But is it HEALTHY?

I've already talked about a lot of good ideas from other foodbloggers, but there are some aspects of that world I'm... not entirely in love with. Particularly the sort of guardian-of-everyone's-health aspect that crops up quite often. And I'm not even talking about blogs that are specifically set up as healthy-living or weightloss or diet blogs, although those are their own little world of insidiousness, but just regular old food blogs where people post recipes and maybe talk about their day a little bit. There's this whole thing of telling you what you should and shouldn't feel guilty about eating, or that it's ok that they ate something or other because they went out for a run, or any number of other ways to tell you that certain physical appearances are bad and wrong.

I have a few soapbox topics and this is one of them. I don't have the authority to tell someone what they should and shouldn't look like, just as they don't have that right with regard to me (or anyone else, for that matter). Not only that, but I'm not their doctor (and they aren't mine, etc) and therefore have no business telling them these things under the guise of "health advice." It's not up to me to say that a) eating a big bowl of these cheesy chicken noodles is bad for you, or that b) if it makes you gain a couple pounds, which, let's be fair, it might, that that would be a bad thing. More to the point, I'm not here to put value judgements on something that is, in the end, aesthetic. You wouldn't say that everyone with brown hair is smart or stupid, lazy or motivated, virtuous or morally turpid. But people are happy to make that call on someone based on their weight or size. And even when it isn't overt - these generally well-meaning food blogs aren't going out there saying "if you're fat, it's because you're too dumb to know you should be eating kale chips instead of regular chips!" - it carries the same stamp. So I never want to do that, and it really rubs me wrong when people do. Even the whole "this dish looks sinful, but actually it's guilt-free!" thing is part of it, because it says you're supposed to feel guilty for eating certain kinds of things and that it is quite literally a sin to do so.

Look, I'm a white North American female of a particular age group, which means that my relationship with food and my own body is, at the least, complicated (and at the most, dangerous - which is another thing, you never know whom you're triggering with your casual remark), so I get it that there's an urge to keep within certain prescribed boundaries and to feel like a better human being for doing so - that happens to me all the time, and if you were inside my head as I made eating decisions on a given day, you'd find it hard to believe the same person wrote this post. But the difference is that I'm being dictatorial and strict with myself, which is the only person I have a right to do that to, just like everyone else.

So. With all that said. The recipe is for the cheesy chicken noodles I linked earlier - it's ok, you don't have to scroll up, here's the link - and the WHOLE THING came about because of a nearly throwaway line in that post about tossing some vegetables in. Yep. Something that small can set me off on a tangent. As you can imagine, I have lots of friends.

By the way, my thumb is officially broken. Well, the teensy little scafoid bone is, anyway. So I'm still a hardass typing from a splint. Or, you know, an idiot who decided that braking was for other people and so were wristguards. One of the two.