Food and Fads: When I started this blog, I just wanted to write and share with the world my thoughts on “stuff”. A week later I got the inspiration to write about food, it made sense: I was watching ridiculous amounts of Food Network television, beginning to cook for myself and was reading lots of inspiring food blogs. I like food.
It’s a bit surprising to find myself, three months later, a disciple of the current big “food fad.” (which is to say, “the thing everyone is talking about,” not “the thing that’s not going to last”) It’s really strange, because I usually work hard to buck trends. I still haven’t seen the Lord of the Rings movies or read the Twilight books primarily because everyone else has. I just like to be contrary. But it suddenly seems like I’m running into vegetarians all over the place and everyone is talking about flexitarianism and here I am, ranting and raving about not eating meat (though I still do) and cooking food with barley and beans and wondering how on earth that happened. It’s just so unlike me. I used to eat so much junk and now I’ve changed my habits dramatically. Its like I don’t recognize myself. Part of me wonders if one day soon I’ll wake up and go back to eating roast beef sandwiches and candy bars for lunch.
Teaching: Originally I was going to keep my blogging completely separate from my life as an educator. But recently, as I’ve thought more about it, this blog has never been separate from my life at school. The main reason I started cooking at all was that I couldn’t bear the thought of bringing one more cold cut sandwich to school for lunch and wanted to eat “real food”. It was my students who initially brought to my attention the fact that meat production causes global warming. It was my work as advisor of the debate club that got me into the kitchen, baking.
Twitter: Last weekend, in a moment significantly influenced by boredom (and lack of my usual bucking of trends), I joined Twitter. Why? Two reasons. One: It was becoming apparent to me that some of my favorite food folks were on Twitter (Ruth Reichl, Mark Bittman, A Food Coma, etc). Sorry if I’m too into people and not enough into food, but its kind of cool to witness a conversation between people who really know what they’re talking about. Two: Some facets of the education community have been all abuzz about Twitter and its usefulness in the classroom. There are some really brilliant teachers out there worth following (Steve Hargadon, Kathy Shrock, Tom Barrett, etc). Having signed up under the name of this blog (follow relishments), it quickly became apparent to me that that I was going to have a serious problem with the notion that I could separate out my life. I’m a teacher. I love to cook. I’m really into technology I sometimes also find other random things interesting. I can’t pretend to be two (or more) separate people. So here I am. It might appear that my Twitter account is about food because of my username, but I chose it as much for blog recognition as the fact that when I get married in 4 months I’ll be changing my name and neither name seems appropriate at this juncture. I still feel like I don’t know what I’m doing or who I am on Twitter, but feel free to follow me.
In summary: Yes, I gave into the trends. But I like them and so far my new diet and Twitter are working out pretty well for me.
"borrowed" from Unshelved.com
