What's your posts written in your head/posts written and published ratio?
Mine is about 5/1.
I had a great one this morning, but it's been a busy day and I completely forgot it, so I'm going to revert to the "To Blog" list and tell you more about our eating habits, since that ranked only slightly below the ill-fated foray into home schooling you voted for ages ago, before our trip ("you" en masse, not "you," dear reader, who may not have voted for it, or anything else, at all).
I realize that many of my readers are way ahead of me on this stuff. I only discovered that kitchens contain more than electric kettles and imported tea about three years ago when I moved in with Cole. I was writing my dissertation then and was supposed to work from 2-5 pm, but often, pooped out at 4, turned on "All Things Considered" and cooked dinner to be ready for Cole's arrival home at 5. (My they do things early here in the Midwest!)
Once we started planning for a baby, I had moved our eating habits up a notch, health-wise and now hoped to move them further in time for Nat, in the hopes that I wouldn't spend too much time as a mother being a total nutritional hypocrit and sneaking my velveeta dip after bedtime while insisting Nat eat raw carrots and quinoa. I know good and well that children do what we do, not what we say, so I knew I needed to whip us into shape as fast as our lifelong bad habits could handle it if I wanted my baby to eat healthy food and develop healthy habits in a natural, thoughtless way.
As with all topics that interest me, I started buying books and reading them. I have bought a number of books and read them thus far, but as this sort of thing goes with me, I'd say I'm still on the upward curve of my reading in this area. The first book I read was the Super Baby Food book (linked somewhere in a post below on feeding Nat). Just that book gave me all kinds of nutritional information and I started tweaking our adult (pre-baby) diets based on that. No more white flour, for example; more oatmeal for breakfast.
I felt really good about how I fed Nat in her first year. If I had known pre-Nat, what I know now about adoptive breastfeeding (see Suzie for loads on the topic), I am fairly certain I would have tried it. Everyone I know in real life is completely freaked out when I mention the concept, but so many people here in the computer have done or are planning to do it that it doesn't seem freaky to me personally, at all. At the time, though, I had only read a brief clip about it on the LLL website and it sounded like more trouble than it was worth.
But breast feeding or no, I still feel like Nat had a fabulous first year, nutritionally speaking. And so far, I feel really good about her developing tastes and eating habits in her influential second year. Right now, her candy is blueberries recently plucked at our CSA. That's what she begs for more of and whimpers about when they're all gone ("aw gaw" being her latest favorite phrase). When she sees the pictures of actual candy in a couple of her books, she points to them and says "uck!" ("Yuck!" being her word for not-food, that shouldn't be put into one's mouth).
I know that I would be naive to think these days will last, but I am determined to stay the course on my end of things. People (you know who you are) have a tendency to say "she'll learn what McDonald's is! You can't keep her from it!" I know that. My goal is to raise a child whose biggest rebellion is to secretly eat twinkies and watch commercial television at sleepovers and think that I don't know that she did it. I learned this parenting technique from my detractors themselves, in fact. As a kid, my big rebellion was to tell my parents I was going to the movies with friends, and then go instead to the art gallery, alone. (And I am in so much trouble right now, because they just found out.)
Anyway, back to books. Some are cookbooks. My mother-in-law is one of those people who wants you to give her a list of Christmas presents she should get you sometime around September. The first Christmas I was with Cole, I was a bit intimidated by the need to generate a list, so I told her I wanted measuring spoons and cups and a copy of The Joy of Cooking. I figured it would make a good impression on my new mother-in-law if I asked for things that would help me put a timely dinner on the table of an evening for her daughter.
I love The Joy of Cooking because it just tells you how to do everything. I didn't know how to do some pretty basic things. (Like make oatmeal from oats instead of from a paper packet of "instant oatmeal." Ha! What a scam! You don't have to buy that stuff, all you need is oats and you can make oatmeal very nearly instantly! Who knew? Not me.)
I also have an encyclopedia of the healing uses of foods which seems to more or less say that everything is pretty much really good for you and you should eat lots of it. I appreciate knowing the details though.
The book I read a few months ago that sent me flying to the computer at 2 am to find and join a CSA for the seaon, however, was Jane Goodall's Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating.
I am not someone who thinks it is categorically wrong to eat other animals. I never have been. There are hunters in my family and while I personally would never want to shoot a deer, I don't think people who do are unqualifiedly evil. I do have a lot of picky notions about meat, however and what makes for ethical inter-species relationships (and I think hunters often have exceptionally ethical inter-species relationshps, by the way) and though I probably won't send any money to PETA anytime soon, part of the reason I gave up eating meat a few years ago was disgust with factory farming. I had got a glimpse of a chicken "processing" plant on some documentary in a hotel room and was so horrified not at the fact that chickens were being killed for food per se, but at the complete lack of balance in how it was happening. The scale was just "off" somehow. I remember vividly a scene in which dead chickens hanging from their feet were being hauled through a factory on some kind of pulley-line. Chickens by the hundeds flying upside down through an ugly, dark, dirty building.
I didn't stop eating meat right away, but I started buying kosher chicken after that. It was my first act ever of "mindful eating." I figured, however it was processed, someone had at least prayed over it when it died and I liked that better than the cold industrial image in my head of chicken-as-commodity.
Are you bored yet? I'm really rambling here. I've been trying to write this post mentally for a while, but like I said, I'm still on the upward curve of the topic, so you're getting some pretty stream-of-consciousness stuff.
Anyway, Jane Goodall's book forced me to reconsider my feelings about factory farmed animals (and mind you, I only read it a few months ago, and was not eating meat at that time, nor had I been for years). Along with the animals of course, there's the earth in general. And what poison goes on the earth gets into the water, so then there are the fish (which I never stopped eating--if anything I've eaten much more fish in the past five years than I ever did before), and the drinking water and all of it eventually ends up in Nat's body, as far as I can tell. And as my reasons for not eating meat had been, up to that point, to eat lower on the food chain and lessen my footprint on the planet, what Goodall had to say about "Industrial Organic" farming versus "deep organic" and local food sources made me realize that however convenient, frozen blueberries from Cascadian Farms were not going to save the world.
Hence my rush to join a CSA (and ours was just closing the week I joined). The CSA has proven easy enough to handle, armed as I am with this book and this book along with others of lesser importance. We have a whole share. David often eats with us and has taken up the task of retrieving and eating the food while we've been away and that helps a lot. As long as we eat it, it saves us money on groceries.
Ironically, I now feel ready to eat meat again. Now I know more about how to come by meat that has been raised responsibly, sustainably and humanely, and since a basic prohibition against killing other animals for food is not part of my problem with meat, I am okay with eating it in moderation if I get it from good sources.
I have never, ever, ever liked beef. Giving up beef was not a problem for me, because I never wanted to eat it in the first place. Cole likes it, though and often gets herself a steak when we are at high quality restaurants, since I don't make it for her at home. Well, guess what? Every year, David's father, who still has many acres of farmland in Indiana, buys three calves and runs them painlessly and harmlessly in a pasture behind his house that is bordered on three sides by forest and hasn't had any chemicals on it for at least 30 years. In the winter when they're big enough, he has them butchered and gives a side of beef to each of his kids at cost. So David comes into our household with a freezer of beef that meets my meat standards and that Cole says is the best stuff she's ever tasted. So I'll probably cook with some of that in the future, even if I don't personally eat much of it.
I found out as well, that our CSA raises chickens according to practices I like and they are available for sale on Saturdays at the farmer's market. So this weekend, I'm off to buy my first chicken in a long time. I've decided a roast chicken on most Sunday nights is a reasonable amount of meat to eat, as long as raising and processing the chicken didn't take up considerably more than its fair share of space on the planet.
The book I've been reading that converted me to careful and considered meat eating is The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan.
I didn't know who Micahel Pollan was until Joylynn told me that a good friend of hers is headed to Berkley to study science journalism with him. Turns out he's a lovely, lovely writer as well as a smart person with thoughtful food values. Run, don't walk (or bike, but don't, by any means, drive!), to your nearest independent bookstore or public library and pick this baby up. You won't be able to put it down until you've read the last acknowledgement. I wasn't. In its pages you will learn the connection between high fructose corn syrup and the war in Iraq.
And finally, before I give up and go to bed and leave more polished posting on this topic for a future time, I must recommend What to Eat by Marion Nestle, whose name I am always forgetting and calling, "the grocery store woman." She also wrote a book a while back called Food Politics which is on my list. She's great. The book I linked takes you through the grocery store and gives you an aisle-by-aisle geneology of what's there, why it's there (and not in some other aisle) who might have tried to keep it off the shelves, who kept it on and their stakes in its being there etc. ad nauseum. It is highly researched and informative in terms of what is going on and has been going on in the U.S. food supply for the last 60 or 75 years. There's an explanation, for example of why we hear more about things like salmonella and e.coli than we did twenty years ago (it's not because people are more squeamish or reporting on food poisoning is heavier, it's because they weren't around exactly--at least not the same way--twenty years ago as they are today).
And with that, I abruptly leave you to plop into bed by my snoring better half.
