Listen to Di get fresh on Trim™

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This week, Di takes us on a short walk through California history, Monterey style, a lesson in bocce ball, plus her mother’s recipe for banana bread that has been given a healthier twist, below, but with the same great taste.

First California brick house built in 1847

Di talks about a childhood spent on her grandparent’s Iowa farm where they had to do some real work before they sat down to the breakfast table, which perfectly frames the tenet that if you don’t work, you don’t eat. There are few handouts on the good ol’ American farm. Everything, every animal and everyone must produce something in order to co-exist peacefully.

This has me pondering the plight of modern society in a western culture far removed from its roots. The Me culture. Not Generation Y, but Generation Why Not? I don’t believe the American Dream should be “I got mine, now you get yours.” Rather than only a few people enjoying life high on the hog, it’s time to take some corrective action that will bring our heads down out of the clouds, get our hands dirty, again, and producing at home via old-fashioned American ingenuity.

Unless America commits to a sustainable urban environment in the next few years that adopts and adapts our ancestors’ down on the farm approach to self-sufficiency, then I predict we will see the further crumbling of this empire due to rampant outsourcing, incredible losses of our manufacturing base and the continually growing gap between the haves and the have-nots.

Too few feed too many who do little but consume like pigs being fattened for slaughter. It’s time to push away from the corporate trough and stop wallowing around in the mud of apathy. The Consumer Era needs to be laid to rest. Just shoot it and put it out of our collective misery.

True, by your very existence, you are consuming and destroying throughout your life, just to survive, but the past few decades has seen consumption on a gargantuan scale that is directly altering the planet’s ecosystem of which we are a tiny part. We should create what we need for ourselves and share the excess with those close to us, first. Stop buying food that is not grown locally.

If you’re not attempting to learn how to grow some of your own food, then you are already behind the curve. Relying upon huge shipments of food and consumer goods from distant states, much less other countries, will once again become a luxury and not business as usual. Why? This always poor economic model is destroying our planet. Continued growth is an oxymoron when a finite land mass and resources are factored in. Don’t listen to economics gurus who tell you otherwise.

The world cannot continue at its present pace, consuming vast underground reservoirs of oil, natural gas and potable water, while ignoring the signs of quickly approaching tipping points that scream there’s no turning back. We have too many people, too few resources and too much greed to even contemplate the word sustainability, it seems.

This must change.

I believe that every consumer good or food item should be labeled with the amount of energy used to create it, package it and ship it to your location. Just as we count calories, sodium and sugar content, each product should have a carbon footprint warning to enlighten the consumer about how much energy is wasted by the purchase of that piece of plastic crap from China.

Perhaps when the mass of consumers are properly educated about their true impact upon the planet from super-sizing their wastelines, SUVs and McMansions, then we might stand a chance of convincing them that, No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus. The elves are Asian sweatshop children, the reindeer have stopped procreating due to effluent from the nuclear power plant upstream and all of the toys have been coated in lead paint. Happy Friggin’ Christmas!

Unbridled Consumerism will finish last in the Millennium Race assuming it doesn’t bolt off the track and careen into a landfill where it deserves to die a quick and unpretentious death. Just whack it in the head and move on. Nothing to see here. We don’t need the bloated corpse giving some economist any ideas of how to resurrect it. It never has and never will work.

Now, I propose taking the best of each era and combining them to create a better, healthier lifestyle. We don’t have to get rid of electricity. We don’t need to plow our fields with horses, again. We just need to stop sitting around waiting for Washington to lead us. They are incompetent. They are crooks. They do not have your best interest at heart.

Vote with your wallet and your feet. Stop buying crap made outside of America. Demand that America make something that wasn’t planned with obsolescence in mind. Start buying locally. Eat fresh foods. Grow your own vegetables and fruits. Walk more. Drive less. Buy an electric vehicle.

Insulate your house. Fix your faucets. Stop wasting water. Take shorter showers. Stop washing your car. Put in a cistern . . . and a thousand other things you can do, today, to change your lifestyle and help preserve your planet for your children’s children’s sake.

And let them eat cake, but take a little bit of the old and mix it with some new so it, too, is healthier. Try Di’s Banana Bread recipe, below, or put your batter in a bigger pan for the cake experience. See, there are choices. It will still taste moist and yummy, but it won’t do a number on your heart.

Let them eat banana cake

Banana Cake

1 ¼ cup sugar
¼ cup butter, ¼ Apple Sauce
½ cup egg beaters – 99% egg substitute – beaten very lightly (or 4 eggs – egg whites only)
1 tsp baking soda
¼ cup milk, skim
1 cup banana, mashed
1 ¼ cup whole wheat flour
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp vinegar
¼ tsp salt
½ bag of dark chocolate chips

Dissolve the baking soda in the milk.
Add the tsp. of vinegar to it.

Cream together butter, applesauce and sugar.

Add eggs and the baking soda mixture.

Beat well, then add the bananas, flour, salt and vanilla.

Add dark chocolate chips.

Mix well and spread in a well-buttered oblong pan of your choice and to your desired thickness.

Bake in the oven at 350 degrees for about 50 minutes to an hour, depending upon your oven.

Oh, and only eat one piece of it, then go walk it off. Proper exercise or physical activity is always a key ingredient of any good recipe for a healthier lifestyle. A little discipline, now, and you won’t be needing that heart bypass surgery, later.

The Kat