Author: Sally Fallon Morell

Sally Fallon Morell is best known as the author of Nourishing Traditions®: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats. This well-researched, thought-provoking guide to traditional foods contains a startling message: animal fats and cholesterol are not villains but vital factors in the diet, necessary for normal growth, proper function of the brain and nervous system, protection from disease and optimum energy levels.

Lab Meat: Big Hype, Bad Investment

Laboratory-produced meat or lab meat—sometimes called “cultured meat” or even “clean meat”–is in the news these days, with gushing articles in the Washington Post, the New York Times and many magazines. The publicity machines are whirring at high speed, and all the chic arguments are on display. “Save the planet bite by bite,” is one of the slogans. If we eat lab meat instead of real meat, we’ll save the land from the desecration by cattle, cut down on water use, protect the air from cow farts containing methane and forestall global warming. Lab meat would be kinder also, because no animals would be killed.

Diet For A Large Planet

Recently I participated in the 2018 Long Island Food Conference, the lone meat eater in a lineup of speakers espousing “plant-based” diets. The keynote speaker was Francis Moore Lappé, whom you will recognize as the author of the very influential Diet for a Small Planet, the 1971 book that convinced many to embrace a diet of grains and beans.

Flavored Milks: How Low Can You Go?

Flavored milks are highly sweetened beverages made with powdered skim milk—they are actually the dairy industry’s way of getting rid of all the skim milk left over from the production of butter and cream, mostly for ice cream. Since Americans are huge ice cream eaters (and since Americans are eating more butter these days), there’s an enormous amount of this waste product that the industry needs to get rid of.

The 2018 Global Food Forum

Recently I attended the 2018 Global Food Forum, organized by the Wall Street Journal, held in the Intercontinental Hotel in New York, and sponsored by Pratt Industries (maker of recyclable packaging), the South Carolina Department of Agriculture, US Soy and The Australian (news coverage).

Food in Switzerland

Earlier this year I made a trip to Switzerland to give two talks on raw milk and to visit one of my boys, who lives in Geneva. Of course, the food in Switzerland received my special attention.

MSG and Free Glutamate: Lurking Everywhere

A few weeks ago, on a trip to British Columbia, I ate in a local restaurant. When eating out, I always try to order something simple, without a gravy or sauce, since these sauces are bound to contain MSG. So I ordered a plain crab cake with rice and vegetables—no sauce, no mayo. Boy, did that crab cake taste good! About midnight I knew why. I woke up with a dry mouth, a terrible thirst and a headache. The next day I felt sore all over, like I’d been in a fight. My hands felt like they had arthritis.

Cooking The Whole Fish

My mother and I both loved Paris and several times had the pleasure of being there together—either meeting there or traveling there. However we met up, we never let the opportunity go by without a visit to our favorite restaurant, La Boule D’Or, in the 7th arrondisement.

All Those New Oils

I often get questions about all these new—even new-fangled—oils like grape seed oil, rice bran oil, hemp seed oil and argan oil. Other oils new to the scene include avocado oil and camelina oil. Do they have any health benefits, and should we use them in cooking and food preparation?

Pancake Batter

One of the most versatile and successful recipes from Nourishing Traditions is the pancakes. Freshly ground flour (spelt, emmer or soft winter wheat) soaked overnight with equal parts of yogurt or kefir serves as the base for delicious, light tasting and highly digestible pancakes.

Gizzards, The Gateway Organ Meat

Have you ever wondered how animals without teeth chew up their food, especially hard foods like grains? They actually have an internal grinding apparatus, called the gizzard.

Milk and Water Kefir

Kefir grains are a wonderful way to culture raw milk because they are not temperature sensitive—for yogurt and other cultures, the milk needs to be heated and kept warm for the culture to work.

True Blue Zones: Loma Linda

So far we have looked at four “blue zones,” regions that have lots of long-lived people: Sardinia, Okinawa, Costa Rica and Ikaria. What have we learned so far about the characteristics of these nonagenarians?

Maybe the most important thing is to live in a place that ends with the letter A. Just kidding.

True Blue Zones: Ikaria, Greece

Tourism in the Greek island of Ikaria got a big boost when scientists determined that Ikaria was a blue zone—an area with a large number of long-lived inhabitants

True Blue Zones: Costa Rica

The Nicoya Peninsula is a fertile rectangle of land on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. Since the arrival of the Spaniards, the region has hosted herds of beef and dairy cattle. Many tropical fruits thrive there, including citrus, mango and papaya.

True Blue Zones: Okinawa

In my last blog, we began a discussion of blue zones—regions with a lot of centenarians—as popularized by Dan Buettner in his book The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest. As we saw in his chapter on the Sardinian blue zone, he leaves out considerable information that contradicts his premise, namely that the longevity diet is one that contains a lot of vegetables and only small amounts of meat—that’s lean meat, not “processed meats that are filled with fat.”