Kitchen Literacy

Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes from and Why We Need to Get it Back

by Ann Vileisis

Ask children where food comes from, and they'll probably answer: "the supermarket." Ask most adults, and their replies may not be much different.

Where our foods are raised and what happens to them between farm and supermarket shelf have become mysteries. How did we become so disconnected from the sources of our breads, beef, cheeses, cereal, apples, and countless other foods that nourish us every day?

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Everyone Has Time for Fitness

Think you don't have time for fitness? Kevin Gianni and Annmarie Colameo beg to differ.

A certified personal trainer and a certified athletic trainer, respectively, the husband and wife team are the owners of Lifestyle Fitness In-Home Personal Training.

Kevin and Annmarie recently published "The Busy Person's Fitness Solution," a new book outlining a wellness system that promises to "get you motivated, skyrocket your energy levels and boost your productivity" in just a few hours a week.

"Our approach is holistic. It's about taking everything you know, throwing it out and learning some new things, considering some new possibilities and enjoying the process."

In the book, Kevin and Annmarie start out by debunking what they call the "Seven Biggest Health and Fitness Lies," including such myths as "no pain, no gain," and the notion that health and fitness gadgets and gizmos ever live up to their promises. [Kevin & Annmarie are Organic Connection customers and their book is available in our store]

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What to Eat

What to Eat is a book about how to make sensible food choices. Consider that today's supermarket is ground zero for the food industry, a place where the giants of agribusiness compete for your purchases with profits-not health or nutrition-in mind. This book takes you on a guided tour of the supermarket, beginning in the produce section and continuing around the perimeter of the store to the dairy, meat, and fish counters, and then to the center aisles where you find the packaged foods, soft drinks, bottled waters, baby foods, and more. Along the way, it tells you just what you need to know about such matters as fresh and frozen, wild and farm-raised, organic and "natural," and omega-3 and trans fats. It decodes food labels, nutrition and health claims, and portion sizes, and shows you how to balance decisions about food on the basis of freshness, taste, nutrition, and health, but also social and environmental issues and, of course, price.

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Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between our Food and our Health

With a record number of overweight people and an alarming increase in degenerative diseases, many of us find ourselves turning to meds or fad diets in an effort to drop excess pounds or recover our health. Since most drugs come with dangerous side effects, modifying our diet would seem relatively safe and simple. But what if our foods were doing more harm than good, and fad diets only made matters worse? Deadly Harvest is a groundbreaking book that carefully examines how the foods we eat today have little in common with the foods of our ancestors, and why this fact is so important to our health. It also offers a proven program to enhance health, combat illness, and improve longevity.

Organic Housekeeping

The Nontoxic Avenger shows you how to improve your health and that of your family, while you save time, money, and, perhaps, your sanity.

Longing for a kinder, gentler world? As the old saying goes, everything begins at home, and odds are, if you live in the all-American household, the air inside is more toxic than the air outside, even if you live in the most polluted of cities. You regularly handle the filthiest object in your home -- the kitchen sponge -- and put the same chemicals on your face that are used in brake fluid and antifreeze.

The cleaning agents and personal care products commonly marketed to and used in American homes contain not only some very dangerous, toxic chemicals, but they also create an "overly clean," chemically bombed-out house that compromises immune systems. And with more than fifty million Americans suffering from allergies and other autoimmune diseases -- not to mention the developing and fragile immune systems of children and seniors -- large numbers of people are actually being made sicker and sicker by their homes.

Learn to live a clean, healthy, more economical way with Ellen Sandbeck, the Nontoxic Avenger. In this must-have book for the twenty-first century home, this passionate, witty advocate of all things organic will teach you how to maintain every part of the home -- from living room to septic tank, kitchen floor to bathroom sink -- using safe, simple cleansers and quick preventative measures as well as the most effective organic products on the market to get the job done.

Your Right to Know: Genetic Engineering and the Secret Changes to Your Food

Unlabeled, untested...and we're eating it. Your Right to Know is an informative, full-color reference guide that provides everything consumers need to know about genetically-engineered foods, and smart shopping tips on how to avoid them. More than half of America's processed grocery products - from cornflakes to granola bars to diet drinks - contain gene-altered ingredients. How and more importantly, why? This engaging and empowering book illuminates the GE food controversy, defeating the attempt of the biotech industry, and some in government, to keep us forever in the dark about the human health, environmental, and social consequences of GE foods.

Your Right to Know is also an accessible how-to primer for concerned parents and the buying public addressing issues of health risks, organic options,and shopping choices and how we can impact our collective food future. Whether you are a parent, an activist at heart, or just an interested member of the public, Your Right to Know is a must read on this vitally important food issue.

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Nutrition and Physical Degeneration

Review by Niel Rishoi

This book is so unbelievably riveting, so meticulously documented, and so palpably thorough in its research, I have no reservations about saying that this may be the most crucial piece of work on nutrition to ever have been written. In addition to being the most frightening: the "before and after" aspect of the hundreds of photos leave the reader in abject shock. There is a real sense of horror, chapter after chapter, of seeing the after-effects of modern foods on various peoples.

After reading this book, several factors have fallen into place. That is, the realization of why, despite "advanced" technology, medical care and knowledge, the nation and the world continue to be plagued with disease, degeneration, obesity and ill health. The most chilling realization of all is the very real possibility that pre-natal "germ plasm disruptions" - coming from parents who lack the proper means of health through nutrition to create ideal offspring - may be taking place in epidemic numbers. What this is tantamount to is the actual de-evolution of the human race. That is, destroying nature by countermanding through our modern foods.

What modern technology does not recognize is that many primitive societies have knowledge that have been passed on from millenia in which to base their vital health. What Price does here is to show the effects of "modern foods of commerce" (as he calls it) on these primitive societies. You see, in mind-boggling photos, how healthy, disease-free primitives look; the ones who have been subsisting on their own diets for millenia have beautifully formed faces, palates, jaws and teeth that are totally devoid of caries. Then, there are, among these same peoples where white man and their modern foods have taken over. Children (and the adults they become) with birth defects, deformed palates, rotted, missing teeth and ill-health.

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