Good Food is Everybody's Business
At GoodFood World, we’re all about whole or minimally processed food and avoiding all those additives and preservatives that Big Food uses to give “edible food-like substances” their creative aromas, peculiar colors, more-intense-than-real flavors, and months’ long shelf life.
Today I received an email inviting me to subscribe to a program (for $180/year!) where I could get a discount (and $80 shipping credit on each order) for beef “sourced from ethical farms within the world’s best regions for raising beef.” Which are? According to Herd and Grace, those regions are Southern Australia and Tasmania, more than 8700 miles away. What???
It is high time we confessed: we eat meat. The message we are trying to convey with this particular good food experience (a vegetarian meal prepared for guests in Seattle about ten years ago) is that there is wonderful good taste and variety available in natural, whole food for people who want to be healthy. What is more, for people who choose to stop eating unhealthful processed food full of salt, sugar, fat, and chemicals that enhance taste and extend shelf life, good nutritious food is available and affordable.
Just a couple of years ago, we could all take our food for granted; it was just there. Pretty good quality, the produce seemed fresh, …
One hundred years ago, the Helena Commercial Club, a local service organization, published a booklet promoting the Helena Valley as a “Land of Opportunity for Real Farmers.” Today the Valley is “growing” 5-, 10-, and 20-acre residential lots instead. We no longer hear the rousing enthusiasm for local food grown just minutes from the city limits.
Bread was truly the “staff of life” for both the peasant and the nobleman for centuries. In the Middle Ages, for example, a majority of the population – mostly peasants – ate 2 to 3 pounds of bread a day. Today, even with government recommendations of 6 to 8 ounces of “grain equivalents” a day, most Americans are eating about half as much bread as they did just 40 years ago.
If you were to eat a dinner consisting only of Montana’s top agricultural products, here’s what you’d have in front of you: steak, a potato (no butter or sour cream, sorry), a big piece of bread, a cold glass of beer, and a piece of black cherry pie. What happened to that salad or side serving of veggies?
