Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

About 16 months ago I switched to butter. I like butter. It's natural. I enjoy the creamy texture and the taste. Margarines and spreads are oil and chemicals. Although I use butter when I cook, when my kids have a choice they want the margarine dolloped on top of their mashed potatoes. Why? Because--get this--butter doesn't taste like butter. That, to me, is a good indicator of how much we've been conditioned by the food industry. The artificial butter taste is considered the authentic taste of butter. I've had concerns about our industrialized food system for quite some time now but wasn't sure what to do about it. So I started inserting better foods in my house. I talked my wife into getting a half of grass fed beef. The kids were sold on it. They thought the taste and texture were much better. We got half of a pig and even Kathy thought that was better. We started making our own bread and I taught the kids. Josh loves the heartiness of the homemade bread and he gladly makes a loaf when he's about to run out. Steph likes the fluffiness of the store bought stuff. You can't win 'em all, eh?

Anyway, the reason I bring all this up is I've been concerned about the health and nutritional value of the food we eat but I didn't know enough about the subject. Enter "In Defense of Food" by Michael Pollan. He does a great job of explaining the changes made in our food over the years, how food products have replaced food, the effects our Western diet have had on us, and what we can do about it. Essentially, he described much of what I've been uneasy about and helped me understand it better.

Now if I could just figure out how to keep the spinach from falling through the grill.