Nanowrimo

Darkmirror asked me to join him in Nanowrimo as a writing buddy, and I said yes. Then I remembered that I don’t write fiction!

A few minutes later Wild Thing asked me to bake with him. He held up a magazine article that showed a tasty treat to make. It started with a tube of prepared biscuit dough from a huge multinational food corporation, Pillsbury. Pillsbury works in partnership with another huge multinational food corporation, Nestle, that we boycott because of their tactics in selling breastmilk substitutes. I was morally outraged

Next, I googled the ingredients.

Enriched Flour, Bleached (Wheat Flour, Niacin, Ferrous Sulfate, Thiamin Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid)Buttermilk, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean and Cottonseed Oil, Sugar, Corn Syrup Solids, Baking Powder (Baking Soda, Sodium Aluminum Phosphate)Salt, Xanthan Gum, Propylene Glycol Alginate, Enzymes.

We do our best to eat whole foods. I avoid bleached flour products, hydrogenated oils, cottonseed and soy, high fructose corn syrup, and oh yeah, toxic antifreeze. This added to my outrage.

I had a really hard time finding the ingredients online though. The first few pages of links were all to people wondering how to make Pillsbury biscuits if they couldn’t find them in the store, as if Pillsbury invented the buttermilk biscuit. How did something so incredibly simple become the domain of the processed food industry?

Then I started thinking about the slow food movement and the general dismissal of it I see in mainstream society. It is all well and good for chefs (who make their living out of a cooking) to talk about a return to local fresh ingredients and taking time to cook from scratch, but most people don’t have time for four course menus. Contrary to popular belief amongst the big name slow food writers, most of us don’t live in southern California, with year round access to lemons and avocados and red peppers in the spring.. I think for the most part they’re adding to the disconnect with simple whole foods by turning it into an intellectual gourmet racket.

I thought about blogging about it and then realized I had my Nanowrimo project. I needed to write a whole foods locavore cookbook for the rest of us busy, lazy, disorganized cooks with a conscience, who don’t make food our hobby.

So that's what I'm going to be doing. It isn't a novel (yet, we'll see what it morphs into) so I'm technically a Nanowrimo rebel. If you want to be my buddy I'm mudmama!