An Irony

The week before we left for Florida, I listened to the audiobook of Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food. It was awesome, and it gave me that last little nudge toward getting our family’s eating habits more in alignment with a “healthy lifestyle” (ugh, what on over-marketed term). Pollan provides quite a bit of background information and history to show how the Standard American Diet developed, and why it is so unhealthy for us. He takes a shot (I think rightfully so) not just at the food manufacturing industry, but at the health and nutrition experts, and at the media, for making the simple task of deciding what to eat so difficult and confusing, and for making healthy eating so much more difficult than unhealthy eating. If you need that last little push to get you going in the right direction, this may be it. In addition to overhauling my meal planning and shopping, I planted a small kitchen garden before we left for vacation (hopefully it has survived in my absence). And, I’m revisiting Mireille Guiliano’s French Women Don’t Get Fat for meal ideas. Yum.

Now, in light of T-Bear’s illness, eating well is no longer just a matter of keeping each member of my family “healthy enough”, it has become a matter of controlling a serious disease in one of my children. It’s no longer optional. My challenge will be creating meals that support T-Bear’s prescribed food intake in a way that will be tasty, enticing, and using as many “whole” foods as possible. So, I’ll probably be writing more about food and diet as our family makes this transition, since this will be one of our biggest challenges, and posting some of my initial thoughts on diet from a couple of weeks ago. Odd how our paths progress, isn’t it?