Eating Food

I have established a little tradition on those Saturday nights when I find myself without plans. I grill myself a steak. So last Saturday I found myself in front of the meat counter at the local super market looking for a nice steak. Along with a baked potato and steamed carrots, I grilled a 12 ounce sirloin steak on my hibachi...4 minutes on one side....3 minutes on the other. The meal would have been perfect were it not for one thing...an imagine from the market that stayed with me as I ate.

As I walked to the meat counter I took a quick look at chickens....I had thought about buying a roaster for Sunday dinner. Next to the roasters and broilers were organic chickens. These birds were much smaller and more closely resembled the poultry I remembered from when I was a kid.

I grew up in a small, rural community in southern Rhode Island. We had a garden from where all most all of our vegetables came, we picked our own apples, we ventured into the woods to pick our own blueberries. For a number of years we also raised our own turkeys. We fed them, watered them, cleaned up after them, mended their coop, and when the time came, slaughtered them.

For me, this was not an idyllic part of my childhood...I hated the work associated with home gardening and I intensely disliked the business with the turkeys. However...I did learn something at a very early age from those experiences...that it matters what we put into the food that we put into us.

So thinking about those organic chickens I wondered about what we put into their non organic counterparts. What they are fed, how they are housed, and with what they are injected have contributed to these birds having unnatural proportions. And what these birds were fed and injected are now inside of us. Wrap your head around that one.

Food is very important to me and certain foods bring with them certain memories...homefries, roast chicken, sushi, and chicken marengo particularly so. For me it is a way of providing and experiencing comfort. If I cook for you I care about you...and if I care about you I will cook for you. However....I am starting to think that I need to think more about what goes into the food that I feed the people about whom I care.