A Delicious Beginning...

food: a substance you eat, then poop out. Usually followed by a nap.

Actor: specific to LA, anyone who works as a bartender, waiter or waitress.

"Oh you're an actor? Wow, really? Which restaurant?"
(source: urban dictionary)

As someone in (or at least desperately trying to get into)the theatre industry, the stereotype of the starving artist often comes up. Some bohemian misfit sharing a squat loft apartment with a painter, a writer and their respective love interests, blowing your grocery money on beer and performance art. Though how fun that sounds, I haven't quite reached that point yet, as student loans save my ass yet again. But I still live on a relative budget when it comes to eating, and when I first left for school, fell into the same trap that many 18-year-olds do: living off of grilled cheese, schmeered bagels, bulk bag gala apples and ramen. Terrified of the freshman 15, and absolutely loathing the concept of 'dieting', I vowed to change some of my eating habits, starting with whole grains. I started buying only multi grain bread, and eventually I was at the point where the taste of white bread disgusted me(still does).

When I got into a conservatory style acting program, I was taught a more conscious view of my body, and how what goes in affects how I perform as an artist. This encouraged me to further change my eating habits, including a religious devotion to the Food Network, and a self-induced (though not intended) descent into lactose intolerance. As my knowledge of cooking increased, my desire for healthy meals and learning where my food came from also arose. Enter Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food . Now, I hate to attribute anything I do to something I read in a book, but it seriously made my re-evaluate what I was putting in my body, and how it affected the global market. So, running on the heels of The Hundred-Mile Diet and other such eating manifestos, I have decided to chronicle my adventures as a low income single attempting to eat and advocate healthy food choices. This will sometimes include things like grocery bills, farmers' market tabs and research on Canadian food producers. Who knows? Maybe my blog will get turned into a book, too.