My name is Becca. I am a 25 year old wife and mother of two handsome boys. I work as a waitress at a local diner who's bread and butter, no pun intended, is that everything is homemade. I am saved by the grace of God through Jesus Christ my savior.
Oh, and I love to cook!
I grew up on a ranch where the closest city was a hour's drive away. There would be days that my mom would spend all day cooking. I love my mom's cooking and I owe all my love for cooking to her and God.
Now, enough about those things. They are just quick points that will further be developed as I go through this journey.
Did I mention I love to cook? I love making everything from scratch. I even love peeling potatoes to make my own mashed potatoes. I make my own flour breading for frying things, I make roux for gravies and sauces, my favorite term in cooking is mier poix, I even went to cooking school for half a semester*. What's missing? Well, I use things like bleached flour, margarine, I have Kraft American cheese in my fridge and, although I don't carry sugar in my home, when a recipe calls for sugar I use refined cane sugars. And really, those are just a few things out of the hundreds that I could mention about processed foods.
Why make the switch? (If my husband's gut isn't enough of a reason, I don't know what is [awkward laugh])
But seriously, the top of my list of concerns about my family's diet is our meat consumption. The meat and dairy industry is just barbaric at best. You don't have to dig far to see the inhumane ways that animals used for eating are raised and slaughtered. Animals are raised in small pens with no room to turn around and the assembly line slaughter makes me wonder if the slaughterer must have become numb to it. And quite possibly the worst that I have seen is the egg farms. Chickens are crammed into cages with no room to move and there little chicken feet are getting cut up from walking on wire their whole lives. The only break they get from standing on wire is if their little chicken friend dies for them to walk on because the egg farms are so huge that dead chickens go unnoticed. I haven't even mentioned the hormones they pump into those animals so that they can grow bigger, faster. Hormones that we, in turn, consume. Is this really where I want my food coming from? No thanks. The more of this meat I eat, the more I contribute to these awful living conditions. And although we are just one family, I bet that I have at the very least eaten a cow in my lifetime. That is at least one cow who's sad little life existed purely so that I could eat it.
I will touch some on produce, although I have not done much research on this mainly because our budget is low and I am just not up to going completely organic yet without the funds. I know if I do the research I will be convicted and spend the extra money. However, there are things about synthetic pesticides and such that do concern me and I do plan to buy solely organic produce when we can afford it and that will be soon, God willing.
You may be thinking to yourself, "This lady really hasn't mentioned anything new." And you would be right, I haven't. These are all things that we are informed and know about. But these are things that I have blocked from my consciousness until recently and thus the beginning of my journey to Becoming a Real Food Foodie.
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