Living in a city speckled with lusciously appetizing places to eat and with such abundant online resources for home cooking, I will never understand why so many people eat lousy food.
Food is love!
I grew up eating heaps of healthy homegrown food, and my mother spared no ingredient crafting both complicated and simple delicious recipes for her hungry little chicks. (She would say emphatically when we tumbled in the door from school "who will help me grind the grain? Who will help me knead the dough?!" in the voice of The Little Red Hen, meaning, could we please set the table?)
My love and appreciation for the fruits of the earth lovingly planted, tended and harvested in my childhood backyard is embedded in my core food values. Once long ago, my mother lost me at my grandmother's house, and just as she was working herself into a panic, she caught sight of my chubby little toddler legs straddling a large and leafy tomato plant in my grandmother's garden. I was contentedly plucking the sun-kissed candies one by one, enjoying the zesty explosion of flavour in each little red bomb. I've always loved tomatoes. I am allergic to red artificial food colouring, and we never found out until Valentine's Day of grade 4. My delight in gardened goods and general lack of exposure to 'junk food' was something I took for granted most of my life.
When I went off to university it was up to me to seek and purchase my groceries. Like every other early-twenty-something I knew I headed to the nearest grocery store, stocking up on pesticide-laden fruits and chemical-ridden garbage in boxes and cans that seemed perfectly normal to consume. I drank a few cans of Fruitopia (damn your clever marketing!) and after a fews days my teeth ached so badly that it gave me migraines. Still, I never considered that tiredness, dull hair and sallow skin, or a lack of energy could actually be the result of a poor diet, not 'the student lifestyle'.
Between my undergraduate and Master's degrees I spent some time with Jain communities in India, people reknowned most especially for their particular eating habits and the non-violence that inspired Gandhi. I developed a deeper appreciation for the origins of my dinner.
The Jains helped me to see why as a consious, living, empathetic being I should become more mindful of the food I had previously taken for granted (tomatoes notwithstanding.)
I do not want to preach to anyone, since people need to arrive at their own conclusions about what they eat through a process of gradual growth and self-development, but to make a long explanation short, I have stopped buying items whose ingredients are unintelligible. I am buying or growing organic, hormone-free, GMO-free foods, and it is wonderful.
When it comes to meat, I am incredibly selective. I grew up in the country, I have killed and eaten animals, my relatives derive their incomes from farming of various kinds. Meat is a natural human food. I used to think, "those vegetarians are just weaklings! Picky eaters!" However, I GET IT NOW. For me, it's not about meat, it is about cruelty. It is about violence. I can no longer stand the idea of chickens standing in their own feces in a cage in the dark for their entire lives, when I have seen chickens running around in the grass in the sunshine and I know that I am choosing which life they lead through my purchases. Some things are not worth me eating an egg for 12 cents less.
A lot of people claim that locally produced, chemical free food is hard to find.
Well that is simply not true! The purpose of this blog will be to demonstrate that eating, even Urban Eating, can be cruelty free.
<3 Dreamshare
Food is love!
I grew up eating heaps of healthy homegrown food, and my mother spared no ingredient crafting both complicated and simple delicious recipes for her hungry little chicks. (She would say emphatically when we tumbled in the door from school "who will help me grind the grain? Who will help me knead the dough?!" in the voice of The Little Red Hen, meaning, could we please set the table?)
My love and appreciation for the fruits of the earth lovingly planted, tended and harvested in my childhood backyard is embedded in my core food values. Once long ago, my mother lost me at my grandmother's house, and just as she was working herself into a panic, she caught sight of my chubby little toddler legs straddling a large and leafy tomato plant in my grandmother's garden. I was contentedly plucking the sun-kissed candies one by one, enjoying the zesty explosion of flavour in each little red bomb. I've always loved tomatoes. I am allergic to red artificial food colouring, and we never found out until Valentine's Day of grade 4. My delight in gardened goods and general lack of exposure to 'junk food' was something I took for granted most of my life.
When I went off to university it was up to me to seek and purchase my groceries. Like every other early-twenty-something I knew I headed to the nearest grocery store, stocking up on pesticide-laden fruits and chemical-ridden garbage in boxes and cans that seemed perfectly normal to consume. I drank a few cans of Fruitopia (damn your clever marketing!) and after a fews days my teeth ached so badly that it gave me migraines. Still, I never considered that tiredness, dull hair and sallow skin, or a lack of energy could actually be the result of a poor diet, not 'the student lifestyle'.
Between my undergraduate and Master's degrees I spent some time with Jain communities in India, people reknowned most especially for their particular eating habits and the non-violence that inspired Gandhi. I developed a deeper appreciation for the origins of my dinner.
The Jains helped me to see why as a consious, living, empathetic being I should become more mindful of the food I had previously taken for granted (tomatoes notwithstanding.)
I do not want to preach to anyone, since people need to arrive at their own conclusions about what they eat through a process of gradual growth and self-development, but to make a long explanation short, I have stopped buying items whose ingredients are unintelligible. I am buying or growing organic, hormone-free, GMO-free foods, and it is wonderful.
When it comes to meat, I am incredibly selective. I grew up in the country, I have killed and eaten animals, my relatives derive their incomes from farming of various kinds. Meat is a natural human food. I used to think, "those vegetarians are just weaklings! Picky eaters!" However, I GET IT NOW. For me, it's not about meat, it is about cruelty. It is about violence. I can no longer stand the idea of chickens standing in their own feces in a cage in the dark for their entire lives, when I have seen chickens running around in the grass in the sunshine and I know that I am choosing which life they lead through my purchases. Some things are not worth me eating an egg for 12 cents less.
A lot of people claim that locally produced, chemical free food is hard to find.
Well that is simply not true! The purpose of this blog will be to demonstrate that eating, even Urban Eating, can be cruelty free.
<3 Dreamshare
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