I Eat It Up.
Today I fed wonderfully.
Four days a week I have to be in class before 8am, so I’ve readily adopted an early-to-bed, early-to-rise schedule. Most days I’m out from under the covers by 6am, and out the door by 7:30. This gives me plenty of time to bumble about in the kitchen without having to worry about bumping into my room mates. This morning I had oatmeal mixed with cinnamon, cactus honey, and a sliced pear, two fried eggs, toasted sourdough bread, and a quartered orange. Aside from the soymilk in the oatmeal, it was a locavore’s delight.
Twice a week I have a three hour break for lunch between classes. Today, instead of dropping bills in the downtown for pizza or a “super crazy veggie burrito”, I rode home (through the spitting rain) to again roll the dice and see what I could cook up on my own. Picture this, the ultimate sandwich: fried polenta, thick slices of salted tomato, fried onions, melted farmer’s cheese, spicy brown Sierra Nevada mustard, all pressed between two massive slices of toasted sourdough bread. This sandwich kind of kicked my ass.
Dinner was grazing on cheeses, crackers, sliced melon and utterly flavorless olives at a town-hall styled lecture in the student union. After getting wet riding back to the apartment, I finished the evening with some Mexican hot chocolate, which incidentally I prepared well for the first time. It tasted even sweeter since it was a gift from a friend, is there anything better than sharing good taste?
I’m half-way through Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. So far so good. While the readily available kernal of Pollan’s second treatise on taste may be “eat food, not too much, mostly plants”, there’s another point he makes that I think may be even more important.
Pollan describes how nutritionism studies the qualities of foods in a reductionist manner, by looking at the dietary effects of individual components (ie saturated fat, omega-3’s, calories) instead of at the whole food (ie broccoli, fish, feed-lot beef). Food is studied in this way because nutritional science isn’t capable of explaining the complex ways in which nutrients behave in concert, we just don’t understand it well enough.
Instead, he suggests a study of not just the nutrient parts of food, nor just the food that makes up a diet, but an understanding of the where our food comes from, what it was grown in, or what it was fed and what its food was grown. “Our personal health cannot be divorced from the health of the entire food web.”
I think the idea that one’s well being is inextricably linked to the state of their environment, and that taking care of one improves the other, has pretty far-reaching applications. This concept is vital to the formation of an environmental ethic. Hell, its the reason for developing one.