Image by turtlemom4bacon via Flickr
My wife, Vanessa, is great. Our household attempts to, for lack of better word, go to the basics. Granted, I say that in a blog on a custom-hosted website with a domain name from the Isle of Man, but I digress.
One of the many things that she do to keep our household not taking anything for granted is she started baking bread tonight. From scratch. No bread machine.
Some flour, some yeast, some sugar, some salt, some time, some kneading, maybe some honey, some rising, some baking and presto, a loaf of bread appeared from our oven tonight. It’s not the perfect-shaped loaf of bread that Mrs. Bard’s can make in her sleep, but there’s something about the taste.
Some people believe that if you consume anything processed or commercially-made, you’re allowing the equivalent of demons hellbent on your destruction into your body. I’m nowhere close to this camp. I love fast food probably more than the next guy (although, I’m slowly realizing that I regret eating it whenever I do), so I say this with no disrespect to anyone: It’s truly amazing and a gift from God to be so connected to your food.
For the vast majority of human existence, we had an intimate connection with our food. The meat we ate, we hunted, skinned, prepared and cooked. The jams we used were from berries we picked. The milk came from our cow, or at least came straight from the neighbor’s cow that day. Our eggs were all free-range and our vegetables were all organic. Only recently did those things change.
Of course, fewer people die of hunger because of our abilities. Famines, outside of extremely poor areas, do not happen anymore. But, along with that, our connection to our food was severed. Some of the things I eat, I honestly I have no idea anything about what it is, from it came from, or no idea how it was made. I know more about the food by way of all of the nutritional facts, but that also tells me that whatever I’m eating has had the prepartion process so well standardized that every 14 chips I eat, will equal these exact measurements.
Something to be said to the way things have been done for the ages. With that, time to grab another slice.
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