I am by no means a person (woman, Jew) without food issues.  I was a chubby kid growing up, though that never stopped me eating what I liked, and I was also an active kid so that largely balanced things out.  I got heavier when I became a bookworm, got skinnier when I became interested in working out, and so on throughout various ages and stages in my life.

I am now at a point where, while I watch my weight, I detest “diet food.”  If I have to eat less of richer food to maintain a healthy weight, then I will do so, because life is too short to waste eating low-fat sugar free crap.

That said, when I first started roasting my own chickens, making my own stock, and generally using as much of each chicken as I could find means to do, I became intensely interested in the cult of schmaltz (chicken-fat, for the uninitiated.)  I discovered that I could toss and roast firm leafy greens (hello, kale!  Hello, chard!) in the shimmering golden pan drippings from the resting chicken, and those two tablespoons of otherwise wasted leftovers made green vegetables so heavenly delicious that even my herbiphobic husband would eat them.

How exciting that schmaltz is making a comeback!

I now will regularly trim wads of fat off the edges of my chickens, render it, and pour it off into a container to be frozen for future use.

I arrived at my present general dismissiveness of diet food some time after I became inspired to ‘do it myself’ in my own kitchen.  (As I discovered, it’s hard to replace the fattiest or sugariest parts of a recipe and still wind up with something satisfying.)  Julia Child, as you might imagine, played a huge part in my personal food revolution; it was watching her show and reading about her that made me realize something critical: that the recipes in her books weren’t designed to be outlandishly rich.  This was how people *ate* as a matter of course in the 50s in France, and probably in general before food- and diet-science got out of control.

What is the point of food if it isn’t satisfying?  I will admit that I’ve been struggling with my weight recently, and spending time feeling deprived.  Just recently, I decided that I am simply no longer going to waste calories eating food that I don’t enjoy.  Life is too short… but I’ve already said that.  I may wind up eating less, but I will wind up more satisfied.

This article about Julie and Julia, Julia Child and what it might really mean to be a woman who loves food without reservation, got me thinking down this path.  I don’t hold out a lot of hope for being a food lover with complete abandon; I’ve regarded food as an adversary for too long to ever truly leave that mindset behind.  But it’s meaningful to me to be closer to Julia’s end of the spectrum than I was when I started out 5 years ago trying to put together meals with a modicum of flavor that I wouldn’t feel guilty eating.

Eff that, that’s what I have to say about feeling guilty about eating.  It’s an affront to all of humanity both to eat more than one needs to, and also to feel guilty about nutrition.  I am also a strong proponent of slow food, and to that end believe that less processing is healthier for the food, for the eaters, and for the environment.  De-fatting and de-sugaring certainly qualify as processing.

In a world where so many people go hungry, don’t I – as a person, a woman and a Jew? – have a responsibility to approach food in a healthy way?* And not just in a “health food” (as in turkey bacon?) kind of way.  So much of what we consider culturally Jewish cooking is founded on principles designed to squeeze out every ounce of flavor and nutrition from food sources animal and vegetable alike, and to make delicious and truly satisfying food in a physical and emotional sense.  (There’s a reason that “comfort foods” of all cultures are the richest ones.)

Shouldn’t we all be eating food, and not processed food products?  And I mean all of us, from the richest breakfast-bar-buying demographic to the poorest literally starving population on the planet.  I didn’t start this post intending to soapbox about sustainability, but the same principle that encourages me to explore economy for not entirely economic reasons – say, to stretch a single chicken to its absolute limit, and my vegetables to main dishes, scraps for stock and trimmings for compost – to me suggests that the entire human population could be getting a lot more nutrition out of raw foods than we are getting from high fructose corn syrup and bleached white flour.

This entry is my committment to eat foods I love, and love the foods I’m eating.  It’s a committment to avoiding waste and leaving more for others.  And yes, it’s a committment to whole foods, which includes fat, glorious fat, an important dietary component and biological requirement.

If it’s going to be struggle to find a balance between enjoying whole foods and not enjoying them *too much* then that is a burden I am willing to bear.

*Hazon thinks so – they host the Hazon Food Conference every year, which Wikipedia tells me is “an annual meeting of farmers, culinary experts, global citizens, business, community and Jewish leaders to focus on contemporary food issues and exchange ideas on improving health and sustainability in communities throughout the world.”

Fat Camp – by Daniella Cheslow > Tablet Magazine – A New Read on Jewish Life
Celebrating “Julie & Julia”