Your environment

The other day someone at work mentioned how much your environment, the physical realities of the place you live, work, and sleep, affect your mental state. I didn't want to go all new age-y on her so I simply nodded in agreement. What I wanted to say was that if your environment is not grounded, i.e. you've just moved, you're perpetually messy, you live with chaos, then those energies affect how you feel throughout the day. I think this works with food too. I need really grounding food when I have a lot of heavy duty thinking and tasking to do. When I have no responsibilities I like to have lighter, dreamier food.

I've just started reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I know, it's a huge NY Times best seller and everyone else has read it ages ago. That's fine. I have a tendency to avoid books that everyone else likes because I don't trust that I will agree with everyone. I usually don't. I'm hard to please and have very high standards when it comes to literature or writing in general. Grammar mistakes, poor sentence construction, and general sloppiness just piss me off. And yet I can't stop reading a book once I've started, so I have to finish even the worst drivel. Hence I try not to start anything until I'm sure I will really like it. I was not sure about Eat, Pray, Love. It seemed so cliched. I used to work in a travel bookstore and spent all my time reading these kinds of travel/ spiritual quest/ memoir. They are roughly all the same. Man/woman goes to foreign locale and learns lessons about life/ experience/ specific skill. But this one had been on my radar for a while. A friend had read it and told me it was ok. Not "fantastic, you must read this!" but "ok." So when I saw it at the library I thought, "Well, why not?" Since I got it from the library at least I won't be spending any money on it.

I have to admit through my skepticism that I am enjoying it so far. The Italy section made me want to go to Italy. Not so much for the art or the culture, though I'm sure that's nice, but for the food. As a vegan I'm not sure I even could eat in Italy, certainly not the way she did sampling everything that was suggested to her with a healthy side of gelato. It did make me want cheese though. I find that missing cheese is the one thing that is hard for me as a vegan. Macrobiotics helps more than that awful fake vegan cheese but something is not satisfying me in my regular diet the way cheese would. Anyone have a cheese substitute suggestion? I've seen the recipes for miso/tofu cheese in the macro books and they just don't look good. Anyone ever tried those?