ha-aretz

ha-aretz means “the land” in hebrew, and also the name of an israeli daily newspaper. i feel like i’m going through a “fat” period. like, doing my storing up for winter now that we’ve got some real cold. storing up like eating, and also storing up on ideas.

i’ve been hibernating to some extent, dreaming of the spring instead of focusing on now. the cat’s got the same idea. now that his thyroid isn’t freaking out, he doesn’t pee on my stuff anymore. we’ve been keeping each other warm at night.

child care is hard work, but rewarding. i’m trying to influence their little brains about reading, using one’s imagination, and trying non-chemically foods.

i just read in defense of food: an eater’s manifesto by michael pollan. he spends a lot of time defining just what the hell food is not (factory-produced chemical garbage that makes “healthful” claims according to the current nutrition fad, for example) and gives a seemingly-simple strategy for making good food choices:

eat food. not too much. mostly plants.

i will include a few choice quotes from his book. note his oh-so-dry wit:

[A]s a general rule it’s a whole lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or a carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over in Cereal the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming their newfound “whole-grain goodness” to the rafters. (Pollan 39-40)

quoting Weston Price (b. 1870), a dentist concerned with the rise of tooth decay:

“The dinner we have eaten tonight,” [Price] told his audience in a 1928 lecture, “was a part of the sun but a few months ago.” (99)

think about it! eating real food is like eating the sun! but it’s more than that–it’s connecting what one eats (which, when put through the mostly-perfect machine that is the human body, gives life) to the people who grow the food, to the sun and the water and the soil that produced the food, to the process of evolution…i mean, it gets really big.

in the chapter “eat food: food defined” one of pollan’s food-choice rules to follow is “don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” he elaborates:

Is a product like Go-Gurt Portable Yogurt still a whole food?…There are in fact hundreds of foodish products in the supermarket that your ancestors simply wouldn’t recognize as food: breakfast cereal bars transected by bright white veins representing, but in reality having nothing to do with, milk; “protein waters” and” nondairy creamer”; cheeselike foodstuffs equally innocent of any bovine contribution; cakelike cylinders (with creamlike fillings) called Twinkies that never grow stale. Don’t eat anything incapable of rotting is another personal policy you might consider adopting.

now–i enjoy a moon pie as much as the next junk-eating american but the man has a point.

[side-bar: in searching for a link about moon pies, i discovered the official website with a "moon pie memory" contest. this piece won "most unusual":

My favorite Moon Pie memory is one of the most bizzare experiences I've ever had. I was driving my squad car one Summer night, eating a Moon Pie, I received a call of a man walking down the highway, in the nude. I arrived to find one of our local eccentrics (actually bi-polar) named Jack *Smith* walking down the side of the road without any clothes, carrying a box of Moon Pies in his left hand & eating one with his right. As I approached him, he said to me "Here, ya' want one?", and I haven't been able to eat one since. As a joke, some of my co-workers will put a Moon Pie on my desk. I probably need counseling.

W.D.

enough said.]

aren’t there foods that “bring you back?”