Making room for food

I don’t know if I can shop at the grocery store anymore. It’s been a several-year-long process, so this supermarket aversion hasn’t come as a complete shock. But with my current lifestyle, it doesn’t make things very easy, either.

But then, ease is probably what created the supermarkets and the food industry that stocks them and our culture’s perceived need for this time-saving, cost-saving middleman. Ease needs to be shifted down a few rungs on my food priority list.

Mr. Incredible, who has a five-ingredients-or-fewer rule when it comes to bread, joins me in this quest to find and buy food that nourishes and delights—but that doesn’t completely break the bank. Which is more and more of a problem considering the way food prices are rising these days.

Nevertheless, we’re determined in our household to make time to shop for, prepare, and savor healthy, tasty food. And as much as possible, we’ll find room in our budget for good food, too.

People at work are always asking me how I manage to bring in healthy leftovers each day, when they eat out for lunch three to four days a week. My answer? Sometimes, cooking is all I get done in an evening. Meaning I don’t necessarily have their social life or keep up with the TV lineup like they do.

Take tonight, for instance: there’s red lentil and cauliflower coconut curry to prepare (the cauliflower and cabbage must be used ASAP!) and then I’ll have to get a head start on the cottage pie I’m preparing for dinner at a friend’s house tomorrow (there’s no way I’d be able to get it done tomorrow between work and the time we have to leave). Just like in college, when I would gear myself up for a late night of paper-writing, I prepare myself mentally to devote the larger portion of my evening to food. And surprising as it may seem, I rarely regret these cooking marathons. (I just have to remember to drink a lot of water and sit down while I chop these days, otherwise my pregnant back and feet will regret it tomorrow.)

So what’s the problem with the supermarket and why can’t I just buy healthy, yummy stuff there? They do carry produce, after all.

Most of the products at the store are highly processed, something that I’m becoming more and more aware of as I read more labels, and I’m just not sure if this frankenfood is good for me. Even foods that seem fairly straightforward and pure are messed with; that is, they have additives and conditioners and dyes and preservatives (not to mention residual pesticides and antibiotics)—all kinds of things that would be absent if I prepared these foods myself at home.

Even the produce is making me wary. Grocery store tomatoes are the perfect example of produce that’s made for easy transportation and long shelf life, apparently without much thought to taste (or nutrition, actually).

There are a lot of people to blame for my supermarket frustrations: there’s me, of course—the compulsive label reader and lover of really good-tasting, fresh food. And there’s the delicious legacy of our families’ home gardens and family meals. But then there’s also Barbara Kingsolver, whose book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle has made me a believer in eating close to home, for reasons that range from nutrition to family life to economics. And this summer, Michael Pollan has caused me a great deal of irritation as I browse the supermarket shelves and see so-called health claims calling to me from foods that may not even be food, let alone healthy. His book In Defense of Food has been a daily source of discussion in our household for its critical view of what most of us has accepted as nutrition.

But this awakening has caused me more than just frustration. It’s also caused me to see my food as more than fuel. I’ve been pushed to reevaluate my priorities and decide just how much organic local potatoes and free-range eggs mean to me and the health of my family. As it turns out, they mean quite a lot; I just have to decide what to cut out of my life now in order to make room for them. And I’ve been reminded that food is more than just its nutrients. Really good food—really well prepared—constitutes a social event, an act of gratitude toward God and his creation, and a labor of love.

And when you think of it that way, suddenly the supermarket doesn’t seem so super.

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By the way, if you're still looking for something to read this summer, I highly recommend both of the books below.

Everybody wants to be an executioner.

Or so it seems from all the marketing copy I’ve been reading and editing lately. When asked what they do best, companies continually answer:

We execute.

When asked what differentiates their company from the rest; what they excel in, they say:

Execution.

What concerns me about this is that, if you take their meaning to be that they “get things done” and that they “excel in the implementation of their solutions to customers’ problems,” that’s not really something to brag about, is it? That kind of execution barely keeps you in business, let alone propelling your company to the front of the pack.

Therefore I must consider: are these companies doing some side jobs for the mob?

I know that’s not what these companies mean, but seriously – come up with something original to do, and an original way to express what you do, or I will assume that you’re whacking people in the back room.

On a lighter note, all this talk of execution makes me think of the almost-fate of Bartholomew Cubbins, the 500-hat-wearer of Seuss fame. Check out the book if you’re bored; it’s one of my childhood favorites.

The unforgivable curse

So I've been thinking a lot about photocopiers lately, and why exactly they give me the creeps.

Today I finally figured it out: it's the green light.

You know, that eery green light that is just barely contained by the lid -- that light that can make you go temporarily blind? Well, doesn't that remind you of something? Something Voldemort-ish?

It's the same flash of green light that you see when someone issues a killing curse in the world of Harry Potter.

Weird, huh?

What I'm reading

Thursday Next: First Among Sequels
by Jasper Fforde

This, I think, is the last of the Thursday Next series, and I can't wait to find out how it ends! (Of course, if I stopped reading four books at one time, I might find out sooner.






Moon Handbook: Pittsburgh
by Dan Eldredge

A good guide to Pittsburgh, with a surprisingly casual, insider's perspective (usually these things are all ads and endorsements).







The Moving Finger
by Agatha Christie

One of my guilty pleasures. Actually, this one is quite well-crafted--one of Christie's favorites, and not nearly as formulaic as some of her other works. It's a Miss Marple mystery, but I'm halfway through and Miss Marple hasn't shown up yet, so that's a pretty shocking change of pace. Seriously, I love Christie's mystery novels, and this is a great one.




Food and Faith: Justice, Joy, and Daily Bread
edited by Michael Schut

With a collection of essays by the likes of Wendell Berry (yes, that was a huge selling point for me), this book explores . . . well, justice, joy, and daily bread. Heh heh. So far, I've read a thought-provoking piece on food as sacrament, and I thought it was very well done. I can't wait to read the rest of it. I'm sure it will be a blog-entry starter for me for the next few months, given that food and faith are two of my favorite topics!

We are worth so much more.

"Writers don't make any money at all. We make about a dollar. It is terrible. But then again we don't work either. We sit around in our underwear until noon then go downstairs and make coffee, fry some eggs, read the paper, read part of a book, smell the book, wonder if perhaps we ourselves should work on our book, smell the book again, throw the book across the room because we are quite jealous that any other person wrote a book, feel terribly guilty about throwing the schmuck's book across the room because we secretly wonder if God in heaven noticed our evil jealousy, or worse, our laziness. We then lie across the couch facedown and mumble to God to forgive us because we are secretly afraid He is going to dry up all our words because we envied another man's stupid words. And for this, as I said before, we are paid a dollar. We are worth so much more."

—Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz

Blogging the blues [part one]

Well, I have been a little blue for a couple of days, but that's not what I mean. To be really accurate about my moods, I guess I'd say I've been purple or orange or something with a little more aggression than blue. But that's not what I'm blogging about.

I'm about three years behind in this endeavor, but I'm finally reading Blue Like Jazz. Mr. Incredible reminds me that it's a collegey book (and I am sooo past that, right?) . . . but frankly I'm feeling like I might have skipped some of the developmental stages that the average Christian college student goes through, so I've got some things to catch up on.

First off, any non-fundamentalist who begins a book talking about the depravity of humankind is going to get my attention. That's just the way it is.*

The genius of Don's opening chapters--and indeed, his own experience of coming to faith--is that he identified a problem (human depravity, the broken state of things here on Earth), and it was working from this problem that he found a solution.

Some old Brethren in Christ people would probably be very pleasantly surprised by Don's talk about sin and depravity--the kinds of things, my boss mentioned recently, "that aren't preached anymore." Well, I don't know about that. The word "sin" is in little danger of going extinct at Dillsburg, but according to her this concept that we're fallen--that "what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing"--is falling out of favor with Evangelicals.

What really struck me as I read was that I've read so many people say they discovered God in nature--something I resonate with, as it's always been particularly easy for me to see Him in His creation--but I've never really heard anyone detail their natural discovery of coming to understand what sin and brokenness are by looking at the world around them. Don writes,

. . . I knew, because of my own feelings, there was something wrong with me, and I knew it wasn't only me. I knew it was everybody. It wasn't on the skin; it was on the soul. . . . It was as if we were broken, I thought, as if we were never supposed to feel these sticky emotions. It was as if we were cracked, couldn't love right, couldn't feel good things for very long without screwing it all up.

And if we don't realize this, what will God and His grace mean to us? If there is no question; no problem, there is no need for an answer; a solution.


*For all I know, Miller--no, I think I'll call him "Don" to match the casual tone of his book--might go on to completely undermine the foundation he's built in these opening chapters. But I'll just have to wait to find out.
**Edited for clarity 12.06.06 8:50 a.m.

Alagaësia

Where have I been recently? Lost . . . in a book. Well, two, actually: Eragon and Eldest, written by a young homeschooler who's made quite a name for himself in the fantasy/young adult realm. And for good reason: he's definitely managed to bring some fresh ideas to the fantasy scene, something that's really quite difficult to do, when you think about the rigidity of that genre.

Way to go, homeschoolers!

Ahem. Sorry. Back to my post . . .

But like most groundbreaking books, the first two books of Paolini's trilogy not only test their genre's limits; they also remind us all what the genre was supposed to be about in the first place. It may be because Paolini is such a clear thinker and writer, or perhaps it's simply because he's so young, but his themes and basic concepts are so easy to see that it gets people like me thinking about the fundamentals of sci-fi/fantasy literature, archetypes, and more . . . Mr. Incredible says I should write my doctoral dissertation on the kinds of things I've been thinking about regarding the sociological drives behind sci-fi/fantasy literature--and he's probably right.

If you share my taste in books--and it occurs to me at the moment that most of my readers probably do not--be sure to check out the Inheritance series and lose yourself in Alagaësia.

*sorry, the ideas are half-baked right now; will reveal later