Food

Happy Carnivores

I just met a guy in a parking lot and handed him a check for $175 for 100 pounds of raw beef and organs to feed to my dogs. The meat was delivered on Saturday, as part of a chain coordinated by a raw-feeding cooperative.

I’ve been meeting people in parking lots to buy raw meat for more than four years now, although I’m not a raw-feeding purist. When Leo was a pup, a holistic vet suggested I supplement the raw meat with a grain-free kibble, to help him put on weight. We like Taste of the Wild. Sometimes Leo doesn’t feel like eating his raw beef breakfast, so I like knowing that he’ll eat his kibble dinner (fed to him in either a Dog Tornado or Aikiou paw; I alternate which dog eats out of which).

Raw meaty bones are the best for keeping doggie teeth clean, so I recently picked up 100 pounds of deer bones, hoping they’ll last nearly a year. Here are my little darlings munching away. Twinsies!

carnivores

A new food pyramid

I learned about the pyramid of quality in film school. Between Good, Fast and Cheap, you can only have two. Your movie can be good and fast, but it won’t be cheap. Cheap and good, but it won’t be fast. Fast and cheap, not good.

I’ve noticed a similar pyramid regarding my efforts to eat healthfully and locally. Between healthy, local and convenient, I can’t do all three.

After I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I consciously tried to eat locally. My problem is, if I buy too much produce at once, I can’t eat it all. Sometimes, I become extremely averse to it, as was the case when I came home with some mushrooms and kale from my local food co-op and was unable to eat one bite of it. I did not prepare a single meal with it. Wound up throwing it away a few weeks later.

As much as I want to buy all my fruits and veggies from my local farmers, I’ve been seduced by the convenience of Trader Joe’s. I know in my head that I don’t need my veggies to be pre-sliced and wrapped in plastic, but my heart… I find it so much less overwhelming to buy a plastic container labeled “Asian stir-fry vegetables,” or “Asparagus sautee.” Granted, their bag of chopped kale isn’t particularly superior in price or preparatory ease to the kale I buy at the co-op, but the stuff stays crisper in the bag if I buy it and don’t wind up eating it for a week. (The local kale wilts.)

So, if I want to set myself up for success, which is one of my Skinny Rules, I have to do the non-eco-friendly thing, and shop at Trader Joe’s. (They also have prepackaged servings of mixed nuts, which prevent me from eating an entire bag of trail mix.) I balance it out by eating lunch most days at the co-op, and buying most of my apples there.

How are the Skinny Rules going, you ask? Well, I still think they should be easy to follow and result in tremendous weight loss. In theory. But I’ve been breaking an awful lot of them.

Look, the holidays are a tough time to eat right, and all I can think about are cookies! I want to eat All the Cookies. Basically, I’m doing my best for now, and will do better starting Jan.1. Promise. I’ll make a resolution or something.