What I had for Dinner
I don't want this site to be another blog about "what I had for dinner". That whole vein seems rather silly ‘cause, in the long run, who really cares? However, I do have broader ideas about food that I think are important to share.
Eating local food is important for me. It is a priority, more so than eating organically. I prefer to eat organic, but it is cost prohibitive for a poor artist. Eating locally, if well planned, is very affordable. I want to touch on this further, probably Thursday when I talk about blueberry picking.
There seems to be a bourgeoning segment of the organic consumer which eats organic on an instinctual level. They know it's better for them and they can afford it, so they buy it, but they really put very little thought into what it is to eat healthy. I've lately been trying to think beyond organic. I want to figure out a personal approach (or even philosophy) towards food. I know that I want to eat locally whenever possible, I feel healthier when I do, but why is that? I don't think that it is psychosomatic. Obviously it is fresher, but that is a superficial answer. I think the real reason is that when I eat local food, I am eating seasonally. I can't buy local watermelon in March.
Everything elemental in life comes in cycles. Tides, tree leaves, trendy jean designs - all of it is cyclical by nature. Historically humans ate whatever was readily available. They probably didn't understand nutrition like we do, but I can't think of a food that was around 150 years ago which is bad for you. Hell, I'd take lard over Crisco any day.
So how do we eat seasonally? I don't think it should be a strict thing. I'm going to grow lettuce in my closet in the non-summer seasons. But generally, eating seasonally means going heavy on produce in the spring/summer/autumn months, and heavy on meat, cheese and bread in the winter. Only in recent years have we been able to get great apples from New Zealand in February. This might be a nice treat occasionally, but the environmental cost should keep it an occasional treat for anyone with a conscious.
Like I said, I don't want this site to be another blog about "what I had for dinner", but seriously, check out my dinner. It was totally seasonal. 3 plums, 20 red cherries and ½ of a honeydew melon. How awesome is that? Hydrating, delicious, and no cooking on a 90 degree day. You can't do better than that.
Fat America
It's CalorieLab's annual state obesity ranking. Basically, about 26 percent of people in America are not just overweight, but obese. Does this seem weird? 1 in 4 people are obese? I almost don't believe it. I picture the people in my life, and none of them appear particularly fat to me. Sure, we all might have a pound or two to lose but 1 in 4 obese? Hardly.
That's the crux of it though, isn't it? I don't see people as obese and I imagine that the same holds true for most people. Our perception of fat must have changed in recent years. Look at family photos from the 70's and 80's. Hell, everyone in my aunt Mary's wedding photo looks hungry by today's standards. They all look ridiculously thin, but for them that was normal.
We've come to accept fat as normal, and so we're surprised when Tim Russert dies at 58. Sure, he was a typical looking guy, but typical doesn't mean healthy anymore.
The moral? Don't be typical.
The Artist Forages: Blueberry Picking – A Gay Old Time
I've been meaning to write about blueberry picking for a while, but never got around to it for whatever reason. The blueberries have been in season in North Carolina for around a month now, and I've been lucky enough to get out to the farms 4 different times. There are two organic blueberry farms within a thirty minute drive of me, so I've really been taking advantage of their proximity. Blueberries are really important to get organic when you can because they have such thin and sensitive skins that they absorb whatever pesticides are sprayed onto them. I'm not sure what pesticides really do to our bodies, but I do know that it's nothing like the comic books. They definitely don't give us superpowers and an impetus to help get kittens out of trees. More likely it's cancer or an impending sense of doom.
I should probably mention at this point that I eat frozen blueberries for breakfast almost every day. They're fantastic with granola and yogurt or shredded wheat and milk. I also eat them a few times a month in pancakes. Blueberries are amazingly nutritious for us humans and they seems to grow all across the states. They're always listed as a superfood in those asinine "healthy foods you should be eating" lists that are regularly on the front page of Yahoo or in the NYTimes. (Those lists always have foods that aren't grown in the US and/or are ridiculously expensive. Açaí palm, anyone?)
There's a huge catch 22 with blueberries for me. They make me feel healthy and I'm sort of hooked on them as a staple for breakfast, but organic blueberries are super expensive and I'm a poor singer. For the past year I've been buying frozen organic Maine blueberries from Whole Foods (the only place I can find organic) at around $3.60 for a dinky 10oz bag. I'm no mathlete, but if I'm eating two bags per week for 50 weeks, that's over 360 dollars. How stupid is that? That's more than my groceries cost for an entire month.
So how do I rationalize the consumption of large amounts of organic blueberries on a poor man's budget? I pick my own! In two hours of foraging, I can pick a gallon of blueberries, and it only costs me $10. Let's do a little more math. A gallon weighs 8.35 pounds, so there are 133.6 ounces in a gallon. Divide that by 10, and you have 13.36 10oz bags. Multiplied by $3.60 (the cost of a Whole Foods 10 oz bag), you have $48.09 or what the $10 worth of blueberries would have cost me at the store. That comes out to $74 for a year's worth of blueberries. Awesome, right? Of course my math could be wrong, but I like those numbers.
Wait! The Gay Old Time! Let me tell you, blueberry picking is a gay old time. I bought a big blue bonnet from the garden section at Target. It protects my pasty Irish skin from the sun and since I'm huge it looks fantastic (What's better than a 6'6" guy in a big floppy hat? I'm like Hagrid or something). It's easy to get lost in the rows of blueberry bushes looking for that one perfectly juicy berry and before you know it, your bucket is full. It also gives you a newfound respect for migrant farm workers who spend 12 hours a day doing what you're tired of doing after 2.