Sowing Thoughts Today





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I've been thinking about how to write this post all day. There are many thoughts in my head that I don't know how to organize so I'm going to just go stream-of-conscious today. I just got back from a long weekend in New Orleans visiting friends and eating, drinking, and being extremely merry. All that rich food, sun, and general excess have taken a small toll on my skin and body and I started a detox/liver cleanse this morning--no caffeine, alcohol, processed foods, sugar, junk food, or red meat for two weeks. I use soy butter, soy-yogurt, and soy milk anyway, so avoiding dairy won't be an issue (except for my sincere love of cheese). I'll mainly be eating lots of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and legumes. I'm not sure if I'll eat chicken, fish, or eggs yet. We'll see how the first week goes. (I sort of just made this menu up from various cleansing articles and vegetarian/vegan meal plans that I collected).

Along the lines of this type of "clean" thinking, I started reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle on the plane ride home. I have read almost all of Barbara Kingsolver's ficition, and I have been on a long waiting list at the library for this one. I love the concept of trying to only eat what you can grow or obtain locally, but my first and immediate thought was there's no way I could ever do this. Like the author's daughter, I love fruit and like having access to it year-round, especially tomatoes and strawberries. But I also understand that big chain grocery store produce is not grown for flavor and tastes nothing like what you can grow in your own backyard, and sometimes--actually, most of the time--my store-bought tomatoes and strawberries go bad after a day or two. I'm at the part in the book where the author's daughter mentions that now that the family is in the middle of this project, she doesn't even think twice when she sees ripe strawberries for sale on the farmers' market truck--buy them up now while they're in season because you won't be able to get them for another year. Getting to this part of the book now is so appropriate because we just planted strawberry plants last week. We didn't have much luck growing them last year.  At the end of May we have strawberry festivals in Virginia. This year I'm not only going to grow my own, but I'm going to stock up on fresh, in-season strawberries, and freeze them so that I can have them year-round.

So thoughts of my garden, in-season-eating, and my cleansing diet were consuming me this morning when I turned on the news. As a former New Yorker who spent several years working in a building that overlooked the pit at Ground Zero, I am happy that bin Laden's death may bring comfort to those who lost loved ones on 9/11 and have been seeking some sort of closure or justice. It's a morbid sort of feeling, and it feels wrong to rejoice in someone's death, but it also sort of feels necessary (?). I'm not sure how to process my thoughts as I watch images of 9/11 and hear people getting emotional as they relive that day, and then see images of air raides and other violence. I actually want to cleanse my mind as I'm cleansing my body over the next two weeks. I'd like to try to keep negative thoughts out. I'm not sure yet how I'll even attempt that.

The other news bookend to this weekend was, of course, the royal wedding. I visited Windsor Castle a few years ago as part of a vacation in London, and I had one of the best meals of that trip in a pub right next to the castle. So I'm ending this post on a happy memory, and bringing it back to food.