Shake the hand that feeds you.
Eating with the fullest pleasure—pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance—is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.*
Don’t eat anything incapable of rotting. Food v. “food product.” There are many reasons to avoid eating such complicated food products beyond the various chemical additives and corn and soy derivatives they contain. One of the problems with the products of food science is that, as Joan Gussow has pointed out, they lie to your body [my ital]; their artificial colors and flavors and synthetic sweeteners and novel fats confound the senses we rely on to assess new foods and prepare our bodies to deal with them. Foods that lie leave us with little choice but to eat by the numbers, consulting labels rather than our senses. (And, one might add, infinitely less pleasurable.)
MICHAEL POLLAN, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
Please, before you start yet another diet, restrictive food regimen, or the latest, flavour-of-the-week, TV-certified, self-help/lifestyle how-to fad, read Michael Pollan. One of the most sensible, pleasurable, indeed doable, approaches to food, eating, and a well-lived life I have ever enjoyed reading/relishing. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” And devour this book.
Slow Food Canada
Toronto’s Farmers’ Markets
Farm Boys
Photo: Edible Nation
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