Eat food

Okay. I understand the title of this blog entry might strike you as a little strange. We all eat food, right? Well, I'm learning maybe not. Between reading Laura's blog entries on "Getting Real with Food" and Michael Pollan's new book "In Defense of Food", I'm quickly learning that most of what I eat on a daily basis is only masquerading as food. Have you looked at the ingredient lists on what we find at the grocery store? I can't even pronounce most of the stuff I put into my body. (click on links above to see for yourself)

Michael Pollan's book is so good that I can't even choose which excerpts to include here. Suffice it to say the book is definitely worth a read. His main arguments are to: Eat food (real, whole foods), not too much (enough said) and mostly plants (not only, just mostly). He talks a lot about "nutritionism", the ideology of breaking down food into elements. I had never noticed it before, but marketers now sell us food based on things we can't even see: low-fat, omega-3, psillium fibre, low-carb... what ever happened to just getting natural food as it naturally grows?

I highly recommend a perusal over Laura's "Getting real with food" series. She's a regular mom on a less-than-regular income, but has decided that eating whole, natural foods is not a luxury these days, but a necessity. She writes about her grocery bill ($500/month to feed a family of 6, including 5 males), ways to store food you grow, buying a cow, and the every day reality of searching for good food. She also includes her weekly menu plan, complete with recipes. Her idea revolves around eating simpler but still eating yummy. Just glancing over her menus inspired me to start adapting my own menu ideas.

I wish I could write all my thoughts on this subject, but I don't even know that I could form them all into a coherent stream of consciousness. I'm sure the subject will pop up again as I move forward in my search for real food. I will be attending a workshop on the "100 mile diet" in September (basic idea: eat foods grown within 100 miles of where you live) and I'll certainly have some ideas to write on that. In the mean time, anyone in the Orangeville area with information on local, natural, organic food sources, please let me know!