Food Individuality

Another great thing about Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is that it has recipes. So, I found some really cool recipes I wanted to try out: Cucumber Yogurt Soup, Grilled Vegetable Panini, and Cherry Sorbet. Ideally, this meal would be cooked in mid-July when everything is in season. But I guess since I'm used to having whatever food I want from California year-round, I jumped the gun. Anyway, everything turned out pretty nicely and I was proud of myself for successfully cooking. I'm really excited to cook some more. Nothing too exciting has happened in the next chapter of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Just the usual eating real food is pretty than eating man-made chemicals. Oh, and that the United States only grows one main corn crop and one main soybean crop and like 80% of additives added to food (high fructose corn syrup, corn starch, siy letchin, etc)are from these crops. So theoretically, if something happens to these crops such as some super bacteria or virus, then America will lose the majority of their crops like that. Hopefully, that won't happen, but we really should invest in more strains of food.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: 15 pgs

Exactly How Hard is it to find Locally Grown?

I know that it's better to eat local produce (clearly) but at the grocery store, I was amazed by how un-local everything is. (By the way, I was at Meijer, not WalMart, so at least I was supporting an area grocery store chain and not a large worldwide corporation.) Everything at the grocery store was grown in California! I know it's only May and still pretty early for a lot of fruits and vegetables, but still, I would like a bundle of strawberries or a crop of onions at least from Indiana. I can't even reach the local farmer's market I used to go to due to the construction on Aboite Ctr and Dickie. Plus, Hilger's closed down last year which is seriously tragic. Why does it seem harder to find good food? I would go down to the Whole Foods place down by the zoo, but my parents say the food there is too expensive even though i repeatedly tell them it's worth it. My mom is the dietitian in the family, however, so she has more authority... for now. This obviously ties in to Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which I'm afraid is making me a food zealot (which, by the way, is a soon-to-be etymology word). In the pages I was reading, Barabara Kingsolver and family go on vacation around the East coast and somehow, they find local owned, local grown restaurants everywhere! Where does this happen? Maybe, growing up in the second largest city in Fort Wayne has altered my perspective on food. I'm usually a big city person, so when I'm on vacation, I never see locally grown food and even if I did, the prices would most likely be outrageous. I'm just glad that my mom agreed to let me take over the vegetable garden this year. If I don't kill these plants hopefully I'll have some food. I grow flowers successfully so hopefully vegetables won't be much different. According to Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I should just ask around at grocery stores for locally grown food and apparently that's suppose to encourage supposed manager to start bringing in locally grown food to their store. I feel bad asking though. I'm afraid I'll get that look that adults always give the picky and radical teenager, like I'm trying to cause trouble or something. There's a whole foods market down at Bloomington, so I feel like I may have to go to IU for college. My parents are still trying to push for Purdue, since they both went there, but I don't know. Purdue does have a really nice Greek place and a very authentic Indian restaurant, but the last time I was there, Baptists were passing out pamphlets claiming that evolution doesn't exist. As a future Biology major, that was a little scary. Plus, Purdue may not accept some AP credits. Wow, really off topic. But basically, this chapter was suppose to prove that it's easy to find locally grown food in your area. I'm not really convinced. I'm pretty sure the land in Southern Virgina is easier to work with than the clay I have to work with in Northern Indiana. I didn't even have enough room to grow corn in my garden, and that's what we're known for. Iowa is actually the biggest corn producing state. I should probably end this post before I ramble on more.

Animal, Vegetable Miracle: 20 pgs

Las Vacas

WELL... this book is unarguabley mind-opening. I naturally assumed buying organic milk meant the cows were happy and healthy and got to roam on a pasture etc. Turns out, the United States does not have strict enough rules about regulating organic food. For example, Horizon Organic Milk, a very popular orgnaic milk brand, feed their cows organic barley, alfalfa, etc, but they get less than an hour to graze and roam freely. At other times, their stuck up in these crowded rooms, just like regular factories. I mean, at least they aren't being pumped full of hormones. But we can still do better. I learned all of this from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. This chapter, Barbara Kingsolver learns how to make cheese. Naturally, especially since I have 2 parents who work full-time, I never even considered how cheese was made. I feel dumb now. I really should consider learning how to make cheese, just to say I can. I could make some killer palak paneer then. I'll write more later.
Read since Last Post:
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: 23 pgs.

Middlesex... wow.

(This is an amazing cover!!)
Well, needless to say, this book is about a hermaphrodite. (I hope that doesn't creep anyone out.) Hermaphrodism is an intersting, though unfortunate defect. I wonder how common it is to be born with both male and female sex organs. Although I've only read a couple chapters, I can just tell this book is going to be marvelous. I just feel a great deal of sympathy for the fictional characters. The hermaphrodite Cal/Callie tells her unfortunate story of her family. Her grandparents are brother and sister. They fell in love with each other after their parents' death and although brothers and sisters are obviously not suppose to get married and produce offspring, they did. I feel a great deal of sympathy for Desdemona (Cal's grandmother) who is constantly afraid that her children will have birth defects. Unfortunately, I haven't really read far enough in the novel to give a full-out analysis, but so far, it's been a very good read. i love Eugenides writing style so I'm really looking into reading his other novel, The Virgin Suicides. I'll write more when I've read more!
Reading Log:
Middlesex: 30pgs

Poor Turkeys

The more I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, the more I wonder how realistic a life like that is anymore. Yes, it is absolutely wonderful that Barbara Kingsolver and her family aren't feeding into the monopolizing food industry, but every family having their own farm and eating only what grows in their own community seems pretty far-fetched to me in the quick-paced and industrialized United States. It's clearly healthier to live this way (body only gets food from natural food sources, no high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated oils, margarine, etc.), but so many Americans have thrown out their health anyway. Plus, I think about my future and how practically impossible it would be for me to live a lifestyle like that. Sure, I'd rather starve than eat a deep-fried Twinkie, but there is no way I'd be able to grow all my own food as a struggling med student. I guess I'll just try to eat organic whenever possible, and maybe grow a few plants. By the way, i just googled the Twinkie website to make sure I spelled "Twinkie" correctly, and I consequently learned that a Twinkie has a shelf-life for 26 days... ew, that can't be healthy.

Anyway, although I think this memoir/investigative journal is very idealistic, I have learned a lot about animal cruelty. I'm a vegetarian because I've always felt sympathetic towards animals, but I don't have a problem with non-vegetarians just as long as their respectful toward animals. I always connected to those Native Americans tribes who have ceremonies celebrating the buffalo or another animal. I don't really like how homo sapiens deem themselves as the dominant creature. I'm way off track. Anyway, Barbara Kingsolver and her family aren't vegetarians, but they only eat free-range meat, which is apparently the way to go. I don't miss meat at all, and frankly, free-range meat is way too expensive (for my family at least) so I'm still fine with my vegetarian status. However, Kingsolver wrote a pretty convincing paragraph that only made me more sympathetic of poor edible animals:

"Of the 400 million turkeys Americans consume each year, more than 99 percent of them are a single breed: the Broad-Breasted White, a quick-fattening monster bred specifically for the industrial-scale setting. These are the big lugs so famously dumb they can drown by looking up at the rain. (Friends of mine swear they have seen this happen.) If a Broad-Breasted White should escape slaughter, it likely won't live past a year old: they get so heavy, their legs collapse. In mature form they're incapable of flying, foraging, or mating. That's right, reproduction. Genes that male turkeys behave like animals are useless to a creature packed wing-to-wing with thousands of others, and might cause it to get uppity or suicidal, so those genes have been bred out of the pool. Docile lethargy works better, and helps them pack on the pounds."

Pobre Pavos. (Poor Turkeys) The page continues on explaining how humans artificially extract turkey sperm and introduces it to hen egg, since the majority of American turkeys are unable to have sex. This book has been extremely eye-opening. Maybe I can convince my family to eat tofurkey this Thanksgiving.

Reading Log since last post:
animal, Vegetable, Miracle: 50 pages

Exactly How Insane are the Insane?

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest... Another one of the 1001 Books to Read. I also want to read this because the movie's suppose to be really good. Although my reading has been fairly sluggish this week, I've still succeeded in reading about 60 more pages of the book. So far, it's pretty great. There are a lot of references to machinery. It's a little odd how the narrator is a "deaf Indian" (He's actually Native American because he's not from India) but I think the protagonist is this McMurphy character. Nurse Ratched acts as the evil dictator of the insane asylum. McMurphy serves as her foil and is currently planning to spite her.
The creepiest passage in the novel so far has been the fog machine. The fog makes time slow down or speed up and fogs their reality. in essence, it's what makes them insane. But really, how insane are they? There appears to be nothing critically wrong with any of the men. McMurphy show signs of violence, and yes, he was involved in a alleged rape, but that in no way makes him insane. Plus Bromden (The "Indian"/Native American) is not insane either! In fact, he appears to be fairly intelligent. He causes no trouble for Nurse Ratched and therefore he's not abused. Plus, he hears a ton of conversations that he wouldn't normally if he didn't put on his deaf facade. It's a really interesting book so far. My dad said it had a sad ending (so far I don't think it's particularly sad) but I'm looking forward to the twist at the ending. I have an AP test tomorrow, so sleep sounds pretty good right now. Plus I need to remind myself about dreaded public policy. Ugh. I'm crossing my fingers for a 4.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: 60 pgs.

The American Industrial Food Pipeline

Although I am a total health freak, I've been becoming even more obsessed after beginning Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. The author, Barbara Kingsolver wrote this novel as a memoir and investigative journal about the American food system. Boy, has the quality of our food gone down. I've only read a couple chapters, but I'm already re-thinking the way I think about food. As Kingsolver claims, products (especially strawberries, other fruits) are shipped from California so we can have them all year around. But it's such a waste of energy and fuel to ship food everywhere. So, I went to a greenhouse today and bought tomato, broccoli, squash, onions, eggplant, green pepper, jalepeno pepper, and kohlarabi plants! I love vegetables. I should grow fruit as well. Kingsolver and her family move away from big city life to live in a rural town and grow all their food themselves, nothing artifical or shipped from out of town. I do believe the food industry is pretty out of control, so I find this novel pretty inspiring. I can't wait to read more. I'm so exhausted, so I'll write more later.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: 76 pgs