A Better Way to Eat Sweet Potatoes

For most of my life the only time I ate sweet potatoes was at Thanksgiving when they were covered in butter and brown sugar, which is not really the way most vegetables (or foods in general) should be eaten! But then I came to Winston-Salem and started to notice sweet potatoes in the Refectory and on menus in almost every restaurant I visited. One day I tried sweet potato fries and I don’t think I have missed the butter and brown sugar version a bit. I prefer my sweet potato fries baked even though they don’t get as crispy. I think they are so good, especially because they are super easy to make. As an added bonus, sweet potatoes are almost always available locally and cheaply in the supermarket and they are great at any time of the year. I don’t follow a specific recipe to make sweet potato fries, I just cut fresh sweet potatoes into strips, season them with salt and a drizzle of olive oil and put them in the oven for about thirty minutes at 425 degrees. They come out perfectly and taste great!

This week I went for part of a bike ride with the class and also went for a walk with my younger sister over the weekend.

Such an active week!

This week has been super! I've been SOOOOO active!

Monday: I played tennis with my boyfriend for about 2 hours. Now, since he doesn't actually know how to play tennis and lifts weights on the regular, he thought it was a home run derby contest. Needless to say, it was a lot of ball chasing, which still counts as exercise, right? Regardless, we both got something out of it...but the end of the two hours, we could at least volley the ball back and forth. He learned some tennis skills, aka, how NOT to hit it OFF the court, and I burned some calories.

Tuesday: I ran for just under 5 miles through Robinhood. It was a good run--I felt accomplished. I was tired and sore after, and let me tell you--I felt the burn on Wednesday.

Wednesday: In the spirit of Academic Day of Excellence, I did no physical exercise that day. Wait, that's NOT the spirit of ADE? Oh well, I was sore. Bottom line: my butt slept in, with my legs and lungs.

Thursday (aka Today): I swam TWICE today! I got back to my competitive swimming days. I sway just over 6,000 yards today...and I'm positive I'll pay tomorrow. I got out of the pool around 5pm, and slept a solid 3 hours...that's how tired I was.

Overall, I think it's been a good week of productiveness, well, physically. Let's NOT discuss the loads of work I've put off all week.

Promoting Travel to Local Farms

One thing I really miss about not living at home is getting to read the newspaper (in my case, Raleigh’s News & Observer) every day. Now I try my best to read the Sunday paper whenever I am at home, like I did this weekend. I was really thrilled to see this article on the back page of the Life section about travelling to different farms in North Carolina. The article is about a book written by Diane Daniel entitled “Farm Fresh North Carolina”. The book chronicles Daniel’s travels around the state going to different farms, farmers markets, roadside stands and other farm-related places. The goal of her book is to encourage readers to make day trips to some of the destinations included and to increase awareness of all the wonderful farms North Carolina has to offer its citizens. Daniel’s book is divided by region and she offers several different itineraries for each area. The article in the paper included ideas for people in Guilford county that mostly centered around Greensboro. They included visiting the Greensboro Farmers’ Curb Market (the oldest of its kind in the state, established in 1874), the Edible Schoolyard at the Greensboro Children’s Museum (a great way to educate young children about agriculture), and a number of different restaurants (such as Lucky 32). The article, and Daniel’s book, helps to let people know that there are places out there where they can spend some time learning more about their food and having firsthand experiences with how that food is produced.

This week I went to my yoga class and walked for about an hour. I am writing this before our class outing on Wednesday, but I am planning on biking when we go out on the trail.

Food or Fuel?

This week I read an article from the New York Times called “Rush to Use Crops as Fuel Raises Food Prices and Hunger Fears” (which you can read here) by Elisabeth Rosenthal. This article sheds light on the growing biofuel industry and the way it impacts available food crops. There is a rush to convert energy use to biofuel, and in order to produce this biofuel companies need raw materials like corn and sugar cane. Using these crops for fuel rather than food reduces the amount of food available.

The article gives the example of Thailand and the cassava that grows there. Thailand is a developing nation and its cassava supply is an important source of food for its citizens. Unfortunately, cassava is also an important source of biofuel. In 2009, however, 98% of the cassava that was exported from Thailand was sent to China to be made into biofuel, meaning that there was much less of it available to be sold as food to people who depend on it. This contributes to world hunger and increases issues people in these smaller nations already have with nutrition. Additionally, this shrinking food supply increases prices because there is less availability. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Index estimates that food prices rose 15% between October and January alone. This increase put food prices at their highest since the group started tracking them twenty years ago.

Overall, I found this article very interesting because I had not thought about how the increase of the use of biofuel would impact people in different ways. There must be decisions made about whether these crops should be used for food for people in developing nations or if they should be used for fuel. I think that this is an issue that will need to be studied much more before any decisions can be made, but I also feel that it is important for the people growing these crops to benefit from them rather than seeing them made into fuel that they will not be able to use.

This week I went for a walk in my neighborhood for about an hour. I have also been taking a yoga class at Salem, which I really enjoy, in order to fulfill my physical education requirement.

Local vs. Regional

After Dr. Ferrier came to talk to us this week she made me really start to think about where the food we eat comes from. I looked in my family’s refrigerator and noticed an interesting trend. The majority of our food was produced in places other than North Carolina. In fact, most of our food came from places that seemed impractical. We had apples from Whole Foods that were grown in Washington, carrots from Whole Foods grown in Texas and milk from Target that was produced in Minnesota. We also had salad dressing that was supposedly from Biltmore House, which is in Asheville. I assumed that this meant that it would be produced in that general area, but actually it is produced in West Virginia. The only products in our refrigerator that were from North Carolina were butter and heavy cream from Harris Teeter, which were produced in Matthews, NC near Charlotte. Even though these were produced the closest to our home, they still came from outside of the 100-mile “local food radius” that we talked about in class. I was really perturbed by this, because I had never realized how illogical it is to eat foods that are not local. I decided that I wanted to find out more about this phenomenon, so I went to our local Whole Foods.

A new Whole Foods just opened near my house. Whole Foods presents itself as an alternative to big, national grocery store chains and lulls customers into believing that by shopping there they are being more responsible consumers. I always felt like I was doing the right thing by shopping at Whole Foods, and I was really surprised when I looked in my refrigerator and realized that the organic produce I felt so good about buying was coming from places that are so far away. The apples I bought came from the other side of the country. It does not make any sense for apples being sold in North Carolina to be grown in Washington when there are apples that grow in our state. When I went into Whole Foods I noticed that a lot of the fresh produce they were selling had signs advertising it as “local”. I decided to see just how true this was.

Looking through the different fruits and vegetables I noticed items from across the United States (California, Florida, Idhao and Washington were all popular places) as well as various countries (Chile, Mexico, Bolivia and Argentina). Obviously, these items are far from local, but they also are not being promoted as such. I decided to shift my attention to local and regional products.

I asked an employee how these labels were defined, and he told me that “local” products come from “the entire state of North Carolina and a small slice of Virginia” while “regional” items can come from “South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia, and a small bit of Florida, anywhere within a seven hour drive”. While this is more local and regional than California or Washington they are still shipping these products a long distance, adding to consumers’ overall footprint. I looked at the “local” products and found items that came from places twenty to one hundred miles away. I think that if Whole Foods wants to market these products as local they need to reconfigure just what that means for them and rein in these distances. The entire state of North Carolina is not “local”. In my opinion, that would be “regional”, but I think that this further proves that these terms are very subjective and do not have a particularly solid definition. Overall, my trip to Whole Foods proved to me that these terms are very loosely defined and that it is important to look closely at just exactly what they mean.

This week I took my dog for a walk in a local park because the weather was so nice. I enjoyed getting out in the nice weather and having an entire weekend that finally felt like spring!

Exercising away...still.

Over spring break, I'll admit...I WAS LAZY.

However, I did run once and take the dog out for a walk once. If you've ever taken a 68 pound English bulldog out on a walk, you would agree it's a workout worthy of posting.

Using MyPlate has been interesting. I will say I'm not the best at adding my food as I eat, or even in the day I eat. I've found it takes longer to do that I normally have periodically throughout the day. So, I end up writing it all down and doing 2-3 days worth of entries at a time. It's a bad idea...in case you were wondering. But I'm getting great ideas for our project...things like "I wish myplate was FREE for my blackberry!"

Just a shout out to the class...everyone PLEASE get us your answers to our questions as soon as possible. Thanks ladies!