Tag Archives: food system

The National Eating Disorder

DadsRecipeBox got its start when I decided to pass along family-favorite recipes so the kids could make those same dishes in their own kitchens some day. I also shared home-cooking tips I’d learned since stepping up my cooking activity what with The Queen building her home-based business.

About that time, I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan and I suddenly had a larger mission. We were in the throes of a “national eating disorder” perpetuated by systemic issues around how we get our food, from the farm all the way to the table. Our family-favorite dishes might be hurting us and our families. I needed to write about this.

From that time until now, DadsRecipeBox has shared info and ideas around three interests: family-favorite recipes, cooking tips from one home cook to another, and the larger world of the food system and its impact on our lives.

Now that a day-job is no longer a distraction, I am diving in to DadsRecipeBox with renewed purpose. I will publish 2-3 posts per week exploring three themes: recipes, home cooking, the food system. I will also produce a book provisionally called Dad Versus the Food System and other, more typical cook books emphasizing healthy cooking and eating. This scratches my publishing itch (see TouchwoodPress.com) while taking up Michael Pollan’s challenge to examine and act on our national eating disorder.

Hope you can join us for the ride.

Press reset

agriculture countryside crop cropland

“Suddenly, saving our planet is within reach.”

— David Attenborough

We have just watched the brand new David Attenborough “witness statement” documentary on Netflix—his review and analysis of a life spent observing nature over 70+ years. We are greatly moved by his conclusions and recommendations, which add so much to our understanding of how we should be doing food.

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Where do little shallots come from?

“Are those onions…or…shallots?” The 50-something grocery store clerk examined the small vegetable carefully. “Shallots,” I said. “Same family as onions, they say.” In fact, shallots are a type of onion, according to Wikipedia.

This interchange in our local grocery made me think immediately of a story on NPR or the Food Channel some years ago about how some kids growing up in innercity “food deserts,” so-called, have no idea that strange looking items their elders call food, like carrots, actually grow in the ground and are meant to be eaten. Not so odd, actually, when you think about it, for people from another planet.

But the fact of this makes the point that if we never learn what actual, natural, healthy food is and how we get it, we should expect the food we get—from fast food joints and processed food purveyors.

I’m all for vegetable gardening, in any form: window-sill pots to corporation megafields to seaweed farms. And even if over time we figure out to provide healthy vegetables to everyone, everywhere, even if 98% of the world’s English peas come from Peru, kids in every generation should get the chance to grow a carrot or a shallot or at least see and touch how it’s done. Grocery clerks should know when a shallot is not a yellow onion or anything else.

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