Food

It's always strange to come home from working on the food preservation shoots. Last night Zach and I hauled everything into the barn for the final time on this project and then pulled our tired bodies home. It was 3 days of fascinating conversations. Three days of relearning food and rethinking the way we live.

These shoots, while stressful, have an element of magic to me. As if someone pulls out a pouch and says, "Here is your peoples' lost ancient wisdom." I don't think it was some master plot but at some point we got hoodwinked. We were told enough times that food was too complex and too tiresome that we had no time for its art. That that knowledge was neither desirable nor necessary. Did you know that you can make pickles w/o even boiling them? Or that cabbage has vitamin C and you can make sauerkraut that sits out on a counter (no need for refrigeration) with merely salt and water? Or that some apples late in the season can be "cellared" and last the whole winter?

Me neither.

I had this realization that if I wasn't so obsessed with my weight I would drastically change how I eat. I don't eat for health, I eat for size. (An expanding one at this point so maybe I have nothing to lose :) Yes I drink diet coke because I am mentally and physically addicted but also because it's something I can have without calories. But what the hell am I putting in my body? It's a filler for something that could actually be feeding my body. And I am a glutton for packaged foods. There is something about the bright lights of a 7-11 that really evokes a childlike joy. But Jesus. If all it takes is salt and water to make kraut, what unnecessary crap am I putting in my body when I buy one off the shelf?

When you begin to think about all the extras put into our food so that it can be made with bad ingredients en mass and then survive shipping and shelf life, it doesn't matter if we're buying it at whole foods or safeway, we are buying inferior products. We are feeding our bodies a lot of unnecessary crap. I'm not saying it's going to cause something like cancer, but it's unnecessary. And it's created a system that is wholly bad.

Rambling, yes. But I hope this time coming home I can hold on to some of the lifestyle choices I saw our host live. And I hope I can begin to shift my eating away from processed and packaged and more into real ingredients. Actual food.