From the editor.

With the mass media portraying the war as a bigger and more spectacular Superbowl, many people are turning to the fundamentals of life, the real things. It's got me thinking about where I live, who my friends are, where my water comes from, the air I breathe, and the food I eat.

The disconnection and lost-ness that we as a culture collectively feel has gotten us into a great deal of trouble, as we all experience in myriad ways every day. Native plants and animals around us don't pick up a best seller or a magazine to find out the healthiest way to eat, but we modern human beings seem to need direction and advice in many things that come naturally to other species.

I spent about eight years of my life in a serious struggle with "food sensitivities." Once I discovered this and learned about it, I began to be able to tell which foods I ate caused subtle reactions like lowered energy, headaches, mental fogginess, fatigue. After a while on a very simple and pure diet, I became able to tell whether or not a food would be good for me that day just by smelling or looking at it. This is not some superhuman power; it's simply a natural ability that we've lost in a cloud of added flavors and sugar.

For several years, I worked as a nutritional counselor for others, and helped many people get healthier by teaching them a simple thing about food: food is a simple thing. The more complicated it becomes, the more processed, colored, packaged it is, the less it is what Mother Earth wants us to eat, and the less it helps us. Processed food has something taken away from it, an emptiness that creates a craving for more. Whole foods, eaten in a balanced way, nurture you with their wholesomeness. They are the opposite of addictive; they are fulfilling.

In addition to our collection of fun recipes from restaurants across the region, you'll find a variety of articles about healthy eating in this issue, containing opinions from experts that sometimes conflict dramatically with each other. Whether you choose a vegan diet, a raw foods diet, a meat and potatoes diet, or some other option, my humble advice is this: listen to your body's changing needs, and eat simple foods, as close to how Mother Earth makes them as possible. By eating whole foods every day, you are taking important steps toward recreating your connection to our Earth. And that connection is more important than anything else on Earth.