Eat Better

We Are What We Eat!
I should have been smarter.  I had gotten so tied up in my little world that I was eating fast food and huge wildly, inappropriate meals.   I saw Alice Waters and Michael Pollan back in early 2008 and realized that I’d lost a connection to my food and my earth.

So I’ve been reflecting for a number of years on what we eat and what we could eat, and believe there is much to be learned about who we are and how we got where we are; as well as motivation to live and eat differently.

Watching Michael Pollan at Muir HS in 2009

Michael Pollan has perhaps been most helpful in laying out the issues.   To paraphrase his book Food Rules, our western diet and the consumption of highly processed and chemically laced food has led to an unacceptable increase in many of the biggest health issues we face in America and the world.  We don’t know enough about how our body uses the complex combinations of food each of us chooses to consume, and traditional diets, regardless of being protein, fat, or carbohydrate dominated, do not lead to many of these health issues.

Enlightened and invigorated by Pollan’s wisdom, we set out on a journey to identify practical approaches to address this complex food/diet/health crisis; and everything seems to point toward local, sustainably grown fresh food reclaimed by a passionate community. (Sound familiar? That’s how it was in your great grandmother’s day.)  So to better understand this sad situation and our best suggestions to address it, we will explore four key subjects:

1. Why we eat what we eat and how we got here: What happened?  How did things go so terribly wrong over the past half-century or so?
2. What should we eat: Pollan’s rules are about as simple and practical as it can get.  And Joel Furman’s Eat to Live points us toward the best food by examining nutrient density.
3. Get the good stuff: It might seem more expensive when we try to acquire healthy, local, organic and artisanally produced goods but there are ways to make it work affordably.
4. Make it tasty and healthy: It can be done and here are some great ways to do it.

So please join us on our journey to retake our food, our health and control of our own kitchens.