Photo by Jannis Brandt via Uplash.

If you’re anything like me, you might find it easy to fall into a boring and redundant dietary routine. Personally, I love trying new foods, but I often only think to do so when dining out or traveling—neither of which I do frequently as a full-time student with a full-time job. It was only after I read a Healthline article describing the benefits of “eating the rainbow” that I truly realized how dull and colorless my diet had become. Since my realization, adding more diversity to my dietary selection has brought on a number of benefits I’m eager to share with you in this article!

A colorful diet comes with health benefits:

Did you know that diversity in vitamins and minerals is correlated with the color of your food? While eating fruits and vegetables is commonly understood as the ideal strategy to maximize vitamin intake, slimming down your color selection can deprive you of nutrients you might not be getting anywhere else. Here are a few key insights to keep in mind when selecting your produce, courtesy of Healthline:

Red produce is anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, may help lower risk of heart disease and certain cancers and may help reduce sun-related skin damage. 

Yellow and orange produce is anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, supports eye health and may help lower risk of heart disease and cancer. 

Green produce is anti-inflammatory and antioxidant; cruciferous veggies in particular may help lower risk of cancer and heart disease. 

Blue and purple produce is anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, may help improve brain function and may help lower risk of heart disease, neurological disorders, type 2 diabetes and certain cancers.

Dark red produce is anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, may help support athletic performance through increased oxygen uptake, may help lower risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, and certain cancers

White and brown produce is anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and may help lower risk of heart disease, colon cancer and other cancers.

According to the National Library of Medicine, a diet containing a vast selection of colorful biolative pigments in fruits and vegetables is linked to positive health outcomes regarding body weight, lipid profile, inflammation, cardiovascular disease, mortality, type 2 diabetes and cancer. 

A colorful diet encourages you to try new foods:

After beginning to practice mindfulness in my diet’s color palette, I quickly noticed that I rarely eat blue or purple foods. As someone who prefers savory foods and saving money, solving this problem with an excess amount of blueberries and blackberries did not seem feasible. As an alternative, I’ve discovered that I really enjoy beet kraut as a sandwich topping along with my usual sauerkraut!

Likewise, yellow and orange foods rarely make their way onto my dinner plate, which encouraged me to recently try yams for the first time. My family wasn’t very fond of sweet vegetables, so foods like sweet potatoes and pumpkins were a rarity. Now, I have been making yam and tofu bowls as part of my regular meal prep—which has become one of my favorite things to eat.

From regional, in-season produce to exotic fruits you didn’t know existed, there are very few limits in selection thanks to the wonders of modern agriculture. You might as well take advantage! What foods do you think you might be missing out on?

A colorful diet promotes well-being:

While subjective, it has been my experience that visually appealing meals make my life feel less bland and more vibrant. The enchantment of a colorful selection of food brings positivity into my life at every step of the process, whether at the grocery store surrounded by a vivid selection or at home preparing my plate with a sense of elation. Pair this appreciation for edible radiance with the sense of adventure and tangible health benefits as mentioned earlier and the result is a profound sense of holistic well-being.

Final thoughts:

Each time I prepare a meal, I now challenge myself to incorporate every color of the rainbow. Doing so has helped me find a new sense of both creativity and balance within my diet. If you find yourself lacking proper nutrients, void of fresh inspiration, or simply feeling bored and underwhelmed with your diet or surroundings, perhaps introducing some color into your diet is the change in pace you didn’t know you were looking for! 

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. To me, it is a combination of the best parts of Christmas reduced into a less commercialized and distracting holiday. The most important parts of every major holiday seem to center around family, friends and food, and Thanksgiving exhibits these at the most undiluted level. At Thanksgiving, the common tradition is to gather with family and friends around a lush fall harvest meal and give thanks for all of the blessings in our lives. 

Thanksgiving means something different to everyone and includes unique traditions, celebrations and food. For me, every year I look forward to the traditional Thanksgiving food that we normally do not partake in during the rest of the year. Cooking and baking are some of my favorite things to do, and while growing up I learned to cook by helping my mom and dad. Throughout my life I have witnessed and learned how the sharing of food can be an act of kindness, love and healing, especially around the holidays.

If you are looking for some suggestions for your Thanksgiving menu this year, here are some of my favorites and the recipes that I like to use:

Appetizer:

Baked Brie
One of my absolute favorite appetizers to share during the holidays is baked brie. Brie is a soft cheese with a really rich flavor that pairs well with a variety of flavor combinations. This dish is usually baked so that the brie melts and can be easily scooped up with crackers and shared amongst a group. One of my favorite things to pair with brie is a tart or sweet fruit jam flavor like cranberry or raspberry that matches well with the rest of your holiday meal. Some recipes even wrap the brie with a puff pastry that adds another layer to the dish. Baked brie is an easy dish to prepare and can be easily customized to include your favorite flavors and toppings. Here is an example of a fun holiday baked brie recipe that I have tried before:
https://www.halfbakedharvest.com/pastry-wrapped-cranberry-baked-brie/

Main Dish:

Honey Ham
This may be a slightly controversial opinion for Thanksgiving traditionalists, but I prefer a nice baked honey ham over the traditional roast turkey for my main Thanksgiving dish. Hams are an easy option that are not as difficult to get right compared to the roast turkey. Most of these hams come pre-smoked, fully cooked and spiral sliced so all that you have to do is add whatever flavors you like and heat it back up in the oven before serving. My favorite way to cook ham is to add a honey and brown sugar glaze to the top before putting it in the oven or the smoker so it carmelizes over the top for a delicious addition to the juicy ham. Some hams even come with prepackaged glazes and instructions that you can follow but here is another simple and delicious recipe as well:
https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/trisha-yearwood/baked-ham-with-brown-sugar-honey-glaze-3361933

Side Dishes:

Cornbread Stuffing/Dressing
Stuffing is traditionally stuffed inside of the roasted turkey, but I prefer stuffing in its dressing form, which means that it is prepared and cooked in a separate dish that can then be served alongside the turkey or the rest of your meal. There are all kinds of variations that you can give to the basic spices and dried bread base of the stuffing/dressing to make it with your own favorite flavors for a unique taste. My favorite way to prepare dressing is with a combination of cornbread, french bread and ciabatta as the base. I then like to add celery and onions for some texture and aromatic flavors along with the traditional spices of thyme, rosemary and parsley. If I want to add some extra dimension to the dish, I also like adding some cooked ground Italian sausage or diced granny smith apples for some extra flavors. The recipe that I usually follow for the basic cornbread stuffing/dressing is linked below, but don’t be afraid to experiment with unique recipes and flavors!
https://www.thepioneerwoman.com/food-cooking/recipes/a11893/thanksgiving-dressing-recipe/

Dinner Rolls
One of the most popular dishes at my family’s Thanksgiving are the dinner rolls that my cousins, sister and I always beg my mom to bake for us (as you can tell from this list, we really like bread). Rolls are the perfect addition to any meal to help tie in all of the other rich and decadent dishes that are being served. Warm, flaky and buttery all combined into a small little package, you can always find room to eat at least three in one sitting (although you probably should not). People sometimes find making and baking bread a daunting task, but it does not have to be a difficult process to get a delicious result. Our favorite recipe comes straight from the Pillsbury Hot Roll Mix that you can buy for just a few dollars at the grocery store and only needs water, eggs and butter to complete. If you still have reservations about your bread baking skills, there are always good pre-made options in the bakery section of your local grocery store, but here is my favorite easy recipe in case you want to challenge yourself this year:
https://www.pillsburybaking.com/recipes/buttery-hot-rolls

Honorable mentions for other side dishes include: mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole (best with marshmallows and cranberries on top), green bean casserole, roasted carrots, cranberry sauce and homemade gravy.

Dessert:

Pie
Now, getting to everyone’s favorite part of any meal: dessert. Despite stuffing ourselves with ham, turkey and all of the delicious sides, there is always room in our stomachs left for a sweet piece of pie for dessert. Pumpkin pie is a classic choice that you can’t go wrong with, especially with a dollop of whipped cream on top. The recipe I prefer uses canned pumpkin puree, evaporated milk, eggs and baking spices to make a traditional pumpkin pie. Apple pie is another top choice for me and tastes even better when it is fresh out of the oven with some whipped cream or vanilla ice cream melting on top. I prefer using fresh Granny Smith apples that are peeled and sliced for the filling, but if you want a simpler solution you can find premade filling at the grocery store as well. The great thing about pie is that you can get premade pie crust from the grocery store that makes the baking process much faster and easier, but still tastes delicious. Here are some of my favorite recipes for these pies:
https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/23439/perfect-pumpkin-pie/
https://www.bhg.com/recipe/apple-pie/

These examples are all fairly traditional Thanksgiving foods, but do not be afraid to experiment with different recipes. Most importantly, cook whatever you feel like expresses your thanks for the season and the people you are sharing the meal with.

A great deal of myths and misconceptions surround so-called “Genetically Modified Organisms.” From health influencers advising consumers to stay away from them to pictures of fruits stabbed with syringes, these misconceptions have led to very negative views about GMOs amongst the general population. As such, it is an ongoing project in science communication to clarify these misconceptions.

Before it is possible to understand both the benefits and flaws of GMOs, it is important to understand what GMOs are. In a sense, humanity has been genetically modifying its crops since the dawn of agriculture. Modern corn is derived from a grass called teosinte that grows only a small number of small green kernels. Compared to its wild counterparts, even corn listed as non-GMO has a horrifying level of genetic modification. 

Rather than a biological definition, GMOs have a legal distinction. The term mandated by the Food and Drug Administration is “bioengineered.” Bioengineered organisms are defined as organisms that contain DNA that they could not have received from conventional plant breeding. For example, crops such as BT corn are made through a process called transgenesis, the introduction of genes from other organisms into a desired host. Transgenesis is the only way by which any FDA approved GMOs have been made. Due to the specificity of this definition, other methods of genetic modification are often able to use non-GMO labels.

There are many such methods that are used. Selective breeding has been used for most of human history to produce and amplify crops with more beneficial traits. With enough patience and thoughtfulness, humanity has been able to achieve some truly incredible effects. Brassica oleracea is a plant that has been bred into many different cultivars, with broccoli and kale being just two of the dozens of cultivars listed by the North Carolina State University’s plant atlas. There are two large inefficiencies with this method. Due to its reliance on natural mutations in plants, certain plants are not able to be modified this way. It can also take a long time for the required mutations to appear.

In an attempt to speed up this process, humans have been using mutagens to induce mutation for the last century. This process, known as mutation breeding, allows for the large-scale introduction of new genetic material into a crop population. This increase in variance allows conventional breeding methods to push crops to have both higher productivity and higher tolerances to stress. Despite this being a very human endeavor to modify the genetics of a plant, all genes present in the final crop could have been obtained by conventional breeding techniques. As such, mutagenic crops do not have to disclose this fact to the consumer.

GMOs gain a great deal of precision over these conventional methods. Where mutation breeding uses random mutations, biological engineering inserts specific genes into a crop. There are three primary uses of GMOs: resistance to pests, resistance to herbicides and increased yield. When, in the 1990s, papaya ringspot virus (PRSV) nearly destroyed the Hawaiian papaya industry, a genetically engineered papaya known as the Rainbow papaya was engineered with resistance to PRSV. This additional resistance allowed the papaya industry to recover, and only minor differences in their nutritional values have been found. Roundup Ready (RR) sugar beets have added genes which give them increased resistance to glyphosate, a common herbicide. This herbicide resistance allows for farmers to plant crops closer together, reducing both land and herbicide usage. AquAdvantage salmon have been modified to include a growth hormone promoter from a faster growing fish called an ocean pout. The additional active growth hormone allows for AquAdvantage salmon to grow faster, requiring less total feed and land usage. 

These positives shouldn’t imply that GMOs are without their issues, though. Due to the risk of crossbreeding with both wild and conventionally grown crops, the FDA has put large restrictions on the growing of genetically modified crops. In addition, due to the technological nature of these crops, they are eligible for patents. This means that biotechnology companies such as Monsanto are able to require very specific practices from farmers growing their crops. Farmers who choose to grow RR sugar beets are required by contract to remove any beets that flower. This can both reduce yield and increase costs for the farmer. Despite these restrictions on farmers, many farmers choose time and time again to grow genetically modified crops rather than conventional crops.

While there are valid reasons to be concerned about the biotechnological industry, most of the concerns raised about GMOs lack a scientific basis. Humans have been changing the genetic content of the plants and animals they cultivate since the beginning of agriculture. Every study on the nutritive quality of GMOs has shown that their nutritive value is well within the normal differences between different lines of traditionally grown crops. Ultimately, GMOs are a powerful tool to prevent food shortages.

The following photo gallery is from the Vietnam Cafe located at 522 Campbell St., in Kansas City, MO. The cafe is open daily from 9 a.m.-8 p.m. and closed on Tuesdays. 

The cafe offers a variety of menu items and specialty coffee, soda and tea, and is an inexpensive way to expand your palate for different cultural cuisine. 

One dish they serve is Goi Cuon Chay with peanut sauce. The meal comes with two vegetarian wraps loaded with tofu, lettuce, mint and vermicelli. At only five dollars, the dish had a very clean and refreshing taste.

Photos by Kari Tott.