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As I sat across from Mal at the table this morning eating breakfast, I couldn’t help but think back to the what must have been hundreds of hours I spent, eating cereal and reading every last bit of text on the box of cereal; ingredients, nutritional info, how to win a prize, etc.

Of course, Hannah is cute even if she’s not staring at a cereal box.

Why we need Audiophiles. Or at least, why we need people who care about music, and how it sounds.

I don’t remember when exactly–in recent memory, for sure–I was grocery shopping with Mom and Dad. I’d picked up some organic eggs, I think, and Dad raised the question as to why we needed to purchase organic. I remember Mom saying you didn’t need it for everything, but for things like eggs, it’s good. At the time I only had a vague understanding of why I was choosing organic eggs, but I continued to do so.

Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, answers Dad’s question and more. I highly recommend reading it, along with the followup (which I read previously), In Defense of Food. If it doesn’t change how you think about food and your relationship to it, well, something is wrong.

Case in point (picked and included so I could share the picture below!): bread. Bread is simple, right? Flour, water, yeast, and maybe some salt and sugar of some sort. Maybe not: Adrienne and I rarely purchase sandwich bread from the store, but when we do, it’s usually the Baker’s Inn Brand, 100% Whole Wheat. I think it’s good. Here’s the ingredient list:

Whole Wheat Flour, Water, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Cracked Wheat, Wheat Gluten, Yeast, Contains 2% Or Less of: Molasses, Soybean Oil, Honey, Calcium Sulfate, Wheat Bran, Salt Vinegar, Cornstarch, Wheat Starch, Dough Conditioners (Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Datem, Mono and Diglycerides, Ethoxylated Mono and Diglycerides and/or Calcium Dioxide), Yeast Nutrients (Ammonium Chloride, Ammonium Sulfate and/or Monocalcium Phosphate), Enzymes, Enrichment (Ferrous Sulfate (iron), Zinc Oxide, Niacin, Calcium Sulfate, Vitamin D, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride (B6), Riboflavin (B2), Folic Acid, Thiamine, Calcium Propionate (to retain freshness), Contains Wheat and Soybeans
(thanks to my beautiful wife for typing up the ingredients!)

That is not food, it’s food science. This is bread – flour, water, yeast, salt and honey:

Granted, this was not great bread, but I made it over the course of an evening and so far it’s served well as breakfast toast, accompaniment to soup, appetizer to salad and as a little garlic-cheese bread. With a little more time, it’s even easier to make great bread! Even if a loaf of homemade bread is as far as you go towards eating real food, what are you waiting for? Oh, and read the books! Adrienne’s up next in the queue, and we can ship them to you after that, so long as you promise to ship them to the next person (and eventually back to us)!