New Food Pyramid

[lescaret]

Have you all seen the new US gov't defined food pyramid?

http://www.mypyramid.gov/

One of the silliest (or ignorant, take your pick) things about this is the fact that this new set of guidelines is only on the internet at the above noted site. So, if you're poor, or don't have access to a computer, or don't know how to navigate the web, well, tough luck!

Then there are the categories: Grains, Vegetables, fruits, Milk, and Meat & Beans.

Meat & Beans? Okay, sure, protein, but - suppose your little personalized MyPyramid suggests you eat 8 ounces of "meat & beans" a day. Uhm, doesn't that suggest that eating all meat is just as healthy as eating all beans?

Once again, this whole effort seems crafted around not pissing off agribusiness and the giant Food Industry in this country rather than giving the public sound & honest information on health and nutrition.

For an alternative perspective, check out this excellent website:

http://www.informedeating.org/

Question for the masses: how important is Food in your life? Do you pay attention, try to eat healthy, love cooking, insist upon organic, revel in exquisite food, host dinner parties regularly, or do you subsist soley on processed food and things that come in shrink-wrapped packages, or ..... what ?

[Lightning Rod]

As I reply I am eating some very zesty onion, celery, potato soup that I made with my own hands.

but I'm just as likely to eat a double cheeseburger or a hotdog.

basically I am not a person who lives to eat
I just eat to live.

I like good food, but in small amounts

beer and tomato juice are at the top of my food pyramid

[mousey1]

Well this makes me as

"Mad as a Cow"

Yes, I'm from Canada!

When are you good ol' boys gonna start buying our beef?

If it's good enough for George W. it's good enough for you all!!!!!!

This is an example of tongue in cheek by the way...
One of my favorite meals.

I'm soory Lescaret, I play with your thread.

Do you eat lots of carets....good for the eyes they say...


And to answer your question

How important is food in your life?

I definitely live to eat!!!!!!!

One of my greatest pleasures!!!!

And I eat for taste not for nutrition!!!!!

And yes, I love cheese!

[stilltrucking]

I live to eat. I pretty much. I see my self as a worm gnawing my way through mother earth. My mouth is always full, I hardly have time to breathe.

If it wasn't for sucking on the cigarettes I would weigh three hunded pounds.

I started cooking soups, only thing that slows me down, and also because I am such a terrible housekeeper I have thrown away all my dishes except a bowl, a plate, a cup, and a little jelly glass shaped like a strawberry. I also threw a way all my silverware expect a spoon a fork, and a knife. I can't find the fork so I have t eat everything with a spoon. That helps too

Thanks for the info Les, I been wondering about it.
A few years ago Scientific American did an article on The Possessions of The Poor. pretty good

[Doreen Peri]

I eat 2x a day because if I don't, I'll faint. I pick, too. A few bites of this, a few bites of that, in between those two meals, which are usually small ones. I honestly cannot, for the life of me, figure out how I gained 10 pounds in the past 6 months. I don't eat much.

The most enjoyable eating is dining out. I don't have to cook. I don't have to clean up and someone waits on me.

I used to love to cook. I'd prepare a variety of dishes for entertaining.... plus party platters. These days, friends have moved on, moved out of state, gotten divorced, disappeared off the face of the map. Since I've spent the past 7 years on the internet, I have made few new real life friends. We rarely have company.

I don't cook every night any more because my son has moved out and Clay and Alicia and I don't have large appetites.

I try to eat healthy. I often make veggie platters... veggies for dipping in salad dressing. I like creamy caesar.

We rarely eat meat, but I do use stewing beef in my pasta sauce which also has celery, parsely, vidalia onions, whole italian tomatoes chopped up with a knife, so there are chunks of tomato in it, and garlic. No oregano. I hate oregano.

I also use ground beef or stewing beef in my chili.

I'm not a health nut but I truly dislike fried foods. Greesy, gross. Ugh.

We eat a lot of different types of soup, some homemade, some not.

I eat a variety of things. Mostly my choices are based on what makes me feel good, rather than making a conscious effort to concentrate on which foods are healthy. But the healthy foods like fruits and vegetables tend to make me feel better than the non-healthy foods.

I remember back in college, I lived in a house with these people who ate only macrobiotic foods. Nothing processed. They were obsessed with the health food store. They also stayed up all weekend dropping acid. What a riot! Too funny. Druggies eating health food.

[stilltrucking]

druggies eating healthy
the flesh of the gods
a fungus amongus

Speaking of druggies, Burroughs how did he eat I wonder?
He must have taken care of himself to live to be so old. Or just luck.

[lescaret]

Speaking of druggies, Burroughs how did he eat I wonder?
He must have taken care of himself to live to be so old. Or just luck.

I once had the good fortune of eating dinner at Burroughs' house in Lawrence, KS (with 5 or 6 other people). Burroughs hadn't taken a liking to me because I'd expressed reservations about cats and he loved cats.

So, at dinner, I recall that we had, among other things, steamed spinach and hollandaise sauce to dress it with.

I'll never forget Burroughs holding the gravy pitcher of sauce out to me and intoning, in that Burroughsian and, as I interpreted at the time, menacing almost threatening, voice "Here ... have some more hollandaise sauce!".

[sooZen]

you are what you eat...

We stopped eating meat in 1987. Cecil's father was a 'meat and potatoes' man and died from heart disease in his late 50's. My family genes are not much better...diabetes abounds.

Cec and I are both health minded, into herbs and have home grown a very large vegetable garden for years until it was too hard to take care of it anymore. We used food both as medicine and entertainment. We still do. Both of us can and like to cook. Most of our meals are eaten and made at home except for our occasional forays to our favorite Mexican food place Kiki's where the owner is Jewish and uses no lard: http://www.kikisrestaurant.com/default.asp

We buy organic (when we can afford it). I will have a booth at the local farmer's market this summer selling my jewelry so have an opportunity to buy local produce regularly and I will sell herbs too.

Dinners at our house can include candles and a good (inexpensive) bottle of red wine or a beer (I have a new favorite wine but I don't want it to get too popular so it will remain nameless.)

Cec and I like getting a consumable for our birthdays, dark chocolate, wine or spice instead of some 'thing' to collect dust.

Cooking and eating a good meal is one of the great pleasures in life especially if shared...You're invited anytime.

(I am trying to picture what having a meal with Burroughs was like.) Hah!

SooZen

[lescaret]

I remember back in college, I lived in a house with these people who ate only macrobiotic foods. Nothing processed. They were obsessed with the health food store. They also stayed up all weekend dropping acid. What a riot! Too funny. Druggies eating health food.

This had me chuckling because I could relate but you know what? It's not as ironic or contradictory as you make it sound, Doreen. "Druggies eating health food".

Now, I don't know the people you lived with and maybe they were the tobacco-smoking, coke-snorting type of hippie Deadhead. But by way of explanation, I can speak to how I used to feel and how the idea of taking acid all weekend but insisting on macrobiotic food makes sense.

Acid, as many of us probably know, is powerful stuff and ingesting a tiny amount produces the desired effect. So, it's not like you have to flood your body with a toxic synthetic chemical to have your trip. A very minute amount does the trick.

And acid is a mind drug rather than a body stimulant (though of course it does produce body sensations but those aren't the point). This is important because acid can enhance a mindset and make it seem magical, powerful, beautiful, transcendent. In that regard, if you already are into organic food and believe in the dictum "eat well, feel well", then taking acid can powerfully solidify the body-mind connection.

How many times have we eaten something not particularly healthy and loved it at the time - hot dogs at ballgames, cotton candy at the circus, giant ice cream sundaes, haunches of braised beast, etc. - only to begin feeling yucky shortly thereafter? To compound that yucky feeling with THINKING about what you just ate and imagining it coursing through your body, well, that can make you feel even worse!

But here's the deal - someone who is dedicated to eating really good, healthy, environmentally-beneficial food (health of the planet!) can ingest a miniscule amount of LSD and really ramp up that mind-body connection, to the point where, by simply meditating on the course of, for example, a 16 ounce wheatgrass/carrot/apple shake making its way through the body temple, one's natural healthy sheen is actually ENHANCED and STRENGTHENED. It becomes a cumulative thing so that the natural health that comes from eating well is magnified by the mental/spiritual connection generated by the acid.

I know, I'm probably not quite getting it right, not explaining it real well.

I guess, having once been pretty connected to the type of Deadhead, trippy, health food types mentioned, I'm aware that there are nuances that aren't adequately communicated by the term "druggies". And that taking acid on the weekend doesn't invalidate a determined lifestyle that values and celebrates conscious, healthy foodways.

[Zlatko Waterman]

After some very serious illnesses ( the most serious most people can conceive of), I am seriously limited as to what I may eat.

Worst of all, I am limited in the drugs I can feast on, principally alcohol, which I am forbidden. I haven't deigned to switch to chloral hydrate yet, like Hank Williams. But I don't want to die at 29, either ( little danger of that now). My Cheatin' Heart has to be kept tickin'.

Because of diabetes, I can have nothing that contains sugar.
I have been a lifelong chocolate freak and a steady drinker, though the real tsunami of alcohol subsided ( through willed abstinence) about fifteen years ago.

My former idea of a great meal was four Godiva chocolate bars washed down with a pint of Jack Daniels. Once, when I was in my thirties and my girlfriend threw me out, I rented a motel room for the night in Thousand Oaks, California and spent the evening writing poems and watching Jane Goodall and her chimps on PBS with the sound turned down.

I wrote and watched and crunched Godivas and swilled Jack.

It's amazing I'm still alive.

I am determined to live my allotment without being confined to a wheelchair, or drooling through a series of strokes, all of which transpired for members of my gene pool.

My father died by millimeters from cancer when he was 53.

It's amazing how you can subsist almost entirely on art, weak coffee, water and tiny amounts of fruit juice. That and shredded wheat are pretty much my daily regimen. And vegetable soup.

I had to abandon my 15-year vegetarianism because of pernicious anemia.

Burroughs says somewhere in "Junkie" that he lived mainly on orange juice, since a junkie "Doesn't want anything to happen."

I envy the gourmand and the successful alcoholic, such as John Huston.

It's all the genetic motherboard ( and "fatherboard") that's responsible.

I got a very bad set of genes.

Who ever heard of a one-eyed artist who draws all day long?

By the way-- a somewhat irrelevant footnote:

Some of you may think that avatar to the left of this note is a picture of me. It isn't. It's a photo of the great French comic book artist, Jean Giraud, also known as "Moebius."

I like to keep shifting position. No sugar is required for that.



Zlatko

[Lightning Rod]

Z, to be a 'successful alcoholic' you must begin drinking as soon as you wake up but desist the moment you feel the least bit of intoxication.

I am lucky, I guess. I can live on ideas and sunlight and oxygen if you throw in about a tablespoon of peanut butter a day.

When I was in college, our commune went macrobiotic. Brown rice three meals a day. It went well with the LSD.

But I would get so high on that diet that every couple of weeks I would have to sneak down to the hamburger joint at the bottom of the hill. They made beautiful hamburgers. After two weeks of brown rice, eating one was like making love to a beautiful woman and shooting heroin and smoking a cigarette afterwards. Ahhhhhhh

[Zlatko Waterman]

LR:


Shooting hamburgers sounds pretty sexy to me, too.


--Z

[sooZen]

Lescaret...I always though of LSD as a sacramental journey, not a drug in the druggie sense. I never did it for laughs...

Eating right seems natural anymore, I don't have too many cravings although I do scream for Ice Cream on occasion...I try not to bring it home and then I don't think about it.

Food can make you high, expand your waistline or your horizons. I am pretty fruity, fairly nuts and planted firmly in earthly delights.

SooZ

[judih]

tasty, soo
for the first time, you make me think of cannibalism



uh, never mind...i'll just watch

[Jenni Mansfield Peal]

I prepare meals mainly by color.
I've tried other ways of feeding myself, but the color thing makes me most happy.
I love to cook and my sweetie and I enjoy having real mealtimes together - he's got a lot of beautiful photos of food and I hope he shares some.
We're mostly vegetarian (best colors). The sustainability and global economy issues impress me, too - that is, just because I can consume like royalty doesn't mean it's okay to. I mean, I feel pretty privilaged already without the meat - gratitude is a major part of my religion.
Eating is so personal!
Thanks for this cool topic!