This blogger is in a state of blogging indecision.

I was informed by a very trusted source that I have showed up on the legal radar of a certain industrial food giant with a long litigious history. Believe it or not, I don't have the funds to match them in court. While an official cease and desist order has not been filed, it has made me painfully aware that my message is getting out. Just to the wrong people first.

Someone I turn to regularly for sage advice when I'm dealing with just about anything out of my scope offered this morsel of wisdom: "Fuck 'em. It will hurt them more than you if they shut you down". I agree. But this has required a lot of soul searching. Maybe some balls searching, too.

I'm not certain that I am done searching, but here's a brief update on my humble homestead:

• I made the ultimatum with my wonderful wife that any junk food (save for milk chocolate once a month) must be made in-house with quality ingredients. I am munching on a from-scratch sugar cookie as we speak.
• Our 2011 garden was a booming success and is now kind of a disappointing fizzle. We took squash, zucchini, cucumbers, and heirloom cherry tomatoes in droves. We gave away as much as we kept. Then it all kind of went to hell. The oppressive heat made keeping water on the garden nearly impossible and made weeding a far less appealing chore. We still have peppers in abundance and our brandywine tomatoes should produce some. The cherry tomatoes are still pretty strong. I am still giving the musk melon the benefit of the doubt, but I'm not betting money that they will produce. Overall, Garden 2011 was grossly more successful than Garden 2010. I'm marking this in the win column.
• Preserving is the new fad of the house. I canned home grown dill pickles again this year for Punkin'. Also I pickled some home grown sweet banana peppers for pizza making this winter. We bought a box of ding and dent West Virginia grown peaches. Wife and I dispatched those into a ton of half-pint preserves. I lost count. Really I did. Who knew that a single peach makes ALMOST a half-pint of preserves. Still on the docket is strawberry jam (maybe freezer jam) and probably some canned tomatoes.
• Another green step that we have been forced to make is living without air conditioning. Ours has been dying for years. As our home has casement style windows, a new unit runs in the neighborhood of the national debt. This year, we just turned it off. Here's how it went: HELL-LIKE! Don't do it! If you can help it, don't do it!

Because the FDA protects us. Right?

FDA finally admits chicken meat contains cancer-causing arsenic (but keep eating it, yo!)

My first denunciation of shit food  came unrighteously. It was years ago when I stood firmly in my home and demanded that I would not eat Macaroni and Cheese out of that damnable box anymore. My wife can live on the stuff. I was foundered in it. It's cheap, easy, and convenient. It felt like we ate it as a side three nights a week and as a lunch equally as often. I was done with it. I knew that it couldn't be doing my health any favors and I was so damn sick of even looking at it. It led to a lot of domestic strife. The strife really did not end. Occasionally I would find an empty blue box in the garbage. I would grill her about her gastronomical infidelity. There would be a small quarrel and I always came out feeling like the dickface in the matter. But I stuck to my guns.

Then Kroger put this stuff on sale.

I don't yet know how I feel about it. It's been about 7 years since I boycotted boxed mac and cheese. I no longer fly into a homicidal rage when I see it prepared. I read labels so I can appreciate that the Annie's variety is probably healthier to put in my body as it's ingredients list doesn't look like an inventory of a collegiate chemistry lab. It tastes almost exactly like the crafty name brand. So we do have it, occasionally, as a side dish now. Everything in moderation, including moderation, right?

I guess this is how we reach Joe Sixpack? Cleverly replace his favorite shit food addictions with alternatives that look and taste the same? I don't know that I agree with the philosophy, but it makes things a bit less tense in my house.

Sandwiches are my kind of grub. I'll eat damn near anything if it's wedged between two slices of bread. In fact, bread makes up a HUGE portion of my diet. The past year and a half has brought major changes to the way my family eats. In baby steps. Bread was a impenetrable steel fortress. We MUST have bread. But bread has industrialized chemicals in it. Don't believe me? Just look for yourself:

Whole wheat flour, water, wheat gluten, high fructose corn syrup, contains 2% of less of: soybean oil, salt, molasses, yeast, mono and diglycerides, exthoxylated mono and diglycerides, dough conditioners (sodium stearoyl lactylate, calcium iodate, calcium dioxide), datem, calcium sulfate, vinegar, yeast nutrient (ammonium sulfate), extracts of malted barley and corn, dicalcium phosphate, diammonium phosphate, calcium propionate (to retain freshness).

This is the ingredient list for a popular brand of bread straight from the supermarket shelf. We'll call it Blunderbread. When was the last time you went out to the garden and ate dicalcium phosphate off the vine? And look! There's our old friend high fructose corn syrup! See my predicament?

So what's a guy to do? Bake my own bread? Are you crazy? Nobody does that shit anymore. Right?

After a long talk with my loving wife explaining the problem and trying to find a non-hypocritical solution to get my bread fix, she agreed to the unthinkable. She would bake all of the sandwich bread consumed in our house. And she has. Since November, 100% of our loafed bread has been produced by my wife and daughter. Roughly two loaves a week. It's all made by hand, from scratch with organic unbleached flours. She's recently even got the knack for making whole wheat bread. I am ecstatic. Scratch made bread tastes so much better. Hell, it tastes. It must be healthier. It can be done. Really, it can. Bread is such a convenience food. But at the cost of nutrition, industrialization, and most important (to me, at least), taste.

We are still occasionally buying specific purpose breads. Namely burger/hot dog buns. However, my genius love of my life crafted buns in the form of homemade soft pretzels. Please follow me. Bacon cheddar burgers (grass fed, free range, organic) on homemade pretzel buns. This was one of the most amazing meals of my entire fucking life. I had the 'Itis immediately after. Took fifteen minutes to sleep it off. It was a truly spiritual experience.

Go bake bread.

The lastest candidate that Netflix has offered up for my viewing pleasure is titled To Market To Market To Buy A Fat Pig.
To Market details the journeys of Rick Sebak as he visits some of Americas best farmers and city markets and the people that bring goods to sell. He spends a lot of time talking to the people manning booths and visiting the farms that stock the shelves of the market. It really focuses on the sense of community and family that creates a unique shopping experience at these types of places. I identified with much of the theme of the film. Shopping at a market, Charleston's Capitol Market for example, feels different than Kroger's or Foodland. You get to know who you're buying your food from. And in the summer months, the difference in quality is astounding. When the outdoor market is in full swing, you benefit from the competition of the growers. They race to bring you the highest quality produce at prices lower than the other guy in the next booth. I really didn't learn much from this film but I certainly appreciated it. It spoke of all of the reasons why I love shopping at farmers markets and I felt it adequately portrayed what makes them special.

Definitely a feel good piece of film.

Emergency! Pathogen New to Science Found in Roundup Ready GM Crops?

After watching Food, Inc I really was motivated to change how I live. I am seriously lacking motivation right now, even though I'm doing much better since my holiday decline. I'm just not excited about it. So I set out on Netflix to find that next Food, Inc. My choices are sorely limited, frankly, but I found a couple of contenders. This weeks flick is called Food Matters.

There is a great message here. There are some really bright people with a really great message. But you have to wade past the vegetarian/raw foods propaganda to get to it. At one hour and seventeen minutes, the film could nearly be divided into three unequal parts: 1) Bashing big medicine (YAY!), 2) Bashing Americans diets and industrialized foods (YAY!), and 3) Explaining why you'll go to hell for eating meat. Okay, maybe it's not quite that bad. But I, like a lot of other people, hear just those words when the vegetarian zealots come to give us our sermon. I do believe that most avid omnivores are just tired of being brow beaten and messages involving food and nutrition could be better communicated without telling us how wrong we are. Maybe I'm biased because I adore great meats, but humans are scientifically classified as omnivores. Meaning we're not wrong for loving animal carcass. We may be wrong for eating obscene quantities of deep fried, fat-laden, heavily processed animal carcasses. I am being more aware of where my meat comes from these days and how much of it I shovel in my pie hole.

The other thing that this film seems to miss is that people want to eat food that tastes good. Spirulina, by and large, does not taste good. It's not a meal. You can't sit with your family over a glass of spirulina and recap where the day took you. Eating well does not have to taste terrible. It's not about "health food" but it is about healthy food. This is a point that the film touches on. Depletion of nutrients in the soil from industrial, unnatural overfarming leads to reduced crops that cannot fend off disease on their own. So farmers pump the soil with chemical nutrients. Plants are sprayed with chemicals to keep pests and disease from claiming them. All of that shit ends up in our bodies. I honestly do not know just how efficient or inscrutable our nations bureaucracy is for determining what is "Certified Organic", but I will try to believe that by buying foods with this label, I am at least helping encourage farmers to not treat their crops in this manner. I also buy local organic as much as absolutely possible and have my own organic garden. I would like to think that my intake of poison has drastically decreased over the last two years.

My final word here is that this is a decent flick with some good information. It talks ad infinitum about the need for less prescriptions and more nutrition. About the healing power of food and vitamins. About the evils of industrialized, processed foods. And about the culture of poor health that we've all been lulled into being a part of. It is not the inspiration that Food, Inc. was, but Food, Inc. was a truly visionary, remarkable film. I was nearly turned off by the non-science that is presented in the film, but its worth the time spent. Give it a look.

Oh yeah, I really dig the theme song too!

Please click this link if you've enjoyed fast food recently.

I'm not going to say that I don't indulge on the run in some grease-bomb drive through activity. It happens. It happens to everyone. But before you take that bite, do you ever stop to acknowledge what you're about to ingest? And that doesn't just go for the worst of the worst comestibles. I know I am guilty of going on eating autopilot. That's the reason that I can only have good foods in my house. See, good food usually isn't as convenient as shit food. There is an argument for raw plain veggies and fruits but it's hard for them to compete with HFCS laden, individually wrapped, chemically preserved, industrially processed shit food. Why? Because we've engineered this shit to be convenient. And taste good? Well, that's debatable. There are people who think that we've fooled ourselves into believing shit food is tasty. Some believe that we've evolved to enjoy the taste of industrially processed chemical. Regardless, most of us do have a dark side of our palette for shit food. And because shit food is easy to prepare, cheap to buy, and highly profitable to the corporations, everyone eats it. The only downside is potentially what it does to our insides and, hell, that's not all that important. Right?

My good friend Erin posted this on Facebook and it speaks volumes to me.

I'm over my Jim Bakker moment.

What the fuck are we thinking? Cheese. It's fucking cheese. That's all. You wanna know who ruined cheese and, somewhat dairy, for every US citizen?

This Asshole!

It's humbling.

When you eat crow, it doesn't much matter if it's organic, cage free, and without hormones. It always tastes like shit.

I have dreaded and avoided this blog as if it were plagued by the worst contagious hells the human mind could conjure. The only thing I've had to blog about as of late is how I cannot seem to practice what I preach. Sure, I can sit here and wax on about how busy the holidays are and when money is tight, garbage foods are cheap. And it would all be true. But I am still a hypocrite. And I hate it.

When you spend an entire spring and summer season eating as near to an entirely organic, locally produced diet as our region allows, funny things happen when you go back to gorging on shit food. You gain weight at an alarming rate? Check. About 10 pounds in 3 months. Your digestive system hates you. Always. Especially at 3am? Check. I have been so sick that I can't imagine how I gained the 10 fucking pounds.  Insomnia owns your ass? Check. If I wasn't up all night stress testing our plumbing and septic technologies, I was up looking at pointless websites, or reading comics that would be there tomorrow, or watching the most inane things on NetFlix. I don't know if it was the High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS from here on) or some other chemical nonsense that has no business in my body, but I know I wasn't sleeping. And I'm still not. I cannot accept that this is all coincidental. This is my body revolting against my habits. It was given the good life then thrown back to the shit pile.

It's not all been $5 pizzas and terrible drive through tacos.

My wonderful wife has been making 100% of our sandwich bread since just after Thanksgiving. Making a grilled cheese sandwich from this and some great colby jack and real butter was a wonderful idea.

Thanksgiving brought us a family meal that was awesome as always.

Christmas Eve was truly amazing. Our extended family did something for us that I hadn't experienced since high school. They made The Feast of Seven Fishes, an Italian Christmas tradition that I have enjoyed nearly all of my life until moving to a place where Italian heritage is strangely absent. It was an amazing meal and it really felt like home. I can't thank them enough.