Eat The Rainbow 🌈

When we take the kids food shopping, one of our favorite activities is to identify as many colors as possible in the fruits and vegetables. We are always bowled over by how many different hues and shades there are in nature. It is like a rainbow. This also keeps the task of shopping exciting and refreshing. This rainbow translates to our plates and to their lunchboxes.

“Eat The Rainbow”: Consume Foods With Many Colors

“Eat the rainbow” 🌈 comes up a lot in this blog and many other publications that tout the benefits of real, whole foods. It has become a popular catchphrase in the health food world.

“Eating the rainbow” means that you should always aim to eat foods with the broadest array of colors. These should be real, whole foods. Each color signifies a different palette of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and phytochemicals. When you eat the rainbow, you will be getting a huge variety of vitamins, minerals and other nutrition.

What it does NOT mean is eating foods that are naturally or artificially colored, like cheddar cheese, Skittles and wasabi, or drinking liquids like Gatorade. These usually contain very non-natural sounding dyes such as Blue 1, Blue 2, Citrus Red #2, Green 3, Red 3, Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6 or FD&C Lakes.

The Benefits To “Eating The Rainbow”: Tremendous Food Variety

When you seek out foods in their natural state, you really get to know your food and what it looks like. Learning the rainbow is a powerful way to learn about your food by looking at it.

Even within one fruit or vegetable, there may be tremendous variation in color. For instance, cauliflowers come in white, orange, purple, green and yellow. Carrots come in orange, white, yellow and purple. Bell peppers also come in a wide array of colors. Additionally, what may not seem so obvious are the purple varieties of lettuce, basil, string beans and kohlrabi, to name a few.

The goal with “eating the rainbow” is to get out of your comfort zone by tasting new varieties or trying new fruits and vegetables altogether.

What Do All The Colors Mean? Each Represents Specific Nutritional Benefits

Each color signifies a specific nutritional profile. The following is a summary of the most common colors, their corresponding benefit and the fruits and veggies that they represent:

Orange & Yellow

Contains beta carotene, a powerful carotenoid and the precursor to vitamin A. Beta carotene is found in carrots, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, oranges and apricots. Beta carotene is crucial to maintaining eye health.

Purple & Blue

Contains anthocyanin, an antioxidant that protects cells from damage. Anthocyanin is present in beets, red cabbage, eggplant and blueberries as well as purple variants of lettuce, string beans and basil.

Green

Contains phytochemicals such as carotenoids. Carotenoids may have anti-cancer properties. These are abundant in plants such as spinach, asparagus, cucumbers, limes, green beans and green apples.

Red

Contains lycopene, an antioxidant. Lycopene is hypothesized to play a role in reducing cancer risk and keeping the heart healthy. It is abundant in tomatoes, red bell peppers, strawberries, red grapes, watermelons and radishes.

White & Brown

Contains phytochemicals that have antiviral and antibacterial properties. Allicin is one that is abundant in garlic. White and brown also signifies potassium, which is abundant in bananas, potatoes and mushrooms.

Encourage Kids To Eat The Rainbow: Engage Them In The Process

It isn’t enough to buy colorful foods. The kids need something to inspire them to actually eat these foods. Some fun ways to engage children in consuming these foods include:

• Encouraging them to choose at least 3-4 colors as a part of their meals, then to add the corresponding vegetables to their plates

• Helping them make a fruit kabob for dessert, using as many colors as possible

• Serving side dishes with multiple colors of the same vegetable, such as sliced baked potatoes 🥔 (white and purple) and/or sweet potatoes 🍠 (white, orange and purple), beets (red, candy stripe and golden) and carrots 🥕 (orange, yellow and purple)

Make Eating “Healthy Fun” For Kids

Eating healthy food should be a fun activity. Spicing it up with colors serves a triple purpose: it introduces kids to a wide variety of new foods and flavors; it allows them to contribute to the meal in creative ways; and it introduced a wide array of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants into their diets.

Eating Intelligently Is An Art

Noted 17th century French author François de Rochefoucald wrote that:

“To eat is a necessity, but to eat intelligently is an art.”

It’s a brilliant and inspiring quote.

We all need to eat. But to eat with knowledge about what goes into your body requires purpose, planning and intention.

Elevate Eating To An Art

Here are 4 variables to consider in elevating your eating from a necessity to an art:

Frequency

(how often you eat): Do you eat three meals a day with a snack or two in between? Do you eat just two meals and skip breakfast? Do you fast intermittently?

Mealtime

(what times you eat): Do you take the time to stop working and eat lunch at work? Do you finish your food before it gets too late at night?

Quantity

(what quantity you eat): Do you eat until you are stuffed? Or do you moderate your intake until you are merely satisfied?

Variety

(how much variety you eat): Do you eat the same subset of foods most of the time? Or do you actively seek out variety in the form of a diverse array of foods, colors, flavors and nutritional values?

Actionable Ways To Eat With Intention

Eating intelligently takes practice and intention. Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Meal planning once a week (usually on a Saturday night or Sunday morning)

• Learning how many meals a day work best for your body and your mind, despite the meal schedule to which you may have become habituated

• Reading ingredients lists on all packaged foods

• Preparing lunches the night before or first thing in the morning, based on the weekly meal plan

• Taking moderate portions of food that you and your family are likely to eat

• Deliberately choosing seasonal fruits and vegetables to diversify what’s on your plate throughout the year

• Consciously choosing alternate varieties of common fruits and vegetables, including different colors, to diversify your nutritional profile

• Actively packing snacks for school or work so that you and your kids avoid grabbing salty/sugary/fatty snacks in the moment

Does Making Healthy Food Choices Mean You Are Missing Out?

homemade sourdough bread and vegan butter

“Making healthy decisions doesn’t mean you’re missing out on the so-called ‘good things in life’. Ironically, it means you’re gaining a better life.”

— Sara Speckels, Professional Whole-Food Plant-Based Chef

Since I was a child, I’ve always loved food. At every major family event, including my own bar mitzvah, I was always the last person to clear my plate. However, as it turned out, the food I was eating was not as healthy as I was led to believe. I suffered from debilitating sinus issues, food allergies and sensitivities for over 25 years. Whenever I would get a cold, it always evolved into a sinus infection.

In 2014, while experiencing brain fog, lack of energy and a host of issues brought on by work-related anxiety and stress, I also learned that I was suffering from advancing adrenal fatigue, which is certainly not helped by the Western diet.

Updating My Diet

On the advice of my doctor, I made a conscious decision to remove the refined breads, dairy, soy, processed and manufactured items, food additives and, for a time, all red meat and wheat products. With my wife’s help, I learned how to make almost all of my food from scratch.

Over several months, my sinuses largely cleared, many of my sensitivities disappeared, I lost 20 pounds, my mind became clearer and my energy began to return.

Eventually, this journey affected my entire household. My wife and I figured out how to make everything from nut milk to sourdough bread to school snacks for the kids.

Seeing Food As Medicine

I learned that the food that we eat can have a powerful effect on the human body. Do I miss eating a bagel and cream cheese, a pizza, a hot dog or a doughnut? To be honest, not really. But that’s just me. Like binge-drinking, eating the wrong foods always felt terrific in the moment. However, I always paid for it later.

I no longer struggle to breathe in the morning (the California wildfires notwithstanding). I have not gotten a sinus infection in nearly six years. And when I do react to something in my diet, it is very easy to identify it and make the appropriate substitutions.

What Are The Health Effects Of The Western Diet?

According to a study reported on by Forbes, 58% of all calories and 90% of added sugars consumed in the United States are from ultra-processed foods. Needless to say, these are a major health concern. These ultra-processed foods are loaded with empty calories, unlike the calories in their nutrient-dense whole-foods counterparts.

What Foods Should You Be Eating?

By switching to a diet rich in predominantly whole, unprocessed foods, you’ll consume much less simple starch and sugar, experience less inflammation and reduce toxins in your body. You will almost certainly feel better that you were before. It need not be a sudden shift. A gradual evolution is the best way to proceed.

Starting this Thanksgiving, why not use the holiday season to experiment with healthier new recipes? I’ll be posting simple and efficient meal ideas from my own experience. These include foods that have become staples in our household and that our kids have learned to enjoy as well.

Advice For The Holidays

Eat as many colorful plant foods as possible. Eat animal foods that have been sustainably farmed, properly fed and given a good quality of life. Using these raw materials, pick a handful of recipes that you can learn to make from scratch.

Don’t think in terms of what you might be missing out on. Consider what you are gaining.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Average Consumer: Is Kale Trendy? Real Foodies: Who Cares?

preparing homemade kale chips

My family has been eating kale chips for about 4 years. It is one of our go-to snacks roughly every Monday and Thursday. Each week, we buy 3-4 heads of kale, usually at the farmer’s market. We usually dehydrate them into chips. Plus, through some significant stroke of luck, my wife convinced my then-6-year-old son last year that kale chips would make his nightmares disappear.

Maybe it’s time to find a new green leafy obsession, though.

The Atlantic published an article on September 30th, The Saddest Leafy Green, lamenting the decline in kale’s popularity in the United States. It even questioned whether it was ever truly liked in the first place. It’s a great article and definitely worth a read.

It’s a strange point of view, however. Foods are inherently healthy or they are not. They are not better for you because Gwyneth Paltrow endorses a vegetable (as when she demonstrated how to make kale chips on the Ellen Show in 2011) or because Beyonce dances pantsless in a music video while wearing a T-shirt with “Kale” written on it. These two incidents arguably helped fuel the kale-as-a-superfood trend. But kale has been cultivated for hundreds of years and it will continue to be cultivated and consumed.

Another vegetable that gets a bad rap (or worse, not even a rap at all!) is arugula. Arugula has been cultivated for thousands of years. It is mentioned in the Torah and the Talmud and is eaten all over Italy, Israel and the entire Mediterranean region. This leafy green had its day in the sun in 2007, when then-candidate Barack Obama name-checked it while on the campaign trail in Iowa. Alas, in the popularity contest that is Google Trends data, it never quite took off after that. But it is very much in demand among culinary enthusiasts and others who know food.

How do food trends get started, anyway? This BBC article explains how avocados and kale became so popular.

When you make discovering and trying new vegetables a regular part of your food shopping experience, you get to decide what’s popular in your home and what isn’t – based on an entirely different set of criteria than the cultural popularity meter.

To not be influenced by the marketing trends is difficult but doable.

Real foods have no need for popularity trends. They stand on their own merits. Besides, what’s the alternative, an Oreo cookie?

I can tell you with absolute certainty that kale makes my 7-year-old son’s nightmares go away. How do I know that? He believes that it makes his nightmares go away and tells me all the time. Placebo effect? Obviously. But in our household, that is a good enough validation for a vegetable that has gone from being the darling of the food world back to relative obscurity.

The Whimsy Of Imperfect-Looking Produce

This past Sunday, my kids had a field day exploring all the imperfect-looking produce they discovered at our two favorite Los Angeles-area farmer’s markets, Larchmont and Hollywood. We were greeted by numerous fruits and vegetables that were either conjoined twins or had whimsical-looking appendages. Perhaps it was the proximity to Halloween.

In just one visit, we found:

• Persimmons and bell peppers with protrusions

• Conjoined delicata winter squash

• A conjoined carrot in the shape of a woman’s waist, with legs crossed (!)

• Heirloom tomatoes that were bursting at the seams

• Oversized Wonderful pomegranates that were cracking apart because of the sweet, juicy seeds inside

• Undersized white Paper Shell pomegranates (ironically, these were the tastiest of all the poms!)

• Apples with bumpy skins and inner cores that curve

• Oranges with yellow blemishes

• Gourds full of contortions, spikes and warts

it got me thinking: With the exception of the gourds, I’ve rarely, if ever, seen any of these others in an American supermarket. The gourds are associated with Halloween, so their disfigured, grotesque and ghoulish forms are in line with our expectations of how these fruits should look and feel. Ironically, most people purchase these for display purposes and then throw them away afterward. So they are a source of waste rather than food.

I’ve never quite understood what is repulsive or off-putting about fruits and veggies that are not perfect-looking. Nothing in nature is perfect. People come in all shapes and sizes. So do dogs.

Why not produce?

Real Produce Is Enchanting

Real produce runs the gamut from the whimsical to the grotesque. Once you move past the familiar story that produce always has to appear instagrammably perfect, you become conscious of the variety and character of imperfect-looking produce. The defects in the produce take on an enchanting quality. Developing this consciousness can be a powerful method for teaching kids to recognize fruits and vegetables in their natural state. It elevates the veggie experience from the mundane to the extraordinary.

The effect that perfect produce has on our minds is similar to that of the beauty industry on young women: When all you see are airbrushed, unblemished and impossibly thin bodies in fashion magazines, you begin to feel that your own body is less than adequate. Similarly, when you walk into a major American supermarket, you see rows and rows of beautiful produce with nary a bump, blemish or extra protrusion.

Unfortunately, according to ImperfectProduce.com, at least 20% of all the produce grown in the United States goes to waste because it does not look beautiful. Yet, these cosmetic defects have no effect whatsoever on the quality and taste of the produce. Imperfect Produce, the company, has done an amazing job bringing top-of-mind awareness to this problem in the United States. If you don’t have access to a farmer’s market, I wholeheartedly encourage you to subscribe to their grocery delivery service. And no, this is not a paid endorsement, just a recommendation to encourage my readers to take action on this subject.

How Do You Involve Your Kids In Developing A Passion Around Produce?

Every piece of produce, blemished or otherwise, tells a story. And kids love stories. First, take your kids to a farmer’s market to pick out some imperfect-looking produce. Then engage them around the dinner table. Ask them to pick a fruit or veggie. Tell them to imagine that each piece of produce is a character with an interesting back story. Have them consider its shape, size, color and texture. Let them take turns bringing these foods to life, as if it were a puppet show.

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Bonus: Here’s some conversation-worthy stone fruits from the summertime.

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Making Food is a Family Collaboration

Weekly Farmers Market Visits

The farmers market is a family ritual for us, a weekly adventure of discovery. Every Sunday morning at 8am, we take a trip to the Larchmont Village Farmers Market in Los Angeles. My kids talk to familiar farmers; schmooze new vendors; sample fruits, kombucha and dairy-free yogurts; and assist one of the vegetable vendors in shucking corn and de-leafing broccoli.

It is one of the highlights of their week!

Teaching Healthy Choices

People constantly ask me how I have been able to convince my two primary school-aged boys to eat healthy, unprocessed whole foods.

It’s really quite simple.

As a parent, I’ve learned that it’s not enough to espouse a certain lifestyle. You must actively practice what you preach – or your kids call your bluff. When you are conscious about the food that you eat, when you discuss the sources of your food with your kids, when you establish new eating habits together and allow them to actively pick out their food each week – you and your kids grow together in your habits. They will crave what they experience and they will feel confident in their choices if you feel confident in yours.

After avoiding kale chips for several years, my younger son started eating them a year ago because my wife mentioned that kale makes nightmares disappear. Does it work? According to him, it is the only foolproof method!

It’s not perfect. There are occasional slip-ups at school and tense standoffs in our pantry.

Food Substitutes

You also learn to find substitutes for common conventional foods. For instance, my younger son loves starch. So we take him to Trader Joe’s to pick out pastas that are more nutrient-dense than traditional, refined flour pasta: brown rice & quinoa, lentil, black bean. And sometimes to Whole Foods for his current fave: Banza chickpea pasta.

Social Pressure

There is strong social pressure to conform, however. Friends and family constantly get on my case for not allowing my kids to eat processed foods, partake of cake and ice cream at birthday parties or eat pizza, dairy and packaged snacks. They hound me that my kids are somehow missing out on “the fun things in life.” I point out that I have trained my kids with the knowledge to decide what goes into their stomachs. They choose to eat what they like, not what the majority is having.

My older son had a schoolteacher a couple years ago who got angry at him for refusing to eat the matzo that they made in class for Passover. She sternly told him that "if you don't have Celiac disease, then you are missing out on valuable nutrients in your diet”. The teacher was caught off guard when he responded back, deadpan, that refined flour has no nutrition!

Involve Kids In The Process

Whether it’s a farmers market, a trip to the local supermarket, a visit to a farm or even planning an Amazon Fresh order together, involving the kids in the process is very important. It will pay dividends throughout life.

Food Is Your Responsibility

“The average person is still under the aberrant delusion that food should be somebody else’s responsibility until I’m ready to eat it.”

— Joel Salatin

Eating in the United States is a simple act, mostly performed by third parties until the food is on your plate.

Much of this blog is about sourcing and preparing your own food. Yet, with the exception of Friday night and Shabbat meals, few people take the time to be in charge of what goes on their plates.

I make it a point to have two meals a day with my family: breakfast that the boys and I prepare before they go to school; and dinner, which my wife always cooks fresh. We take full responsibility for the preparation and for what goes into the dishes we eat. Before the cooking even happens, the entire family goes with me to the farmer’s market every Sunday morning and picks out what they want for the week. And mealtime isn’t just about the food. The bonds that we forge by interacting together are irreplaceable.

But our household goes against the grain of the cultural norm.

In 21st century supermarkets, convenient packaged kosher items are very easy to find: According to market research firm Mintel, more than 40 percent of new foods launched in 2014 claimed to be certified kosher. And over one million ingredients that come from suppliers of raw materials are certified kosher, translating to over 135,000 packaged items being certified kosher. With this many prepared and packaged options, it is obvious that eating kosher in the United States is a simple choice.

On the flip side, there is a perception that making your own food is not easy, affordable or accessible. Often, it is perceived as a privilege.

This is unfortunate.. Unless you live in an inner city “food desert”, where there is truly – and tragically – a lack of fresh and healthy food, cooking should be a habit that is practiced regularly in the household.

Cooking your own food is amazing. And doing so results in numerous positive benefits. On the other hand, not doing so has negative ramifications:

According to author and journalist Michael Pollan, “the decline of everyday home cooking doesn’t only damage the health of our bodies and our land but also our families, our communities, and our sense of how our eating connects us to the world.”

Dr. Mark Hyman goes a step further: “We have abdicated one of the essential acts that makes us human – cooking – to the food industry. Making our own food is essentially a political act that allows us to take back our power.”

The benefits are many:

• You save money. Going out to eat (or ordering takeout) is expensive! And it is hardly ever healthy.

• You get to practice meal prepping. Once you discover the dishes that you and your family enjoy eating – and the ones that you don’t – you can build simple meal planning menus. For instance, why not schedule a Taco Tuesday meal every week? Or establish that Sunday nights are for finishing Shabbat lunch leftovers? Every night does not need to have a theme but setting up a recurring schedule with thematic elements simplifies shopping, speeds up preparation and relieves stress.

• You eat healthier, more nutritious food.

• You feel better by providing yourself and your family with the most valuable health insurance policy of all: real and nutritious whole foods that build health rather than foster disease.

• You decide which ingredients go into your food. You get to choose where your ingredients come from, which markets sell the best produce and which vendors you trust.

• You transform the process of preparing a meal from a solitary chore into a family collaboration. Kids love to help, from picking out ingredients at the market to mixing, baking and cooking.

• You take the power to influence your kids away from the food industry, the advertising industry and society as a whole. Your kids will model themselves after your choices. If they see you eating nutritious food, then that is what they will crave. The younger you start them on this path, the easier the transition and the more resiliently they will stick to these habits.

• Most importantly, you re-establish the connection between the food you eat and the origin of that food.

Writer Jo White has an excellent and thoughtful blog post on Medium, entitled “Is the Kitchen Dead?”, about how, despite the advances in technology and convenience, cooking in the kitchen will remain a fundamental human behavior and people will still cook.

Once you take responsibility for cooking fresh, homemade food, you will no longer want to rely on the vast majority of packaged and processed foods on the market.

Real Food Is Ingredients

So much of the food that we eat, whether for convenience or out of habit, is not really food; it is food-like substances packed with ingredients. But, according to Jamie Oliver, real food is different:⁠

“Real food doesn’t have ingredients. Real food *is* ingredients.”

— Jamie Oliver

Processed food comes in packages with long lists of ingredients, many of which are difficult to pronounce. Real food doesn’t come with ingredients lists.

Processed food is made in a factory and typically has a branded story attached to it. Real food grows in the ground and looks like vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds and grasses (grains).

Processed food tells a story. Real food *is* the story.

I was inspired by a TED Talk that I watched some time ago with Jamie Oliver, which featured a clip of him in a West Virginia school, asking if the first graders in the class recognized specific fruits and vegetables. The kids knew tomato ketchup but not tomatoes. Although parts of this episode were almost certainly staged and edited for the cameras, it nevertheless highlights a very real lack of education and knowledge in our culture, both in the kosher world and mainstream society, when it comes to fresh food. Whether out of convenience, lack of time or lack of education, this is a problem.

When kids identify most strongly with food that comes out of a branded package, they are going to make whatever the food companies tell them to eat. They will never cook for themselves.

The next time you take your kids to the local market, have them read the ingredients of their favorite packaged foods. It’s an excellent habit to establish at a young age. See how many ingredients they can recognize or pronounce. Start a conversation around how and where that product is made and how those ingredients function in the food. I’ve done this with my kids.

Then take them to the produce and fruit aisle. Have them describe how their favorite fruit or vegetable comes into being, what “ingredients” go into “making” it and the color, taste and texture it has when it is ready to eat. My kids will grab the nearest carrot, pepper or apple.

And then those fresh foods become the “raw material” ingredients for an infinite variety of delicious, freshly-cooked dishes.

It’s almost as if making your own food has now become an act of subversion!

Cooking as a Form of Worship

Judith Jones is the publisher who championed Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”. She was a tour de force of cooking literature and an advocate for home cooking.

Cooking is a very grounding process, an opportunity to connect to the source of your nourishment. There is a certain sanctity in being able to trace the origin of your food through the cooking process and onto your plate. It is a very different experience from popping open a package of factory-prepared and -processed food made from 20 ingredients and to which you have no emotional connection. Cooking is also the one act of food that is beyond nature, the process of transforming a food into something else.

I recently took my family on a camping trip to Sequoia National Park. My two young boys learned how to catch, clean and cook a fish. It was a powerful learning moment for them and a reminder to pause and reflect on what the earth had given us.

As an observant Jew who eats only kosher food, I have been taught that raw ingredients and the ability to consume are both provided by God. Having food, and being able to eat it, are not a given. Therefore, we say blessings both before consuming specific foods as well as after the meal, to acknowledge from where our food comes. It is our way of giving thanks.

The one area of food preparation in which we do exert control is the cooking process. By cooking our food, we act as partners with the Creator in molding something new – like bread, soup, quiche or crackers. There is ample reason to give thanks.

With these thoughts in mind, we should savor our food rather than devour it. We should commit to eating purposefully rather than instinctually. And we should approach cooking with intention, to elevate our food from the earthly to the sublime.

Reconnecting To Our Sources

“One of the most important things we can do around our food culture is to reconnect to its sources.”

— Michael Pollan

In the documentary “Cooked”, Michael Pollan truly hits upon the reasons why I love shopping farmer’s markets, visiting farms as often as possible and posting photos of fruits and vegetables:

“One of the most important things we can do around our food culture is reconnect to its sources…. Outsourcing has its values, and it certainly makes life easier, but it renders us all into passive consumers.”

I’ve never been entirely comfortable in the Western mindset of passively consuming products. As a consumer, I feel like I’ve ceded choices and decision making to supermarkets, clothing manufacturers and advertising agencies. On the surface, it appears to make life easier: they satisfy with convenience, taste or speed; and they free us from doing a lot of manual work ourselves. But this mindset actually strips us of *real choice* and desensitizes us to what the earth actually provides us.

At heart, I’m passionate about sources in all aspects of my life: I love exploring plants in the forest, examining rocks along the coast, wanting to know the story behind each thrilling discovery. As a kid, I learned how to tend to the myriad fruits and vegetables that my dad grew in our backyard. While eating our harvests, we often talked about the uniqueness of each pick: the enormous zucchinis; the scrawny grapes; the fat blackberries; the hefty collards that gave my dad a kidney stone.

There’s a certain sanctity in reconnecting to food sources, in recognizing the panoply of shapes, textures, flavors, aromas, colors and sounds in which nature packages its bounties. No plastic wrap; no cardboard boxes; no refined, processed & unrecognizable ingredients that are generations removed from their primary sources.

Pure, unadulterated joy.