Great to see you again! If you haven't already, please subscribe to my RSS feed, to keep updated on life in the middle of the road or follow me via Networked Blogs by clicking the button in my sidebar! If you are interested in mini-guest posting on A Moderate Life I would love to have you! Please check out my Baby Steps to a Rockin' Life Guidelines. Thanks for visiting!

An elephant never forgets and you should also remember these great real food love links! Photo by Hans Hillewaert

Sending out the link love!

Happy Friday folks! Two more weeks of summer for us before school starts. Lot’s going on during that time, including a beach day and a visit to colleges for my oldest daughter. Before any more valuable summer sunlight is wasted, I better get to sharing this week’s great real food love!

Is Cheap Food Really Cheap?

Raine Saunders has put together a compelling and indepth article on the actual cost in dollars and health of eating commercial food versus healthy, sustainable, local whole foods. It is an extremely eye opening article and some of her graphics show you a few surprises that I didn’t even realize, like Kit Kats cost $8.49 a pound! Check it out if you are on the fence about the “cost” of real food.

Want to Learn How to Make Mealtimes Work? Ask the Momma of a BIG Family!

Christy of Frugality and Crunchiness with Christy is the happy mother of a huge family and she still blogs, takes care of them all and prepares wonderful healthy meals for them all. She just put up an amazing article on rules for meal times, which include what should go into each meal for health, what needs to be removed from the table for peace and how to make meal times a loving and nurturing centerpiece of your family’s day. I was thrilled to read this article and put some of her tips into play that I had neglected over the years. If you want your mealtimes to be a blessing, please check it out!

Can You Really Tell if Your Meat is Antibiotic Free by Reading the Label?

Sarah of the Healthy Home Economist shares an eye opening article on confusing food labeling and how, even if you want to avoid antibiotics in your meat, you may be consuming them without your knowledge due to labeling loopholes. Another reason to support small local grass fed and organically stewarded animal farmers.

Gluten Intolerance in the News: What’s Popular in the Media and What is Healthy for a Fact!

With more information on gluten and dairy sensitivity hitting the main stream, this article on a mother’s reaction to her son’s gluten and dairy intolerance, posted on AOL Health, is both a good thing, because it brings gluten intolerance into the light, and a very sad thing, when the mother in question is frightened of feeding her child gluten, but turns to genetically modified corn products like Fritos to replace the flour in a chicken tender recipe. If you want real healthy information on going gluten free, please check out Jason Timmon’s beginners guide to gluten free, and email it to anyone you know who has gluten issues or Celiac disease.  Misinformation, half truths and unhealthy replacements only make matters worse. Getting the healthy facts can make all the difference between great quality of life and a shadow of it.

Commercial and Sustainable Food in the News

According to AOL News and other media outlets, the USDA and the FDA are in the process of implementing a mass recall of eggs containing salmonella from, you guessed it, a huge commericial battery egg farm. Another reason to purchase free roaming pastured eggs from a good steward farmer!

I hope this takes off!  Seattle, Washington, which is pretty progressive when it comes to ecofriendliness has legalized for profit urban gardening—so you can buy your food where you live—local, sustainable and GOOD! The new law could be a guideline for other cities to create economically friendly gardens for urban consumers who wish to eat seasonal, local, sustainable foods.

According to our friends at Organic Consumers Organization, it looks like the commercial meat industry is taking the heat from the sustainable-food movement! Consumers are no longer willing to blindly eat commercial meats just because they have a USDA sticker on them. Continue to support local, sustainable and grass fed family farms and hopefully the demand for this type of meat will usher in changes in the whole industry as they scramble to provide consumers with what they really want! Remember, at the end of the day your voice is heard through your wallet! So spend according to your beliefs and let your voice be heard!

Now THIS Truly is the Definition of Real Food Love!

I am so touched that Heather of Girlichef took me seriously in my quest for a good Chile Colorado recipe and decided to make some for herself! Her recipe looks so good and I am totally making this delectable, melt in your mouth meat dish very soon! What I also love is that I taught HER something by asking my question and this is what the real food love is all about! Bloggers asking questions, sharing information, teaching each other new things and spreading that real food love far and wide! As a community we have the ability to help others with our warm welcome, our wisdom, our recipes and our food, so reach out and help change the food the world eats by passing on the good stuff!

Mushrooms as Both Medicine and Food

As some of you know, I am very interested in the idea that you are what you eat, and that what you eat influences your health tremendously. In the near future I will be expanding on this in the form of a herbal remedy and foraging challenge that will be shared with a number of other blogs that are focused on both herbs for remedies and foraging for foods. In this vein, I am thrilled to share a wonderful guest post by Dr. Sarah Cimperman, a NYC based natropath, on Michelle’s Health Food Lover Site, all about the health benefits of mushrooms and a healing mushroom soup recipe that looks yummy. Another reminder of what Hippocrates said, let thy food by thy medicine!

Two for Tuesday Recipe Blog Hop Highlights

This week we hit volume 10 on the blog hop! Double digits so fast and the wonderful real food recipes are piling up so high, it would take me a year to cook them all one after another! If you haven’t seen the latest hop, please check it out. Here are a few links that really stood out for me personally, though they are all amazing and I thank each and every blogger for joining in to make this diverse and interesting community a wonderous thing!

Brenda of Brenda’s Canadian Kitchen  posted a recipe for Salisbury Steak that  made me crave it so badly with her description and beautiful photography I had to share it with you all! I am so making it this weekend once I pick up some fresh mushrooms from the farmers market!

Joanne of Eats Well With Others shares an awesome squash and sausage pasta recipe with bold flavor combinations, but her story writing is so much fun, I always look forward to seeing what she will whip up in the kitchen and in her creative sharing of a story! I find this to be one of the great joys of blogging, being able to share the fun of food, and your own personal point of view and sense of humor with your audience as well as the recipe!

Sue of Couscous and Consciousness  shares a big bowl dinner salad idea that combines the bold flavors of chorizo and olives with the sweetness of sweet potatoes and delicate salad greens. What I love, besides the ingredients is her sharing of constructing the dinner salad without a specific recipe, but by throwing it together in an organic series of intuitive decisions. This is how we should all aspire to eat by listening to what our body and our soul says about what we are making it dinner! Simply divine!

Real Food Media News

Last week I told you that Jenny of the Nourished Kitchen was running a great real food challenge all about harvesting and preserving summer’s bounty naturally. This week, she ups the ante by running a great fermentation giveaway.  Check it out and enter to win a fermentation crock, the classic guidebook Wild Fermentation, a mandolin, starter culture and sea salt. I am totally coveting the fermenter! This is a great way to start making your own lacto-fermented vegetables which is very important for a healthy gut and ultimately a strong immune system!

Ann Marie of the Cheeseslave site’s  Surf and Turf online cooking course sign up deadline has been extended to tomorrow, so if you are interested in learning how to prepare healthy recipes using seafood and grass fed meats that can help you with your mood and balanced health, please check it out immediately!

Have a great weekend everyone!

A Moderate Life also recommends these posts!

Anticipation…is making YOU wait… I know you are all here, looking for Thoughts on Friday from the Middle of the Road. I am here to...

Friday Thoughts from the Middle of the Road… From Grandma Jane's Garden! Photo by Alex Clark Hey all! Happy Friday and time for some "link...

Thoughts on Friday from the middle of the road! Well, actually I am not in the middle of the road right now, but on the highway traveling up...

Friday thoughts from the middle of the road…. Hi All! It has been a busy week with the end of school wrapping up. Next two weeks are...