My story of food - III

Tomorrow Michael Pollan, Author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and most recently In Defense of Food, will be in Salt Lake City to speak on… surprise… food. Or more to the point, what we eat and how we eat it. In that spirit I decided Monday to take a look at my own "Story of Food"; how I was influenced and how I have changed and grown.

Feast after Famine

Yesterday I told you about a couple of later influences in my food history and about how drastically that changed when I was on my own. I spent a lot of years essentially in a food purgatory. In 1999 I met my soul mate (and just for the record, I don't throw that phrase around lightly.) But the food drought wasn't over yet. There were a couple of very lean years after we first got together. My good job of the last 3 years had been jettisoned because I had had to relocate and the work that I could get, was barely above minimum wage. We lived on little, received food assistance from our church, and at one point needed to store food in the snowbank for a while because we had no refrigerator. In March 2001, just as we were getting settled into a routine, providence shined on us and I fell into the position that I am in today. My income more than doubled overnight, and before long we were eating like kings (or at least it seemed that way from where we had come).
I mentioned A~ being from West Virginia and having a strong food tradition of her own, well that tradition combined with her skills in the kitchen and desire to feed people had many upsides. Delicious brown beans and cornbread, Biscuits and gravy with fried eggs, sweet potato pie; all of which I had had at least limited exposure to at some point, but had never had made like these. One down side, I also quickly learned, was that the secret of such mouth watering delights was bacon grease, sugar, shortening and huge portions . I don't have a problem with using bacon grease for some things, and there's really no other way to make proper biscuits and gravy if you ask me, but my fathers entire side of the family has a long history of heart disease and now that I was finally happy with my life I wanted to be around to enjoy it for a while. Long story short, after nearly six years of the dietary equivalent of reckless abandon, I had grown to approx 220+ lbs from my previous all time high of 153. Mind you I worked physically a lot through the latter years, and a lot of that gain was in new muscle, but much was what one of my coworkers likes to call "table muscle". This brings me to last year.

One of my new years resolution for last year was to begin to get myself healthier. It was the first time in my life that the prospect of a diet was looming before me, and I didn't really know what to do about it.

Tomorrow is Michael Pollans lecture and I'll take that cue to wrap up this Story of Food with how a shift of perspective and some good advice lead to unforeseen changes.

P~

~~For those of you that read this through a reader of some sort, I appologize for the duplicate post.~~