you are what you eat

I love the Grist.

This article raises an issue that I've harped on a lot already, but it was actually one of the comments that really drew my attention. Jabailo writes:

People eat junk. It's cheap and they like it. Yes, you could offer them high quality organic food from local farms but they wouldn't want to pay for it and they don't want to cook it either.

It's sad and often inexplicable to me, but this is very true. Most people would rather live in a big house, drive a new car, and subsist on McDonald's. Somehow, the quality of the things around them is more important than what goes inside them.

But it's not what's on the outside of a dish that makes it dirty, but what's on the inside...

We started talking about the sizes of our houses today at work (an inexcusable conversation, I know, and the only mitigating factor I can offer is that our energy-conscious boasting centered around the smallness and not the largeness of our respective homes), and I was somewhat surprised to discover that my house was definitely the smallest. The next smallest was about 200 square feet larger--and only one person lives there to our two. Everyone said I must be saving lots of money, and, well, I hope we will. But in fact a large proportion of our money goes to food. Growing food is cheap, of course, but we haven't yet become successful enough as gardeners to provide ourselves with anything more than occasional meals that do little to offset the cost. Sevananda, the local food coop, sells local food pretty cheaply, but it's still a lot more expensive than the average grocery store. The farmer's market is usually a little more, and Whole Foods, of course, is by far the most expensive. We've been eating out a lot more since I started working, as I've had less time to cook, but all our groceries are still coming from one of those sources, and we try to eat at restaurants that are at least locally owned if not locally sourced. The upshot of which is, as I already said, we spend a lot of money on food.

But the truth is that we like it that way. Everyone has priorities, I guess. I've never been big for enjoying food--I have too many food allergies for my dining experience to ever become too focused on pleasure--but despite that (or maybe because of it), I would much rather spend most of my money on food than on, say, clothes or furniture. True, food doesn't last long. But it becomes a part of you. It shapes how you feel, what you do, even, to an extent, who you are. You are what you eat, right? And I'd so much rather be local organic vegetables than a McDonald's hamburger. If nothing else, they're prettier, and much more crunchy.