Books About Food

Hello all –

Sorry for my absence… I’m battling some sort of flu/cold combination and all I’ve been eating is chicken noodles soup out of the can (minus the chicken, noodles and vegetables).  It hasn’t been that bad, mostly a fever and headache but cooking is not so much a priority as laying on my couch and readng trashy celeb blogs and fake online shopping.

Of course I have impeccable timing, I’m leaving tomorrow to head to NYC and then on to DC for the inauguration.  I will do a detailed NYC eating report somewhere along the way… yum!

Sometimes I think that I’m somewhat of a masochist.  Recently I’ve been reading a lot of books about food.  And not even warm and fuzzy and happy books about food.  We’re talking doomsday books about food.  Think In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan and What to Eat or Food Politics by Marion Nestle.  These books leave me so stressed out!

I don’t put a lot of limits on WHAT I eat.  I’m open to most types of meat, love all fruits and vegetables and grains etc.  I’m open to various “ethnic” types of cuisine (ethnic gets quotation marks because it’s a term that annoys me… no one is ever trying to call a hamburger ethnic) and am just generally laid back when it comes to food.  In high school some people used to call me Meaty.  I kid you not.  It’s because I used to get this pizza slice that was called the “bacon double cheeseburger”.  Pepperoni, bacon, ground beef, mozzarella and cheddar.  It’s a wonder I made it past 16 really.

Now I can deal with all the talk about foods being unhealthy.  That’s easy enough to deal with.  You like Big Macs?  Don’t eat them everyday maybe just a few times a week.  That, I can deal with because it’s an easy fix.  But when we get into talks about how industrialized and dirty our food industry is I can’t deal because really, where do you run?  And at what cost?  What has really shaken me up is the meat industry in particular.  Why do cows only eat corn and antibiotics?  Seriously.  If you put cows into the pasture they wouldn’t be gravitating towards cornstalks…. cows don’t naturally eat corn.  They eat grass and stuff. Then it got me thinking, if I had to eat corn EVERY SINGLE DAY that would make me grumpy.  And what kind of energy would be in my “meat”?  Not good energy.  The thing that really gets to me is the idea of eating meat from unhappy cows whose last emotions were sadness and fear.  That weighs so heavily on my heart.

I say all of this not to be some sort of crusader or anything but to announce one of my goals.  I don’t eat A LOT of meat now to begin with but from now on I would like to try and committ to buying meat from happier cows.  Cows that feed of a pasture.  Cows that aren’t loaded up with drugs.  Cows that have cow friends.  Cows that maybe even have names (and not numbers).  Mainly this is to keep ME happy but I like the trickle down effect of supporting people who believe in a happier and healthier food chain and having animals on this land that lead slighly less miserable, torturned lives.

I’m also excited to try “happy chicken” because everyone says the flavour is so different.  Chicken and eggs freak me out a bit.  I find that leftover chicken has a bizarre taste that I don’t remember from childhood which I attribute to changes in how they are raised.  So maybe I will be able to add chicken back onto my regular-ish rotation.

There are also problems with our fruit and vegetable industries but I’m less concerned with that area for some reason.  Maybe because I can relate to the animals.  Not sure.

Seriously, pick up the books that i mentioned.  They are GREAT.  I really enjoyed Marion Nestle’s book What To Eat because it talked a lot about food marketing.  Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food was also a great read.  When I finished reading it all I could think of was having a big juicy steak.  But maybe that’s just me.

Sorry for the rant, this has been on my mind for a while and I’m thinking the cold meds are kicking in.