All my blog readers disappear, and so do I, a little bit.
No, I didn't give up blogging for Lent, though I did prune back my RSS reader quite a bit. I do have a few things percolating around that I'll be writing about soon.
For instance, some weeks ago commenter and blogger Jamie asked me if I wouldn't pretty please read a particular book by Ellyn Satter, Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family, and then offer my opinion. I am here to report that it is a very interesting book, that I am not done with it yet, that I struggled with it for a few days before finally settling on reading it backwards (starting with the appendices), and that so far I have several opinions.
One: it's not a very easy book to digest, something about the density of informati0n, but I will do my best to distill it for you when I write my real review (or, more likely, reviews, since the book's three parts could have been three separate books, but aren't — for one very good reason).
The three parts, by the way, break down like this: (1) how to feed yourself, (2) how to feed children ("get children to eat"), and (3) how to cook.
Two: there are some extremely useful organizational principles — I mean mentally organizational principles, not ways to make things easy to find in your freezer. Good ways to think about, for instance, how to rank the competing values that are often in play when we decide what to eat, or exactly what it is we're teaching children when we set out to feed them.
Three: I am not really the intended audience for two-thirds of this book, but some of the extremely useful organizational principles are found in the parts of the book that I would think I wouldn't need to read. What I'm getting at: The "how to eat" and "how to cook" parts are very, very, very basic. But it's in there that some of the useful principles are to be found.
Four: I think this is one of those books that has a gem or two for everybody, and should probably become the How To Feed Yourself bible for a small subset of the population. There are also a lot of recommendations that make the most sense for people who have a certain set of food-related skills and/or issues, but would not really be relevant to people who possess a different set of food-related skills and/or issues.
Five: The author definitely comes from the "you can't lose weight by dieting, so you might as well try to be healthy at your size" school of food writing. My readers know I don't agree with this sentiment as a one-size-fits-all, permanent assertion, but considering her audience and the purpose of her book, I think she is not off base in making this recommendation.
Is that cryptic enough for you? I will write more later. For now, consider that your appetizer.
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