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Operation: Healthier Eating

Today begins our family's journey towards what we hope is a healthier lifestyle, at least in terms of the food that we choose to put in our bodies. This isn't just some knee jerk reaction to the USDA beef recall or whatever the latest food scare is, but is more of a conscious decision that we've been working towards over time. We're not turning into vegetarians y any means. It's just a matter of eating less bad food and more good food.

As with exercise, this takes some planning and dedication and we have a lot of forces working against us:

1. We have small children, which can always prove to be a challenge when trying to get them to eat anything remotely healthy. Fortunately, our kids are pretty adventurous when it comes to eating but it certainly adds a degree of difficulty.


2. I like to cook. A lot. While you would think that this would normally be a good thing, I'm not exactly pulling recipes out of Cooking Light for the dinner table. This should be the easiest behavior to fix, as I'm looking forward to cooking things that our outside my comfort level.


3. We live in Indianapolis, IN, the chain restaurant capitol of the world. It's not like they're handing out free Hardees Double Bacon Thickburgers on every corner....but it's close. Finding a restaurant that serves remotely healthy food in moderate portions is pretty tough. Finding one that also happens to be kid-friendly? Forget about it. There is no Whole Foods (yet). We had a Sunflower Market, but it closed. We do have a Wild Oats Market, but it's nowhere close to being convenient to shop there. Finally, our two primary grocery store chains, Marsh Supermarkets and Kroger, are horribly inconsistent. I have an ongoing hate-hate relationship with my local Kroger, which is less than 1/4 mile from our house.

It's the grocery store thing that has pushed me over the edge. Even on their best day, I just don't trust the food. Reading the article, "Don't Eat Anything That Doesn't Rot" by Michael Pollan made me want to do something about it. As luck would have it, a friend told us about a local company called Farm Fresh Delivery. The concept is just great, and totally fits our lifestyle: Organic and locally produced groceries delivered to your home. It took me very little research on the site to realize that we need to at least give this a shot. I signed up for the service a few weeks ago, and set the date for our first delivery for the week of March 24th. Delivery for our area of town is set for Tuesday, and we received our first bin of goodies yesterday!

We decided on the Small Farm Fresh Bin, which contains all organic fruit and vegetables, and one dozen locally produced eggs from pasture-raised hens with no hormones or antibiotics. The bin is $35, and the eggs were an additional $3.50. We decided on an initial bi-week delivery, but I would anticipate that we'll move this to weekly at some point.

Here's what was in our bin:

1 pound Asparagus
16 oz. Strawberries
2 pounds Red Potatoes
1  Jumbo Yellow Onions
3 Golden Delicious Apples
1 Bunch of Broccoli
1 Bunch of Carrots
1 Lemon
6 oz. Spring Mix
1/2 pound Mixed Mushrooms (Oysters and Shitakes)

Everything is delivered in an eco-friendly reusable bin. Produce is packaged separately in what is essentially a brown paper bag, which you can return with your empty bin instead of throwing away.

A few days prior to our delivery date, we were sent an email message with a delivery reminder and a link to modify any part of our order. This is a very nice touch - there are a number of items that you can substitute for anything in your order, assuming you make the change in time.

Here are a few pics of the delivered product:

We had the Spring greens as a salad w/pasta last night, and they were very nice! A mushroom and asparagus risotto is on the menu this weekend, and the kids have already dived into the strawberries.

Next up in our plan is to switch to a combination of free-range and grass-fed meat, some of which is available via Farm Fresh Delivery.

Obviously, all of this comes at a higher cost than buying mass-produced products, but in the end the trade-off is a healthy lifestyle, which is worth the price.

Do you love your job?

I was skimming the RSS feed for one of my favorite blogs, Slashfood, and came across this post that is basically a rant on Starbucks customers by a barista.

Note: this guy's post is ridiculously profane, and coming from someone that grew up around the construction business, you can take that for what it's worth!

It's somewhat amusing, but two things struck me about this:

1. He doesn't really mention the customer that insists on ordering multiple deviations from a normal drink. Bob Sutton, author of "The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't" has a follow-up post on his blog with a new Asshole Metrics called, "The Starbucks Test".

New Rule: The more complicated the Starbucks order, the bigger the asshole. If you walk into a Starbucks and order a "decaf grande half-soy, half-low fat, iced vanilla, double-shot, gingerbread cappuccino, extra dry, light ice, with one Sweet-n'-Low and one NutraSweet," ooh, you're a huge asshole.

I wonder if Starbucks baristas hear it so much that they're completely desensitized to it?

2. It's obvious to me that this guy really, really hates his job and needs to find a new profession.

Which got me thinking...why continue to toil away in a job that you hate? Sure, we all need to pay the rent and put food on the table, but what we do for most of our waking hours really defines who we are as a person. Ever been around a person who clearly hates their job...I mean really hates it? Invariably they're in need of an outlet to vent their frustration, and it just winds up sucking all of the fun out of the room. I know this because I have been that person in the past.

Something to think about today: Do you love your job, or just not hate it? If you won the lottery tomorrow, and you had the financial freedom to do what you wanted to do, what would you do?

Personally, I love to cook. I'm not that great at it, but I can hold my own in the kitchen I suppose. I've often thought that if I were in that position, I would immediately enroll in cooking school and set out to become a professional chef. But what if the part that I love about cooking is really just the 2-3 hour creative release that it gives me each day? If I came to see cooking as just my job, with all of the trappings of a typical J-O-B, would I begin to resent it, in effect losing something that I used to really enjoy?

This is why I don't play the lottery...