It’s Fat Tuesday. The height of the Mardi Gras celebration. The pinnacle of Carnaval. The time of year when religious and non-religious types alike trek to places like New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro to whoop it up before the season of Lent begins. Granted, most party-goers could likely give a rip about Lent, but to celebrate the storm before the calm is still a tradition many engage in.

Mardi Gras is literally translated “Fat Tuesday” in French. It is the day before Ash Wednesday, the traditional start date of Lent.

So, during this week that marks both the partying of Tuesday followed by Ash Wednesday (which is why Mardi Gras ends abruptly at midnight on Tuesday), people all over the world don beads and masks. And millions of others wake up the next morning making solemn vows to God. Perhaps they decide to fast, skip the wine, the beer, the smokes, the chocolate or Diet Coke.

Lent itself was a tradition practiced by the early church. In the 600’s, under the papacy of Gregory the Great, Lent became a 40 day period of time (not including Sundays) that helped the church prepare for Easter. It was marked by fasting and by denying oneself of pleasures normally engaged in during the other 325 days of the year. In the early tradition, Christians ate only one meal per day, in the evening. For others it was fasting until noon or 3:00 pm.

Most traditions included some form of fasting from meat. During Lent in the early church skipped meat, fish, and animal products. In other words, they went vegan for 40 days.

But today, it is sort of a self help gig for many. I confess to using Lent as a way to prepare for swimsuit season. What could it hurt to skip all the sweets in the name of Jesus? Perhaps if I did it for Jesus I would fit into that swimsuit come Memorial Day. And then I remember that Jesus really does not care how I look at my community pool.

So this year, I’ve got a new idea for Lent. It is based on the history of the church. I’m skipping meat altogether, for all of Lent. For many reasons. Most of which are, of course, rooted in my love of God’s Creation. For those of you who are proud to call yourselves carnivores, this is not as hard for me as it might be for you. Normally I chow down on chicken breast twice a week. The rest of the time I skip the meat. But it is still a significant shift in how I think and view my meals.

And, since raising beef and other meat places a heavy burden on our ecosystems, and because it is considerably kinder to the planet if I eat grain and vegetable products, I’m going to skip it altogether for this season.

My reason for sharing all this randomness? To ask you to join me. Okay, okay, I know, not every day if you don’t want to. But consider skipping it one day? Two days? One meal per day? Whatever floats your Lenten boat. But since God made this place, it seems wise to take note of that fact and make a commitment for a few weeks to help honor that Creation. And if you are a person of faith, when you have a hankering for something beefy and grilled, think for a moment about the sunset, the trees in your yard, or any other scene that helps you connect to God. It can be more than a freaky, earthy thing. It can be a connection to God this month+. It may also help you understand that you can eat and be in this world in a different way. Not too shabby.

So grill up a sirloin, don the beads and then skip the burger until Easter.

I think my garden is officially closed. We plucked the last green bean today and pulled a few cracked tomatoes off their stems. The kale is still hanging on for the ride, but I sort of over-dosed on that earlier this year so just looking at it pretty much makes me shiver.

My daughter toddled out to the garden to help me yank the last bits of summer. She’d just had a bath and then I decided to haul her outside to the garden. The day after it rained. I am brilliant like this.

We plucked green beans. She yanked leaves and such. Squatting like a pioneer woman making corn meal or something, she hovered over the bowl and threw in whatever looked good. A few beans, a slug looking sort of thing (I kid you not) and even an old carrot that managed to hide out and escape a pluck earlier in the summer.

Then of course she started to throw the plum tomatoes. They look like balls so I cannot fault her. “Ball” she says as she chucks it across the garden. “More balls” she says as she grabs for another. The kicker this time was that these little tomatoes are like gold. There is nothing on this planet that tastes quite like a home grown tomato and I know that I will not taste one again for a good 9-10 months.

So I shrieked and grabbed her grubby little hands. “Here, pull weeds honey” (or at least throw the beans) I said as I confiscated the tomatoes.

We managed to go almost the entire summer without purchasing any vegetables from the store. Sure, we grabbed lettuce and the bell peppers that I had decided not to grow. But for the past 5 months we have managed to eat most of our veggies from the garden. I underestimated what a phenomenal sense of accomplishment this would bring me.

Like the time I was preparing lunch for the kids and realized we were out of carrots, so I stepped outside and yanked a handful out of the ground. And all the fresh basil I’ve tossed into pasta, the cucumbers and tomatoes with every meal. Mint for my Mojito fetish. Sugar snap peas and green beans galore.

Accomplishment means everything to a mom who cannot finish a thought. So finishing a garden, I may as well have won an Oscar.

And of course, there are people who garden way better than I do. People who are still pulling fall crops out of their gardens, people who have planted to eat squash and such for several weeks to come. I was not one of them. But all comparisons aside, I sort of feel like Laura Ingalls Wilder. I really do. Like I am in Kansas with Ma and Pa, Mary and baby Carrie.

Either that or I am on the Banks of Plum Creek waiting for Melissa Gilbert to come make home made jam with me.

I know these musings are completely geeky and over-blown, but for a suburban woman to just grow vegetables all summer feels fantastic. Each day I would step outside to water and would look at the garden and think “holy cow, this really works, those seeds really grew.” And when I would go to our grocery store I would stand in the produce section and look around and would be stunned to realize that I really did not need anything.

So as we snapped the last green bean off the plant. As I noticed the leaves turning brown. I got a little sad. We were wearing sweatshirts. The wind was blowing. I was suddenly imagining myself snowed in on the prairie in some blizzard, waiting for Pa to get home safe. Really, though, it will just be cold out. The garden is gone, the farmer’s market closes down in a few weeks. It’s back to the grocery store for a few months. I’m not Laura enough to have canned anything, but that is what next summer is for I suppose.

For now, we just said “bye-bye garden” and waved at our now crispy plants. We put the blue toy shovel away and headed inside. I’ve got a week’s worth of beans. A few days of tomatoes. kale, sage, basil, and mint are still hanging around. 

Other than that, no more gardening prairie mom for me. Just suburban supermarket mom. sigh.

I had a phase in college when I thought that perhaps I would become a vegetarian. I had no real reason for doing so other than acting sort of hippie-ish seemed like an identity that I wanted to try on for a while. That and a good friend at the time was a vegetarian. Vegan was a little to extreme for my little experiment so I decided dairy would be okay, yogurt and ice-cream were close companions and I dared not part from them.

This little charade lasted about two weeks. I was a college athlete and suddenly completely protein deficient. And while it is of course possible to get enough protein from other sources, I was either completely unaware or happened to strongly dislike those other sources at the time. Forget beans and nuts and legumes. I was eating Wheat Thins and tomatoes with the occasional cucumber thrown in. Of course there was my friend the cup of yogurt, but I was starving for protein. So I added chicken back to the plate.

All kidding aside, there is something to be said about eating your veggies. Us Americans have a penchant for meat. Our meals revolve around it. First we decide what the meat dish will be and then we dabble in the sides. In 9 out of 10 meals, veggies are the sides. I have to say, I am increasingly aware of how lopsided this view of the dinner plate actually is. It just seems to me that we would be significantly healthier if we started with the veggies and then worked our way over to the cattle ranch.

My oldest son is about as picky an eater as they come. For about three years the child ate no meat except for chicken nuggets (which hardly count as meat). He is now 6 and has had maybe 5 bits of beef in his entire life.

But give that child a pile of fruit, a stack of carrots or cucumbers and watch him go. He can plow through an entire pint of blackberries without taking a breath. In a panic I once asked my pediatrician if this was okay.

I am an American mom, I wanted to see him throwing down some meat. So I said this to our doctor “Is it okay that all he eats are fruits and vegetables, cheese and yogurts?” He laughed and said “Well, some people actually choose to raise their children this way, they are called vegetarians.”

“oh, right.”

But all college trendiness aside, there are good reasons to at the very least, reduce your meat consumption. According to the well loved earth-friendly classic, “Diet for a Small Planet” by Frances Moore Lappe, it takes about 16 pounds of grain to make one pound of beef. 

The average grain-fed animal who is heading to the slaughterhouse will down 2.5 tons of grain and feed per year! If you think about it for a moment, it makes more sense to just consume that 16 pounds of grain rather than stuff it into an animal that will only yield one pound of meat as a result. Lappe tells us that those 16 pounds have 21 times more calories and 8 times the protein of that burger.

Add that to the fact that gassy livestock blow enough methane into the air each year that worldwide it is estimated that they are responsible for 15-20% of the yearly greenhouse gas emissions on our little planet. seriously. cow farts are killing us.

The UN estimates that if every American simply skipped meat ONE day per week, that we would save the CO2 equivalent of flying from NY to LA 90 million times! sounds staggering eh? Methane is considerably more potent in our atmosphere than CO2, it packs a much greater climate punch.

So give it a thought. Can you skip meat one day per week? I actually only eat meat ONE day per week. I’m a six day a week vegetarian of sorts. I eat yogurt and tons of cheese. Once a month I toss in an egg. I’m not neurotic or crazy about it. Just conscious.

So try on the trend. Just one day at a time. You may find you like it and if so, another green step for you!

If you spend any length of time in a famous-ish place you will likely see some sort of bumper sticker that will alert you to the fact that you are not lucky enough to be from that famous-ish place. A reminder that you are just visiting and that some people actually get to live at the beach or off the ski slope. Stickers that say “I’m a Local” or simply “Local.” When we lived in Colorado we noticed that folks out there made a big fuss over being a “native.” Since most of the folks who reside in Colorado are really from Texas or California, if you were one of the few who were actually born on Rocky Mountain soil, you earned the badge “native.” Colorado natives slapped stickers on their cars to alert you to the fact that, even if you were to live out the rest of your life in that state, you were still somehow on vacation.

All this talk about locals is fascinating to me. I love to watch the attitudes of people shift once they get a permanent residence in some cool place like Maui or Lake Tahoe. Most of the time, to be a local is to be lucky enough to live where the rest of us only spend one week a year. I can respect the pride in that. I am still lame enough to have kept my Colorado license plate (never was a native but somehow, the fact that I skied and paid taxes in that state makes me prideful).

All this local talk has me thinking. I am currently reading a book called “Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100 Mile Diet.” It’s by two Canadians named Alisa Smith and JB Mackinnon. I am loving it. It’s just a simple book really, two super crunchy eco-types who live just outside of Vancouver, B.C. (talk about lucky locals). Lots of chatter about food and where it comes from and how we’ve lost the art of understanding our food and how it grows. Stuff I’ve been thinking about for a while actually, since Barbara Kingsolver crept into my fridge. But if you’ve not had the chance to think about your food in a while, pick it up. It’s a great lesson on life and food and what it means to have enough.

So anyway, I digress. In a super small nutshell, the basic idea of eating locally is this. Most of our meals travel 2000+ miles before we eat them (take a salad for example: think lettuce from California + tomatoes from Mexico + Palm oil from Indonesia + packaging + chemical additives + the 20+ ingredients in salad dressing that had to come from somewhere). This is an odd phenomenon when you consider the fact that many of us live in places where food that we can eat is grown some 100 or so miles away. I live in Illinois. Farmland galore. Wisconsin is just to the north of us, less than 100 miles away. Dairy State. But if I am not careful, I will stock my fridge with cheese from Europe and lettuce from California. So the idea of eating locally is eating what is grown near you, what is in season by you. The point, cut down on carbon emissions and gas and waste, and learn what actually grows where you live. Like people did for hundreds of years before Con Agra Foods.

So I was in the grocery store tonight. It has become a haunting experience for me lately. My kids nag me for Twizzlers, so we get them. This is one part of my life. The other part is writhing in pain over how insane what we eat really is. I try to keep my cart filled with fresh stuff but I have lots and lots of boxes and Cheezits too. I am proud to say I rarely, other than for chicken nuggets, get anything frozen. There is no need. Ice-cream excluded of course. So I am making strides. There are more bags of fresh produce than there are boxes of stuff. More organic items with short ingredient lists than the Twinkies and Hi-C juice I grew up on.

Anyway, when I got to the berries (which I would have grabbed at the farmer’s market but that is not until Wednesday and we are out of food, just got home from vacation), so when I got to the berries, the sign said “Eat Local.” The sign was hovering over the berries, swinging in the air conditioned breeze. I was giddy. I pushed my wobbly cart with the lame-o wheel over to the berries. “Victory!” I thought to myself. Then I noticed that all the berries were from California. California?!?!?!?! This is considered local? I live in Chicago. LA is 2070 miles away. It takes about 30 some hours by car. This is not local. 

Although, I suppose when you consider the fact that the berries could have been trucked in from South America, then California is local. And I have always wanted to surf and be cool, so maybe this is local eating? Nope. The strawberries were what made me weak in the knees. I love them. My dad grew them when we were kids and I remember ever little detail of his growing them. My mom grew rhubarb in the back of the yard. And when the strawberries and rhubarb would meet in a cobbler recipe of my grandmothers, it was heaven. So I get all giggly about strawberries. But 2000+ miles is too far for a gal trying to eat more locally.

So if you find yourself in this dilemma, better wait until they show up at the Farmer’s Market from a local grower, of just wait until later in the summer when they are in season. This is the best way to eat locally. Eat what is in season.

Or, eat from your garden. I pulled radishes today. I sort of hate radishes, but they were ready and I am eating them. I am going to pickle them. I’ve never pickled anything in my life. But this is the only way to make them go down and I am ready to do it. They are not strawberries. But they are also not from California. I also have fresh basil and mint and sage ready to go. My carrots are coming up nicely and my tomatoes are growing like crazy. I am dreaming of pico de gallo and salsa for the next few months. And Michigan blueberries are on the move. So all will be well. I don’t need to be a local from California. Just gotta wait a bit longer for the strawberries.

PS, if this all seems like a bit of a stretch for you, then consider simply buying food from the US versus overseas. For example, at our dairy counter I can get Muenster cheese from Finland or Muenster cheese from Wisconsin. I buy the Wisconsin cheese. I can get apples from Washington or from Canada. I buy them from Washington. Small steps are still steps!

Have you ever cooked with kale? Until this past week I was largely unsure of what kale even was. Some random green leafy plant that was probably off the charts good for me but I had yet to discover it. This was my experience with kale until this week. I am proud to say that I do my best with veggies, but I am not an adventuresome sort of vegetable gal. I will pile up a bowl of spinach and tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, and the occasional red pepper, douse it with a healthy bath of Italian dressing, and I am a happy salad eater. But this is all I know when it comes to my vegetables, just the basics.

I play it safe with my veggies, not because I am scared of them, but because I just don’t know what to do with them. Sometimes if I am really living on the edge I may add a yellow pepper or a green tomato to a meal. Maybe I’ll whip up something with a yellow squash. But there are things out there called Jerusalem Artichokes, Romanesco, and did you know that potatoes come in all sorts of shades of purple? There is something called Jicma too. All edible and good for you. If I am encouraged, I can do my best to be daring with my veggies. It’s not the same with meat. Not so daring with the meat. Scary stuff that animal fat or liver or muscle or random organ is. Not a fan. But give me something green or purple and I am game. But you will have to show it to me because I am clueless about the true size and depth of the vegetable world.

So back to the kale. Try this out. It is a great recipe from my cool friend Lynn. Go to the store and grab a bunch of kale from your produce section. Take the big leaves and cut them in half or thirds to make them smaller. Spread them out on a baking sheet, sprinkle them with sea salt and then pop them into a 350 degree oven for like 15 minutes. viola! Now you have green, iron and vitamin rich potato chips! 

I am such a geek. I tried this the other day and loved it. I was alone. I snarfed down an entire pan of this. The next day my friend comes over with her kids. Everyone is eating lunch and I say to her “hey, you want some toasted kale?” Have you ever been asked that on a play date at your friend’s place? She looks at me strangely, shurgs, and says “sure, yeah.” So I bake us up a batch of it. Gone. 

That night for dinner I make stir-fry. I put kale in my stir-fry. Tonight, I did it again. I am addicted to the stuff. Funny thing is that I just e-mailed my friend Lynn to thank her for the tip. Her reply “don’t over do it.” Apparently she over did her kale experience and said she could not touch the stuff for a while. I may be on the brink of that sort of green destruction.

So I tell you all of this because I find myself consistently stuck in a food dilemma and my guess is that I am not alone. Like today, I can eat kale and a pile of colorful vegetables for lunch and dinner. And on this same day I can eat half a box of Wheat Thins, two Diet Cokes, and I can sneak chocolate Easter eggs all day long. I can eat whole grain pancakes for breakfast followed by a cookie. I can eat quinoa for dinner with my vegetables and use that as justification to eat a handful of jelly bellies before bed. My little food world is amazed and stupefied by vegetables but is fueled largely by high-fructose corn syrup. 

But what I am finding as I grow greener is an ever increasing agitation over all things processed. The other day I grabbed a bag of dried strawberries from the grocery store. I thought they would go well with my kale (kidding). Seemed like a good addition to a spinach salad with a little feta cheese. I opened them up and popped one into my mouth. Deeelish. But wow, so much sweeter than I anticipated. Of course I waited until this moment to turn the bag over to read the label, mostly because who would have thought that a bag that read “Dried Strawberries” would be anything but shriveled strawberries. Turns out the food conglomerate that packaged these goodies felt it necessary to add high fructose corn syrup, preservatives, and coloring to the berries. Why? Why? Why? I was so, and still am, riled up over this. Just give me the freaking strawberry! I don’t want added sugar, I don’t care what color it is. I mean after all, it is a shriveled strawberry that looks horrible, all balled up like rabbit poop or something. I am not expecting a plump berry. They are dried! Why do I care how red it is?!

Why does the food industry do this to us? All I wanted was the strawberry. If I am eating jelly beans then I am asking for it. But a dried strawberry? Heaven forbid an American eat something pure and natural. Everything we eat, unless we are intentional, had unwanted additives in it. And because of the apparently insatiable American sweet tooth, sugar is the filler du jour. Sugar comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Cane sugar, corn syrup, maltodextrin, beet sugar, etc. Check out this article from Lakeland, Florida’s The Ledger http://www.theledger.com/article/20090325/NEWS/903255032?Title=Good-Old-Sugar-Waging-War-with-Corn-Sweetener

Seems we’ve gone and added sugar to everything and while most of us know about high-fructose corn syrup and try our best to ward it off (even Michelle Obama says she won’t feed it to her kids – love, love, love her, but good luck with that mama obama). HFC is bad, but so is just plain old sugar. Really, the battle at the end of the meal is about how many things we eat that are fresh and green and leafy and from our yard or the farm down the street versus how many things are processed and sugary and refined. And even if you don’t want to eat sugar, it is in everything. Your salad dressing, yogurt, milk, peanut butter, ketchup . . .

We can’t eat kale for every meal, but surely we can start to learn the names of the other vegetables out there. I know that chocolate comes in lots of forms (mint, crunchy, creamy, dark, light, 60% cacao, 65% cacao, 70% cacao . . . ., with peanut butter, with almonds, with toffee bits, shaped like eggs, bunnies, santa claus). I can name a lot more candy items and varieties of soda, cookies, cakes, and even gum than I can name vegetables. 

No wonder my jeans are tight. No wonder the produce aisle is smaller than the aisles with boxed food and sodas and sugar enhanced cereals. We don’t know what real food is. Real food is green and red and orange and yellow and it comes from a plant and it makes your heart healthy and your skin all glowy and it makes you feel like offering your friend kale out of the oven rather than jelly beans. Shall we learn the names of our vegetables before we learn the names of all the candy? A tough thought for the week following Easter eh? Got a few bunnies in your basket?

Well, try this (and i promise I will try the same), for every piece of Easter candy you eat this week, learn the name and one way to eat a random vegetable. You don’t even have to cook it. Just google it and at least learn what is out there. And if you can find it in the store and actually incorporate it into a meal then you win the healthy award of the week (I have no idea what that might be, just felt like someone should win something at this point in the blog). Would LOVE to hear what you find!!!!!!!