chew the cud

So i was thinking about this in the shower. it's been in the back of my mind for awhile now but I've skirted the issue deliberately, not wanting to have to change my habits. but ultimately, I believe that this is something no thinking person can avoid confronting. it's a small step to take from purchasing food to wondering where it came from, who made it, under what conditions, and at what cost (not in the dollar sense but in an environmental and social sense, which could and should be translated into economic value but I'm not the person to do that). whether you acknowledge it or not, the answers to these questions have a direct relation to you.

Once these questions have been asked, the answers are easy to find. Michael Pollan is a good place to start, as is Peter Singer but there are other writers out there I haven't read who have written on the subject. There is too much to go into here and I can't pull the facts out of my head automatically but trust me on this (and if you don't, investigate for yourself) the issue of ethical food matters. Where was your food grown? How far has it travelled to get to you? Who grew it and was s/he paid a fair wage? What is in your food (this is particularly relevant when you're looking at processed foods)? Under what conditions was your food grown and are these conditions sustainable? These are the questions that ought to be asked.

It's funny that it took a bar of chocolate I picked up out of curiousity to lead me to this point. See I started thinking in the shower about the trade-off that I make as a consumer in choosing to purchase that expensive ($5 for a 40g bar, to compare $5 for a 250g block of commercial chocolate) piece of chocolate. Simple math, if you look at it from a purely economic angle but then think about what was on the back of the 40g bar. Organic. Fairly traded. Locally made (if using imported cacao). A short, explicit ingredient list (I had a packet of Dove chocolates around. Ingredients: sugar, cocoa mass, cocoa butter, milk solids, emulsifier, flavours, Note the ambiguity of 'flavours', 'emulsifier'. Dove chocs are made by the Mars company too so that means that the cocoa used was not fairly traded).

The bottom line is, I can eat the expensive local, organic, fairly traded chocolate with a clear conscience knowing I have not contributed to a company which condones unfair trade and does not practice full disclosure to the average consumer of its products. Instead of giving money to a large corporation which prioritizes its growth, I'm giving money to a company which funnels it to a community which has worked for it and needs it. This I can live with, even though this chocolate costs 6 times more than the other. I don't need to eat that much more chocolate and I'm willing to cut back on my intake of what is essentially a luxury since the little that I will consume has been ethically produced. It won't make a difference to my food budget (don't really have one, but hypothetically speaking now) because I'll be spending the same amount on chocolate. Less of it, to be sure, but of ethical origins. Extending this to other food groups means that in some, maybe many cases, what I pay for will be of better quality and better nutritional value (fresh produce gets main mention here).

Coincidentally, I'm painting my nails a shimmery rich chocolate. yum.

Dinner: tortilla-base pizza (because the one thing I baulk at is yeast. Especially when I'm hungry) with prosciutto, rocket, bocconcini and tomato. I have some prosciutto to use up and it's too intensely flavoured to eat in a sandwich. shouldn't have bought so much. damn DJs. d-oh. melons and bocconcini and I'm set.


There was a woman in the bus today with a funny hiccoughing laugh. haha. stop. haha. stop. literally. at some point on the way to the city this woman in a suit scooted into the empty seat in front of me. i was distracted for awhile by the hiccup-laugher and then spaced out like you do on bus rides. then i noticed that the woman in front of me appeared to be sleeping, leaning against the side of the bus. she must have had a rough day. since it was 1 in the afternoon, maybe she had to work really early too. as i exited the bus, i glanced at her. puffy faced and tired-eyed. a twinge of sympathy.

reading material

-raw organic activated almond & purple corn dark chocolate-
62% raw cacao
single origin from Satipo Peru
our cacao is fairly treated

** organic chocolate bars are handmade in Melbourne. the organic cacao we use is raw, which means our chocolate has up to 4 times as many antioxidants as conventional chocolate. We use organic agave syrup (a natural, low GI sweetener) instead of sugar to create this delicious chocolate bar.

Ingredients: organic raw cacao butter, organic raw cacao powder, organic agave syrup (dark), organic activated almods, vanilla beans, purple corn extract, himalayan crystal salt.

taste. apparently much better than cacao nibs (I haven't tried, JY has). a bit coarser than commercial dark chocolate but with a more complex flavour. maybe the soft bitty bits were cause it's raw... ooh, himalayan crystal salt, agave syrup. i'm a sucker for new stuff. and packaging. and

fair trade. the makers of this chocolate reportedly observe the spirit of fair trade more than green & blacks and, obviously, the big guns (incidentally, cadbury owns g&b) and definitely more than Lindt, Nestle, Hershey, and the Mars company (crap. boo!! off my safe eating list, you lot.)

more here

I have way too much time on my hands

Pollan is making me seriously think about food for a change (as opposed to what exactly I'm not sure).

New project: Industrial vs organic chicken
Pollan's book is roughly divided into 3 sections; industrial, organic (which has two subdivisions), and personal, each of which traces the paths of produce produced through each system. Industrial follows corn because it's the keystone of American industrial agriculture. Corn - beef, corn - HFCS, cornstarch, dexterin, -glycerides, and other molecular derivatives of corn mass. Thirteen out of the 38 ingredients that go into a Chicken Mcnugget are corn-derived. Yeah, 38. I digress.

What was my point? Oh right, industrial/ organic chicken. So the premise of this experiment is the 'chicken-ness' of say, a Chicken McNugget. Does it really taste like chicken with its 38 ingredients, including natural chicken? I'm not sure. In my memories Chicken McNuggets seems like chicken, although the dominant flavour is the crust of the thing and it's McDonald-ness (no better word, not going to bother trying to find it either). You know that particular flavour or aroma McDonalds food has. The texture of the thing certainly isn't chicken - which isn't surprising considering the 38 things that go into it. The chicken meat that has gone into a Chicken McNugget has been processed and disfigured to the point of no longer resembling it's source. That's my hypothesis.

So I'm going to make a side by side comparison of Chicken McNuggets with a piece of organic, free-range if possible grilled/ pan fried chicken (although these veracity of the labels attached to such a chicken in the supermarket may be misleading, I've got no other source so that chicken will have to do as 'authentic chicken')

And yes, this is an attempt at distracting myself from the boredom and loneliness so I don't give in and call any of them. hah.

Next time, I will only write after having coffee. So incoherent.

strike one: 'fast' food

i don't think i'll be able to look at a maccas meal without seeing a bushel of corn and a gallon of petroleum now

sigh