A month of reduced food options

As I mentioned in my previous post I am doing a book group with a bunch of cool ladies and we are currently going through "7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess" by Jen Hatmaker. We are attempting to follow along with some of the experiments she discusses in her book. The first chapter is about food where she goes down to only 7 foods she can eat during the whole month. Several of the ladies in our group are sticking to the 7 rule. I am following it a little more loosely, mainly because I want my whole family to be able to participate, and I want to be able to do something that might be sustainable. So, what my husband and I decided to do is to reduce our grocery list down to 12 items for the month: brown rice, bread, yogurt, eggs, carrots, broccoli, apples, bananas, chicken, black beans, milk, and tea. We will use whatever condiments, spices, leftover, etc that we currently have in the house, but once we are out of those items we aren't replacing them until the month is over. On top of that, I am trying to only drink water and when we go out to eat we are trying to limit ourselves to ordering only the items on the list. We will have two exceptions: 1) my daughter's birthday is smack in the middle of this month, so the morning we celebrate the rules are off. 2) If we are invited to eat at someone's house we will eat what is there, but try and limit ourselves, and I at least will stick with water to drink and no sweets or desserts. Beyond just focusing on reducing the amount and type of food that we consume, I also want this month to be about other areas of food consumption. I came up with a list of questions/areas that I want to answer and focus on during this month: 1. What are the ethical implications of what and how we eat? My hope is to take each item on our list and figure out what brand/type of that food is the most ethical (in terms of how it was produce, environmental impacts, etc) and where in Tulsa I can buy those items. 2. What are the social implications of reducing our food consumption (how will it impact the world around us)? 3. How will the 12 food choices simplify our live and thus hopefully leave room for other important things/relationships? 4. How will these changes affect our lives in other ways? 5. What are the health implications of how we are eating? 6. How can we incorporate the kids into this experiment and teach them about hunger in the world, and how our food choices impact others? We are on day two of this experiment, and so far I can tell that I am a wussy, privileged American. I don't like being limited in my choices. And it is really easy already to think up excuses as to how to hedge. I am especially having a hard time with the only drinking water. I think (or maybe rather hope?) that what I miss is the ritual involved. I am a big tea drinker, especially in the cold months. I usually have a cup of English Breakfast (with some milk and honey) in the morning which I usually have to reheat multiple times to finish due to the many interruptions provided by my children. Then in the afternoon when the kids are (supposedly) napping, I make a cup of chai tea with frothed milk (if I'm lucky my husband will have made his homemade chai tea which is A.M.A.Z.I.N.G.) grab a snack (usually something sweet) and do some work on the computer (bills, answering emails, and ok, I admit it, pinterest). Last week when I made the decision to go to only water it was in the upper 70's and beautiful spring weather. So I thought it wouldn't be a big deal. The past two days have been cold, rainy, and perfect hot tea drinking weather. Ugh. So I have contented myself with hot water and soup. I am about to go heat up some water to cup my freezing hands around and get a piece of bread for my snack. I really feel like this bread is cheating though. My husband went out yesterday and bought two loaves of bread from a local bakery. Supper yummy (which they should be for the price) but they are not just plain bread. They have raisins, and nuts, and all sorts of yumminess. But since it is a bread, and he bought it and it is in the house, I will eat it. But I will forgo the delicious butter he also bought (not sure how that was considered ok to buy...oh well) and just eat it toasted and warm. And remind myself how very lucky and blessed I am to have even those options.

New Experiments

I started this blog quite a few years ago in the hope that it would a sort of on-line journal, and a way for me to vent and deal with the fact that I live in Oklahoma and other issues that were not resolved by me marrying a psycholgist (he won't even psychoanalyze me in fairly safe areas, like telling me what my crazy dreams mean). Thus the title of the blog. I am still in Oklahoma, so obviously I have found a way to deal, even though it didn't include posting on this blog (my psychologist, and did I mention from Oklahoma, husband did help though). A HUGE part of my dealing is thanks to the awesome, amazing, totally cool community we found and have been doing life with these past two years. Several of the women of this awesome, amazing, totally cool community have started reading through a book called "7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess" by Jen Hatmaker. It focuses on 7 different areas that the author feels she needs to work on simplifying and reducing and which also happen to be 7 areas that consumerist Americans have a hard time with: food, clothes, media, spending, waste, possessions, and stress. As part of our book group we are attempting to do some of the experiments she did in her book. I am not going to strictly adhere to what she did, but rather I am going take the area of focus and look at several different questions and issues and apply it to my life, and hopefully incorporate it into the life of my family in a sustainable manner. My hope is that I can find permanent ways to affect the world around me day to day, especially those who are much less fortunate than I am, while I live in Tulsa, OK (not in sub-Sahara Africa working in an orphanage like I always thought I would be doing). Our book group started a facebook page to encourage one another and talk through issues that come up around each topic. However, since I already have a gazillion things I want to post about our first topic (food), I decided rather than inundate the facebook group with postings multiple times a day, I would reinvent this blog and post here. Mostly it will be a way for me to keep track of all my many thoughts, and to catalog my findings on each topic. Hopefully there will be some posts that will be useful to anyone who happens to mistakenly stumble upon this blog, but I also want to write about specific ways I can address the issues in Tulsa (for example what stores sell the most local, ethically produced eggs). Thus I think the title of my blog still kind of applies. And, honestly, I am just too lazy and not creative enough to think of something different/better. It took me long enough to come up with the current cheesy title. Needless to say, I am not the literary genius in my family. That title is held by my brother who will some day, I am sure, produce the next great juvenile fantasy series, and my mom, who no doubt will be editing my blog in her head as she reads it and shuddering at my overuse of comas.