A Beginner's Guide to Buying, Cooking, and Eating More and Better Vegetables
The thing that Montana likes most about CSAs though, is the opportunity to directly support farmers. “It's community supported agriculture. [Everything you eat] comes from small farms. You are actually supporting the small farmers in your area and eating local food. It really reduces the supply chain that food passes through.” Replacing some of your meat consumption with that of vegetables and roots from CSAs, then, will make a big impact on your carbon footprint. Just as it’s saving you money.
Start with the Basics
However you decide to get your vegetables, it’s time to start actually cooking them. If you’ve never really cooked with vegetables you don't need to jump right into using them as your meal centerpieces. “It's okay if you're not chowing down raw kale like the day after you're like, 'I should eat more vegetables,'” said Montana.
When you’re just starting out with vegetables, even after looking at a lot of different recipes, you’ll find that most of what you’re doing with them falls into three different categories: steaming, frying, and roasting.
Steaming is the one probably the most associated with the worst taste, evoking that rubbery broccoli of your grade school cafeteria. But it doesn’t take much effort to do better. One of our favorite non-stick pans, made by Our Place, actually includes a steamer basket. Fill it with water, set it to boil and put your cut vegetables on top of the basket. As long as you make sure you don’t leave them in for too long, and season your food with at least salt and pepper, you’ll get something pretty good.
You’re probably not that likely to deep fry any of the vegetables you pick up, though you totally could! If you’re cooking vegetables, you’re going to have to get familiar with sautee-ing, which is basically frying in a very small amount of fat. Headley suggests using this technique to make a sofrito, which is a kind of a powerful flavor base that you can use in other things, like beans. After cutting them up into small pieces with a chef’s knife, “you cook down celery, and onions, and carrots, none of which are expensive or particularly hard to find, into this beautiful mush basically, and I mean mush in the most positive sense.” It’ll take a few hours to do properly, since you really have to let it go, but Headley says you can make a bunch at once and then store it in the freezer in a deli container.
The third technique, the one you’ll probably end up using the most, is roasting. “When I’m cooking [at home], I like to think, ‘how do you lazy cook?’ How do you come home from work after being so burnt out from the day and still decide to cook? Really the best thing you can do is take a whole cauliflower head, toss it with olive oil, add salt and pepper, and roast the whole thing on a sheet pan in the oven at 350° F. That’s it.” You can apply this technique to pretty much any vegetable, though they’ll all require different amounts of time to cook. As long as you keep them in separate pans or separated in the same pan, you should be good.
The one thing that might happen as you start to cook more vegetables, especially if you cut out meat entirely, is that your meals will start to look a lot different than they did before. This happens to Brooks Headley at Superiority Burger. “Sometimes people are like ‘Well then, what am I, just eating sides?’ They’re like, ‘it’s just a bunch of sides!’ To which I say, ‘Yeah, so what!’ … Everything you eat doesn't have to be like a chunk of protein and a pile of vegetables.” Getting comfortable with that will make your journey a lot easier, especially while you’re getting adjusted to a bunch of new ingredients.
Get Adventurous
Once you’ve started to get familiar with these techniques, you can start to expand your palate. In fact, if you’ve decided to get a CSA, you might be forced to. Crates from CSAs will often have a lot of vegetables that you might have never heard of before.“One thing that’s so cool about a CSA is the fact they give you a thing that you don't know what to do with,” said Koslow. “Something you would never buy for yourself, like kohlrabi.”
The Worst Thing About “Birth of a Nation” Is How Good It Is
The release of “Django Unchained,” and the discussion surrounding it, have brought “Birth of a Nation”—D. W. Griffith’s disgustingly racist yet titanically original 1915 feature—back to the fore. The movie, set mainly in a South Carolina town before and after the Civil War, depicts slavery in a halcyon light, presents blacks as good for little but subservient labor, and shows them, during Reconstruction, to have been goaded by the Radical Republicans into asserting an abusive dominion over Southern whites. It depicts freedmen as interested, above all, in intermarriage, indulging in legally sanctioned excess and vengeful violence mainly to coerce white women into sexual relations. It shows Southern whites forming the Ku Klux Klan to defend themselves against such abominations and to spur the “Aryan” cause overall. The movie asserts that the white-sheet-clad death squad served justice summarily and that, by denying blacks the right to vote and keeping them generally apart and subordinate, it restored order and civilization to the South.
“Birth of a Nation,” which runs more than three hours, was sold as a sensation and became one; it was shown at gala screenings, with expensive tickets. It was also the subject of protest by civil-rights organizations and critiques by clergymen and editorialists, and for good reason: “Birth of a Nation” proved horrifically effective at sparking violence against blacks in many cities. Given these circumstances, it’s hard to understand why Griffith’s film merits anything but a place in the dustbin of history, as an abomination worthy solely of autopsy in the study of social and aesthetic pathology.
Problematically, “Birth of a Nation” wasn’t just a seminal commercial spectacle but also a decisively original work of art—in effect, the founding work of cinematic realism, albeit a work that was developed to pass lies off as reality. It’s tempting to think of the film’s influence as evidence of the inherent corruption of realism as a cinematic mode—but it’s even more revealing to acknowledge the disjunction between its beauty, on the one hand, and, on the other, its injustice and falsehood. The movie’s fabricated events shouldn’t lead any viewer to deny the historical facts of slavery and Reconstruction. But they also shouldn’t lead to a denial of the peculiar, disturbingly exalted beauty of “Birth of a Nation,” even in its depiction of immoral actions and its realization of blatant propaganda.
The worst thing about “Birth of a Nation” is how good it is. The merits of its grand and enduring aesthetic make it impossible to ignore and, despite its disgusting content, also make it hard not to love. And it’s that very conflict that renders the film all the more despicable, the experience of the film more of a torment—together with the acknowledgment that Griffith, whose short films for Biograph were already among the treasures of world cinema, yoked his mighty talent to the cause of hatred (which, still worse, he sincerely depicted as virtuous).
Griffith’s art offers humanly profound moments, whether graceful and delicate or grand and rhetorical, that detach themselves from their context to probe nearly universal circumstances, such as the blend of shame and pride in the face of a returning Confederate soldier when he comes home in tatters and finds his sister in tatters as well, or the stalwart antics of a Union girl (Lillian Gish) as she sends her brothers off to war before collapsing in tears when they’re just out of view. The breathtaking shot that starts close to a huddling mother and children, high on a hillside, and then moves to the advance of Sherman’s army, seen from the family’s elevated refuge, poignantly depicts the intimate ravages of war. The shot of a former slave-owner, under siege by a posse of freedmen for his son’s membership in the K.K.K., holding his grown daughter by the hair and raising his pistol above her head—he’s preparing to kill her if the blacks breach the door—has a harrowing and exalted grandeur that surpasses the film's specific prejudices to achieve a classical moment of tragedy. The cavalry charges of the K.K.K., done with moving cameras that hurtle backward at the speed of the gallop, are visually exhilarating and viscerally thrilling, despite the hateful and bloodthirsty repression that they represent; it's the kinetic model for a century of action scenes.
Throughout the film, Griffith’s pro-Confederacy feelings are grossly apparent; yet his depiction of events—his representation of reality as he understands it—involves the inclusion of much that departs from his intentions. The very essence of his realism is open frames, complex stagings, and multiple planes of action, all of which suggest far more than Griffith’s descriptive title cards, and his stunted politics, would themselves allow.
For instance, a scene of slave-owners and their Northern guests amiably passing by cotton fields while slaves toil in the background presents, as if in a documentary, the obvious connection between the white Southerners’ gracious ways and the hard, enforced work of slaves that makes it possible. This was not Griffith’s intention, but it’s the effect. He shows a summary trial by the K.K.K. of a black man whose sexual advances toward a white woman induced her to leap to her death. That trial and the delivery of the victim’s corpse to the doorstep of the mixed-race lieutenant governor are meant to seem just, even heroic, but come off as obscene and horrifying. The splendid festivities to celebrate the Battle of Bull Run, intercut with the eerie flare of a bonfire, suggest a dance of death, the bonfire foreshadowing the burning of Atlanta. Despite Griffith’s beliefs, the arrival of the Klan, pointing rifles at unarmed blacks who merely seek to vote, appears unjust and cruel.
The overall subject of the film is the original sin of the proximity of the white and black races. The opening scene, in which Africans are brought to the United States and sold as slaves, is described in a title card: “The bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion.” The problem, from the movie’s start, wasn’t slavery but the undue mixing of races—and Griffith’s original ending was to show the return of freedmen to Africa. The two great villains of the film are both described as “mulattos”: the licentious, social-climbing housekeeper of a Radical Republican congressman (based on Thaddeus Stevens, down to the bad toupee), who takes advantage of the widower’s so-called “weakness,” leading to his divisive, aggressive, vengefully carpetbagging version of Reconstruction; and the conniving, contemptuous politician whom the congressman imposes as South Carolina’s lieutenant governor. The crisis that sparks the revolt of Southern whites is the blacks’ claim (asserted with a hungry leering) to the right of intermarriage. The very notion of racial purity (or what one title card calls the “Aryan birthright”) is at the core of the film. Yet the essence of the movie’s aesthetic power—and of its enduring significance—is its intrinsic heterogeneity.
The movie’s perspective on the events of the plot is rich, broad, and deep enough to provide the material for its own contradiction. That’s the very definition of Griffith’s realism, the founding of a cinematic manner that flourishes to this very day, in a wide range of varieties and refractions, and that reflects filmmakers’ confidence that filmic representations, however artificial or contrived, make direct contact with the world of their experience. Griffith doesn’t hide behind interpretive ambiguities or assume that the facts speak for themselves; he makes a world after his own mind, stoking the events vigorously and skewing them decisively with the equivalent of a first-person voice (as in the title cards, adorned with his signature, throughout). He filmed a world that was made to embody his point of view—but the detail and scope that he considered necessary to simulate the reality of that vanished world was inherently multitudinous and polysemic. (And the scenes that aren’t—such as those, in the state legislature, depicting black legislators as leering slobs—are ridiculous and cartoonish.) The one-word definition of Griffith’s realism—and of the best of the generations of movie realism that followed in its wake—is “more.” Despite his best (or, rather, worst) efforts, his movie escaped him.
6 Weird Things You Can Thank Your Hormones For
They're a major part of your life, responsible for bone health and muscle building, among other things, but what exactly are hormones, anyway?
"They're chemical couriers that help get messages from one part of the body to the other," says Jennifer Landa, MD, an ob-gyn based in Orlando and the chief medical officer of BodyLogicMD. "We really couldn't survive without them." (Feel better starting today with Rodale's The Thyroid Cure, a new book that's helped thousands of people finally solve the mystery of what's ailing them.)
"Hormones are also the chemistry of our emotions. Our hormone balance can influence how we feel," says Liz Lyster, MD, an ob-gyn in Foster City, CA, and the author of Dr. Liz's Easy Guide to Menopause: 5 Simple Steps to Balancing Your Hormones and Feeling Like Yourself Again.
You're probably familiar with three of your major sex hormones: estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. (Even though testosterone is usually associated with men, women have a small amount of it, too.) And you likely know that these hormones play a major role in boosting your libido—a surge in estrogen before ovulation triggers the release of the egg, and is associated with increased sexual feelings. But that's not where the benefits end. As you'll see below, your hormones are also partly responsible for mood enhancement, preventing the flu, helping you sleep, and more.
MORE: How To Turn Off Your Weight Gain Hormones
1. Preventing the flu
Here's something that you can hold over your hubby. A study led by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, published in American Journal of Physiology: Lung Cellular and Molecular Physiology, found that estrogen helps protect against the flu virus.
Since estrogen levels fluctuate during each month in premenopausal women—usually becoming more dominant around week 2 of the menstrual cycle, before ovulation—it's possible that premenopausal women are more protected from flu around week 2 of their menstrual cycles. It's also possible that women who are taking certain kinds of birth control, fertility treatments, or hormone therapy may be more protected from flu.
2. Warding off osteoporosis"Estrogen is essential for bone strength," says Lyster. "The bones do not incorporate calcium optimally without a little bit of estrogen around." Testosterone also plays a role in building bones.
You might think of your bones as static body parts that just sit there and do nothing. "But, technically, bone is constantly building up and breaking down," says Landa. "When you're young and you have a higher level of estrogen, the estrogen stimulates what's called osteoblastic activity, which builds up bone. When your estrogen level dips after menopause, osteoclastic activity—the kind that breaks down bone—starts to exceed osteoblastic activity."
This is why after menopause you're at higher risk of developing osteoporosis, a disease that makes your bones weaker and easier to break. "You lose the most bone in the first 5 years after menopause," says Landa. After menopause, it's important to get adequate calcium and vitamin D in your diet and to do weight-bearing exercises to keep your bones strong.
MORE: 5 Signs You're Not Getting Enough Vitamin D
3. Keeping you lubricated
Estrogen is a big reason that you feel slippery during sex, and that's because it improves blood flow to the vagina. "As much as we all think lubrication comes out of a gland, it doesn't. It's actually a filtered portion of our blood that makes us wet," says Landa.
You can also thank estrogen for keeping your vagina plump and pinkish-red in color. After menopause, the vagina can become paler, almost white. And, believe it or not, the canal itself can become smaller. "As you lose estrogen—this is the wildest thing that nobody ever tells you—your vaginal cells actually atrophy and shrink," says Landa. This reduction in size, coupled with vaginal dryness, can make sex more painful later in life.
4. Building muscleTestosterone is a huge help when it comes to building muscle, and it can also help maintain skin thickness so that it doesn't wrinkle, sag, and easily bruise or tear. "Regarding testosterone, we have only a tenth of what men have, but it's really important to us. We need that little bit," says Landa. (Low testosterone? Here's how to boost it naturally.)
If you're annoyed that your husband can build muscle more easily and, therefore, boost his metabolism more quickly and burn calories at a faster rate, blame it on testosterone. "Testosterone's influence on muscle is one of the reasons that, generally speaking, men have an easier time with their weight than women do," says Lyster.
MORE: 16 Signs Your Thyroid Is Out Of Whack
5. Improving your mood
Testosterone is known for increasing your level of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that makes you feel pleasure and improves your focus.
"Women who cry very easily seem to experience a great stabilization of their moods when they take testosterone," says Landa. "And women with higher testosterone levels tend to have a better sense of well-being and more self-esteem, and they tend to be more decisive."
6. Helping you sleepThere's one more major sex hormone that hasn't yet been mentioned, and that's progesterone. Landa calls it the "calming and soothing hormone."
"Levels start to go down in our 30s, and that really picks up steam in our late 40s. Low progesterone can lead to not sleeping well at night, feeling more anxious, having irregular cycles, and experiencing worse PMS," says Landa.
These symptoms are more likely to occur during the second half of your cycle. During that stretch, progesterone is supposed to be higher than usual, so if and when it isn't, you tend to feel the effects.
MORE: 7 Reasons You're Tired All The Time
Should You Try Hormone Therapy?If you're worried that you might be particularly low on certain hormones, or if you feel that your levels may be fluctuating, talk to your ob-gyn. Each woman has different levels and can experience different symptoms in varying degrees of intensity. Your doctor may be able to test your hormone levels and discuss possible treatments with you. (Here are the 21 best foods that balance hormones.)
But keep this in mind: "Treatment is not supposed to restore hormones to youthful levels. It's given to control bothersome symptoms," says Nanette Santoro, MD, professor and chair of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora.
There are a variety of ways to treat your symptoms, and each treatment comes with its own array of risks and benefits. "There is no 'one size fits all' treatment that broadly addresses the problem," says Santoro. "It's really a matter of assessing a woman's health status, her inherent risks of disease, and then factoring in just how much inconvenience her symptoms are causing her."
In terms of safety, Santoro adds: "For many women, a short course of hormones for a few years is unlikely to cause lasting harm. Much of the risk comes with longer durations of use and primarily are related to whether a woman needs both estrogen and progesterone or just estrogen alone [women with hysterectomies have no need for progesterone]. When hormones aren't an option [it's contraindicated in women with breast cancer, for example], there are now a few FDA-approved alternatives to hormones, and there is a decent arsenal of well-studied treatments that aren't FDA approved that can be tried."
Jane Bianchi Jane Bianchi is a writer and editor with more 13 years of experience specializing in health; she formerly worked as a health editor at Family Circle, and her work has appeared in Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Esquire, and more.
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