Blog

The Eat Well Food Tour is back in local mode for now, as Rob and I are in Michigan catching up on things after two intense weeks on the road. We're in the process of getting Michigan and Ontario dates on the calendar and will post new events as soon as they're confirmed. In the meantime, enjoy the delights of the summer harvest. It's blueberry season here!

On Monday, I talked on the phone with a reporter from the Grand Rapids Press about the food tour and she asked what we'd be doing about the dreaded road food dilemma, especially on a tour about food. Attempting to balance idealism and realism in my answer, I said that if we hadn't packed our own food, we'd at least try to stop at a locally-owned business, rather than a chain, to support the local economies of the places we were passing through.

Well, Tuesday was our first chance to test that practice. We had to stop in Three Rivers on our way to our first food tour stop in Demotte, Indiana. Even though we live in Grand Rapids currently, we still have many responsibilities and ties in Three Rivers--including a fair trade store that we helped found and a budding building project for *culture is not optional. We ended up in Three Rivers in 2002 because my family has had a cottage there since the 70s and we plan to move back there in about a year. With three hours to do everything we needed to get done before leaving Michigan for two weeks, we were flying around town with no time to stop for lunch. Finally on the road to Demotte, we resisted the temptation to just stop at Wendy's (cheap, fast and predictable) and stopped instead at Tastee Twirl on Stone Lake in Cassopolis, Michigan.

We've passed Tastee Twirl dozens and maybe hundreds of times on the route between the family cottage in Three Rivers and our hometowns in the south suburbs of Chicago, but I hadn't been there since I was very young. In fact, just being in the building, memories came flooding back of being there with my great grandma, which must have been when I was just three years old. Even after more than 25 years, the space looked exactly the way I remembered and I think I could even point out our table. It's amazing how eating in a place one time with loved people can embed a memory so deeply, as though it becomes a part of you through the food you take in.

The food was, well...what you'd expect from a roadside diner called Tastee Twirl. Bonus points go to the restaurant for using paper cups instead of styrofoam for their shakes and to the woman behind the counter for asking us if we'd like lids and a plastic bag, which helped cut down on trash, though I'm not sure that was their intent. But we definitely lost points for not bringing in the lidded Pyrex container we keep in our trunk and asking them to put our sandwiches in there instead of giant styrofoam boxes. It would have been a small action in the grand scheme of styrofoam hysteria, but every small action has a ripple effect, right? That's something the lake right next to Tastee Twirl should have reminded us of. I'm sure we'll have a chance to redeem ourselves soon.