Food issues.

I have been reading again, which is awesome. My current book is Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. I've also recently read Food Rules: An Eater's Manual. Between the two, I'm settling in on a new way of looking at food, and hoping it will help bring more love to our table and a little less bulk to my behind.

I think I learned many of the lessons in those pages long ago, but have managed to put many of them aside. Eating "cheap" and "convenient" has, over time, warped my tastebuds and my perceptions of how one should enjoy food, and I am really looking forward to getting back to basics, back to local, back to a more sustainable food life. Lest you think I grew up eating only local and natural, let me clarify: this food business racket had me from the beginning. Those packaged solutions to dilemmas have been around for a long time, and I am definitely in the crowd of those who have been taken (even though I have tried to resist, at least from time to time, on certain points anyway).

Getting back to basics is something I had been working on while I was nursing Toby, since I could eat no soy, and the soy industry has managed to get itself a little piece of about 80% of the processed foods, both organic and conventional. Rather than truly finding a peaceful, process-free zone, however, I craved what I could not have and found the few processed items I could eat, and ate them up like crazy.

This spring it's time for rebirth. We're planting a garden, a really awesome garden, that will hopefully give us many of our veggies. We are making a plan to shop the farmer's markets, and plan food around ingredients rather than buy the ingredients around our meal plans. We will eat local as much as we can, and we will eat in season. We may have to deviate to accommodate Henry's love of fruit, but we will do it as rarely as we can manage. We will eat food, not "edible food-like products," and will make things from scratch.

It will be work, but it will be work that brings life to the house. I can think of nothing better than food prepared with love, so making it a priority will be our new priority.

I'm also giving up coupons. Of course, I will be happy to use them if we happen to find one for something we already use, but there will be none of this shopping-around-the-coupons fr our house anymore. The food industry, together with chemical companies, are a manipulative bunch. The lure of saving a dollar on something I would never otherwise buy has gotten me in the past, and I have a cabinet of cleaners and a pantry with some odd processed food items to prove it. Perhaps one of the best lessons embedded in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is that "cheap food" from industrial sources is a myth. We are paying far more, both in real dollars and in costs to health and community, supporting that low price tag in the store.

I sound a little bit "holier-than-thou" right? OK, more than a little. I know. I'll get back to you after I have tried to convince my 3 year old that fish sticks aren't the best dinner...