The Kojo Nnamdi Show

Credit: Flickr user Muffet. Some rights reserved.

A lot of food bloggers based in bigger cities focus on restaurant trends or on a certain type of cuisine. Ed Bruske, a co-founder of D.C. Urban Gardeners and author of The Slow Cook blog represents a bit of a departure from that style. One of Ed's latest projects that he documented on The Slow Cook was his week spent in the kitchen of D.C.'s H.D. Cooke elementary school, titled "Tales From a D.C. School Kitchen."

Ed's findings about the kind of food the school serves bring to mind some of author and New York Times Magazine contributing writer Michael Pollan's warnings about the dangers of processed foods. Pollan's advice for eating healthily can be boiled down to a few simple sentences: "Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Pollan also advises consumers to shop mainly on the periphery of supermarkets; the idea being that this is where fresh food is universally kept in order to be refrigerated. When Pollan says, "eat food," he means food that you can recognize in its natural form rather than something processed and packaged.

Unfortunately, processed and packaged food was mostly what Ed Bruske found at H.D. Cooke. He described the appearance of some of the ingredients in the "baked ziti," (the quotes are his) like the crumbled beef that he says most closely resembles baking chocolate. Overall, most of the food was overprocessed and loaded with sugar and fat. On Wednesday, Bruske will discuss some of the solutions to the epidemic of unhealthy eating in D.C. and nationwide.