Reader Suggestions

I came up short of a topic for February. I gave some thought to writing about food again since it's one of my favorite things to write about.  If I wrote about it, I would probably comment on some of the things I learned from watching "In Defense Of Food," another masterly piece of writing by Michael Pollan.  He has enlightening things to say about the Western diet and if you want to learn a bit more about why you like french fries, google him. Here's one of his famous quotes:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plant based.

That's not exactly how he says it, but those words work. What he means is that we should eat mostly fruits and vegetables.

There's nothing new about eating fruits and vegetables. But there's a lot new about the relationship of our bodies and the consumption of natural foods.  The biggest new thing is that we should really eat MOSTLY fruits and vegetables, very little red meat, and as little sugar as possible. He asks us to take a careful look at what we eat in the USA. Uh-oh. Lots of sugar (as in high fructose corn syrup which is nothing more than another way to say "sugar"), lots of processed foods that contain sugar, fat, and way too many calories. That last sentence pretty much sums up what the Western diet consists of. Because we consume many of the wrong things, we get diabetes which is starting to show up in children at an alarming rate.  We also develop heart disease earlier than we used to.  Other scary health things happen when we eat too much of the wrong things.  We should only eat things our grandmothers would recognize.

That all makes some sense but its application is not simple for me.  I am addicted to sugar, mostly in the form of chocolate.  I eat other awful things but I think if I could get clean and sober of sugar, I might take more pleasure in eating fruit. Some people think fruit is a dessert which I think is ridiculous even though we were served fruit as a dessert item in the school cafeteria when I was a kid. Fruit is definitely not dessert.  Hershey bars, fudge cake, See's Candy (Bordeaux Bars are my absolute best favorite next to my mom's birthday cake) or any kind of ice cream that features chocolate make up real desserts.

So that's what I might have used as a topic for February. Special thanks to my readers who came up with good ideas to write about:  Love, Leap Year, Presidents' Day, and Carnavale around the world were some of the suggestions. I spent some time trying to come up with a way to write about all of them using a common theme, but I got stuck.  I could probably create an essay using food as a common thread tying all those topics together, but the outcome would be a big and probably unbelievable stretch.  I'll conclude by wishing you all a Happy Valentine's Day.  Maybe you could celebrate that special day by eating a red pepper with someone you love.