Food Lust

Granny's Kitchen
Food is something we are quite taken with in my family. My Granny (my Mom's Mom) used to say, we have food lust and boy was she right.

It is not just eating food that tickles us; we are completely smitten by the whole process: perusing magazines and cookbooks for the next great recipe, shopping for that elusive ingredient, planning vacations where the days are organized by what meal we will be having at what restaurant, sharing recipes and shortcuts with other foodies like ourselves. We like cooking meals and sitting down at the table and enjoying them together. In fact, this is the best part. Food always taste better when it is shared with people you love.

When I was a little girl my Granny's house was my home away from home. Like your vacation home, the place that is more fun because you get to do what you choose and escape your daily routines, plus get spoiled in the process. From as far back as I can remember one of the first things out of Granny's mouth when I arrived was "J. are you hungry? This is what I can fix". Then Granny would list off all the wonderfully delicious things that were just waiting for me to enjoy, all I had to do was ask. Granny had a tiny kitchen that had the "three" main ingredients to making a fabulous meal: the refrigerator for storage, the stove for cooking, and passion for the process. That was it people. No dishwasher, no microwave, no bread maker, etc. In a time when people have more tools than ever, we cook less than before because we lack the one true ingredient: passion.

What's For Dinner?
Food has been on my mind a lot more lately. For Christmas my Mom gave me the book The Omnivore's Dilemma A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan. Though I am only about half way through the book I cannot believe how much about food a foodie like myself didn't know. This book has not only opened my eyes to the politics behind food (I mean face it we all have to eat) but the history of how we have gotten to where we are today. Just a few quotes from the book that I hope you find as interesting as I do:

Chapter 2 The Farm Page 41
"The great turning point in the modern history of corn, which in turn marks a key turning point in the industrialization of our food, can be dated with some precision to the day in 1947 when the huge munitions plant at Muscle Shoals, Alabama (*this is my hometown and my hubby J. and I love to say there is always a Shoals connection because people there really is, but that is a whole other story) switched over to making chemical fertilizer. After the war the government had found itself with a tremendous surplus of ammonium nitrate, the principal ingredient in the making of explosives. Ammonium nitrate also happens to be an excellent source of nitrogen for plants. Serious thought was given to spraying America's forests with the surplus chemical, to help out the timber industry. But agronomists in the Department of Agriculture had a better idea: Spread the ammonium nitrate on farmland as fertilizer. The chemical fertilizer industry (along with that of pesticides, which are based on poisonous gases developed for the war) is the product of the government's effort to convert its war machine to peacetime purposes. As the Indian farmer activist Vandana Shiva says in her speeches, "We're still eating the leftovers of World War II".

Chapter 9 Big Organic Page 183
"The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United States (about as much as automobiles do). Today it takes between seven and ten calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver one calorie of food energy to an American plate".

Chapter 12 Slaughter Page 235
"You can't regulate integrity". This was stated by Virginia farmer Joel Salatin regarding governments regulation of the food industry and I thought it was too good not to share.

This is just the tip of the iceberg dear reader. I purposely left out the gory details of livestock and how they are treated before they make it to our plate and trust me; you are thanking me for it.

Local Food-Tastes Better Travels Less
We started buying local organic produce this past Spring from Fresh Harvest Coop.
We were referred to them by a friend of ours and decided we wanted to give it a shot. Not only is the produce more reasonable than Wild Oats and tastier than Kroger’s, it is truly supporting your local farmer. Just knowing the person who is growing your food is a great feeling. It is awesome, not only because the food is super fresh and delicious but because it just feels like a good deed for both of us (the farmer and me the consumer) every time I write a check.

Ok I will get off my food box....