September 2023 Cookbooks

 

Clean & Delicious by Dani Spies

Dani Spies is a food blogger, holistic weight loss coach, and a Holistic Health Counselor. Honestly when I first saw all that I thought this book would be full of fads and fake meat, but it's not. It really focuses on eating real food and stocking your pantry with good quality staples so that you're not tempted to eat fast food or other not-so-great options. The recipes are organized by type/meal - like breakfast, snacks, salads, sides, etc. There were several recipes I'd like to try and I liked that all the recipes include a "level up" note about how you could change up that recipe in other ways. Overall, I was very impressed with this cookbook.

Southern Lights: easier, lighter, and better-for-you recipes from the South by Lauren McDuffie

I love Southern food and while I don't think Southern has to equal fried/bad/etc. it can often have that connotation. This cookbook purports to take Southern food and make it lighter and healthier. But, I was VERY disappointed. There were no recipes I wanted to try and some of it didn't seem healthy at all. The very first recipe in the breakfast chapter is for vanilla cream stuffed baked beignets - normally beignets are fried so baking is healthier, but beignets for breakfast is far from healthy. There were also some very odd recipes like red velvet pecans - basically baked pecans with sugar and seasoning, but adding an entire bottle (!!) of red food coloring. What is the point of that?! I would not recommend this one at all.

September 2023 Reviews

 

Seed to Table: a seasonal guide to organically growing, cooking, and preserving food at home by Luay Ghafari

This is a fantastic gardening book! It covers everything from planning your garden, growing food, starting from seed, harvesting, preserving, and cooking. It is so rare to see all these topics covered so thoroughly in one book. The way the book is organized is very helpful - there are chapters on specific topics, including a chapter of recipes. In the crop guide there are pages for each specific crop with tips, common issues, storage tips, and even a handy "growing difficulty level." I love that the chapter about planning your garden is followed by a chapter about different growing techniques like in containers, raised beds, etc. This is really a fantastic, all-around gardening book that covers so much information but still in a readable, easy to use way. I would HIGHLY recommend this one!

What's Eating Us: women, food, and the epidemic of body anxiety by Cole Kazdin

Cole Kazdin was one of the millions of women who suffered from an eating disorder at some point in her life. She was able to get treatment, and while that treatment didn't cure her it did start her on a path of recovery that did improve over time. But, it still continues to be something she struggles with. In this book she discovers that there hasn't been tons of research done around eating disorders, what causes them, what's the best way to treat them, etc. I agree with the author that most people don't view eating disorders as a mental illness, people think it's either a way to get attention or just a phase that teen/college girls go through. Maybe if more people viewed it as a mental illness it would get better studies, funding for treatment, etc. (although TONS of research has been done around schizophrenia and it hasn't been cured and treatments aren't much better than in the 1970's). This book is part memoir of Kazdin's own struggles with an eating disorder and part highlighting just how little is being done to help people suffering from this issue. I think writing this book helped the author almost as much or more as the official treatment she received because she really found a lot of support from other people through her research. I did find it a little odd that she included her struggle with infertility in the last 2 chapters of the book. While health overall can impact fertility, there is no hard data that shows people who've had eating disorders struggle more with infertility than anyone else. I also agree with a few of the reviews I read that said it was a little repetitive, especially with data - possibly because there's not much data out there. But, I did not expect to laugh out loud while reading a book about eating disorders, so I do think the author is a good writer. I found it an interesting book overall even though I have never struggled with an eating disorder.

Some quotes I liked:

"'I met with a nutritionist the other day,' my friend Joanie tells me. 'She asked what I ate for breakfast, and when I told her 'toast,' she said that was the absolute worst thing I could be eating.' Joanie blew air through her lips and I could feel the anger coming. 'Fuck her,' she said. 'Why can't I eat toast?'" (p. 20)

"Strong research supports the idea that when we decide to eliminate a food from our diet, a neurological response is triggered that actually makes us want it more. In the aptly named 'forbidden fruit' experiment, researchers found that the mere act of restricting or cutting out a particular food triggers the brain to become more responsive to that food. 'Those increased thoughts could result in an unhealthy preoccupation with the food, or to obsessive thoughts about it, which could produce mental anguish,' according to the study." (p. 26)

"Noom is part of a larger trend of weight loss companies masquerading as health-and-wellness programs. As consumers have become savvier and backlash against diet culture grows, the diet industry is adapting. 'They've co-opted the language of the body positivity movement, terms like 'anti-diet' and 'we're not about weight loss, we're about health,'' said psychologist Alexis Conason. 'It capitalized on our awareness that diets don't work. They promise the best of both worlds: You can reject dieting and still lose weight. But it's not true. It's a weight loss company, reinforcing those same oppressive norms that the body positivity movements are fighting against.'" (p. 41)

"Failure is the business model for the weight loss industry, according to Mann's research, and companies rely on repeat customers who return after gaining back lost weight. 'People blame themselves for a diet not working but they should be blaming the diet,' said Mann. 'I don't think this business can survive without repeat customers, and the only way they can have repeat customers is if their product doesn't work.'" (p. 42)

"In fact, less than 6 percent of people with eating disorders are medically diagnosed as underweight, according to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders. People in larger bodies are half as likely as those at a 'normal weight' or 'underweight' to be diagnosed with an eating disorder. As with so many other mental illnesses, there's no way to tell from the outside." (p. 50)

"At my sickest, I didn't look like the classic, dying, after-school-special anorexic. At least not with my clothes on. I just looked very thin. One or two people took me aside and told me I looked gaunt and was anything wrong? But 99 percent of the people I saw and worked with every day told me I looked amazing and asked what my secret was. Throwing up. Starving. Exercising compulsively." (p. 52)

"She views the so-called obesity epidemic more as a function of a changing food environment as opposed to a bunch of people who can't control themselves. It removes blame from the individual. Sure, there have always been and will always be people in larger bodies since the beginning of time. A lot of it is simply genetic. But now there are more of them, and Schwartz's research shows that this increase has a lot to do with the environment. Specifically, fast food, and foods that the average person would put in the 'junk food' category: soda, chips, candy, and other things you'd find in most vending machines. 'This isn't a willpower issue,' Tobias told me. 'It's a food environment that's specifically designed to override our biology. The R & D (research and development) to come up with a new Dorito flavor is insane and the whole point of sales. They want it to be something that you eat not once. That you eat one hundred times.'" (p. 90)

Dear Prudence: liberating lessons from Slate.com's beloved advice column by Daniel Lavery

Who doesn't love a good advice column? I guess if you don't, this is not the book for you. But, if you're a Dear Prudence reader or like advice columns in general then I think you would enjoy this book. Daniel Lavery was the 4th "Prudence" answering the Dear Prudence column on slate.com. He explains how he got the role and his take on answering advice column questions. The book is basically divided into sections based on the topic of the questions and includes several questions and Lavery's responses. I liked that he sometimes added or noted where he would now give different advice or an update to his original advice. Overall, it was a quick, fun read and I always liked reading the Dear Prudence column so it was nice to have a longer collection all together here.

Also, as an aside, until reading this book I did not realize that Daniel (who was Mallory Ortberg pre-transition) was John Ortberg's child. I knew John Ortberg from his Christian living books. Sadly, John Ortberg was forced to resign his role as head pastor of his church after Daniel found out his younger brother, John Ortberg III, had inappropriate feelings towards children and was allowed to continue serving in Children's ministry in their father's church. While I applaud Daniel for forcing this issue to be handled properly, it's extremely disappointing to see yet another Christian pastor/leader go down in flames because of not addressing inappropriate behavior in their church. Lavery tells this story not just to tell it but to highlight his own issues with family estrangement as those kinds of questions were often submitted to the Dear Prudence column and he has some very personal experience with that.

Ultra-Processed People: the science behind food that isn't food by Chris van Tulleken

Chris van Tulleken was working in a lab at University College London while working on his PhD. During his time there the lab staff would often present recent scientific publications and they would discuss the paper and whatever experiments or data was presented. An article was discussed that made the argument that "junk DNA" wasn't dead but was being suppressed by other cells or DNA and could be activated by certain criteria. This was a lightbulb moment for van Tulleken because he realized that our bodies are much more complex than even scientists often realize. After his time in the university lab, van Tulleken focused from viruses to the food industry and how food affects our bodies. In this book he makes the case that what he calls "ultra-processed food" or UPF is transforming our bodies in ways we don't even understand yet. He even participated in an experiment himself of eating only UPF for 4 weeks with bloodwork before and after to evaluate how it affected him. The basic premise is that ultra-processed foods are more harmful to our bodies than the same exact food that is homemade - for example a microwave lasagna is worse for you to eat than lasagna made from scratch. Scientists aren't entirely sure why this is, but this is important information as UPF is more and more prevalent. While the book has some good points and the experiments about eating UPF were interesting it is a VERY scientific book. There are very detailed descriptions of scientific experiments and studies that are not geared towards the regular reader. I skimmed over some of the heavy science content because there was a LOT. I do think this is important information, but I hesitate to recommend this one because it is so science-heavy and I just think the average reader (even someone very interested in this topic) would be overwhelmed.

Some quotes I liked:

"UPF now makes up as much as 60 per cent of the average diet in the UK and the USA." (p. 5)

"UPF has a long, formal scientific definition, but it can be boiled down to this: if it's wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient that you wouldn't usually find in a standard home kitchen, it's UPF. Much of it will be familiar to you as 'junk food,' but there's plenty of organic, free-range, 'ethical' UPF too, which might be sold as healthy, nutritious, environmentally friendly or useful for weight loss (it's another rule of thumb that almost every food that comes with a health claim on the packet is a UPF)." (p. 6)

"Sometimes entirely novel products and textures are created - things like gummy sweets or lentil-foam crisps - but usually the aim of UPF is to replace the ingredients of a traditional and much-loved food with cheaper alternatives and additives that extend shelf life, facilitate centralised distribution and, it turns out, drive excess consumption." (p. 20)

"Having solved the problems of cottonseed oil, P&G began a large campaign marketing de-toxified oil as Crisco, an acronym for crystallised cottonseed oil...By 1920, use of the product was widespread. Crisco shortening, essentially a fake lard, was possibly the first mass-produced UPF." (p. 28)

"But there is a wealth of data about the pharmaceutical industry, as well as other industries, showing that, when an industry funds science, it biases the results in favor of that industry." (p. 66)

"And then there's the fact that Carlos Monteiro found a bag of sugar on the table to be a sign of health in his research, because it signified a household that cooked. That doesn't, however, mean that sugar is healthy. It simply means that our diets are so terrible that buying your own sugar to make your own sweet food at home is healthier than buying pre-made industrial UPF with sugar added at source." (p. 118-119)

"Coke is not a public health agency. They aggressively sell drinks that, when consumed in excess, harm children and adults (although what constitutes excess is not written on the can, or anywhere else that I have been able to find). I don't want Coke shut down, but it seems uncontroversial to suggest that respectable health journals shouldn't publish research funded by Coca-Cola any more than they should publish health research funded by the tobacco industry...Coke should not fund public health programmes, and should have no influence over public health policy. The relationship between Coke and health policymakers should be adversarial - not collaborative." (p. 135)

"'Factory farming and UPFs are two sides of the same industrial food coin,' [Rob] Percival said. 'And then, of course, lots (though not all) of that factory farmed meat is subsequently turned into UPF.' The result of this is that, of the thousands of different strains of plants and breeds of animals that have been cultivated since the birth of agriculture, just twelve plants and five animals now make up 75 per cent of all the food eaten or thrown away on earth." (p. 257-58)

Ejaculate Responsibly: a whole new way to think about abortion by Gabrielle Blair

In this succinct book Gabrielle Blair lays out 28 reasons why unwanted pregnancies should be an issue for men (instead of just for women). The main headline as the title states is that men should be just as responsible for birth control as women. Men are fertile ALL THE TIME and for their ENTIRE lives, yet typically the onus is on women to deal with all things birth control. An obvious reason for this is that women are the ones who actually carry and give birth to the child, so in many ways it is more on the woman to manage her fertility because there are more consequences for her. But, as Blair points out it is society that often absolves men from their consequences and puts more of the weight on women. While I agree with her main points, I did feel the book was repetitive with many of the same points being made again just with different wording. I also think encouraging/suggesting that men should get vasectomies because they can be reversed is not a wholly logical suggestion. I think for permanent birth control - yes - but not as a normal method of birth control for someone who does want children in the future. To me the biggest point of this book is that couples need to discuss things more. If a woman is struggling with the side effects of birth control then that needs to be addressed with her partner (and doctor). If your partner isn't willing to take the reins on this or consider alternatives, then do you really want to be having sex with that person?! Some of these issues around birth control also speak to larger issues of women's emotional labor overall. I also liked that Blair started out by saying this is not a for or against abortion debate, but rather a new way of looking at this issue because without unwanted pregnancies there would be far, far few abortions. So regardless of where you stand on the issue of abortion, it's worth thinking about why has this become a "women's issue" when it still takes two to tango.

Some quotes I liked:

"Murder is the leading cause of death for pregnant women, often committed by the man who impregnated them. If that doesn't underscore the power dynamic in sexual relationships, I don't know what will." (p. 86)

"The United States, one of the richest countries in the world, is ranked #56 in maternal mortality - that's dead last among industrialized countries." (p. 95)

"The vast majority of those interested in relinquishing their child through adoption never seriously consider abortion. And for those who are denied access to abortion, 91 percent still won't choose adoption." (p. 104)

"Colorado created a program that made birth control free and easily accessible. The result? Abortion rates fell by almost half. And not just Colorado - St. Louis had a similar program with great results. As a bonus, these programs can save millions of dollars. The health department in Colorado reported that every dollar spent on that birth control initiative saved $5.85 for Colorado's Medicaid program." (p. 119)

On Our Best Behavior: the seven deadly sins and the price women pay to be good by Elise Loehnen

Any woman in the United States (and I'm sure anywhere in the world) understands that there are unwritten societal rules for women. Even in the age of #metoo and women-run companies there is still a double standard for what is acceptable and expected for women versus men. Elise Loehnen explores this from an interesting premise - that these expectations are based on the seven deadly sins. Whether you're religious or not, these ideas still come into play in the expectations for the lives and behavior of women. A monk named Evagrius Ponticus wrote a book called Talking Back that was organized into 8 books which identify eight "inner demons." Two centuries later, Pope Gregory I cut out sadness and created the "seven deadly sins" we're familiar with today - sloth, envy, pride, gluttony, greed, lust, and anger. Pope Gregory also ascribed all seven deadly sins to Mary Magdalene, starting the beginning of women being the root of all evil and temptation in the world. Fast forward to today and women are still being judged and held up against these seven deadly sins. Loehnen tells a lot of her own personal story in each of the chapters about each "deadly sin" and how women can fight back against these unfair standards and expectations. To me it was an eye-opening book and I'm someone very well-read on women's issues and feminism. I thought her arguments made sense and she did a good job of both showing how these expectations play out for women and how to change and fight back against them too.

I was surprised that the majority of negative reviews were because she used to be the chief content officer for goop. I'm not a fan of goop but that wouldn't have stopped me from reading this book. Loehnen has had several different jobs all in the magazine/publishing world and only very briefly mentions goop in the book. There were also a few other negative reviews that seemed to have missed the point entirely and were expecting some sort of history of the seven deadly sins - which this book never claims to be. Overall, I really liked it and felt like this was a unique look at society's expectations for women and now in knowing this we can better fight against these expectations in our own lives and work to make our society more equal for everyone.

LOTS of quotes I liked:

"While the Old Testament's Ten Commandments are concrete, the Seven Deadly Sins are amorphous, ripe for interpretation, which may have something to do with their continued potency. They are not about objective, tangible bad actions (you stole, you killed, you cheated); they are about human qualities where one crosses an imperceptible yet defining line (you are slutty, greedy, lazy!). And because they are subjective, they are easy to brandish like a whip. It's impossible to pinpoint the moment when you've transgressed. How much food is gluttonous? When does meeting your needs morph into greed?" (p. xviii)

"In its first emergence, Christianity was not the organized, religious arm of the patriarchy: In fact, it's easy to find textual evidence of Jesus's feminism. Yet early church fathers conveniently ignored this, eventually creating a canon that ensured the second-class status of women." (p. 9)

"The early promise of technology was to improve efficiency to liberate us from constant toil. In reality, it's done the opposite. The idea of fallow time, creative time, time for sitting and thinking or for visiting with an office mate suggests that you're not maximizing your yield, that there's room to give or do more." (p. 32)

"According to a Gallup poll that tracked the roles of men and women in U.S. households from 1996 to 2019, while the gap between women and men is tightening, the gender roles are as entrenched as ever: Women are more likely to do laundry (58 percent to 13 percent), prepare meals (51 percent to 17 percent), clean house (51 percent to 9 percent), grocery shop (45 percent to 18 percent), and wash dishes (42 percent to 19 percent). Both sexes are equally likely to pay routine bills. And then men take over when it comes to decisions about money (31 percent to 18 percent), keeping the car in good condition (69 percent to 12 percent), and performing yardwork (59 percent to 10 percent). It's depressing." (p. 40)

"While some of the pay gap is flat-out bias - women of equal experience earning less than men in the exact same role - the reason the pay gap is so stark is that so many of the jobs of 'care' in this country (teaching, nursing and home healthcare, food services, housekeeping, and childcare) pay the worst. This essential support is perceived as low-authority, low-status 'women's work' of lesser value. (Men in the care categories typically outearn women, a double slap)...According to a 2021 survey, male nurses (who comprise only 12 percent of the nursing workforce) earned an average of $38.61 an hour versus female nurses, who made $35.88 - annually, this $2.74 difference adds up to almost $6k a year." (p. 53)

"If you're single or childless, your value in the capitalist market approaches that of a man - but socially, you're perceived as broken or selfish. Pick your path. If you're a mother who doesn't work outside the home, you're wasting your potential. If you're a mother who does work outside the home, you're damaging your children." (p. 54)

"What I learned in boarding school is what I've witnessed at work lunches and dinners with friends in the years since - not complete abstention but a hypervigilance about food akin to a perpetual diet of can'ts and won'ts. Now, among fellow mom friends in our metabolism-waning forties, we've gone beyond an annual diet or cleanse to permanent restriction or orthorexia...Nobody looks ill; it's just an obsession that's not about health and it only tenuously about vanity. It's really about the fear of losing control." (p. 128)

"Rape and sexual assault are about entitlement because men can - and typically do - get away with it. Of every 1,000 sexual assaults that even make it to the criminal justice system, approximately 975 perpetrators walk free." (p. 187)

"The public perception of anger is that it's only ever righteous and proper for men to be visibly enraged. Therapist Harriet Lerner, who wrote the 1987 classic The Dance of Anger, nails this concept in a way that still holds true three decades later: 'The direct expression of anger, especially at men, makes us unladylike, unfeminine, unmaternal, sexually unattractive, or, more recently, 'strident.' Even our language condemns such women as 'shrews,' 'witches,' 'bitches,' 'hags,' 'nags,' 'man-haters,' and 'castrators.' They are unloving and unlovable. They are devoid of femininity....It is an interesting sidelight that our language - created and codified by men - does not have one unflattering term to describe men who vent their anger at women. Even such epithets as 'bastard' and 'son of a bitch' do not condemn the man but place the blame on a woman - his mother!'" (p. 210-211)

"This 'ill health' that [Gabor] Maté [a family medicine doctor and addiction specialist] mentions is the rampant autoimmune disease that overwhelmingly affects women, which he has treated and written about for decades: He continually points to women with 'superautonomous self-sufficiency,' or an unwillingness to ask anything of anyone else, as well as 'niceness' and its correlation with cancer, ALS, and autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis." (p. 223)