Nutrition Smarts

To those of you that read my blog and don't have kids -or maybe have a squeamish tummy- I apologize for yesterday's post. But that's life with kids. That's my life with kids. Two things this blog is about. I'm happy to say that I think the worst is over and thanks to those that sent well wishes. All of this brings me to a subject I've been dealing with for many years, even before kids.

Food.

It's such a vital, integral part of our short time surviving on this big ball and something highly neglected. There are many sides to the food debate, meat or no meat, animal products or not, organic or doesn't matter, farm raised or styrofoam packed. I don't have an answer to what you should do. I can only work towards what is good for us, what we feel comfortable and secure doing. Be it eat meat or not, or any of the other questions being posed at the time.

Back in my youth I was a vegetarian for about six years. It initially started as a "fuck you" to my mom, just one more teenaged thing I could do to piss her off. My family ate meat daily. Sometimes multiple times a day. Sometimes for every meal. I didn't like it. I was forced to eat it if I didn't want to. Made to sit at the table until all the grisly pieces were ingested. But, not truly knowing what vegetarianism was, how to do it or having a very valid reason for doing it to begin with, I was a very bad vegetarian.

I ate carbs and nothing else, really. I hated onions, peppers, squash. I despised celery, lettuce and eggplant. Nary a mushroom would pass these lips! Then I got pregnant and my body screamed for MEAT! So my carnivorous days began again. But I was a bad carnivore too.

Fast food, processed meats loaded with salts and "flavorings", adding meat to dishes just because it had a slot on the pyramid. I didn't know what I was doing was wrong. TV, billboards, media as a whole, bogged me down with false promises of healthy eating for me and my kids with very little thought towards what it was exactly we were ingesting. I'm slowly pulling myself out of the fray, slowly trying to find my balance.

Over the past year or more I've been trying to find a balance in my life as a whole. Where new meets old. Where technology has a place right next to old fashioned. A peaceful marriage between parts of my world that have fallen out of sync. Food is a huge portion of that. It gives me the energy to persue the things I want, to keep us from being sick or better able to fight illness. Over the weekend we ate crappy food. Fast, easy and loaded with garbage -one meal would probably not ever decompose. I felt sick after eating it too after so long away from food I used to eat multiple times a week. No wonder we fell ill to whatever we picked up! If our food makes us sick how could we prevent true illness?

Living in the city gives us lots of options but it also limits them too. There aren't a wide variety of suburban farms at the ready to sell us the freshest food we could get. Though there is a plethora of restaraunts at the ready to serve us a quick dish. It's a major reason I want to be a farmer and to move into the country. So I can walk out my door, head over to a cow I raised from a babe, that's been free feeding in our clover and relieve her of some milk. Then to the chickens for a few eggs, the garden or greenhouse for a pepper and tomato and a few leaves of basil. Gives "vine ripe" a completely new meaning. And while I'm scrambling up that breakfast for my bairn, I know every ingredient has been created under the best circumstances, using the best available methods and can't really get any fresher. I can't get that kind of guarantee from the grocery store. I can't get that kind of satisfaction out of my life if I just went shopping for it.

So, for today I'll try to do my best with what I have. I might not do it right all the time but I'm trying. Trying to create nourishing food for my family that might not be "convienient", might not be the easiest, but are the best I can give.