During college, I became good friends with some students from Beirut, Lebanon. We often dined together and when dessert time rolled around, they would throw back handfuls of the fruit of kings, Medjool dates like they were blue M&Ms. At the time (before my real food conversion) I just could not fathom how an individual…

This article is part one in a series on conquering Lyme Disease. I usually ignore the glossy magazine with the latest news about celebrities, but a four letter word in bold Helvetica type stopped me in my tracks. The word LYME stretched across the cover. The latest issue chronicles how this intrepid disease crawled its…

This post contains affiliate links. (Read disclosure policy) September is the month of maintenance.  It’s the month to yank faded annuals from your flower beds and garden pots and exchange them for cool weather flora.  At this time of year, newsstands feature glossy magazine covers that promote the current de-cluttering and organizational techniques for our…

I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating, “you should care about what you eat.”     Boats and cars are easily replaced, but you only get one body. Discussing food with people is a tricky topic. For the most part, we are willing to spill our hearts to a trusted friend about our troubled marriage, our…

Writers often receive these dreaded things called a rejection slip for a book, a poem, or an article One of my favorite authors, Madeleine L’Engle laments that “Every rejection slip—and you could paper walls with my rejection slips—was like the rejection of me.”  I can relate.  Writers might spend hours weaving the perfect nouns and…

I am going to let you in on a secret.  Writing is hard, even for people who do it for a living.  The getting going is the toughest part of writing.  Writer R. Crumb laments, “getting started is like getting a rocket off the ground.  You need the most energy and the most push to…

When you swipe your card to pay for “grass-fed” beef, you need to distinguish between a marketing ploy and authentic grass-fed beef. Labels that identify a package of beef as “grass-fed don’t always tell the whole story,” asserts grass-fed beef expert Jo Robinson. Articles and notes litter my desk about the controversial and complex grass-fed…