Walking the Walk

Food, good food, is my passion and, bread and pastry, my particular fetish. I love bread. I would eat it at every meal if I could. And, I'm tired of apologizing for it!

In these carb abolitionist, gluten free, Dr. Atkins and Paleo crazed days, that kind of confession doesn't seem too far off the mark.

So there it is. I love great bread, and I just so happen to be able to make a great loaf of bread in the privacy of my own home. With that confession put aside, I eat far too much bread, and most of it is definitively NOT great. There are multiple factors that contribute to this, including the fact that I do not live alone and cannot dictate the type and quality of every food item that comes into my home. Add to this, the fact that making bread at home, while enjoyable, does require large blocks of time, and quality bread bought from a baker is expensive. Factor in that fact that I cannot occupy the kitchen all day everyday. Add a little human laziness (mostly mine) and the result is that the chemical inoculated plastic stuff from the grocery store is still a part of my regular diet.

I'm not very happy or proud of this fact.

Issues of quality and provenance aside, I still eat too much of the stuff, and I've been trying for a long time to alter my habits. I must say, emphatically, that unless you are a Celiacs sufferer, are allergic to wheat, or suffer from any one of the gluten intolerance symptoms, there is nothing wrong with bread, wheat, or unbleached flour. How many qualifiers can I put on that?

Obviously I am not a prohibitionist when it comes to the daily loaf, but as an omnivorous animal, I should be eating from the greatest variety of plants, fish, and animals available to me that I can reasonably afford - financially or calorically. Allowing one foodstuff, one grain in fact, to take up such a huge part of my diet just seems like a bad idea no matter what that foodstuff happens to be. Still, bread and pastry (bread in a cuter outfit) continue to be areas in which I have a great deal of difficulty "walking the walk," when it come to my own nutritional wellbeing.

So, I've decided to do something about this other than moan that I shouldn't be eating so much bread, as I shovel more bread into my mouth. To do this, I've set up some rules for myself that have worked with other nutritional hurdles in the past. Altered to your needs, they might just work for you.

Rule 1: Any bread I eat must be of the "great" homemade, or bakery kind. No preservatives, conditioners, etc. I've actually done very well with applying this rule to baked goods an pastries, and I have no reason to believe it will not work here.

Rule 2: Don't eat bread just because it's easy or convenient. I do this far too often when I'm feeling a little hungry before bed or even as I'm preparing a meal. Sometimes bread is just necessary component to a meal.  A sandwich is probably the most convenient lunch, but a sandwich can no longer be the default choice when a salad, best yet one containing some other grain, is more sustaining and increases the amount of other foodstuffs I can eat within that meal.

With these rules come the following strategies:

As I mentioned, buying good quality bread from a bakery can very quickly get economically prohibitive, so obviously, strategy number one is get into the kitchen, and make some bread. But isn't that letting the fox into the hen house? The second component of this strategy is to slice and freeze whatever bread isn't eaten the day it is made so that I am forced to thaw whatever I need, when it is needed, and no more.

Since I cannot clear my environment of the so-so not so good stuff this will require some will power on my part but, these rules and stratagem are no good to me, of course, if I don't also savor and enjoy what bread and pastries I do eat, which only feeds into the, "only eat the good stuff," rule.

The second strategy, also involved the kitchen: prepare some foods that are just as convenient to eat as a couple slices of bread. Have them ready to eat in the refrigerator, and then: eat them!

Someone once said that we do not change our diet without essentially, first, changing our tastes. This sounds extreme to me, but there is a nugget of truth there. There is no use depriving oneself of something if you do not simultaneously cultivate an appetite for something else. In other words, having a substitute available is an essential tool to changing any bad habit. You cannot expect yourself to tackle the problem with willpower alone.