Fully settling into the no packaged food lifestyle now. Eating has regained some level of magic and I have been massively appreciating how amazing food simply is. When you cannot take avail of the so-called shortcuts of the modern industrialized food system, your well-being requires that you take it down a notch.  But it also has inspired me to be even more intrigued about what good food does for me, how great I feel, how much I enjoy not reading ingredient lists, and not doing a single ounce of recycling. 

I have spent more time cooking, but I have enjoyed it more. It's more fun. I like writing about it and taking pictures of it. It has forced me not to hurry - but to wash the lettuce with care and store it in the spinner, to simmer the oranges and nutmeg and mint and honey in the homemade almond milk for sorbet, to roll out the pasta, to make fresh juice. 

It seems, that when I take more care in how I purchase the food, I also take more care in how I prepare and eat the food. I feel closer to the food or more respectful or something. I feel like we have a more workable relationship this way: me and the food. Like we could go on this way forever. I also enjoy grocery shopping more -  I love skipping all those packaged-food isles! Just going for the good stuff! 

Anyone want to take on this challenge - torch? 

People get hyper, people get defensive, when it comes to food, like they do with with culture, or religion, or political persuasion. It is how we see the world. It is our idea of truth.  

It is our most direct connection and daily contact with the world. It is how the world we live in nourishes us, in the most direct and obvious way. It is the decision we make more times a day than any other decision. 

What to eat. How to feed ourselves. How to grow, raise or catch our food. How to care for our families.

These decisions define the culture that we each live in. These decisions describe our way of viewing the world and how we have decided to live in it. Do you pray before you eat? Or when you plant the seeds? Or when you kill the deer? If so, what do you say? What does this food mean to you? What does it mean to you when the sun shines and rain rains on the seed you have planted and you see it grow? What does it mean to you to kill an animal? Do you believe your health or your well-being or your Being are built through the food you choose? Through the way you choose to participate in this most intimate of chores. 

Food is at the root of culture (excuse the pun). A culture's relationship to food defines it. Does the culture buy apples from the farm just outside of town from a boy pulling a cart or from a mega-corporation that poisons the planet and its customers with pesticides, plastics and petroleum? 

When a culture has gelled, has defined itself, that culture becomes protective of itself. Its food tradition, its language, its land, its people, its medicines. The culture becomes static because it fails to question itself and to improve. You can see this throughout time. But now, our food, and the disease it is causing to befall our people, is asking us to question it. 

We Americans have created a food culture, a food cult, of packaged, processed, toxic food. The massive marketing of a new religion, a sickened malnourished, junk-food culture. It's time to take  a breath America, and ask, really, why are we doing it this way?