As my month long experience draws to a close, and I consider the fate of my eating habits and the fate of this blog, I find that I cannot say it better than Mr. Pollan.

I can manage to criticize every ingredient label, examine every restaurant meal with a wary eye, but when it comes to talking about the experience here, I just don’t know what to say.

I’m not giving up. I plan to keep going with the blog even once the month is over. I want to continue to share healthy, all natural recipes, and share my thoughts on various revelations as I read through even more books on the subject of what we eat and where it comes from. I don’t plan on giving up, but I didn’t realize just how hard it would be to get into the swing of things.

Give me a few months, I will try harder. I promise.

On Friday, my office had it’s first outdoor cookout lunch. There were hotdogs, buns, all the fixins, chips, soda, the works.

You might think that I sat this one out, brought my lunch outside to socialize whilst staring longingly at the grill, inhaling the delicious smell of dogs, ketchup, and mustard. But no, I did not long for hotdogs – I ate.

With a few alterations, I, in my experimental month, enjoyed a delicious cookout, hotdogs and all. This is in thanks mostly to the wonderful folks at Applegate Farms.

Applegate farms produces grass-fed, free-range meat products. Bacon, lunch meats, and, most importantly in this instance, dogs of the hot variety. I had my choice of a variety of hotdogs – turkey dogs, organic dogs, organic beef dogs. I settled on Organic Stadium-Style hotdogs. I was not disappointed.

To go with my hotdogs, I picked up some all-natural, whole-wheat buns, organic ketchup, and…well that’s it. Mustard for the most part contains no preservatives or additives, so I was good to go there. I of course had to avoid the potato chips, the pretzels, and the soda. But, I brought my homemade potato salad (with all of 7 ingredients, none of which are mayonnaise), and one of my coworkers brought in some fresh cucumber from his garden. It was a feast and all of it natural.

Then, as we all headed back inside after an hour in the sunshine, I faced the inevitable. The dessert table. There was some green cool-whippy looking substance, “dirt” composed of pudding, oreos, some other chocolatey substance (cake perhaps), and cool whip, and brownies with a 90% chance of box-made. Chastizing myself for walking into the kitchen at all, I refilled my water and grabbed a few strawberries from the spread. It was then that one of my coworkers mentioned that the fudge at the end of the table was made by another coworkers husband. Homemade? My interest was piqued. I chatted with the coworkers, and discovered that yes! I could eat this dessert! I had a piece of fudge.

So, let this be a lesson to you. While you may have to make some changes, there is often an alternative available to you. With a little willpower to avoid the potato chips and the brownies, I had just as much food as my coworkers, with no additives, preservatives, or guilt over my love of the hotdog.

Friday night, however, was a new challenge. Dinner ended up occurring quite late due to Dennis getting home around 9, and we were both tired and wanted nothing more than a quick bite to eat and a cold beer. As often happens, we ended up close to home, which meant the spectacular selection of 3 or 4 chain restaurants. We ended up at Applebee’s, which is ok, not great, but passable for a quick bite.

With my new-found rules in mind, I scanned the menu and quickly realized that most of the full meals were out – the sauces were of unknown origin, the breads in sandwiches had the potential for a variety of preservatives and even HFCS (in bread, WHY?!), and most of the typical sides (fries and mashed potatoes) could contain any variety of unknowns. However, I did have a few options to choose from. I finally settled on a salad containing boston lettuce, shrimp, avacado, tomato, and egg. I skipped the dressing that typically comes with the salad, opting instead for simple oil and vinegar. To round out the meal, I went with a simple baked potato with butter. They couldn’t possibly much that up with preservatives or processing.

The dinner was good – I’ve had the salad before, and having it with simple oil and vinegar didn’t alter the taste or enjoyability of the meal. The potato was simple, but delicious – I had actually been craving a baked potato for a few days so it was a welcome treat.

So, all in all, my original fear of being unable to eat in restaurants was somewhat unfounded. I simply had to follow a few key guidelines -
- Avoid sauces/dressings of unknown origin
- Select items that are made with few ingredients
- Avoid breaded items (breading is up there with sauces in terms of unknown ingredients)
- Find something you like and tweak it to get rid of any unknowns

Which just goes to show you, that with a little alteration, and some careful selection of dishes, even chain restaurants can provide tasty, healthy, preservative and process-free meals.

Sunday I went to the grocery store, and amongst my planned purchases of fruits and veggies, eggs, and cream for coffee, I picked up this little gem – http://www.floridacrystals.com/

Less refined, this stuff smells like cane/maple, and tastes delicious in my coffee. It’s from Florida, versus the Hawaii-harvested Sugar in the Raw. Travels less, and is actually carbon neutral in its production.

On the less positive side, I confirmed that the fat-free ice cream I usually buy does, in fact, contain HFCS. I thought I could maybe substitute some sorbet, but the ones I could find in the one grocery store I visited also has HFCS. I will continue my search.

Today, a friend of mine pointed out that I should probably not be drinking decaf. So, I did some research, and it turns out that the majority of decaf coffee is decaffeinated via a chemical process. Luckily, my office switched to a new coffee service recently, and I’m hoping that if I swap to regular I won’t end up with stomach aches in a week.

On the plus side in my quest to find alternative drink options, Dennis had the great idea that I cut up some lemons and limes to add to my water. So today at work, I tossed a few slices of each into my nalgene, and they lasted all day and gave my water just enough flavor to keep me from craving soda and other drinks in the afternoon.

So, all in all, 2 pretty good days. On top of the food pluses and minuses over the past 2 days, I made some more granola bars, made some tazo passion iced tea, and drank a LOT of water.

More on my progress tomorrow!

So, Saturday began with me waking to realize that I couldn’t partake in my usual english muffin breakfast. Luckily I still had some handmade local bakery bread, so I paired that with some eggs and even some local butter I had left from a trip to my local farm stand a couple of weeks ago. So far, so good.

The rest of my day was within the rules, although somewhat unconventional. We had a 3 hour drive up to NY to taste cake for our wedding, which meant lunch in the car. Any other trip like this we would have made a quick fast-food stop for Chick-fil-A or McDonalds, but not this time. We stopped at Wawa on the way out, and I decided to go with a few snacky items - cheese sticks and apple slices with peanut butter (I checked the PB, it was within the rules and HFCS-free). Dennis opted for a sandwich, which aside from the unknown nature of the roll, was close to being within my rules. Not sure about mayo…need to check the ingredient label on ours. Hmm. Note to self, may be making your own mayo later this week.

So, we made it up to Poughkeepsie, and we ate cake. I am working under the assumption here that any reputable bakery does not use HFCS, as I have never seen a cake show in which corn makes any sort of appearance in cake  - and I’ve seen a lot of cake shows. So cake was eaten, and selections were made, and we were off again on our busy Saturday.

Dinner took us into Manhattan, where we met up with some friends downtown. They had chosen sushi for the night’s meal, which fit well with what I needed. No mystery ingredients, it’s all laid out right there for you on the plate. Shared some dumplings, veggie tempura, and edamame. Dennis and I shared 2 massive rolls containing eel, yellowtail, rice, cucumber, avocado, and seaweed. Not all in the same roll, but a little of most things in each. I topped off my meal with some yellowtail sashimi. Probably not locally caught, but fresh, well prepared, and delicious.

We made our way home after that, and I was certainly not hungry the rest of the evening. All in all, I think day 1 was quite a good start, albeit a bit unconventional what with all the driving and the cake.

Some things I need to buy for next week -
- Natural/raw sugar for coffee
- Additive free cream/milk/etc for coffee
- Restock ingredients for granola bars
- The usual fruits and veggies

Also, I made some delicious whole wheat/oat blueberry muffins last weekend, low-fat recipe courtesy of my boss, Mary. I will try to post this later today.

Right now I am feeling pretty positive about this starting on Saturday. I haven’t posted lately because I haven’t found as many dilemmas as I thought I would, at least not while theorizing. I’m sure once I’m actually in the thick of the experiment, I will face some challenges.

I think the hardest rule for me to follow will be with regards to meat products. I’m having a hard time finding grass-fed/free-range/naturally raised meat products. Most of them are from far away places like South America and New Zealand, which to me in a way defeat the purpose. Most of these countries are fully invested in the grass-fed industry. It’s only in America that we push away the natural order of agriculture and raise animals on factory farms. I want to support local grass farmers, but I’m afraid it might be out of my budget much of the time. But I will try.

Both of my grocery stores have put up a Jersey Fresh section in the produce department – local fruits and veggies. I will try to stick with those as much as I can, which will probably mean skipping out on my strawberries (no longer in season here on the east coast), and choosing Jersey eggplant over China artichokes. I want to go as extreme as possible for the month, just to see how it changes what I eat.

Thinking about this extreme trial, I realize that it would be drastically different in the winter. Not much grows in the northeast in the winter months. What is in season in the country changes, and what I would be eating in January will differ greatly from what I will be eating in August. This is, as of recent decades, something we don’t often have to think about in our industrialized society (artichokes from China in New Jersey are a prime example).

If you are what you eat, this August, I will be Jersey Fresh.

What? Why? Milk already contains sugar.

So now I face yet another dilemma in my “what do I drink” saga of avoiding HFCS and also limiting my sugar intake. My mornings start with coffee, a little sugar (slowly replacing the splenda), and fat free half and half. Do I go to regular half and half? Milk? I don’t want to add a ton of fat to my diet at the expense of cutting the HFCS, but this is something I have to consider. What else am I eating that contains unknown HFCS?

More on this later…must research.

My current dilemma is drinks. Since I am cutting out artificial sweeteners, this cuts out about 75% of what I drink on a daily basis – coffee with splenda, Crystal Light-sweetened water, low/no-calorie flavored “waters” such as Fuze, Vitamin Water, etc, and soda. Since I’m a type 1 diabetic, juices are a bit of a “special treat” for me, as I don’t like to take unnecessary amounts of insulin to compensate for the juice. I already drink 100% juice when I do partake, so that avoids the HFCS issue.

So, my current list of drinks includes – water (of course), naturally sweetened coffee (I plan to bring some raw sugar in to work instead of using the refined stuff at the office), and tea. Luckily, I fell in love with Tazo’s iced passion tea from Starbucks, and discovered that Tazo has kindly packaged its tea into 2-quart pitcher sized teabags. Unfortunately, this limited drink list is a little disheartening. Can I go an entire month without soda?

Going out for happy hour is a bit easier. Most decent beers are relatively naturally made, and wine is always an acceptable option. Mixed drinks are more of an issue considering that many of the mixers I would have in my drinks likely contain HFCS or other artificial ingredients.

I like to think that I can be strong. But what if I’m at work and get that sudden caffeine craving in the afternoon? I guess we’ll find out!