~it’s NORMAL, it DOESN’T CAUSE WEIGHT GAIN, and RESTRICTING makes it worse…but it can be abused~ {I’m delighted to welcome dietician Ellyn Satter to the blog today with a re-print of her article on emotional eating! Thanks, Ellyn!} In my review of the January through June issues of the journal Appetite, I found that a high number of articles addressed emotional eating. As with earlier articles on the topic, the underlying assumption of authors was that emotional eating is to... Read more

One of the things I love about gardening (and eating in season) is that it shifts your focus from what you WANT to what you HAVE. potatoes, purple and yellow, dug just before dinner Instead of saying, “Hmn, what do I feel like eating?”, you say, “What do we have? What’s ripe and ready?” and you build your meal around that. And that–as Barbara Kingsolver suggested in this interview–turns everyday eating into a practice of gratitude. Rather than starting with... Read more

…a remarkable story about what my brother-in-law has done in Philadelphia: “It’s not like I get up every morning and think, I’m going to change the world,” says Paul Stone [my brother in law] and owner of Emerald Windows. A small manufacturing business in the North Central neighborhood of Philadelphia, where Stone has seen drug deals—and occasional gun violence—from his office window, over two years Emerald has become the creative space for more than 40 artists and artists’ groups in... Read more

I’m ridiculously happy about basil. It’s growing like mad, this basil that started out months ago as seeds started inside, and yesterday I pulsed cups and cups of it in the food processor, adding just enough olive oil to keep the processor running smoothly, poured that green stuff into a silicone muffin tin to freeze, then finally popped the little discs of green into freezer bags, to be deployed sometime this winter as pesto, in soups and maybe even in... Read more

(or, the dilemmas of Sunday Coffee Hour) Recently I talked with a woman who’s in recovery from bulimia. “We’d never bring a bunch of recovering alcoholics into a room full of booze,” she said, “but you can’t really avoid food, and especially not at church.” Indeed, eating and drinking together is an important part of the community life in most churches, whether it’s limited to the celebration of communion (or Lord’s Supper, Mass, or Eucharist) or extended in “coffee hour”... Read more

I love seeing the search terms that bring people to this website. Some of them are strange, some are creepy, some are funny, some are sad. Sometimes, the search terms inspire posts, like this one, which landed someone here last week: “Is Hating My Body a Sin?” And so I’d like to attempt to answer that question. To begin, we might ask “What’s sin?” I’m aware that there are about a thousand disputed ways to answer that question–and so no... Read more

We’re hitting the road, folks! The family and I are beginning our Malawi adventure… …by going to Pittsburgh. No, really! We’re going to the Presbyterian Church (USA) 220th General Assembly! (You will actually be able to watch a live streaming video feed here. If you hear a noisy child disturbing the peace during a particularly serene moment of worshipful meditation, it’s probably one of mine.) Then we’re going to Kentucky, but, alas, going to the fair is not on the... Read more