This is a blog for people who want to join me in the effort to know more about the food we eat, the food products we buy, and in doing a generally better job of coexisting with other species of living things on the planet. There are newish terms out there like locavore and sensivore but they didn’t fully cover what I’m after. I wanted a term that is as much about the journey as the final pronouncement of who we are if we are what we eat. We’re trying to eat better in as many ways as we can manage – philosophically, calorically, environmentally, whatever. My term is also vaguely in keeping with the officially Latin terms like omnivore or herbivore. Melio is a hybrid of the Latin and Italian words for better. I figure it is a small but acceptable seizure of power in my own blog to give the Latin word for better (melior) a Milano runway upgrade to meglio, but without the ‘g’ for us Americans. Mea culpa.

So I’m saying that a meliovore is a better eater. Not better than thou, but better than before, regardless of whether you have evolved to the degree that you exclusively eat sprouted spelt bread or can’t give up the lily white stuff. I admit that I am full of contradictions – I won’t buy beef that isn’t fully grass fed and yet there are nights when SPAM winds up on my dinner table. (My kid really likes it, and hey, it’s the reduced sodium SPAM, alright?) But I won’t let my guilty pleasures make me feel I have no right to the areas where I am setting a somewhat higher bar. Let’s acknowledge that not everyone is at the same level of progress and reform. If you want to make the effort to bring better quality food into your kitchen, then you should embrace whatever you can reasonably do. I am certainly not declaring that I will be a sustainability saint, but I have followed through on some steps I’ve considered a priority and will continue to make more as resources and budget will allow.

Part of my quest is a search for the truth among the confusing maze of marketing language and  ‘natural – farm fresh’ claims, deconstructing those, pointing out some good practices and sharing some ways to move into the slower lane of eating without spending too much and getting obsessive and annoying about it all. We might even improve our health and avoid some ground meat recalls while we’re at it. So, thanks for reading and coming along.

Some stated goals and areas of focus:

• reduce amount of prepared food we eat
• investigate food products with stated healthiness claims
• plan meals to save money and resources & be more healthful
• reduce amount of food wasted
• reduce sodium in my family’s diet
• reduce use/waste of food packaging

Goals for the blog:

• Pass along results of my investigations into relevant products or services
• Share best practices and spark dialog about better eating
• Provide regular posts that are brief and, hopefully, useful for busy people.