The Birth of a Foodie
Dear Readers,
Big changes are coming to my blog. The most important is the the blog is both changing name and locale. I will now edit and contribute to the (tentatively named) Local Flavor section at Wolverine CuiZine. Don’t be afraid to follow me over: the new blog will be just like the old one, but with more stuff! This summer of blogging has been delicious, and so, without further ado, here is my final retrospective as a soloist:
“The Birth of a Foodie”
Until recently, my typical trip to the grocery store always followed the same basic pattern: walk into Meijer, stroll down every aisle, place the most colorful or convincingly packaged items in my cart, proceed to checkout. Cooking was just as simple: if something fresh is in the fridge, eat it. If not, have a Lean Cuisine. Now there is nothing terribly wrong with taking this approach to food — I was still healthy and was usually well fed — but my habits changed drastically when this summer arrived, and so began my transformation from supermarket victim to farmer’s market junkie.
In April I (mostly) gave up eating meat. I had a dozen reasons, from animal rights to nutrition, from the horrors of factory farming to summertime boredom, but my near-vegetarianism had an unexpected consequence: I was suddenly aware of the food that lay in front of me. “What is in this?” That seemingly simple question upended my conception of food. I began tracing back the foods I ate to their sources. With the help of a few alarming books, I could soon see the path a particular item had taken from natural produce to processed product. How seductive that knowledge can be! I hated the thought of being manipulated by corporate propaganda, and so a small dose of awareness soon rearranged my whole diet. Suddenly food excited me and I wanted to spread my new taste for food, so in June I started a blog.
Blogging was not what I had anticipated. If you are unfamiliar, a blogger trolls the Internet until he or she finds something interesting. The blogger proceeds to post a link to that item to his or her blog, usually accompanied by an inane comment or rant. On rare and momentous occasions the blogger adds some valuable, original content to his or her blog, and these microscopic injections of valuable information keep the blogosphere revolving, however slowly or precipitously. Those were my initial impressions of blogging, but I soon realized that the concept is saved by its shear size. There are so many blogs that a great wealth of information is being created and delivered to audiences that are far more targeted than those of any newspaper. Like Wikipedia, blogs are making information simultaneously more global and more accessible.
Coming back to the issue of food, I have learned a great deal from a few short months of floating around the blogosphere like a culinary Ziggy Stardust. In fact, the topic of my blogging has affected far more than my diet.
Eating is an awesome hobby for more reasons than I could fit in a pastel cornucopia. First, every culture loves its own local cuisine. I challenge you to find a country, except perhaps our own, where the deeply rooted local dishes are not a source of pride. Educated cooks and eaters can make friends in any part of the world because they have that one universal thing in common. If we ever meet aliens and their diets are similar to ours, send the cooks in first. Along with sex, eating is the defining experience of animal life, and humans have gone a step further. With our development of cooking and a thoroughly omnivorous diet, eating has become as creative and entertaining as anything we do (again, right along with sex).
As a kid I was always a huge car buff. I could name every modern supercar and ten statistics to go with it, but I realized after receiving my first paycheck that my Porsche Carrera GT was a long way off. Most of us will not own more than a dozen cars in a lifetime. However, if you eat three meals a day and live for 78 years, you will have consumed 85,410 meals. Unless you plan to become a connoisseur of oxygen, cooking and eating constitute the most spacious hobby imaginable.
Now I’ve always disliked the work ‘foodie.’ It seems elitist, unattainable and somehow associated with French cuisine. After a summer of cooking and eating I have one piece of advice for newborn foodies and it is most eloquently rendered in the movie Ratatouille: don’t be Anton Ego, that closed-minded toad of a food critic. He is the type of eater that gives the term ‘foodie’ its negative connotation. Instead, try to be like Remy, the food-loving rat with an eager stomach and a daring palate. The key to being a likable foodie is to embrace all the food around you. Make a meal out of brown rice and black beans, and simply enjoy their natural flavors (of course a little salsa helps). So, with Joe the Plumber in mind, I propose that foodie be re-ordained as an everyman’s term, a label for anyone and everyone who likes to eat.
