Freaked out about food

It's almost Halloween! Hands down, my favorite holiday. I like scary stuff and fall stuff and short skirts- all of which abound. Last night we carved punkins and had a weenie roast at my parents' house (those are the punkins Patrick and I did- his is the kitty, mine is the ghetto Jack the Pumpkin King.) This is a family tradition, but this year I had to bring my own hot dogs and buns because I have become a certifiable food crazy.

It started with this book: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingslover (get it here: http://www.amazon.com/Animal-Vegetable-Miracle-Year-Food/dp/0060852569/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320015388&sr=8-1 ). Kingslover is usually a fiction writer but this book chronicles her year living off nothing but locally grown, organic food in her small Appalachian community in Virginia. It is absolutely fascinating- the way she talks about the delicious food inspires food envy the likes of which I have not experienced since I read Julia Child's My Life in France.

It's also an amazingly compelling argument for eating locally and organically. The stats that scared me most were just how much of what we eat starts as mass-produced corn or soybeans. If they aren't directly putting it into our food in the form of syrups and additives, they're pumping our livestock full of it. I love animals but I'm not a vegetarian- but this book has definitely convinced me to do my best to purchase organic, free-range, or grass fed whenever possible. The other scary thing is the sheer amount of fossil fuels used to transport our food so that we can have strawberries in January. According to the book. for every 1 calorie of food in our grocery stores, 87 energy calories were burned to bring it there! That is really scary to me. I won't quote the book or give you every argument in there because you should just get it for yourself and read it (it's pretty popular so it should be at the library.)

I've always been nervous about the hormones and chemicals pumped into our food, but never enough to really read labels. I thought I was doing a good job of eating healthily because I pay attention to sugars, dietary fiber and protein, and I buy probably 60-75% organic produce. But boy oh boy, when you read the labels, you see all sorts of icky stuff they put in there- there is high fructose corn syrup in everything! The way I see it, there are 2 main reasons to go organic/read your labels/eat locally:

1. You are nervous about the additives, chemicals, hormones in food.

2. You are morally opposed to 6 big agrabusinesses getting all the money by running small farmers out of business and growing mass amounts of corn and soybeans that are inedible to humans and only used for feedlots.

I am both of these things. So today I went grocery shopping and only bought stuff that didn't have high fructose corn syrup, didn't have additives, and was organic and all-natural (except the laundry detergent and mascara. I don't know what the hell is in that stuff. Also, there may or may not be high fructose corn syrup in the toilet paper I bought.) I also bought some meat and animal-product substitutes because sometimes that's cheaper than free range, but I'll discuss that in another post. It was a little more expensive, sure. But not by that much. And in my opinion, if you're only buying stuff that's good for you, you're actually saving money on all the stuff you aren't buying, like chips and donuts. So in the end, it evens out. Also, if you watch your coupons or visit sites like http://coupons.com/, you can find a lot of good deals on healthy, organic stuff. Trader Joe's is great too, and Marsh usually offers organic produce for the same price as regular. Kroger, my chain of choice, has almost everything organic that they have regular and it's generally less than a dollar more.

I also really believe that the hormones in our food are making us fat. I think I've said this before, but when I look at pictures of my mom from when she was my age, she is so skinny. Like, her bone structure is so much smaller, and I really believe it's because she was developing in an era when our food wasn't so pumped full of crap. So I'm going to see if, by eating the same things but using organic instead of regular, I will lose any weight.

I'll leave you with an image of me and my adorable cat, Petunia. She is very friendly and takes after me- the other day she bitch-slapped the other cat for getting too close to her food.