“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” March is National Nutrition Month, and those seven words by journalist and author Michael Pollan from his book “In Defense of Food” are even more compelling today than they were when they were penned in 2008.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “most people in the United States don’t eat a healthy diet and consume too much sodium, saturated fat and sugar, increasing their risk of chronic diseases.” The average American consumes 130 pounds of sugar a year, about 3 pounds every week per person, and one in four Americans eats fast food every day.
In Italy, in March 1986, the Slow Food movement began as a protest to the opening of a fast food restaurant near Rome’s Spanish Steps. The idea spread, and today more than 160 countries participate, their vision: “A world where everyone can eat food that is good for them, good for the people who grow it and good for the planet.”
The Slow Food diet, like the Mediterranean diet, emphasizes consuming local, seasonal and high-quality nutritious foods – legumes, pasta, fruit, vegetables and meat or fish.
What can we do to make slow food, rather than fast food, a daily habit? Michael Pollan’s three rules are a good start: “Avoid processed foods and ingredients you don’t recognize. Use meat for flavor, not the main course. Pay more, eat less.”
Here in north Orange County, we have easy access to the fresh, locally sourced foods we need to stay healthy in our many farmers markets: Placentia on Tuesdays 3 to 7 p.m.; Fullerton on Wednesdays 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., and beginning in April, Thursdays 4 to 8:30 p.m.; Buena Park on Saturdays 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.; and Yorba Linda on Saturdays 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., starting March 9. See OrangeCounty.net for more information.
Amanda Cushman never planned on a career in food. From helping a friend with her catering business, to becoming a recipe tester and developer, to opening her own catering…
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