Breakfast at the Farmers' Market/Only 11% of Americans eat recommended amount of fruits and vegetables
This morning I ate breakfast at the Dane County Farmers' Market. Because the winter market is held indoors at the senior center, which has a kitchen by the lobby, local chefs--assisted by volunteers from local non-profits--are invited to prepare meals using ingredients mainly supplied by vendors. This week the chef, from the Mermaid Café, supervised East High School students taking part in a "Chef in the Classroom" project.

A meal usually costs $7.50--about three cereal boxes on sale--so I hesitate to eat breakfast away from home. But today's menu was an interesting change. Along with fruit juice were "pan-fried trout; country ham with grits and red-eye gravy; corn bread with plum preserves; fresh salad with mixed greens, also including micro greens, pea shoots, and spinach served with a warm bacon dressing and crumbled feta cheese." I try to avoid eating food from animals, except for milk products, fish, and eggs, but the local vendors use more humane methods to raise animals and the thin ham portion was smaller than my palm.

Eating at the winter farmers' market sometimes inspires me to eat greens in the morning. When my grandmother was living in her own home until last year, I sometimes picked greens,such as Swiss chard and beet greens, from the garden I'd planted and cook them together for breakfast.

These days, the variety of food is limited mainly to cheese, meats, baked goods, root vegetables, preserves, and greenhouse-grown greens. One of the people at the Hook's Cheese table told me that they'd been so overwhelmed by business from a story on NPR of their 15-year-old cheddar that they turned down a recent request for another story, that is, free publicity. For Christmas, I gave my parents cheeses from Hook's and Forgotten Valley, as well some small samples of WI cheeses sold by Fromagination, a cheese store on the Capitol Square. I also talked a little with someone selling cat grass plugs, leading me to wonder whether it would have been useful to plant when my grandmother had a cat who often coughed up hair balls. This posting by a veterinarian doesn't recommend cat grass and contends that, at best, the evidence is inconclusive on whether it's beneficial for cats: http://davesgarden.com/guides/articles/view/1823/

My intro soc classes have a systematic observation assignment with a one-day food diary option. Besides giving students practice with simple systematic observation and thinking about validity and reliability, the assignment helps set up the unit on food and society, which is a good topic to illustrate the impact of macro forces on individual behavior. Studies that I'll summarize use data gathered by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys: only about 11% of Americans eat three servings of vegetables and two of fruit per day.

Another shocking finding: "Approximately 62% did not consume any whole fruit servings and 25% of participants reported eating no daily vegetable servings." Summary of relevant articles by the publisher of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authored_newsitem.cws_home/companynews05_00628

I wish that Obama would emphasize this issue in his upcoming State of the Union speech and in more visits to community gardens because improving our diet would be a low-cost, high-pay-off campaign in terms of health, the environment, and energy. But then some would attack him as being a government nanny even though most of such an effort would be non-government actions.