Food Trucks

There is a lot of buzz about food trucks nowadays.  The restaurants hate them, because they offer inexpensive quality home-style food cooked to order.  OK, some of their wares are unhealthy, but they seem a good alternative to sit downs.  The portions are smaller too.  In Mexico, street vendors lack refrigeration, and thus are forced to use fresh ingredients.  You can buy fruit cups, tacos, and all sorts of things.

There are restrictions i the U.S. on parking and selling food.  Are they there for health reasons, or do the restaurants pay the city council to make things hard for the competition?

The other thing you see in Mexico is shacks.  Among then, every 10th shack will have a window and a little store.  Think about it, during the latest recession unemployment got near 10%.   What if every tenth person sold food to his neighbors?  or made food to sell out of a cooler on the street or in the bus?  Whey then, chunk chunk, lets do the math, 10 - 10 = 0, we'd have no unemployment.

What is so wrong about neighbors selling food to each other?  Vested interests try and prevent people from doing a little business and supporting themselves because they don't want competition.

Street food is cheap and often the best chow in town.

Let's eat.

Corporate Food

It's all about money.  Big oil, big ag, big fast food, big business.  That's why our food is artificial and our school lunches unhealthy.

I was reading in the New Yorker that environmentalists are disappointed that Obama wont come out against the pipeline.  That's not the only issue he's weak on, here are ten issues that he has not taken a stand on.  What is the bully pulpit for if you don't use it?

1) he supports foreign wars

2) supports foreign military bases

3) supports drug war and mass incarceration of harmless people

4) supports bailouts for banks and auto companies

5) supports coal, oil and nuclear industry over solar and wind

6) supports ethanol

7) supports agribusiness

8) supports arresting and killing whistleblowers

9) supported gay rights only weakly, and only after "evolving"

10) supports big fences on the border

12) supports the IRS

13) supports corporate welfare

At least Michelle speaks out about food and health.

 

Spreading the Word

What might I do to spread the word of The All-Food Diet throughout the land?

Funny you should ask that...

You can follow this blog.

You can tell your friends.

And like the facebook page.  Only 16% of my facebook friends have liked so far.

www.facebook.com/AllFoodDiet

You can write on the page anything you want about diet, health, food, lifestyle, or what you are making for lunch.  Or tell us where you shop.  How you keep fit.  Your views on the industrialization of the food supply.

You can also share the page onto your timeline. 

Write a  review on Amazon.

www.amzn.com/gp/product/148009966X 

This site not only lets you like, but lets you 'try' and 'rate'.  If enough people do so, the relative rankings appear.  They list several thousand diets.

www.dietsinreview.com/diets/the-all-food-diet/

or like or review on goodreads, or put it on your shelf or lists...

www.goodreads.com/book/show/16145627-the-all-food-diet

You can still like or comment on the Waking Times piece.

http://www.wakingtimes.com/2013/06/28/the-all-food-diet-buy-foods-with-one-ingredient/

One

One is an important number, both in mathematics and in spirituality, not to mention numerology and diet.

How many screens should a movie theatre have?   One.  And it should have an old facade & marquee, serve real healthy snackfood if there is such a thing, have plush seats (one per person please), and have sconces and runway lights, and the piano should pop up out of the stage.  I never go to small noisy smelly modern multiplexes.

How many cars should you own?  Well, an argument can be made for zero, but one could also say no more than one.  Going one step further, many of us could get by on one internal combustion engine, and not own power mowers, ATVs, and the like, unless of course you really need them or have a good reason.

How any houses should you own?  Well again, you don't have to have even one, but consider the inconvenience of having more than one.  You have twice the taxes and maintenance, and how often do you really get to the second house?


How many wives should a man have?  Setting aside a discussion of none being an acceptable choice, and that the bible not only permits but requires a man to have more than one in the somewhat special circumstances that his brother leaves a widow with no sons, I would maintain that even though in a truly free society one can do as you please, the average American might find more than one hard to handle, and indeed given the divorce rate one seems to place an undue burdon on many persons.  Let us momentarily neglect the fact that "42" is the answer to everything.

When you buy food, how many ingredients should the food items contain?

Bags

How much is there to say about bags?  How compulsive can one be?

I have found that vegetable bags have little use.   These are the bags you get at the supermarket produce section.   Recently I've been putting onions and other fresh things straight into the basket.  After all, they are washed and cooked before eating.  Sometimes I take a veggie bag from the fridge and wrap something else in it, but there are few opportunities to use them.

At the markets, I usually put things in re-usable bags, although the name on the bag rarely matches the place I'm shopping at that day.  Putting the canvas bags on the conveyor belt helps the cashier to notice them and award you your dime.  When they say "paper or plastic" I respond with "canvas".

Regular plastic bags, the kind that Ireland and Los Angeles are legislating against, I use for messy garbage.  If I don't have enough, I find someone who has extras.

Paper grocery bags are for paper garbage, or for combining all the trash in the house.  Sometimes I fall short and ask others for extras.  Buying trash bags seems crazy, considering all the influx of bags and boxes into the normal household.

Recycling goes into boxes.  The boxes come from food and other purchases.  Sometimes I re-use them, pouring out the recyclables into their bin and taking the box back into the house.

My favorite bag is my baggallini.  They are made out of recycled industrial pasta, so you have to make sure you don't take them out in the rain, lest they break down.

Traffic and Weather together

Traffic and weather are impediments to biking.  It's the height of our short summer in the twin cities.  It's warm, light till late, and it is neither raining nor snowing.  The weather isn't bad, so let's talk traffic.

I've been riding to St. Paul a lot.   While there is not a single bike path going where I want to go, there are several routes work pretty well.  Much of the route is on a car-free bike path.  Other segments are low traffic.  Only a few blocks involve serious car threats.

Starting at my place, it's down the alley, to the end of the dead end block and onto the bike-crowded but car-free bike path.  I take this till it hits the Mississippi.  Someday they will re-purpose the RR bridge and add bikes to it, but not yet.  Then it's up river road bike path to the Franklin bridge.  Here we encounter cars.  There is  a bike lane over the bridge, and up the hill maybe 1/2 mile to University.  Behind University is a bike/bus only road, with bikable sidewalks as well.  This road curves around and drops you at the state fairgrounds.   While they are terribly crowded 12 days a year, on other days the grounds are deserted.  One route is thru como zoo and the como lake park, but I've been sticking to the fair grounds as far East and North as I can go and then taking a shady low traffic side street to my destination.

You can't always take a zero-car point to point route, but often you can get cobble together a route with a reasonable amount of coffin avoidance.

Big storms and food

Friday was the biggest storm in Minneapolis ever.  Tree limbs 18" in diameter blocked roads.  The power was out all over.

Be prepared.

The power was out, but the gas stayed on.  We were lucky.  There was plenty of hot water.  It makes sense to keep drinking water around, and some washing water too.

Batteries are not very green, but they can be handy in emergencies.  Generators are noisy.  I don't like them.  I guess they make sense for hospitals.  So stock batteries and LED flashlights and a keep a radio handy.  The radio should be windup, or solar, or run on batteries.

My van helped too.  It has a gas fridge, which I didn't need, and an inverter which was quite handy for charging the iPhone.  It wasn't cooking, lighting, eating, or cooling we were worried about, it was internet and phone.

With little or no internet, we got a lot of reading done, and sang,  and cleared some downed limbs, and did some cooking

Now, the All-Food Diet recommends keeping your fridge mostly empty.  When the storm came, we didn't have too much food to worry about.  We made a concerted effort to identify and consume the perishables.  It's not nice to toss Mother Nature's food.  Be creative in using it up before it goes bad.  FIFO.  When it gets to be bad or questionable, toss it.  There is no point in getting ill.

All die hard adherents of the All-Food Diet have little in the freezer.  We managed to cook what needed to be et before it defrosted.

A rally against Monsanto

I bused and biked and arrived at the State Capitol in Saint Paul, books in hand.  Many people were in attendance, of a variety of ages and lifestyles.  Some were in costume, such as the Grim Reaper, who carried a pitchfork with ears of corn attached.  Rabid petitioning was in full force.

After a spell, we marched down into Saint Paul, and I spotted some Morris dancers who had gathered from states far and near.  I talked to some friends, turned around, and the parade was gone.  After wandering to the farmers market and bridge over the Mississippi, I googled and re-joined the rally at the Capitol.

Then there was music and speaking and more soliciting.   Most people I talked to were exceedingly healthy in their dietary habits.   Some ate raw food.  That sounds healthy, but I like it cooked, and we've been cooking on fire for so long that it's in our genes.  Of course there were vegans & vegetarians and gardeners.  I've been a pescetarian three times.   I don't know why I did it the first time, but it came to an end when I discovered that hamburgers were made from animals.   The second time was based on grain shortages, discipline, and peer groups.  After a while my fervor waned and I was less inclined to follow others.  The third time was related to factory farms.  Eventually, I evolved to choose foods based on their intrinsic health value, how they were created, and where they came from.  The All-Food Diet is anything but extreme.  People seem to appreciate being able to cling to their favorite foods in moderation.

It's good to know that people are thinking about food, where it comes from, how it's labeled, and what they want to put into their body.  It's strange to see people agonizing over choosing the very best motor oil for their car, and throwing any old chemical laden fried greasy sugary oily over-packaged fast food down the hatch.