WHAT'S FOR BREAKFAST?

So what do you have for breakfast?
For a long time now oatmeal has been my favorite. Not the quick cook variety but those lovely rolled oats that you tip into boiling water and let soak for several minutes. Of course, it helps if you have some raisins in the water before and then add some walnut pieces and chopped bananas. Lately I have discovered that diced apple works pretty well and that adding a couple of dessert spoons of ground flax seed top off what must be the perfect breakfast dish. If you like a little extra sweetness you can add a little honey at the last, before some half-n-half (for Australians who read this, 'half-n-half ' is the closest you can get to real milk here in the good old USA where fat is akin to temptation and ingesting it tantamount to sin).

Despite all the goodness of oatmeal I have lately been seduced by barley (a notion introduced to be via the Real Age website). Lower glycemic index even than oatmeal, meaning you will not begin to feel famished until lunchtime, full of more nutritional goodies, as well as amazing health benefits. You cook it like brown rice; pouring a cup of hulled barley seed into four cups of boiling water and allowing to stand overnight. In the morning a several minutes on very low heat completes the uptake of moisture resulting in deliciously tender but still chewy swollen grain.
Mind you, I am not referring to pearl barley which is to hulled barley as white rice is to brown rice; meaning most of the nutritional goodies have been ground off.
I hope I have sufficiently tempted you so that you will want to step out to your local supermarket to get some and give barley for breakfast a try. Good luck but I doubt you will find anything like it, except maybe pearl barley. You can get it off the Internet if you are prepared to pay $2 or so per pound and $10-$12 for transport via UPS. This will still be cheaper and better for you than the sugar coated box of rubbish some of you may buy in box from the 'cereal' or breakfast section of your local supermarket (watch out, Robert, your nasty prejudice is beginning to peek out!).
I get my hulled barley for $1.19 per pound at a organic food co-op in Ithaca, some 45 miles from Painted Post. That's about $10 in gas, there and back, so I have to combine it with other things to do in Ithaca, like eating at the excellent Thai restaurants there or visiting the wonderful second hand book shops on The Commons.

'Where is all this going?' you might well ask. Why is he rabbiting on about boring breakfast concoctions? Now is the moment for a 'When I Was a Lad' contribution...

When I was a lad one could go to the local general store (no supermarkets then) and buy a pound or two (or five) of hulled barley grown within 100 miles and prepared at a mill even closer. What you could not buy was a box of sugar frosted "O's", or sich like, made of some sort of cereal grown far away and transported 1,500 miles or so for purchase off the shelf.

Actually, I am getting a little worried about that sliced banana I add to my oatmeal or barley. Not only does it come a long way but I read this morning in NY Times that banana plantations are so heavily dosed with pesticides so as unfortunately to decimate birds venturing into them.
Or what about the out-of-season melon I am tempted to purchase, grown in Mexico under conditions that apparently are killing off the skunk blackbird, a songbird once common in eastern USA (see NY Times article, Did Your Shopping List Kill a Songbird, March 31 '08).

Where is this leading? Where else but a discussion of 'Food Miles' and the cost component of oil in your food? In the meantime, enjoy the picture 'before and after' picture of barley for breakfast.