Food Rant

In some ways I was fortunate to grow up with a mother who was very nutrition conscious. Soda pop, potato chips and fast food were rarities in our home. I was 14 before I ever ate at Mickey D's. My mother was a fan of Adelle Davis and Carlton Fredericks.Both of these authors were highly controversial especially Davis who was held responsible for the death of a small boy.

Mother had a vegetable garden in the summer and her very own compost pile. She periodically tried to feed us coarse whole grain cereals. Those didn't go over well with kids who had already been seduced by Tony the Tiger and the Trix rabbit. Mother has always had a love-hate relationship with food. She must have gained and lost the same three pounds several hundred times. I recall once talking to her about my trip to New Orleans (in days before Katrina and her dementia) and the wonderful cuisine of that city. She had been to there as well. Her response: Oh, you might get fat. Sigh!

There is a lot of horrible stuff out there which is passed off as food. Breakfast for some candy bar and a can of Mountain Dew. I scan the carts of others at the grocery and am appalled what some people feed their families. Even worse is when they pay for it with food stamps.

So, in one corner is the huge convenience pseudo-food industry. In another corner is the organic, non-pesticide, free-range, hormone-free, nothing artificial pure natural foods. This can mean a lot of things. Natural may just mean real corn syrup for example. Given the choice between organic and non, I go organic. I can now buy organic milk, butter, eggs, some fresh veggies and fruit, and hormone free chicken in my local stores. This is a big improvement. I figure the fewer pesticides and alien hormones in my body the better.

The new food fad is sustainable food. Foods that are grown within 250 miles save precious fossil fuels we are told. Okay. I live in farm country, but this is not big organic territory. The local farmers use pesticides and fungicides, and give hormone laced feed to their live-stock. The farmer's markets and road-side stands, as wonderful as they are, do not sell organic products.The few organic farms ship most of their products to the organic markets in the city. The local dairy farmers sell to the big milk companies. I can get sustainable milk, but it's not organic. The organic milk sold here is from California.

Michael Pollan, in his Omnivore's Dilemma, certainly made us sit up and question the sources of our food. We should. E-coli in our spinach or poison in pet food are cases in point. Novelist Barbara Kingsolver's new book is a recent addition to the sustainable bandwagon. It's a nice story. Her book ought to sell well among city dwellers who been told to feel guilty about eating a peach from Georgia or an apple from Washington. It would appear that my mother is not the only one out there with a love-hate relationship with food.

I rejoice at the abundance of food in this country. I believe we have more food, more variety, more cheaply that any nation on the earth. So now I am headed out to the kitchen to fry up some bacon from Kentucky, toast bagels from New York, scramble cage free brown eggs packed in either Missouri, Ohio or Illinois, and pour out a glass of not-from-concentrate orange juice produced in Florida. I don't have a clue where those oranges grew up and what hen layed those eggs. Don't even get me started on the fat and carb police!