Food, Glorious Food

I am sitting here with tears in my eyes, because of more awful information I just found out about food. Food is EVERYWHERE it seems, yet more and more of the time, I find I cannot bring myself to eat it, buy it, feed it to myself or my family.

We pride ourselves on constantly trying to eat better and healthier, but we have found it so hard to do with a limited budget. We only buy our grocery meat from stores where we know the animals are fed vegetarian, non-hormonal diets. I recently realized that even though we get our meat from those places, only places that are "certified humane" are the ones that guarantee humane treatment of the animals. Dang it.

I try to buy organic fruits and vegetables if they fall under the Dirty Dozen list that reveals the ones with the most pesticides detected. I buy truly natural, plain yogurt and occasionally Fage with some fruit. I am learning to make breads at home. But I still do a lot of shopping at Aldi: nuts, chocolate, spices, milk, butter, pasta, rice, canned tomatoes, avocados, mushrooms, cheeses, frozen berries, and frozen veggie mixes. Shopping there saves us TONS of money, but after today, I just don't know what to do. I've known for a while that I want to eventually switch us over to more local dairy, but I also found out that the majority of cheeses are made with a GMO--rennet from cloned cows. I need to research this a little more, but let me say...our family LOVES cheese. It is also a great way to easily flavor up the meatless meals I try to make us more and more.

One of the handful of times I've fed my children something with food coloring in it.

I guess I just feel defeated. I know I can do so much more, but it is already so tiring, and so guilt-ridden. I keep trying to cut back on our grocery budget but keep finding it virtually impossible. The more I find out about the food I buy at the regular grocery store, the less I buy, and the more I spend. I hate that this is what it's come to. Plus, I feel doubly guilty because I know that we as Americans spend the least percentage of our income on food. We have so much more disposable income because of it--but it has come at a huge cost. I don't think it takes much thinking to see what that cost is (in the form of disease and death).

Sometimes, yeah...I hate having convictions.

Here I am, somewhere on the New England coast, when I was 2 or 3, I think. I have always loved this photograph, even when I was little. It seemed to encompass how I felt for most of my life, and to say, "Yes, I love cloudy and rainy and misty and stormy days." I'm pretty sure I wasn't thinking about that when this was taken, but, you know, it's fun to superimpose interesting, melancholy thoughts on a person you see in a photograph. Even a child. I also love how this reminds me of my own beautiful daughters: the curly, brown hair and the chubby cheeks, the diaper butt and the sweatpants. My dad took some beautiful photos.