So..... I'm browsing for cookbooks on Amazon and....

I came across a GREAT book.....at least I think it's great because I LOVE what the author says on one of the pages I got lucky enough to see in the "Look Inside" portion. I'm waiting for the book through interlibrary loan right now, because I hate to buy a book, only to find out that I don't really love it after all!

Anyway, the book, should you wish to look it up, is called:

Feeding the Whole Family: Cooking with Whole Foods by Cynthia Lair, and Peggy O'Mara.

I like what the authors say on this ONE page because they think like me, of course. They say "to determine whether a food is whole or not, we must be conscious when making food choices" Didn't I say that?? The authors say that before we eat it, or even heat it up, or even put it in our cart, we need to think about where it came from. They run it through the following questions:

1. "Can I imagine it growing??" Marshmallows, diet soda, fruit loops? Yeah, hard to imagine them growing, isn't it??

2. "How many ingredients does it have? A whole food has only one ingredient--itself. No label of ingredients is necessary on simple ingredients like salmon, apples, and wild rice"

3. "What's been done to the food since it was harvested? The less the better. Many foods we eat no longer resemble anything found in nature. Stripped, refined, bleached, injected, hydrogenated, chemically treated, irradiated, and gassed, modern foods have literally had the life taken out of them"......."if it isn't something that you could possibly make in your kitchen or grow in your garden, be wary. For example, you can make tofu, but you can't make isolated soy protein."

4. "Is this product part of a food or the whole entity? Juice is only part of a fruit. Oil is only part of the olive. When you eat a lot of partial foods, your body in its natural wisdom will crave the parts it didn't get."

I'm going to add to her list.... egg whites are only part of an egg. An apple or potato without its skin is only part of an apple or potato. Obviously, this logic only goes so far. We don't want you eating egg shells or banana peels.....

5. "How long has this food been known to nourish human beings?...... Putting something on my toast or in my tea that the FDA just approved last month warrants caution......Most whole foods have been on the dinner table for centuries."

ISN'T THIS AWESOME????? I love these criteria. They are similar to mine, but written so much better and make more sense than all my ramblings.