Gluten free?

I watched The View this morning, where Elisabeth Hasselbeck was promoting her new book "The G-Free Diet," and talking about Celiac Disease, and it reminded me of my brief and unpleasant encounter with gluten-free pasta. I remember vaguely a flash of media fervor about the health benefits of a gluten-free diet, or more accurately, how awful gluten was for your health. I didn't have lots of time then to explore the facts, and so I impulsively bought some gluten-free pasta to try and see if I could even stand eating it. It was inedible, so I tossed the rest of the package, and the idea of going gluten-free along with it.

Well, this morning's discussion on The View peaked my interest again, and this time, I spent some time looking at what a gluten-free diet actually might include (rather than exclude). Surprisingly, maybe because my eating habits have improved in the past couple of years, at least 70% of what I eat is gluten-free already. Since I'm already incorporating more fresh, organic/pesticide-free, local produce and free-range, cage-free, organic-feed meat into my diet, I figure going gluten-free can't be that much of a stretch. So I'll try it out for a week, and see what happens. It will help a great deal that rice, fruit, meat, vegetables, vegetable/olive oil, and nuts (even honey-roasted!) are all gluten-free.

One more reason to love living in California

Thanks to Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, in which Barbara Kingsolver intelligently advocates for locavorism, I have new reasons to be grateful for California. I've known for a long time that we were the birthplace of the locavore trend (thanks Alice Waters!), but Kingsolver's book provided the factual underpinnings for all the vague, abstract rumblings I always heard in articles, newsletters, and ads, to drive the point home. I finally learned where the buzz words "sustainable," "organic," "grass fed," "free range" and even "local," fit in the landscape of my life.

I also learned that a greater variety of produce grows in California for more months out of the year than anywhere else in the U.S. One of her themes throughout the book is that if you live anywhere East of the Rockies or North of the Sierra Nevada (i.e., her farm in Virginia), and you see produce "out of season" (i.e. fresh greens in December), it likely came from California. Every time I came across one of her “it likely came from California” moments, I rejoiced, because I live in California!

There are many other books on similar subject matter that surely will provide this same "aha!" for people that are interested (i.e., Michael Pollan fans - it was one of his articles that whetted my appetite for the subject), but Kingsolver's book just happened to be the first I got around to reading.

Finally, I’d also like to thank Kingsolver for writing a book that kept me riveted through the last page. Without giving away the ending, let’s just say that I underestimated the drama that could come of turkey breeding. If her novels similarly keep the reader engrossed throughout, I’m bumping them to the top of my reading list. So many other novels I have read recently lacked this important trait (see earlier blog re Nick Hornby novels).

The book is, however, so very rich and compacted with information, that I recommend giving yourself time to digest after every chapter.