Food and stuff
As I've mentioned, I have a lot of free time on my hands these days. As everyone else says, though, "Not for long!" We'll see when the semester starts, but I'll still have a lot of voided non-school time, especially weekends and evenings and mornings and afternoons; my school is in these big scary blocks.
So. I've taken to coming up with rituals to keep myself from going crazy. Among these rituals includes making food rather than eating out. I must say, I've saved quite a bit of money by not eating at school (out of necessity) every day. As a result, I've taken to looking at food labels more than usual. As an organic foodie, I tend to do this anyway, but usually resign myself to having to eat something I don't want or like occasionally, or something I believe is straight-up toxic even though I protest to its use in the first place.
I've been thinking about what I should do. Since I make all my own food now, I can actually control what goes into my meals and my beverages and all that. So I've come up with some fun rules. Play along!
- If I'm using eating a pre-made food item (pasta, yogurt, etc.), that item should contain things from a whole-food item and be listed as such on the label. "Wild Rice," "Quinoa," and "Milk" count as whole foods.
- Reduce the number of non-food ingredients to as few as possible when possible. This includes things that have been processed in one step or more, such as mechanical extraction or hydrogenation. "Evaporated cane syrup" still counts as a "process" by this rule, as does hydrogenation and "flavoring," whether natural or unnatural.
- Try to reduce the overall number of ingredients to as few as are reasonably possible within a food product. If you're buying bread, how many ingredients does it have? If you're buying yogurt, does it have more than two or three ingredients (milk, cultures...maybe juice for flavor. What else do you need?)
- Are you drinking pure processed sugar and factory produced chemicals? Ew. Try some tea or juice instead. Or water; water can taste good, too; I think we just have the idea that it tastes like nothing. For the record, I'm curious to know if anything in Coke Zero comes from the world or if it's just made in one of those Star Trek materializer gadgets.
- How many unnecessary ingredients are in your food? Sugar, salt, and other things that you don't even really think of when you're consuming it. For example, I put sugar in my coffee so it willt taste sweet, but do I really need sugar in my bread, my tea, my yogurt? No. No I don't. Honestly, I only need flavoring in my yogurt because the taste of it usually makes me gag a little, so a little lime or lemon juice alone does the trick.
And that's pretty much the name of the game. Last night I even had this urge to order a pizza; I was fucking starving. I took a few deep breaths and thought to myself: What do I have in the house that's real food? I made an awesome sandwich and drank some tea on the side. I've been looking for alternatives to scary recovery drinks for my new gym plan, and settled on pure Grape Juice, which seems to have the highest content of simple carbohydrates for anabolic etc, etc (45g per cup; more than fucking lemonade). I've been eating sunflower kernels between meals, but next time I'm going to get the bulk unsalted ones, because the kind I have now are honestly way too salty.
What else...ah. All this is in the wake of two books I finished: The Way of the Peaceful Warrior and Oryx and Crake. Read them, or suffer the consequences of my thorough synopses and light critiques of both!
So. I've taken to coming up with rituals to keep myself from going crazy. Among these rituals includes making food rather than eating out. I must say, I've saved quite a bit of money by not eating at school (out of necessity) every day. As a result, I've taken to looking at food labels more than usual. As an organic foodie, I tend to do this anyway, but usually resign myself to having to eat something I don't want or like occasionally, or something I believe is straight-up toxic even though I protest to its use in the first place.
I've been thinking about what I should do. Since I make all my own food now, I can actually control what goes into my meals and my beverages and all that. So I've come up with some fun rules. Play along!
- If I'm using eating a pre-made food item (pasta, yogurt, etc.), that item should contain things from a whole-food item and be listed as such on the label. "Wild Rice," "Quinoa," and "Milk" count as whole foods.
- Reduce the number of non-food ingredients to as few as possible when possible. This includes things that have been processed in one step or more, such as mechanical extraction or hydrogenation. "Evaporated cane syrup" still counts as a "process" by this rule, as does hydrogenation and "flavoring," whether natural or unnatural.
- Try to reduce the overall number of ingredients to as few as are reasonably possible within a food product. If you're buying bread, how many ingredients does it have? If you're buying yogurt, does it have more than two or three ingredients (milk, cultures...maybe juice for flavor. What else do you need?)
- Are you drinking pure processed sugar and factory produced chemicals? Ew. Try some tea or juice instead. Or water; water can taste good, too; I think we just have the idea that it tastes like nothing. For the record, I'm curious to know if anything in Coke Zero comes from the world or if it's just made in one of those Star Trek materializer gadgets.
- How many unnecessary ingredients are in your food? Sugar, salt, and other things that you don't even really think of when you're consuming it. For example, I put sugar in my coffee so it willt taste sweet, but do I really need sugar in my bread, my tea, my yogurt? No. No I don't. Honestly, I only need flavoring in my yogurt because the taste of it usually makes me gag a little, so a little lime or lemon juice alone does the trick.
And that's pretty much the name of the game. Last night I even had this urge to order a pizza; I was fucking starving. I took a few deep breaths and thought to myself: What do I have in the house that's real food? I made an awesome sandwich and drank some tea on the side. I've been looking for alternatives to scary recovery drinks for my new gym plan, and settled on pure Grape Juice, which seems to have the highest content of simple carbohydrates for anabolic etc, etc (45g per cup; more than fucking lemonade). I've been eating sunflower kernels between meals, but next time I'm going to get the bulk unsalted ones, because the kind I have now are honestly way too salty.
What else...ah. All this is in the wake of two books I finished: The Way of the Peaceful Warrior and Oryx and Crake. Read them, or suffer the consequences of my thorough synopses and light critiques of both!