As we finish unpacking and prep for our baby’s upcoming arrival, my wife and I have been talking about changes that will happen and ways to treat our lives as parents as an opportunity. So rather than “we’ll go out less” instead “we’ll have a good time at home.” My recentish attempts to get fit and enjoy exercise in order to help get fit are sort of related.
Tonight we heard someone on the radio talking about food and health and all that. We started talking about how I’m excited about heirloom vegetables and would like to try to grow some despite lack of yard and lack of green thumb. That turned to an idea we want to try at some point.
After we’re used to having a baby we’re going to take a crack at this. The idea is to set some parameters for our eating and cooking that will encourage us to eat foods that are unprocessed as possible prior to us cooking them. The main parameters are health, taste, and pushing ourselves to try new foods and ways of cooking. This should be fun, maybe not just fun but also fun. Additional parameters are having less packaging, calories that don’t travel as far, and products that have less social costs and ecological costs (fair trade and organic, say). We’re allowing ourselves some exceptions - coffee and tea, for example, and milk and soymilk - and we’re going to treat this more as aspiration than as rigid strictures. (So, we can order a pizza if neither of us feels like cooking, and we won’t feel guilty.) We will try to get homebrew beer when possible.
Concretely, starting with foods we eat a fair bit of - we’ll be making our own tortillas, but can use masa that we buy rather than, say, grinding our own corn. Baking our own bread but not grinding the flower. Still buying oatmeal. No condiments! Unless we make them. No ketchup, mustard, mayo, barbecue sauce. Tofu is a packaged good but we’ll allow that. Canned and frozen vegetables if whole (on the assumption that canning and freezing is little different from drying, and we intend to buy dried beans and such.)
That’s a start for the plan. Like I said, I don’t know when.
Also plan is a writing component - blog about it, keep a journal, maybe do some related reading and write about that.
Have you ever brewed your own beer? It’s really incredibly easy. I started doing it last fall, and, besides the steep entry price, it makes buying beer seem silly; and even with the cost of a kit it pays for itself soon. Plus, you get to create your own recipes, which is pretty bitchin.
But, all that said, even homebrew is fairly ‘processed’: when you do it at your own place, at least if you are not doing fairly involved all grain brewing (an impossibility for me, living in NYC), you basically dump in a jug of pre-made sugar syrup.
You could also look into doing 1 gallon batches of fruit wines, made from local produce. I dunno the berries that grow in the midwest all too well, but I am sure there’s a bunch of wines, cordials, etc, that were worked out there in the last 300 years that would be interesting to try.
Comment by JCD — August 4, 2009 @ 7:41 am
i’m a foster plant parent right now (ask me sometime; it involves the performance art festival) and it’s breaking my brain how easy container gardening is. you dont need space or talent, seemingly.
Comment by jim — August 9, 2009 @ 1:08 am
Jim, the first time I read that I missed the word “plant” so I was like “whoa! how…? wait, what…? huh?” Then I re-read it.
Neat about the container garden. Does that take much natural light and outdoorness?
Comment by Nate — August 9, 2009 @ 1:36 am