I want to start a movement, a grassroots movement that grows worldwide and engulfs the peoples of the globe in its loving arms.
I want to start a food movement. Like the local food movement or the organic food movement, I want my movement to grow out of the grass-roots initiatives of people who really care and have science on their side. I want my movement to begin in the blogs and the small-town newspapers and the yuppie west-coast coffee shops of our nation. I want my movement to be hip in Asheville and down in Louisville. I want my movement to take stay-at-home moms with slings instead of strollers by storm. I want my movement to be so cool it's a class statement.
I want to start the: I Am Not A Bad Person Because I Love Baked Goods movement. We'll take cupcakeries, doughnut shops, and pie-stands along with us as we sweep the nation! People will learn to love yeast again! The hip-hot spots like Voodoo Doughnuts, Sprinkles, Crumbs, and Magnolia will stand as our beacons of truth. Pies - unique receptacles of pastry goodness - will serve as our open door. Fill us with your regional specialty, we are willing. We are warm. We flake on command.
Baklava makes us international.
Muffins ingrain us in your morning rituals. We are filled with oats and bananas and blueberries and sunshine.
My movement will not, however, do several things. Firstly, no one will advertise my movement in cycling class. Or pilates class. Or at triathlon training. Or even, most probably, during yoga. My movement is not about diets or exercise plans or working it off. My movement knows no cycling class. It knows no pilates. It knows no jazzercize, no body pump, no nothin'. You see, the whole point of my movement is that you eat not that you regret eating so my movement has no checks-and-balances - it doesn't need them. My movement is already balanced, balanced with joy.
My movement will not hire nutritionists. Our scientists are psychologists who wish they'd become philosophers and philosophers with the sympathetic ears of psychologists. My movement is not about an obsession with food as a means to nourishment anymore than good sex is about procreation. My movement is about foreplay. My movement is about eating. I want my movement to be to food as the removal of abstinence-only education is to the budding minds of young teenagers. It is liberating. It is responsible. It is realistic.
Food today is a lot like sex education today. If we simply tell children that pre-marital sex is wrong surely they will abstain, right? It's wrong morally. It's wrong for your health. It's wrong for your future. But oh, oh oh, it's so good. BUT YOU CANNOT HAVE IT.
Yes, yes, I recall that all the teenagers I know respond well to that kind of message.
We do the same thing with food, baked goods especially. Those doughnuts are so good. They're calling your name. You want one. You need one. You should eat this diet bar instead, because otherwise your body won't look like a 12-year old boy's anymore, and that's wrong. That's bad for your health, looking like a grownup. It's bad for your future. Doughnuts and premarital sex are for kids who don't know any better and never plan on leaving this town.
Let's take back baked goods, folks. Let's take back childlike wonder. Let's take back joy. Let's take back first kisses and daring trysts and spices wafting through the house. Let's not let the naysayers rule our lives. Let's not let people who've lost touch with reality in some twisted crusade for Purity of Body and Spirit be those who dictate whether or not our carnal pleasures can lead to a higher enlightenment.
I see magic and dreams in our layer cake. I taste art in these brownies. I transcend with every bite of our maple-glazed doughnuts. I do. I really, really do.
So, if you'd like to end the abstinence-only education of our mid-twenties, come join me. I will be baking. And smiling. And loving. And free.
