By now you may have heard of a weird trend – women are having feeding tubes inserted down their throats so they can be given low doses of nutrients through the naso-gastric tube (“the K-E diet”) and not eat food at all. The goal? Lose 20 pounds in 10 days. This lunacy would be hard to believe, unless you’ve been observing the desperate measures and weight-loss scams people have tried over the last 50 years, which I have done.

As a licensed psychologist, retired after 25 years* of treating people with eating disorders, I can officially tell you this is INSANE. We’ve known for years that crash weight loss is a sure recipe for weight gain the minute you return to a normal diet, even if the new normal diet is better than your pre-crash food choices.

In our world of sugary, fatty foods available everywhere, and reduced need for exercise, and “convenience” foods full of sugar, salt, and fat, it’s hard for a lot of people to maintain a healthy weight. As one expert stated in an article I co-authored,  “If you wanted to see what is the environment that would maximize the rate of weight gain, we’ve more or less created it.”

So it’s not totally the fault of the overweight individual. If a structured support system is necessary for you, try Weight Watchers, a sensible system that works for many people.

If you know someone who’s toying with the idea of trying this tube feeding fad, just politely say, “Ok, but first let’s go shopping for a complete wardrobe for you in the bigger size you will attain after you try this racket.”

As an advocate for food that is healthy for person and planet, I recommend the Mediterranean diet, which is NOT a get-rich fad plugged by some phony “expert,” but an accepted medical term meaning food choices rich in fruits, vegetables, and nuts, and low in meat and dairy. Better yet, no meat, dairy, or fish! (That’s the part that’s good for the planet. Need information? Visit sfvs.org, the site of the San Francisco Vegetarian Society).

Here’s hoping you and the people you love know the life-affirming ways to reach and keep a healthy weight.

*The other 25 years occurred before my psychotherapy career, as I watched my mother and other people, mostly women, try to lose weight. I fell into the eating disorder and weight loss world myself, and emerged safely, determined to help others avoid it.

We all know that packaging is a part of our food world that is damaging to the earth – just look at the plastic bags, water bottles, pizza boxes, aluminum cans, and more, that litter our parks, fill our landfills, clog our streams, and can ultimately harm ocean animals, as you can see in the accompanying photograph of trash taken from a turtle’s stomach.

Ok, where’s the good news? Nature, as usual, has anticipated our need. There ARE foods with their own packaging – bananas, eggs, grapes, walnuts, and more.  Some ingenious people have been working on making food wrapping that is biodegradable – I first mentioned this in my 2002 book Eating to Save the Earth. Progress is being made, and in fact, the new wrinkle is to make the wrapping not just biodegradable, but edible.

Writer Beth Buczynksi says it well in her title, “Is Edible Food Packaging The Answer To Plastic Waste?” She highlights the work of Harvard professor David Edwards, who has invented a machine that creates WikiCells, which are membranes made of natural food elements. I am not making this up. Tomato coverings for gazpacho soup and orange membrane to contain orange juice and (be still, my heart) chocolate membrane to contain hot chocolate.

At the moment, you’d have to buy a machine to create these, but we might see these in stores in a year or so. Borrowing a phrase from my recent food/environment book The Green Foodprint, I’d call this Nude Food!

However, let’s not forget that this would be a product of biotechnology, and the molecules would be manipulated with industrial methods. A journal article abstract on the topic in the Annual Review of Food Science and Technology contains phrases like “biopolymer-based food packaging materials” and ”dry thermoplastic process” and “nanocomposite concepts.”   What do you think?

Long before so many American jobs were outsourced, our food supply network was spread across the globe. Over a hundred years ago, the great short story writer O.Henry located many of his tales in Central America on fruit plantations or the ships that brought the fruit to the U.S. It was not a pretty picture then, and it’s worse now.

Most of the shrimp consumed in the U.S. now comes from southeast Asia, where factory fish farms are set up along the coast, destroying mangrove forests in the process. Mangroves are those weird-looking trees with roots above the water line, but to people who used to live there, they were home. And to children at the Avocado Elementary School, they were a wonderful home to wildlife (see their wonderful illustration).

But fish farms are just as destructive as factory farms on land. Result: the carbon footprint of these shrimp is higher than that of beef from ranches built on land that was once Amazon rainforest. Tom Philpott, a great food writer for Mother Jones, quoted this bleak conclusion from the book Bottomfeeder by Taras Grescoe: “The simple fact is, if you’re eating cheap shrimp today, it almost certainly comes from a turbid, pesticide- and antibiotic-filled, virus-laden pond in the tropical climes of one of the world’s poorest nations.”

So to get your food choices out of all this destruction, please take shrimp off your menu, if you haven’t already. Delicious options that are easy on the earth and kind to your conscience can be found at Bay Area restaurants such as Café Gratitude in San Francisco, Lydia’s Kitchen Cafe in Fairfax, and International Vegetarian House Restaurant in San Jose.