Friday's Food Finds

All week I am all over the Internet blogging about food, commenting about food, reading about food and finding tons and tons of stuff! I simply can NOT dedicate a single post to each individual find, so here's what I am going to do: I am going to give you a CliffNotes version of some foodie finds that I think you might all be interested in, so you have stuff to read and tinker with over the weekend! Here it goes:

Food Web Sites and Tools

• DinnerTool While catching up with my fellow bloggers I read on Life With a Possum by Kimberly Battersy about this new site from the iVillage Food Network. DinnerTool is a website that has recipes, videos, meal planners, shopping lists creator, articles, a blog by Ariane Duarte (who is in a number of the videos I watched) and, a number of customizable features for your recipe searches such as cuisine type, diet restrictions and the difficulty of the recipe itself. I like the videos and the recipe search the most, although I feel like both libraries are still growing, so I am waiting to see where this goes. Check it out for yourself and let us know what you think!
• Mangoes and Chutney This is an excellent blog that I found through the 31DBBB program. Miranda, who writes the blog, tackles cooking for us all - from dealing with the crazy cooking terms we all need to learn when first cracking open our cookbooks, to the golden rules of cooking, meal plans, the deliciously fun series called "Fat Camp Friday" (be CAREFUL with this one!!) and MORE (yes, there's even more!!). Needless to say, I am now a faithful follower and look forward to learning as much as possible from Mangoes and Chutney in the future!

Food Reads

• Is 'Eat Real Food' Unthinkable? It is time for a new acronym ERF, maybe you have even seen #ERF on twitter this week, well here is where it all started. Mark Bittman's second column in the New York Times Opinionator. He also write a response blog post called "Beyond the Acronyms" which discusses the USDA dietary Guidelines.
• Food Inc.: Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser Discuss Food Safety, Walmart and How to Feed the World I don't know how I didn't know about this sooner, but I read about it Thursday, instead of being one of the truly awesome people that followed it LIVE on twitter (thanks to @cocoxochitl) on Wednesday night. However, being a complete and utter food-geek, I found the tweets and copy and pasted them into Google docs, so I can try to see if I can figure it all out.
• 10 Useful Cooking Tips This list from Bibi on the Daily Organized Chaos blog is absolutely INVALUABLE! If you are in the kitchen, you must check this out!! Bibi is another buddy from the 31DBBB group - I am finding so many cool people and cool things to share with you because of this project - YAY!!

Good Food (Recipes)

•  How to Cook Quinoa in a Rice Cooker I am not sure this needs too much explaining, but this post by the Gluten-free Goddess (lower your heads in respect of her greatness) added a number of quinoa recipes to the end of this post as well. I realized in my post about my quinoa, tomato and black bean salad this week that I pretty much just flew right over the rice cooker process - so, feeling guilty, I decided to go on a quest for this very thing for you!
• Gluten-Free Chocolate Recipes for Love Two things are going on here: 1. Once on the Gluten-Free Goddess website, it is very difficult for me to just jump away, and 2. Monday is Valentine's day!! Who doesn't love chocolate?? (OK, OK, I know there are some of you.... My brother is dating one of you, but I LOVE chocolate!!). What I love about this post is that there are even recipes for the sad sacks like me that are gluten-free and dairy-free! So many different options if you want to show one of your diet-restricted loves that you really care.

Food FIGHTS

• Stop FRACKING Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is a drilling technique used to extract natural gas from shales and tight rocks by shooting millions of gallons of a mixture of water, chemicals, and sand into the ground. In the last year the toxic results of hydraulic fracturing have lead to cattle being quarantined in Pennsylvania, an explosion at a mine in West Virginia, as well as continued contamination of drinking water in Wyoming and Colorado. In order to protect our water, we need to pass the FRAC Act. It has become clear that hydraulic fracturing threatens our drinking water, our health, and our livelihoods. Please send a petition to your local representative about stopping this practice!
• GE Alfalfa If you have not already taken a stand against the genetically engineered Alfalfa approval, there is still time to let the President know how you feel. Please take a moment to use this tool from the Food & Water Watch to write to President Obama to let him know that regulation of genetically engineered foods is NOT one of the places where he should be worrying about government over regulation! 

  

Do you have a food website, tool, food read, recipe or food fight you think I should check out and share with the readers of Searching for Sustenance? If so e-mail me at BlogWithNV@gmail.com!

5 Movies to Nurture Your Eating Conscience

Being a conscious eater may translate, for some individuals, into a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle, for others it may mean buying less processed foods, or buying more organic foods, but whatever it ultimately translates to on your plate, it all begins the same way - someone starts thinking about food. If you've begun thinking about food, or are looking for reasons why you should be thinking about your food, here are five films you should watch that will nurture the conscious eater in you.

Food, Inc.
No conscious eater has missed this one. It received a lot of press coverage when it was nominated for an Academy Award, so most people, even if they have not yet seen it, have at least heard of it. The tag line on the official movie website is "Hungry for Change?" The fact of the matter is, you will be by the time you finish watching this movie. Here is the trailer for the film so you can see for yourself

Food Matters
Where Food, Inc. focused mostly on the food industry and the impact it has on our diets and culture, Food Matters comes back to looking at the actual food and its affects on our health. The film begins with a quote from Hippocrates that pretty much sets the stage, "Let food be thy medicine." While the message seems to be pro-Raw diet, which I am not 100% sold on (see my post on Vegetables: Raw or Cooked?), the discussions of the nutrient deficiencies in our diets, the lack of nutritional education for most medical students and the cancer studies were all equally fascinating. The official website of this film is packed with all kinds of resources and communities, so if you are intrigued by what you find in Food Matters, there is plenty of stuff to keep your curiosity satiated. Here's the trailer for you to check out:


Tapped
Do you drink bottled water? Do you think it is better for you than tap water? Do you think it is different than tap water? If so, here is a film to get you to start reevaluating some of your choices. I was first awakened to the true horrors of the water industry when I watched Blue Gold: World Water Wars last Spring (see my post here), but Tapped managed to take that global perspective and make it incredibly personal for me. Their official site is also jam packed full of information from the movie and beyond. This is a must-see film for anyone who carries a bottle of water with them. Cue the trailer!


King Corn
Two guys, friends in college, decide that, upon graduation they will move from Boston out to Iowa to farm an acre of corn crops. Why? Well, they found out that an inordinately large proportion of their bodily make-up was from corn! If you have read The Omnivore's Dilemma or been exposed to Michael Pollan in any way - other writings, interviews, etc, than this news is not terribly earth shattering, most of us in America would find the same thing. However, these gentlemen decided to explore it further - grow corn and follow it to see where it goes and what it becomes. This was a fun movie to watch with a serious message. Do they have an official website? Of course! Who doesn't - check out the King Corn official website, then check out the trailer:


No Impact Man 
An author and activist in New York City was thinking about what his next project should be, when he came up with a year-long endeavor for his entire family to undertake. This family of three went through an entire year, still living in the city, producing no waste, turning off their electricity, using bike and scooters, taking stairs instead of elevators, buying no new products and everything else in their power to make NO ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT on the world around them. This was a family that lived on food in packages before the project and then began to make use of the farmer's market, growing their own and eating in season. This is a compelling project that was documented on the No Impact Man blog and in a book No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process (holy moley! That is a LONG title!!). Take a sneak peek at the whole deal with this trailer:



There they are - five films to make you think. There are more, and there are books, too, but for today, we will stop with this early primer. By the way, if you have Netflix, then you are in super-luck, because ALL FIVE of these movies are availble for instant streaming (I just checked), so you can start watching them right now! Enjoy the movies, come back and let us know what you think and whether or not you feel these films have nurtured the conscious eater in you!