Salad for Dinner

So I just had a salad for dinner.  I am traveling, at an airport terminal with all sorts of yummy fast food temptations.  And I make a salad from the salad bar.  I am becoming one of those weird healthy people, and I like it.  The salad was amazing.  I had a scoop of tortellini with pesto sauce.  I had a few cubes of mozzarella.  There were craisins, sunflower seeds, kalmata olives, a hard boiled egg and a few slices of beets that I diced.  Every bite was like a different dish entirely.  Some bites were salty and nutty - lots of seeds and egg pieces.  Some were very sweet - I must have gotten some beets and craisins.  I felt like I was eating at least five different meals instead of just one continuous flavor (like say, a ham and swiss sandwich).  And yeah, maybe I'm being healthy, but I'm also have an awesomely tasty meal.  The only thing I'm missing is that heavy feeling in my stomach.

And I must give kudos to my latest fast.  You all know I love fasting, dear readers.  This year's fast was a fast from all breads, the entire taxonomy, inspired by this post on Slow Food USA.  I cheated a few times toward the end: once for Seder, and once for the closing of Doc's Little Gem Diner.  But overall, this fast taught me to get a little more creative with my every day meals.  No longer could I go to a sandwich or a wrap for a default, easy meal.  No more pizzas either.  (Nor anymore cookies, muffins, etc, etc).  I was forced to think.  I was broken out of my ruts.  And I think that particular fast gave me the courage, and habit, of not just going to the staples.  So today, when I'm in a hurry at an airport, surrounding by temptation... I circled the salad bar.

Yum!

Fasting

(This is a copy of my post at the Slow Food CNY blog)

Fasting. While this is a blog about food, I want to post about the absence of food. If you think about it, the slowest food possible is the food that never reaches your mouth. ;-) While I am not Catholic, I personally find this time of year a good time to fast. The long of winter is (mostly) behind us, and spring is around the corner. Time to do some internal spring cleaning, I say.

Almost every year, I conduct a carbohydrate fast, or some variety thereof. This year I am trying to fast from wheat, refined sugars, and artificial sugars. The wheat is because I am curious if I have a slight allergy to wheat. The refined sugars are because I want to loose my winter weight. And the artificial sugars are on the list as more of a spiritual objection to the overly sweetened foods we have so readily available to us. I want to cut down on the sweetness. (Sorry, but I am not giving up honey this year.)

Does anyone else around here fast? Do you do it for spiritual reasons or health reasons? (Or both??)

Utopias without Time

I took a "Utopia and the Landscape" seminar in graduate school. Not something explicitly practical from a scientific perspective, but it has been incredibly informative in the way I look at manifesto, mass media and geopolitical trends. I want to discuss the timelessness of utopias and then draw parallels with that and some contemporary trends I've noticed.

Utopias without Time
One of the most interesting things I learned in this Utopia seminar is that utopias are by definition timeless. One cannot have a perfect society in time. There cannot be a history or future. History would make it seem like there is something to learn from. History would show stupid decisions at best and horrors at worst. This cannot be in a utopia! And what about the future? Forget it! There is nothing to build and nothing to aspire to. Avant Garde - beggone! Everything is already perfect. Utopia, in the classic sense, exists as a static moment. Honestly, if you really think about it, utopia (and perfection) can be downright hellish.

Utopia in Time
But as humans, we're always looking to create utopia. (Yes, this can be argued.) So what happens if we hypothetically reached utopia at some point and then went past this point of perfection? I'd argue you'd get today's USA. Now let me qualify, I don't actually believe there ever was a point when all people, irrespective of race and social class had a perfect life. Especially not in the USA. But I believe we came close enough... and have since spiraled away. So what trends do I see pointing back to a near-utopian moment?

First, I see suburban sprawl. This is the physical manifestation of the perfect balance of community and open space.... gone out of control. The volume of suburbs we have in America is not sustainable. Suburban land use patterns are hugely inefficient at providing basic services (hospital, water, social, fire and police). Let's not forget the infrastructure maintenance, and oil and automobile dependence either. Suburbs aren't inherently bad, but when they destroy farmland and hollow out cities, something is out of balance.

Secondly, there is the food we eat. Our farm policies in the US are crafted to provide us with plenty of food. We spend less of our income on food than any generation prior. Perfect right? Well, this food has little-to-no nutrient value. We have a generation raised on sugar, caffeine and fat. This has created an obesity "epidemic" which is leading to huge problems with diabetes and heart disease. But, isn't this abundance?

Thirdly, we have access to perfect information. The internet and our technology does an amazing job of keeping us all in the loop. But a lot of that information can be wrong. And who remembers Enron? That company profited through the manipulation of information only to collapse under its own delusion. Sadly, most of the information we access is meaningless.

Fourthly, our collective apathy. I'm being a little polemic in my language with this one, but as a culture, we no longer seem to remember the past or think about the future. We rack up huge debts on credit without thinking on the long term implications. We build in flood plains and in the path of hurricanes. To me, all of these things shout that, as a culture, we have little concept of what happened in the past or care about what will happen in the future. We are living as if we are in a utopia.

Time will march forward. These systems and trends will either collapse, or reinvent themselves. But people, we don't live in a utopia. We can't expect things to stay the same.

(I'm sure there are other trends out there and I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this.)

Dangerous Suburbs

It's always nice to have confirmation of my rants. In my last post I talked about how there is a greater perception of danger in cities, but the reality is that suburbs are actually more dangerous. I got to this point through reasoning through my points, but I didn't do a study or look for statistics. Well, here is the statistic: You’re 20 percent more likely to die in the suburbs from accidental deaths. (And by accidental deaths, we are referring to cars.) Here's the article. It's largely about how our land use patterns contribute to many chronic health problems. Sounds like a future post to me.....