Oprah, Food and Alicia Silverstone's Bathroom Habits

Oprah: Next time you're in your closet try out brown and orange, really.

Fiance: Is Oprah always this annoying?

Me: Yes.

Oprah is totally annoying. Rules of life: humans need oxygen, babies always cry in movies, you will always need to pee when you're as far from a clean bathroom as possible on a road trip and Oprah is annoying.

She has clearly decided to throw caution to the wind in her last year and jump on the 'campaign' bandwagon. I mean, distracted driving? Does she even drive herself around?

In a show this week Oprah discussed the way Americans eat. It was actually impressive how she kept telling the audience to form their own opinions with the information they were presented in the show. The headliner was none other than Michael Pollan who I have professed my love for in the past. He was involved in the movie Food, Inc., which I still haven't seen, dam nit. Why are movies so hard to see? Oh right, no time in life for sitting still.

The two things that jumped out most were when Pollan discussed his food rules. He has lots of them but on Oprah the best were:

#2: Don't eat anything your grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.

#39: Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.

Really, what #2 means is don't eat anything that people who lived before we industrialized (read: bastardized) our food system couldn't have eaten easily. Pollan talks about Twinkies, which are kind of obvious but this group also includes things like margarine, fat free single-packaged cheese or even simple things like packaged lunch meats. I know, this totally kills those easy sandwiches you can shove into a kid's lunch bag. But, honestly, that cheese is creepy, have you ever seen it melt on a burger? It is like watching a pyromaniac burn a plastic toy. As for lunch meat, I dare you to Google nitrates. Just, ew.

As for the second one, #39 is something that took me ages to learn but thank God I did. For instance, on Wednesday night we ate handmade nutmeg pasta with smoked roasted duck sausage. Okay, so I didn't case the sausage or roll the pasta but they were both from the farmer's market (another Pollan tip) and we didn't cover either in store bought tomato sauce but instead shaved parmesan on top and used a bit of olive oil. It was awesome and way cheaper than something comparable we'd have gotten in a restaurant. Same goes for homemade bread and even simple things like salad dressing. Basically, Pollan says this because of his feelings on the food system at large, which are concerns I share but my personal love for this rule is that homemade junk food is way better than the purchased kind. This is similar to how I feel about taking care of the environment. I'm all for taking care of my planet but what gets me to actually do it is that being environmentally conscious is so much cheaper than not.

Also, towards the middle of this Oprah episode Alicia Silverstone talks about her own bowel movements. Just, saying.