The Wheat Process, Discovered

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Wheat Food Council. All opinions are 100% mine.

As very busy women are prone to do, myself included, going to the grocery store and sticking a bunch of items in your cart, dashing through the checkout and back home is a mundane and sometimes even tedious task. Very, very rarely do we think about the items we are throwing into our carts while checking our watches and making sure we’re out of the store in time to run the other errands we have on our lists. Where do these foods come from? How were the fruits, vegetables and wheat farmed? Where did our wheat come from, anyway? Well, thanks to a great new interactive, online multimedia program we can now not only find out where certain types of wheat come from and how they are planted, farmed and ultimately get to be served on our dinner tables, we can virtually see and even actively take part in the farm-to-fork process.

How Wheat Works is educating the masses on where wheat starts and where it ends up in four phases–growth, harvest, milling/baking and your local grocery store. This is all made possible by the Wheat Foods Council who are striving to shed new light on wheat education and its nutritional properties and will ultimately result in informed food choices for families everywhere.

When I first saw the website and started going through the process, I immediately thought, “This is awesome, I get to play a game!”, which is when you know a company is doing something right when it comes to educating people on making more informed choices on pretty much anything. Adults are a lot like children in that respect, because even as we have gotten older, we’re still willing to do just about anything if it means having a little fun in the process–and I am no exception.

But while there is a definite fun factor in addition to learning a lot more on where the most popular grain comes from and how it winds up on your kitchen table, the Wheat Foods Council is also giving back in a very positive way with this initiative. For each participant who signs up at How Wheat Works and plants their virtual wheat field, the Council will donate two pounds of flour, up to 90,000 pounds to Operation Homefront, a non-profit organization providing assistance to US troops and their families who are in need. That is a lot of flour and it will undoubtedly make a great difference in the lives of those who need it.

The Wheat Foods Council is also extending this program to reach the youth population with their additional website, wheatfoods.org, which is chock full of great resources about wheat, fiber and grains, Just for Kids education about wheat and even recipes and photos, a great deal of which look absolutely amazing and I know I’ll have to try!

I learned a great deal from How Wheat Works, including where certain types of wheat are grown and that my state of Pennsylvania only grows one type of wheat and my state had one, very small and lonely dot indicating wheat was grown here at all. So go check out the website, plant a virtual wheat field and above all, make a difference by getting the Wheat Food Council up to 90,000 pounds of flour donated to Operation Homefront.

Alexa Ray Joel Starts the New Year by Raising Awareness

Alexa Ray Joel had made many headlines in the past few months after an overdose on sleep medication after, she says, experiencing real depression after a breakup with her boyfriend.

While many of us have had very hard breakups in our lives, some people do experience such heart-wrenching depression that cannot be cured with wallowing either with our best girlfriends, a sad movie, a large pizza with everything on it and copious amounts of ice cream. Because of her own experience, Alexa Ray Joel took to her Facebook page to spread the word about her “current passion”:

I have many exciting new developments for the New Year, and I hope all of you can be a part of it!! This includes new creative projects, and even more volunteer work in hopes to give back to the community and, most importantly, to help young girls with something I feel I know a GREAT deal about: Heartbreak-Related Depression. Although it does not get much attention in our society, it is a very serious and painful condition that often gets “swept under the carpet”. I hope to bring this topic more to light… I’m even going back to school for Psychology in hopes to learn more about this and many other afflictions that many of us have had to face… after all, there’s nothing more fascinating than the human mind and it’s respective conditions…

I think that it’s pretty awesome that she isn’t merely using her celebrity status and her name to blindly “educate” people who may need real help and is going back to school for psychology so she can initiate some real change for those who need it most.

[Image via INF Daily]

Seriously, Don’t Vote

Don’t vote if you don’t care about the recession or the financial crisis or the recently passed $800 billion financial bailout. Don’t vote if you don’t care about health care or the education of your children. Don’t vote if you don’t care about women’s rights or human rights. Don’t vote if you just don’t care–About America, about yourself, about your children, about the rights we all depend on every day.

Where I live, the deadline to get your voter registration in is today. While you’re out running errands, stop by the post office and drop off your voter registration. What’s the worst that can happen, you’ll have a say in this election?

This is the most crucial election you will probably vote for you in your lifetime, don’t let your voice not be heard. If you aren’t registered to vote, go to Vote for Change and register right now. If you don’t know if you’re registered, you can find out if you are and even where your closest polling place is.

Book Review: Please Excuse My Daughter by Julie Klam

Allow me to preface this review by stating the fact that typically, I enjoy memoirs. Memoirs, in my opinion, mark the struggles, triumphs, courage and stamina of a person. They signify a life that has truly been lived and allow a person to share their lives with others who may benefit from reading their story.

Julie Klam was born and raised in a Jewish family where her mother and many other Jewish wives and women in general believed that women did not work. Instead, they married rich men, spent their husband’s money on luxuries that purely benefit the way they look and eat and nothing else and have a few children before they are expected to get a job and contribute to their families. Julie was not only raised in this lifestyle, she inhabited this lifestyle and truly made it her own.

Her mother frequently took her out of school so she could go shopping and wear the best clothes out of all of the girls she went to school with because she was raised thinking that that was the important part of life–The best clothes, the best hair, the best nails and so on. Because of her upbringing, Julie did not receive the education that she deserved as a young child growing up.

As every adult knows, there comes a time when you need to become an adult; to grow up and take responsibility for your life and eventually, for your family. Sadly, Julie Klam never did break away from the way she was raised and instead, formed a lifestyle around fear and laziness.

On the back cover of Julie Klam’s memoir, Please Excuse My Daughter, you will see a laundry list of pseudo-accomplishments. She had attended NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where it was a requirement of hers to watch a countless number of movies. She was an intern at Late Night with David Letterman, she landed her first “real” job at VH1 on the popular music video show, Pop Up Video, where she met and later married the show’s producer, Paul Leo. It was for Pop Up Video that she received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Special Class Writing; however, as good as “Emmy Nominated Writer” looks by your name, she simply received that nomination in conjunction with the rest of the writing staff of the show. Since then, she was also published in O: The Oprah Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour and Rolling Stone, although you learn in her book that her close friend works for Rolling Stone, so it is obvious to see how she landed that gig.

Julie Klam’s life has been a series of excuses. Excuses as to why she had never had a real job that she could stick with and not because she simply enjoys the life of freelancing, but because she is simply incapable of being an adult. Throughout her memoir, where at 257 pages, was 256 pages too long, Julie whines, complains and feels sorry for herself for not being able to highlight her hair or go to Saks; she is truly her mother’s daughter.

Julie Klam simply wrote an entire memoir based upon what most “mommy bloggers” are writing about now, yet most mommy bloggers are far more entertaining and don’t lose their reader after a few posts. As a matter of a fact, Heather Armstrong of Dooce did write a book and from what I have been hearing, it’s a hell of a lot more interesting to a broader range of people than what the reviews of Please Excuse My Daughter are receiving across the board.

While Please Excuse My Daughter is written very well and some of the times is absolutely hilarious, Julie Klam’s memoir is long, dry and sticks to your throat as you try to swallow it. In my (most humble) opinion, I believe that the next time Julie Klam finds herself in another slump and needs money desperately, instead of writing a memoir (because this one surely is not going to make her the millions she lies awake dreaming of at night) she should opt for children’s books. She has a wonderful sense of humor and a talent for writing humor and should apply her talents to something not so involved; something that will not let her drag out a story and pretend it is epic when it simply falls flat.

Taken from Julie’s own blog, in a post written about Goodreads, a site where people are able to keep track of the books they want to read, have read and write reviews, you can tell what a self-assured woman Klam is when she responds to those who do not enjoy her book and agree with her that she is brilliant by saying, “…I’m thinking of leaving the Author Program, too, because I want to write nasty things to people who give my book low ratings and I don’t want them to know it’s me. (Like “Sorry, I didn’t write the book for half-wits.”) You know?”

Well Julie, who did you write this book for? If it was for yourself, then I suggest you stick to journaling your random thoughts and long monologues about why your life was so hard. If you wrote the book for well-read individuals looking for a book about someone’s life who has accomplished something and who actually has something to say, well I’m here to tell you that you’ve disappointed your ideal audience.

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