Rebuild from Depression Blog

Here in the Sequoia National Forest all you need is a good shot and some desire to clean an animal to end up with a healthy dinner. Foods are depression buster foods if they are high in combination of our depression-fighting nutrients. We have also spotted deer, raccoons, rabbits, and squirrels in the yard.

I’m on the road this week and have the opportunity to do what I almost never do: shop for food. We keep a freezer stocked with meat, a hen house full of layers, and a pantry stocked with food co-op items. When we are really on the ball, we even have produce in our garden. (When we are not on the ball, my husband shops for groceries to fill in where we need them.)

I know that makes us sound really hard core, but we do live in the absolute middle of nowhere actually in the Sequoia National Forest. We have friends here who pretty much hunt and forage all of their food. That is what I consider to be “hardcore.” Here, “hardcore” is pretty much the only way to live. If you're not "hardcore," you could run out of food or use a full tank of gas to get some.

Now I find myself on the road, all by myself and not knowing how to behave without a kindergartener with me. I visited Costco and called a friend.

“Have you seen these bake-your-own pizzas for ten bucks? That ten bucks would buy you and I two giant meals. That’s $2.50 a meal, we wouldn’t have to cook, AND we would get to eat pepperoni pizza!”

Our child would eat almost nothing if we were not creative. He plays and plays until he is so tired and hungry that he has a meltdown. We are always looking for ways to engage him in his eating experience. We cook with him and follow him around the house with food.

One successful strategy involves a metal food steamer. As Frederick says “It can be a bowl and a plate too.”

The first picture here is the steamer in a closed position. That’s where you put the food and say “I wonder what’s in there.” The “bowl” position is the steamer half-opened; the “plate” position is the steamer opened flat.

Give it a try. You might even get him or her to eat some salad. We’re still working on that ourselves.

Part of my recovery from depression has been eating a whole lot of high-fat food that I avoided for the better part of the 1980s and 1990s. Low fat diets were the ticket to an enviable Body Mass Index and dress size. It did work for the ten minutes you could stay on a diet of bagels and plastic cheese. It turns out that those sorts of diets are bad for the long game. Our brains need the fats in our foods to stay healthy.

Low carb diets offer another option which do allow fat. These diets also work for the ten minutes you can stay on them. Actually, to be fair, I find these diets much easier than the low fat sort. However, I have faced a dilemma: I have realized that I require a certain level of obsession to stay on any of these diets. I dieted through the 1980s and 1990s with a certain level of obsession – just enough obsession to stay on the diet, but not quite enough to inspire a clinical diagnosis of obsessive compulsive disorder.

This is the sole blog entry for this contest, a contest that was a very bad idea.

In a moment of bad judgment about one year ago, I pitched the contest to some of my twisted friends. It was only when receiving Cynthia’s nominations that I realized what a bad idea this contest was in the first place. Here I am just hours away from turning 39 years old for the first time and it seems somehow appropriate to get this over with. (And besides, who really reads blogs on Saturday night of President's Day weekend?)

Cynthia: You win a free book. You will disqualify yourself if you send me more pictures of dead animals.

“Hey Amanda. Dead Milkmen or how about “Cream”? ‘Liven’ that milk. Make it raw.”

Tom nominates Dead Milkmen or Cream as both rock groups and depression buster foods. Apparently he likes it unprocessed, just as it comes out of the cow.

Dead Milkmen is an interesting choice because raw milk advocate and Organic Pastures Dairy owner Mark McAfee often talks about the “Got Dead Milk?” people: the regular old dairy industry. Many raw milk drinkers talk about “dead milk” – pasteurized milk. Most probably don’t know about the punk band “Dead Milkmen.”

I met the "Dead Milk" people this week at the World Ag Expo and their talk about raw milk was about recent news here in California (you can see that I do extra curricular writing over at The Ethicurean which is one reason this poor blog suffers).

Milk is a great source of protein and calcium. Feed the cows grass and they will have higher levels of Omega 3 fatty acids. The same goes for the cream.

But as much as I like milk and cream, they did not make the depression buster cut. When you are doing an index based on the weight of food, milk is at a bit of a disadvantage because of its high water content, but neither cream nor cheese made the cut even with their lower water content. Milk is a high fat food but it is actually not a great source of Omega 3s even when the cows are pastured. Milk is basically a non-source of Omega 3s when cows are confined.

So don’t get me wrong, I am drinking as I write this (and what I am drinking may even be milk), but neither milk nor cream made the list. Sorry Tom.

Send in your contest entries.

My son tells me I work too hard. My numb shoulder and neck agree.

The generation above me tells me to "enjoy them while they are still young." That too makes a whole lot of sense.

What I have been trying to figure out is how to work on projects for this blog and have a lot of fun at the same time. In the spirit of having fun and working on food politics, my son has created some politically-inspired artwork posted at The Ethicurean. We call them "Pollan Paintings" because they come from my discussion with Frederick of Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. Three of a series of four are now on the site:

Children of the corn
Chicken Little at Magic Mountain
Sequoia National Pork

In honor of meeting a Monsanto representative at the World Ag Expo this week, we are working on a little Monsanto series at the moment.

Today isn’t actually my birthday but we did have the cake today. My birthday was Sunday and I would have posted my thoughts on that grand day had I remembered it was my birthday. My sister called at some point to wish me a happy birthday and I said “Whoa. It’s my birthday.”

My dad arrived later and I asked “Wasn’t there something you came over here to tell me?”

He pondered the question, chuckled, and said “Did I miss it again?”

“No, now is your chance.”

You might have guessed that birthdays are not the biggest of events around here. This birthday was different, however. Between writing paragraphs on an article, my mom and I cried our eyes out over what may be my best birthday news ever.

Best birthday present

[I've been busy running around and working on organic dairy politics article. Valentine's Day found me at the World Ag Expo in Tulare. I wrote this essay for The Ethicurean.]

Last week marked the largest proportion of climate change naysayers gathered in one place since Dick Cheney walked into an empty room. Volunteers at the entrance to the World Ag Expo in Tulare, California, screened people as they presented their ticket.

“Do you believe in global warming?”

“It sure is cold out today. I should have brought a sweater,” I answered dutifully. I didn’t mention that it was strange that I could survive without a sweater in mid-February in the first place. I kept my answer as simple as possible. The deception worked, and I was allowed into the expo.

The World Ag Expo is the meeting place of industrial agriculture. Around 100,000 people visit the show every year to shop for tractors, irrigation supplies, carousel milking machines, cow vitamins, pesticides, herbicides, Posilac, teat dip, farm security systems, buildings, shade covers, and methane digesters, just to name a few items.

The show made it easy for folks to register their animals under the National Animal Identification System. I intended to quiz the NAIS reps about my legal requirement in registering my hen, Henny the Huge, or the bobcat that ultimately killed her, but I spent too much time talking to the Monsanto and AFACT people. Next year I must attend all three days.

I am always amazed at the technological advances in agriculture on display at these events. It is an astounding thing, for instance, how much milk you can squeeze out of a dairy cow using technology. Some of the innovations are good, some not so good — but they are impressive nonetheless.

Fill’er up on downer cows?

Continue reading at The Ethicurean

If you read even a smidgeon of this blog you know I am a big fan of beef. I lamented a few weeks ago over the increase in the pathogenic E. coli 0157:H7 in beef. It caused me to pass up an In-N-Out burger which would have been the first fast food burger in my diet in five years. (So you see that the pathogen is doing at least a bit of good work in this household.)

On Friday a friend suggested we go out for burgers at a local cowboy restaurant here in Sequoia National Forest. (I call anything a “cowboy restaurant” that has knotty pine paneling and a lot of people wearing cowboy hats and boots.) I was tempted. Unlike the In-N-Out option, with this burger I would have at least enjoyed the time with a friend and the ambiance of a cowboy restaurant. Had I gotten sick it wouldn’t have been nearly as regretful as getting sick at a fast food place.

Obsession?
All of this pondering about E. coli makes me wonder: Is this my new obsession?

For a person with a history of mental health problems, the obsession part of all of this is probably much worse than the bacteria. I know I must move on and yet the news is being made at my doorstep.

The pathogenic E. coli 0157:H7 is found most commonly in beef and dairy cows. When the cattle poop, the bacteria may end up in manure lagoons and on range land. We have so many dairy cows in the area that their own “emissions” contribute to our poor air quality. For every dairy cow, there is probably a beef cow or steer as well. Because of the sheer volume of cattle poop, I expect I could throw a stone in any direction and hit a colony of E. coli 0157:H7. I live in the belly of the E. coli beast.

To fuel my obsession, the Bakersfield Californian reported a few days ago that lettuce implicated in a 2006 outbreak was contaminated right down the road from here. Dairy cow poop helped fertilize the fields. A few hours north are the spinach fields implicated in other 2006 illnesses. A two hour drive from here is the raw dairy implicated in yet another 2006 outbreak.

My only solace is that I am not the most obsessed. A California Senate Select Committee on Food-borne Illness met today to discuss food safety. E. coli obsessive people like Bill Marler testified. (He does earn a living from his obsession which makes his obsession far more rational than mine.)

Channel the obsession

You never know what you will find around here when you decide to take the back road on a beautiful day. I found grazing Holstein heifers from the Vander Eyk Dairy.

The Vander Eyk Dairy is the dairy we love to hate on this blog, but I have gotten a bit soft on it in my advancing age. My husband and I made a video eulogy to the dairy back in June when its organic certification status (or lack of) was made public. The dairy lacked pasture, just like two other rather notorious feedlot dairies in the country. I wrote about one on The Ethicurean and its diagnosis of Absencia Grassiosis.

Back when the Vander Eyk Dairy got chopped, it seemed like great progress. It was one big win for the integrity of the organic label. Nine months later, it would appear that not a whole lot has happened to the fellow feedlot operators at Aurora Organic Dairy and Dean Foods (Horizon). In a battle with lines drawn between the “big guys” and “little guys,” Vander Eyk is a little guy running a big dairy. The real “big guys” are still bottling organic milk as they transition to a system that gives their cows access to pasture.

Seeing the Vander Eyk cows today made that point come home: the Vander Eyks may well be in a transition phase back to organics themselves and yet they are not allowed to continue bottling.

As far as I’m concerned, if the USDA is not going to enforce the standard for Dean and Aurora, then the local dairymen should be able to get back in the game.

The situation reminds me a bit of a job I was on years ago. We were doing a study that included my old high school. We surveyed teachers as part of the study and those teachers from my school who were from my era got a little cute on their surveys:

“The only good thing I see in this reform is that it has provided a job for a researcher.”

I got a good belly laugh and, of course, I knew from the handwriting exactly who made the comment. He knew that I knew and I knew that he knew that I knew.

When I saw the heifers grazing on Vander Eyk land and with Vander Eyk ear tags, I thought “Good for you, Bessies.”

If we’re going to have organic mega-dairies they might as well be right here helping the Tulare County economy and giving me blog fodder.

At my six-month check up yesterday and cleaning, I asked the dental hygienist “how old” my teeth are. “You know that book ‘Real Age’ that adjusts your calendar age for bad habits like smoking and good habits like exercise to come up with your ‘Real Age’? What’s the ‘Real Age’ of my teeth?”

First of all, no patient has apparently asked the question before and she explained how no algorithm exists to answer. However, she did say that my teeth were pretty much on target for hitting their first 39th birthday just last week.

She said, “You have no major signs of inflammation and certainly none that couldn’t be solved with more regular flossing.”

“Inflammation? You can see it in my teeth?”