Edible Pioneer Valley and The Rough Guide to Food. We've been willfully swallowing lies and it's fupped duck.

Lately I feel like I've spent more time unlearning than learning. Maybe it would be more accurate to call it relearning correctly. A full immersion in falsities had become the norm until recently when the bullshit got so thick in Washington and in the mainstream media that it was impossible to swallow anymore. As the money has started to show its true colors, it makes sense that other areas of our lives and our world would be subjected to a more critical eye. It's like the moment that my brother found out the Easter Bunny wasn't real. He paused, reflected, and said...."what...about....Santa?"

So since we've been eating so much bullshit, I thought I'd dedicate a post to eating and food. While I do plan to partner on a vegetable garden this summer, I'm the last guy to teach you anything about eating well, but I have two publications I want to turn you onto.

The first is a local quarterly, Edible Pioneer Valley. I picked up my first issue (it's free) at Cooks Shop Here on King Street in Northampton (my dad drives from Amherst to get tea there...Dad's Shop Here too.) and read an article on milk that basically refuted everything I knew about the dairy "industry" and its terminology. From their homepage: "Edible Pioneer Valley is a seasonal, community-based publication that promotes the abundance and variety of local foods in the Pioneer Valley. We celebrate our area’s authentic foods and culinary traditions, as well as the creativity, innovation and individuality that thrive here. By trumpeting tales of small family farmers and food artisans, local chefs and restaurateurs, wine makers and brew masters, and reporting on the unique people, perspectives and personalities here, we share what makes the Pioneer Valley such an amazing place to live, and eat."

Then there's the latest in the Rough Guide series out of England; The Rough Guide to Food. I heard about this on today's Common Dreams. George Miller and Katharine Reeve found that a surprise consequence of writing a book about food was that they lost their appetite, having underestimated just how devastating the effects of our industrial food systems are on our health, animal welfare, climate change and the earth's resources. Thankfully, a few trips to some farmers markets with their good news story of artisan baking, handmade cheeses and fresh-from-the-ground veg offered the escapism they needed and helped provide a sense of perspective.

10 Things We Didn’t Know About Food. How the authors of the new Rough Guide to Food lost their appetites for the food industry.

One commenter makes this point about the criticism that vegans and vegetarians etc. are crusaders. "When everything seems to have genetically modified ingredients there is little choice. Talk about pushing your beliefs on others. Bio technology scientists think they are smarter than nature and they want to push that belief on everyone else." And they have the government and corporate backing to do it.