Real Food: What to Eat and Why

Yes, Virginia, you can butter your carrots. The country’s leading expert on farmers’ markets and traditional foods tells the truth about the foods your grandmother praised but doctors call dangerous.

Everyone loves real food, but they’re afraid bacon and eggs will give them a heart attack–thus the culinary abomination known as the egg-white omelet. But it turns out that tossing out the yolk isn’t smart. Real Food reveals why traditional foods are not only delicious–everyone knows that butter tastes better–but are actually good for you, making the nutritional case for egg, cream, butter, grass-fed beef, roast chicken with the skin, lard, cocoa butter, and more.

In lively, personal chapters on produce, dairy, meat, fish, Nina explains how the foods we’ve eaten for thousands of years–pork, lamb, raw milk cheese, sea salt–have been falsely accused. Industrial foods like corn syrup, which lurks everywhere from fruit juice to chicken broth, are to blame for the triple epidemic of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, not real food.

Nina Planck grew up on a vegetable farm in Virginia and learned to eat right from her no-nonsense parents: along with lots of local fruits and vegetables, the Plancks drank raw milk and ate meatloaf, bacon, and eggs with impunity. But the nutritional trends ran the other way–fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol were taboo–and in her teens and twenties, Nina tried vegan, vegetarian, low-fat, and low-cholesterol diets, with unhappy results.

When she opened the first farmers’ markets in London, Nina began to eat real food again–for pleasure, not health–and to her surprise she lost weight and felt great. She began to wonder about the farmhouse diet back home. Was it deadly, as the cardiologists say? Happily for people who love food, the answer is no.

Real Food upends the conventional wisdom on diet and health. Prepare for pleasant surprises on whipped cream and other delights. The days of deprivation are over.
(from the flap)