I love all that stuff, because it's delicious. It's nice that it's healthy, but I wouldn't eat it if it tasted bad or was boring. Last night I made pasta with quinoa-corn spaghetti and a pesto sauce (fresh basil, olive oil, soy parmesan, pine nuts, and lots of garlic). Simply amazing.

Cooking with real food is a pleasure. When you get away from artificial flavoring, corn syrup, white rice and white flour, and all the other crap which passes for food in too many places, you discover how delicious simple and good food really is.

Getting away from meat is an eye-opener, too. After a few years of not eating dead animals, you wonder what on Earth made you decide to eat carrion in the first place.

I've been reading and admiring 101cookbooks.com for awhile, and I am so happy to see this cookbook featured on salon.com. Heidi can take a photo of anything--including raw ingredients--and make it a showstopper. And best of all, her recipes are thoughtful and complete. I've always had success with the ones I've tried.

I would love to eat this way 100% of the time, but I don't have a Whole Foods Market, or even a decent health food store with fresh food in my mountain community. I'm 4 hours away from any major city (Phoenix or Tucson), and 2 hours away from a modest-sized city (Flagstaff). It's not as simple as "voting with your dollars" -- I literally have a choice between Safeway or Wal-Mart in this "meat and potatoes" town. Safeway gets my dollars, and I make the best choices I can, but on a limited income, I don't have the luxury of cooking with mesquite flour, no matter how amazing it is.

Swanson should be grateful she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and has access to the wonderful food at her fingertips and cut the rest of us some slack. We're doing the best we can!

Does your safeway sell brown rice? Organic rice or pasta? Use them if you can. They're actually much more filling and satisfying than the non organic kinds, adn so you eat less as well as spend less. Tofu? Or miso? Arborio risotto rice? These are more exotic and so may not be available - but they're also still pretty cheap which is why I'm mentioning them. How about nut butter without additives? Or just raw nuts? They're a fantastic addition to stir fries and a great snack on their own. Free range eggs are great too.

However, even if your more conventional supermarket doesn't have this stuff there's bound to still be a lot of good ingredients. Don't count yourself out of such a basic and important good thing.

Fresh vegetables are always worth the money, as are whatever fresh fruit is in season. From these you can bake pies, sauces and stir fries - all healthy.

Another great source of cheap wholefood protein, which never gets enough attention in my opinion, are canned legumes: chick peas, cannelini, kidney and borlotti beans.

To make a delicious salad simply combine a can of drained beans, whatever fresh greens you can lay your hands on, a lot of avocado, and then add olive oil and balsamic vinegar - lemon juice or white vinegar will be delicious also.

many Salon screeds lament how sexuality (specifically FEMALE sexuality) is used to sell things, yet this article is posted extolling the virtues of using sex (specifically FEMALE sex) to sell something. Even taking into account the variety of opinions on every topic among women and feminists, isn't it a bit ironic that you women fly off the handle on a certain topic, posting extended diatribes eviscerating said topic, when you know many others will disagree with you about said topic?

Is doing this sort of thing just a way to pull men's chains? Or is it intended to make you women seem irresponsible, training us men to take you less seriously? Is it to create faux drama?

I really want to know what sort of logic stream (if ANY AT ALL) is responsible for such maddening behavior.

Oh brightstar,

Don't you know? Vegetarianism, elitist foodieism, and sex-positive promiscuity in the name of feminism are all sacrosanct here on Salon. After all, what kind of sicko would eat carrion?! And didn't you know? Organic food fills you up more...must be all the extra mark-up, advertising, soil tillage, and field labor that makes it so mm mm good. *sigh* I pity the billions of people out there who don't know that. Guess I'll go write a self-congratulatory posting on the internet and stare at the screen for a few hours, basking in my own pseudo-intellectual glow.

Crimeny, the things this woman takes for granted!

We have a Wild Oats, which is the closest we get to an organic marketplace. They used to sell quinoa, which I love; now they don't. And everything is three times more expensive than food at a regular supermarket. The Farmer's Market in Germantown is shockingly high too. Asian Markets? Those guys are getting their food in bulk bags from overseas - hardly "eating local"! Yeah, great, if you have the budget and the inclination to make food your major expense, you can get some of the things she suggests here.

Correction: organic rice and pasta fill you up more - organic vegetables in my opinion don't and it's debatable if they're worth the money anyway. Organic grains and legumes are worth the small extra expense as they 'cost' less for the same effect in caloric terms.

I wouldn't have thought I'd say this but in this one Oprah is right - you can either choose to be a victim and eat crap and feel crap and look crap and age in a crap way ... or you can open your mind, learn something, try something new, and feel and look and live very differently by changing some very simple things. Your choice. Stop making excuses and do it.

"healthy" = in good health

"healthful" = good for one's health

example:

I am healthy because I eat healthful food.