Work for your food

I have to give partial credit to my friend Jeff on this one. We're both very concerned about the state of childhood obesity in this country. That state being Nebraska. Ay-oh!

Just kidding. But seriously. Have you seen kids? They're really fat these days.

So our idea is for an obstacle course, or series of obstacle courses, in which you are rewarded with food. But, like, that's your dinner. So you have to climb one of those wall things and at the top is half a sandwich. Then you crawl through some mud and swing over a puddle and get a cookie.

You know, typing it out makes it seem kind of mean. We didn't plan on that. It was more a way to incorporate calorie loss into calorie consumption. And trying to create a zero balance. And this wouldn't be something you'd do all the time, it would just be a silly learning exercise to help people equate the two. I don't think people often realize, or even consider, what kind of effort it would take to "get rid" of what they're eating.

It's not mean. It's supposed to be fun.

Living local

I'm reading this book about what it might be like if you really tried to cut the petroleum out of your food chain by having your own garden and getting anything you couldn't grow yourself from farmers/ranchers/mills near by. Lots of people (see Michael Pollan, Carlo Petrini, etc.) talk about the horrors of the military industrial food complex, but I think it would be really eye-opening if nothing else for people to do this eating local experiment for themselves.

And when I say eating local, I mean ALL local - everything from your oranges to your chicken to your walnuts to your oats, olive oil. There will obviously be things you can't eat for as long as you're running your experiment, but - and this is where I feel like I'm having a slightly newish idea - if everyone did this, you could start to see differences in regional cuisines again. There would be pluses like everything being in season and probably mostly home made (which is a plus for me, at least), but, beyond that, I think it would be more exciting to travel, if things weren't always the same everywhere you went.

It would be like taking the idea that baguettes are better in France up a notch because maybe they'd only exist in France. Maybe you'd have to come up with your own bread shape or regional dishes that worked for your climate and lifestyle. You could get excited about food again, because it would be challenging and new. And, if you grew it, it would be a lot more personal and meaningful.

And finally, if we were able to save all that oil that we pour on our fields to produce states and states-worth of corn and soy beans maybe we'd be able to spare a bitty bit of fuel for transporting us to faraway and actually foreign places.

Zoo Recipes

So, when you go to the Louisiana swamp part of the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans, they have all the bayou animals, including this really cool alligator with leucism, which looks almost exactly like albinism except that your eyes aren't red and it's actually a completely different disease. If it survived Hurricane Katrina, you should really check this alligator out.

But anyway, they also have recipes on the walls mixed in with all the bayou animal tanks. Things like crawfish boil or crawfish étoufée. You read it and then there are the little crawfish crawling around (or doing whatever it is that they do). And that's the idea - posting recipes of the zoo animals above their cages. Ideally these would be recipes of people who had to subsist on these things in the wild.

You wouldn't want to encourage people to hunt endangered species and make like giant panda stew, but I think if you could get recipes or even just first hand stories of people interacting with these animals in the wild, it would make it that much more real to people, and you could get a sense of the whole ecosystem, rather than just looking at a miserable little guy in a box or pen.

Another corollary idea is this: you should really check out the Cajun section of the Audubon Zoo, because it's pretty bad ass - especially the white alligator, whose house is air conditioned, I might add.