Big Daddy Paul

Amy and I are in the Sunday SF Chronicle! The best thing is that it is in the style section, which is the first time that the words “Paul” and “Style” have been uttered without the qualifiers “Has no” or “reminiscent of a homeless clown.” I will take it! Check out the cool article about how Amy and I met and how we got where we are today.

P.S. If you are worried that I will get a big head over this, don’t worry. My head is already as large as humanly possible. Seriously! Look at the picture they put up of me, It looks like my head is about three sizes too big for my body (and I am not a thin person!)  The photographer told me he was charging the Chronicle $5 per head for the photos he takes, and he was gonna charge $15 for ours! The title of the article needn’t be about Role Reversals, it should be about how I train my neck muscles to hold up a melon that size. Yowza!

Props to mother in law Jean for coming up with this joke and for not instructing Amy to dump me when we joined bank accounts when our relationship reached the ripe old age of 6 weeks old. Thanks Jean!  Happy late father’s day everybody! I am in Hawaii right now and will be blogging as soon as I can put down the mai tais….

I am going to start this post by saying that I am not a doctor. Like most politicians, I don’t really understand how “science” works, and the only real area of expertise I have is mid-80’s baseball stats. Following my advice will probably make you sick or worse yet, have bad skin. But, if you like living adventurously, listen to this, ’cause I got something to say.

Eat anything you want, as long as you make it yourself. That’s right, real food. I have been eating for several years now, and can gladly recommend a diet that is high in butter, cream, bacon, oil, cheese, salami and chicken wings. Those don’t sound good to you? STOP READING MY BLOG! If that list doesn’t make you salivate, I have nothing to offer you. The truth is, the so-called “bad for you” foods are actually really good for you, as long you balance things out and don’t ruin everything by putting a bunch of processed crap in your meals. Real, whole, naturally occurring foods bring a wealth of nutrients to your body, and also have the added bonus of correctly telling your body when it has had enough (most of the time right after you’ve downed the second bowl of hot buttered popcorn.) Stick with the real stuff and you will have a healthy, happy eating life.

You may think you are doing yourself a favor by ingesting low-fat cookies, diet soda and fat free chips, but you are actually doing yourself a disservice. All that processed crap may be appealing at the store when you are looking at the nutritional information, but your body doesn’t care about that information. The only thing it cares about is the ingredients, and when it receives a heavy dose of artificially created ingredients, it freaks out. That’s right, it freaks out and shuts down. It gets heart disease, diabetes, and sometimes even syphilis. (I told Amy that I got Syphilis from a taco truck in Mexico, and I’m would appreciate it tremendously if you could all do me a solid and back me up on that one. OK?)

Why does it do this? I have no idea. Remember, I know nothing about science so I am clueless as you are, but I am going to make a stab in the dark. When food becomes processed, it stops working correctly. If it helps, just think about like this: if you severed someone’s arm at the elbow and then put it through a meat grinder and cooked it up and served it up to them, they wouldn’t be able to use the arm-burger to throw a baseball. Much in the same way, processed fats don’t aid in the digestion of vitamins and minerals, carbohydrates don’t store the right kind of energy, and proteins get wasted and act like a bunch of douche bags. Trust me, you don’t want that.

So what to do? Nothing.

Do NOT let this man make any decisions for you...

Never ever make large changes in your life because of what some idiot says on his blog. (That goes doubly when the idiot has no job, a suspect intellect, and spends large portions of the day alone.) Just go about your daily business, but try to eat unprocessed food. (And don’t be afraid to use a little butter!)

I on the other hand, am making some big changes. That’s right, big. It starts on Monday, and trust me, you won’t want to miss it.

It is a fact. Kids get dirty. Oh, you can try to stop them from picking up goose poop and then jamming their tiny little fingers in their nose (and then eating the whole mess, something we call the “Canadian Boogie” in our house,) but the truth is, kids are going to explore the world. Sometimes that means getting dirty. The real question is, “How do you deal with it?”

A growing group of parents are dealing with it by sanitizing the shit out of their kids. Each contact with germ laden materials is immediately met with a visit by the hand sanitizer fairy with the hope that a cleaner child is somehow a healthier child. In this world, there is no five second rule and touching anything at the doctor’s office is a strict no-no. Forget about play dates with the snotty kid from school. Germs are the enemy of the people and must be eradicated by any means necessary.

Well, I am here to tell you today that this is all nonsense.

I need a name for this drink

Sure, it’s handy to have a high-alchohol gel on hand to take quick nips from when you desperately need some hair of the dog to combat last night’s festivities, but it’s just not worth it. A recent Slate Article interestingly found that what this 100 million dollar a year industry doesn’t want you to know: these hand sanitizers won’t stop you from getting sick. Worse yet, a recent study found that pervasive use of these products will actually make you sicker later in life. The theory goes: if you expose yourself to germs early on, your body learns how to deal with them. When you don’t, your body struggles with germs later in life (in the same way that people who take up golf later in life suck at it.) Consider early childhood germs the equivalent of locking your child in a closet with a box of cigars so that they will think smoking is a disgusting activity. The kicker is that, since sanitizers can’t kill all of the bacteria, the bacteria that survive become resistant to anti-bacterials and become something totally frightening called “super bugs.” There’s only one place in this world where “super bugs” should be allowed and that’s in a smash up derby.

In light of all this, we have made a conscious decision to expose Malcolm to as much filth as possible. In China, we smiled when he grabbed a lollipop from a local kid and licked it, and smiled even more when he dropped it on the ground (in Tianenmen Square, mind you) and then plopped it back it his mouth. If he starts licking the backs of seats on an airplane, we call it, “character building.”  We don’t have a five second rule. In fact, we slow cook meals on the hood of the car. If it’s true that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” Malcolm will become a bodybuilder (until he dies of E.Coli exposure.)

Oh sure, we tell Malcolm to wash his hands after pooping in the middle of dinner, but we don’t sweat the small stuff. Germs are everywhere, and each disgusting lollipop he eats is one bug that won’t get him later in life. One day he’ll figure out on his own that there are places his tongue doesn’t belong, but only because it’s embarrassing and not unhealthy. So let your kids give eskimo kisses to the snotty kid and at school, and if one day your kid’s  sandwich accidentally falls into a homeless person’s shoe, let it slide. They’ll be better off for it. We don’t carry around a diaper bag anymore, but, even if we did, it wouldn’t have Purell in it. No need to, it’s in the flask!

I have, recently, begun to concentrate on where our food comes from. Now, I know what you are going to say, “When one carrot and another carrot love each other very much…” No, not that part. I am talking about where in the world our food is grown. Why do you ask? Let me tell ya.

Food travels, on average, 1500 miles from the farm it is grown on to your plate. That means every time I eat an “average” meal, it is like I traveled to Denver to eat it. Yikes! I don’t even like Denver, why would I want to eat all my meals there? Needless to say, a lot of fossil fuels are burned by the planes, trains and automobiles to get broccoli and raspberries to my house. In order to accommodate this rigorous travel schedule, growers select plants that can withstand brutal harvesting techniques and survive for longer on the shelf. (If you ask me, they should select plants that are tasty. I picked Amy as a spouse because she is fun and hot, not because she can hike and doesn’t bruise easily!) All this is done so that large, multinational corporations take your money at the grocery store and spend it on corporate retreats in the Caribbean. It all sounds pretty fishy to me.

There is a better way, though. Eat locally! For those of you lucky enough to live in California, there are tons of easy ways to ensure that you eat food that is produced close by. For those of you in Montana, you are stuck with Moose Jerky and Huckleberries (Hey, I didn’t tell you to live there!) We have selected a company that gathers local, organic fruits and veggies and drops them off in a box at our house every week. The veggies are in season, perfectly ripe, and delicious. Since we get a large box, I broaden my culinary horizons and fit the meal around what is in season, rather than fitting the season around what I want to eat. I also have started paying attention to where food I buy in the grocery store comes from. So now, I buy the organic, California grown tomatillos instead of the ones grown in mexico. What’s a tomatillo? Here you go!

Buying locally does many things. It cuts down on fossil fuel use. It keep your food money in the community, so that we can tax the hell out of it. Farmers are a bit odd, so it is likely that they will use this money for strange things like tractor cozies or pig lipstick. Buying locally will also prevent the countryside from turning into one giant housing development and strip mall. In short, buying local produce will solve all the world’s problems and make your sex life better.

I saw that someone who ordered a local, organic produce box compared the price of the box to that of produce bought at a major supermarket, and found that the local organic produce was cheaper (on average $.20 of your food dollar goes to growers, the rest is spent on packaging, distribution and marketing, not to mention CEO salaries). I can’t vouch for that, but I do know that I have really enjoyed the locally produced meals I have been making a lot more. Isn’t that all that really matters? At the very least, it beats eating in Denver.