So I’m just starting this site up, I’m about twenty hours in to conceptualization, deployment, and refinement. It’s been difficult to put in to words just what it is I want to convey. I know there are some people and events that have brought this together for me, and I know what I’m passionate about, but putting that down in to a tagline or an elevator pitch has been difficult. Like most things in life, my focus waits in the shade of my enthusiasm.

I have notes that talk about eating healthy, cooking from old family recipes, dispelling food myths, everyone should know how to cook, food is fun, knowing where your food comes from, supporting local businesses, what influences local chefs, giving food and time to feed the homeless, and, most of all, being aware of the events and influences that have brought dinner to your table. The later having to do with your own personal culture and family life. I’ve written down words like healthy, awareness, influence, soul, culture, ritual, community, habit, family, dinner table, ecological impact, sociology of food, and why?.

I’ve coined Eat Up! as a catch all to mean let’s get together to cook and eat and learn about food and be engaged in the food ecosystem. When grandma told us to Eat Up! (or Mangia!) it was a demand that “you better clean that plate kid because we’re poor and it took a lot of effort for us to put food on the table”.

When I first picked up Michael Pollan’s In Defense Of Food yesterday, I was taken back. This guy gets it and he’s writing it so much better than I can even think it! Here’s a few quotes from just the Introduction(!):

Eating – a practice that owes as much to culture as it does to biology.

We forget that, historically, people have eaten for a great many reasons other than biological necessity. Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity.

we have as much, if not more, to learn about eating from history and culture and tradition.

Eaters have real choices now, and those choices have real consequences, for our health and the health of the land and the health of our food culture – all of which, as we will see, are inextricably linked.

Heck ya, Mr. Pollan!! If the introduction is any indication, In Defense of Food just may become the Eat Up! manifesto.

I’m anxious to get this blog rolled out but I have to make time to read the rest of Michael Pollan’s works. I’ve posted an Amazon link to his books below. If you’ve read them and want to chat about them, please send me a message.