eat local

We have a mega crisis staring us down.  If people would turn off their tv’s and get out of their cars, they might see it. What happens when gas is $5 a gallon and we are shipping food from thousands of miles away?  How do you afford food and gas? What happens when all the beef on the planet is recalled because of contamination?  I live for the day when people wake up to the corn conspiracy that fills our grocery stores with crap that gives us cancer.

What if we start buying food from people we know?  What if your neighbors grow your veggies and kill your cow?  It can happen. When i was a kid, helping with dinner often meant going out into the garden to get some food that ended up on our plates.  I lived 40 miles from NYC in a suburb – not a farm girl, but this is what we did.  I thought everyone did. I know that i will never grow my coffee beans in my backyard – but i can plant a victory garden. My mission – get people excited about eating real food.

I want people to get up on Saturday morning and go to the farmers market. I want people to walk through the doors of their local food co-op or natural foods store and find some REAL FOOD to buy. Get into your kitchen and try some new things. You might not know a whole lot right now but with a little time you will find yourself cooking great food.

There are so many abominations that have been ‘created’ in the last 50 years by chemists in some lab and they simply are not food. Margarine is not food. White sugar and all it’s chemical substitutes (aspertame etc.) that feed our sweet tooth are killing us. Corn and soy are in everything. Food preservatives, dyes, flavor enhancers, think about it – food is created by food scientists and chemists in a lab.  Are our bodies built for this?

For thousands of years our food came from the earth. People ate plants and animals that co-evolved as part of a complex ecosystem. We experience food allergies, obesity, heart disease and cancer at rates that are unbelievable and yet the general population does not seem angry about it. Folks keep buying low quality meat that has been exposed to radiation, pesticide ridden vegetables, liquid corn and flavor enhanced crap at drive up windows all across the nation. Grocery store shelves are full of labels with unpronounceable ingredients. Big business tells us how good it all tastes and we buy it.

I know it is not true. I am out there teaching one person at a time. I buy fresh ingredients and feed them to people who come back later and tell me that I have changed how they look at food. It happens over and over again. I don’t lecture, I don’t condemn, I just feed them healthy food that tastes great and it changes their lives. This is how it has to happen, and it must happen.

One meal at a time we can change the way people think about food.