The Universe Beats Me Over the Head With a Simple Message

In today's post, I'm going to attempt to explain my interest in bread machines and making the boys' bread, as I promised earlier, along with a few other things that have captured my attention. Bear with me, Gentle Reader, because this post will probably come off somewhere between high-minded, intellectual and rational pontificating and tinfoil hat-wearing ranting.

Let the fun begin, eh?

That Simple Message, Delivered Repeatedly, in the Chronicle of a Year
As you probably well know, Gentle Reader, over the past year or more, I've learned to really pay close attention to what I put in my body to nourish it and what I offer my family to nourish them. Initially, that attention came as a result of my most recent weight loss success and my vow to keep the weight off without winding up on some silly eating routine that essentially starved my body of certain key nutrients.

However, as the weeks and months passed and my interests in the culinary arts really began to dovetail with my longstanding interest in health, fitness and health care, my reasons for being so fussy about what the family and I eat began to expand. For example, we hoped a more keen sense of the nutritional value of foods we offered the boy would help him behave better at school (not that we were feeding him shit in the first place). I began to see an alarming--yet not entirely surprising--uptick in the number of food product recall alerts from the FDA. Our addiction to fresh veggies, fruits and herbs, not to mention bread that didn't have high fructose corn syrup as the second ingredient, didn't wane even when our bank balance began to decline.

Having been raised by parents who for many years had a fairly abundant garden, some of which was pickled, preserved, frozen or in some other fashioned canned for later use by Mum, and who for many years bought half a slaughtered cow's worth of meat for the deep freeze and who grew up on the farm and still had siblings farming, my instincts to try my hand at raising some of my own family's favorite items were spot-on. Of course, all my previous attempts to tend to anything green have largely failed, but I thought surely this time my interest in reducing our grocery bill and knowing better just how those produce items were cultivated would keep those growing greens healthy and alive and--dare I dream it?--fruitful.

But not only did I try to start some container gardening on the yoga patio (with a tremendous amount of starting-off help from Mum), I also got around to reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. This book had sat on my to-read pile for almost a year before I got around to reading it. I kept putting it off for other tomes, and I'll admit readily I was reluctant to read it because I wasn't in the mood for what I thought would be a crunchy-granola overgrown hippie diatribe on the orgasmic bliss of growing one's own food and devoting one's entire food budget to all things organic and to hell with everything else in a twisted, slavish devotion to the cause.

Thankfully, I was wrong.

The book is, I think, an even-handed look at one family's attempt to eat locally for one year by raising many of their own foods--including meat items--and acquiring what they could not make themselves from local sources. If memory serves, "local" for Kingsolver and her family meant raised within 100 miles of their Appalachian home. They take on this experiment not for any zealot-like principles per se. It's more common sense: Food that's grown elsewhere or processed elsewhere costs us all in many ways a lot of us consumers have yet to acknowledge. Economics, environmental conservation, good health and good old-fashioned self-sufficiency meld in a way that just, well, strikes me as good common sense.

Kingsolver, her husband (the bread-maker of the family, hence one of the key sparks of my interest in making bread) and her college-age daughter collaborate on the book. While Kingsolver the professional novelist records the family's year-long experiment, her husband Steven Hopp supplies sidebars that connect the family's activities to broader movements and "Hey, did you know?" topics, while the daughter supplements each chapter with recipes referenced within and meal planning ideas. None of the three ever get on a soap box and bash the reader over the head with their ideas, and the natural flow of raising food provides enough fodder for drama and just plain, good storytelling.

Of course, if you are somewhat conscious of issues with today's food production, then some of the stuff in the book, particularly in Hopp's sidebars, won't be as shocking as they might be to other, less-aware readers. For example, Hopp dedicates one sidebar to the nutritional differences that result from the different techniques for raising and processing animal flesh and byproducts, particularly bovine and poultry meat, bovine milk and poultry eggs, for human consumption. (Having covered international pharmaceutical and biotech firms for a number of years, I know a surprising lot about the origins of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, aka mad cow disease, and its human form, Jakob-Creutzfeld disease. It's disgusting how cheap agribusiness is when it comes to feeding fellow humans, and it's honestly a wonder how so many of us around the globe haven't dropped dead from terrible health problems related to the consumption of mass-produced meat.) He reveals that cows and chickens that are allowed to eat the way the design committee of the universe intended them to eat are not only less prone to infections and health issues that make them dangerous for human consumption, but their meats and byproducts (milk, eggs) also have better nutritional profiles and flavors. Eggs from free-range chickens have less "bad" fats and more "good" omega fatty acids than eggs from chickens raised in cages amongst their filth that are pumped full of antibiotics and feed that contains, among other things, slaughtered animal byproducts.

With this in mind, is it any wonder that (a) the number of salmonella contaminations have occurred lately and (b) the FDA recently announced new measures to curtail salmonella contamination?

But again, Gentle Reader, if you have any awareness of where your food really comes from and how it's produced and what kind of issues are being raised about our food supply, such revelations that Hopp makes are not shocking. I mean, some of the things I hadn't read before, but they were conclusions that I determined for myself made sense because of what I know.

And then there are the discussions about big agribusiness' quest to control through patents and IP and genetic engineering the world's crop production.... Gads, it's really quite frightening what people are driven to do for big money, and anyone who eats pays the price. I have uncles from both sides of my family who grow wheat (or at least try their hardest to do it), my dad still helps with harvest each year on the farm where he grew up, and one of my uncles manages (or at least I think he still does) the local mill. These are, by and large, honest men working hard and trying to do the right thing, but the "right thing" has become twisted and corrupted by agribusiness, which cheapens their work and cheapens our lives. Our health--hell, our very lives really do depend on changes taking place at these early stages, at this ground level of our food supply.

The Message Gets Animated
Then there was that episode of King of the Hill....

While I wish I could share with you the entire "Raise the Steaks" episode, just know that Hank resorts to shopping at--and "volunteering" at--the local food co-op because he's tired of buying tough, tasteless steaks at the Mega-Lo Mart, which eventually takes over the co-op, forcing Hank to rescue the cows the co-op farm was raising for its meat market. Hilarious episode and I swear lines of dialogue were lifted from Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, especially when one of the characters (I think it was Hank) gushes over his slice of tomato have ::gasp:: flavor!

Here's a fun clip:

Airing as it did as I was in the final chapters of Animal, Vegetable, Mineral and contemplating the acquisition of a bread machine and lamenting that farmers' markets in the area are held at times that are not convenient for me and feeling so frustrated that all my herbs had died and that my bell pepper plants would not be bearing fruit, I couldn't help but see this episode as just another bap on the head from the universe to do more.

Reality...and Reality
I recognize the truth in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral and in the PRs I revise and upload to dailyrx.com about food recalls and in "Raise the Steaks." I would dearly love to live that truth--to have a much more intimate knowledge and awareness of the foods I prepare and eat.

But here's another reality, one that Kingsolver also acknowledges to some degree: Making choices that promote environmentally responsible and healthful food production and consumption is tough, requires some degree of sacrifice a lot of us aren't willing to make and can seem awfully expensive, especially when money is tight. And here's another reality that she doesn't acknowledge to much extent: Not all people and not all geographic areas are well-suited now for food production that could sustain a person in some meaningful way.

I'm one of those people. I don't have the patience, the knowledge, the knack, the intuition and all that other stuff that it really does take to grow food. As I was reading Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, I found myself at times longing to live back home in Bumblefuck where the soil isn't hard, inhospitable clay and where there is space to raise a respectable garden and where the culture is a tad more connected to the cultivation of food. I found myself envious of my mother's knack for growing things successfully and knowing when to water and when not to water and when to prune and how to prune and where to plant and where not to plant. In a word, I can't grow shit--not even cilantro in a pot, which any idiot should be able to do--so self-sufficiency to any degree is out for me!

Compounding my incompetence is the local weather. Spring here starts in late January, early February. Summer starts in late April. Summer ends in late October. While that's great weather, for the most part, for outdoor enthusiasts, folks who have health conditions that can be exacerbated by cold weather and summer fun-lovin' fools, it really does suck for trying to grow anything. A plant doesn't really do well when the temperatures go from the pleasant 80s one week to the blazing triple digits the next. Yeah, sure, Gentle Reader, you can preach all you want about xeriscaping and native plants, but I would dare to say that thanks to climate change, even plants that once were native have a hard time thriving because their natural habitat has changed.

Which leads me to another point: No matter how much you work to use healthful, environmentally responsible techniques for cultivating your food, you're still doing it in a global climate that is hardly free of pollution. As a highly respected Ayurveda practitioner once counseled a group of yoga teachers, people today are hard-pressed to benefit from the techniques and advice contained in ancient texts because our world is polluted, and not just with environmental pollutants. Do you understand what I'm trying to say, Gentle Reader? It's sort of like living in Europe in the years after the Chernobyl disaster and trying to claim that your mountain retreat offers pure, unpolluted air, water and land. Uh-uh, it's just not possible. Hell, I recall reading just a few years ago how the radiation contamination from Chernobyl is still polluting Europe. It's not like that stuff just goes away!

So what's a person to do? For me, the only way I can rectify things is to make conscious decisions whenever I can. I'll try to buy local produce when I can, but I'm not going to burn up a tank of gas trying to get it from the really nice farmers' market in South Austin. I'd love to buy local, free-range chicken, but doing so would get me whole chickens that would largely be wasted--and being wasteful in my mind is a big, big crime that ought to be avoided as much as possible.

Just as I've gone to extremes in the past to keep my weight at a certain point, only to mistreat my body, I'm not going to go to far-flung extremes to keep in line with certain ideologies. I'll do more to choose fresh produce that's in season; I'll be more conscious about choosing produce that's had to travel a long way to get to me and has had to undergone some really nasty stuff to reach me in a visually appealing state. I'll try my hand at making the boys' bread so the high fructose corn syrup stays out and more whole grains--from organic sources, if I can afford it--go in. And the entire time, I'll be berating myself for not doing more.