Food for Thought

There's a lot to think about when it comes to food. Here are some of the things on my mind:

• My table is the centerpiece of my hospitality. When people are coming over, I spend the most time thinking about what I'm going to feed my guests, rather than what activities we're going to do.
• I loved making homemade baby food and feeding it to Vinny. There was something very satisfying about watching him experience these foods for the first time. It was almost therapeutic enough to make up for my inability to breastfeed him.
• It's important to be aware of what goes in your mouth. Jeff and I have been using the program Diet Power to track what goes in our mouths for several weeks now. I've lost about 4 pounds since the beginning of the year.
• It is a privilege to need to track what goes in my mouth. We have such an excess of food here in this household and in most households in this country. There are far too many people who don't have enough.
• Having more than a meager graduate student income has enabled us to quit buying the cheapest food and buy better quality food instead. For example, we get all our meat from a company that doesn't use growth hormones in their animals, resulting in a better tasting and healthier meat. It is wonderful to have room for that sort of expenditure in our food budget.
• I think I'd like to join a CSA this year. I've said that every year, and forgotten about it until it's too late every year. My state has a pretty informative agriculture website where I've seen a list of CSA farms and I need to look at that again sooner rather than later.