happy holidays!

Well, after a few days in California with my girlfriend and her family, I'm back in the PNW. The trip was pretty much nonstop wine and food and I'm feeling HEAVY, like a lead weight. That said, I don't regret indulging over the holidays and there is nothing like sharing good food with family during this time of the year. It wasn't all bad though. In addition to mash potatoes, ham, endless pies, and casserole, we did one day whip up baked salmon, handroll sushi, roasted squash soup and veggie stuffing -- all reasonably healthy stuff.

On the way down, I started reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. This book is fantastic and the writing is just excellent. I know it sounds weird to say that a non-fiction book about our food supply is riveting but I'm tearing right through it and the story that is laid out before you is truly eye opening. So, a brief synopsis: the author starts by trying to answer the question, "What should we eat?" However, it becomes apparent rather quickly that before answering that question, you first must understand "What are we eating now?" Pollan attempts to follow 4 common food chains from the point at which they enter our bodies back through their life cycles and supply chains to arrive at their origins. He starts with the modern supermarket meal and follows it back to its origins. With over 40,000 items in an average store, you would think that the path back would follow many divergent braches, but you'd be wrong. No, a journey following most supermarket products back through their respective life cycles, from snacks to drinks to meats, most commonly ends up in an American corn field in Iowa. More than the Aztecs who called themselves the Maize people, we Americans are the real people of the corn, literally -- an analyzis of the carbon in our bodies will show that, far more than any other nation, including Mexico, our bodies are composed of carbon from eating products that at one point were snatched from the atmosphere by a corn plant. That fact would end its novelty there, save for the inconvenient facts that is costs more to make corn than it does to sell it (guess where a ton of your tax dollars go to -- yeah that's right, corn subsidies that push prices ever downward and promote unchecked overproduction), and that because corn is largely dependent on fossil fuels for it's nitrogen fertilizer and pesticides, the energy required to product corn is slightly higher than the energy output. Considered on a large scale, the implications of this are huge. Our food supply is unsustainable. Grim news I know, but it's fascinating and really wakes you up to the fact that what you eat is not only what you are, but can have far ranging effects much more profound and complicated than you could ever fathom on a daily basis. Anyway, I've just started the book but will continue to share any interesting nuggets.

Anyway, back to the mundane. I did get out for a lunch run today but it's my only run for a week and I think I've only done 2 or 3 runs in the last 3 weeks. Tomorrow, I meet with Chris to get my new GPS enabled heart rate monitor so get ready for much more fitness data on me than you ever cared to know. Once I get that, I can do a fitness test to benchmark myself at this point (I don't really want to because it will be embarrassingly poor, but hey the truth will set you free, right?) and even fit in a physical (it would be good to benchmark blood profile like cholesterol, etc.)

OK I'm up way too late. Stay tuned.