I like food.
Really, I’m a big fan. I like meat, and potatoes, and rice, and veggies (for the most part), and fruit, and bread, and grease, and ooey gooey yummy sticky chocolaty stuff.
Mexican food? Oh, yeah. Italian? Chinese? Bring it on. Sausages full of secrets from around the world—and around the pig? Make it so, brother.
I’m not a sushi fan—I’ll admit to that. Squid is a “No,” as is any sort of snailish creature. And once when I was in China I was served a soup with both halves of a very dead pigeon bobbing in it—seriously creeped me out.
Oh, and tomatoes. Not even, really, a food.
Apart from that, however, my taste buds are pretty much open for business.
Food is one of the many reasons I adore my bride. The lady can cook. For a guy who grew up on Hungry Man dinners and something we called “Boil in the Bag,” married life has been a culinary delight.
Which is why I am so frightened.
See, Cathy has been reading a book, and doing research, and she’s developing some truly scary ideas.
I think I need to back up and explain a few things about The Wife of My Heart. This beautiful woman of God is committed to living a life worthy of the calling she has received, and part of that calling is to feed our family. To that end, she is always looking for ways to improve the quality of our diet, while working within the budget constraints that come with a single-income teacher salary. For years now Cathy has fought a valiant battle against the forces of ill-nutrition. She designs, plans, and prepares meals that fit all the latest guidelines of good health.
Which keep changing.
When we first married, fat was evil. If you wanted to be healthy, you avoided fat, particularly “saturated fats,” a term I remember but don’t pretend to fully understand.
Later, the Whole Foods movement came along. Now, fat was good, so long as it was natural fat and not factory fat. This gave Cathy some difficulty, because the idea of eating the dark and deadly saturated fats—and I’m still not totally sure what those were—went against everything she had been taught about nutrition. At the same time, the Whole Foods people made some great points about eating foods whose origins you could identify. I know what a cow looks like, and I have a pretty good idea of how butter comes to be. As to margarine…I wouldn’t know where to begin. I think it comes from a canola, which is….?
In the end, whole foods won. I was jazzed about this, because it meant one beautiful thing to me: I got to eat butter again.
Part of the whole foods concept was eating whole wheat, so Cathy started buying grain by the 50lb. sack and grinding her own flour. I gotta tell you—I felt like Charles Ingalls. Homemade whole-wheat bread from fresh-ground flour…oh, oh, oh! Cathy was just about ready to go to the next level, which involved “sprouting” the grain—and here I should tell you that I am dubious about foods that have “sprouted.” When we clean out the fridge, we usually throw that stuff away.
Anyway, she was just about ready to go to this level when disaster struck.
She read a new book.
A book that may change everything.
I’ll tell you more next time.
