Recent Thoughts About Food
Dandelions are a fantastically hearty plant and thrive even during dry times when many other annual plants die from lack of water.
Right now, as we enter September and the ground is parched, dandelions are everywhere on our property sporting their bright yellow flowers beloved of bumblebees. One of my favorite sights is a big black and yellow bumblebee visiting a dandelion flower growing at the top of long spindly stalk, and the weight of the bee causes the flower stalk to bend down so the flower touches the ground.
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I’m ever on the quest for sources of protein sympatico with my particular digestive system, now in its 77th year. Dairy, no. Eggs, no. Fish, iffy. Peanut butter, no. Chicken, yes. My homemade granola featuring sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, almonds, and walnuts, yes.
One of my recent finds is a delicious protein-rich gluten-free lentil garbanzo flax seed olive oil bread. I have now made five batches of this bread. My first few batches were good but tended to crumble a bit when slicing. The addition of psyllium husks to the mix has greatly minimized the crumbling.
From May until October, I grow all the lettuce we need for our nightly salads. I also grow lots of potatoes, radishes, salad turnips, bunching onions, carrots, chard, and zucchini. Some years I grow snow peas and sugar snap peas.
I think about food all the time because I’m always planning what to cook for supper and what to have for lunch and breakfast. I like to watch films about how food is made in other cultures. Lately I’ve been watching films about how food is grown and caught and cooked in Iran. This may come as a surprise to Americans who get their news from the mainstream media, but Iranians love food as much as Americans do.
The other thing I’ve learned from watching these films about Iranians farming and fishing and cooking and eating is that Iranians are beautiful people indistinguishable from American people, and they do not want to starve, which is something the American government keeps saying America wants to do to the Iranian people: starve them. I don’t know about you, but in terms of waging illegal wars and trying to starve people in other countries, the American government does not speak for me.
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Marcia and I are now making our own tortillas. Holy smokes are they good.
Last night for supper I made a bean and vegetable mélange to have with our corn tortillas. The meal was so good we kept referencing the scene from the movie Big Night in which the Italian chef played by Tony Shalhoub is talking excitedly about the food in Bologna, Italy. He means to say that the Lasagna Bolognese his uncle makes “is to die for,” but because Tony’s character’s English is not so good, he says the food is so good that after you eat it “you have to kill yourself. You can’t live!”
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I recently heard an excellent lecture by the brilliant economist Richard Wolff on the Great Depression in America that lasted for most of the 1930s. He said that unemployment in America during the Great Depression was officially 25%, though it was actually much higher than that. Tens of millions of people didn’t have enough food to eat for many years. He said indications are we may soon be in the midst of another great depression largely due to our government doing the bidding of fossil fuel corporations, billionaires, and the Israeli lobby, and not serving the majority of Americans.
The majority of American do not want to spend money on needless wars against beautiful people who love food as much as we do. The majority of Americans don’t want to pursue policies creating the global environmental catastrophe currently unfolding. The majority of Americans do not support genocide being carried out by the Israelis against the Palestinians and the Lebanese, which genocide is entirely funded by the American government.
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I like learning how to make tasty nutritious meals with organically grown foodstuffs that are not prohibitively expensive. One way to learn how to do this is to watch films about how food is made in other countries where most of the food is made with inexpensive foodstuffs. Of late I especially love watching people in Mexico, Malaysia, and Iran make their food.
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Beans and corn tortillas make a complete protein! Yum!
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The salads Marcia makes from the lettuce and radishes and salad turnips we grow, along with the micro-greens I buy at the Farmers Market, are so good you have to kill yourself. You can’t live.
fin
Max from Todd’s album Through the Fire