17. Buy your snacks at the farmers market.
18. Eat close to the earth.
While I can't shake the image of eating my dinner from a seat on the floor, Japanese-style, that's not actually what Michael Pollan means when he says Eat close to the earth. What he means is to try and eat your food as close as possible to the moment when the earth offers it up. Shorten the journey it takes to your plate; eliminate any and every step on that journey that you can.
The reasons for this rule are abundant, ranging from the practical (the shorter the journey, the less fossil fuels burned transporting it to you, and the less opportunities for unknown entities to fill your food with additives) to the more abstract (if your food comes from nearby, you're likely to be more knowledgable about it and thus make better choices) to the philosophical (the more connected you are to your food, the more connected you will be to yourself, your body, and the world around you.)
The ideal, of course, is to pick the apple straight off the tree, though most of us can't just go foraging for our food. Still, there are things we can do: we can buy as local as possible. We can shop at the farmer's market instead of the supermarket. We can make food for ourselves where we would have let others make it in the past.
For me, what this is has come down to is if there is a reasonably feasible way to shorten the distance to my plate, I have to take it. If there is a local option, I have to buy it and if there's a way to live without it when there's not a local option, I have to live without it.
And I can't buy bread. I know this sounds pretty arbitrary - bread, especially if its purchased from a bakery or farmer's market, is a pretty innocuous entity; not really a Food Rules offender in any other way - but stay with me. And here's the thing: baking bread is SO SIMPLE. I might not be able to make my own cheese, or raise my own chickens, but gosh darn it, I can make bread. It's not that hard. And it's even less hard if you own a bread maker, like my parents do.
I'll admit it, I love bread makers. I'm not ashamed. Back in New York, in my shoebox-sized apartment, I dreamed of the day when I would have enough space to store my own bread maker. That, and a coffee maker that ran on a timer. Then I'd set both of them to go off in the early morning, and I'd wake up to warm, homemade bread and freshly brewed coffee all the time. It would be paradise; I'd live like royalty while my robot servants did my bidding.
So yeah, I love bread makers. I know all the hardcore bakers and chefs out there will say that using a bread maker is second rate; I even know a few people who would go so far as to say that when you use the machine instead of making the bread yourself, you are depriving yourself of a sacred task that has been man's birthright almost since the day we discovered fire. I get that. I mean, this project is about getting closer to the process that brings you your food, and one can make an argument that a bread maker is a step in the opposite direction.
But from my perspective, there's something so visceral about seeing the raw ingredients, and combining them yourself, even if "combining" them is just dumping them into a box and pressing start. And - seriously - that is all you have to do. To me, for the purposes of this experiment, that makes it almost unconscionable to go out and buy a loaf of bread - no matter how good and fresh it is.
And that's also why I am SO PROUD OF MYSELF for finally, FINALLY getting around to making a loaf of bread. I've been living essentially bread-free with the occasional exceptions of sandwiches from Flying Star and a few pieces here and there from Farm & Table. It's made for some very sad mornings full of eggs with no toast and some equally frustrating sandwich-less lunches.
This was the first time my parents' machine had been used for anything except kneading dough (what a waste!), and when the finished product came out looking more like a bread cube than a bread loaf I was skeptical.
But it was delicious. Oh, it was so delicious! Soft! And moist! And about as fluffy as whole wheat bread can be! Even though MP specifically instructs me to limit my snacks to unprocessed plant foods (Rule 72), I think the obvious exception is "unless there's still-warm fresh-baked bread." I had a slice of it piping hot, right out of the oven -er- machine, with butter and local honey.
I swear to you, I have never loved any bread more than I loved that slice.
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