On Tour...

On tour in Scandinavia!

Will post all about Swedish cuisine when I get home and back to a computer in a couple weeks. Til then -- enjoy your food and don't eat with your mouth full.

- Shel

Good Milk

I was listening to an interview with Jim Hightower and was happy to find that he and I drink the same milk! Well, at least I drink it when we manage to get down to the organic grocer.

A lot of people complain about the price of organic milk. Yeah, it's frigging expensive. But you are actually putting this stuff in your body. Isn't it weird that we'll buy name-brand CD-Rs because they are more trust-worthy, but we won't think twice about the utters producing the milk we consume.

And I'm as much a part of this as anyone; the idea of regularly spending $5 on a gallon of milk is appalling. Though I don't blink spending that on a six-pack.

Time to re-evaluate the dairy thing. Have managed to go Stonybrook Farms Organic on yogurt, so that's a start -- and only ten cents more a cup. But milk seems like something that shouldn't cost $5 a gallon.

Of course, milk is kind of like voting. You know all those people who go on about voting 'scientifically'? Like folks who say, "I'd vote for Kucinich, but he'd never win; so I'll vote for someone else instead." Of course, we all know, a vote is a vote and whomever receives more gets the nice tableware. But it's sort of like that with milk. Folks say: "Yeah, organic tastes better, but so few people buy it they have to make the price so high. And I just feel like a putz spending $5 on a gallon of milk." What we need to do is get everyone to buy organic milk so the price will have to come down. Let's put the big commercial dairy farms out of business and let them sell their cows to the organic farms. When it really comes down to the brass tacks, it's only a matter of a few extra bucks a month.

Take It!

The operative word is 'cabbage'.

Nice Can

It's amazing just how much food I grew up on that came out of a can.

From tuna fish (which BTW, is one of the few seafoods that we call by type and species) to SPAM, an aluminum shell was where it was at. And vegetables! I remember all of our veggies came from cans -- from those 'French-style' string-beans to the button mushrooms and right down to canned white potatoes. All in cans.

Thinking back on it, I wonder if this was a cultural thing -- like some by-product of the Cold War. Or my mother's reactivist backlash against Hippie agrarians.

I've got a spot for cans next to the toaster in the kitchen. Mostly kidney beans and tomato paste. The occasional soup.

I can't even imagine how heavy my mother's grocery bags must have been.

Car crashes, hailstorms, and pizza... a day in the life of an independent filmmaker

Been away from the blog for a couple days. Working on directing a new movie. And what a day we had today.

1) An actor went missing in Texas at the last moment [he was supposed to be in Maryland].

2) We got stuck with a hailstorm on what the script called for as a pleasant day.

3) We unintentionally were involved in a car crash en route to a location.

But worst of all: the lunch pizza was kinda lousy.

You see, I've noticed something about being on a film shoot: you tend to eat lots of pizza and junk food. This could help to explain all those hefty directors: Hitch, Peter Jackson, Michael Moore...

My buddy Chris and I decided back when we worked out how to shoot this film that our goal was to finish a full-feature film that would get distributed and make us enough money so that on our next film we could afford a car crash.

Alas, we got the car crash... just not the sort we intended.

Maybe we'll make our next goal to hire a catering truck.

Chocolate Jesus

For those of you following the ever-evolving epic of my personal relationship with vegetarian jerky, may I just offer this:

Now that we have Chocolate Jesus, let's put our heads together and forge a lobby to instigate some great and progressive food producing company to take this to the next stage -- Veggie Jerky Jesus.

I'll start working on the song.