I will stick with coconut bliss, being already on the diabetes train and all. But I think I could feel good about giving this to my kids.

P.S. Apparently I lied about that last one being… uh, the last one.

The recipe I used was our Simply Splendid Sugar Cookie, which uses equal parts whole-wheat flour and white flour and a little less sugar than the norm.

Ok, if you’re new here, I’ll state what seems to me to be the obvious. These are cookies made with white flour and sugar. Those things aren’t “real food,” they’re industrial products that are doing real damage to the health of all of us.

25% of people over 60 have diabetes. That’s a lot of people. “…white flour and a little less sugar” aren’t going to solve that problem.

He used to walk part of the way. Then one day he announced to us that his bike might need a tune-up, because he can’t use first gear in the front. OMG!

That weekend, mama got some greasy hands, and the kid got, effectively, a new bike. The next week he was biking the whole way.

He noticed that even with a good breakfast, he needs food when he gets there. And even with a good lunch, he needs food before he heads home. So we went off looking for some energy bars. And most of them were made out of all kinds of weird stuff. But then we found… tadaa! Larabars!

According to their website, each flavor has no more than six ingredients. (“Cashew Cookie” has two: dates and cashews.) Check out this ingredients list for the “Ginger Snap” flavor.

• dates
• almonds
• pecans
• ginger
• cinnamon
• cloves

Carbs and Flavor

They’re sweet. No denying it… and that could be good or bad, depending. Ginger snap has 220 Calories, and 19 non-fiber carbs. They provide lots of fuel for my boy’s bike ride.

But probably not for me. The company claims that for “many diabetics” the whole food carbs don’t significantly raise blood sugar. I have only tried a few bites, so I can’t say.

I could make them myself

… but why? I have to admit, I’m kind of sick of making butter out of raw milk, and cooking everything from scratch. (Ack! Did I say that?) This once, I’m just gonna go with it.

Have you tried Larabars? Have another favorite bar? I’d love to hear about your experience!

We can only change so much of our diets and our lives at one time. So what changes are urgent, and what can you put off for a while? How do you decide which “vices” you can hang on to? It’s a very individual choice, isn’t it? And the big question for me has been whether if I hang on to some “vices,” I will get gradually better, and be able to give them up, or whether I’m just fooling myself. My body used to tell me that the best possible food was either cookie dough, (butter and sugar, with a touch of refined flour for balance) or cinnamon rolls (butter and sugar, with a touch of refined flour for balance). I know that in the past, I’ve switched to artificial sweeteners (the epitome of industrial food) and later discovered my sweet-tooth was as strong as ever. Soon, I was back to the cookies and cakes I’d thought I was free of.

Now, I’ve given up almost all sweets, but hung on to a few crutches. Mainly choco-perfection chocolate which is sweetened with a natural fiber-based sweetner that doesn’t affect blood sugar or insulin. I’ve been diluting them, by melting a small chunk of the chocolate in some coconut oil, and then cooling it in the freezer. The other day, I was at the grocery store, and bought myself a bar, and ate a piece straight. And you know what? The sweetness of it was really unpleasant. I discovered that I’ve actually freed myself of the desire for super-sweet tastes. What good news!

The moral of this story is that if *I* can get to the point where the idea of eating cookie dough is *gross* — anybody can.

Over the next few weeks (now that I’m back) I want to talk more about the process of transitioning away from industrial food toward real food. How do you decide which sweeteners to give up first? What about convenience foods? Is organic more important, or local?

If you have tricks you use to wean yourself off industrial food, or vices you still cling to, leave a comment!

For me the absurdity of the situation became inescapable in the fall of 2002, when one of the most ancient and venerable staples of human life abruptly disappeared from the American dinner table. I’m talking of course about bread. Virtually overnight, Americans changed the way the way they eat. A collective spasm of what can only be described as carbophobia seized the country, supplanting an era of national lipophobia dating to the Carter administration. The latter was when, in 1977, a Senate committee had issued a set of “dietary goals” warning beef loving Americans to lay off the red meat. And so we dutifully had, until now.—Michael Pollan

A Canary in a Coal Mine

It’s said that coal miners would keep a canary in the mine with them, because the canary would react to dangerous situations (gasses in the air) before the miners could detect them. If the canary keeled over dead, the miners knew to get out of there!

I think I — and people like me — are just like those canaries. I’ve spend a lifetime eating industrial food, culminating in a couple of decades of high-fructose corn syrup in everything from salty snacks to spaghetti sauce to… yes, bread. The result? A condition that runs in my family, variously known as Metabolic Syndrome, Syndrome X, Dysmetabolic Syndrome, Insulin Resistance, or pre-diabetes.

And “normal” people all seem to think they’re immune. I want to say “People! Stop doing this! Your body will rebel too, eventually.” You might think you’ve escaped it, but did you know that 20% of people aged 60 or older have diabetes? Twenty percent! Obesity rates have soared over the last 20 years. Is that because our characters have become weaker and weaker? Or maybe because we’re eating junk?

It’s not bread’s fault

I’m pretty sure that real wheat, ground whole, and mixed with water and allowed to grow yeasty, then baked, isn’t the murderous villain that it’s cousins are. (By cousins, of course, I mean everything from Wonder Bread, made of styrofoam, I think, to the “100% Whole Wheat” bread available at the local grocery.)

But my body doesn’t work anymore. I’m afraid it might be too late for me to give up industrial food.

Industrial Low Carb Bread from Hell

Some times when I’m sick of not eating bread, I get this lovely stuff from Great Harvest. It’s pretty good. Not heirloom wheat allowed to rise slowly, without sweetners to rush the yeast, but it’s still good.

Other times, though, when I know that bread is making my insulin levels soar, and wearing out my pancreas, or whatever, I break down and buy — and eat — crap like this “5 Net Carbs” bread. Sad, but true.

I’ve talked about sugar-free chocolate, and the mix of xylitol and stevia I use. I’ll even admit to the occasional diet soda. Until you’ve had to give up your own home-made jams, most bread and grains, and every single sweet thing you’ve ever eaten, don’t judge me for the soda pop, ok?

Real hippies eat grains

I want to eat a lovely, sustainable, grain-based diet. I also don’t want to die early, having achieved full-blown diabetes and a weight over 300 lbs by my 50th birthday, blindness by 60, soon followed by amputated limbs, and, eventually, death. What’s a hippy to do?

For now, I’m aiming for some balance, however frustrating. I have a few industrial food-like substances that serve as crutches. And I’m gambling that a real food diet, with a reasonable amount of whole, real grains (and I don’t mean this stuff) will help me recover before it kills me. I allow myself one slice of Great Harvest bread with my local, delicious eggs in the morning, even though I shouldn’t, and I eat brown rice or millet with dinner.

Come back and ask me in a few years, and I’ll tell you whether it worked or not.

Then I realized something. This birthday party is a special occasion. If I served the standard birthday cake, I’d be saying to my sweet boy that yes, normally we eat actual food, but when it’s a really special day, a wonderful day, we eat junk. What kind of impression would that leave? At least, the impression that when life is really good, it’s accompanied by industrial non-food, and not delicious, nourishing celebrations.

We managed to come up with a cake made of real food, and I’m happy to say that he loved it, and has been asking for more ever since. [Insert happy dance here.]

Never mind the magazines that say that a woman’s worth is inversely proportional to her weight, and the plastic bags and containers that are forming a new continent as we speak. Those things were easy to deal with.

What was bothering me today was the fact that once you know that flour and sugar aren’t food, there’s not much left to eat at those places.

I’m really looking forward to fresh garden produce, and the chance to cook with and write about the surprises that show up each week from the CSA. For today, I just took a deep breath, continued wading through the fluorescent swamp in search of some organic carrots, and managed not to pass out from the smell of Tide.

Score one for me.

But we are too smart for that. Our instincts tell us to seek out sugar, which, in the wild, would result in our finding delicious, fleshy fruit that nourishes us. But we have figured out how to isolate sugars, and so when our bodies go seeking them, they find things like twinkies, breakfast cereals, and all kinds of things, from bread to spaghetti sauce, that are helped along with a bit of sugar, to make them more appealing.

The same can be said for the fats that we crave. In nature, such a craving results in our eating what our bodies need. In civilization, though, it results in eating all sorts of things that just simply aren’t food, and make us sick. Now we even have fat substitutes, like Olestra, that cause all sorts of other problems.

Even the production and delivery of food have become harmful. We are hearing more and more about the costs of transporting foods over great distances. Fueling the delivery trucks and planes adds dangerous carbon to our atmosphere, and veggies and fruits are bred for the ability to withstand travel rather than for taste and nutrition. Chemicals like BPA have been found in the containers we use to distribute food, and have been implicated in a wide range of diseases.

Life Love Food is about learning to unlearn all we know about food, and creating a healthy, connected way of life. We’ll do this by exploring everything about food, from permaculture and sustainable farming to cooking and preserving. It’s time to take back food. Because food is life, and life is beautiful.