Archive for 2012

Sometimes I just can’t even believe that  a mere 150 or so years ago, to get across this massive country of ours, you’d have to hitch up your horses, pack up 3 months worth of non-perishable food, load up your rifle, pack up the family, and set off in a wagon. Made of wood. With no real roads and nary a town west of the Mississippi ’til you hit LA, (if you made it all the way), you were seriously on your own. With no rest-stops, no Panera and Quik-Check, and Iron Skillet guiding you westward, I find it hard to believe that people even made it. How did we manage to settle across such a gigantically freaking huge land mass in just 200-odd years? Using horses, and wagons? 

I know people made it ok, like the Ingalls, my favorite family, and thrived and all, but not everyone was so lucky, or smart, or maybe just good at finding food. I’d like to think I would have made it, I’m pretty resourceful, and semi-tough, and despite my weekly rantings, not too picky about food. Not that pickiness would play any part in trans-continental survival. Eat or be eaten would be my motto. (still kind of is)

So why is it so hard for me now, in our world of endless-food-at-our-fingertips, to ever find something to eat when I’m on the road? The modern, paved, petroleum-fueled road lined with food options. Maybe because in that 150-odd years, we’ve turned our food into Foodiness, and I was really meant to travel by covered wagon, not by Subaru Forester or Southwest?

In tonight’s episode — Big Foodiness Gets Occupied — I get real about how to snatch food back from the jaws of corporate foodiness with Occupy Big Food co-founder Kristin Wartman; why the McDonalds and Applebee’s crowd or the garden burger and protein bar crowd should care about how their chicken fingers or their Tofu Chik’n Fingers are produced; Wartman’s theory that the Sarah Palin chocolate chip cookie defenders identify with their corporate food kidnappers a la the Stockholm Syndrome; and whether the Occupy Big Food message can realistically get out to the mainstream in time to save food for the future or if real food is going to be permanently replaced by foodiness like Facebook has replaced friends and reality shows have replaced talent.

Tonight, finally! A new live show! “Food is already smart…” On tonight’s all-new live show…Don’t lie to me and tell me that my food is “smart” or “enhanced” or a “better choice”, that’s all just Foodiness, and I KNOW what real looks like, tastes like, and smells like, and it doesn’t look like that stuff.

And I know how to COOK it, despite a childhood filled with James T. Kirk, 2001 and the Flintstones (remember Gazoo?) predicting pellets, pills and simulators. Sci-Fi may have told us that science and technology would bring us better, enhanced, smarter food in the future, but the future is now, and I’m not seeing all that much that impresses me. In fact, Foodiness seems to be the direct descendent of Soylent Green, and we know how that all turned out. Thank Jeezus I watched more “Little House” than “Battlestar Galactica”…I’d rather eat dinner with Laura and kiss-ass Mary, than with James T. and Scotty. Well, I’d rather eat their food, actually, the rest of the night might be more fun with the Enterprise gang….Anyway, my food is already smart, ‘cuz it’s REAL. So screw you Foodiness!

Also, a word or two about poop.