church and food

My favorite part of this article is the end, the suggestion that every church have a food garden--something the LDS sort of do, but in a more centralized manner.  How wonderful would it be to have both the centralized farm/welfare system in addition to a localized one? (Are you imagining a calling as "Ward Weeder"?)

intractable

'Tis a churlish day.

Spent the morning re-typing my poetry manuscript, the electronic copy of which was stolen when my rental car was broken into in Seattle last January.  It sounds like no big deal, but it's kind of a hairy manuscript, and I've hit a patch in the mss. where I don't like the poems anymore (right now) (did I ever?), so I want to give up now, give up the whole thing, the whole writing thing. Which means the whole existence thing. 

(Don't worry, I'm not suicidal, just, just. . . bothered in a kind of restless, unsettled way, as the Bard says with what i most enjoy contented least.)

What do you do with a day like this?  And how do you keep it from seeping into other days?

I did bake Cracked Wheat Honey bread today.

So I guess that's two things on my to-do list--retyping the mss. and baking bread.  I should feel good about that, right?

Gimme some advice:  what do you do when you suddenly feel your whole idea of yourself is built on a faulty premise?  Start over?  Ignore it?  Decide it's too late to turn back?

Blah.

everything i know about monsanto is bad

So don't let them eff up our wheat supply!  Seriously, we don't want Round-up Ready Wheat, and this website will tell you why and how to contact some people who can help stop this from happening.

Love you all!  Love you even more if you help make our food supply safer and more sustainable.

styrofoam

I found this link on Bitten, and was taken aback by one of my least favorite things about school lunch in the US: styrofoam.  Notice that none of the other school lunches from outside the US are served on disposable dishes.  They even use metal chopsticks.  

What's wrong with us?

For the love of all that's holy, people, let's stop eating food out of styrofoam.  A) it's completely disgusting and B)what's so hard about cleaning and re-using dishes and C) paper containers work just as well as styrofoam (unless you're eating something you should really be sitting down at a table to eat, instead of, say, slurping down in your Jazzy at Silver City in Branson)?

Someone please tell me how this degradation has occurred.  And by the way, I do all of the dishes at our house, for three meals a day, so you can't use that excuse on me. (And for my taste, I would also ban plastic ware for use in food consumption as well, if I had dictatorial powers.  I just know it's wrong.  You can get really cheap, strong stoneware at IKEA for dolls and use it for your little ones.  They'll learn to eat more in a more civilized manner and more carefully with a breakable dish as opposed to an unbreakable one.)

For some reason this is making me really angry right now (might be PMS).  It might be that my kids' lunches in Utah are absolute rock-bottom nutritionally:  an anemic leaf of iceberg lettuce, a brown and wilted apple slice, maybe pizza, maybe a corn dog, maybe nachos, and of course the ubiquitous chocolate milk, which ends up being the most nutritious item offered.  It might be that the styrofoam is just staring me in the face right now as an indicator of how far we've fallen, how out of hand our values have become.

That's my self-righteous rant for the day.

p.s.--Bittman points out the awesome French lunch with mussels and an artichoke.  Now that's a school lunch I can get behind.

clean air

Hey! The Daily Herald published a hastily written (telling you it was hasty because embarrassed by some awk sentences) letter to the editor I wrote last week. There are some interesting and/or amusing comments in the discussion section.

http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/301560/56/

I've been meaning for years to join Utah Moms for Clean Air.

(If you're from out of state, you might not know that we have major air quality issues here.)

I'll become a mom for clean air eventually.