baking

I’m hungry as usual. A couple of food things have been going on with me lately. Recently I flipped through Michael Pollan’s handy pocket guide Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual to remind myself about real food. Isn’t it ridiculous the way we slavishly rely on others (scientists, athletes, dieticians, whoever) to tell us what to eat?  I like Pollan’s ideas a lot, but I frequently remind myself that he is a journalist. So I’ve been de-junking the cabinets (which is really tricky around Easter time), trying to convince the kids (and myself) that fruit is an awesome dessert, and trying to stick to the edges of the grocery store. The other thing is (Warning: incoming pat on the back) I’ve been working out for 5 weeks now. An unintended side effect of this has been a greater desire to eat well, so I get more bang for my buck, so to speak. (Sadly this means there is not a lot of baking going on around here. I just can’t do it. Baked goods are my kryptonite).  So when I’m not daydreaming about what I want to eat, I’m thinking about what I will eat. Anyway, all of this and then I came across this article in the (where else?) NYT today. When did food get so complicated? What is it with affluence and prosperity that has turned us into such a food crazed society? Oh, I’m right there, don’t worry. I think about food all day long. I love nothing more than eating delicious food – savoring the way it looks, the way it smells, everything is appealing about food.

Food gets right in there with our emotions which makes it so hard to divorce ourselves from it.  Just yesterday I found myself battling the urge to eat every single chocolate delight that GoB brought back from Holland. You see, I’d had it with the kids. I had been shouting to no avail, ignored, disobeyed, and just plain pushed around. I knew MB wasn’t coming home until bed time which made my blood boil. I just wanted to eat every bad thing – emotions telling me that would make me feel better. I wanted to fuel the angry void. I settled for one small chocolate buttercream because I knew what was going on, and why I wanted to CONSUME.  Dang that was hard, and it made me even grumpier. It made me recall the conversation I had with my kids on the way home the night before – the one where I lectured them, after they begged for fast food, about being responsible for your health and practicing moderation. To which Maxine cried, “But I love treats. They are so yummy.  I love them TOO much and I HAVE to eat them every day.” That’s what I wanted to scream at my kitchen cabinets.

Back to the article, I wasn’t really surprised that people are taking pictures of their food. I’ve done it. I’ve seen people do it in restaurants. I like to take pictures of my fancier baked goods because they take hours to make and minutes to disappear. I feel like I preserve a little bit of my effort that way. If you’re on vacation it would be fun to show your friends the local cuisine. So yada yada yada, why was this a big deal?  I kept reading and as I absorbed what they were saying about Mr. Garcia taking pictures of every single thing he eats, little epiphanies came about the implications of that action. 1.) What a great way to analyze your diet – instead of just writing things down you would have the visual record. 2). How incredibly personal and revealing. 3) What a great way to remember what you’ve been doing. Thinking myself clever, further reading only proved that all of these points were aptly covered by the author. Food journaling seems to be a growing trend. Though I really don’t know if I could photograph everything I eat. With camera phones it’s a lot easier, but still, logistically it’s kind of a pain. And YIKES! I don’t know if I want to really know – it would be very telling. As summed up by Tucker Shaw’s (food critic for The Denver Post) insight towards the end of the article:

“Mr. Shaw said the year he spent photographing his food (and a year was enough for him) resulted in an achingly honest account of his life that revealed far more than the fact that he ate too few leafy green vegetables: “The pictures, I realize now, are incredibly personal, and by looking at them you can probably deduce the type of person I am.” Moreover, the pictures set off memories and emotions in a way a written journal could not. “I remember every single day, who I was with, what I was feeling,” he said…….. Unlike a picture of a flower or friend, a picture of a meal recalls something smelled, touched, tasted and ultimately ingested.”

Chew on that for a while.

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