Chicken

"Why is it that carrots, a simple root that you can just pull from the ground, cost more than a box of Twinkies, this incredible combination of food science and technology that has forty ingredients?” – Michael Pollan

“What we eat and how we eat it reflect whether or not we think we need to abide with others at all. When we thoughtlessly eat commodities alone and on the run, there is no time or place for abiding. But when we eat with a commitment to the strengthening of the ecological and social memberships that make food possible, then it becomes possible for eating to be an act of abiding with another.” – Norman Wirzba

 

In his book, Food & Faith: A Theology of Eating, Norman Wirzba does an excellent job of relating our theology to our consumption of plants and animals as food. He makes a lot of great points, but at the heart is the idea that our decisions about eating matter.

Now that the baby has begun eating solids, I've been thinking a lot about how I want our family to view food and eating. I've come up with a few things that are important to me.

1. Good food takes time.

I don't know very much about the Slow Food movement, but based on thirty seconds of internet research, I see that it was started to oppose the opening of a McDonald's in Rome. It is described as an alternative to fast food (makes sense). 

What I do know is that the best meals start in the garden or at the butcher shop or farmer's market. They begin with real ingredients grown and harvested by real people, sold by real people, and prepared by real people (that last real person is usually me).

Side note: my best season of cooking happened when I lived in a house with three other people and a few regular visitors. We often had a team of four or five cooking dinner together. If I could find a way to make it happen, I would cook every meal with a team. Good food doesn't take as much time when more people are working together to prepare it.

Garden tomatoes about to become soup

Not only should food take time to prepare, it also takes time to eat. You don't scarf down food as quickly as possible if you spent hours tending a garden to grow it; you savor it, appreciating the sweet juiciness of fresh tomatoes and the crisp, earthy taste of lettuce. Someone invested a lot of time into all the food we eat, and all meals should be savored as though we grew the food ourselves.

2. Good food doesn't have to be expensive. 

Everyone wants organic food these days, but a lot of people are put off by the price. Some produce is almost double the price of conventionally grown produce. However, according to the Leopold Center for Agriculture (via this website), the average carrot travels 1,838 miles from farm to table. Growing up in rural Indiana, some of the produce I ate traveled approximately 100 feet from my mom's garden to the table. Or less than ten miles, from a produce stand to my house. 

Unfortunately, much of it also traveled as far as the average carrot. According to Barbara Kingsolver, in her excellent book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, the United States exports as many potatoes as it imports every year. So the farms around me in Indiana were sending their food to Japan while the grocery stores were buying their food from Chile.

Rather than spending a lot of money on organic food that is produced halfway around the world, I think our money should be spent on local food that should be cheaper because of the much lower production costs. If this food is produced organically, all the better, although I have been disappointed to learn more about the strict criteria and expensive process used to classify food as organic that my own garden probably doesn't meet.

On the other hand...

3. Good food isn't cheap.

At the other end of the spectrum are the bargain hunters. If milk from a local dairy comes in a glass bottle that requires a two dollar deposit at the time of purchase, then they will buy the cheaply packaged milk from two states away. If locally grown strawberries are twice the price of strawberries from California, then they will choose to save a few dollars and accept a dramatic reduction in quality.

Multi-colored lettuce growing in the garden

Americans spend a smaller percentage of their income on food than any other country in the world. My husband and I have made the choice to eat less meat but to buy higher quality meat. We also try to buy local produce as often as we can. In general, I am trying to retrain my thinking on how to make good spending decisions when it comes to food. Living on a budget means we can't just buy the highest quality of everything we want. Rather than sacrificing quality, I am trying to learn to make other sacrifices like buying less food, not buying food out of season, and making more things myself.

We have also chosen to eat out only a few times a month so that when we do eat out, we can choose higher quality restaurants over deceptively cheap fast food.

4. Don't throw stuff away.

Americans throw away 40 percent of their food. I have to admit, I enjoy cleaning out the refrigerator. Unlike other parts of the house, I have never agonized over whether that moldy piece of meat has sentimental value, whether my grandchildren might want to reminisce over the time their grandparents had steak for dinner back in 2013, or whether my husband will come home to find that I have accidentally thrown away a family heirloom. 

When my husband and I were newlyweds, however, cleaning out the refrigerator became heartbreaking. I bought things thinking he would eat them. He bought things thinking I would eat them. For a few months, it seemed like we were throwing away more than we were eating! I realized how easy it is to make impulse purchases and then casually toss them in the garbage when they have exceeded their shelf life. We are a lot more conscientious now, and I want our son to grow up recognizing the value of food, the gift that it is, the great lengths it took for it to arrive in our kitchen, and our responsibility as stewards to care for what we have.

Chicken

In Dorothy Day's autobiography, The Long Loneliness, (an excellent book not at all about food), she wrote that her daughter attended a school focused on practical knowledge. One of her classes taught her how to prepare the cheaper cuts of meat. That caught me off guard. Dorothy Day was born in 1897. I assumed that it was only recently that people had to take classes to learn about things that it seems like all of our grandparents knew. I realized that if Dorothy Day had to intentionally educate her daughter on food preparation, there was no shame for me to acknowledge my ignorance and start learning too.

My proudest accomplishment so far is learning to cook a whole chicken. Here is my recipe from Jamie Oliver's website:

1 chicken

carrots

celery

1 onion

dried rosemary

1 bay leaf

a few peppercorns

salt

a few cloves of garlic

1. Put the chicken in a large pot and cover with water. Add the vegetables and spices.

2. Bring it to a boil and then simmer for an hour and twenty minutes.

3. Eat, add to recipes, let cool and shred to use later.

The broth can be poured through a strainer and frozen for later use.

Chicken and broth in the freezer, ready to go!

I want our son to see his parents making intentional, responsible choices about the food we eat everyday. I want him to avoid the epidemic that is leading to obese children with nutrient deficiencies because their diets contain so many sweets and so few nutrient-rich foods. I want mealtimes to be enjoyable for our family. I think we are off to a good start, but we can do a lot more!

Sweet potatoes are yummy!