Archive for March, 2010

Both Rob and myself are fairly addicted to working out.  We were both pretty excited when the Colorado Athletic Club opened up a gym in the same center where Modmarket is located – working out is much easier when it is across the parking lot from your office.  I have been going there since they opened and can honestly say it is the nicest, best equipped gym I have ever been a member at.  The saline pool and hot tub alone are worth the price of admission.  The peeps that run the gym are pretty cool too – we convinced them to give us an offer to give to all our customers.  Next time you eat at Modmarket, flip over your receipt and you will see a free 5 day pass to the gym.  How cool is that?  Eat great food at the Mod, then go snag a yoga class and a hot tub across the street.  Sweet.

Interesting study recently came out showing that fatty foods can be as addictive as hard drugs. As someone who has watched numerous friends and family members struggle with changing eating habits over the years, this is not surprising at all.  One of the people involved in the study made a very interesting comparison between modern food and cocaine.

“We make our food very similar to cocaine now,” he says.

Coca leaves have been used since ancient times, he points out, but people learned to purify or alter cocaine to deliver it more efficiently to their brains (by injecting or smoking it, for instance). This made the drug more addictive.

According to Wang, food has evolved in a similar way. “We purify our food,” he says. “Our ancestors ate whole grains, but we’re eating white bread. American Indians ate corn; we eat corn syrup.”

Very interesting stuff.  Makes me happy that Modmarket is doing its part to be a solution in this whole food mess rather than part of the problem.

Awesome video from the TED conference that talks about thinking of food from an ecological rather than modern agriculture standpoint.  Fantastic talk.

So today, I was buying some baguettes to take with us to our weekly lunch service at Crispin, Porter & Bogusky (you should convince your company to let us come visit you, it is an awesome spread).  Everyone who knows me, knows that I am obsessed with whole grain products.  I like the way they taste and I usually feel better after eating them versus things made from highly refined flours.

That being said, I have always had a soft spot for baguettes, especially the ones made by Udi’s, a cool local company that makes fanfrickintastic artisan breads.  The King Soopers across the street from the Mod usually has those in stock so I decided to grab a few to take with us to our event.(they are amazing with our green chicken chili).

On the way to the register I saw some King Soopers Brand Whole Wheat baguettes and I thought ‘mmm, that sounds good, I think I’ll have that’ and I tossed one into my basket.  As I was self checking out, I noticed that the Udi’s one had 4 ingredients.  Flour, salt, water and yeast.  Seemed about right.  I then made the mistake at looking at the King Souper ingredient list.  It was a mile long and contained a lot of things that sounded like chemicals not food.  I am not a nutritionist, but I am pretty sure I would be better off without thiamine mononitrate or azodicarbonamide, sodium stearoyl lactylate or ethoxylated mono-digycerides in my baguette.  This is EVERYTHING that is wrong with American food culture.

The Udi’s bread tasted amazing.  It had 4 ingredients.  That is all you need to make an awesome dough.  The ‘whole wheat’ one, which I am sure a lot of people buy b/c they think it is better for them, contains a bunch of odd sounding food additives that we really have no idea what they do to our body or how they affect the way our body functions on a long term basis.

Gee, thanks King Soopers.  All you had to do was make a bread from 4 ingredients.  Instead, you make a ‘food product’ and toss it in the fresh bread section cleverly tricking people into thinking that they are buying better for them, fresh baked, whole wheat bread.

Thanks Udi’s, you are rad.  You make food from simple, whole ingredients.  Why can’t more people be like you???  (more…)