My step-mom sent me this really cool old letter from my great-great-grandfather to my great-grandfather (the Mason that my Mason is named after)… By the way, if you click on the picture, it will take you to Flickr where you can make it bigger…

We’ve made a concerted effort to start eating more organically grown vegetables, making sure that the meat we eat is grass fed and lacking the majority of chemicals found in the products at the large supermarkets and fast food restaurants (see my previous post about the McNugget.)  We’re visiting Farmer’s Markets and Food Co-ops more often than we have in the past.  The family is planning a visit to Polyface Farms (I read about in The Omnivore’s Dilemma).

We’ve started a garden (with some decent success) and I have a feeling that it will be greatly expanded next year.  Who would’ve thought having a garden would bring me enjoyment.

I put up a clothesline and we’ve started to make our own laundry detergent.   I feel a subscription to MOTHER EARTH NEWS in my future.  This is not to say the kids are eating anymore healthy than they have in the past, but we’re getting there.

There’s a sense of accomplishment.  A sense of settling in to a groove.  A feeling that we’re doing more as a family.  It’s not all perfect, but we’re trying.

“The ingredients listed in the flyer suggest a lot of thought goes into a nugget, that and a lot of corn. Of the thirty-eight ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, I counted thirteen that can be derived from corn: the corn-fed chicken itself; modified cornstarch (to bind the pulverized chicken meat); mono-, tri-, and diglycerides (emulsifiers, which keep the fats and water from separating); dextrose; lecithin (another emulsifier); chicken broth (to restore some of the flavor that processing leeches out); yellow corn flour and more modified cornstarch (for the batter); cornstarch (a filler); vegetable shortening; partially hydrogenated corn oil; and citric acid as a preservative. A couple of other plants take part in the nugget: There’s some wheat in the batter, and on any given day the hydrogenated oil could come from soybeans, canola, or cotton rather than corn, depending on the market price and availability.

According to the handout, McNuggets also contain several completely synthetic ingredients, quasiedible substances that ultimately come not from a corn or soybean field but form a petroleum refinery or chemical plant. These chemicals are what make modern processed food possible, by keeping the organic materials in them from going bad or looking strange after months in the freezer or on the road. Listed first are the “leavening agents”: sodium aluminum phosphate, mono-calcium phosphate, sodium acid pyrophosphate, and calcium lactate. These are antioxidants added to keep the various animal and vegetable fats involved in a nugget from turning rancid. Then there are “anti-foaming agents” like dimethylpolysiloxene, added to the cooking oil to keep the starches from binding to air molecules, so as to produce foam during the fry. The problem is evidently grave enough to warrant adding a toxic chemical to the food: According to the Handbook of Food Additives, dimethylpolysiloxene is a suspected carcinogen and an established mutagen, tumorigen, and reproductive effector; it’s also flammable.

But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to “help preserve freshness.” According to A Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause “nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse.” Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill.”