Why

It would be hard to overstate what a major role food and cooking play in my life. For as long as I can remember, cooking and eating good food has been central to my everyday experience. Some of my earliest memories are getting to season the spaghetti sauce in our kitchen at home. It is not uncommon for me to wake up thinking about what we should have for dinner, and I am more than content to spend my expendable income and time cooking a good meal or seeking some new ingredient that I have been longing to cook, and stumbling on a new bean, vegetable, cut of meat or type of seasoning is akin to buying a winning lottery ticket.

As the food revolution continues to swirl, more and more of my daily thoughts have been spent not only thinking about food but thinking about how we think about food in this country. As a born and bred urbanite, I grew up thinking that meat just grew in shrink wrap and Styrofoam plates. The idea that companies injected CO2 into the packages to prevent meat from turning grey never even occurred to me. I was like many oblivious to the effort it took to grow and deliver vegetables to my plate, or milk to my glass. And the connection between how we think about food and what our food culture is doing to us – our bodies, our children and our society (with implications for our health, economy, and our security) is becoming a more common topic of discussion everyday.

So my hope is that this blog (should it succeed where others have failed) will be my muse – where I’ll try to share what I am buying, cooking and thinking as it relates to these subjects. Along the way, with any persistence on my part, Local Munch will hopefully become a kitchen sink of content, from recipes, anecdotes about the kitchen and our community garden plot, places we eat and other food related topics.