So for lunch today, my wife was home once again and ate exactly the same sandwich that she ate yesterday, as did my other little granola girl. I ate the braised-cauliflower leftovers.
Here's a picture of my hunter gal-therer showing the snacks we (the girls and I) ate after school:
Let's diagnose this plate, shall we? Let's see, we have pistachios in their shells, dried mango at 9 o'clock, raisins at the top, and those are those home-made Tamari-roasted almonds I've mentioned before, which you can make right-quick at home. Three out of four of those came from a package, but I don't know how many people would say these are typical snack foods they'd give to their kids, not to mention this particular gal-therer could be arrested if she were caught threatening the denizens of her school with wild offerings, recklessly waving bunched handfuls of almonds and pistachios like a puerile pirate.
I don't know, when I look at this picture myself, there's something very, er, non-North American about it, as if my daughter has been spending the last two weeks on a walk-about with Marlo Morgan (see Mutant Message Down Under
) or the Tanzanian Hadza Tribe
.
Perhaps it's because we forgot what it used to be like out there in nomad land as we scoured the trees and bushes before we learned how to make a spear. I wonder what we ate before we learned how to shoot a buffalo between the eyes with a well-honed arrow-tip. Did we just scavenge around eating left-over "roadkill" like the vultures? What drove us to hunting, I wonder. Weren't we just satisfied eating nuts and berries? Hmmm...
Veggie Daddy Fun Fact:
It took 150,000 years to learn how to sharpen one side of a spear. It took another 150,000 years to learn that we could sharpen the other side. From what I understand (from Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines)
this is because the more technologically advanced we become, the faster time goes. So before the Industrial Revolution, there was a huge 5,000 year gap of technological advancement. Before the Industrial Revolution, the British didn't live all that much better than those of early civilizations 5,000 years prior. It is the Industrial Revolution which threw us out of the Malthusian Trap. So after the I.R., the time between significant events began to shrink exponentially, and so now, for us, time seems to actually speed up. I-Pad 2, Nintendo 3DS--we are like a gargantuan snowball careening ever-faster downwards, absorbing everything in our (some would say "destructive") path. Or are we rolling upwards? Are we rolling off a cliff?So while time was uber-slow, molasses-dripping slow, and nothing significant ever happened, I have to ask the question, what did we eat during the 300,000 years it took us to learn how to carve a spearhead? Anyone? I imagine the meal must have looked something like the food on my daughter's plate, which looks...ancient. Like I can't identify with it, but seems somehow to make all the sense in the world if I think about it hard enough.
I must admit, eating kissed-by-the-sun dried mangoes (I'm lying, we bought them at Cost-Co--don't tell anyone!), pistachios, almonds, kissed-by-the-sun grapes (nope--Sunmaid!), choosing to consume such primitive nibbles as these does not come naturally to me. I have to actually make the conscious decision to go to the cupboard and eat these strange little pods that seem to have descended down from another planet. And why? We just aren't brought up that way, not the majority of us. And certainly, especially in today's world of blue dinosaurs bleeding their gelatinous insides into their instant-and-distant, runny oatmeal, neither are our kids.
Perhaps we've lost touch with our roots. Not all of us, though. There is now a small, very small, minority of us out there who are highly conscious of the fact that in our fast-paced, high-tech world, we have lost something big, something important, something like a connection to our ancient, ancient past, before the time that we hunted game with crude weaponry. We seemed to have lost the connection to the fact that we use to eat actual food, bright and vivid as a double rainbow, oh my god, and when we see something so colorful, we can only zone out on the literal acid trip we have riddled our bodies with when we eat non-food, processed food, food that has lost so much vitality that we must shoot them in their arms with chemicals and colors and pretend it is food that is alive, but is actually dead. And we do the same to livestock.
Veggie Daddy Fun (NOT FUN AT ALL!!!) Fact: 70% of antibiotics are given to our healthy livestock.
I have actually heard it is more. Chilling...and so we're illing.
Veggie Daddy Parent Tip: Modeling, Modeling, Modeling
No, I'm not talking about walking down a runway pretending you're Pamela Anderson. If we want our kids to find this lost connection, we must model eating such real foods ourselves. We must let our kids see us enjoying the "fruits of our labor," and they too will follow. They, too, will begin to see, as they stroll through aisle after aisle of dead food on the shelves of the grocery store, that there is a true double rainbow of good food waiting for them, that there is a true difference between alive food that is bright and vivid as opposed to dead food that they have to throw thirty different additives to it so it actually tastes good, but mostly just tastes like sugar and high fructose corn syrup.
Veggie Daddy Rule #4: We must model eating b(right) food, and our kids will too. The kids actually want to.
Pick up an almond or a peach as consciously as you would go for a walk around the block or do a push-up because you know you have to exercise. It's not about eating right. It's about making the conscious decision to eat real food, pesticide-riddled or not. It is better than eating dead food.
Let's model eating food that has the real colors of the rainbow that nature naturally provided us while we were lying around in the sun wondering how to carve the other side of that spear, before we learned to hunt. EAT REAL FOOD the way nature intended and we can help our kids and ourselves discover our own (double) rainbow connection. Oh my god.
This rich, orange-colored butternut squash...
The dish was good, but I would like to call attention to the colors of the squash when it was raw and when it was cooked. Notice anything different? Yep, the color is gone. Many of the best nutrients in raw food take a trip to Neverland once you cook them. The evidence is as plain as the taste of the glowing Kraft Dinner in your child's bowl. Even if you eat nothing raw all day, throwing in a salad, and there are so many kinds, with your dinner is a perfect way to get back to your roots.
If you would like advice on how to get your children to eat more real food, here is a little tip. And don't forget to model! Work it, baby, work it!
If you would like advice on how to get your children to eat more real food, here is a little tip. And don't forget to model! Work it, baby, work it!
Why are there so many songs about rainbows
And what's on the other side?
Rainbows are visions, but only illusions,
And rainbows have nothing to hide.
So we've been told and some choose to believe it
I know they're wrong, wait and see.
Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection,
The lovers, the dreamers and me.
--Paul Williams
Eat B(right),
Veggie Daddy
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