So, a Chinese Caveman walks in the door

I have a confession to make. I’m embarrassed of it, as I should be because I know better. I mean hell, I’m an educated sometimes intelligent human being that reads zines and Utne and knows that looks really are what get you through life…but,
I DRINK SODA
Yep, kiss my ass, I do
Which brings me to my current status as an absolutely and absurdly so, strong disliker of most “Foodie” culture. Before you lambast me with your organic heirloom cross bread Armenian sown peasant tomatoes, let me tell you that this has been building for twenty years.
Twenty years ago I went away to college (a bit late, I realize) and my eyes were opened to a big big world out there filled with small college town co-ops that smelled like vitamins and freshly ground peanut butter. I signed up on the dotted line and spent a few hours a week re-stocking shelves of tempeh and celery hearts for my fifteen percent discount. I read John Robbins Diet for a New America and went vegetarian to save the hens from their own long toenails. I even had a “Stop Factory Farming” bumper sticker on my car in 1993. I met people that wouldn’t enslave bees for honey or objectify a heifer to hold up their pants. It was fun and idealistic to say the least. The problem came from the fact I was (and still am) a huge hypocrite. I wanted chicken. No matter how hard I tried, I wanted that fleshy thigh BBQd with a crispy skin slightly charred. I felt satisfied after eating it in a way that rice and bulgur never could do. I lasted on and off for nine years until I finally said to hell with it. Thank god I quit that crap before heading around the world and being subjected to endless days of eggs, cheese and carbs as was the fate of my then still vegetarian husband.
In the process of the vegetarian years, people began to care what happened to their food and what path it took to their dinner plates in new unprecedented scrutiny. No longer was it acceptable to simply eat healthy from the garden with or without meat but now it had to be certified, prepared by ethnic grandmas and follow a code of ethics made for scientific investigators. I knew something was amiss when I heard my friends declare their three year old had a piñata filled with raisins and peanuts. Gone were the days of whole wheat bread and fresh fruit as the healthy lifestyle for children. This new movement was gonna require charts and books and a healthy dose of time shoppin’ and choppin’.
In the process of this movement and even before I felt its hands clasp around my bank account, I had reckoned a problem with my own environmental ethics. Mainly the feeling of an elitist movement filled with overly educated and financed whities (gulp, hi!). You have to remember that in this decade of my twenties, I was also traveling the world and watching naked children eat garbage out of the streets and women living in plastic bags sleeping on the sides of highways. Caring about the direction of my lettuce from inception seemed a bit preposterous to my brain upon re-entry into American culture. “Hey leper, if you had fingers which lettuce would you buy with your money you spent begging for all day while sitting in a gutter?”
It was around this time that I first pulled away from said movement for financial and social reasons. We bought a house and began to have babies. Simply trying to get dinner on the table and pay a mortgage without all the extras needed to be a participant in the new culture, seemed monumental. I had given up the vegetarianism and was simply trying to eat healthy and stay awake at three o’clock in the afternoon. And so I missed the bus. Of course I didn’t want to get on the bus (moo), as usual, but I definitely missed it.
In walks the new foodie culture, club, cult, occult. In walks the glass bottled, soybean GORP, food club naming world of “the new foodie”. It was no longer about eating good food because it tasted good or felt good in your body but instead it was the new club because “they” told us we should eat this way (god, scientists, John Locke?)
Which brings me to a conversation I had today with my dear friend “Butter” (I won’t “out” her for fear of the retribution from animal loving vegans out there). Butter has been playing with different food eating plans for as long as I’ve known her. She used to bake all the family breads and strive for vegetarianism. I know she’s gone vegan and struggled with what fit best in her body. Well, I haven’t seen Butter for awhile and went for a little visit today. It was sitting around the table that she confessed that she had finally found the right elixir. She’s now a PALEO eater meaning a meat, fruit and veggie eater. Picture cavemen in the burbs. It is the way to eat she says. She, of course, knows that I’m a foodie culture strong disliker so she brings this up to get to me (Bitchy Butter is kind of a cute nickname don’t you think?) I tell her that she sounds just like every other food cult out there. She sounds no different than my own in-laws that read a book called the China study and once again, changed their entire lives declaring that everyone will die of prostate cancer if they eat red meat. Of course Paleo Butter declares soy is bad, etc. etc. etc.. Hmmmm, says I.
Now, I’ve been living in a school bus for nine months. We don’t read guide books as a family. We don’t have many cook books on the bus either. We just have to wing it because sometimes in Baja, um, you eat what they have, not what you want. What we do know is that if something doesn’t feel good in our tummies, we all know it. Phelan did say just last week that we should have some sugar free days after receiving some pretty fun candy from visiting cousins. Ryder has told me he sometimes feels hungry for no reason in the middle of the night. Steve and I have noticed how we feel if we eat too much meat or if there isn’t enough salad in our diet. All of it has come from simply listening to our bodies and how they process our food. Not to get too graphic but this is a small space with five people sharing an RV bathroom – there are no secrets. We have found a groove for our family without little voices pulling at our wallets, hearts, souls.
Guide books sadly take away our intuition by flooding our heads with ideas that may or may not be true for each individual or um, true. Eating a vegetable with every meal sounds like a good idea but some of “them” think vegetables should be eaten alone without being mixed with proteins. Eating as much meat as you want might work until you’re a certain age and then maybe your body won’t work so well with high quantities, like cats. I know that soy milk was the one thing that made my boys bleed in their diapers when they were babies so I cannot imagine what would happen if we gave it to them all the time. I don’t like bulgar but I love quinoa and millet. I also know that pasta makes me feel too full as does a steak and ice cream and I are not friends. I know that if I bought the food I’m supposed to according to them and the latest Acai berry manufacturer, I would never be able to sit on a beach in Mexico with my husband and kids for months at a time watching flamingoes fly by while my children look for dolphins and whales soaking up their daily intake of vitamin D. Life is about choices and thank god, we get to make them every day about how we live. So, be good to yourself and make yourself happy because that is the key to life – happiness (“they” told me that, btw). It is the only thing you can control and it is the only thing worth pursuing. If you want to be a caveman or Chinese, do it with love and laughter, and relish it to the fullest… organically though…mango corn relish that is, made by Mayans, on the equinox, while sacrificing a virgin squirrel just as the sun sets....

**Dedicated with love and laughs to Dick & Kay, Trader Joe’s and my friend that needs some new SOX.