Food and Stuff

While I'm no expert, I am a reader, and that, at least, makes me informed. I also like to eat. Excellent food paired with good conversation (and, occasionally, no conversation at all) is one of our family's core values.

We like to eat out. We like to eat at friends' houses. We like to eat at home. We like to eat in the car. We like to eat outside. We just like to eat.

I forget that the way we eat has been completely revolutionized until I get around other people.

Recently, my husband went on a grocery run with one of his friends. His friend said, "Everything in your cart is perishable. It's all going to go bad." Well, sure, if we left it in our cabinet forever, but we usually eat what we buy that week. The fruit goes on the counter for Judah to help himself (he's becoming more and more self-sufficient) and it's what we eat instead of chips, cheetos, crackers, cookies. . . .

Most of our vegetables come from a local farmer's garden, and they're usually consumed by the next grocery run as well. Anything we're not too keen on, we give away. Okra went to Grandma a couple weeks ago. Extra watermelon went to our neighbor. Occasionally, we have fruit or vegetables that do go bad. We now add them to our composter so we'll have some decent soil and keep bags of trash out of landfills. (Between recycling and composting, we're down to one kitchen-sized bag of trash each week--mostly Miriam's diapers--but that's another entry entirely).

We try desperately to avoid partially hydrogenated oil, high fructose corn syrup, anything that says it has artificial flavors and/or colors, anything "white," which usually means it has been bleached or processed to death then "enriched"--white flour, white sugar, white rice, white bread--(you could eat cardboard and take a multi-vitamin for the same effect.)

Years ago, a friend said that the shorter the ingredient list, the better the food. Someone else said that if she can't pronounce the ingredients, she doesn't buy it. I recently read that someone eats only foods with one ingredient. Those would be "whole" foods.

Our bodies don't know what to do with fake stuff. We're not designed to ingest plastic in the name of food and become healthier and live longer as a result. Quite the opposite.

In The Oiling of America, Enig & Fallon write, "Trans fatty acids are sufficiently similar to natural fats that the body readily incorporates them into the cell membrane; once there their altered chemical structure creates havoc with thousands of necessary chemical reactions—everything from energy provision to prostaglandin production. . . . most of the trans isomers in modern hydrogenated fats are new to the human physiology and by the early 1970's a number of researchers had expressed concern about their presence in the American diet, noting that their increasing use had paralleled the increase in both heart disease and cancer. The unstated solution was one that could be easily presented to the public: Eat natural, traditional fats; avoid newfangled foods made from vegetable oils; use butter, not margarine." (emphasis mine)

James forwarded an article to me a few days ago (it took me three days to read it, but I finally read the whole thing) from The New York Times: Unhappy Meals by Michael Pollan, January 28, 2007. Excellent read.

What it boils down to is this: Real food has been largely replaced in America with processed, boxed, labeled, nutrionally-deficient "stuff." It's not real food. It tries to pretend to be food through "nutrionism." Nutritionism, according to Wikipedia, is an ideology that assumes that it is the scientifically identified nutrients in foods that determine their value in the diet. [1] Ever heard of lycopene? Ketchup sellers use it to get you to buy ketchup. They actually want you to think that the high fructose corn syrup-laden goop is somehow "good" for you. That it could help your body fight cancer. Give me a break.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Ah, synergy. Never thought I'd say that food is synergistic. But it is. It truly is.

Eat a tomato. Enjoy it fresh from the garden, warmed by the sun. A bottle of ketchup with a 2008 expiration date doesn't begin to compare to my garden-fresh, ripe, delivered the same day, grown an hour away, truly delicious tomatoes. Sliced with a smidgen of sea salt or sandwiched or diced and tossed into my husband's fresh gazpacho, mmmmmmm.

In case you were wondering, we didn't get here overnight, and we didn't grow up eating healthy food. Just a few years ago, I was pregnant in Africa and craving all kinds of cheesy, processed junk. It was somehow comforting to me to eat "cheese" crackers ("made with REAL cheese!"--what else have they been making it with? Think about it). It took a LONG time for me to reach for a piece of fruit instead of a bag of chips. For my son, however, the fruit is much more appealing. Praise God.

Speaking of fruit, Judah was upset tonight when I told him we didn't have any more plums. "May I have an apple, then?"
"You ate the last apple right before you took a nap on the couch."
"Then tell me what we do have."
"We don't have any more fruit. We'll have to buy some more."
"No more fruit? Why?"
"Because we ate it all."
I thought he was going to cry. Then he ate almost all of my zuchinni. Little stinker.

Oh, I could write about this all night. It's 10:00, though, and I need to join my husband upstairs and drift off to sleep. I have so much more to say, but I'll save it for another post. I'm re-reading Food Politics by Marion Nestle and I'm hoping to read Eating in the Dark by Kathleen Hart before I have to take both books back to the library. I may post a few quotes from both books and comment on them. Reminds me a little of school. Can you tell I miss researching and writing on a regular basis?

Now that James is back home, I should be on here more often. I hope so.