There’s nothing like a pregnancy to make you start really thinking about your eating. Again.
We are already pretty “different” about our food. We did a phase of hardcore raw, but then fell off the wagon what with the move onto the boat, and then my pregnancy. And of course, cold weather does not encourage a raw diet, it just doesn’t. And it has been cold this year.
But you know, the question of “what” to eat is beginning to pale really, really fast, when compared with the question of “how” to eat.
I stumbled into The Cleaner Plate Club a while back… she’s brilliant. Her “How I Taught My Kid to Curse and Why I Blame Big Food” is a work of genius, and I cannot read “The many things I can talk about” with a straight face (course, that’s my face wobbling between laughing and crying, but anyway, it’s a fabulous post.)
If you clicked on those links, you wandered off Cleaner Plate and onto The Ethicurean: Chew The Right Thing. She’s got a series of digests up right now that are anything but digestable. The two pieces about “accidental” GMO contamination of corn and rice crops both make me really, really nervous.
After a whole childhood colored by Feingold, the idea that diet impacts behavior is old, old news to me. Course apparently it is news to science, and a big study at the end of 2007, published in Lancet, indicates that really, I haven’t been insane for the last 30 years, artificial crap in your food makes you unwell! How novel! ::sigh:: I’m printing a copy of this study out, to beat people with who continue to insist that I’m making it up when Rowan freaks out from consuming HFCS or coloring.
So what’s my point? My point is that the more you read, from Downergate to Pollan, the state of food here in the US is absolutely abysmal. Finding real food to feed your family is getting tougher all the time, let alone organic, seasonally-appropriate, healthy food. Going to the grocery is a depressing endeavor, not because it’s so hard to find what Pollan calls “real food”, but because even then, there’s danger (like the time I saw a produce guy putting clearly non-organic broccoli in the organic bins, and who, when I called him on it, shrugged and said “no one knows the difference without the labeling.”).
So how does a gestating, lactating, mother of growing people, ensure that everyone’s eating stuff they really should be, and not eating the kind of yuck that is becoming more and more common in our food supply? It’s a trick, without being fulltime hunters and gatherers. I’d be interested to hear how other people are dealing with this…
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