Battle of the Diets

So when I met my dad today to grocery shop and eat lunch at our lovely local independent health food store we found ourselves with a little of a situation. My father had decided to return to a past vegan diet about 5 days ago. Great! In reality our diets don't mesh well in the winter. He's not eating meat, diary or wheat. The three things I can pretty much count on to not need a growing season, and that are involved with a lot of my food. Not only did we have to deal with the practicality of choosing food, but conflicting ideas about what was best to eat. This is an interesting point that I started to learn about today listening to Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma while driving to vermont: Our nation's eating disorder. With diets coming and going, what is bad for us continuously becoming good or vice versa, and array of experts, its becomes rather overwhelming and confusing for the consumer to figure out what to eat and where to get it. I feel this is especially hard when trying to figure out the healthiest food for your body and the planet. I think local eating gets at the general picture of how we should be eating: real food that isn't processed and from real people. But I'm also understanding that its also a quite nuanced issue.

In real life, practicality mostly wins. After food shopping we checked out the deli section for lunch. Nothing was entirely local and thus there was nothing I could eat. I wasn't terribly surprised. While the health food store had a decent selection of healthy food, not a terribly not of fresh produce is in season in vermont right now, and us americans, while we want healthy food, we don't want to have to sacrifice our oranges and bananas.

So we sucked it up and went to another place in town that my dad's friend had suggested for some local food. We walked in and explained the situation: 1 vegan, 1 locavore. Turns out, much easier to feed the vegan. While they had a fair amount of options that had local food IN it, not really much entirely local. So i compromised and got soup with local carrots that also had coconut milk in it (my dad said, that's not local? no dad, coconuts don't grow on this continent.....), with local greens, slice of local roast beef, salad dressing, and local bread. I'm hoping eating out locally will get easier as it has for vegans.

I couldn't help but feel like we looked overly self-rightous in that deli. But the great thing is that while it may have been a pain for the girl helping us out, it was totally fine and the chef was happy to talk to us about what was in each meal. At the end of the day, as frustrating as our shopping and lunch was, I felt fortunate that I was discussing local vs vegan with my dad than real food vs mc donalds, and that I have a father that is concerned with his health enough to plunge into an intensely vegan dad. I feel like while "going green" is so popular, sticking to your convictions even when its inconvenient or not cool is not always part of the green attitude. So rock on those who do.