Food is a popular thing around my house. It’s summer, all the kids and their friends (mostly teenagers) are around, and when they are, they eat. I don’t mean three meals either, I mean they eat constantly. Barely an hour goes by without the sound of the fridge or cupboard doors opening and someone asking a food related question. Grocery shopping happens every couple of days, and I search through my messy recipe collection for another idea to stretch the food budget and make tasty and filling meals.
Today we are having burritos with the leftover ground beef that I made a few nights ago. Add a little cheese, green salsa, sour cream, fresh herbs from my small herb patch and voila… dinner! Perhaps a green salad to go with that, made from fresh local ingredients. But that will mean a trip to the fruit stand down the road… and we need milk again, and the cereal is getting low and before you know it, a trip to the grocery store is in full swing. Nuts, I was just there yesterday!
Perhaps it’s no surprise that food is on my brain these days… what to cook, what to buy, what we are eating. I lay awake at night considering ‘organic’ and ‘100 mile diet’ and how I might become a better food consultant and creative chef to our family. I wonder if we really are what we eat, or if my best educated efforts are good enough? And I think about a couple of untimely and unfair and shocking recent deaths in our family where it just didn’t seem to matter to either disease that our loved ones were eating healthfully and exercising and taking REALLY GOOD CARE care of themselves. They died. And then I wonder if all the focus on what we eat and how much we exercise is just another result of our OCD culture? Is it?
My favourite local fruit stand has recently obtained ‘Organic’ status. Great, I think. I already enjoy their bounty, and now I have another reason to find it good and healthy and good for us. But I wonder at what cost that designation will come? I’m about to pop over there now, so I’ll try to assess the prices and see if I can determine if it is more expensive this year than last year. I wonder?
Have you noticed that the grocery store chains have latched on to ‘Organic’ too… there are large organic and pricey sections now with a wider variety of items than every before. What does that mean for the rest of the food that is not organic? Is it bad for you? And then I can’t help by wonder why our Gov’t would allow non-healthy non-organic foods to be sold in the first place? It’s almost like you have to be wealthy to eat healthy… that can’t be right, can it?
Anyway, just sharing what I’m thinking at the moment on the topic of food. Let me know what you think.
Are you what you eat, or not?
Lesley-Anne (proud consumer of milk, butter, white bread, homemade jam, meat, fish, and lots of fruit and veggies etc. etc.)
Photo from HERE
BUDDY BREATHING 
I’ve always bought organic where I can and haven’t found it that much more expensive than non-organic. A lot of farmers in the UK though find it very expensive to convert to organic status. Small producers especially will often do what they can to reduce their use of chemicals but not go for official organic status, but as they sell a lot of their food locally they build up a reputation for selling affordable ‘organic’ produce.
I think a lot of goverments are very happy to let their citizens buy unhealthy food, think of all the money that goes from big business to government, a lot of it from big food companies or from companies that produce agricultural chemicals…
I think organic has real health benefits, it prevents you ingesting loads of chemicals.
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