12.15.2010

What I want to eat

I’m back home now, which means I have a ridiculous amount of free time and much more control over my day-to-day life. And now that I’m able to decide what I eat again, I’ve been thinking about food and food politics even more than usual. So here are my thoughts on what I care about and where I want to go from here.

I’m interested in food because I think it’s at the core of so many issues I care about—human health, environmental degradation, animal rights, habitat preservation, climate change, environmental justice, toxicology, community resiliency, poverty and our increasing lack of self-sufficiency, to name a few. Through chance and circumstance, much of my life has been spent indirectly around these issues. I volunteered at a food bank weekly starting when I was five and kept it up through middle school. Now, I work at Safeway, which I credit with partially igniting my interest in these issues. Reading Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma was one thing, but seeing how most people actually eat was something else entirely.

My own eating habits shifted during high school too. I was lucky enough to be raised by a stay-at-home mom, which meant I could count on a freshly prepared dinner at least five nights a week at home. Mom got a job towards the end of high school, though, and my extracurricular routine frequently meant that I got home from school between 8 and 10pm. Suddenly, I found myself eating frozen pizza or grabbing a burrito on the go a bit more than I felt comfortable with. I’d never learned how to cook beyond the basics, and even those came late (pasta—sophomore year of high school). I wanted to do things differently, but I didn’t have the time or energy to make it happen.

Since the end of high school, I’ve been slowly working to teach myself useful skills. I can make a few basic meals now, and I shop for groceries I know I’ll actually use, so I don’t panic and fall back on frozen food. I’m hoping to petition to be off of a meal plan this spring so I can cook for myself and learn more. For now, I mostly want to do a better job of eating well. “Well” is something I take seriously, and it includes my health, as well as supporting local producers and good treatment of animals and land. Here’s my current thinking on how that breaks down:

Good FoodStuff to AvoidNever, Ever Eat
local, organic produceout-of-season producetropical fruits and vegetables
local, ethically raised beef chicken, pork and turkey, even if from a small, local producerany meat killed at a conventional slaughterhouse
game animalsfish (sadly including sushi)factory-farmed meat
eggs raised humanely by someone I know conventional eggs, including “cage-free” and “free range” ones
raw milkconventional milk milk from rGBH treated cows
yogurt and cheese (ideally locally made or homemade) tofusoy-based fake meat and dairy products (soy burgers, soymilk, etc.)
beans, lentils and quinoa carbohydrate-intensive meals (pasta, etc.)white bread and prepackaged bagels
homemade baked goodsprocessed snack foodssoda and other sugary drinks
homecooked, fresh meals or raw fooddining hall prepared foodsfrozen dinners


Beyond just eating, I want to learn how to garden, compost, preserve food, make twelve different dishes with kale and have a goat or chickens in the city. And obviously, changing how I eat will do absolutely nothing to fix the food system. So in the next week or so, I’ll be writing a longer post about what’s wrong with the way we eat now, and hopefully some ideas for fixing it. In the meantime, check out my final project from Semester in the West—a podcast about grass-fed meat and what that label really means.

No comments: