I’ve been ruminating a lot lately about how different I feel, just four months after embarking on this S/O/L/E food quest and becoming what my sister calls a “food dork.” I and — to a slightly lesser extent — my husband (the lab rat known as Potato Non Grata) radically changed what and how we eat, starting in March when I interviewed Michael Pollan (pictured, right) and read an advance copy of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. That book, which is still hovering close to the bestseller list, is changing a lot of lives, I think.

Definitely mine. On a purely physical level, I feel great, despite my hellish seasonal allergies. I have more energy, with almost no sugar cravings and no afternoon slump. I’m less irritable in general. My skin is remarkably clearer. My digestion is, um, much improved.

In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve also been exercising more regularly, which could account for a lot. And by starting this blog and resurrecting my long-dormant novel, I finally feel creative again, less like a toxic-waste dump for pop culture and celebrity gossip.

But mainly it’s the food that deserves the credit, I think. Not that the Potato and I ate too badly before — I always bought sustainable meat, some organic produce but more conventional, and very little processed food, with the exception of cereal, bread, and Amy’s canned organic soups and chili.

(The first of many digressions: Amy’s, by the way, is not only local — in Petaluma — but also really, really good, with nothing but actual food in the ingredient lists for the soup and chili. The microwaveable snacks like pizza and enchiladas look similarly wholesome, but a little less recognizable, and I’m trying to avoid all premade stuff like that.)

One dramatic difference in my diet is that I’ve drastically reduced my high fructose corn syrup intake, along with artificial sweeteners. Hard to believe I haven’t had a Diet Coke in four months, but I’ve successfully switched to unsweetened iced tea, with the occasional cane-sugar-sweetened Reed’s Premium Ginger Brew. (Sooo tasty. And no, this site doesn’t have sponsors.) With a few stumbles, I’ve stopped eating candy and chocolate entirely, as I found the more I ate, the more I wanted. I think HFCS is like crack, frankly. I’m only now starting to allow homemade and restaurant-made baked goods back into my life, and damn, they taste good. But during the sugar hiatus, I rediscovered how delicious really fresh berries and stone fruit can be, especially with a little whipped cream.

Going cold turkey on HFCS also meant switching from the Oroweat Health Nut bread that we loved, but I’ve settled on a super-seedy sourdough from Beckman’s Old World Bakery as a better replacement. (The Potato, however, still mourns his Health Nut. I’ve told him to stop complaining and buy it, we’re not absolutists here, but he hasn’t.)

The main change is, I’ve been buying only organic or local dairy and produce, mostly from the Berkeley farmers’ markets but also via a CSA box from Eatwell Farm. I have a thriving herb garden in containers at home, with basil, mint, cilantro, rosemary, oregano, tarragon, parsley, and lemon thyme. For the first summer on record I haven’t killed all the herbs by July by forgetting to water them.

When I do have to shop at the supermarket, I’ve started looking at how far the produce traveled, and choosing whichever variety of apple, for example, was grown closest to me. I get butter from a local dairy, eggs from chickens that roam Eatwell’s fields, and I’m starting to ask questions about my beloved cheeses. I experimented with raw (unpasteurized) cow’s milk but couldn’t hack it. I mainly drink milk only with my cereal — I ditched the Cheerios for Nature’s Path Heritage Grains in the Ecopac size — and raw milk, with its slight vinegary tang, was just too much for me first thing in the morning. I switched to Straus Family Creamery, which is pasteurized but not homogenized: I love harvesting the plug of cream from the top of the glass bottle and putting it in with my cereal.

I used to think I was a pretty good cook. I never realized how circumscribed my repertoire was, how very limited to things I knew I liked and had eaten while growing up. In the past few months, I’ve cooked so many things for the first time. I had to, because they came in my subscription box from Eatwell Farm. The S in our acronym S/O/L/E technically stands for Sustainable, but we really should have put an S in there for Seasonal, too. By eating what’s ready to pick 60 miles north of here, I am exposing myself to a lot of vegetables I’ve ignored my whole life at the grocery store, such as fava beans. Beets. Dinosaur kale. Swiss chard. English shelling peas.

Eating food picked the day before, as opposed to a week earlier and traveling across the state or country by refrigerated truck, is a revelation. For the Potato, who is quite a bit older than I am, it’s a journey back to his youth in Arizona, when he remembers eating things like sweet, juicy strawberries, which have more or less disappeared from grocery stores. For me, it’s discovering that what I thought were strawberries were just berry-flavored, Styrofoam-fleshed facsimiles. All this time, the real thing was just a few miles away. I feel cheated. When did people start settling for Styrofoam? Was it so gradually, like the proverbial frog in warming water, that our tastebuds never caught on?

The new vegetables have been an education on many fronts. The Potato and I have had to learn that fresh favas should be barely blanched, not boiled for five minutes, before their second peeling unless you want fava mush. Despite being a lifelong beet hater — I thought they were gelatinous filler food — I’ve come to really like the vermilion little suckers, especially roasted and tossed in tarragon vinaigrette. And we’ve discovered that kale is fine with a little garlic and butter, but positively outstanding when sautéed in leftover sausage fat. My Southern great-grandmother who put bacon in everything knew what she was doing, turns out. She also lived to be 84.

Aside from the every-other-week Produce Challenge, as I’ve come to see it, I’ve been trying to get braver about meat, even cooking a whole chicken. Laugh, but as an ex-vegetarian, this was a big deal for me. Thinking I would be getting an Ethicurean Poster Chicken from Marin Sun Farms soon, I wanted to practice on a Rosie Organic Chicken first. It was an oddly discomfiting experience — holding that chicken around its ribcage, under its little wings, was oddly like holding a newborn baby. I had no idea it would be so … floppy. But I managed it, rubbing butter with lemon verbena all over the skin and slipping it into slits at the joints, and sticking a lemon in the cavity the way Man of La Muncha had instructed. And it came out OK, although without the crispy breast I was hoping for — I discovered later that my oven is about 40 degrees cooler than the dial says.

Later I made stock from the carcass, another first. I made vegetable stock too, which I had done before. I was afraid I wouldn’t use all of it up in time, so I reduced it and froze the concentrate in two ice cube trays. I felt like Martha Stewart! But having the cubes has been trés handy.

Eating Ethicurean has made me much less wasteful in general. In the past, since I dreaded going to our local No. 1 grocery store, Berkeley Bowl, I would load up the cart on my weekly shopping trips. (The Potato likes to tease me that in my previous life, I grew up in the Depression.) But when I came home from the store with all my many grocery bags, I would first have to throw away the putrid lettuce and slimy green onions and moldy peppers and whatever other items from the previous week that we hadn’t gotten around to eating. I felt guilty about it, but only from a financial point of view and knowing how many hungry people there are just in our neighborhood, let alone the rest of the world.

Now, I’m much more aware of what’s in the fridge and when it’s likely to expire. At the farmers’ markets, I buy only what I plan to cook or eat in the next few days. (By the way, I find that if stored properly, produce bought from the markets lasts longer than that from the store, despite what you may have heard — because it was picked so much more recently.) Partly that’s because I actually enjoy wandering around the farmers markets, so I don’t mind going more often — I’m also lucky in that Berkeley’s Tuesday and Thursday ones are close to where I work.

But mainly it’s that I can’t bear to throw away food that I’ve bought directly from the person who grew it. It feels disrespectful to them, and to the planet. And if it’s meat that I’ve somehow let go bad, that’s even worse: that animal has become more real, more worthy of my consideration, to me by virtue of knowing who raised it.

For example, not too long ago I watched as one of the ranchers at a Bay Area farmers market ransacked his coolers in search of a pork shoulder roast another customer wanted. He got increasingly more agitated, and when he finally pulled out a package of pork, he stared at it like it was bright green instead of red.

“They sliced up my shoulders,” he said in disbelief. I eavesdropped as he told the other customer that the plant that processed his meat would fit his tiny lot in at the end of the day, and not infrequently did a half-assed job. There was nothing he could do about it: it is the only USDA-certified plant for miles around that’s even willing to do business with him. In this case, they had cut two beautiful 9-pound roasts into several giant pork chops, over an inch thick and about 3 pounds apiece, with bony “eyes” where the joint had been.

The rancher held the plastic-sealed, plate-sized meat in his hands. “You know, you raise an animal for nine months, babying it and feeding it, and then something like this happens …” his voice trailed off. “Who’s going to want these? Such a waste.”

I said I would take one and figure out something to do with it. The other woman decided she’d give one a try too. The man seemed relieved: two monster chops down, four to go. I asked the man if I could talk to him about his processing problems for the blog, and he shook his head. Which is why I’m not naming him or which market it was.

“I’m stuck with those people. I can’t afford to antagonize them,” he sighed.

(For those who don’t know, farmers are not allowed to butcher their own animals if they are selling the meat to consumers — the work has to be done at a USDA-certified plant, which significantly adds to the price of grassfed beef and other small-farm meat. Sometimes people get around this by selling shares in a cow to consumers while it’s alive; they can then butcher the animal for its owners as a “courtesy” service. But if you want to sell meat at a farmers’ market, they have to deal with these big plants that are accustomed to processing many thousands of animals a day.)

At $24, it was a hella expensive pork chop, and I had no clue how to cook it. Once at home, I looked up a few things, called up the Dairy Queen Mother back east, and dithered about whether to braise it or tie it up into a roast. I didn’t yet own a Dutch oven, so I decided to go for the slow roast.

When I opened up the package, the meat fell apart into three sections, each with a bone. I know that roasting bone-in is supposed to be better, but these were funky-ass bony bits that I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to slice around, so I cut them out. I rubbed a mixture of salt, garlic, and fresh rosemary and thyme over the pieces; then with much difficulty, the Potato and I tied the meat together. As it was our first experience with cooking twine and we couldn’t follow the diagram in my cookbook, it was the most amateurish, bondage-looking little football you’ve ever seen. I wish I’d taken a picture.

But it worked, more or less. The outside got a little crispy and the inside stayed moist. I wish I hadn’t put the garlic and herbs in it, because the pork itself was so tasty: vaguely nutty and sweet and heavenly fat-permeated — that is, utterly unlike the lean, bland stuff that comes from the pig factories. We ate pork sandwiches for days. And every time I savored my lunch, I thought about the rancher, and how anguished he had seemed at the rough treatment — even after death — of an animal he had known intimately for nine months.

You don’t get that with your shrink-wrapped chops from the refrigerated section at Safeway. And maybe some people would prefer it that way. Not me, not anymore. I want to eat with full consciousness of what’s on my plate, and how it got there.

There was a lot more I wanted to write, about all the things I hope to find out about the people growing my food, and hope to learn about how food is grown in general, but this is one long post already and I have to go to bed. I’m getting up early tomorrow to visit Marin Sun Farms, on my first-ever tour of a cattle ranch, in order to look my steak in the face. I’ll tell you about it on Thursday.