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Restaurant Daily News Tuesday, May 22, 2018 5 4 Snacking Can Be Part of a Healthy Life By Robin Mather As a busy mother of three herself, Joy Bauer definitely understands the grab- and-go lifestyle, and why so many parents reach for snacks to satisfy their children and themselves between meals. "I think everyone is so overscheduled and juggling so many things in their lives that they're often not sitting down to eat traditional meals anymore," Bauer says. "So grab-and-go snacks that actually pro- vide nutritive benefits to your body and give you quality energy have become super, super important." Bauer thinks about these issues a lot. She's a registered dietitian, the nutrition and health expert for NBC's "Today Show," a monthly columnist for Woman's Day magazine and the official nutritionist for the New York City Ballet. She's writ- ten 12 best-selling books – the most recent, "From Junk Food to Joy Food: All the Foods You Love to Eat...Only Better," published last year – and was the Director of Nutrition and Fitness for the Department of Pediatric Cardiology at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, New York. She's also the Founder of Nourish Snacks, a line of sensibly indulgent granola bites in five flavors – Blueberry Apple, Chocolate Banana, Chocolate Peanut Butter, Double Chocolate and Coconut Vanilla. Knowing what your customers are looking for is a big factor in making wise retail decisions, Bauer says. "A key to success is to make the healthy food snacks area look inviting – clean, well-organized," she says. "People are going to mosey right on over, if it looks enticing. Use good signage, circu- lars and shelf talkers to draw your cus- tomers' attention to the healthier option snacks you offer." Customers have become much more informed about health, she says. They know what they're looking for, and you can help them find it. "I always say there are three golden rules for a snack: It should be no more than 200 calories – that's the sweet spot where hunger is satisfied but your appetite isn't ruined. It needs to be made with whole, nourishing, quality, nutrient- rich ingredients. And it has to be deli- cious, something that makes your cus- tomer happy and satisfies their cravings." There are wonderful, real food snacking options, Bauer says. "You can couple peanut butter with an apple, or turkey slices wrapped around bell pepper strips to dip into spicy mustard." Logically, however, retailers want their customers to reach for the packaged snacks, too. Bauer has some thoughts on that. "The iconic snacks like chips and cookies – customers who want that stuff will find it, so there's no need to waste the front and center space on these items. It's the newer, healthier stuff that has never been seen or tasted before that should be most visible. Think of it as helping to fuel your customers with beneficial nourish- ment." Oftentimes, Bauer says, retailers will do a test, putting healthy snacks out in easy customer view. "But they don't always give it a fair shot – they decide it's not working before it's had a chance to do so. Retailers have to decide that they're going to make a positive statement, or lead an initiative, for their customers' benefit." Retailers should listen when cus- tomers ask about healthy snack products, she says. "Health takes center stage in the mainstream magazines, online publica- tions, all over the place. Health is hot right now. Customers are seeing healthy snacks everywhere, and are asking about them." Understanding customers is obvious- ly important, Bauer says. "Take moms for example. They rank their kids as top priority, and health is super important," Bauer says. "If a mom is going into a store to buy milk and she sees healthy snacks, that's going to be a logical add-on purchase for her." Understanding Hot Trends in Snacking Two of the hottest topics in snacking right now are protein and sugar. Everyone's talking about the protein trend in snack- ing, Bauer says. "Protein is important because it helps sustain your blood sugar and satisfies your hunger," Bauer says. "But a lot of people are getting too much of it -- you need about half of your body weight in grams. If all you're doing is snacking, then yes, protein is something to look for. But most people are eating protein with at least one meal a day – eggs at breakfast, or a turkey sandwich at lunch." Because that's true, high protein snacks aren't needed as much. "If you are somebody who's skimp- ing on meals completely, it's as easy to grab a Greek yogurt and a piece of fruit as it is a protein bar, but both are good choic- es. Plant-based protein is becoming more and more prevalent, and that's great. It's good for the environment and it's great for your body. But I don't think protein is the end-all for snacking." As for sugar, well, we're all aware that our sugar consumption is out of con- trol, says Bauer. Americans are eating far too much sugar – the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that the average American consumes 19.5 teaspoons of sugar every day, or about 66 pounds of added sugar every year, per person. That's more than 13 five-pound bags of sugar a year. While the U.S. Dietary Guidelines recommend 5 to 15 percent of calories a day in "discretionary calories," including both sugar and fat, children and teens are getting about 16 percent of their total caloric intake from added sugars alone. "Sugar is certainly villainized right now," Bauer says. "But the answer is not to turn to artificial and fake sugars. You can help your customers by giving them a chance to choose lower-sugar, better-for- you snacks." Remember, she says, "Health is a huge priority for a majority of the popula- tion – and it's not just about diets and los- ing weight. People know that eating the right foods, in the right combinations, has lots of positive health effects.... In a world where so much seems out of con- trol, our food choices are most certainly within our control." Recurrent Droughts a Threat to California Specialty Cheese By Lorrie Baumann Catalina bleats insistently from her pen in the Toluma Farms nursery barn as farmer Tamara Hicks approaches. Slender and long-haired, Hicks has the sun-kissed com- plexion of a woman who spends much of her time outdoors, and she doesn't have the bottle that Catalina, a pure white Saanen kid born several weeks ago, is hoping for. Toluma Farms is a 160-acre farm in west Marin County, California, and Hicks and her husband, David Jablons, bought this farm in the rolling hills near Point Reyes in 2003 with the idea that they could become agents of change in the local food production system and in the debate about climate change. "We made a conscious decision that we could be part of the conversation about restoring the land," Hicks says. They've sunk most of their children's potential inheritance into this property, and over the past few years, as it's increasingly affected by climate change, California is giving them a prac- tical lesson in what the state's climate means to the future of local food. The period from 2012 through 2014 was the driest three-year period ever in terms of statewide precipitation; exacer- bated by record warmth, with the highest statewide average temperatures ever recorded in 2014. Every California coun- ty has been included in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's drought des- ignations at various times between the beginning of 2012 and the end of 2014, when the state passed its first-ever law designed to protect the state's groundwa- ter from the effects of too much pumping for agricultural purposes. Unlike most other natural disasters, drought is a gradual crisis, occurring slowly over a period of time. There's no sudden event that announces it, and it's not usually ended by any one rain storm. The impacts of drought get worse the longer the drought continues, as reser- voirs are depleted and water levels decline in groundwater basins. Marin and Sonoma Counties have been the heart of northern California's dairy industry since 1856, when Clara Steele made the first known batch of cheese in this part of the country from a recipe she found in a book. Hicks and Jablons take some solace in the knowledge that this property has a long history of having sufficient water. California's most significant historical droughts have been a six-year drought in 1929-1934 – the Dust Bowl years, the two year-drought of 1976-77 – a comparative- ly short drought that nevertheless had very serious effects on the state's ground- water, and another six-year drought in 1987-1992. The 1929-1934 drought was comparable to the most severe dry peri- ods in more than a millennium of recon- structed climate data, but its effects were small by present-day standards because the state's urban population and agricul- tural development are much greater now. When they found this property, 18 miles west of Petaluma, in an area where they'd been coming for weekend camping excursions for years, it was a dilapidated farm with a history of dairy production that had been abandoned and the pastures neglected. Ten thousand old tires had been piled on a hillside in an ill-advised attempt to prevent the slope from eroding and were spilling down into the road. Other discarded junk had been dumped around the house or buried in backhoed pits. Neither Hicks nor Jablons had any experience in farming – Hicks is a clinical psychologist and Jablons is a surgeon, both with busy practices in San Francisco – but they felt that their financial resources, their skills in forming and maintaining helpful relationships with other people and their commitment to their values could see them through the challenges of returning the farm to its historic use as a productive dairy farm. "It's a good thing that we are both equally committed to the idea of restoring the farm to health and making a statement about the value of sustainable agriculture and a healthy food system," Hicks says. Otherwise, she adds, their mar- riage might not have survived the chal- lenges of figuring out how to turn derelict pastures and an ad hoc landfill into a finan- cially and ecologically sustainable family farm. After more than a decade of work with the Natural Resources Conservation Service to rehabilitate the pastures, hauling away the tires and other garbage, building a guesthouse that's rented out for in-depth educational farm stays and meeting space, and opening a creamery for making cheese, the farm hasn't yet fulfilled that dream of sustainability. Hicks is hopeful that the artisan cheeses from the Tomales Farmstead Creamery she opened on the property in 2013 will be the final piece in a patchwork of enterprises the couple oper- ates to support the farm, but returning the land to health will probably take a few more decades, she estimates. "We're not profitable yet," she says. "I'm not sure if it's possible to make a living as farmstead cheese producers." Tomales Farmstead Creamery makes and sells five cheeses made from the milk of its herd of 200 goats and more than 100 East Friesian sheep. The cheeses all have names that reflect the heritage of the coastal Miwok Indians who lived here before the Europeans arrived. Kenne is a soft-ripened goat cheese with a wrinkly Geotrichum rind that's aged for three weeks. Teleeka is a soft-ripened cheese made with goat, sheep and Jersey cow milk – the only one in the collection that's not a farmstead cheese, since the Jersey milk comes from Marissa Thornton's dairy farm just down the road. Assa, a word that means "female" is an aged goat cheese with a chardonnay- washed rind. The name is a tribute to the many women who work on the farm as well as the female animals that produce the milk. Liwa is a fresh goat cheese aged just three days – the name means "water." Atika is an aged sheep and goat cheese with a McEvoy Olive Oil rind. Atika won a sec- ond-place award from the American Cheese Society in 2014, in the creamery's first time to enter the awards contest.