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Our love affair with food

I’m sure you’ve heard some version of the old adage, “eat to live; don’t live to eat,” and while it’s a great sentiment, it doesn’t help us at all with our modern love affair with food. It’s easy to bemoan the realities that have lead to that end, but what we really need is a fix.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me, food is too often an entertainment and a salve. What I have discovered is the bulwark against that behavior is keeping it simple in the kitchen.

When I say keeping it simple, I mean exactly that. Most of the time, if I go into the kitchen to make something complex, I get discouraged or bored, and default back to the kinds of foods that make me sick in the long run.

What I’ve been doing over the past couple of years is collecting a goto list of simple, direct dishes that I can prepare in a short amount of time and that satisfy my need to eat. I hope to document those dishes here in future posts.

DLH

Food and food making

I started this particular blog years ago with the idea I was going to capture my journey into eating better by showcasing recipes and ideas I encountered along the way.

What I actually encountered along the way is that, while I can cook and go through spates where I do, in general I tend to cook as an afterthought, which is to say, not at all when I have something going on. That becomes problematic because my spouse has a similar view of cooking, meaning we spend an awful lot of time staring at each other and asking what the other one wants to eat until one of us dies.

Jokes aside, the fact is I got fat by just-in-time eating of convenience foods because I always felt like I had other things to do. I still feel that way, and that has made me realize I have to rethink how I approach the whole idea of food and eating and cooking if I’m not going to be fat or starve to death.

My main realization in trying to figure this all out is that, most of the time, my food needs are simple and straightforward. I don’t tend to eat meals most of the time. Instead, I “graze” and if I have nutritious, grazing compatible foods around, I can eat those for quite a while before the desire for variety overwhelms me.

The first realization factors into the second one that I’ve been doing intermittent fasting (a combination of 16/8 and 5/2) for about a year now, and in embracing that change to my eating habits, I also need less complicated food nearly all the time.

So, where does that leave this blog? I don’t know yet to be honest. I would still like it to be a place where I catalog recipes and ideas I encounter along the way,  but more than that, I think I want this to be a place where I document my changing relationship with food and, frankly, with our cultural presumptions about eating. We’ll see.

Stay tuned. More will follow.

DLH

The problem with making your own food…

The problem with making your own food is that you actually have to make it.

It’s amazing to me how, in certain ways, lazy we moderns are compared to our ancestors or people living in parts of the world without our standard of living. Granted, all sorts of measures say we’re the most productive humans ever, but those measures treat modernity as the pinnacle of civilization to this point, which fact remains to be proven.

It wasn’t all that long ago that failing to produce one’s own food meant starvation and death rather than a late night run to the grocery or Taco Bell even in our own culture. Perhaps our ancestors weren’t as productive on the modernity scale, but they certainly knew how to survive without the incredibly large and fragile web of dependence we’ve created for ourselves.

Nevertheless, I consider returning to a form of their productivity worth pursuing, but for me, it’s a constant battle to actually do it. I have to remember to proof my sourdough starter before the bread runs out or start my next cheese run in enough time that it’s ready when I want to eat it.

Perhaps the problem is that I have the luxury of thinking of it as a problem. For my ancestors, it was life itself. For me, at least as of yet, it’s a luxury and a novelty. I’m not saying I want to be at risk of starving, but I do want to take the undertaking more seriously.

DLH

We’ve all gotta eat

It turns out we’ve all got to eat, and it’s probably no surprise to anyone who knows me that I have a few things to say about the undertaking. Hence this food blog.

My goal is to focus on the preparation of food from locally grown, sustainable ingredients as well as the science, history, and folklore behind food, especially foods that many people consider ingredients and don’t think about making themselves. In addition, I will post interesting food related tidbits as the mood hits me.

DLH