(for further reading on the Seder Passover held at the USDA, check out this article on the USDA blog)

Noha Waibsnaider
Founder & CEO
Peeled Snacks

From Feed the Belly: The Pregnant Mom’s Healthy Eating Guide (Sourcebooks, 2009) by Frances Largeman-Roth, RD

Citrus-Spiked Rice Pudding

Prep: 5 minutes

Cook: 20 minutes

Makes 5 servings

2 1/2 cups frozen brown rice or cooked white or brown rice

1 cup organic 1% milk or vanilla soy or almond milk

2 tablespoons fat-free, sweetened condensed milk

2 teaspoons orange zest

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon, plus more for dusting

2 tablespoons pure maple syrup

½ cup chopped Peeled Snacks organic dried Apricots

1. Place the frozen or cooked rice, 1% milk, and sweetened condensed milk in a medium saucepan, and heat over medium heat until shimmering, about 5 minutes. Add the zest, vanilla, cinnamon, and maple syrup, and cook an additional 10 minutes, until most of the milk has been absorbed.

2. Stir in the chopped Peeled Snacks organic apricots and heat through, about 4 to 5 minutes. Serve warm or cold with a dusting of cinnamon if you’d like. Enjoy!

Calories 204; Fat 2g (Sat 0.2g, Mono 0.3g, Poly 0.3g); Cholesterol 1mg; Protein 4g; Carbohydrate 3g; Sugars 16g; Fiber 3g; Iron 1mg; Sodium 37mg; Calcium 111mg

Makes 10 muffins

Ingredients

• 3/4 cup whole-wheat flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 cups bran crumbs (ground bran crackers)
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon ground allspice
• 2 tablespoons canola oil
• 2 tablespoons molasses
• 2 tablespoons agave nectar
• 1 large egg or egg substitute, lightly beaten
• 1 1/3 cups low fat buttermilk
• 1/2 cup Peeled Snacks Cherry-Go-Round
  
• Greek plain yogurt, for topping

Instructions
1. Preheat oven to 375º F. Prepare a muffin pan with nonstick baking spray. 2. In a medium bowl combine all dry ingredients. 3. In a small bowl, combine canola oil, molasses, agave nectar, egg and buttermilk and mix well. 4. Add liquid ingredients to dry ingredients and stir just until dry ingredients are moistened. Do not over mix. 5. Stir in Peeled Snacks Cherry-Go-Round and fill prepared muffin pans 3/4 full. 6. Bake 15 to 20 minutes in preheated oven or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Serve bran muffins crumbled atop nonfat Greek plain yogurt.

Last month Peeled Snacks launched in Duane Reade drug stores.  In the last couple of years, Duane Reade has made some fantastic strides towards providing genuinely healthy, fresh options.  This year they tapped Peeled Snacks for their snack department.  It didn't take long for Duane Reade to see that Peeled Snacks is a MOVER, thanks to loyal supporters and newcomers alike, and that they need to keep plenty of Much-Ado-About-Mango around.

CVS has joined the healthy snack movement as well, putting our organic snacks in various places around their NYC stores.  With CVS, we're just starting in a small geography, but with over 7,000 doors, CVS represents an opportunity for Peeled Snacks to take a giant stride towards accomplishing our goal of making our treats available everywhere you need a snack.

All this momentum speaks to a retail environment that's drastically different than the one Peeled Snacks faced in its early days.  Whereas we once had to fight tooth and nail for a chance to be available to a store's customers, now retailers come to us because we provide a solution to one of their big problems- what can these stores offer that's truly GOOD?  Tastes good, looks good, is good for you?  Happily, that's us.

And right now, it's getting better and better to be us.

-Peeled Skinny

Lately a good deal of press has been given to the toxicity of sugar and what should be done with it.  Last Spring, the New York Times Magazine published a great expose about sugar's dangers.  More recently "Nature" magazine published a startling article calling for the federal regulation of sugar.  This debate seemed to me relegated to the world of the press, talking heads, and foodies.  But no longer, alas.

Last week, food activist and author Mark Bittman, published a thought provoking article  about the politicization of sugar. Bittman heralded Florida Republican state senator Ronda Storms for her tackling the sugar debate.  He points out that Storms trends in most social issues to the far right, but took flack from party members (as well as lefties) for her anti-added sugar stance.  She criticizes her State's Food Stamp program for allowing food stamps to be used to purchase sugary food (along with tobacco, alcohol, and other taboos).

Here at Peeled Snacks HQ, we've always felt a little righteous about the whole sugar debate, seeing as we've never actually added any sugar.   But that righteousness is color blind- it's not red, it's not blue, it's the color of FOOD.  We have worked for several years trying to spread the word (to ALL people, regardless of political stance) on the dangers of added sugar, and we strive to provide snacks that taste yummy but aren't full of sugar. 

In theory, food issues should be color blind.  Food is health, and a healthy population is in everyone's best interest.  But food makes MONEY, and money, well, money is politics.  In a season when lawmakers are overturning stone after stone looking for pork-barrel budget bits to cut out, no law maker that I know of has discussed cutting out the corn subsidy, in spite of the BILLIONS it would save, and the impact its removal would have on public health. 

Public health should have no party lines.  Whatever else Storms stands for, in this matter she's spot-on.

-Peeled Skinny

For full disclosure's sake, I probably haven't eaten a twinkie since the early 80s, and even then didn't care for them.  But I recognize the Twinkie as being iconic.  For better or worse, it's a proud member of essential Food-related Americana, like Apple Pie or the Hershey bar.  The Twinkie took new meaning to me when Michael Pollan pointed out the ridiculousness behind a Twinkie costing less than a bag of carrots. Pollan refers to a Twinkie as an "iconic foodlike substance", a term that I have found very useful while writing this blog.

But I'm not writing to pick on the Twinkie.  That'd be too easy, and it's not nice to speak ill of the sickly.  And all of you out there that have ever eaten a Twinkie, well good for you- it's cheap, it'll keep you alive, nuf said.  But Hostess?  The largest baker in the United States is on the verge of collapse, and yet I can still find Twinkies in probably 8 stores within a couple blocks of my office.  I assume that somebody high up at Hostess has been saying to any nearby ear, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".  But obviously, it's broken, and has been for years.

Hostess has had plenty of success over the years, and employed a heck of a lot more people than Peeled Snacks has.  Though there products have never been healthy, excepting maybe Wonder-Bread, Hostess has never said that they were.  But with all that distribution, and all those employees, Hostess has for decades had the capability of really getting good stuff out there.  But it hasn't bothered.  It hasn't changed.

Perhaps bakeries just shouldn't be big companies.  Perhaps bread should be distributed only as far as a truck can ship it can get while still cooling from the over.  Perhaps people just shouldn't eat food that doesn't rot.  But there's no "perhaps" about Hostess' missteps- a company with so many employees and so much reach that fails to adapt to a changing world has let a whole lot of people down.  Investors, consumers, employees, families.

The food world is changing while I type.  Peeled Snacks is trying to help lead that change, but if we achieve our goals, if we make real food really available and offer a real challenge to products with average sugar, great.  But if we get there, it'll just mean that there's someplace else to go.  Maybe there was somebody high up at Hostess who saw this coming and shouted, "fix it!  Fix IT!"  He or she should have shouted a lot louder.

There's a dang good chance that somebody will buy some or all of Hostess' catalog and production capacity.  If and when that happens, I'll be watching to see if the new owner can update that "Foodlike substance" for the times.  Chances are, though, I still won't eat it.  Sayonara, Hostess.  It's the end of that era.  But, then again, it's the start of ours.

Happy Snacking,

Peeled Skinny

This was me, Noha Waibsnaider, Founder & CEO of Peeled Snacks, in high school. I think back on that time and remember being lethargic, constantly grumpy, and on a perpetual diet to lose 20 pounds. My friends and I would crash diet, limiting lunch to a piece of bread and a slice of American cheese. I'd be starving all day, but then come home to binge on sugary snacks. My blood sugar would yo-yo, and I'd end up exhausted and depressed. By dinnertime, I wasn't hungry for anything substantive. I would eat nonetheless, rather than be hungry later. Then I would repeat the cycle the following day, feeling powerless to stop it, hating the result, and hating myself for my inability to stay on track.

I struggled with my weight until my mid-twenties. A combination of living a more active lifestyle and getting control over my food intake helped me kick my bad eating habits and those 20 pounds, which felt significant on a 5'2" frame. I learned to eat breakfast, incorporated more protein, and cut out sugary drinks. I stopped feeling tired and started truly enjoying my meals.

Years later, I worked at a large food company and learned about the ingredients and processing that goes into food. I realized my addiction to food was well engineered: people are biologically programmed to crave sugar, fat, and salt. Many large food companies process food to take advantage of those traits.

I realized big food companies were great at processing food, but they weren't offering food that make people feel good about snacking. For years, I had struggled to find real food that was naturally nourishing, yet tasted great and was fulfilling. I thought, I can give people that option. I can create a snack that makes you feel good and is available everywhere you need a snack. I launched Peeled Snacks with that goal in January 2005. Seven years later, our snacks are available nationwide. And we're getting close to achieving the goal of making them available everywhere.

This new year, the Peeled Snacks team has made a resolution to inspire our community to start off the year right: feeling energized and balanced throughout the day. We partnered with health and wellness experts to create the Real Energy Challenge. We put together a Real Energy Guide, tips from experts, and an online forum to share our experiences and your stories. We're also offering 50% off on Peeled Snacks and a chance to win a month supply of snacks (a $200 value). I invite you to join us in this challenge and sign up here.

Here's wishing you a healthy and happy new year, filled with all the energy you need to achieve your goals. -Noha (below in red, with the Peeled Snacks team.)

Is that an uplifting prospect or what?  With that astronomical incident in mind, I think about 2012 with a whole heap of optimism.  Peeled Snacks has had a great year- we've grown, we've successfully launched a new line, we've brought on some wonderful new team members (you know who you are!).  And we may have, probably, in all likelihood made some headway in our main corporate goal of giving people the option of better, easier snacks.  And that feels good.  Real good.

But as good as 2012 is likely to be to Peeled Snacks, the economic climate in general is brightening.  The world didn't fall apart as was often predicted, the US pulled OUT of Iraq, the world lost 2 of its crazier leaders (who we hope won't be succeeded by even crazier leaders), and though the race for US president is in full swing (and ample fodder for the late-night comedians), we KNOW it'll all be sorted out by 2012's end.  And that's a comforting thought.

On a more personal note, in 2011 my wife and I welcomed our 2nd child, a cute and cheery daughter, and now that we're getting back to sleeping somewhat regularly, life's pretty sweet.  Babies mean hope.  Even if you don't want one for yourself, cool, no problem, just remember that all the late-night comedians of the world started as babies.  So hurray for babies.

Come 2012 we've got a lot of work to do- new products, new markets, new customers, new procedures, and hopefully soon even a new office.  In spite of all the hard work, it's actually getting EASIER to get our good snacks out there, and for that I'll say thank you to YOU.  Isn't that an uplifting thought?  You, yeah YOU, make my life easier.  I hope I'm doing the same for you.  Happy New Year, and happy darkest day of the year.  I guarantee, tomorrow will be brighter.

Peeled Skinny, who loves this time of year

But  regardless of my family's tradition, Thanksgiving around this country amounts to a holiday about FOOD, and REAL food to boot.  We've no shortage of eating holidays- without dwelling on the non-secular options, I love me some Memorial Day and 4th of July BBQs, and though Labor Day competes with "back-to-school" melancholy, I usually picnic on that typically lovely day.  But Thanksgiving?  Nothing beats that holiday for its vital vittles.

And unlike most other holidays, almost everybody gets behind the "Real Food" tradition.  According to my favorite crowd-sourcing site, Wikipedia, 45 million turkeys were sold for Thanksgiving in 2009.  That's one Turkey for every 7 people or so.  Statistically speaking, everybody got fresh cooked turkey in 2009.  And let's hope that every one of those turkeys were stuffed with yummy stuffing.

Thanksgiving also reinforces seasonal food choices- carrots, sweet potatoes, brussel sprouts (yummmmm...); to say nothing of the seasonal pie choices.  Sure, stuffing COULD be made year-round, but almost everything else is native to November.  I'm not sure how sensitive most of America is to that seasonality, but it does prevent proof in the concept that even non-foodies can crave and enjoy seasonal food.

So here's my issue- Thanksgiving being so undeniably delicious a holiday, when do we only have one per year?   Why not enjoy a national "Spring Greens" holiday, or play a "Fruit Bowl" come August?  Perhaps the Obama's should put forward a new Spring Food Holiday, one with lamb and eggs and scallions.  Perhaps we could call it, ahem, "Thanksgetting"?  Think about it and get back to me.  Happy Season of Eating,

Peeled Skinny, look forward to some stuffing next week

As I entered the grocery store, I was just behind two woman eating potato chips as they walked, and courtesy of their casual pace, I couldn't help but overhear their conversation, spoken whilst flecks of potato chips flew about....

Lady #1: "....I needed to EAT.  I told him I was so HUNGRY."

Lady #2: "You need to keep something in your [presumably work] desk, and he needs to let you."

Lady #1: "Seriously!  If I don't eat, I could pass out.  I could get HURT."

Lady #2: "Seriously."

Whatever she believed, she was NOT, definitely NOT, hungry.  One can't be hungry mid-chip.

I don't want to rag on potato chips- when you need to much, and need a little salt, then sure, potato chips work great.   Great at parties and picnics, great for the game.  But potato chips offer empty calories; not the emptiest but they provide very nearly nothing.  The body either burns the calories, stores them, or "discards" them.  It can't use them because there's no nutrition, nothing but raw, pointless calories.  There's a time for eating potato chips.  And perhaps that time IS when you're hungry.

But consider, with all that eating of worthless food, maybe that person isn't hungry at all.  Perhaps, rather, many (not all, but many) of our society's members are in fact MALNOURISHED.  They eat plenty, but nothing nourishing, nothing that their body needs, nothing sustaining.  Empty calories get stored in fat cells for later use (for use when they really ARE hungry).  They crave, sure, and they consume.  But, alas, consuming ain't eating. 

Our current food system, with its over-production and industrialization of corn and soy, provides a cheap way to keep the population alive, but doesn't nourish.  I shudder to think how long it would take Lady #1 to actually understand real hunger.  Given the food options out there in this country, she never needs to.  But it's too bad how much she has to learn about malnourishment.

-Peeled Skinny, trying to help nourish people

Funny thing, that's just our President Obama tried, while trying to keep in his health-conscious wife's good graces, but he could help but admit to Jay Leno that handing out Dried Fruit for Halloween will likely get the White House egged.  Am I willing to risk cleaning egg off my front stoop in an effort to help the snacking habits of the local neighborhood kids?  No.  No, I am not.

But it's not so simple as that.  There are, to my understanding, 3 candy holidays- Halloween, Valentine's Day, and, if you go that way, Easter.  Each have their distinctive candy delivery systems (little candy bars for Halloween, boxes of chocolate and little hearts for Valentine's Day, and chocolate rabbits and weird eggs for Easter), and thus offer the candy manufactures opportunities to spice up or reinvent their sweets every few seasons.  While I haven't had a Cadbury Cream Egg in a long long time, I can't imagine that one or two a year would cause any permanent damage.

Okay, okay, we at Peeled Snacks made a huge stink about the article in the New York Times last April that painted sugar as toxic.  We made everyone in the office audit their sugar intake and cut back on this and that and really probably pissed off a good number of co-workers.  And I'll hold the party line- added sugar in food poses a major problem to our youth, to our economy, and (ahem) to the success of Peeled Snacks.

But today, just today, and maybe come the other candy Holidays, we can take a breather from such food policing and let our kids eat some candy.  Frankly, I think that the problem isn't kids eating candy on Halloween, it's kids eating candy any OTHER time of the year.  Candy should be the rare exception, the special outing, the thing that kids wait months and months for, and they should eventually have their anticipation relieved.  But some random Tuesday?  Please, eat a Peeled Snack.

You wanna see something REALLY scary?  The human population numbers just topped 7 billion.  That's a lot of Homo Sapiens running around.  You wanna see something REALLY scary?  The last Vietnamese Rhino got killed this week, poached for its horn.  Another one bites the dust.   Top scary movies about food: The Stuff, Soylent Green, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Poltergeist (want some steak?), Alien, Silence of the Lambs (I still can't eat Fava beans), Se7en, and Food Inc..

Boo!!

Happy Halloween,

Peeled "I am what I eat, so soon I will be YOU" Skinny

On Saturday I went to the farmers' market and found this: Romanesco Broccoli.

While it might looks like an alien vegetable, romanesco is closely related to broccoli and cauliflower, so you can treat it the same way.

I had never cooked romanesco, so I consulted my library of cookbooks for recipe ideas. Allrecipes.com and the Food Network recipe site are also good places to search for easy recipes if you have an unfamiliar ingredient. Try out a new vegetable this fall and you might find a new favorite. Please share your recipes in the comments!

Easy Romanesco and Pasta

Ingredients

1 head romanesco, cut into bite sized florets

2 tbsp olive oil

1 tsp dried red pepper flakes

2 garlic cloves, sliced

2 tbsps tomato paste

1 lb pasta

¼ cup grated Pecorino or Parmesan cheese

Fill a large pot with 6 cups of water. Salt and bring to a boil. Add the romanesco and cook for 3 minutes. Strain and rinse the romanesco with cool water to stop cooking.

Fill a large pot with salted water and bring to a boil. Add the pasta and cook according to instructions.

I've been particularly concerned about the effects of added or refined sugars since reading the NYT article,  "Toxic Sugar" by Gary Taubes http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.html?pagewanted=all, which attributes sugars impact to everything from obesity and diabetes to cancer.  When I'm just thinking about the issues, I'm concerned about the diabetes and cancer, sure.  But what really annoys me and motivates me to do something about this lollipop problem is my son's meltdown that inevitably follows the sugar high. The screaming, the crying, the pounding of the floor with his fists and or head....

It's not like I want to deprive my son of the fun he derives from a sugar rush. But the meltdowns.... If I don't interfere, we could easily face a sugar-induced meltdown just about every day: between birthday party cupcakes, Popsicles on hot days at his daycare, dessert at family get togethers, and even the doctor's visits that end with a lollipop ("don't worry, it's organic" they say.  Well, then are the meltdowns organic too?).

And then there are the well-meaning adults who offer "low-sugar" 100% fruit juice - which contain, for the record, the equivalent sugar content that the American Heart Association recommends for an adult for an entire day. Or, my personal favorite, the insidious "fruit snacks" and fruit roll-ups that are "made with real fruit". Those snacks are worthy of a separate entry about the confusion between real fruit - as in Peeled Snacks- vs fruit juice and fruit concentrate. But don't get me started on that. I'll save that topic for my book.

So how is a mother to negotiate with a 3-year old when most of the adults in his life want to "sweeten" his day? I've developed a few tactics: hiding the candy, saying we'll eat it after the meal and hoping to distract him in between, or even asking him to share it with me so he doesn't ingest all the sugar (yes, very generous of me). I'm even considering avoiding birthday parties altogether, or at least making up an excuse about why we have to leave right before the cake. With 12 kids in my son's class, and all the family and friends' birthdays, that easily adds up to a meltdown each week. Or, if we avoid it, a peaceful evening each week.

On a professional level, how do I make Peeled Snacks the next lollipop?  My son craves Peeled Snacks Mango with just as much fervor as he does a lollipop, only the mango doesn't turn him into Mongo- it satisfies him and gives him a treat.  I'm now offering Peeled Snacks free of charge to parents at my son's day-care who want something in their goodie-bags (too bad you don't go to my son's daycare).  But it's not for them.  It's just one of the many steps that I have to take to preserve my peace of mind.  One of the many, many steps.

-Noha Waibsnaider, CEO, Peeled Snacks

As our great nation trims the fat on its budgets (science class and foreign language apparently being trim-worthy fat), I turn my eyes away from that travesty too scary to behold and look at my usual topic, food, and wonder just WHAT those kids back in school are eating in this down economy.  School districts never have had much moolah to spend on kids' diets, and this year I have to wonder if the typical frightening dreck served by lunch ladies now contains 20% more melamime.

Every year, Peeled Snacks gets overtures from a dozen or so varied school districts, charter schools, school vending suppliers, or education oriented non-profit organizations asking us to sell our products to them.  But they usually have no money to spend.  Given our mission, we really want to make those deals happen- to offer where they are needed most.  But then we run into that budget problem- schools barely have enough money to buy books.  Food barely registers as a priority.  And therefore we only have a handful of primary education customers.  And that's sad.

But we're TRYING to make it easier, especially to families that can think just a little ahead.  We've just launched a bulk bag of our Farmer's Market Trio in Mid Western Costcos, and we regularly offer online deals that make it a lot easier for parents to give their kids a REAL food snack without any added, uh, Melamime.  Alas, though, we compete with all the dirt-cheap food-like substances that trick parents into thinking that they provide a real healthy option.  Unfortunately, something with less than 5% real fruit can still say on its packaging, "made with real fruit".  Blech.

And there's the problem.  All parents WANT to keep their kids healthy.  And food manufacturers know it, and know how to trick parents into thinking that gelatin or cellulose or fruit pulp is real food, and that eating the fake food they offer is actually HEALTHY.  The FDA, so eager to keep everything running but too poor to really offer anything meaningful, lets companies get away with offering pretend food at low cost.  Everybody wants this to be okay, because if it IS okay, then everybody wins, right?

But it's not okay.  Feeding our kids pretend food is not okay, in spite of what anyone says.  Sigh,

Peeled Skinny, who shouldn't blog on Mondays

Guest Writer: Claire Moyle

Like most Americans, I was raised in a household where meat was a part of every meal. My Mom always made sure to include a significant amount of veggies, but the focal point of every meal usually involved an animal of some sort. As I got older and started purchasing and making my own food, I started eating less meat. Mostly I felt I was eating too much meat and not enough fruits and vegetables. I have tried many diets in my life including vegetarian, vegan, raw, protein bars and protein shakes, but ultimately, I always returned to the habits I grew up with. I attempt to include healthy food in my diet, while still consuming foods I enjoy (that perhaps aren’t as healthy).

Then one day I watched Food Inc. and was horrified. I realized that by consuming meat and animal products I was contributing to  a myriad of environmental and ethical problems that are brought on by the factory farm system. I couldn’t escape images of featherless, crippled, alien chickens cramped into warehouses pecking each other to death. But as much as the movie disturbed me, I still couldn’t commit to the concept of never having another cheeseburger in my life.

My compromise? Vegan weekdays. I now eat a vegan diet, free from animal products, Monday-Friday.  When the weekend comes around, I allow myself to have some meat and dairy products.

When I do eat meat, I try to get it from a source I can track. Luckily, it is becoming easier to find local farms raising animals in an ethical manner, sans hormones and antibiotics. Although PETA may still frown on my diet, it is the ideal solution for me. I don’t go crazy from depriving myself of foods I enjoy, and I consume much less meat. If you have similar convictions, it might work for you too.