KB Ranch

In thinking about food choices, a good place to start is where we eat (out at restaurants or at home). Since I’m less interested in restaurants these days, I’m going to focus on home food choices.

Eating at home first entails getting food, whether fully prepared meals or raw ingredients, so let’s look at some options for that. (Click to enlarge.)

Of course, where you shop depends on many factors, some of which I’ll cover in my next post. For store-bought food, it’s also worth thinking about where your food came from before it got to the store. (Again stay tuned for more on that.)

I’m not sure most people think about what “form” they buy their food in, but it turns out that it’s pretty relevant to the effects of our food choices (on ourselves, our community, and the larger world). For example, say you like scalloped potatoes. Do you buy it as:

a) A container of already-made scalloped potatoes from the deli counter or a frozen, ready-to-pop-in-the-oven pan of scalloped potatoes.

b) A box of scalloped potato mix, just add milk and butter.

c) Buy whole potatoes, milk, butter, cheese, and make it from scratch.

Perhaps because I am a contrarian myself, I can start hearing the objections. “I don’t have time.” “I can’t cook.” “I’m in a single person household.” “My kids are picky.” etc. I’ll talk more about these issues in upcoming posts, but for now, I think it’s worth just reflecting on the food we eat. This morning I went into my kitchen and pantry and looked around.  You might do the same, and think about what’s there, where it came from, and how much you know about it.

We think so much about so many things in life… and yet, most of us don’t think that much about the food we eat. What could be more important than food? Not only does it have a profound impact on our own health and well-being, but it also has a huge impact on our community and the larger world.

[Sidenote: If you’ve read this far, please feel free to add comments below or on subsequent posts with your thoughts, questions, objections, etc. I have a pretty diverse group of readers, and while a few of you are probably right here with me, others are thinking “Here goes Karen down one of her weird paths that really doesn’t work for most people.” I’d love to hear your thoughts as I progress through this series, especially since this is in part preparation for a presentation to a group of people not very much like me. Thanks.]

[This is the first part of a series of posts about food and why our food choices matter. It is related to a bunch of reading I’m doing and a presentation on these topics that I’ll be making next month. Since it has nothing to do with the ranch, I will be tagging the posts as “foodchoices” so you can choose to read or not.]

I love food. And when we moved here, one of the things I worried about was that there wouldn’t be the kind of food choices I was used to living in a big, diverse city.

Over time though, I’ve come to see that we all have many food choices, no matter where we live. And , in fact, Brad and I are eating better now than we ever have…even in LA.

Why is that? In large part, it’s because of thinking more about the food we eat.

In LA, we typically shopped by the meal. Each night on our way home from work, we stopped at a grocery and bought the main ingredients for our dinner. We also ate out a fair amount, usually one or twice a week.

Here, we need to think a little further ahead. With no local grocery here, we must buy ahead and plan. When we first moved here, we went to the grocery every week or two. Now we go once or twice a month on average, and it is almost always when we have to go to town for some other reason. (Restaurants are in limited supply here as well. There is one restaurant that is open evenings about 10 miles away. We have eaten there once in 20 months and that was when we won a free dinner there.)

Shopping for several weeks of meals forces me to think about what we’re going to eat several weeks out (instead on what we’re going to eat in a couple hours which requires very little planning and results in much less interesting menus).

Stay tuned for the next installment…food choices we have.