De-chemming Your Diet - How to Eat More Naturally Without Going Nuts

Everyone has their own reason for wanting to eat a more natural diet. For me, it was the suspicion that a sensitivity to MSG (monosodium glutamate) was responsible for a number of nagging health problems I've had over the years. Others might be interested in losing weight, eating more environmentally/globally responsible food, or simply increasing their well-being in general. Whatever your motivation, it can be difficult to alter your cooking and eating habits in order to reduce the number of artificial ingredients in your food.

While I started my journey by simply avoiding MSG in my diet, the time I spent reading food labels sensitized me to foods with large amounts of processed and artificial ingredients. I soon decided that I would also avoid eating foods containing high-fructose corn syrup, and would in general try not to buy foods with large numbers of artificial ingredients. It hasn't been easy, but through careful shopping I've managed to both greatly reduce my consumption of processed/artificial foods and significantly reduce my grocery bill. I no longer suffer from regular intestinal problems and dizzy spells, I've lost weight, and I have more energy. It's been great for me, and I thought I'd share my tips for others who'd like to eat better, but who also want to eat affordably. I make compromises - I'm not sure if the organic foods I buy are truly organic and completely pesticide free - but I've made a good start without breaking the bank or driving myself insane.

Here are my shopping tips:

1. Shop on the periphery of the grocery store. I noticed a popular nutrition/diet book out that gave this same advice about a year after I'd started doing it myself. The vast majority of my current food purchases are from the produce, meat, and dairy sections of the store. The middle aisles of the store are Processed Food Central, and shopping there usually involves a lot of label reading for me.

2. Read labels and decide which ingredients you will definitely avoid, and which you will tolerate. If you want to avoid MSG, look both for "monosodium glutamate" and any "hydrolized" ingredients on food labels. Also avoid buying foods that list "soy" + anything that isn't "beans", such as "soy protein isolate". Soy lecithin, however, is not associated with MSG and seems relatively non-toxic.

In general, when comparing products, I will go with the product that has the simplest, least polysyllabic ingredient list. Since I now know which ingredients are most important for me to avoid, I've gotten much faster at choosing what I'm willing or unwilling to buy.

3. Check around town for inexpensive ways to buy organic/natural food. Many organic/natural food stores (hello, Whole Foods) are expensive, but luckily organic and natural foods are becoming more popular. Sometimes you can find them in surprising places. For example, in Canada, Shopper's Drug Mart is currently selling an affordable line of organic canned and boxed foods. Finding MSG-free soup at Shopper's has been a godsend for our emergency food supply. In the States, you may be one of the lucky individuals who lives near a Trader Joe's. If you are, I am very jealous. Tell them to open a store in Toronto, damn it!

Just like for regular groceries, you'll have to read the labels on so-called organic and natural foods. Many supposedly healthy or natural foods are full of the exact same artificial ingredients as normal processed foods.

4. Take a serious look at store brands. This may not be true of all store brands, but I've found that the store brands at my local grocery stores contain far fewer artificial ingredients than the big brands. Foods with a lower price and with natural ingredients? Yes, please!

Hopefully, this will help budding natural eaters get started with the shopping. Next time, I'll talk about eating naturally while keeping your cooking time down and your flavour level up.

Note: I have linked to Wikipedia in this entry because it's an easy central location from which to get basic information. Of course, if you want to get serious about researching food processing and artificial ingredients, find better scientific sources than Wikipedia.

Virtual Farming and Other Technological Indulgences

Like many gamers, the Harvest Moon series converted me from, "Virtual farming? That sounds boring" to "Just a minute dear, I'm harvesting pineapples" with its addictive mix of farm care and relationship building. Just as the Harvest Moon formula of transforming a farm (and usually a town) from poverty to posterity via plowing prowess began to get stale, Marvelous Entertainment introduced the Rune Factory series, which added dungeon delving and monster raising into the farming sim mix. I'm currently playing Rune Factory Frontier, the first Wii installment of the Rune Factory series, and it's an excellent game.

Although I'm only midway through my first summer, I can appreciate how well the Rune Factory series is evolving. RFF controls very well and avoids many interface annoyances that have plagued both the Harvest Moon series and previous Rune Factory games. Tools are easy to select and use, crops and other items stack automatically, and you are given time to pick up any object you accidentally drop. You can even move items in and out of your shipping box freely until the daily pickup, which farming sim vets will recognise as a welcome improvement over the usual "black hole" shipping box.

I'm most impressed, however, by the character interactions in the game. The characters in RFF are some of the best realized characters I've seen in a virtual farming game. They have a wide variety of things to say, and most of them seem to have their own storyline that will play out throughout the game. They write letters to you, sometimes asking for your opinion on things (which you select when you reply to them) or for items that they'd like you to send them. They drop hints about the items that they enjoy receiving as gifts, especially as you start to raise your friendship level with them, so that you don't need to consult a FAQ or use tedious trial and error to discover what they like. You can give them accessories, which they will wear if they enjoy them. They give you quests to go on, which often advance the storyline, help you learn more about them, or even change the town. The protagonist isn't silent, either, so he actually takes part in a number of dialogues. Overall, the game gives you the feeling that your character has an actual relationship with the townsfolk, and that they care about his opinion. It goes a long way towards making me care about the game.

Of course, RFF is as addictive as all of these games, and has led me to take notes in order to maximize my farm's fertility. I felt bad about using so much scrap paper, though, so last night I turned my DS on and started using Pictochat to take notes. That's right, I was playing a game on one Nintendo device while scribbling notes via stylus on another Nintendo device. I should totally get some kind of nifty Nintendo swag for that show of pure nerddom.

I'm looking forward to playing through the entire storyline, and I'll be sure to post a review here once I do so.

Spring Blooms - Allen Gardens, Toronto

Game Review: De Blob

De Blob

Platform: Nintendo Wii
Players: Main Single Player Campaign with Multiplayer Minigames
Official Website: http://www.deblob.com/
Genre: Quirky platformer

Concept/Storyline: At the beginning of De Blob, the player is presented with a happy, colourful city inhabited by Raydians, cute rainbow-coloured blob people. It is quickly invaded by dreary black and white aliens called Inkies, who drain all colour from the town and enslave the populace. A small band of rebels called the Colour Underground aims to restore colour to the city, liberate the Raydians, and fight off the Inkies. The player controls Blob, the newest member of the Colour Underground. Blob, pictured above, rolls through a series of levels, collecting colour energy and using it to paint the town and defeat enemies.

The levels, which make up different areas of the city of Raydia, are quite large, and the player is guided through them by other members of the Colour Underground, who give missions such as painting buildings a specific colour, racing from one location to the next, or defeating Inky enemies. However, the player can completely ignore the missions and simply paint the levels. As long as the player gains enough points via missions or painting, the next area of a level will open. This happens much faster if missions are completed, but if the player doesn't like a particular kind of mission or finds a particular challenge too difficult, it can be skipped.

Along with the main story campaign, there are unlockables such as short challenge missions, a free paint mode for every level, multiplayer mini-games, and media such as concept art and short movies.

Aesthetics: De Blob features slick, vibrant graphics that are just right for the Wii. Its menus and cutscenes ooze humour and style. The player is even able to scribble on the screen with the Wiimote when in the menus or on loading screens (which feature comic panels telling the story of the level as it loads). The levels themselves are cleverly designed, and are generally quite interesting and diverse. Blob can collect patterns throughout the levels that make the buildings even "funkier" and add to the visual interest of the game. Most of the levels are visually distinct from each other and have a particular theme (the sports district, the arts district, the hanging gardens). A few of the levels in the middle of the game have too much boring industrial architecture, but otherwise it's a treat to see how the city is transformed by Blob's painting.

The sound design in the game is top-notch. Each level unlocks a new jazzy track, and the player can select any unlocked track they desire to hear while playing. The tracks are dynamic, reacting both to the amount of colour energy the player's been collecting and to the colour the player is painting with. It's delightful to hear the music hum along when you are doing well, with licks from various instruments added as you switch colours. If you make a mistake that causes Blob to desaturate, the music grinds to a halt, slowly building up as you recover. Thus, the music design is both an auditory queue to how you are doing and a motivating factor to do well. Any gamer who is also a fan of music, especially jazz, should give this game a try for the music alone.

Controls/Interation: The game is controlled using the Wiimote and nunchuck, with the nunchuck used for movement and the Wiimote used for jumping and attacking. The controls are generally responsive and fluid. Blob paints an object by simply touching it while loaded with paint. A simple flick of the Wiimote jumps Blob, and it's generally not difficult to predict where he will land. A downward stroke launches a slam attack, used to quickly collect paint or to slam enemies.

There are a few issues with the control scheme. Sometimes Blob sticks to buildings too easily, so that when the player hopes to jump forward, Blob instead launches backwards. He can also occasionally get stuck on the scenery, especially when he has a lot of colour energy and becomes very large. Using slam attacks against many enemies or quick moving enemies can be difficult, because it's not easy or intuitive for the player to quickly select which nearby target to slam. I cursed a few times when attempting to slam an enemy, only to have Blob launch himself at a paintbot half a screen away. These issues are fairly minor to the overall experience of the game, though they unfortuantely crop up more often later in the game, as the challenges become more difficult and the player needs to be more precise.

The camera is semi-controllable and generally good. The game also does a good job of making main campaign accessible, while providing optional challenges for advanced players. The levels and challenges have forgiving time limits, which can be extended in various ways. It's not difficult to complete a level, but it's much more difficult to complete the optional challenges in the levels, such as rescuing all the Raydians and painting 100% of the level. Players who go the extra mile to do well on the levels and the mini challenge levels are rewarded with unlockables.

Conclusion/Recommendations: De Blob is a stylish, fun game that is easy to complete but difficult to fully master. It's definitely worth renting, and has enough replayability to be worth a purchase. I'd recommend this game to gamers who are fans of art or music and to most fans of platforming games. This game should appeal to a broad audience of all ages. It's not recommended for gamers who think that colourful games are "kiddie" games or gamers who prefer very challenging platformers. This game does have a very mild anti-Capitalist bent to it, though one would have to be fairly sensitive to be offended by its message. If you're interested in supporting high quality, innovative third party games on the Wii, I strongly recommend that you purchase De Blob.

Note: Images used in this review are available for download at the game's official website.

In Praise of Nice Guys

I just learned that an old friend of mine, now in his early 40s, recently met his special lady and got married. I spent the next hour grinning from ear to ear, because this friend is one of the most genuine, sweetest men I've met. He's like a big brother to me, and for years I've been disappointed in hetero womankind for not realizing what an amazing catch he is. Now I can happily welecome his lucky wife into the Spouses of Nice Guys Club. We married Nice Guys and we've never regretted it.

I mean, I understand. Mysterious people, challenging people, charmers with a dangerous air to them... those people can be very alluring. I've been on the crazy roller coaster ride of a relationship that sparks like crazy. It's exciting, and you feel like you're in an adventure or a romance novel. It can be all-consuming and exhilirating, but also exhausting.

A nice guy probably won't have a mystery to hide or an air of intrigue. But he will listen, really listen, when you've had the shittiest day and you just need to vent about it. He will cook or wash the dishes, and he probably likes to cuddle. When he makes love to you, he wants to make sure that he pleasures you. He might be a bit shy or a bit nerdy or geeky, and he'll probably cry sometimes when he's sad or upset. If you deserve a nice guy, you know that those things don't make him any less of a man. In my books, they make him more of one, because the greatest courage is being true to yourself even when society comes down on you for it.

So here's to nice guys. Not the Seth Rogan schlubs that the movies want you to think are the nice guys, but the real ones. They aren't perfect, but who is? I've seen far too many of them overlooked by people who have swallowed the stupid message that nice guys are "friendship, not relationship" material. Forget that shit, single people, and go snog a nice guy today!

On the Edge of Spring - Toronto Photos

Taken on a walk to the grocery store, through York Cemetary and the North York Civic Centre.

My Little Piece of Obamarama

The hubby went to a convenience store trade show for work, and brought me home some Jones "Orange You Glad for Change" Cola. Jones is funny. I'm pretty sure they're the company that produced the "Pink" soda I bought a few years back. The stuff actually tasted like pink!

Poor Canada, we're suffering from major Obama Envy right now. We had an interesting Prime Minister when I first moved up here. Jean Chrétien was a former boxer who, upon discovering a guy lurking in the PM's residence late one night, took him out with a statue to the head. Chrétien's record was mixed... he kept Canada out of Iraq, but he also presided over some major scandals and financial boondoggles. Still, I wonder if Canadians are missing Chrétien a bit. Our current PM, Stephen Harper, is a wolf in sheep's clothing, combining cutthroat politics with an exceedingly bland personal image.

So many Canadians are looking over at the USA, wishing we had an alternative with more colour and more compassion. Unfortunately, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has a personality that's about as compelling as that copy of The New Yorker sitting in a California dentist's office. Though I'd certainly prefer his politics, boy I'd love to have an Obama instead. Guess I'll have to settle for my Jones Cola.