Hello, and welcome to Epic Organic! I’ll be your host, and I am Shelly. As I write this, I’m a 35 year old Chicago native (brr!) living in the southwest suburbs.

I began 2010 with a few resolutions. Continue eating natural and organic whenever possible. Try 10 new foods this year. Learn to cook.

I recently realized the foods I bought off the shelves of my local supermarket and ate every day weren’t what I had assumed them to be – in fact, some weren’t actually foods at all, but more like chemical concoctions made to resemble food. As I dove deeper into researching the US food industry and food labels and ingredients, I discovered frightening facts about genetic engineering, hormones, antibiotics, cloning, and other things that, quite frankly, don’t sound like they should be anywhere near my food.

On December 3, 2009, I decided to “go organic,” after spending a few days reading about what that actually meant. To quote Organic.org:

Simply stated, organic produce and other ingredients are grown without the use of pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, sewage sludge, genetically modified organisms, or ionizing radiation. Animals that produce meat, poultry, eggs, and dairy products do not take antibiotics or growth hormones.

That sounded much better to me (though I still find myself scratching my head, thinking, why isn’t our food made that way to begin with? And since it’s not, why don’t more people know this?)

Enter: this blog. I hope to share what I’m learning about organics, eating from local food sources, food, and cooking in general with you. Maybe you’ve gone organic or are thinking about it, and maybe not. That’s OK. I respect informed opinions, agreeable to mine or not. My fear is that most people are not well informed on these topics and have no idea what’s in our food, how it was produced, and just how far from “nature” most of it really is. I believe that if more people were informed on these topics, they might just start humming the organic tune… or singing it at the tops of their lungs.

The amusing part of this endeavor is that I don’t really know how to cook. I’ve been a freezer-to-microwave kind of girl my entire life. I come to you with a grand total of 3 cooking specialties in my arsenal – spaghetti, scrambled eggs, and peanut butter pie. You are going to witness quite a bit of trial and error here. Heck, half of the ingredients in my cookbook I’ve never even heard of, and some that I have heard of I’ve never seen. (Yes, I’ve been using Google Images to look up the produce that I’ve never actually identified in person). Avocados are green, right?

Like I said… I began 2010 with a few resolutions. Continue eating natural and organic whenever possible. Try 10 new foods this year. Learn to cook.

I invite you to join me! Again, welcome, and thanks for reading!

{Posted: January 10, 2010 at 9:57 pm}
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