Giving up meat, poultry and bread: Diet food never tasted this good

Thin Icelandic flounder fillets ($7.99 a pound at Costco Wholesale in Hackensack), coated in a homemade mixture of spices, take about 12 minutes to cook in a 375-degree oven. I enjoyed them with boiled sweet potatoes that I mashed with extra-virgin olive oil, a little salt, cinnamon and other seasoning. I finished the meal with an organic spring-mix salad.

Trader Joe's Whole Wheat Spaghetti ($1.39) in canned Trader Joe's Marinara Sauce with anchovies, sardines and canned Kirkland Signature Organic Diced Tomatoes (about 75 cents a can at Costco Wholesale).

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR


When you give up meat, poultry, bread and pizza to lose weight -- as I have -- then everything else is diet food.

Of course, I've never been a big fan of cake, pastry and pies. My idea of a sweet ending to a meal is fresh fruit and a great cheese.

My diet foods include wild-caught seafood, organic salad mixes, reduced-fat cheese, greens, vegetables, fresh fruit, whole-wheat pasta, brown rice and tofu.

Instead of butter, I use lots of extra-virgin olive oil in cooking and salads.

Salt-free, raw almonds I roast at home and dust with cinnamon are my main snack, but I also rely on snack bars from Kashi, Kirkland Signature and others to help me skip lunch. 

Lundberg Wild Blend Rice from Costco stands in for bread in this Jamaican breakfast of ackee and salt fish (ShopRite is a good source for dried cod at $6.99 a pound).

An open-face, egg-white omelet with Campari tomato halves gets its gooey richness from reduced-fat Jarlsberg Swiss Cheese and Kirkland Signature refrigerated Basil Pesto. All the ingredients come from Costco.

45-pound weight loss

I've had a weight problem since I was 13, and I've taken off and put on so much weight my clothes have needle tracks from being altered repeatedly.

In 2010, I started using a trainer at the gym who said that if I really wanted to lose weight, I should give up bread and pizza.

Earlier in 2010, I gave up meat and poultry, and immediately lost 4 pounds.

But the no-bread, no-pizza diet, which I observe to this day, knocked off more than 40 pounds.

Last week, I gave away a half-dozen pairs of shorts with 40- and 42-inch waists.

We grow lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes and black figs in our garden.

Sweet fig halves from our garden top a salad of Earthbound Farm Organic Spring Mix and Sunset-brand Gourmet Cucumbers, dressed simply in extra-virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar and eaten at the end of the meal.

An occasional guilty pleasure is the heel from a Balthazar baguette, still only $2 at the bakery on South Dean Street in Englewood.

A platter of escoveitch fish using porgy from H Mart in Englewood ($2.49 a pound). The fish is pan fried, then doused in a spicy sauce of vinegar, whole pimento, carrot, sweet pepper and onion.

Porgy with steamed broccoli.

Leftovers for breakfast: A frittata with pesto and smoked wild salmon, left; wild coho salmon with pesto and organic diced tomatoes; and whole-what pasta with anchovies and sardines. Most of the ingredients can be found at Costco Wholesale.

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How Whole Foods Market helps and hurts

If you could afford to food shop at only one store -- Whole Foods Market -- your troubles would be over.

You wouldn't have to do Internet research and hunt around for a steady, reliable source of naturally raised meat and poultry, wild-caught fish and organic vegetables.

They're all there -- in abundance -- at Whole Foods Market. The store even pledges it's farmed fish is raised without antibiotics and other harmful additives.

And if you time your visits, stock up on some items and take advantage of sales and promotions, you would not be spending a great deal more money than you do racing to three, four or more other places in search of savings.

Celebrity chefs

But Whole Foods Market has blinded many celebrity chefs, doctors and other so-called food experts to what the vast majority of shoppers -- who can't afford this premium food-shopping experience -- have to go through to put healthy, nutritious meals on the table.

With many other supermarkets, the discussion is on how to save the most money, not where to find poultry and meat raised on vegetarian feed -- without antibiotics, growth hormones or animal by products.

At ShopRite, for example, you always see big sales on drug-filled Perdue and Tyson chicken, but promotions are rare on Readington Farms, Coleman and other naturally raised poultry.

The Oz phenom

I've watched Dr. Mehmet Oz for many years on "Oprah" and occasionally since he started his own TV show, and I've never heard him discuss how a steady diet of antibiotics in meat, poultry and fish can raise resistance to antibiotics he and other doctors prescribe.

Does Dr. Oz shop for food or is he familiar with what is offered at most mainstream markets? I imagine he's never stepped foot in a supermarket, and leaves all of that to his wife, who probably shops only at the Whole Foods Market in Edgewater, near their Cliffside Park home.

Now, his daughter Daphne is getting into the act with her own TV show on eating healthy. I don't expect much, judging from her book, "The Dorm Room Diet," published in July 2010.

On her Web site, she lists "5 principles of healthy eating,"  including "always have breakfast," "drink half your body weight in ounces of water daily" and "eat at least every three hours."

This from a Princeton grad, no less.

TV cooking segments

I've watched morning TV cooking segments on "Today" and other programs from an exercise bicycle at the gym for more than a year, and have never heard any chef discuss how animals are raised or how animal antibiotics can harm us.

Some of the chefs offer naturally raised or organic food at their restaurants -- more in Manhattan than in North Jersey -- but apparently don't think the home cook should bother to look for them in supermarkets.


When Chef Bobby Flay opened his so-called Burger Palace in Paramus, near Whole Foods, he apparently made a bottom-line decision to serve Certified Angus Beef -- which is raised conventionally -- over a Natural line that receives no antibiotics, growth hormones or animal byproducts.

Lucky for Flay, the clueless reporter who wrote a lavishly promotional story about the restaurant and the chef's family for the local daily newspaper never questioned the chef about the quality of beef used.

Paramus Whole Foods

I attended opening day at the Whole Foods in Paramus on March 19, 2009, and have returned every two weeks or so to take advantage of sales or pick up an item I simply could not find elsewhere.

I stopped eating meat in February 2010, so appreciate the store's fresh seafood delivery seven days a week, and how it cooks or discards  unsold items after a day and a half or so. 

I've paid a lot more for mussels at Whole Foods than elsewhere, but found sand or other problems with cheaper mussels.

Hake is a meaty fish you rarely see outside Whole Foods, and when fillets are on sale at $5.99 a pound, it's a good deal for great-tasting seafood.

But Whole Foods has disappointed me lately.

Slowly, I've gotten my wife to go to Whole Foods for the poultry and meat she uses to prepare her home-cooked specialties.

Missing chicken feet

A few weeks ago, I went to the Paramus store to pick up frozen organic chicken feet, but there were none. A butcher took my home number and said he would call when they came in, but he never did.

Last night, my wife called Whole Foods -- still no organic chicken feet. So, she went to Hackensack Market and bought a couple of pounds of "Grade A" mystery feet.

In place of the organic chicken feet, Whole Foods has begun to offer organic goat meat from Coleman Natural Foods -- free of antibiotics, animal byproducts and growth hormones -- and my wife was delighted with how tender it was in her curry goat.

-- VICTOR E. SASSON

What are oxymoronic shrimp?

Image via Wikipedia

The latest sales circular from Fairway Market in Paramus offers jumbo shrimp for $6.99 a pound. They are described as U.S.A. caught, 16/20 count, "sweet and succulent," "super-fresh" and "oxymoronic."

Oxymoronic? I Googled the word and came across a discussion on line that it's an oxymoron to describe shrimp as jumbo. But not all shrimp are jumbo, as you quickly learn if you order a shrimp dish from a Chinese takeout restaurant and don't specify "jumbo."

So maybe Fairway is trying to distract us from noticing that these shrimp likely are farm-raised, which also may mean habitat destruction and unwholesome additives. It's always best to buy wild-caught shrimp and other seafood.

A poor job of food journalism

The Record of Hackensack carried a column today by its restaurant reviewer, Elisa Ung, who criticizes "silly cliches" on menus. In a previous column, Ung highlighted typos, misspellings and other language problems on the menus of the places she has reviewed.

Unfortunately, her supervising editor and copy editors do a poor job of catching and fixing the typos, errors and wordy prose in her own columns and stories. In a restaurant review data box this past Friday, she listed $21.95 as the top price for entrees, but panned a paella for two at $41.95. On June 5, she noted "a casual relaxation from an easy dinner out." Once, she said a room in a restaurant was "chandelier-clad." In a story about Bobby Flay's hamburger restaurant in Paramus, she was just plain wrong on the type of ground beef used.

Ung is a woman in her 30s who demonstrates her limited knowledge of food and language with every column she writes. Rarely does she discuss how menus omit the origin of food and whether poultry and meat were raised with antibiotics and growth hormones. It is no longer enough to say a steak tastes good and was cooked to a customer's order. What I and many others want to know is whether the animal was 100% grass fed or confined in a feed lot and given grain, animal by-products and hormones to speed up its growth. And we also want to know whether the seafood we are ordering is wild-caught.

The $24.07 lunch menu Friday at Del Posto in Manhattan said the tomatoes were heirloom and the pork loin came from a breed of black pigs that are vegetarian-fed and raised without antibiotics and growth hormones. Other items were described similarly, as in the free-range chicken listed. Ung should start writing about whether the menus she sees in New Jersey show the same sensibility. (Revised Monday, Aug. 3, and Tuesday, Aug. 4.)