I’ve been back four days since ten days traveling to Salt Lake City and back, my first time on the road that long in a while—in particular, since improving my home cooking and farmers market shopping.

Nearly all the food I found on the road was yummy or comfort food. I could feel the skin on my abdomen getting softer as fat grew under it covering my abdominal muscle.

Even when I went to a place touting all vegan, local, organic, and all the food buzzwords, it was still comfort food. The vegetables were minimal and covered with some rich sauce that covered the vegetables’ flavor and texture with creaminess. Don’t ask me how since I only know the result, not how they achieved it.

Another place with all the buzzwords had a dish that would have been perfect except everything was covered with an overly sweet, tangy sauce.

At the conference events with snack food, most was packaged, glazed, fried, etc. I ate mostly fruit. Here’s one I saw and can’t understand: glazed walnuts. What about walnuts suggests covering them with sugar? What leads a person to say, “these walnuts aren’t palatable, let’s put sugar on them”? I guess that not putting sugar on them leads to people not eating them.

What happened to us?

Why do people treat vegetables, fruit, and nuts like a problem they need to cover up? I can’t blame anyone since I did the same thing most of my life, but I can’t help remarking on it.

Since returning to shopping for unpackaged food and home cooking from fresh vegetables, fruit, legumes, nuts, seeds, and a few spices, I’m back to

• Eating more food
• That tastes better
• Producing almost no landfill garbage or recycling
• Spending less money
• Spending less time
• And losing fat, as I can feel my abdominal muscles under less fat skin

By contemporary standards, my experience traveling makes eating more food, saving money, saving time, polluting less, and so on sound unamerican. That I get all these things I like while losing fat seems by mainstream American media impossible.

Yet it’s simple, a matter of learning to love vegetables, fruit, legumes, nuts, seeds, etc unblemished by removing fiber from them and packaging them.

I remember my days of ice cream, Doritos, chips, pretzels, and other yummy food and comfort food. It cost more and left me craving more, the opposite of what I find satisfying today.

I like what’s pictured below better than mainstream American yummy and comfort food. I wish it was anywhere nearly as available or subsidized by the government.

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