What the Fork I'm Eating

 Stefanie Sacks's book, What the Fork Are You Eating?, supplied a chart to use to focus on what I need to work on with my dietary choices. It keeps track of what I ate for 4 days (it was designed for a week) and I shows me what I ate, when I ate, and how I felt afterwards. This lets me know how eating certain foods and certain times affect me. Sacks states that "simply recording what you eat for five to seven days will help you see what's broken" so that's what I did in 4 days (223). I filled out 4 of the charts supplied starting on Sunday the 17th.



This day was good and filled with physical activities (2 soccer games), so the food didn't make me feel bad in any way. I made pretty solid choices on what to eat because I didn't want to lug on the field.

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Wasn't feeling too hot this day. A bagel in the morning always bothers my stomach and I was sore from the day before, leading to poor, lazy decisions on what to eat like pizza. When I'm feeling like that I should make better choices on recovery meals.

 

Tired from the day before, stayed up late so I didn't have time for breakfast. I should always eat breakfast, so I grabbed a nutter butter for a snack. couldn't really find a better option for lunch because I had to eat school lunch. the rest of the day was good food-wise.



Having a smoothie before school is great but pizza is not good before soccer kids, don't do it. It made me sluggish and made me want to make bad food decisions for the rest of the night.

In conclusion, I figured out I base my food decisions on how my day is going, what's happening that day, or how I feel. I've decided I should always eat how I would on a game day because Sunday was the day I felt best and energized. I should pick foods that take longer, not ones that I can shove in the microwave when I feel lazy.


Do you try to keep track of what you eat and why? How?
Sacks, Stefanie. What the Fork Are You Eating?: An Action Plan for Your Pantry and Plate. New York: Penguin Group, 2014. Print.

On The Edge of the Market

Going grocery shopping for healthy foods is actually pretty hard if you don't have a Whole Foods or a Trader Joe's in the neighborhood. I have never really known what to look for in fruits and vegetables to get the ones that are best for me. Stefanie Sacks points out some interesting things to look for when choosing any type of produce.I've decided to use some of Stefanie Sacks's produce tips to use at my local Safeway grocery store.

Sacks states that it's always good to know where your food has been, or a your food's "food footprint." You can find out if the produce is local or if it has traveled across the country by checking the sticker on the side. She says to "learn where your fruits and veggies come from...If you know the origin of your produce, then you have an idea of how long it took to travel to you"(191). I wanted to find the most from just the sticker of these oranges, using Sacks's tip to use these codes:

Conventional Produce- four-digit code

Organic Produce- five-digit code with a 9

Genetically Modified Produce- five-digit code starting with an 8

 

I traveled through the produce section to find all the different types of codes. Everything was conventional produce that wasn't obviously labeled organic. I couldn't find any five-digit codes that started with an 8, Sacks stated that this genetically modified sticker isn't being used often (190). I expected not to see any  of these codes because having GMOs in produce isn't that popular and most companies don't want to show that their produce is modified.

The products that were organic were obviously organic, I didn't even need to look at the code. Organic products are viewed in a positive way so they show it whenever they can. They even had a sticker next to the sticker to look for the 9 in the code.

I really wanted to find a product that was genetically modified but this trip to the produce section was uneventful. Now I know what to look for if I ever go to the a store that uses these codes.

Have you ever paid attention to these codes? What did you think they could've meant?

Sacks, Stefanie. What the Fork Are You Eating?: An Action Plan for Your Pantry and Plate. New York: Penguin Group, 2014. Print.

The Forking Healthy Alternatives

People are always looking for the healthiest way to go in the food world; there's a better side to every food. Stefanie Sacks knew this and put this idea into her book, What the Fork Are You Eating?. It has a very helpful sixteen page list of the recommended greater halves of common foods in the book. I took this useful tool to my local Fairwood Safeway to see if I could find these better halves of common foods.

I started off in the snack section of Safeway because I know they have plenty of selection. In the back of the book, there's a subsection called "boxed bakery" where I found the alternatives for energy bars.

Grace and I found the healthiest looking type of bar there was and it turns out it wasn't mentioned in the healthier alternatives. Sacks lists that "Bliss, Bumble, Greens, Kind, Luna, [and] Oski" were the better brands of this common food (331). The only brand at this store was Kind, even with such a large selection.

Continuing down the snack aisle of the grocery store we found a good place to find healthy alternatives, the fruit snacks. We then compared, again, the healthy looking type of fruit snacks to the ones actually listed in Sacks's book. The only alternative listed was Annie's Natural Gummy Bunnies, so it was easy to find. Mott's and Sunkist, two brands that claim to be really healthy, didn't make the cut.  

Then we traveled down into the dairy section, thinking this list would be really helpful for cheese and other products. All the brands for the healthier cheeses weren't available. Same thing goes for cream cheese and yogurt. I finally figured  out that milk would probably have the healthy choice and it did. The book read that Organic Valley and different brands would be a better brand of milk than others. This one is kind of predictable because it reads "organic" in the title (324).

Over all, it's pretty hard to find Sacks's recommended better halves of common foods in a Safeway, but this list is still really helpful when trying to find the healthiest choice of foods.

What brands of common foods do you get? Do you think that brand is the healthiest?





Sacks, Stefanie. What the Fork Are You Eating?: An Action Plan for Your Pantry and Plate. New York: Penguin Group, 2014. Print. 

What the Fork to Make

Instead of focusing on other people, this time I am focusing on myself and what I'm eating. I decided to look through the book and found a section called "Recipe Rehab," which states exactly what I need to have to make healthier foods. I went straight to the dessert area of these recipes, and found "Salty Caramel Apples." Obviously you would think it was going to be healthy because of the apples, but then again there's salt and caramel? Stefanie Sacks stated herself that "anyway you slice it, caramel is not health supportive. But its darn delicious"(Sacks 301). I had to look into this to see how she made this dessert into something healthy.

INGREDIENTS:

1 stick of unsalted butter

1 cup of dark brown sugar

1/4 cup brown rice syrup

1/2 teaspoon of pure vanilla extract

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

2 teaspoons rock sea salt

4 large apples, sliced

When I saw the ingredients I was confused. Wasn't half of this stuff bad for you? But then I realized these were all the better alternatives of that food. For examples, there's unsalted butter instead of salted, there's brown sugar instead of cane sugar, and there's brown rice syrup instead of maple syrup (Sacks 334-5). Another thing I realized is that you can spend a whole day in Safeway and you won't come out with brown rice syrup. It's just not there. Healthy food shopping is not as easy as finding fattening foods. I settled with maple syrup (I checked the nutrition facts and it was the healthiest one I could find), and went with it.

METHOD:

1. In a small pot, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the brown sugar and brown rice syrup  maple syrup and whisk. Bring to a slow boil over medium-high heat, then reduce to a simmer.

 2. Add the vanilla extract and baking soda and whisk until mixed well, at which point the caramel will bubble. Remove from heat immediately to let caramel settle (2 mins.). Stir in salt.

Then it says to serve warm or refrigerate, so I did both. I'll have some for later and some for my dad, now. It turned out pretty good, didn't taste like is was supposed to be healthy, but we still ate it. I think next time I try to make something healthy I'll go to Trader Joe's or a store like it so I find exactly what I need. 

Do you have any healthy alternative recipes that you use in your home? What makes it healthier than the original? 

Sacks, Stefanie. What the Fork Are You Eating?: An Action Plan for Your Pantry and Plate. New York: Penguin Group, 2014. Print.

What the Fork to Do

All my life I've never really paid attention to food labels, my fat intake, how many calories I was eating per meal and so on. In What the Fork Are You Eating by Stefanie Sacks, there are specific, helpful sections of the book to really keep me on track on what I should be eating daily. In chapter 15, Sacks talks about introducing healthy eating ideas to your family. One way that particularly stood out to me was the "Chopped" competition. This is one way to introduce healthy foods in a fun way. She said that after participating in this competition, her son, "Hunter, [her] picky child who prefers food from a box, ate fish and mushrooms for the very first time! Everyone was on board that evening" that her family tried the "Chopped" competition (Sacks 214).

Chopped is where you give the people you want to help try healthier foods four ingredients to make their own meal. Sacks gave her kids and husband potatoes, onions, fish and mushrooms to make a dinner with. They were more creative and actually created meals like soups and grilled their fish (Sacks 214). I gave my sister and stepdad the task of making an afterschool snack instead, with the ingredients of an apple, a banana, yogurt and mixed nuts.

Ruby decided to mix mashed banana and vanilla yogurt together and topped it with chopped nuts to make a dip for her apple slices. While Monty decided to bake his apple, and roll both the apple and banana in crushed nuts and also used yogurt as a dip.

Bananas are something Ruby would never eat by choice, but with the snack she made, she actually enjoyed them. She said herself that this snack afterschool would be great rather than going to the pantry to have chips. This introduced both Monty and Ruby to a healthier decision as a snack and hopefully they will use this information later when deciding what to eat.


Would you be willing to make a meal with healthier foods you don't usually eat?

Sacks, Stefanie. What the Fork Are You Eating?: An Action Plan for Your Pantry and Plate. New York: Penguin Group, 2014. Print.