Thought For Food

I haven’t been shy about proclaiming my recent romance with vegetables. Something in my head clicked last year and made me appreciate the infinite possibilities of cooking when pulling produce out of the fridge and onto the stove. There are so many flavors and ways of merging the healthy substance of food from the earth into the recipes that delight my tastebuds.

I don’t want to get religious about this. Because… honestly, I hate it when people preach about food just as I hate it when people preach to me about God. It is a personal choice to damn or preserve self. And NO ONE has a right to make another do anything else.

But as I discover all that greener foods have to offer, not just in flavor but in how it makes my body feel… I wonder why on earth do we constantly choose the other stuff?

We. Really, I’m talking me here. Can’t speak for anyone else. But I will note the observation the other day at our mentor activity, where we took the kids to a cooking program. Chicken pot pie was the dish du jour. The mentors were salivating over the carrots, turnips, onions, mushrooms, peas, etc. The kids… just wanted the chicken.

So we… I outgrew the predisposition to select the crap food with little or no substance. My taste matured? Well… and I started to open my eyes to the politics and mass manipulation of fast food. How it hurts the environment. And more significantly, how it hurts the machinery of my body.

But it’s still there, that temptation to eat the other stuff. Because… it’s there. Because it’s cheap. Because, a little bit won’t do any harm. Because, because, because… it’s easy to justify any behavior. Infinitely easier to conjure multiple excuses when I know something is wrong.

Not any more.

I spent a lot of time last year scraping the plaque off of my meaner motivations. I haven’t transfigured into sainthood and still make a lot of poor choices. I do try to live 90% of my days cognizant of how my words and actions ripple into the emotion of others. I attempt to inspire more smiles than frowns because that makes a healthy soul.

Well, this year I am going to take the steps towards creating a new habit of food to make a healthy body. To showcase my appreciation, I will direct one of my topics each week towards my discovery. Not to preach, pray tell. To share. If you throw up your shoulders and decide Big Macs are still the way to go, who am I to stop you? But, if you find a new way to look at Brussels sprouts, so much the better. I’ll have you come over for dinner.