O-K-L-A-H-O-M-A, Oklahoma... OK

I wasn't born when FDR was president. We may have had a good one or two-- Eisenhower (in retrospect) and JFK (in dreams)-- while I was alive, but I have a desire for there to be one great one before I die. And there's one on the horizon: Elizabeth Warren. She's got to win her battle for a Massachusetts seat in the U.S. Senate first. Polls show she will and yesterday's amazing endorsement by the Boston Globe should help close the deal. Will Oklahomans be proud of their native daughter? Will they support the brilliant woman who was born just over 60 years ago in Oklahoma City, at a time when Oklahoma was very, very blue and very, very populist?

Oklahoma isn't blue anymore and whatever populism is left is strictly Know Nothing and neo-fascist right-wing populism. Oklahoma is one of the few places where they still admire the Tea Party. A week from Tuesday they'll be vying with far right Mormon bastions, Idaho, Wyoming and Utah, for who gives Obama the smallest percentage of votes. In 2008, Oklahoma gave McCain his biggest win anywhere-- 66-34%. Since gaining statehood in 1907, Oklahoma voted Democratic in all but two elections (in the Warren Harding landslide over James Cox in 1920 and in the Herbert Hoover landslide over Al Smith in 1928) through 1948, but has not gone Democratic since-- Elizabeth Warren's whole lifetime-- except in the landslide win for Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

The only Oklahoma Democrat holding federal office any longer is Blue Dog Dan Boren, who is so far to the right that in the current 2011-'12 session, 15 Republicans have higher ProgressivePunch scores, including die-hard conservatives like Tom McClintock and John Campbell of California. Boren, who used to brag he was George W. Bush's favorite Democrat-- and whose main function in Congress is to allow Boehner and Cantor to pass extremist insanity and call it "bipartisan"-- is finally retiring... and the weak, right-wing Blue Dog hoping to replace him, Rob Wallace, is likely to lose to Markwayne Mullin, a character right out of the Rush Limbaugh dittohead audience. Wallace appears to be running against President Obama and Nancy Pelosi instead of the Republican.

Time for an "on the other hand." Remember when we first met Oklahoma state Senator Andrew Rice, founder of the Progressive Alliance Foundation who ran against right-wing freak Jim Inhofe in 2008? Running as an unabashed strong progressive, he scored 5% better than Obama did and won 4 counties-- Okmulgee, McIntosh, Muskogee and Cherokee (unlike Obama who won none).

A few weeks ago Digby, Amato and I had a Blue America meeting at M.A.K.E. in Santa Monica. It's the brand new state-of-the-art raw food restaurant in Santa Monica, the crème de la crème of vegan dining. I knew it because the owner/chef, Matthew Kenney was the founder of my favorite restaurant in New York, Pure Food and Wine (Gramercy Park). It was delicious! I'm having dinner there tonight. But you know what? Oklahoma beat Santa Monica to the punch!

The Matthew Kenney Academy, located in Oklahoma City, is the first licensed and classically structured Raw and Living Foods educational center in the world.

Formerly called, 105degrees, the Matthew Kenney Academy was created in response to the increasing demand for chefs skilled in the art of raw and living food preparation.

The curriculum emphasizes the use of whole, organic, unprocessed, plant-based foods to achieve healthy, aesthetically refined and flavorful cuisine.

The Academy, along with the Matthew Kenney OKC restaurant, is the endeavor of celebrity chef and author Matthew Kenney and Oklahoma City resident Dara Prentice.

Forbes named Matthew Kenney OKC one of America’s Best New Restaurants in 2010.

Raw food is also referred to as living cuisine for the healthy natural enzymes protected in the food by keeping its temperature below 105 degrees Fahrenheit during preparation.

A graduate of the French Culinary Institute, Matthew Kenney started his career 20 years ago when he was named one of the Ten Best New Chefs in America by Food and Wine Magazine. He has received two James Beard Nominations for Rising Star Chef in America. He is the author of several cookbooks, including Raw Food Real World, Everyday Raw and Entertaining in the Raw.

...Wendy Thomas, from southern California is attending the academy and is blogging about her experience, she wrote: “For me, it’s about learning how to eat consciously and in agreement with nature. I came all the way to Oklahoma for two months to learn as much as I can and I want to make the most of this experience. I’ve learned a lot, made mistakes, learned from those mistakes and in the end, I am very thankful for every moment.”

Boris Lauser, a student from Berlin said, “I came into the Academy with 3 years of experience as a raw food chef. However, the Academy course starts at a contemporary high level of raw cuisine and only 2 weeks into the course, we started doing exciting fermentation, including coconut yogurt and tree nut cheeses. The school’s focus on artful plating and excellence in taste and quality has definitely left an imprint on my work.“

The intimate class size and personalized instruction, under the supervision of Megan Massoth, the Academy Director and lead instructor, allows for a hands-on experience within a state-of-the-art commercial living foods kitchen.

The one-to-two month long training for chef certification, prepares students for careers in the many areas of the fast-growing field of culinary arts emphasizing health and sustainability. It includes opportunities in spas and restaurants, catering outlets and culinary educational centers.

“I invite you to come learn with me to make the world a healthier place, one bite at a time.” said Matthew Kenney.

That's cute, huh? How about this story from This American Life a week or two ago? It's all about how Oklahoma, against huge odds, came to have the first and best publicly-funded pre-school system in the country. It's a story I've been trying to figure out how to share with DWT readers since I first heard it driving in my car.

Do You Like To Drink? Are You Open To Advice From An Iranian?

Last Sunday we met, or re-met, former Bush Surgeon General Richard Carmona, one of Jordan Rubin's "Health Legends" from his new book, The Raw Truth. This week, let's look at another of Rubin's Legends and his work, one whose research was done while he was a prisoner of the Khomeini regime in revolutionary Iran. Fereydoon Batmanghelidj, born in 1931, died in 2004, was a British-educated Iranian gastroenterologist, author of many studies and two important book, Your Body's Many Cries for Water and You're Not Sick, You're Thirsty.

Because he lived in Britain for so many years, when Khomeini took power Batmanghelidj found himself in the former Shah's notorious Evin Prison, scheduled for execution. He was kept alive so he could treat sick prisoners... although with no tools or medications.

One day, he was asked to see a prisoner complaining of excruciating stomach pain, so much so that two friends had to help him to his feet as he doubled over in pain.

The only thing Dr. Batmanghelidj could give the poor soul was a couple of glasses of water. Within minutes, his stomach pain subsided and eventually disappeared after drinking additional water. This prisoner was severely dehydrated.

More hurting prisoners asked to see Dr. Batmanghelidj. In fact, over the next two and a half years, he treated hundreds, if not thousands of prisoners suffering from stomach pains caused by the stress of being falsely imprisoned with a regimen of water drinking. As he noted their physical recuperation after hydrating themselves with plenty of water, Dr. Batmanghelidj began writing his clinical observations on the effect of water as a treatment for various stress-induced health problems.

Here’s where the story takes another twist: after nearly two years in prison, the warden told Dr. Batmanghelidj that he was free to go. The Iranian physician, instead of walking out the front gate, asked the warden if he could stay in prison a while longer to complete his scientific study of the link between drinking water and prisoners’ health.

I’m sure a guard had to pick the warden off the floor, but he granted Dr. Batmanghelidj’s request. The Iranian doctor stayed four extra months and finished his study, which he announced in the Iranian Medical Association Journal.

The rest is history, and Dr. Batmanghelidj’s clarion call to drink more water was eventually heard by health-minded readers of his books, Your Body’s Many Cries for Water and You’re Not Sick, You’re Thirsty!

...How much water does the body need to stay hydrated? The most oft-quoted advice in health books is to “drink eight glasses of water a day,” which is easy to write and hard to do. Many think that if they drink that much water, they’ll be running to the bathroom every twenty minutes. Others sense they need to drink something, but instead of water, they ply their bodies with mocha coffees, flavored sodas, and sport drinks.

Yes, you do go to the bathroom more often when you’re well hydrated, but is that so bad? Our bodies need water. “Every twenty-four hours, the body recycles the equivalent of forty thousand glasses of water to maintain its normal physiological functions,” said Dr. Batman, which is what many call him. “If you think you are different and your body does not need eight to ten glasses of water each day, you are making a major mistake.” ... [P]roper hydration plays a key role in regulating body temperature, carrying nutrients and oxygen to the cells, cushioning joints, protecting organs and tissues, and removing toxins from the body.

Rubin goes on to describe the necessity of drinking plenty of water that is clean, uncooked, untreated, unadulterated and unchlorinated-- spring water. He's also a big proponent of raw (unpasteurized) dairy products from grass-fed cows, especially kefir, yogurt, and hard, aged cheese, as well as of fresh veggie and fruit juices, raw nut milk, and coconut water and coconut kefir.

Raw fruit juices and raw veggie juices shouldn’t be a breakfast-only item. After these juices are made in a juicer, you can drink them any time of day, but they are best consumed on an empty stomach at least twenty minutes before eating other foods. When you consume the whole fruits and vegetables found in a juice, you receive easily absorbable nutrients, along with enzyme co-factors. Since the nutrients and enzymes have been liberated, so to speak, from the fiber pulp-- and without any heat, I might add-- the cells of your body can take in the nutrition quickly and easily. Keep in mind that the body’s cells are made up mostly of water, which is why good hydration is essential for proper cellular nutrition.

Batmanghelidj's books assert that chronic dehydration is the root cause of most diseases, and they endeavor to explain the damaging effects of dehydration. Among the diseases he claims are the result of dehydration are high blood pressure, premature aging, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, obesity, heart disease, cancer, sleep disorders, diabetes, hypertension, kidney stones and even attention-deficit disorder.

If you'd like a free copy of Rubin's book The Raw Truth today, make a contribution to the Blue America PAC, which fights to elect conscientious, progressive legislators.

Washington Post Starts A New Column To Look Into The State Of What Americans Eat

In yesterday's Washington Post Ezra Klein, commenting on the recently released film Food, Inc., writes that "something is wrong with our food production system... Food, Inc. joins In Defense of Food, Fast Food Nation, Super Size Me and dozens of other polemical books and films in the necessary effort to convince us that checking out at the supermarket is, on some level, a political act, with consequences for ourselves, our families and our world."

I dropped out long ago. I was lucky that a girlfriend when I was in college was a health-conscious vegetarian and a great cook. I never made a decision to become a vegetarian... but it's been almost 40 years (not counting, in the old days, here and there, some chicken-- which my doctor says is worse than beef-- and fish). I do remember, much more recently, becoming a raw foodist. The aforementioned doctor gave me a choice: go raw (or, really, rawish) or die from the cancer that had recently been discovered. I learned-- with little fuss and no hesitation-- to love raw food.

When I started, there were no restaurants serving raw cuisine anywhere near my home. The closest was an hour away. Learning to prepare my own meals was a joy all over again. It's so healthy! Now there are several in L.A. I could walk to in a pinch. Actually now I'm in Bali and there are almost as many restaurants serving raw cuisine here as there are in L.A. In fact, the house I rented just outside Ubud is a paradise for a raw foodist with a Vitamix, a dehydrator and a wonderful chef who just made me some raw yogurt from coconut milk!

If I go to a "straight" American grocery store, it might be to get toilet paper, a light bulb or a battery. And that includes Whole Foods, which is maybe 10-20% more health conscious and more organic and less deadly than supermarkets with far less pretension. Ezra isn't talking about me when he points out that Americans "know rather less about our food than our grandparents did. In part, that's because the process of creating food in a lab is less familiar than the process of growing it in a garden. Food producers might have to print ingredient lists, but no one ever passed a law saying we had to understand them. (How do you hydrogenate an oil, anyway?)"

I know I'm not going to live forever, but my cancer is gone, I lost over 40 backbreaking pounds, I feel better than I can remember in decades, I don't get sick, I have more energy and my feet never itch. I don't eat food created in labs and I feel sorry for folks who eat hydrogenated oils.

But there also has been a concerted effort to pull a curtain across the food production system. You see that twice in "Food, Inc." Once, when a farmer who raises chickens for Tyson agrees to allow cameras onto his farm, only to have Tyson quickly call and persuade him to rescind his offer. And again, when Monsanto refuses to comment on, well, anything. It's one thing to be kept out of Dick Cheney's underground lair(s?). But we're eating this stuff.

Ezra interviews the director of Food, Inc. who points to the Inside the Beltway power structure: "Industry, committees on the Hill, the USDA, and very little input from us." He forgot the FDA. I'm sure Ezra will get around to it in his new twice monthly column on the politics of food, but no one mentioned the fount of death-by-eating, Congress' most corrupt enclave, the Blue Dog-dominated House Agriculture Committee. Forget the Medical-Industrial Complex and the banksters when it comes to running wild over their slices of our lives. Compared to AgriBusiness they are each thriving in an oasis of enlightenment, instead of the den of iniquity run by America's chief poisoner, Collin Peterson.

Yes, Yes, We Are What We Eat

Do Republicans want you and your family to die? Not necessarily. Republican Party orthodoxy adamantly opposes federal regulatory protections and has steadfastly claimed that the market-- which they worship far more assiduously than Jesus-- should correct health and safety issues, not the government. And if we lived in a rural 18th century setting they might be at least partially correct. But we don't; and they're not. Sure poisonous food will tend to put a company out of business-- the market forces in action-- but how about if a hundred or a thousand children die first?

Today's NY Times has a very different kind of editorial: "Food Safety For People Who Don't Cook." Being a raw foodist, I couldn't wait to read it. But it wasn't about people looking for nutritious diets by avoiding cooking and cancer-causing oils. It's about the polar opposite-- people who eat processed fast food-- and how avoiding outbreaks of foodborne illnesses is lately being called part of consumers' personal responsibility by the lucrative food processing industry. The Times assembled an impressive panel to debate the issue.

First up was Douglas Powell, an associate professor of food safety at Kansas State University and the editor of barfblog.com. He makes the point that self-serving irresponsible companies like ConAgra are being ingenuous when they try to shove responsibility onto consumers.

Food safety isn’t simple-- it’s hard. For decades, consumers have been blamed for foodborne illness-- with unsubstantiated statements like, “the majority of foodborne illness happens in the home.” Yet increasingly the outbreaks in foods like peanut butter, pot pies, pet food, pizza, spinach and tomatoes have little to do with how consumers handle the food.

Everyone from farm-to-fork has a food safety responsibility, but putting the onus on consumers for processed foods or fresh produce is disingenuous-- especially for those who profit from the sale of these products.

Ann Cooper is a chef and author of Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children. For someone who eats cooked food her perspective is remarkably sane:

Large multi-national corporations started taking over our food supply a generation ago, convincing consumers that processed food would be safer and easier. If we look at advertisements from the 1950s, the message was that processed food would help mothers get out of the kitchen while providing nutritional food to their kids. The notion that processed is safer has carried over to school food service administrators all across the country, causing them to switch from roasting fresh chicken to highly processed chicken nuggets, pizza pockets and burritos, all hermetically sealed.

These plastic wrapped frozen lunch items are touted as safer because you heat them in the plastic, hold them in the plastic and serve them in the plastic, never needing to worry about contamination.

In fact these companies have gotten so good at marketing the safety of these products that most schools in our country are truly afraid of cooking raw chicken–- as if it’s a foreign object from another planet–- as opposed to a food that families have been cooking for eons.

And now, these food manufacturers-- the ones that convinced us to stop cooking and that good food can come frozen in plastic-- have realized that mass production can lead to unsafe food, and so they are trying to transfer the responsibility back to consumers who no longer know how to cook.

This is crazy. We now have a generation that doesn’t cook. If the companies are selling a fully cooked highly processed product, they-- not the eater-- should bear responsibility for its safety.

If we want a safe, healthy and delicious food supply we need to cook. We need to realize that highly processed foods aren’t better and even the companies are realizing that they’re not safer.

They close-- fair and balanced-- with right-wing ideologue Walter Olson, an apologist for Big Business: [W]hat seems to be increasing is not so much food-borne illness itself as our ability to trace its origins accurately, and get the word out about it widely and quickly. As for why food processors are moving to more conservative (higher-temperature) cooking recommendations, wouldn’t you do that too if faced with mounting political pressure and lawsuit risk? ...There has never been a guarantee that nasty bugs would not grow on food, and there isn’t one now."

I travel a lot and I prefer renting a house or apartment to staying in a hotel partially because it is so much more healthful in every way to prepare your own food than to eat out all the time. The apartment I rent in Bangkok is over a McDonald's and although the main entrance to the building is not through the McDonald's, it's a shortcut. It's also the only times I've ever been in a McDonald's. I don't eat that stuff; I don't even think of it as "food," just manufactured feeding materials. Have a great weekend. Here's your chance to learn something about eating healthy raw food as an alternative to the processed stuff that will make you sick and kill you.

Eating Healthy In The Wake Of The Bush Economic Miracle

I'm a comparison shopper. It takes 3 stores for me to get my groceries-- Trader Joe's and Nature Mart in my neighborhood and Erewhon way on the other side of town. Trader Joe's sells 1.5 liter bottles of Fiji water for almost a dollar less per bottle than anyone else. I drink around 14 bottle a week, theoretically, a savings of nearly $700/year. That kind of thing adds up. Trader Joe's is always the cheapest place in town to get organic blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries and the only place with pomegranate seeds. Nature Mart is the closest place to my house but I go there the least frequently because their prices are high and their service is indifferent (high employee turnover) but it's where I can always go in a pinch if I need an avocado, some tomatoes or a raw food munchie.

My grocery store of choice in Erewhon because it caters to raw foodists. The prices are ok but not great. I used to shop at Whole Foods. That's how I figured out that Erewhon was ok. Aside from being way cheaper than Whole Foods, they have much better produce. Whole Foods is about 25% organic-- if that. Erewhon is over 90% organic. Corporately, Whole Foods knows what raw food is-- they have quite the nice raw foods set-up in the flag ship store in Austin-- but in L.A.... clueless. I shouldn't say that. They used to get an F and now they get a C, big improvement.

Today's NY Times takes a look at Whole Foods' p.r. campaign to change its image as an unaffordable rich people store to one for just plain (health-conscious) folks. Some value conscious wag nicknamed it Whole Paycheck-- which stuck-- and since the p.r. campaign is based mostly on smoke and mirrors, it doesn't work; at least not for me. I don't think the Times bought it either. This graphic is theirs:

Whole Foods Market is on a mission to revise its gold-plated image as consumers pull back on discretionary spending in a troubled economy. The company was once a Wall Street darling, but its sales growth was cooling even before the economy turned. Since peaking at the beginning of 2006, its stock has dropped more than 70 percent.

Now, in a sign of the times, the company is offering deeper discounts, adding lower-priced store brands and emphasizing value in its advertising... Whole Foods’ makeover comes amid a tumultuous time in the grocery industry, as customers struggling to pay for higher-priced fuel and food are trading down to lesser products and discount-oriented stores.

About 15% of Americans are hard core organic food consumers, but the growth has slowed down and, because of hard economic times, it's even slipping in some areas (like packaged foods). A day or two ago we looked at the petering out of the globalization craze, mostly from the perspective of the re-industrialization of America. But it also means that it will be far more expensive to ship foods from cheap, far away countries. But there's a bright side to that coin too:

Soaring transportation costs also have an impact on food, from bananas to salmon. Higher shipping rates could eventually transform some items now found in the typical middle-class pantry into luxuries and further promote the so-called local food movement popular in many American and European cities.

“This is not just about steel, but also maple syrup and avocados and blueberries at the grocery store,” shipped from places like Chile and South Africa, said Jeff Rubin, chief economist at CIBC World Markets and co-author of its recent study on transport costs and globalization. “Avocado salad in Minneapolis in January is just not going to work in this new world, because flying it in is going to make it cost as much as a rib eye.”

BRINGING RAW FOOD TO CONGRESS, ONE CANDIDATE AT A TIME

Jon Powers, the Blue America-endorsed candidate from western New York (NY-26), was in Los Angeles today and Irwing and I took him to dinner. I didn't ask him if he wanted Buffalo wings; instead we took him to Juliano's Raw for his first raw vegan dinner. He says he loved it and he sure cleaned his plate as well as the rest of us. Irwing has been thinking about enlisting in the French Foreign Legion and Jon gave him a good talk about that and recommended a couple of books to read a movie or two to watch before he does anything precipitous.

Jon is running against a classic rubber stamp Republican, Tom Reynolds, a professional politician and the walking, quacking definition of an Inside the Beltway hack. Reynolds has tried to tout himself as "an independent voice" but he can't seem to make that label stick. Maybe that's because of the 56 roll call votes he participated in relating to Iraq, he voted with Bush and Cheney 56 times. That doesn't exactly sound like an independent voice to me. I mean he couldn't even find one disagreement with the catastrophic Bush Iraq agenda? I guess if anyone loves the war and hates the troops they have the perfect candidate in Tom Reynolds.

Smelling very much like another Inside-the-Beltway candidate, former Reynolds supporter Alice Kryzan-- she donated $250 to his campaign on November 2, 2000-- has jumped into the race as well-- but as a Democrat challenging Jon in the primary! Most Democrats in the district who know her, and that isn't many, know her as the attorney for Occidental Petroleum who called the citizen uproar over the toxic disaster known as Love Canal "hysteria."

I hope when Jon's in Congress after January, 2009, he gets the cafeteria there to serve raw food. If you want to see the kind of guy he is, watch this shorts video clip. And if it so moves you, give him a hand in making America a better place.