Recently I ventured back to my UC Davis roots and ate at the Dining Commons (yes, among freshmen!). Back in the day the food was decent, especially by dorm standards. However, now it’s off the charts great. There is a lot of cool emphasis on mindful eating, healthy options and they have a gluten-free and vegan section that would blow your mind! The old faves are still there, like pizza, but it’s not the emphasis. Check out my Post on Davis Life Magazine to read more.
Today I was reading the the UC Davis food blog and came across this post about improving wheat. The benefits to this new wheat is better iron, zinc and protein. Cool right?
Well, maybe. Look closer. Where does the protein come from? Gluten? Yep.
Now, is this a good thing? With the prevalence of gluten sensitivity on the rise, should we be consuming highly glutenized wheat? I get it that it’s resistant to insects, but maybe the vunerability to insects is part of the balance for natural wheat.
Is this another example of ‘too much of a good thing’ with science? Just because we can increase the gluten of wheat doesn’t mean we should.
To me, this is just another reason to eat spelt, a cousin of wheat that is not genetically modified like wheat is because it’s not as ‘important’ of a crop. Wheat makes up a huge proportion of most people’s diets, so it make sense why farmers want to improve yield. But Spelt doesn’t have those pressures, yet.
Is there ‘heirloom’ wheat? Hmm.. I don’t know – maybe that is what spelt and Kamut and bulgar are – heirloom wheats that continue to become more and more distinct from everyday wheat as genetic modification expands.
Reason # 1,295 that I love the Davis Coop: Almond Milk coffee drinks. You’d think more people would have caught on to the idea that soy and dairy are two big allergens, and would offer something else. But it’s a rare occasion down here for that to be th case. The Coop is leading the pack with the revolutionary idea of offering almond milk in their coffee drinks AND having Stevia.
Why almond milk over rice? For me almond milk is trumping rice milk because it is lower in sugar, calories and has a richer flavor than rice milk. I currently stock up on Silk Almond milk in the half-gallon at Safeway when I’m making my own drinks, or buying a quart for $1.69 at Trader Joe’s in Sacto!
Other coffee houses, like Common Grounds, in Davis will make a drink if I bring the almond milk, but I still get charged full price, so it gets spendy.
yay for Coops! They also make their own vanilla flavoring and use cocoa powder instead of sugary cocoa syrup.
What about you bloggies, what are your favorite coffee shop kunundrum solutions?
Healing comes in all shapes and sizes. If you would have asked me a year ago if I thought that bread would offer me some kind of therapy I would have laughed at you! I would have said “no way, bread is what drives me to NEED therapy”.
But oh, how this universe likes to surprise us. It all started when a classmate offered up some Amish friendship bread starter casually in class one day. Intrigued by the idea of anything fermented and edible, I gladly accepted. Now I’m hooked.
I’ve baking bread every 10 days since! I discovered something magical about the process of baking bread. It’s slow. It requires patience. Like a fine wine, the starter gets better with age, so every turn of the dough (10 days) offers up something new. It’s kind of like creating a culinarly legacy. I hope that over time I can create my own unique flavor of homemade breads.
The process of making bread is therapeutic in itself. Diving my hands into the dough, feeling it run through my fingers is extremely liberating and just plain fun. Working with my hands soothes me and it’s a great compliment to my studies, which get me caught up in my head way too often!
And oh, how the house smells so warm and comforting when fresh bread is baking. I love the responses I get from my hubby and landlord. It’s like the pied piper calling when that bread comes out of the oven.
The best discovery of all is how good I feel when I share this bread. I’ve given start to some friends and classmates…now we have fun chatting about it, swapping ideas, and going off on tangents about other edible creatings. I’ve even sent some in the mail to distant friends and it warms my heart to think that they are keeping the process going.
Bread is one of the most fundamental foods of life. We break bread together to nourish our bodies, but also our spirits. I’ve realized that I was missing a deep sense of connection to people. I’m around people all day, but that is not the same as being connected. By making bread and sharing it, I feel like I’m doing some sort of kindness to people I care about, and in return getting kindness back. Everybody loves homemade bread. It’s something we can all relate to and to receive something hand made is a treat in this modern world.
So, me, the offwhite girl, must pay homage to the thing I’d gone without for so long. Funny thing, the more I make it for others, the less I want to eat it in excess. It’s too special to abuse with mindless eating or binging.
So, if any of you want some start, let me know. It’s my own little brand of offwhite sourdough and it’s delcious!
You don’t have to be a gardener to enjoy an awesome garden. So much inspiration for the UC Davis “Good Life Garden”. I wish more organizations would support such an endeavor, as it beautifies their surroundings and offers the community a chance to learn, taste, and experience whole foods at their finest.
I wrote about it at Davis Life Magazine. Click HERE to read that article. It’s short with good pics!
tonight Matt and I ventured out to the Davis Dining Commons – the very same one I frequented as a college freshman oh so many years ago! Dang was it GOOD. I’m so impressed at how they integrate healthy options (quinoa burgers) and sustainability (Getting most of thier produce from the local campus growers). I wrote about it for Davis Life Magazine (Check me out on Monday in “mindful moments”!) but thought I’d share the post with you too, as it won’t be up for a couple of days on DLM.
This reminds me of how tasty the food was at Willamette Univ in Salem too. Apparently we weren’t the only ones who thought so because Rachel Ray even stopped by on her $40/day TV show back in the day. So maybe this will inspire you to seek out some uncommon dining options in your neck of the woods.
Pop quiz: Where in Davis can you get two freshly prepared dinners that include burgers on whole grain buns, customized salads, curried fish pasta, drinks and dessert of your choosing for $12 a person?
You scored an “A” if you said the Segundo Dining Commons on the UC Davis campus, and that is the very grade I’d give them too.
While dining there tonight (btw: I had the quinoa vegan burger, baked fries, salad and hot chocolate), I caught up with manager Mike Baldocchi to ask about the emphasis on health and sustainability at the DC. Simple strategies like switching to baked fries, reducing the oil usage, offering a huge salad bar with lean protein and local veggies, eliminating trays at each station (to avoid overloading the tray with food), and offering a Farmer’s Market meal every 2 weeks are just a few of the ways that the DC helps its patrons enjoy a healthy, mindful eating experience.
Most impressive were the Vegan food sections, Gluten free breads, creative dishes, such as Chicken Afritata and Tabouleh, and the colorful presentation. This is not your typical dorm food. Portions were perfectly sized (about 8 oz/plate) and you have to walk all the way to the back of the DC to grab a soda (time to question, do I really need that?).
I especially enjoyed loading up on fresh spinach, garbanzos, beets, chopped egg and turkey meat during my trip to the salad bar, and was delighted to see 8 oz coffee cups (as opposed to 12 oz or bigger!) when I treated myself to hot chocolate at the end of my meal. This place just screams balanced eating! To be sure, there are your typical DC treats – pizza, regular burgers, cakes and cookies, but it’s nicely mixed with other options. Even better, the DC get’s as much of their food as possible from local growers (even on campus) and they encourage patrons to be mindful of wasting food and napkins to support sustainability.
Oh, and most importantly the food is really good! Seriously. Go see for yourself!
Hi bloggies,
I am prepping for my Grains class at the Davis Food Co-op on Wednesday, and I came across a handy-dandy website about cooking grains. I must be hungry because the recipes all looked fantastic too. My next adventure is going to be in toasting grains before cooking with them – an inspiration I just gained from the site.
Also, stay tuned because yesterday I made gluten-free crepes for the FIRST time and they were fabulous. Easy, light, and less carby than a pancake -love it! We ate them with sauteed asparagus, onion, and spinach….pics on the way 🙂
“Once there was a young warrior. Her teacher told her that she had to do battle with fear. She didn’t want to do that. It seemed too aggressive; it was scary; it seemed unfriendly. But the teacher said she had to do it and gave her the instructions for the battle. The day arrived. The student warrior stood on one side, and fear stood on the other. The warrior was feeling very small, and fear was looking big and wrathful. They both had their weapons. The young warrior roused herself and went toward fear, prostrated three times, and asked, “May I have permission to go into battle with you?” Fear said, “Thank you for showing me so much respect that you ask my permission.” Then the young warrior said, “How can I defeat you?” Fear replied, “My weapons are that I talk fast, and I get very close to your face. Then you get completely unnerved, and you do whatever I say. If you don’t do what I tell you, I have no power. You can listen to me, and you can have respect for me. You can even be convinced by me. But if you don’t do what I say, I have no power.” In this way, the student warrior learned how to defeat fear.”
Pema Chodron in “When Things Fall Apart”
This short parable sums up a lot for me about fear and how I’ve been dragged into battle with it and used food to overcome that battle. Sometimes this is so subtle, and I think it stared so very long ago that I can’t even remember the first time I ate to soothe an internal fear.
This also reminds me that I need to share with you what I learned at the food addiction syposium. I’m going to post several times about what I learned because it touched me at many levels.
First, there is STRONG evidence that certain food substances (ie palatable foods, like sweets and high fat/high sugar foods) are addictive in certain individuals. More on that later.
Philosophically this whole symposium really got down to the essence of addiction to me, which is fear. Fear usually means a concern that something is going to be taken away, or taken out of our control. We learn at a young age sometimes that food will soothe this very base emotion. I’ve often heard that the opposite of love is fear. Love is harminious and self-love is usually associated with good boundary setting, self-care, self respect and awareness. It’s hard to feel a deep/strong self love and give into fear at the same time (in my experience).
I think culturally we too use food to mask our fears. Commercials tell us to savor the flavor of some product and we’ll be sexy, wealthy, our celebrating with friends. So we keep buying in (literally) and replacing our intrinsic coping mechanisms with this false promise. They play to our fear of being alone or unwanted in a subtle way. We feel food insecurities even when there are none, and we feel culturally entitled to having the same freedomes with food that we have with life – we should be able to have access to what we want, when we want. But, what does that do to us? It makes me personally reliant on that external substance (sugar) as my coping tool, as my reassurance that life is okay. It means the voice of fear is larger than the voice of inner trust. I can recall a moment of awareness when I moved to San Diego and, having taken a job that paid 50% less than my previous job, I was obsessed with grocery shopping. Groceries were my new form of abundance because I needed to feel that I was okay and life was okay even with less income. It go worse when I started my own business (very shaky ground, in my mind) and my sugar addiction EXPLODED!
During the symposium, what was interesting is that the most successful “treatments” for food compuslions, binge eating or chronic overeating revolve around mindfulness, spirituality and attitude changes. Not once did we talk about nutritional changes to get people to kick the habit. Sure, nutrition is really important and cravings can be instigated by chemical imbalances perpetuated by poor nutrition. I think that is 50% of the story, but not necessarily the most powerful, or the origin of the problem.
But I thought the juciest messages were in the power of our minds, or spirits and our need for community support to get us beyond the fear of letting go. What would happen if you didn’t say ‘yes’ to that piece of cake, extra handful of chips, or large coffee drink? I’ve seriously felt physical fear when imagining never having a certain food again (hot chocolate for me – that is my big attachment). Physical fear, people. Crazy. It’s just a substance but I’ve projected onto it a false sense of security that I think gives me extra ‘power’ to deal with life’s demands. But it doesn’t. It creates more demands instead of less. It distracts me but I’m caught up with the distraction because it’s familiar.
I was very excited and reaffirmed by the symposium because there are people in this world other than me who want to understand food behaviors and want to help others and themselves change for the better. It’s certainly new frontier in the science world and that is exciting. It’s also a new frontier when for most of us when we, for the very first time, dive into our inner landscape and have to tell that fear, to it’s face that we don’t have to listen to it. Can you do it?
Would love to hear your ideas about fear and food. Agree? Disagree? Somewhere in the middle? Do tell!!
Funny how life always seems to come full circle. Yesterday I found myself in the Nutrition 10 office grading undergraduate diet projects. The full circle aspect of this is that when I was 18 I took Nutrition 10 (Same professor even!) and I too did my diet projects.
Looking at the dietary habits of 18-20 yr olds really got me thinking back to what I was like at an 18 yr old. Ha! I was nothing close to an off white eater, though my belief was that my diet was rather healthy because it contained mostly fat-free foods (remember the fat-free craze of the 1990’s??)
Here’s a little glimpse into my THEN and NOW dietary habits
THEN (living at UC Davis dorms, eating dorm food, rarely eating out)
Age: 18 Height: 5’3″ Weight: 128-132 (from teens to twenties)
Dislikes: celery, potatoes,spices, sauces, anything creamy/fatty, red meat, ethinic food, except chinese, avocado, large meals, hot melty cheese
Likes: plain noodles, pasta, bread, bagels, salad, any fruit, chicken, anything low fat and high sugar, chinese food, quesadillas, pretzels, yogurts
Major Weakness: sugar in any form, including sugar cubes, which I would eat at work while making copies.
Breakfast
cold cereal: Golden Grahams/Captain Crunch/Raisin Bran/Corn bran combo + 1% or nofat milk and a banana. I probably ate 2-3 servings of cereal in 1 bowl
Lunch (Hungry by 10 am, so my lunch got portioned out all day)
Apple, bagel w/nonfat cream cheese OR fat free yogurt, carrot sticks, water, turkey sandwhich on bread w/no mayo and maybe 1 slice of cheese (sometimes in place of the bagel, sometime I had both)
Dinner (almost always between 5-5:30pm)
1 bowl of salad: lettuce, corn, carrots, red beans, croutons, maybe some cucumber and nonfat vinegareette, veggie burger, turkey burger (both with bun) or pasta with red sauce. Maybe some pizza every now and again. Usually topped it off with the frosting from a piece of cake or a small vanilla soft serve cone.
Snacks: Candy, Candy, Candy! We could buy little pieces of candy for 2-5 cents, so I’d get Laffy Taffy, mini-Junior mints, Blow pops, etc. Never chocolate. I also supplemented my candy consumption with regular slurpee consumption and frozen yogurt as much as possible (I had a snack card that gave me $$ for snacks every quarter. I spent most of it at TCBY yogurt. Every now and again I’d switch it up and get some pretzels because they are low fat)
Activity level: moderate – I worked out about 3-4 days/week: running, weights, step aerobics. I biked and walks most places.
NOW (cook at home, eat out 1x/week)
Age: 33 Height: 5’3″ Weight: 132 – 134 (same for about 6 yrs)
Dislikes: creamy sauces,mayo/cream dressings, potato chips, extemely salty foods, celery (except soup), hot melty cheese, crappy, processed foods, food that makes me crave sugar
Likes: just about everything else. Still like the sweet things, just don’t eat them as much. Haven’t had a piece of candy since 2004 and no gum since 2005
Major weakness: SWEET, CREAMY BEVERAGES: hot chocoate, tea with half/half, even decaf coffee w/almond milk and honey…..oh goodness……
Breakfast: Usually 1 of three meals: 2 eggs + fruit, protein smoothie + fruit/veggies, or oatmeal or quinoa with nuts/fruit and maybe protein powders.
Lunch (Not hungry for approx 3-4 hrs): at least 1 full cup of veggies (mostly salad, which is like 2-3 cups), sweet potatoes, beans, leftover chicken or fish, or burger patty, hummus, avocado, oil based dressing. 70% plants at least!
Dinner: much like lunch, usually add fruit at the end for a dessert. Often have lean protein in larger serving. Likely to skip the grain if I had grain with breakfast, for a total of 2 grains/day. Rare occasions (1-2x/yr): Pizza. If I go out, its Chipotle, mexican, or maybe thai or Pluto’s salad bar. I eat all meats and love sauces, spices, etc.
Snacks: not a snacker, try to eat in a way to sustain energy better. I do drink tea and hot almond milk and hot chocolate, which is a between meal occurrence. 1 of the 3 is likely on a daily basis. Also LOTS of water.
Veg and hummus or 1 hardboiled egg are favorite snacks. I also love chips/guac but can’t put the breaks on w/that dish!
Activity level: moderate to high. Exercising 1 hr x 5-6 days/week, mix of running, spin, yoga, cycing, climbing, weights, plyometrics, and walking. Whatever sounds fun.
In some ways my food has gotten better, but the mental obsession with sugar/emotional eating has gotten worse since I was 18. While I was obsessed with thinness, I just figured my diet was great back then so I didn’t associate eating sugar with any feeling state. Now that I do, the struggle to relinquish that urge to eat under stress has gotten more of my attention. I’ve grown a lot as a person, having to look inward and what role sugar plays in my life, but it’s also consumed a lot of my mental energy. However, the journey I’ve been on has been the catalyst for this blog, and most of what I do, so I’d not change it for anything..well, maybe I’d change it for a dozen donuts but we won’t talk about that 🙂
Changing your diet is going to do more than just alter your waisteline. Whether you go off white, simply reduce portions, go Atkins, go Zone diet, or just stop eating junk food, something is going to change.
The non-weight related changes that happen when we change our diets is a seriously undervalued concept, in my opinion. I think its these somewhat ‘immeasurable’ changes that actually drive people to continue making good dietary choices because they are the stuff that real life is made of. It’s not like being skinnier by itself is a lifechanging experience, but rather the new behaviors, attitudes, relationships, etc that happen.
I was recently inspired by a client who mentioned that a week of eating healthy made her want to color her hair, as an act of self-care. Who knew that eating healthy could lead to a better hair day? So I thought it might be helpful to you off-white readers to know what to look out for when you make healthy choices. This by no means a comprehenisve list, and I’d love to hear for YOU about how your life changes when you eat well.
Some of the ways healthy eating can change your life include:
And the list just goes on and on! Thanks to all of those who have shared their stories and inspired ME to think about all the wonderful reasons why I love to eat healthy because I forget sometimes too!
Off White Living 