conscious consumption

A revolution.

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 21:11:00 -0400

This man is one of my many idols.

This man is working his way through convincing people that they can afford to eat well. For years and years, we have been sold the idea that people can’t afford to eat good, organic food. Or, even if you can afford it, that you don’t have the time to cook. So many commercials depict soccer moms popping a KFC bucket on the table to the delighted smiles of her (paradoxically skinny and healthy looking) children that the image seems to have permeated our ideas of what modern cooking really is.

And this man is working to change all that.

As am I, in my own cosmically small little way.

See, I am a college student. I make $12.50 an hour at my on campus job (and I’m lucky for that amount, too!) and I take a full course load. I’m involved in extra-curriculars and I try my best to make it to my professor’s office hours. Right now, one of the things on my mind is calling Wells Fargo and finding a way for them to not charge me $15 a month for not having enough money in my account because frankly, I never had $7,500 in there to begin with.

(from flickr, taken by knautia)

And I cook. I love to cook. I can hardly eat out anymore because I am consistently disappointed when the modest things I cook at home are better.

Since I last posted, I have been on a quest to share my forays into cooking with my peers. Last year I lived in a place where basic sanitary conditions weren’t really achieved (I mean, it’s college) so my culinary activities were sadly restrained. This year, however, I have a kitchen and it is all my own. Dishes are only in the sink temporarily, and strange things aren’t fermenting in there.

(this is not my kitchen. wishful thinking, perhaps.)

It’s a small wonder, really.

Since I acquired this haven I have been inviting friends over. My boyfriend and I whip up simple, delicious meals for them and they are surprised. I tell them how to make them and they are, again, surprised. I offer to teach them how to cook. I tell them where to buy products. I tell them that yes, those tomatoes were only one dollar per pound because when you know the guy at the farmer’s market, he cuts you a deal! And boy, do they ever taste better than those strange spongy things at Ralph’s that masquerade as tomatoes. If you cut down your meat, you can buy three times the food if you stick more to vegetables. Do you have any idea how cheap lentils and rice are?!

And what do they say?

I can’t cook this. I don’t have time.

But trust me, you do!

There’s no way. It’s too expensive.

But I just told you that I spend less than $100 per week on groceries, and that’s for both my boyfriend and myself!

Whether it’s the ingredients or the prospect of just beginning to cook that intimidates them, I refuse to be complicit and enable this trend of poor eating! Just because you’re a poor college student doesn’t mean you should settle for eating garbage! I have been doing my best to further Jamie’s Food Revolution, with moderate success. The stubbornest of my friends simply don’t know where to start, and are defeatist about their prospects. I think of this as more inspiring because it shows just how far down the wrong path we have been going all these years.

So now, I will also post recipes. Simple, delicious, time-saving recipes that I use every day when I get home from 5 hour shifts at work and multiple classes, in the hopes that you, too, will discover the wonders of the kitchen.

(seenpictures)

How about them apples?

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 21:30:00 -0400

I bought some apples back in April. They were Gala apples from Trader Joe’s, for 69 cents each.

Two months later, when I was packing up my room in June, I found two of those apples in the clear plastic bag they had come in…and they were as glistening, red and whole as the day I had gotten them.

I frowned and looked them over. No bruises, no cuts, nothing. They were shiny and gleaming, like Snow White’s downfall but better looking than even the animated version.

Now I’ve tried both organic and non-organic apples, and for the most part they all seem to have some sort of waxy coating. This is because wax allows apples to have a longer shelf life—and the only requirement for organic apples is that the wax be a non-synthetic type.

(from ladylunchalot.com)

Wait…what?

I didn’t know that. I also didn’t know that it is apparently common knowledge that you are supposed to get rid of the wax on the apple. Many people just peel the apple, shucking the nutrient rich skin for fear that pesticides could be trapped under the wax.

Again: wait, what?

Apparently some of the things that are in this wax contain wheat proteins and glutens, which can set off those who have Celiac disease—not good considering I would never expect that, and I don’t think many other people would either. This wax also apparently can vary from apple to apple.

(Images of the waxing process of Washington apples.)

Carnauba wax and certain other types of waxes are apparently okay. (It is also used on cucumbers, even though cucumbers have a skin that naturally provides resistance to bugs and diseases.) They are heralded as “natural waxes,” though I have learned that that doesn’t really mean anything—most chemicals we use come from some sort of “natural” source (rubber, glue, you name it!) We use products that contain carnauba wax every day—it is contained in things like car polish, cosmetics, and candy coatings. I’d argue that there is a significant difference between things that we eat and things that we put on our faces or cars, though nobody seems to have researched long term effects yet.

Depending on the type of wax, they are either digestible or indigestible. In the latter case, they will just pass through your body, but we’re still not sure if that means that they’re safe to ingest in the first place. Though apples are apparently washed before they are waxed to reduce the danger of trapping the aforementioned pesticides, you should still wash your apples.

This still doesn’t entirely satisfy me, though—how do you know what types of wax are on which apples, and what the hell is in them? Nobody is telling us—or trying to educate us. Sure, Washington apples have a website on their wax—and they use carnauba—but what about the rest of them? As a pretty average consumer armed with a computer, I am once again left scratching my head at the information void I am left with.

Now I’m not trying to encourage paranoid about every aspect of the foods we eat. But there are so many people out there who are content with throwing up their hands. “Chemicals are everywhere, and you just have to deal with them. If they were so bad, producers wouldn’t be able or ‘allowed’ to sell them.”

I don’t know if these people have ever heard of food recalls (check the one on apple juice) but people sell food all the time that they later realize isn’t good enough—and they usually only find out because customers get sick and complain or sue—occasionally even die.

What people don’t realize is that nobody is watching. No one is looking out for you to make sure that your food is safe, and no one is asking questions. We put blind trust in everything we see, and assume that the government will take care of it. Why would you trust someone else with the integrity of what you are putting in your body, what you eat? And why are things contaminated in the first place? The FDA puts out guides on how to minimize the dangers of our produce—but why has produce suddenly become dangerous at all?

I still like apples, and I still do my best to eat as many of them as I can. But when something doesn’t rot after sitting on a shelf for two months, I think that something’s wrong—and I hope I’m not the only one who thinks so. And while I admire efficiency, and the ability to store these tasty fruits for months and months at a time, something seems a little bit unnatural about that. Take it or leave it.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE INANIMATE OBJECT?

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 19:38:01 -0400

YOU!

Beginnings.

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 19:02:00 -0400

My journey began about 3 years ago, when I first got sick.

But really, I suppose it goes even further back than that—since my love of food was first instilled in me by my dad, who took every opportunity to feed me new things as a kid. I think he looked at it as some kind of science experiment—let’s see what happens when feed her this! The boiled liver and raw turnip didn’t go over so well. Neither did the chicken feet spaghetti. Still, he took every opportunity to introduce me to new, strange things.

Food seemed to be the center of my family, and indeed I think it is the center of the world. I acquired this vague consciousness of food at a very early age, and of the purity of it. Living in Canada and having parents who loved to cook taught me something I wouldn’t recognize until later.

The summer after my senior year of high school, I started getting sick. With every meal, I felt like someone was scooping at my insides with an ice cream scoop. The nausea was overwhelming, and I spent hours in agony on the bathroom floor, throwing up. At first I thought it was food poisoning—but it happened consistently for a week. I lost several pounds. I had no idea what was making me sick. I visited doctors, got blood tests. No one could tell me what was wrong. They finally sent me to get an ultrasound to check for gallstones, but I came up clean. Being the panicked off-to-college 18 year old I was, I thought for a moment that I was going to die.

My sensible mother calmed me down and helped me with the method to figure out what was making me sick. I started out eating just plain, white rice. I stopped getting sick. I slowly added things to my diet—vegetables, meats, beans. Then, one day, I drank a glass of milk. The familiar ice cream scoop feeling came back to me. I either had suddenly developed lactose intolerance, or I had some sort of milk protein allergy.

For a long time, I did my best to keep dairy out of my diet. I tried, I really did—despite my crippling love for cheese in all of its beautiful forms. And for a long time, I was, for the most part, better. About once every few weeks, I would accidentally eat something that had milk, cream, or cheese without knowing and my college roommates watched me roll in agony on our floor. (This turned on another lightbulb in my mind that would later become part of my awakening.)

One fateful day, I got a latte that had mistakenly been made with regular milk. Feeling bad throwing it out, I drank a bit of it—and was fine. I slowly, carefully sampled some cheese—no pain. Over the next two years I weaned myself back onto dairy with no repercussions. Though I was nowhere near eating the ridiculous amounts of dairy I had before, I was still happy that I could eat something at a restaurant without wondering if I would get sick.

And then, about two months ago, several things happened at once that have landed me where I am now.

First, I started getting sick again. And this time, it was exponentially worse than it had been before. The pain was worse, and what’s more, tiny amounts were making me sick. I would have pesto with a little bit of parmesan in it, put onto pizza and baked in an oven, assuming that proteins would be denatured—no dice. The tiniest amount of milk product would make me violently ill. What was interesting about this was that when I went to a restaurant, or ate pre-prepared foods, I would often get sick when I had not expected to. I started looking at the ingredient labels in supermarkets, and, like most people, stood scratching my head at most of them, shocked at the complexity of what I had previously regarded as “simple” food. Instead of shrugging my shoulders and giving up, however, I decided to delve deeper into those fine-print words.

Second, my boyfriend got a subscription to Netflix. And while this seems silly, and most of the movies are high on the tomato meter, the wealth of documentaries opened my eyes. It struck me that no matter what I watched, whether it was Food Inc. or National Geographic’s special on Siberian Tigers, that there were connections between these. And the phenomena that were common between all of them seemed to come back to a few critical things—and one of these was food.

Third, my good old dad started doing things that I took notice of. He started buying sprout seeds from a farm in Manitoba and used them on his sandwiches. He found two farms outside of Calgary that raised lambs and chickens and began buying from them. Something about this seemed novel, and somehow right—like it was the way things were supposed to be done.

And finally, some of the things that I had begun to notice over the years served as the glue to bring everything full circle. Something about the way I had been eating—and the way I was getting my food—seemed wrong.

So what did I do?

I used to consider myself a produce maven. Being a college student, I have very little money, and this has solidified in me some sort of compulsion to buy cheap produce. I started going to farmer’s markets, and stopped looking for food on sale and instead started looking for apples that weren’t covered in wax, food that looked like it would rot sometime in the near future. I thought it was funny that at one point, it would be normal to find fruit like this, and genetically modified, wax covered fruit-like things would be the exception—not the rule.

I tried being vegan. Doing this without proper research was a big mistake. I found myself weak, cranky, and tired most of the day—operating at about 50% of my normal energy level. I was lacking essential nutrients and consistently crashing every day. I am still working on this—in the meantime I am back to eating some meat so I can function, while looking into ways to be vegan without sacrificing my energy and health.

I tried to source my food—training myself to ask “where does this come from?” with every bite. The simple act of this repeated question often led to somewhat shocking answers.

What struck me most throughout all of this was how hard it is to keep the integrity of your food. I tried really hard. I tried being vegan, I tried buying only non-GMO food. Working long shifts away from home and not having enough time to cook and bring lunch to work every day, I found myself having to trust other sources for my food—sources I realized I couldn’t necessarily trust!

And I had it pretty good. I was a student at a great school, blessed to have enough money to live and study happily without having the financial constraints that many in this country have, and without having to make big choices between veggies and cheap, processed foods. I had it pretty good, and I was making an attempt to be a conscious consumer. What I didn’t expect was for it to be so difficult.

I decided, unlike many, not to give up in defeat, but to strive on for understanding. This will be where I will share my findings—as a humble student at UCSD searching for answers about her food.