The End of an Era ... or maybe just a hiccup

Just canceled the auto-renew for my domain, Essential-Imperfect. So, there goes Spreading Stain and House of Leaves, as well. I am very sad. Seven years, loads of layouts, fic, and art later and I finally caved to the realities of my pocketbook. Hopefully, I will be able to buy a new one later this year, with the same name or not. Keep your fingers crossed. In the meantime, if anyone is looking for a good webhost, I will highly recommend Fatcow. It's very easy to use, there are loads of tools and the customer service is excellent.

The domain goes dead on the 23rd, I believe, but I've already pulled everything down. *sigh*

I suppose I will post the older fic to LJ. But I don't have a clue how to work the art. Since that has to be hosted somewhere. Some people use photobucket, I think. Anyone do that? How is that working out?

TV: Jaime Oliver's Food Revolution (1.1)

Breakfast pizza with Chocolate milk. Cereal with Strawberry milk. SERIOUSLY?!

According to Alice, the local elementary school cook, the system works. This despite the rise in obesity among children, not to mention the rest of the population. I am appalled by the blind-eye. Really?! The system works?! But that's the U.S., I suppose. If it kinda-sorta-mostly works than that's good enough for jazz.

What's the shift?! What the fuck happened?! I do not remember eating that kind of stuff at school. I definitely don't recall the option of having strawberry, chocolate, skim or 1% milk. You got milk, period. In a white box. Maybe with a straw. You also got an orange juice. I remember mixed vegetables and servings of fruit. Peaches, pears, mixed. Whole fruit. Bananas, apples, pears, peaches, and oranges. What the fuck happened?!

And I'll tell you something else. I had a single working mom and she managed to cook dinner every night. She also had six kids and not a lot of money, so eating fresh foods at home was more of a necessity. She couldn't afford the fancy pre-packaged, pre-cooked stuff and she couldn't afford to have us eat out. So we ate alot of beans and rice (black-eyed peas, red beans, pinto beans, bought out of the bulk bin), baked chicken, spaghetti, mashed potatoes (from a real potato. I didn't even know you could make it out of a box until I was 16 and went to a friend's house for dinner) and meatloaf. There was always a vegetable and a salad (from scratch, people, it's really not that hard). Because of the size of our family and the limited budget, she put our plates together for us and then put them on the table. Portion control old school, poor folks style. We got a dessert on the weekends. If you misbehaved, your Saturday night dessert was forfeit. It was usually a cookie or two. Maybe a slice of cake (usually made from a box, but from scratch when the walnuts in the backyard were ripe and we all got together to make carrot cake) and a glass of milk. Maybe ice cream or a popcicle. Bread pudding made from the going stale bread ends that no one wanted to eat, and rice pudding. I remember snapping green beans and peeling potatoes and cleaning greens in the bathtub.

Cheap, nutritious, fresh food.

We weren't allowed to just bust open the kitchen cabinets or the refrigerator and snack. There was always fresh fruit in the house and milk. There was very little soda. We did drink alot of Kool Aid, though. Dude, I still love that stuff.

How is deep frying more convenient than using the broiler or the oven? I can't even tell you the last time I fried anything! And, yeah, if you give kids a choice, they will inevitably pick the pizza. Alice says that the kids like what they like, so they give them what they like. How do the kids even know if they will like the chicken if they don't TRY the chicken? Not to mention that they are so accustomed to eating processed food and junk food that making a shift to something more wholesome is going to really take more than a week.

Really, I'm astonished at the resistance.

Granted, the show is a little saccharine at times and it oversells the schmaltz. It can be incredibly manipulative, but it's also an amazing snapshot of our country's eating habits.