I’ve always enjoyed cooking, and I’ve always been concerned about the treatment of farm animals. I was a vegetarian for several years, and I have an abiding interest in dietary science. But, as much as I am and always have been interested in food, I am blessed to have a reasonably healthy relationship with it. While I may choose to eat or not eat certain foods, I usually don’t think about it much once I get in a routine, and it doesn’t bother me if I eat something outside my day to day fare. As Bob Dylan said,
I’ll eat when I’m hungry, drink when I’m dry
And live my life on the square
And even if the flesh falls off of my face
I know someone will be there to care
Okay, the last two lines are kind of weird and creepy, but the basic idea stands - my general approach to eating has been to find food I enjoy and then to consume it until full.
This made the first few months quite interesting. Going into this project I hoped that the limitations it imposed would give me a sort of meditative peace, that eating the few good things would eventually become a pleasant routine. This was not the case, unfortunately. While I didn’t go hungry, and, as I’ve mentioned, I did not reach a point where individual meals became unappealing, I did become preoccupied with every little bit of variation I could eke out. More generally, while my thinking did not become obsessive, I did spend more time dwelling on what I could eat and when. In part this doubtless arose due to the immense amount of illegal food I could not help encountering in my day to day; if I truly did not have any other options, I doubt I would be so concerned with what I wasn’t eating.
But the beautiful weather we’ve had for the past couple weeks has made me think that a big part of it might just have been boredom. Now that things have warmed up a bit, there are suddenly not enough hours of daylight to do everything I want to. I’m back to eating two large meals a day, and while I enjoy them, they are taking up far less mental space than when it was still freezing out. However, the forecast is calling for the coming week to be filled with days of chilly drizzle, so we'll probably find out how many oat flour and lard cookies I can go through if I set my mind to it.
-Garth
