Last Post

Hello everyone, it’s me Marin and low and behold it is the last post of my challenge and I won’t lie I’m all revved up for it. Mostly because it will be over before my birthday on Tuesday meaning I will be able to eat all those deliciously non-organic foods for myself. Not saying that organic food doesn’t have its own perks, it does. But I’ll go on a limb here and assume that organic cake doesn’t quite taste like non-organic cake and I would prefer my cake to make me go ‘OOOOOOOOOO Nastagia!’.

Anyways…I suppose I’ve got to sum things up here before I go. I’ll try to separate my experiences into either a pro or con category. So, let’s see…

If you are going to go organic with small or little amounts of meat expect to lose weight. I have ended up losing plenty and I am basically at the same condition I was in a few years ago. And for once I feel comfortable in it. Not too big, not too skinny, just right. Pro: Your body will be slimmer.

But that still doesn’t take into account whether or not organic is healthier for you. If we minus losing weight out of the occasion then what we are left with here is a pickle. To put it simply I don’t feel any different from I did before, my mood hasn’t really changed much and those headaches I mentioned a while ago? Well they went away now, they were just random, probably lack of sleep. You see, besides lack of meat and short supply of food that I could readily eat, there doesn’t seem to be much of a difference on my bill of health. Should I count this as a Pro or a Con? Well since it neither deprives my state or enhances it I’ll have to say it is Neutral although I should say that I came in that the process would make me feel healthy but then looking back on it that was pretty foolish of me. It’s the same kind of food just with a different label.
Which brings me to my next point.

Does organic taste better than non-organic? This is probably what most people coming in ask before they go through with it. And it’s definitely what I asked. So here’s the verdict: Not Really. Now to be fair this does depend on what you eat, junk food here is out of the question, so is most sauces or spices that you don’t know how to make by yourself. So what I am basing my judgement on are the foods that came be eaten non organically and organically. With a few exceptions, milk and corn flakes come to mind, organic food tastes just like regular inorganic food. It is some of the weirdest stuff I have ever tried before too in so far as the way it was made. (Why if ever would anyone list “Organic Natural Flavors” as an ingredient next to all the fruit, what is “Organic Natural Flavors”? shouldn’t that count as just fruit and list the fruit only??? I don’t understand ) Neutral case here, all the way. But then why would I eat only organic which doesn’t taste any differently from regular food nor makes me feel healthier and which only allows me to lose weight in the same way just being a vegetarian probably would? In other words why should I bother?

The answer: It supports a cause.
Going organic supports sustainable food growing. Something which industrial food doesn’t. The more I’ve looked at industrial food growing through The Omnivore’s Dilemma and through independent online sources the more it comes up that the food that we eat regularly is going to run out soon with the way we grow it. We’re taking more than we should and its becoming a real problem. One of the ways to solve this is through going organic with an emphasis on local produce. (However I didn’t go local either, considering at the beginning I mentioned that I didn’t know what I was doing, I think I should get a little slack.) There are many other ways to tackle this problem and this is only one but one that I could tackle at one time. To get more things to change more work has to be done starting with the legislator and to be frank I haven’t the slightest idea where to begin on that one. Considering that sustainable food growing is a Pro lets look now at what I’ve gotten out of this both good and bad.

Pro: Weight loss and I helped a good cause. Con: I don’t feel any healthier and the food doesn’t taste very different.

The odds are pretty even. And with that I think there are some pretty fair reasons about why to go organic and why to not. The most important thing here is that I helped to eat a little more sustainably and that I tried something new beyond that as far as I’m concerned I would probably do it again if the inkling arose. With that I urge everyone to try going organic even if it’s only for a little while, see what you think of it and come out of it with a new sense of Sproutlieness. I know I have!

Reevaluating my Health

So it’s nearly been another two weeks since my last post and once again it is because I have had less to right then usual. J-term is winding down and nothing much has changed as far as eating regiment has gone, one of the other reasons that I haven’t gotten around to posting has to do with Omnivore’s Dilemma. Sprout’s book clubs first novel to look at is something else and it’s captured my attention. It’s making me re-think my stance on my organic diet what if anything that I am getting from it. To be fair I’m not entirely finished with the book so I shouldn’t judge but being frank it’s made me think hard on what I would like to do after J-term is over.

Before I forget there was one more thing that I would like to touch on before next time when I post what could possibly be my last blog post. I mentioned once that I would reevaluate my health after two solid weeks of eating only organic foods. So far I think I have thinned out quite abit at least in my own opinion. That’s probably due to cutting out all of those processed fats and sugars from my diet. Because of this I feel pretty comfortable in my body unlike how I did before. However there have been some draw backs as well I’ve been getting more head aches than usual and I am constantly thirsty. That also might have something to do with the lose of processed food since those could be broken down to water and since they were there in great quantities I probably wouldn’t have noticed as much, how much my body had needed water. Besides these new findings I haven’t found much that is bad or very different from eating non-organic foods. Well there is one more thing that I failed to mention now that I think about it. Its my constant craving of meat and more specifically meat of the Chinese take out variety. I haven’t eaten any organic meat only broth and I really miss the filling feeling that I got while I ate meat. I’m not sure why I want Chinese food but it seems to be popping up more and more. I’ll have to see how I’m going to cope with the craving till next time I post considering I’m kind of close to cracking. Till then tata.

I Would Like to Post Something But There is Nothing to Talk About

Hello peoples, this is Marin and I would like to report…NOTHING! One big stinky ball of nothing. This is the reason why I have neglected to post on Monday like I wanted. All I have done is eat Cinnamon raisin bread and cornflakes, which by the way are about ten times better than the regular inorganic kind, and that is all. I haven’t tapped my creative juices quite yet. What I have done thus far has mostly just eaten what I’ve got thus far as is and haven’t gotten to cooking anything to elaborate beyond the things that I regularly would eat at home. Spaghetti has been a favorite as it has been in my other posts and so has salad, finding the cornflakes was a great surprise though. They taste really great and with organic milk, which is also much better than inorganic, they are delightful. I’m having some trouble finding some recipes for organic foods though, something that can be whipped together in 30mins seems like something that’s a bit more challenging. It’s the lack of will to go and find the ingredients combined with the fact that I’m either pretty lazy or just am pretty busy at the dorms, that is really holding me back from writing this. Although now I no longer eat at the cafeteria down stairs in Sorin, I still have a lot to do to relearn the cooking skills that I’ve taken for granted so far in my life. Till next time…

The Past Two Weeks

I’ve been putting off posting on this blog because to be perfectly honest nothing has changed that much since Christmas. Most of my diet has consisted of speghetti some macaroni noodles alla box, its basically repition of the base noodle dinner with some form of fruit, apples, tangerines or pears as a snack. Every once in a while I’ll treat myself to salad or soup but mostly this is what I have been living off of for the days I’ve gone organic. The reason why I have anything of import to post here today is because this week I have decided to go full organic. Gone are the days of stuffing myself of the delicious processed garbage that are great but really unhealthy. Today dawns a new era of discovery of culinary delights (or tribulations since I have mediocre cooking experience even to date).

Thus far I have noticed a few things about organic living. For one thing there is a distinct lack of meat and/or milk in the diet. Like I said at the begining it’s not as though these things arn’t around I’ve just had a lack of will to go out and look for them or to find out how to prepare them (laziness undoubtably my sworn enemy). At any rate I’ll have to go and find some if I am going to be in any way comfortable since I refuse to go vegitarian, I am not strong enough to do that.

One other thing that I have noticed is that there doesn’t seem to be much difference so far in my health when I began eating organic to before I undertook the challenge. There hasn’t been much change that my body has undergone I’ll I’ve noticed is that I feel a bit thinner after going organic for a couple days that I did before. Mentally the effect hasn’t been noticable either or at the very least it was undermined by the stress of finals and the over all randomness of my schedule during break. I understand that not having many wide effects on my health could be due to the fact that I have been going on and off organic in accordance with my schedule. But I feel it would be wise to give it at least two weeks before I check back on my health as effected by organic food.

I still have not found a job to help out with the monetary challenge of organic food living. It wasn’t a problem until now to find the money for the food because my parents have been gracious enough to endulge me in this enterprise and it may continue to not be a problem, however I would not appreciate them having to pay for me forever. So, I will try my hardest to find a job during J-term where I will have Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday off of school though other times may be negociated. It’ll be tough but I’ll see what I can find.

I’ll try from now on to keep in touch regularly on the weeks. I will report the findings of this week for next weeks as usual but I think it would be better for me to have a set day and I think that that day would best be a Sunday. If I don’t end up posting in by then I probably will do it during Monday or maybe choose another date arbitrarily again but I’ll be shooting for Sunday. Well that’s all that I wanted to post and to all those who are coming back for J-term, welcome back.

The previous week and plans for this one

This is Marin, and sorry to anyone who is paying attention to these because I have posted rather later than usual. I got caught up in the Christmas activities in my house so to be perfectly frank I forgot to blog. But better late than never I’ll now give you a review of the week before christmas.

That week I had the days Fri-Sun to come up with things to eat. I went shopping for this week and I bought spaghetti noodles and sauce, chicken stock, more potatoes, onions and garlic. I used the stock, potatoes, carrots from way back when, onions, and garlic to make soup on Friday. It turned out very good, so much so that I ended up just eating the leftovers through Saturday. When Sunday came along I decided to make spaghetti which also turned out very well.

I’ll note here that I won’t be putting up any recipes for my concoctions because I usually cook on the fly. The spices I used and quantity of the ingredients are quite lost on me. I just threw in whatever I had on hand. I’m sorry ><.

One more thing that I should say for this week is that I will be skipping Thursday on organics and instead go organic on Monday since Christmas is a family thing at my house and it wouldn't be appropriate to only eat organic when my mom worked so hard to make a Christmas dinner that I can't eat. I think that pretty much wraps this organic post. So I'll be posting next week with a new update, bye.

Strange Groceries, Strange Times

Hello everyone!

Now that I’m done with this semester and safely at home, I can emerge from my hole of working.

These past few weeks have been strange for my organic groceries experiment. The week before finals week, I knew that I wouldn’t really have time to go grocery shopping, so I ate the pantry. The next week, I was still on my leftover binge and ate things out of the pantry. I made bread and ate a lot of PB and J sandwiches, and I splurged on groceries and bought myself some organic beef to make spaghetti with.

Which was rather tasty, and much better than non-organic beef.

So now, I’m at home for a week and therefore not buying my own groceries.

My family has always tried to eat as much organic/local food as possible. Right now, money is a little tight, so my parents have started substituting some non-organic groceries in to help with the budget. Even though I come from small-town Wisconsin, we have a beautiful co-op that I practically grew up in.

Tonight, mom and I are going to cook a nice dinner out of almost completely organic ingredients. I’ll post the recipe – it should be exciting. We have very different tastes in food (she doesn’t like eating a lot of carbs, I am practically vegetarian), so what we agree on to cook will be an interesting experiment.

In other SPROUT news, our last meeting was very fruitful:

1. Over break, we will all pick up a copy of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and read it. Our first meeting in J-Term will be a kind of book club. There were a lot of other books that we thought about, but we decided that since this one is the “hot” book of our age on food, we should all read it to get on the same page. Depending on how well this goes, we will continue the book club.

2. In January, we’ll be having a massive meeting with all of our neighborhood partners to reflect on this past growing season and get on the same page about the upcoming season. This will also be some sort of farewell to Margaret (sad!)

3. We are continuing the challenge over break! Since I’m not really buying food for myself, I’ll probably give up a couple of recipes and/or talk to some of my favorite local businesses in my home town about where their food comes from.

That’s all for now! I know I’ll be posting again soon.

Abbie

A reiteration of why I need to plan better

Hello, it’s Marin, and I am going to tell you now that I need to plan better for my organic weeks. Last week I only ever ate left overs consisting of tofu and potatoes on Saturday. As far as that goes I didn’t make anything fancy I basically just baked the potatoes and ate the tofu raw the next day I had to get groceries and I honestly had a lot to do that day so i didn’t plan much further than buying food. When I did go grocery shopping, however I can tell you what I did buy. I aquired some dried figs, pears, apples, a head of lettuce, carrots, panda peanut butter cereal and some organic fruit snacks that a friend had given me that day. I basically just chowed down on the apples that day and didn’t go much further than that but I have found a site that can help me a great deal with cooking. It takes the ingredients I have on hand and makes them into an impromtu recipe right there and then or recommends other recipes that include my ingredients. Here is the link

Hopefully any lazy chefs like me will find this helpful. This is about all that I can offer as far as interesting news for last week mostly I was trying to focus on getting everything ready and/or done for finals so I wasn’t very prepared, a bad excuse I realize but none the less true. Hopefully this week, armed with a more varied ingredient list and the above website I found I can make up something a bit more interesting. Tata for now.

A Sustainable Transient life?

11-23-09
Hey folks, wow I’m late on this by like two weeks.
But here’s my take on the challenge.

Firsties – SPROUT is brilliant and It’s been sad to be away from it for a semester, not seeing the final harvest and all that but! I’ve been up to some stimulating things and am excited to be able to support y’all through this blog deal.

Currently I am traveling from New York back to Minnesota via the intriguing southern states and sustainability is on my mind. For the past few months I’ve been working on a biodynamic vegetable and herb farm that has taught me about giving and taking from the land where we live and focused quite a bit around building stronger veins between rural natural growing farmers and folks in big cities to put it shortly. There was a definite consciousness around living in a way that was positive for the ecosystem around us. But, I’m not there anymore- so it doesn’t count. Basically that was only one way of being sustainable but applying lessons I’ve learned from that experience will most definitely be applicable to other situations. Diversity is a key aspect of successful things, and the preservation of this world and humans in it are without exception. So basically farming and camping is not for everyone but thanks to whomever it doesn’t have to be! but food and other things are so lets talk about that.

So sustainable traveling lightly on a light budget? here we go. To me being “sustainable” is about supporting natural/productive/positive/compounding cycles so I would like to focus on making my experiences more cyclical. Supporting local farmer’s when I find them, staying with friends, acquaintances, couch-surfing strangers and providing them a home one day if they need it, supporting public transportation by train and bus and of course being a bicycle presence with cars and threatening that ugly power they enjoy grimacing or just testing their awareness at the cost of my safety, going to community events, cooking as much as possible, and what ever else comes up.

So Ill be leaving in a few days to go to Philadelphia but right now I’m in Brooklyn New York and enjoying it!

enjoy the ride!
Emma

First Organic Experiment with the result of:…meh >.>

Hi it’s Marin and again I am going to arbitrarily mention how the SPROUT Challenge is going for me so far. Last Sunday was my first day of cooking with organic food entirely and quite honestly I was a little out of my depth. Not because I disliked the organic food stuffs I had bought–I used tofu, finger potatoes, soy sause and virgin olive oil–I just didn’t plan out what I was going to make very well. I figured I would just wing it and see what I would come up with and the result was…well…meh. It wasn’t bad but it could have definitely been better. From now on I will probably work from online reciepies instead of getting over confident and just throwing things together. That sort of thing didn’t use to bother me so much. Heck you are looking at girl who would take snacking in the middle of the night with reheated rice, soy sauce ( I love soy sauce , and seaweed rap, to be a decent meal. Here however, I would like to take an opportunity to learn some basic culinary skills, instead of just noming the first thing I see (Om nom nom nom nom nom), along with eating on an organic only diet. I certainly think there is room to fit more than one goal into this experiment. Just saying.

Anyways, what I did for Sunday was take some fingerling potatoes cut them up into shaving like slices, fry them in an olive oil spread pan and added salt. As a side dish I sort of just took out the tofu and sprinkled it with soy sauce ( I used to eat it that way as a kid). Like I said, it wasn’t fabulous but it wasn’t bad.

So, next week end I will be eating organic all of Saturday and Sunday. Yeah…I suppose that’s pretty much all that I wanted to say here. Bye for now.

Hrm … Challenges

Hello everyone, Abbie here again.

This week was … strangely difficult on my budget. This is largely due to the fact that my French Press broke (what a tragedy!), and for a student entering finals, having the requisite supply of coffee is a MUST.

So I had to adjust my budget so I could spend $20 on a new coffeemaker. That meant that I had no spending money for this week. I also had to get gas this week – which was an unexpected cut. (PS, I’m very bad at remembering that gas actually costs money. Especially considering I don’t drive often at all, I forget when I need to fill up.) I also needed to get a windshield scraper, in preparation for winter.  Moral of the story: I’ve felt a little tight on money this week.

**

Here’s what I bought:

Grape Tomatoes

Bag of chips

Whole Wheat Pasta

Can of Corn

Can of Tuna

Tomato Paste

Herb mix

Small green bell pepper

one navel orange

Mozzarella

Lime

Russet Potato

1/2 pound of coffee

Total Cost: $36.63

**

With those groceries, I made my own pizza (huge onion from last week, green pepper, corn, and some chicken I found in the freezer) from scratch and I used the potatoes from last week to make a side-dish to accompany my Thanksgiving leftovers.

I have enough leftovers right now to carry me through the weekend, and possibly to carry me through the first part of next week, but I’m not sure about that. Making the pizza from scratch was quite tasty, and a good way to save some money. However, I did miss the greasy wonder that is junk-food pizza. Oh well.

I think next week is going to be an eating-out sort of week, and an eat-up-everything-in-the-fridge/pantry week. Yes yes.

Also: Organic Finals Week Comfort Food? I’ll try to figure something out …