Food without faces? That's a weird name for a blog. How did THAT come about?
My husband and I were visiting family and trying to figure out where to go for lunch. Someone suggested the local vegetarian place. Someone else suggested not eating at the vegetarian place because the service was so incredibly poor and instead eating at a place that has food with faces.
Umm... That's kind of gross. Why would you want that as the title of a blog?
Well, after I thought about it, I realised that it actually has multiple meanings to me.
The original meaning has to do with our trip to see family and my attempt to eat a more vegetarian-esque diet. By reducing my own consumption of meat, I'm telling myself that I'm reducing the impact that my dietary habits have on the planet. I'm sure you've heard that it takes so many pounds of grain to make so many pounds of meat. Don't worry though. I won't go off on a veggie rant. Being on a gluten-sensitive diet is hard enough. I wouldn't want to make eating anymore miserable for anyone else by going off on a pro-veggie rant. That and I'd be a hypocrite.
The second reason has to with the wheat-free lifestyle that I've had to adopt. I've been mostly wheat-free for upwards of 11 years, before it was trendy, before there were decent gluten-free foods to choose from. The goal of this blog is to push me to find things that I can eat that don't elicit a "This tastes DISGUSTING" face. If you've ever eaten anything marked "Gluten-free" and it's not made by a company like General Mills or Betty Crocker, then you probably know what I'm talking about. That crumbly, tasteless, substitute for real food. Tied into that are the faces that one makes by eating something that their system tells them is a no-go, like milk products for the lactose intolerant. "Food without making faces" was too just wordy, even for me.
The third reason stems from my love of non-traditional, non-Americana cooking. My palette doesn't have a particular identity. In addition to the foods I was raised on, I love Thai cuisine, Japanese, Ethiopian, Senegalese, Mexican, Peruvian, Italian, Cajun, Bulgarian... You get the point. So "Food Without Faces" is sort of a culinary equivalent of "Doctors without Borders" in that I hope it encourages you to put any cultural preconceptions aside and try something new. If I can blend my love of "ethnic" cooking with wheat-free dining, then I've done what I've set forth to do.
