Dear Mom: I am enjoying myself at camp. The food is not good.

I spent the weekend at a 3-day fiber arts workshop down in a boy scout camp in Southern California. There will be a more extensive write-up of the workshop in a later post, but first I wanted to talk about something that bothered me the entire weekend.

You guessed it: the food.

If you talked to attendees, the food this weekend was much better than they'd had at other, comparable retreats, and, in any case, they always eat well at this workshop. Hearing this made me realize just how extremely different my diet is from the Standard American Diet (SAD). Let me illustrate this by recalling the meals offered the first day:

Breakfast--cereal bar, waffles, granola & low-fat vanilla yogurt, scrambled eggs, sausages, fruit (apples, bananas, oranges)

Lunch--sandwich bar with bread, luncheon meats, sliced cheeses, baby carrots, lettuce, leftover fruit from breakfast, chips, store-bought potato salad

Afternoon snack--cookies, chips, crackers

Dinner--taco bar with corn and wheat tortillas, ground beef, chicken, refried beans, rice, shredded cheese, a tiny bowl of iceberg lettuce, one jar of salsa

In essence: a lot of carbohydrates. How very SAD.

Now, were there no vegetables being offered this weekend because it's just too difficult to buy, prep and cook veggies or because they would not be eaten if offered?

I was dying for vegetables. I could only thing longingly of my refrigerator at home, chock full of fresh baby lettuce, kale, radishes, leeks, onions, tomatoes, peas, kohlrabi and my crocks of fermented carrots, beets, cucumbers, and sauerkraut. Once I arrived home yesterday afternoon I enjoyed a snack of prunes and walnuts. For dinner that night, I cooked up some grass-fed beef with onions, with peas and kohlrabi greens on the side. Strawberries and raw milk cheddar for dessert. Bam--there's five servings of fruits and vegetables right there. For breakfast this morning, I had scrambled eggs with sun-dried tomatoes and fresh basil. Bright yellow and delicious eggs--so yellow compared to the eggs last weekend that I could almost not believe it. But that's the difference between real food and industrial food.

This issue is not going to hold me back from potentially attending the workshop again next year, I just have to come better prepared in order to feed myself over the weekend.