Ypsi Cooks

read this on a blog I just found. As I've been buying up new size 4 clothing (!!! I NEVER thought I could even be a 4) people have been asking how I've gotten “so skinny.” Eating well and only (mostly) when I'm hungry. Pollan says: Eat food, mostly plants, not a lot. Well, I've got 2 out of 3 down and it seems to be working. In any case, the research says there's something to it:

“[Harvard economist David] Cutler and his colleagues …surveyed cooking patterns across several cultures and found that obesity rates are inversely correlated with the amount of time spent on food preparation. The more time a nation devotes to food preparation at home, the lower its rate of obesity. In fact, the amount of time spent cooking predicts obesity rates more reliably than female participation in the labor force or income. Other research supports the idea that cooking is a better predictor of a healthful diet than social class: a 1992 study in The Journal of the American Dietetic Association found that poor women who routinely cooked were more likely to eat a more healthful diet than well-to-do women who did not. So cooking matters — a lot. Which when you think about it, should come as no surprise. When we let corporations do the cooking, they’re bound to go heavy on sugar, fat and salt; these are three tastes we’re hard-wired to like, which happen to be dirt cheap to add and do a good job masking the shortcomings of processed food. And if you make special-occasion foods cheap and easy enough to eat every day, we will eat them every day. The time and work involved in cooking, as well as the delay in gratification built into the process, served as an important check on our appetite. Now that check is gone, and we’re struggling to deal with the consequences.” –Michael Pollan, “Out of the Kitchen, on to the Couch” New York Times Magazine, July 29, 2009.

As for a cooking update: I'm in the process of perfecting my chocolate (w/ secret squash) muffins, and that should be posted soon. But really we've just been trying to use up or preserve our glut of EVERYTHING! Eggplants, tomatoes, carrots, beets, cabbage, kale (of course), herbs, now the leeks are coming in… Right now I'm plotting an eggplant, kale, carrot curry. I'l let you know how it turns out.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 28th, 2009 at 1:41 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.