Healthy Meat Comes From Happy Animals

Anyone seen the front page of FoxNews today? Wow... I've watched videos like this on the internet, but never on a MAJOR news site. Kudos to FoxNews for being bold enough to run this story. Healthy meat comes from happy animals...

Undercover Video Shows Pig Farm Employees Allegedly Abusing Pigs

MSG - The Hidden Dangers

It's been over a year since I wrote here and I apologize for the delay. It's just amazing how busy life gets as your kids grow!!! :) A good friend of mine asked me a question on MSG the other day. I avoid it like the plague, but then it dawned on me that I'd never written about it much here. I've only mentioned avoiding it casually. MSG is an excitotoxin, which means it excites brain cells to the point it's toxic. It's basically fertilizer for cancer cells... And the things it does to a developing child's brain is just sickening.

Very scary stuff, but it's so hard to avoid since it's in EVERYTHING - chinese food, canned soups, powdered soups, microwavable meals, fast food restaurants, salad dressings, etc. And it's not just in everything, it's also DISGUISED behind many different names such as hydrolized protein, natural flavoring or smoke flavoring. It doesn't always just come out and say "monosodium glutamate" like it should.

I found a fabulous 4-part special on the dangers of MSG that I thought I'd post here. Part 2 is broken into 2a and 2b because it was the longest segment. Enjoy!

Dining Out: What are you really paying for?

I've asked myself this question many times over the past year when we we get the wonderful opportunity to have "date night" together. We've been finding ourselves more and more drawn to small, organic restaurants. There's something about going out and knowing you're being pampered and NOURISHED at the same time. We are so lucky here in the Northwest to have a nice selection of natural, sustainable, organic restaurants. We've been to several over the past year and really enjoyed the experience. We've also found ourselves being choosier where we take the whole family out for meals (we usually eat at home) when we go out - opting to eat deli or prepared foods at PCC or Whole Foods... or a quick dinner at Chipotle's Mexican Grill (LOVE that place!).

Last weekend for date night, we chose a fabulous restaurant called Bennett's Bistro on Mercer Island. They filter their own water (in a huge, 3-chamber filtration process), serve vegetables and fruits from local farms, RAW cheeses from local dairies, Sunshine Dairy (the brand I buy) products and sustainably farmed meats and seafoods. The meal was absolutely fantastic.




We ordered the salmon poki appetizer (raw salmon on top of avocado with a poki sauce), which was to die for! Then I ordered their "Tip of the Iceberg" salad with a blue cheese-lemon vinagrette, Oregonzola raw cheese, toasted hazelnuts and tomatoes - I substituted the iceberg lettuce for romaine. Horus ordered their turkey burger with Beecher's (local cheese company) mac-n-cheese and chipotle cilantro coleslaw. Mmmmmmmmmm!!!!!

I'm so proud of how natural and organic my own kitchen has become... It's already expensive to SHOP for organic and natural grocery items... I guess part of me just can't get over thinking - why pay extra money for food that I wouldn't serve my family at home? At least when we're home, I know (for about 95% of our food) WHERE it came from, EXACTLY what's in it and HOW it was raised/farmed.

How do you feel about this? What does a fancy dinner really mean to you? Does it mean just simply spending a lot of money? Does it mean getting the absolutely best, most expensive food available (like a mouth-watering, well-marbled, fifty-dollar, corn-fed steak or the most beautiful, bright-orange fillet of salmon), regardless of where it came from and how it was "farmed?" I ask myself this question constantly when we go out to eat - anywhere. ...and if it's not the greatest restaurant, I try to pick the most natural item on the menu.

Do you think about this when you eat out AT ALL or am I just a weird-o? :)