another way of approaching our 72 hour kit and this is one that consists of jars of real food preserved for the future and possible natural disaster.

At last month’s Craftcation conference, Chef and master food preserver Ernest Miller showed us how to make lacto-fermented sauerkraut from scratch. This condiment is rich in naturally cultivated probiotics of lactobacillus acidophilus and takes about two weeks to fully ferment on your back counter. Jars of Early Girl tomatoes line the shelf. Close by jars of black turtle beans and cannellinis are within close reach of pistachios, almonds, flax seeds and raisins. Then come the jars of amaranth, organic brown rice and organic corn kernels. And of course there’s a box of organic rice cereal stashed away.

How does this differ from what we eat on a regular basis? Not much, though we have boxes of organic almond milk to replace our daily dairy foodstuffs for that rainy day.

My favorite firefighter talked about throwing an annual 72 hour kit party where he pulls out the previous year’s stowed away water and foods before they go bad and creatively introduces them into a party his friends and family have come to look forward to. I can appreciate this type of celebration that accompanies a topic that for many can summon a lot of fear. Food preservation helps prepare us for the future- and one that is tasty regardless of the circumstances.

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Annelies

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