Food and well-being

I often patronize our local food co-op, Kent Natural Foods, where I am a member, which entitles me to 5% percent off. I don't buy everything there, because I often think our family can't afford it, even with my discount.  In fact, the whole organic thing is a big, huge, major conflict in my head. I think we should all be eating only organic. We should all be putting only organic shampoos on our heads next to our brains. We should be using oils to polish our furniture instead of chemicals, etc. But organic is so much more expensive; I have never been able to get my head around financing.

Recently, the co-op's Sheila Harko asked me if I'd be willing to be the volunteer photographer for the co-op! Every month, I'll shoot promotional photos, baskets of food that I put together, etc. For every hour I work, I get an additional percentage off for a month. And so for the month of March, I get about 9 percent off all purchases!

This offer happened right about the time I decided I can't take the conflict in my head anymore. I am going as organic as I can. I can justify this by knowing I will be better off as a result, and so will my family, when they eat what I eat. As for money, I imagine myself taking an organic PB and J on organic wheat to a soccer game from now on, instead of buying a Burger King veggie burger. I imagine myself preferring to make myself a cup of organic green tea, with steamed rice milk, which I can make here, instead of buying at Starbucks.

And so yesterday, I spent more than I've ever spent!

One hundred dollars, knocked down from $107, because of my discount!! Ta da!

I bought LOTS of avocadoes, lots of greens and veggies, a big bag of barley. I bought soy milk, firm tofu, tamari in bulk (rich-with-vitamins substitute for soy sauce and organic, which is very, very important for soy, as commercial soy is often genetically modified and heavily pesticide-d). For sweets, I bought dates and a bag of locally produced vanilla almond bars (sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, honey, apricots, tofu powder, almonds and vanilla extract). I bought organic yogurt and bread. AND I bought coconut milk ice cream. OMG. A little dab'll do ya'. I normally want to eat half a carton of commercial ice cream before I feel satiated. After a few tablespoons of this last night, I was done.

This, indeed, is the funny byproduct of healthy eating that I wasn't expecting.

Overall well-being. Not just physical.

I got up this morning and peeled back a tiny avocado that I ate along with a small bowl of barley. And I was completely satisfied!

And I think it was because my psyche and my body were in tune.

It was a strange feeling, leading me to think about eating disorders and bad eating habits.

Is this conflict half, if not most, of the reason we in our culture struggle with eating?
Hm. 

Also, yum. 

I feel happy today.

Soup is good metaphor

Bringing Up Mommy
By Debra-Lynn B. Hook
Special to McClatchy Newspapers

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Bringing up Mommy: Soup is good metaphor

By DEBRA-LYNN B. HOOK

Last week, my daughter wrecked the family van. The bank stamped our checking account "Overdrawn." The neighbor sent another nasty e-mail about our dog. And my hairdresser took me seriously when I said I was kinda bored with my hair.

This is why I make soup.

"Mom!" my freshman daughter shouts when she comes home from college to find me standing at the cutting board with an apron on. "Are you ...? Is that ...?"

"Soup for dinner tonight!" I answer.

A pot of soup simmering on the stove suggests harmony is in the house, even if it's only in the pot.

Disparate parts are being melded into whole.

Somebody cares enough to chop, simmer, stir and wait.

Everything slows, including Mom, who is home - really home.

My family knows when I make soup, I have given over my laptop, my cell phone, the soccer schedule and fast food on the fly to the veggies in the crisper and the J.A. Henckels knife in my hand. It has to be a good knife. When I am chopping vegetables with a fine knife that fits the palm of my hand, I am a ballerina conjoined with the dance floor. I am timeless. I am ageless. I am Laura Ingalls Wilder, Eleanor Roosevelt. I am a good mother, deftly managing carrots, potatoes, garlic and celery, like a fine glassmaker, for her family.

Studies have been done. The medicinal properties of chicken soup, in particular, have been researched by scientists who know that as early as the 12th century, doctors were prescribing chicken soup for cold and asthma symptoms. Modern research has proven chicken soup to have anti-inflammatory properties. Its amino acids resemble the medications used for respiratory ailments.

What these studies do not necessarily address is the emotional response to homemade soup. Marketing research expert K.C. Blair, who has studied soup in relationship to the consumer, talks about this in his essay, "Why is Soup Good Food?"

"When you are too busy, you do not create or experience enough compassion," says Blair. "When you take a moment to make yourself some tea, hot chocolate or soup, you are showing yourself attention and care. Soup is good food because it helps mom (or, for that matter, dad) serve more attention and care on her loved ones."

I know that for my daughter, seeing her mother slowed to a conscious state of health and well-being, intent on providing sustenance for her and her family, is as good as cuddling in a rocking chair with a family of Care Bears singing "Hush, Little Baby."

Soup is for the receiver.

It is also for the maker.

Making soup is like going home to my mother, to a slower, - or so it seemed - more full-bodied time, when people took time in the kitchen, when the windows were always fogged up with something cooking on the gas stove. Making soup brings me to who I am at my core - the matriarch of my own family now, who feels good when she foregoes the preservatives and makes her family a meal that will, in one bowl, cover all the necessary food groups.

Tonight, as the first snow of the season falls on the leaves outside the kitchen door, as our weekend continues with three soccer events, one concert, a sleepover, a Confirmation class, a business meeting and way too much time working, I quietly slip away to the local co-op, where I buy all the root vegetables I can find - turnips, squashes, carrots, sweet potatoes, white potatoes, onion, garlic.

I peel them. I chop them into chunks. I throw them, along with curry, a little cayenne and several cups of veggie broth, into the soup pot. When all the ingredients are simmered to integration, I puree half of the vegetables and return them to the pot. I add half a cup of peanut butter (yes, peanut butter for both thickening and flavor) and the juice from half a lemon. I splash a little red wine into the pot and some into the glass next to it.

I pull out the special bowls that I use only for soup, and I call out to the scattered family. We come together to the simple, but warm and healthy, meal. And I know in the midst of chaos, I have done one thing well today.

(Journalist Debra-Lynn B. Hook of Kent, Ohio (www.debralynnhook.com), has been writing about family life since 1988 when she was pregnant with the first of her three children. Read her blog at http://debralynn-bloopbloopotter.blogspot.com/ or e-mail her at dlbhook@yahoo.com.)

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?

As I begin this post, midway through my annual 12-day pilgrimage to the NOLA Jazz Festival, I find it important to say: I love our little Cape Cod in the little town of Kent, Ohio, where I live now, where I spend the best days of my life with the best family I know. I love Ohio, and the intense changing of the seasons that is so much more apparent north of the Mason-Dixon line. I love my Kent community of diverse, amazing supportive and loving friends and my various therapists. (Think hairdresser as therapist; house-painter as therapist; carpenter as therapist; and my real I-can't-believe-this-woman-loves-me psychologist as therapist.)

I know all this. I believe all this. I want all this -- even as I also feel my heart beating in rhythm with the city of New Orleans, where my smart mama moved us from my native South Carolina via North Carolina when I was 17.

Ironically, I hated the city at first. A 1960s-educated, fear-based Catholic, I was spooked by the above-ground mausoleums and the sticky heat that lay over them. When we first moved, I'd spend hours in my bedroom listening to John Denver and staring up at our white apartment ceiling in the suburbs. I'd take three showers a day, trying to wash the humidity off. Then, somewhere along the way, I got past the mosquitoes as big as macaws and the heat that makes you feel like a streetcar is sitting on your chest. I discovered Jazz Fest and a broomstraw-thin Bonnie Raitt playing slide guitar like hot butter. I discovered Mardi Gras, and intensity tempered with penance: There’s nothing like being in the French Quarter at five minutes til midnight on Mardi Gras, then watching as the trash trucks roll onto the street like Army tanks when the clock strikes 12, pushing everybody home simply because it's Ash Wednesday. I discovered the creativity and verve of this city's diverse people, young women in lace dresses maneuvering bicycles along Toulouse Street, my own mother in her 40s in a tank top, second-lining in the street alongside a Jazz Funeral.

Like young people do, I left home for parts unknown in my 20s, returning only sporadically to New Orleans, usually with my growing family. I spent a Christmas or two there, and spring breaks on occasion.

And then Katrina came, totaling the home of my mother, who my three sisters and I were already grieving as she died four months before in a fire.

Katrina marked sorrow for me, just as it did for anybody who ever so much as visited this magic, tragic city.

Katrina also marked the deepening of my love affair and a vow to return to the City That Care Forgot every year, come fire or flood.

Every year I make good on this vow. I return at least once, some years twice, always for the International Jazz and Heritage Festival, an eclectic festival of food and music and culture, which BTW, should be renamed the Gospel-Reggae-Soul-World Music-Funk-Rhythm and Blues-Blues Festival.

I come, not to stare up at the ceiling, but to infuse my soul with the happy accordion of coonass Terrence Simien. I come to sashay to the the tight, jump-street music of my brother-in-law and his legendary brother, Deacon John, and the haunting, promising horn of 24-year-old Trombone Shorty, who grew up in the immortalized Treme neighborhood. I come to suck crawfish heads and eat collard greens and smothered chicken and mango ice. I come, as much as anything, to ride the city streets with my sister, she behind the wheel of her Buick with the duct-taped window, me behind the lens of my camera, recreating images of street scenes, colorful houses and live oaks, their arms draped with Spanish moss lofting on the breeze of New Orleans spring.

Ohio is the place where I will live happily ever after with the family I have created. It is my home now. But New Orleans is the place where I breathe most free. It may be the City That Care Forgot. It is the City of My Heart.