OK, so I've gotten off of the blogging train. Work and life have been so danged busy that I feel like I just haven't had it in me to compose, edit, and publish posts.
No more!
I'm going in a new direction here.
Last month my mom was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer. Yesterday she noticed symptoms that seemed to indicate a minor stroke. We're still not sure what happened, but at this point a stroke has been ruled out, and instead she seems to have had some nerve damage unrelated to the cancer. That's the good news. The bad news is that her cancer has been upgraded to stage IIIC, possibly stage IV.
The women in my mom's family don't have a history of breast cancer, which makes me wonder if it's primarily environmental for her (as opposed to, say, really bad luck). See, I've been doing some reading (and watching some documentaries) about how food production and farming have changed in the past 50 or so years. Long story short, fast food, processed food, portion servings, additives, etc. have changed the way food looks, tastes, nourishes, and is farmed. And some of the added chemicals are either known carcinogens or have unknown effects on the body (or there is conflicting evidence that it's either Really Bad For You or Totally Fine depending on who provides funding for the studies).
Since the Little Man has begun eating solid food, my husband and I have had discussions about what we should feed him as he gets older. Neither of us want to go gung-ho never-visit-McDonalds-ever-in-a-million-years, but we don't want to hit up the drive-thru very often, either. My mom's recent health problems really drove that point home. She told me once, after she lost 170 pounds after bariatric surgery, that she used to visit fast-food restaurants at least twice per day, every day for years - close to a decade. From what she told me I estimate that she spent roughly $100 per week, every week, on fast food.
The stuff with huge amounts of this processed, chemically soaked food-stuff.
Apart from the obesity, it makes me wonder how much of this fruit of chemical-food engineering contributed to her cancer and nerve damage. How much of this stuff will I be willing to feed my child? Heck, how much of it do I, personally, want to consume? And it's not just the fast food. It's the TV dinners, the boxes of rice with powdered spices, the ramen, the hot-dogs, the lunch meat, the "easy meals." How much of that am I willing to feed my family?
So after conversations with my husband we have decided to try to make a change as a family - before the kid has any inkling that Mom and Dad used to do things differently. First, we plan on going through our current pantry because, well, we can't afford to throw out all the processed stuff and start over. Then we take a good hard look at those food labels.
What we're going to try is to buy primarily things with 5 or fewer "ingredients" on the label - or at least no ingredients that I need to use my community-college chemistry knowledge to decipher. This will mean a lot more cooking. It will probably mean that I'll have to start making my own beef and chicken stocks. I already went out an invested in a bread machine ($15 at the local thrift store!) because it's just cheaper to make our own bread than buy the $4 fancy loaf at the grocery store.
I hear tell that it's actually cheaper to do it this way. Pre-packaged food is kind of expensive, right? I hear that we'll start feeling better physically, emotionally, and we'll have more energy. On that last point - gawd I hope so, because I work full-time with a 30 minute commute before and after work. Many times I come home and the last thing I want to do is work in the kitchen. We'll need to plan our meals better so that we don't end up with waste.
And once in a while we will go through the drive-thru. But hopefully it will become one of those special treats rather than an "Aw crap I don't feel like cooking tonight anyway" things.
It's an experiment, and my husband and I acknowledged in our conversation that many times we come up with these plans and then abandon them in short order. But I'm hoping that this wake-up call will be enough of a push to make eating healthy a priority for us.
So what I'm going to try to do here is document our progress. If I can come up with a quick and easy (and cheap) healthy meal for dinner I'll post the recipe. I'll post tips on how to cut costs. I'll let you know if those miracle side-effects actually materialize. And hopefully I'll be at this long enough to post updates to what a toddler will and won't tolerate as healthy food. Oh, and if I find a good brand of something or other that makes my life a billion times easier without breaking the bank I'll be sure to post that, too.
Sooooo for this week? It's the beginning...
