Another excerpt from "Animal Vegetable Miracle," Barbara Kingsolver's 2007 book.

If I were to define my style of feeding my family, on a permanent basis, by the dictum, "Get it over with, quick," something cherished in our family life would collapse. And I'm not just talking waistlines, though we'd miss those. I'm discussing dinnertime, the cornerstone of our family's mental health. If I had to quantify it, I'd say 75 percent of my crucial parenting effort has taken place during or surrounding the time our family convenes for our evening meal. I'm sure I'm not the only parent to think so. A survey of national Merit scholars — exceptionally successful eighteen-year-olds crossing all lines of ethnicity, gender, geography, and class — turned up a common thread in their lives: the habit of sitting down to a family dinner table. It's not just the food making them brilliant. It's probably the parents, — their care, priorities and culture of support. [pp 125-126]

People often ask me, misguidedly, what's the one thing that's going to reverse the obesity trend, I first reply that there is no one thing. Obesity arises from such a terrible tangle of forces that no single change is going to have an effect. But I am persuaded that family dinner would be a huge influence in so many positive directions.

Welcome to the latest round of “10 words or less,” in which I ask brief questions and request brief answers. Today’s subject is a NEDA Navigator, in which NEDA is the National Eating Disorder Association and navigators are laymen who’ve come through an eating disorder, either personally or familially, and now help others. Remember, please: No counting! 10 words is a goal, not a rule, and besides, let’s see you do it.

Name Vic Avon
Age 29
Residence Brick Township, N.J. 
Author “My Monster Within: My Story,” published in May 2010.
What your disorder was like “Very extreme, very deadly, a classic case of anorexia.”
When you were last active “I stepped into a hospital [University Medical Center, Princeton, N.J.] March 11, 2008.”
Can you recall a low point? “It was so bad that I prayed every night that I wouldn’t wake up in the morning.”

Another excerpt from "Animal Vegetable Miracle," Barbara Kingsolver's 2007 book:

Nobody should need science to prove the obvious, but plenty of studies do show that regularly eating cheaply produced fast food and processed snack foods slaps on extra pounds that increase the risks of diabetes, cardiovascular harm, joint problems, and many cancers. As a country we're officially over the top: The majority of our food dollars buy those cheap calories, andd most of our citizens are medically compromised by weight and inactivity. The incidence of obesity-associated diabetes has more than doubled since 1990, with children the fastest-growing class of victims. ... One out of every three dollars we spend on health care, by some recent estimates, is paying for the damage of bad eating habits. One out of every seven specically pays to assuage (but not cure) the mulitple heartbreaks of diabetes — kidley failure, stokes, blindness, amputated limbs. [Page 116]

This paragraph, coming a just a few words after the previous one, underlines the false economy of choosing what we eat based primarily on cost. If it were any other commodity, that might be more defensible, but food is by far the one commodity that determines health, vigor, longevity. It is just staggering to realize that this obvious fact has become so undervalued: You can get a pretty good deal on a truckload of sawdust, but you wouldn't eat it just because it was cheap.

So there I was, gabbing happily with Pat Hayes of Hayes Family Farm on Saturday at the Boston Local Food Festival when he said proudly that Organic Valley, the largest organic dairy cooperative in the country, supplies all the milk to Stonyfield Farm for its organic yogurt.

Here's another excerpt from Barbara Kingsolver's 2007 book, "Animal Vegetable Miracle."

Grocery money is an odd sticking point for U.S. citizens, who on average spend a lower proportion o our income on food than people in any other country, or any heretofore in history. In our daily fare, even in school lunches, we broadly justify consumption of tallow-fried animal pulp on the grounds that it's cheaper than whole grains, fresh vegetables, hormone-free dairy, and such. Whether on school boards or in families, budget keepers may be aware of the health tradeoff but still feel compelled to economize on food — in a manner that would be utterly unacceptable if the health risk involved an unsafe family vehicle or a plume of benzene running through a school basement. It's interesting that penny-pinching is an accepted defense for toxic food habits, when frugality so rarely rules other consumer domains. [Page 115]

As a compulsive eater and food addict in recovery for a very long time, these issues are mine in degrees greater than the general population, even if you'd think that my experience shoulda learned me better by now. Good nutrition and healthy ingredients are bywords not only of my personal health but of my professional standing, but I still bee-line for the reduced-price cart at my farm stand.

I was conversing the other day with my autodidact pal, Ron, when we stuck on a point about eating: He considers "food addiction" and "compulsive eating" to be the same thing, and I don't.

I’ve gained weight recently. In overweight/obese America, that’s certainly not unusual, and the circumstance can provoke reactions ranging from klaxons and self-hatred to cluelessness and denial.

For today, I don’t have any of those, and I’m delighted. Even though I weigh myself only a handful of times of year, almost exclusively in doctors’ offices, I became aware that my bod was burgeoning by the feel of my clothing. So that’s how I avoided cluelessness.

Hi, friends.

Just wanted to point out a few small changes to the site, underwritten by the move from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 — just as all the hip kids (or is that the nerdy ones?) — are going from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. (Drupal is an open-source content-management system and blogging platform.)

My story on Patti Small, who takes her ever-more-popular service of sharpening knives to farmers' markets in Greater Boston, was in the Globe today. You may recall that I also featured her on my blog not too long ago.

Another excerpt from "Animal Vegetable Miracle," Barbara Kingsolver's 2007 book. This one comes from the same paragraph we visited last time, but I wanted to make a separate point:

Crop failure is a possibility all farmers understand, and one reason why the traditional farmstead raised many products, both animal and vegetable, unlike the monocultures now blanketing our continent's midsection. [p. 54]

The notion of crop failure — hell, the notions of crops at all, as opposed to consumer goods sold under plastic wrap in supermarkets, has longer standing in most Americans' thinking — came to me in a new way during the hurricane last month.