Eat Free or Die!

FAQ

What’s the deal with Eat Free or Die?

It’s all about throwing off the shackles of processed, boxed, ready-made convenience “food”. I love food – preparing it, eating it, enjoying it. It pains me that, in many cases, we have foregone real food as a culture and substituted whatever brightly-packaged fat- and sugar-laden glop-in-a-box that ConAgra and ADM market to us.

Real food is not hard. Real food is not inconvenience. Real food does not require a full-time homebody to supervise 2-3 hour preparations.

What are your qualifications?

None. I’m a professional nerd who designs complicated information systems.

However, I can cook. I cook pretty damned well. I also have the inspiration to not only make real food, but to share with everyone the techniques and methods for making tasty, nutritious meals without blowing the bank and chaining yourselves to the stove.

What if I don’t have time to prepare a meal?

Then, you’re either incredibly negligent, or a liar. I’ll be perfectly blunt about it. Everyone has time to cook if they choose to do so. Good food is within the reach of anyone with 20-30 minutes to spare. If you can spend 10 minutes heating up a Meal-In-A-Box to eat poorly, you can afford a little longer to eat well. The idea of this site is to educate people on their options.

In general, my aim is to get you from the fridge to the table in a half hour, give or take.

What if I can’t cook?

Try.

Seriously – I’m not going to ask you to engage in advanced charcuterie. If you can boil water and fry a burger, you have the basic skills to cook for yourself. The most challenging part of meal preparation for most people is time management, and that will get better with practice. Your first attempts may take longer than I suggest – that’s fine. You’ll get more comfortable the more you try.

If you have problems with managing multiple items cooking at once, start with one-pot preparations. Alternately, ease into cooking gradually. Remove one pre-prepared element from your meal and make it yourself. Increase the home-made items, and decrease the packaged foods, as you become more proficient.

Isn’t good food expensive?

No, it’s not. Good food does not mean that you have to buy only organically-grown, hand-crafted ingredients, produced by local, small farms with fields tended solely by vegan Scandinavian virgins… though you can if you want to. The idea is to get away from processed, pre-prepared foods loaded with sugar, fat, preservatives, and salt. If you’re starting with fresh produce and good, clean sources of protein, you’re way ahead of the game.

Never underestimate the tastiness and power of simple and cheap ingredients – beans, rice, greens, etc. Buy whatever’s in season – it’ll be the freshest and cheapest option.

This Site

What’s with the ReCaptcha thing?

There are a number of anti-spam agents at work on this site. ReCaptcha is the front line, requiring that users complete the text recognition task before being allowed to comment. This reduces the number of items the backend spam filters have to deal with, and that I have to moderate.

ReCaptcha also serves a useful purpose. It helps with the community effort to digitally translate and store printed books. Every ReCaptcha you solve helps to whittle away at the amount of unrecognized text resulting from the optical scanning processes used in converting printed material into digital data. More info at ReCaptcha.net.

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