Miscellaneous Stuff

My mother is a gardener; she loves amarillis flowers. Me, they always remind me of the Italian song, Amarilli, Mia Bella, so I certainly don't have a problem with it!

I'm reminded, as I traipse along in my life, just how driven towards eating disorders women are. I went with my Foodology class to a Wild Oats about fifteen minutes away from school and went on a sort of "scavenger hunt" thing of the store. We had questions to answer - mostly about the marketing strategies that the store used (and I have to say, use of the free-range myth is big amongst health food stores - and it probably does work by deluding people into thinking that the animals really were happy. Feh) - and a list of items to find the brands and prices for. I decided, about halfway through, that no, I just was not going to go into the "happy meat" section and hear all about how the animals they slaughter are given massages in open fields blah blah blah blah blah.

But that's not the point of this. The point of this is that one of the younger girls in the class picked up a can of iced tea and was regarding the nutrition facts label with suspicion.

"That's a lot of calories," she said.

I peered over. Three servings, 70 calories per serving. When I was actively eating disordered, that would have been cause for exercise purging; it would have summed up a little more than what I tried to eat any day. She had no idea, thank god.

"It's only 210 calories," I pointed out. "On a scale of 1,700-2,000 calories per day, just about anything you eat will be negligible."

"That's true!" she said, smiling at this. "It's not so many calories. I'll take it."

There. My good deed done for the day. But the thing is, a little while later we were strolling by the ice cream section and she pointed out the Ben & Jerry's there and how it was, "so good." And, perhaps completely undoing what I had said before, I remarked absentmindedly, "Yeah, but the Rice Dream has less calories."

Gah. I have to wonder: what is up with me today? I've been so... spacey for some reason. I think it's just a mixture of caffeine from the cacao (makes me hyperfocus and lose track of other things) and plain ol' stupidity/brainwashing. I'm just glad that she got one of those So Good vanilla soybuddies later and enjoyed it immensely. She almost went back for another one, but we had to go.

So I went to the store today and got:
1 lb. organic raw walnuts
6 lbs. organic braeburn apples
1 pkg. mellow white miso (also organic)
1/2 lb. organic dried chickpeas (for sprouting)

I swear, I am in love with Vitamin Cottage. (For those of you that don't know, it's a Colorado-based health food store that has the most amazing produce section ever, and it's all organic - in other stores, you'd occasionally find wilted produce or produce otherwise past their prime. NOT here.) It's just so... good. That, right there, is food for five or six days, combined with what I have already - I spend about $30-$40/week on groceries, and as a raw foodist, I eat LOTS. Vitamin Cottage is literally the only place I can find organic apples that are not red delicious for $1/lb. or thereabouts. The root vegetables, tomatoes and squash tend to be a bit expensive, but what'cha gonna do? At Vitamin Cottage, they're $2.49/lb. while at King Soopers, they're $5 for six organic roma tomatoes. And as I implied, the produce is always better at Vitamin Cottage.

One of the things that is going to hinder me in later life is the fact that I am allergic to conventional fruits. I don't mean I'm allergic to the pesticides (though it's probably that, too); I am actually allergic to the beeswax that they wax conventional fruits with. It makes my lips swell up and burn and hurt horribly. Not pretty and not nice. I know it's the beeswax because, when I was just a baby vegan, I grabbed my mother's chapstick without thinking and smeared some on and I got exactly that reaction. (Only nowadays I get a really sore throat, too.) And I may be wrong, but I certainly can't find any link other than beeswax between the conventional fruits, the conventional chapstick and the organic beeswax-laden chapstick that I picked up out of a "vegan lip balm" box. (Fucking liars! Ow!)

Sounds weird? I once knew someone whose boyfriend was allergic to oranges. Yeah.

I'll end on this note: I find that one of my "favorite" binging times is late in the evening, when either nobody's around or I'm too tired to care about them seeing me eat and eat and eat. Of course, naturally, when you get somebody who's been phobic of food before and still retains a bit of that now, what follows a binge is purging. So, in order to cut that cycle short, I find that I have to - have to as in have to breathe to keep living - stuff myself with raw foods to keep myself occupied.

And you know what? I am so fucking happy that I don't have a problem with doing that, because they're all "safe foods" to me.