bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • The curmudgeon and the ponytail.

    J. D. Carriere put a comment in my box today, which reminded me that I hadn’t looked at his blog in a while.  Lo and behold, he’s writing regularly again.  Why, I hadn’t noticed anything new from him since Sts. Cyril and Methodius Day of 2007!  But now there’s lots, including:

    If you have sat through the reception after a wedding, you will likely have heard the popular bit of advice: Don’t Go To Bed Angry.
    Piffle.
    This undercuts the singular attribute of Christian Marriage, namely, that she will still be there in the morning.  I say, leave settling fights at three o’clock in the morning to the blighted pagans and corrupted heretics with their modern, transient mock-marriages.  Get your rest.
    Way back when, I used to bug John (that’s what the J is for) and James that they ought to start a group blog together.  Instead, they each started their own blog and occasionally comment on each other.  Which is not nearly as good as the co-blogging that only exists in my fevered imagination. 

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  • More musings from The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A food-group-based selection of questions at the grocery store.

    General questions

    Shall I move towards a greater variety of foods for improved nutrition, or greater restrictions on our food choices for improved ecological impact?

    Shall I move towards fewer shopping trips to different places, or shall I move towards driving to more places (e.g. the grocery store, the co-op, the farmer’s market, the dairy drop-off, the grass farm)?

    [ADDED]  Shall I spend more time thinking and planning the family’s dietary choices, or shall I use that time for other useful and pleasurable activities?

    Fats and oils

    Shall I use more locally produced fats in cooking, i.e., more lard from the farm I get most of my dairy from, and more butter from PastureLand Farms of southeastern Minnesota?  Or shall I use less animal-based fats, i.e. eat more long-distance imported olive, sesame, and coconut oils?   Or shall I cook with less oil?

    Dark Green Vegetables

    Shall I serve them more often in the summer, in season, or shall we eat them daily year-round? 

    Shall I buy frozen turnip greens that were grown organically, or conventionally?  Or should I not buy frozen greens?

    Shall I buy greens to be eaten raw, or (presumably hardier and more local) cooking greens?

    Shall I stop buying conventionally grown broccoli, with its reputation for pesticide absorption?   Shall I, then, buy only organically grown broccoli, which means less fresh and more frozen?

    Shall I use precious time gardening, not a hobby I enjoy for its own sake?

    Protein

    Shall I serve meat less often and high-carbohydrate protein meals like beans-and-rice more often?  Or should I favor the lower-carbohydrate diet that has been the easiest way for me to keep my own weight down (I’m the only person in the family with that particular health problem)? 

    On Fridays, shall I serve more wild-caught fresh fish, which runs upwards of $20 per pound?  Or shall we choose mostly eggs, cheese, and legumes, or canned fish?   Shall I buy non-smoked canned tuna, or low-mercury tinned smoked kippers?

    Shall I buy ordinary deli meats?  Or shall I let my children eat mainly peanut butter on their lunchtime sandwiches?  Or shall I buy expensive, humanely produced deli meat as a luxury that I serve far less often?

    Shall I stick to our grass-fed beef and pork from the freezer or shall I buy the occasional kielbasa or bratwurst?  Shall I ration the bacon and sausage from our half-hog, or shall I buy it at the grocery store after we run out with months to go before we get another hog?   Or shall I make a trip to buy humanely raised bacon from the co-op?

    Yellow Vegetables

    Should I serve mostly sweet potatoes and squash in the winter, and carrots and yellow squash in the summer?  Or should I rotate them throughout the year?

    Should I buy woody organic carrots, or pleasantly crunchy conventional carrots?  Or should I search far and wide for better organic carrots?

    Fruits

    Shall we eat mostly apples all winter long?  (What else would be local and seasonal?) Or not?  Shall we eat citrus fruit less often?   

    Shall we buy frozen fruit?  Shall we buy imported fruit?   

    Shall we do the research to find out whether the organic apples were sprayed and how much?   Shall we not bother and simply fill the fridge with fruit of all kinds, since the kids like it so much?

    Starch

    Shall we eat more of it, since it can give us the most nutritional calories (you know that’s really kcal right?) per kJ of petrochemical energy expended?  Or shall we eat less of it, because it usually gives us far fewer vitamins and minerals per nutritional calorie than most fruits and vegetables do?   

    Is it feasible we eat more locally-produced starch?  Here in Minnesota, what would that mean — more potatoes in the winter and more sweet corn in the summer?  More wild rice, too, I suppose?  Is cultivated "wild rice" a good substitute?  Should we eat any long-distance starches at all?

    Should we eat lots and lots of it in the form of wheat, since that packs the highest protein-and-fiber punch?  Or should we favor more variety?    

    Sweet treats

    Dark chocolate:  an unmitigated boon or a global-capitalist child-labor horror story?

    "Rapadura" and other less-refined cane sugars:  a funny-tasting ripoff that’s not significantly better than white cane or beet sugar?  (Cane’s a monoculture too after all.)

    Grade B Dark maple syrup and molasses:  worth the extra expense to substitute more often for white sugar, even where the distinctive flavor will be detectable?  Or should I just use less sweetener overall and suit the sweetener to the recipe?

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    1 comment on More musings from The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A food-group-based selection of questions at the grocery store.

  • More thoughts from Omnivore’s Dilemma.

    After I finished the book, I passed it on to Hannah, who had almost finished it by the time I arrived to spend Thursday at her house with Melissa and all ten of our respective children.  Believe it or not, Hannah and I had a moment to sit down with cups of tea in the comfy chairs in the sitting room and discuss the book.  Hannah commented that it had raised some issues regarding "industrial organic" that she had not really considered before.  "For example, I never thought about the pre-washed bagged organic spring mix like that before."

    I knew what she meant.  There’s a detailed description of the pre-washed bagged organic spring mix industry in the book.  It involves specially designed harvesting machines and rows of down-coat-clad workers washing leaves in big refrigerated warehouses, not to mention a fleet of (smoke-belching, I’m sure) semi trucks to deliver it all to the grocery store distribution centers so that you can pick it up from the organic section of your local Kroger or Cub Foods, or indeed, the local co-op.  Michael Pollan points out that the salad costs 57 times as much energy to produce as it supplies in food calories.  Surely that’s one of the worst energy ratios one could possibly be eating. 

    But is that really a fair point?

    The lettuce discussion in Pollan’s book is, to me, emblematic of the complicated nature of the "what to buy" decision, and I said so to Hannah.  After all, who eats lettuce for the calories it contains?  We eat different foods for different reasons, and it’s probably not good for the average American to try to maximize the number of calories eaten per square inch of carbon footprint.  (I have a sneaking suspicion that if we were to try to do that in today’s economic environment we’d still be eating mainly corn! )

    Mark and I share the job of nutritional gatekeeper:  I write "apples" on the grocery lists, he’s the one who chooses between conventionally grown Fuji apples for $1.99/lb and organic Braeburns for $3.59/lb.   Maybe we should switch to some organic produce, I suggested the other day.  Since I have no data regarding pesticide residue and health, I cited fertilizer runoff and other ecological-footprint issues.  He says, "Look, if you want to tread lighter on the planet, our first priority should be eating less meat."   But our meat is grass-fed!  "Doesn’t matter." 

    Yeah, meat is inefficient in terms of calories, I’ll grant you that.   And yet… calories aren’t all I am trying to get from meat.  Those calories come with different stuff when you eat them as meat than when you eat them as grain, or even grain ‘n’ beans.  Lots more protein and fat, for one thing.  And heme iron.  If the beef is grass-fed, even better — the fatty acid profile is good for you.   The more we find out about fat, the more we realize that lipid chemistry is a lot more  complicated than "it’s 9 calories per gram so don’t eat too much."  Speaking of 9 calories per gram, our family cooks mostly with unrefined coconut oil now.   I live in Minnesota.  That’s about as far from "eating local" as you can get.    

    Back to the lettuce — calories aren’t the proper measure here.   Let’s think about rational, appropriate substitutions.  Let’s say it’s summer, and I put "bag of lettuce" on the grocery list, and Mark comes home with local sweet corn instead.  "It’s local!" I imagine him saying.  "And it costs less per pound!  And it looked better than the lettuce anyway!"  I am still going to be supremely annoyed because sweet corn is not a reasonable substitute for lettuce.  Not only is it unworkable in recipe substitution, it is nutritionally a starch, not a vegetable, and certainly not a leafy green vegetable.  It goes on a different section of the plate.  Nope.  Not going to fly.

    On the other hand, if he comes home with a bunch of kale ("It’s a heck of a lot cheaper than the bag salad"), I can work with that.  Lettuce is a green leafy vegetable.  Kale is a green leafy vegetable.   If it’s young kale, I can make a salad out of it — a different salad from the one I envisioned, but a salad nonetheless.  Even if it’s older and I have to cook it, I might grumble a little bit about the extra work, but really I know that the time-saving nature of the bag salad is a luxury I don’t really need, and it’s not that big a deal to steam or saute the kale.  The main point is that the kale and the lettuce occupy the same niche in our family’s diet.  I may not be able to substitute kale into a lettuce recipe (e.g. Caesar salad), but I can substitute a kale recipe for a lettuce recipe into most family meals.

    As I thought about it, I realized that I mentally organize family nutrition into a "food group" model — not the USDA food groups per se, but one of my own construction.  Foods come in categories like "starch," "protein," "deep green vegetable," "not-so-deep-green vegetable," "yellow vegetable," abd so on.  I can make substitutions within the categories but I don’t want to change the categories for eco-purposes.  Even though I do care about global impact, I do not want to make decisions to minimize the single variable of petrochemical-energy-expended-per-calories-consumed.  My first duty is to feed my kids the nutrients that help them thrive, and to teach them to make food choices that help them thrive.   

    I take into account food preferences, too.  Right now, for instance, Milo my 4yo is very happy to eat raw green beans.  I buy a lot of them and I put them on the table most nights for that reason and no other.  Last year it was so-called baby carrots.  I am aware that "baby" carrots are more energy-intensive to produce than non-baby organic carrots.  You know what?  The kids like them and eat more of them than regular raw carrots cut into sticks.  That means I buy them and put them on the dinner table.  Not every time; they need to learn to eat carrots served many different ways.  But I am happy to "indulge" the kids with baby carrots.  I want to encourage the habit of eating vegetables cheerfully.

    Still, there are probably meaningful substitutions that can be made that do make a real difference.  It is hard to tease the meaningful ones apart from the non-meaningful ones.  Back to those apples.  What really is the difference between the $1.99 conventional apples and the $3.59 "organic" apples?  Is that difference worth the cost?   Does it matter what you would do with the extra money? I asked Hannah, "If your family chooses the costly organic apples instead of the cheap conventional apples, does that mean that your family eats fewer apples?"  She thought about it and answered, no, it means they’ll have less money to spend on other things.  For our family, I suspect that the marginal cost of switching to organic produce would simply be to save that much less, for retirement, for our kids’ college costs, etc. 

    Does it matter?  It depends on the substitution.  I have no qualms at all about buying grass-fed beef  and humanely raised pork from a local farm, or the extra cost of the farm eggs and the raw, whole milk and the pastured chickens.   I am certain that the nutritional quality is better, and they taste better too, so the cost translates directly into a tastier and more satisfying meal.  But I’m not sure about the produce.    (In some cases I think we’d pay more to enjoy it less.  All the organic carrots I’ve ever bought have been decidedly woodier than the conventional ones.)  Maybe the first question is — how much more expensive could it get? 

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  • The mission of Catholic higher education.

    I mentioned a couple of days ago a link Derek sent me to an editorial by the president of Trinity College.  As Derek said, it’s got a lot of problems — it’s very fisk-worthy, though I’ve not got the time to fisk it today.  Mark was reading it last night, and he pointed out something that explains quite well the source of the dissonance between the writer and Pope Benedict:

    The mission of Catholic higher education is to educate citizen leaders to enable them to address these grave moral and social challenges with conscience, conviction and intellectual strength.

    "Anything missing from this statement?" scoffed Mark. 

    In that editorial Patricia McGuire makes a great show of loyalty to John Paul II’s Ex Corde Ecclesiae.  This is what Ex Corde Ecclesiae says is the mission of higher education:

    Its purpose is that "the Christian mind may achieve, as it were, a public, persistent and universal presence in the whole enterprise of advancing higher culture and that the students of these institutions become people outstanding in learning, ready to shoulder society’s heavier burdens and to witness the faith to the world"(12).

    Spirit of Vatican II alert!  The quotes and the (12) refer to the declaration on Catholic education from the documents of Vatican II.    If you like, you can go to the document and read a section entitled "The Mission of Service of a Catholic University," with sub-headings entitled "Service to Church and Society," "Pastoral Ministry," "Cultural Dialogue," and "Evangelization," and details spelled out under each explaining how a Catholic university is to fulfill each of these missions.

    Ah, it’s easy to address challenges with conviction.  It takes a little more work to address them with a conviction.  Patricia McGuire cannot tell the difference.

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  • Primary sources (with comments).

    If you get most of your mainstream-media news from NPR — and I wholeheartedly admit that I do, it’s what I usually have on in the car — you may be thinking that Pope Benedict XVI came to the United States mainly to discuss the sexual abuse of minors by priests.   

    It’s not that this isn’t an important thing to discuss.  It’s just that I’ve listened to several NPR distillations of his addresses by now, and so far that’s just the only topic that’s merited extensive commentary.   (I noticed, by the way, that he has been careful to limit the discussion to that abuse committed by apparent pedophiles; we can, I think, assume he is not talking in this trip about men who exploited young people who’d reached puberty.   This distinction narrows the scope of his public discussion on the subject considerably–by about 85% of the victim count–and it’s a distinction I’ve not heard made yet in the MSM.)

    Anyway, if you are interested in commentaries on his addresses that give a flavor of the pontiff’s main themes as presented by, you know, the pontiff, rather than the media-digested versions, you might go to Father Z’s blog What Does The Prayer Really Say?  He has been putting up the texts of Benedict’s speeches and adding highlights and comments. 

    I’m hoping he puts up more… UPDATE:

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  • In which Christy and Derek compete to fill my email box with links.

    A few links from friends appeared in my mail box in the last couple of days…

    First, headline/story dissonance from Christy.  SEVEN OR MORE EGGS A WEEK LINKED TO DEATH RISK!  Oh, by the way, everybody in the study is a male physician.  Oh, also, if you get around to reading down to the last paragraph, eating more eggs also happens to correlate with being an old, fat, cigarette-smoking drinker who doesn’t get much exercise, at least if you’re a male physician.  Not that we would let you know whether the researchers controlled for any of that.

    Next, Derek sends along a link to material on tonight’s PBS documentary, "The Truth About Cancer."  This topic — particularly the "you can beat it" and "I’m a survivor" rhetoric surrounding cancer diagnoses — has occupied more of my attention since my mother died of adenocarcinoma nearly five years ago.  I don’t know if I’ll get to see the show tonight when it premieres, but the website definitely caught my attention.  Maybe I’ll catch it in one of the several repeats on the local PBS station.

    And here’s another note from Derek:  "Predictably, left-leaning Catholics are in a tizzy over the Pope’s call for Catholic educators to meet with him Thursday.  Of course, this can only mean oppression, intimidation, and censorship.  Here is a (badly written) editorial by the president of Trinity College.  The only thing missing from this wandering commentary is someone screeching: "will no one think of the children??"  The basic gist of her editorial is that the Church should focus on (definitely important) issues that non-Catholics can agree with, such as poverty, war, etc. and not be so concerned with moral issues that are not as well-received in popular culture.  She invokes nameless ‘critics’ who would turn Catholic colleges into madrassas, apparently.  The more I read this, the more silly it seems, and the more embarrassed I am for Trinity College."

    Now, from Christy, what’s in your kitchen apparently predicts how you will vote.  Apparently Hillary voters like national brands and Obama has the arugula vote.  It’s entertaining but as usual the NYT writer is overly simplistic.  (Milk-buying Democrats care about the earth, while milk-buying conservatives care about children.)

    Finally and also from Christy and very timely since Mark and I have been thinking (okay, debating) about whether moving to organic produce is worth the extra $$$, why don’t food writers ever write about cost — where are the real frugal gourmets, that is?  An excellent little musing, with some recommended titles.  May I also suggest the Tightwad Gazette?

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  • “God wants us to do this. Because He thinks it’s funny.”

    From Simcha.

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  • Going back to nature.

    In The Omnivore’s Dilemma Michael Pollan describes learning to hunt for the first time.  Not only did he do this by, you know, actually going out and hunting, he apparently also read some hunting philosophers, or rather, he read stuff by people who were philosophizing about hunting.   The hunting philosophers wrote very purple prose, and so did Pollan after he killed his first feral pig.

    I passed the borrowed book on so I can’t open it up and quote the book, but I wanted to share a reaction I had.  One of the hunting philosophers that Pollan quoted wrote that hunting was the only way for modern humans to really get in touch with their pre-industrial selves, you know, the animal that humans evolved to be.  Not just a way; the only way to really go back to human nature, Paleolithic style.

    My reaction was to hoot:  Ah yes, a man might think this.

    I don’t at all mean that as a criticism, e.g. "only a man would refuse to ask directions" or some such silly sexist standard.  It’s just that in my own past armchair philosophizing — hey, wait, what’s wrong with philosophizing in an armchair?  seems appropriate to me — I actually have had the thought that there is one way to really go back to human nature, Paleolithic style, and the words I might have used are very similar to the words the hunting-philosopher used to say that about hunting.

    Of course, when I was having those thoughts, I was thinking of childbirth.  I mean, it’s certainly possible to give birth in a very post-industrial, heavily cultural-modern setting, completely obliterating its human-animality.  (And I mean no criticism in this post of the choice to do so.)  But, you know, I’ve given birth three times now in an out-of-hospital, drugless setting, and  it really is hard to come up with another modern, accessible experience that lets you get quite as close to how things might have been for Paleolithic man, or, rather, woman.  I mean, if you want to get that close.  I acknowledge that not everybody expresses that desire. 

    Let me just tell you that it is very interesting, at least to me, to have been there and done that.  (Pollan also used the term interested in an odd place, now that I think about it, to describe one of the intense reactions he had to killing his pig.  I just now thought of a third point of similarity:  Pollan was shocked and revulsed to see, later, photographs of himself thoroughly enjoying the experience of hunting.  I have a lot of revulsion toward my just-after-birth photos.  The intensity of the experience shows in my face, and … it’s just not the way I’m used to seeing myself.)

    Anyway, I never thought of hunting as another potential such experience, possibly because I have never been hunting.  I can tell that the hunting philosopher had not thought of childbirth that way.  Certainly he had never given birth.  Perhaps he had also never been around a woman giving birth, or maybe all the births in his experience were of the more acculturated and mechanized and anesthetized type.    At any rate, it amused me that there was this guy out there who thought of hunting in the same sort of way that I thought of childbirth. 

    Later on, I thought of one more experience through which the modern human being might commune with his or her ancestral experience, one that is pleasingly gender-neutral, but not probably very popular:  fighting off a deadly attacker.  Mark suggested that one could perhaps make a lot of money creating such experiences for people, provided that you worded the advertisements properly.

    Well.  There’s always death itself.  I suspect that has not changed much, either, in ten thousand years.

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  • The rules.

    A long time ago — I forget why, there was some parenting theory of ours behind it at the time — we established a family tradition that the children may have juice boxes with their dinner if Mark and I are having a beer or a glass of wine with dinner.

    This has, of course, resulted in the children’s plying us with alcohol at every opportunity.  "Mom!  Mommmmm!  I brought you a beer!  Do you want to open it?  Can I have a juice box?  Can I have the cap from the bottle?"

    The other morning Milo, who is four, got a Summit EPA out of the fridge and brought it to Mark.  "Daddy.  Do you want to have a beer?"

    "Milo, I’m eating oatmeal.   I have beer with dinner sometimes, not for breakfast." 

    "Please, Dad?  Will you have a beer?  Please?" 

    "Milo, I don’t want one.  Besides, I can’t have a beer right before I go to work.  It’s against the rules."

    Milo stared at Mark with very wide eyes.  Then he stammered, "It’s against the rules of beer?"

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  • This is one of those posts where I lament that I did not take a picture.

    During the winter here in Minnesota I keep a big jar of Vaseline (a.k.a. petroleum jelly) in the mudroom, for slathering on the children’s faces before we go out in the cold.  Works great to keep the chapped lips, noses, and cheeks to a minimum. 

    Well, it’s warming up around here, and I started to clean out the mud room:  put the coats in the washing machine, cleaned the mud off the winter boots, etc., replaced the heavy things with light jackets, things like that.  And I took the big jar of Vaseline and set it on the end of the kitchen counter, intending to take it upstairs the next time I went up, and then I went to surf the web for a while.

    You know where this is going, don’t you? 

    MJ was reeeeeeallly quiet for a while, and when I got up to check on her she had fetched a spoon, climbed up to the kitchen counter, and troweled the Vaseline thickly onto her face, arms, and hair.

    I provide the following sentence fragment for the benefit of Googling moms everywhere:  How to get Vaseline out of hair.  The answer is cornstarch.  (Which I found by Googling also, a couple of days later, after I’d shampooed her hair about six times with Suave Kids 2-in-1 shampoo and it still looked really greasy.  The results were about evenly divided between cornstarch advocates and peanut butter advocates.)

    I put MJ in the empty bathtub and worked several big pinches of cornstarch into her short blond hair, probably about half a cup of cornstarch, until every bit of her hair felt powdery and soft and thick with it.  Then I put her in the shower (she started to sniffle — she hates having her hair washed — but she went willingly), rinsed it, shampooed it twice with my own non-2-in-1 shampoo on the theory that it might work better to remove oil, and followed it with conditioner.  It dried overnight and now it looks almost normal. 

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  • Food and thought.

    Boy, my last post about various ways one might try to eat virtuously felt really disjointed. 

    Not too surprising, perhaps.  Like lots of kids in my generation, divorced parents meant I grew up bifurcated, seventy percent in one home and thirty percent in another, and my food environment was similarly bifurcated — down to the point where I could never remember whether in this house I was supposed to split my English muffins with a fork over the sink or with a serrated knife over the garbage can.  Or was it a fork over the garbage can?  I don’t remember.  It’s nice not to have to waste brain cells on things like that any more.

    So, anyway, in one house, I was raised on mostly processed food from boxes and tubs.  I would use "Kraft Macaroni and Cheese" as the symbolic archetype of the kind of stuff I ate, except that macaroni and cheese was in fact one of the things my mother did not ever  make from a box.  (She in turn rhapsodized about her grandmother, who always ate in restaurants and never cooked anything except homemade applesauce).  I ate a lot of Lean Cuisine.  I ate a lot of Pizza Rolls.  I ate a lot of canned soup.  I ate a lot of frozen egg rolls.  There were always bags and bags of candy in the house.  Always bags and bags of potato chips and pretzels and Doritos (those were for my brother) and canned jalapeno cheese dip.  My brother and I were each allowed to choose a 2-liter bottle of pop every week.  A couple of times a week my mom would cook a dinner.   Not a wide variety of stuff, but tasty.  There was macaroni and cheese, and Spanish rice, and stuffed peppers, and hamburger patties simmered in jarred mushroom gravy and served over Potato Buds.  Hamburger Helper and Tuna Helper made their appearance. 

    So that was seventy percent of the  time.   The rest of the time I lived in Uber-Gourmet Land.   By the time I was sixteen or so, I’d acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of Cincinnati-area restaurants (and indeed, when a couple of friends from college settled in Cincinnati I wrote a restaurant guide for them as a housewarming present!)  (Once, as a child, I was given a tour of the kitchen at La Maisonette; the chief image I retained from that memory was a brilliant red lobster emerging, tonged, from a cloud of vapor above a glistening stainless steel pot.)  Cooking at home was elevated to performance art, with the trendiest of ingredients, and always served with a good-to-excellent wine.  I learned how to make a proper Caesar salad at age eleven, how to make a red-wine reduction for steak au poivre at twelve or so.  If I may say so myself, I became a pretty good little prep cook, mincing garlic and rolling out pie crust and such things.    I have many lovely memories of cooking at my dad and stepmom’s house, and I remember being very proud to be entrusted with the production of various dishes even for dinner parties.  I made chocolate biscotti once for New Year’s Eve.   

    Oddly, though,  fresh produce never made a huge appearance at either place.   The only fresh vegetables I ever remember seeing at my mom’s house with regularity were green bell peppers and onions.   And while we used vegetables in cooking at my dad’s, with the exception of salads, they didn’t figure in very importantly and were never the highlight of the meal.  It was the eighties and nineties; pasta was king. I can still produce a sauteed-chicken-and-pasta-in-cream-sauce dish without even thinking about it.  Except I don’t want to very much. 

    So when I was first dating my sort-of-farm-raised husband, I used to scandalize him by remarking nonchalantly, for instance, that I had never eaten, or even seen before me, a fresh grapefruit half until I went to college.  I had never eaten fresh green beans.  I had never eaten kale or turnip greens or mustard greens or collard greens.   (Granted neither had he.)  I’d hardly ever had a home-grown tomato.   

    This background has given me a very odd combination of "comfort foods."  I hardly ever give in to them because I know better now, but the freezer case in the grocery store beckons me.  Sometimes I really crave a frozen egg roll.   At the other end is a different kind of comfort food.  I don’t get to fine restaurants (or even to celebrated holes-in-the-wall) very often because of the complexities of raising young children, and when Mark and I get a date night or when I manage to have breakfast  by myself in the Cuban joint up the road on Saturday mornings, I always get this exhiliarating aah-I’ve-finally-come-home feeling.  Yes, I’ll have another glass of wine!  Thank you!

    But I’ve moved away from both those places when it comes to crafting my own family’s environment.  Vegetables and lots of them, tending more and more towards simplicity in preparation; less pasta, rice, potatoes, and corn than I ate as a child.  We exercise heavy control at the grocery store, so that mostly the stuff that enters our house is "green light" and the kids can graze as much as they want.  (They go through a lot of natural peanut butter, which is fine with me.)   Butter, milk, eggs, chickens, and about half the cheese we eat come from one local farm now; pork (including bacon and sausage) and beef from another local farm.  I tell Mark that one thing about marriage I didn’t expect is that I thought we’d eat out a lot more; but I still do go out quite a bit, mostly taking the kids out for late lunches, because I want them to be comfortable and well-behaved in restaurants.  I still do use certain convenience/packaged foods, mostly for afternoon teatime, and I still do take the kids to McDonalds once in a while, but I exert a lot of control over the choices.  The kids may have either French fries or a sweetened drink; the four- and one-year-old share a single kid’s meal plus a fruit salad.  This is America; they’re going to be exposed to a lot of fast food; I may as well teach them how to do it with moderation. 

    So.  It’s all still evolving.  As I navigate mothering and teaching, it has all required a certain transformation of values.  We all want high-value food, after all.  My mom valued convenience and ease and comfort at the end of a long, exhausting workday.  My dad valued (still does) richness and showmanship and atmosphere, a good story to tell his guests and his companions and himself.    I am valuing… what?  Convenience and ease, but the kind you get from simplicity rather than from  preservatives.  Richness and a good story, but the kind you get from whole foods rather than from the niche-boutique foodie store.   

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    1 comment on Food and thought.

  • Eating politics: some priorities.

    If eating is a political act (see previous post), then it can be a virtuous act, too.   "Sustainability" being one of the New Virtues — really it’s just good stewardship under another guise.  But I’ve known lots of different people whose eating was really a form of self-expression, and I’ve gone through stages of expressing different priorities at the grocery store myself.  How many modes are there in which a person can shop and eat as a political act, or a virtuous act, or an expression of personal ideology?  Here are a few.

    1. "I walk lightly on the planet!"  Measure it however you will:  carbon footprint, pounds of pesticide runoff per person, deforestation.   Whatever it is you think is bad for the planet and its denizens on a global scale, plenty of folks out there are shopping to minimize it.
    2. "I refuse to put ‘chemicals’ in my body!" Often seen in company with #1 but really a different animal.  These folks are trying to keep icky stuff out of their own family’s bodies mostly.  So, for instance, they might not care nearly as much about, say, chemical fertilizers as about pesticide residues.  And they’d rather eat cane sugar than a volume of equivalent-carbon-footprint high-fructose corn syrup, just ‘cuz the HFCS is more chemickally.
    3. "I look for the best deal and don’t waste my money." I have met numerous people who pride themselves on feeding their families at very low cost.  Coupon clipping, sale surfing, bulk buying, discount grocers, home canning and preserving, maybe gardening or wildgathering if your local climate allows.   Organic food, with its extra cost, is a luxury item not often chosen.  It’s not the way I would want to eat — nonfat dried milk and other cheap foodstuff has always repulsed me — but I do have a certain respect for frugality as an end, even when it comes to food.
    4. "I don’t short change my family on nutrition."  The biggest priority is a wide variety of food that packs a lot of nutrients per calorie.  Much easier now that we have cross-country refrigerated trucks. 
    5. "If it’s not in season, I don’t eat it."  One way to support local producers and a different way of looking at the "variety" concept.  Can be boring in Minnesota.  (Potatoes and dried fish again?)
    6. "I don’t eat food with a face."  Ah, veganism!  Definitely in conflict with #4, if you ask me, at least for growing children and women of childbearing age.
    7. "I don’t eat food with a frowny face."  Humane treatment of animals; I can respect that.
    8. "I only eat the finest stuff."  Gourmets or gourmands… you make the choice.  The polar opposite of #3.

    …. this list is getting long.  Solidarity with exploited workers… raw-foodism… the latest diet crazes probably count too.  As much as I like producing exhaustive lists that rigorously outline every class of option so that the entire field of possibilities can be analyzed, it’s getting late and I want to stop now.

    Some of these priorities go together pretty smoothly.  Others are opposed to each other.  And for some it depends how it’s enacted.  For instance, it’s possible to be both very frugal and to tread lightly on the planet… if you grow a lot of your own food, eat low on the food chain, etc.  But if you’re buying supermarket veggies, the cheap choices are decidedly industrial. 

    I suppose you could also add a priority along the lines of "I don’t think too hard about it, I just eat what I like when I like it."  Frankly, it’s not without appeal or plaintalking respectability.  People spend a lot of time thinking and enacting food-as-politics.  (In a way, it is a form of gluttony… what C.S. Lewis called "the gluttony of delicacy." ) If you don’t enjoy that, you can certainly pass your time thinking and enacting something more fun. 

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    3 comments on Eating politics: some priorities.

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