I have decided that life sometimes gets in the way of ideals.

Joshua and I probably fit pretty easily into the granola-crunching category of people who are a little preachy about things like recycling (our trunk is currently filled with EMPTY wine and beer bottles taken home from other peoples' houses which we, at some point, plan to recycle). We buy the majority of our groceries on Saturday mornings at the market. In fact at this very moment, I am currently baking a blue hubbard squash that was grown in Indiana on an organic sustainable farm. In approximately 45 minutes, that squash will become soup - a soup that also includes locally grown onions, garlic, fresh sage, and organic vegetable broth. I've been planning this soup all week, but I just had to wait for the temperature to get below 90 frickin degrees.

But my point is this - our fridge and cabinets and even the oven may be stuffed with fresh! local! organic! food, but where did we eat lunch today?

Target. Did you see a stressed-out couple chowing down on an all-beef hot dog and asian chicken pizza hut special? Because that's us.

And yesterday?

Charcoal Delights. Chicken gyros? Us again!

Besides the obvious fact that eating out blows through serious wads of cash, I hate that we do it because then we eat the crap we are trying to avoid in our Certified Organic lifestyle. It is a little incongruous to spend twenty minutes choosing the best beets and swiss chard when really I am consuming my weight in french fries every month.

But the reality is, I do not have the time to make every lunch and every dinner. Some days, I barely even have time to eat anything in between clinicals and internships and class and work. This week has been one of those incredibly overwhelming weeks where everything collided at once and the food we drooled over this weekend is currently sitting dejected in the fridge (not the squash! I cooked the one vegetable that could probably have hung out happy and healthy til Thanksgiving!) while we stuff ourselves with fast food.

I really hate it. And I want to change. But that would require planning ahead, probably one of my least favorite things to do and something I am certainly not good at in terms of food preparation.

And now I have to go, because my squash is almost done and if I even have a prayer of finishing this soup before Joshua gets home and needs to eat before his class starts at 6:30, I should be 10 steps ahead of where I am.