A twofer: The low-carb food pyramid and that ICE video.

I've said it before: some weeks there's nothing to write about, and some weeks there's too much. Like this week. I was all set to opine on the new USDA food pyramid, but then Renee Good was murdered by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. So I'm going to do both -- the food pyramid first, and then the other thing.

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Screenshot from the USDA website

Never in a million years did I think I would ever agree with the guy with the dead brain worm who's running the US Department of Health and Human Services, under which the US Department of Agriculture sits. But weird shit keeps happening in 2026. So here we are.

I think the new food pyramid is actually okay.

In the 14-plus years I've been blogging (it'll be 15 this August), I've written about weight loss, uh, a whole bunch of times. (There's a search box over on the right; plug in "diet" if you want to find them all.) Most recently, I started eating low carb to get my blood glucose numbers under control. It worked great -- until I went back to work full-time. It became much harder to keep to a low-carb diet, making everything from scratch, when I resumed sitting on my butt for nine hours a day. I still have the treadmill I wrote about a few years back, but (full disclosure) it's currently gathering dust. So I've gained back weight that I lost right after I retired and went low-carb.

But I still believe in low-carb eating: protein at every meal, fruits and veggies but not the starchy ones, full-fat dairy, a limit on whole grains, and no sugar, refined carbs, or junk food. And that's what the new pyramid promotes. 

People are howling about The Fat, particularly that full-fat dairy is now okay. I get that it upends a few decades of nutritional guidance. But there has been scientific evidence over the past few years that the low-fat-dairy advice is mostly circumstantial. That is, nutritionists thought that since fat has more calories than, say, carbs, and that fat is what clogs people's arteries and gives them heart disease, then the answer was to eat less fat. But it turns out that simplistic assumption is wrong. High-fat dairy has been found to improve blood pressure in some studies.

And I believe, just as an anecdotal observation, that it was the advice of nutritionists to eat less fat and consume more carbs back in the '80s that have made obesity and type 2 diabetes become public health concerns.

It wouldn't be the first time that nutrition science has given us bum advice. Remember when eggs were deemed bad for us because of the cholesterol in them? Debunked. Remember when we were told to switch to margarine because of the fat in butter? Also debunked (it turns out the trans fats in margarine are worse than the regular fat in butter).

People are also howling about the advice that added sugar should be kept away from kids until they're eleven years old. Parents are saying it's impossible: "There's sugar in everything!" Well, yes, and it's because food manufacturers have been lacing their products with cheap additives like sugar and salt for decades to make them taste good, and nobody has made them stop. I recognize that it's hard for people who live in food deserts to get fresh fruits and veggies. But cheap food additives and food deserts are things we can fix. (Interestingly, Fox News host Laura Ingraham has admitted that Michelle Obama was right about food deserts. I guess if the advice is coming from a Republican, it's okay?)

Anyway, I find myself applauding the USDA's new food pyramid, and I hope my fellow folks on the left calm down enough to see the wisdom in it. (I can't believe I'm putting Bobby Brainworm and wisdom in the same sentence. This is a really weird year.)

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Okay, on to the tougher thing to talk about: The murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis this week. Murder is a loaded word, but I believe it's justified in this case.

So many words have been written about this incident already that I'm not going to add much. But I wanted to address the video released by Vice President J.D. Vance this week that the shooter himself, Jonathan Gold, shot with his phone. I haven't watched any of the videos, nor do I intend to; I used to get paid to see tough stuff when I was a journalist, and nobody's paying me to do that anymore. But I read historian Heather Cox Richardson's description of the video on her Substack yesterday. 

I've seen some social media commenters questioning why Vance and other right-wing nutjobs thought the video would help their side. I know exactly why. It's because it shows that a woman -- not Renee, but her wife -- mouthed off to a white man in a position of authority, and she wouldn't stop. So he killed Renee.

That's it. That's their whole justification for the shooting. Woman mouths off and won't stop? Shoot her. Kill her. She deserves it.

Every abuser, ever, has used the same defense. 

I hate this timeline.

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These moments of bloggy insanity have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. #AbolishICE.

The modern hunter-gatherer.

Alexas Fotos | Pixabay | CC0

The Washington Post published an op-ed this weekend that has raised a few eyebrows. The author of this piece is a middle-aged white male who works as a creative director at an ad agency in Cleveland, and he says everyone should do what he does and shop for food every day. Not just at one store, either. No, this overachiever visits three or four a day, and five or six on Saturdays.

I'll save you from struggling with the paywall and sum up his argument: Shopping more often keeps food waste down. He says, "In the United States, we waste up to 40 percent of the food we produce, and a sizable chunk of that comes from people throwing away spoiled food, which, in landfills, releases methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Planning ahead might be good for retirement, but not for food shopping. How do you know what you’re going to feel like eating for dinner next Thursday night? What if you end up working late? Or your kid’s soccer game goes long and you stop for pizza on the way home? There goes the graying ground meat you planned to use tonight."

But saving the environment is a side benefit to his real reason for living the way he does: the joy of the hunt. He shops every day, or nearly so -- at an Asian market, an Indian market, a Lebanese market, his neighborhood grocer, the local farmers' market, and so on. An avocado, he says, is only perfectly ripe for six hours, and he's willing to go to five stores to find one.

He is, in sum, the modern hunter-gatherer. Let's call him MHG for short.

My mother was a hunter-gatherer, too. Thursdays were for grocery shopping. On Wednesdays, she would sit down with the local paper and go over the display ads from the grocery stores. She would write down who had what on special that week, including the sale price. She clipped coupons. And on Thursday mornings, she'd drive the 20 minutes to town to do the circuit. When I was a kid, it was National, A&P, and Kroger. Later, she added Al's. Then it was Al's, Kroger, and Bernacchi. (We had a Jewel but Mom thought they were too expensive.) When my hometown got an Aldi, she added that to the mix.

But all of them were grocery stores -- not the sprawling supermarkets of today. You can get through a little grocery store quickly, especially if you stick to your list. Mom would leave around 9:00am, visit all the stores, and be home by lunchtime. And too, she could shop on a weekday morning when the stores weren't terribly crowded.

I can't do that. And I can't do what MHG does, either. In fact, I'm one of the folks MHG takes issue with. I have a day job in a large metropolitan area. I ride public transit to and from work. My preferred time to shop is 8:00pm on a Monday, because the store is virtually empty. Weekends are impossible -- all the other worker bees are shopping then, clogging up the checkout line and snarling traffic.

And yes, I only go to one store. I might visit a second store, but not on the same day. Who has time?

I'm like MHG in one respect, though: we both live in metro areas that can support multiple grocery stores. I'm not sure he's aware of how lucky (some would say privileged) he is, but I am. I don't live in a rural area where the only choice is cheap packaged food from Family Dollar. And I don't live in an urban area where the only choice is 7-Eleven, if that. We, too, have multiple international grocers, organic markets, specialty cheese shops, and so on. I just don't feel like blowing every evening and/or a whole day on the weekend to shop at all of them.

So kudos to MHG for making his lifestyle work for him. I have zero interest in doing the same.

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These moments of not-so-foodie blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Healthy harvest.

Everybody wants to eat better, right? I've found one way to do it. I signed up for a cool produce delivery service called Hungry Harvest. We received our third delivery today, and it's working out really well.

Today's harvest. Note the teeny-tiny butternut squash at left.

This isn't a Blue Apron meal-in-a-box thing. As you can see, there's nothing in the box but fruits and veggies -- which I suppose could work if you're a vegetarian, but even so you'd need to supplement with spices and stuff.

Nor is it community-supported agriculture (CSA), which is where you buy a share in the harvest from a specific small farm. Every so often during the growing season, they deliver a box of whatever's ripe. It's a great way to eat local and to support local farmers. But at least at its inception, you couldn't pick what you got in your box, which is a problem if your family includes some picky eaters.

This is a food rescue service, if you will. About 20 percent of fruts and vegetables never make it to the store for a variety of superficial reasons: the produce isn't a preferred size, or the wholesaler ordered too much, or something. This company collects those foods, packs them into boxes, and sells them to subscribers for less than you'd pay at the grocery store. Everything in the photo above cost $15. They offer bigger boxes, too.

Our first shipment.

This photo is of our first shipment, which also cost $15. There's an eggplant lurking in the back, right in front of the box. I'd never made anything with eggplant before, but I used this one to make ratatouille.

Box number two, which I forgot to take a photo of, included a couple of odd-sized beets, one small and one ginormous. I'd never made anything with beets before, either -- in fact, my acquaintance with beets was limited to the canned variety my mother used to serve occasionally and the one time I had borscht at a fancy luncheon place. I ended up boiling and peeling them, and then making a brown-sugar glaze. I thought it was pretty tasty.

By now, you're sensing a theme: we're getting more variety in our veggies than usual. But more than that, this outfit claims each box sold keeps ten pounds of produce out of landfills. And they've also donated more than 700,000 pounds of food to organizations that help people who don't typically have access to fresh produce.

And unlike with a CSA, you can customize your box. You can even add some stuff, if you like. Last time I ordered a dozen eggs, which we dyed on Ostara last week.

Hungry Harvest doesn't deliver everywhere -- it covers the mid-Atlantic and part of Florida right now. A similar organization called Imperfect Produce operates in San Francisco; Los Angeles; Seattle; Portland, OR; and Chicago. (I found out about Hungry Harvest after a friend in Seattle signed up for Imperfect Produce.) If you live in any of these areas, check 'em out. I've found it to be a tasty way to do a good thing. If you know of any similar organizations, let me know so we can spread the word. 

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These moments of delicious blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.