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Here’s a little train of thought video I made after I read this NYT article on which recipe steps stop a cook in their tracks.(via Lifehacker)

photo credit: aJ GAZMEN - GucciBeaR

A phrase that’s been thrown around a lot recently is:

Eat food. Not to Much. Mostly Plants.

And there’s certainly nothing incorrect about it, but it’s so alien to the way we eat in America I don’t know how anyone could apply it. We not only eat a huge amount of meat, but we don’t even realize what else there is to eat. We define our meals by what meat we’re eating; Steaks, hamburger, etc.

And as for eating food, that ship has sailed. We eat things that are processed into generic blocks of transportable organic matter then processed again to replicate the taste, texture and shape of food. But we don’t even know where to start with eating actual food. So I’m picking a place to start and throwing down the gauntlet

We start with a definition, what is food? Food, as we’ve come to know it in the western world, is a composition of 4 different groups:

1. Meat. Good old meat. We eat more of it then we should, but there’s no getting around the fact that it’s the most nutrient (and calorie) dense category of food available. I certainly don’t suggest getting rid of it, but if you’re eating more than 4 ounces it really should be a special occasion.
2. Fruits and Vegetables. Nothing revolutionary here. Too often we relegate these to side dish simply because we don’t have the skills to make them as tasty and desirable as meat. That’s something we have to fix.
3. Herbs and Spices. Basically, anything eaten for taste and not calories or nutrients. Again it’s something we are woefully inadequate at using. And considering our ancestors enslaved whole continents just to get a hold of some of these spices, I think maybe we should pay a little more attention.
4. Staples. Staples are building blocks of any meal. If dinner were a cathedral the staples would be the…building blocks of the cathedral. One of the things that always makes me laugh is how cheap staples are in America even when we don’t know how to use them. Do you know that you can make pancake mix for about 25 cents, the same mix you’d pay $3 a box for at the store? Mastering staples will save us huge amounts of money (especially as global prices for them rise) and are the gateway to eating actual food.

So over the next few weeks I’ll be talking about each of these in turn. How we can better acquaint ourselves with each, how we can master them and create real food. So many of us are used to eating frozen mini-hamburgers we heat up with a microwave we’ve forgotten what actual food tastes like. We’ve forgotten how much better our lives can be when we eat it and make it ourselves.

This post is the beginning of remembering(cue the theme music from Red Dawn).

photo credit: Randy Son Of Robert