The first topic is the most visible in the news: factory farms are nasty places. The conditions, combined with the 100mph processing that the animals go through combine forces . . . → Read More: A flurry of articles: why we do what we do…]]> In the past two days I’ve come across a number of articles on “real food”, as well as the connections between food and health. Taken together, these provide a pretty good starting summary for why we shop, cook, and eat the way that we do.

The first topic is the most visible in the news: factory farms are nasty places. The conditions, combined with the 100mph processing that the animals go through combine forces to spread pathogens. Add to that the fact that the animals are pumped full of antibiotics to combat those same conditions and the not-great health profile of animals that are force-fed corn to fatten them up, and you have a recipe for a chicken dinner far less healthy than the one your grandmother used to make, and one that could potentially be deadly.

We pay more for our meat to opt out of this system, and we eat less of it to compensate.

Article: 48% of Chicken in Small Sample Has E. Coli

The second topic is the “nutritionalization” of our diets. We’ve come to believe that as long as we get vitamins X and Y in sufficient quantities then we can eat cardboard for our meals and we’ll be just fine. Not true. The digestive system and the human metabolism are incredibly complex, and evolved over the course of hundreds of thousands of years to extract nutrition and deliver it to our bodies in certain ways.

In the last 100 years we decided we could just take pills instead. In the last 10 years we’re discovering that it isn’t that simple.

We rely on our food to deliver our nutrients and we assume that quick fixes don’t work.

Article: Weighing the Evidence on Fish Oils for Heart Health

The third topic is really about specialization and hectic lifestyles. Anyone with an intense enough academic and career path probably never learned how to cook, and if they did they probably never actually cooked frequently enough to master it. A major sub-group here: doctors.

Your doctor has never mentioned changing your eating habits in order to impact your health for the simple reason that they have no idea what they are talking about in this area. Our society completely compartmentalized medical professionals from people that can advise on food health, who are all too often “hippy granola” types whom most people don’t take seriously. That’s starting to change, though because doctors are realizing the significance of this gap.

We recognize that we are empowered to make ourselves healthier in ways that doctor’s don’t always fully understand.

Article: To Heal, First Eat: Doctors Learn to Cook Healthy, ‘Crave-able’ Foods

The fourth topic is the “unknown unknowns” of the epigenome. Yes, we’ve mapped the human genome. We thought that would give each of us the power to get a genetic test that would tell us each and every genetic malady that we would ever get. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Our genes are not fate. Whether or not a gene is “activated” depends on diet and environment in ways that we don’t really understand yet.

I’m not sure about any specific linkages at this point in time (such as the one to Autism in this story), but they are certainly there. The bottom line: we don’t really have any freaking clue how the changes to our diets in the past 50 years are impacting our health, but we DO know that many maladies have skyrocketed: food allergies, asthma, autism, obesity, arterial plaque… the list goes on and on. The answers are not simple, and we may never know them in our lifetime.

We choose to try to go back to the old ways of eating, before these changes, to whatever degree we can.

Article: Study Links Autism with Industrial Food, Environment

A friend was suffering from pancreatic cancer at a tragically young age, and was fighting it as best she could with diet. It was primarily about cutting sugar almost entirely out of her diet in every form.

Lindsay and I had read Michael Pollan and already understood . . . → Read More: 60 Minutes: Is Sugar Toxic?]]> Our shift towards eating local food began as a shift towards cooking more for ourselves and eating whole foods (or “real food” as some call it).

A friend was suffering from pancreatic cancer at a tragically young age, and was fighting it as best she could with diet. It was primarily about cutting sugar almost entirely out of her diet in every form.

Lindsay and I had read Michael Pollan and already understood many of the issues surrounding industrial food, but this was our wake-up call to the immediate health impacts. It was what finally kicked us into gear from theoretical activists (“we need to change the system, but we have no idea how”) to personal advocates. We may not be able to change the system, but we can vote with our feet while making ourselves healthier.

In the years since our friend’s struggle with cancer, the science behind the toxicity of our current food system has become more and more mainstream, to the point where 60 Minutes has now done a piece. We urge you to watch it:

15-minute 60 Minutes segment on “Is Sugar Toxic?”

It mentions many of the key lessons that we have learned in the past three years:

• All calories are not created equal.
• The body metabolizes different substances equally and it also metabolizes things differently in different combinations.
• I found that I have a much easier time losing weight on a natural, whole food diet, even at the same levels of calories in vs. calories out (exercise). It also allows me to easily maintain healthy blood levels when I see my doctor.
• Sugar is not just about soda and sweets.
• The food industry figured out long ago that it had to get on the “low fat” bandwagon, but it did so by pumping sweeteners into everything.
• Even things like frozen veggie burgers, which seem like a healthy option, are loaded with extra sugars to provide taste while maintaining the “low in fat” label on the box. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
• Seemingly wholesome items such as tomato sauce and canned tomatoes are often loaded with unnecessary added sugar. Our frustration with things like that leads us to can our own.
• Diet is about more than your weight.
• It’s entirely possible (if more difficult) to eat industrial food and get your weight down, but at the same time you may still face a higher risk for arterial blockages, heart attacks, diabetes, and even cancer.
• Insulin is a very strange bedfellow, but it’s something we’re all stuck with. It’s something that the modern food industry ignores, while taking advantage of our genetic sweet tooth to get us to consume more.

Watch the video. Here is also a similar article in the NY Times from last year.

If you’re curious about following a whole foods diet for the health of you and your family, hopefully these stories will help push you past the tipping point. We spent a long time on that precipice knowing that we wanted to do something but not knowing where to start. The first step is the hardest.

On a quick glance even I thought that the piece was about dumpster-diving (or, I guess, “urban foraging”). Get past that revulsion and actually read it.

What it’s about is how farmers’ markets and CSAs provide people with parts of plants never seen in the grocery store, and . . . → Read More: NY Times Article: “Nose to Tail” for Produce]]> There is an interesting article in the NY Times that is, unfortunately, very poorly titled and includes a stupid picture, but it’s about a great topic.

On a quick glance even I thought that the piece was about dumpster-diving (or, I guess, “urban foraging”). Get past that revulsion and actually read it.

What it’s about is how farmers’ markets and CSAs provide people with parts of plants never seen in the grocery store, and ways to strive to use everything, mirroring the “nose to tail” approach for animals.

The article talks about the subject on three levels:

• Using unfamiliar but nutritious and tasty parts of produce, such as garlic scapes, beet greens, and cauliflower leaves
• Finding creative ways to prepare less-used parts of produce, such as carrot tops (which tend to be very bitter)
• Pursuing old-school techniques to use even the trash / tail-end of your produce, such as corn cobs and watermelon rinds, by doing things such as making vegetable stock with them.

We have worked hard to do all of these things since we have started eating 100% real foods from the greenmarket. We will continue creating how-to posts as we go!

Some of the common points that they raise:

That’s right AND wrong, by virtue of being a straw man. We . . . → Read More: Another Reason to Support Flying Pigs Farm: Their Truck Fuel]]> Every once in a while I get into a discussion with someone who has a bone to pick with the concept of the local food movement and farmer’s markets in general.

Some of the common points that they raise:

• Industrial farms are the only system that could possibly feed the whole world. If we went back to farming circa 1900, millions would starve.

  That’s right AND wrong, by virtue of being a straw man. We don’t need to go back to the farming techniques of the 19th century to move to smaller-scale natural farming.

  Mankind has amassed TREMENDOUS knowledge in the intervening 100+ years. From our understanding of the sciences we can employ far-improved natural techniques to increase yield instead of using the brute-force petrochemical approach we do today.

  One piece of reading that discusses this is Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy

• Greenmarkets cost much more than shopping in the supermarket. Shopping from them is an indulgence for those who can afford it.

  Again, that’s right AND wrong. If you don’t know what you are doing, you can amass a bigger bill buying the same items than you would at the supermarket. But if you’re smart about it, you will spend less.

  This is mostly because the greenmarket is a true market economy. If you jump on the first tomatoes of the season (or those grown in a hothouse), you are going to pay a hefty premium. If you wait until at least five vendors are selling a product, the price will be lower. Supermarkets have created consistency in product, availability, and pricing (at the expense of nutrition, taste, and food miles).

  The irony here is that many of the people who argue these points do so on a reflexive ideological basis, and that same ideology loves free market principles; its fun to watch the cognitive dissonance.

  The only products that are consistently more expensive are animal products (meant, poultry, dairy). That’s because the animals are fed vastly different diets and raised and slaughtered under vastly different conditions than the factory-farm products at the supermarket, and it’s at the expense of your health that you buy such products.

  But it’s a win-win because after we adjusted the amount of animal products that we buy, we actually started eating far healthier quantities of meat and dairy as well. Over all your health will be better and your food bill the same or less.

  I am speaking from a year of personal experience. We went from roughly $100 on average per week to $80. Of course, since we eat a lot more meat and dairy in the winter when there is less produce, our bill goes up in the winter and down in the summer.

• The last common anti-greenmarket argument is:

  Surely it must be worse for the environment for 50 small vendors to each drive 200 miles to the market in old junker trucks than it is for a supermarket to ship using a “modern supply chain.”
  
  First of all, the “modern supply chain” optimizes costs within a framework of other requirements that the stores have outlined (see above). Not to mention the fact that this argument makes it seem like the supermarket is sending one huge shipment across the country (or continent) vs. the greenmarket’s many, which is false.

  But for my new favorite counter to this argument, I tip my hat to our friends at Flying Pigs Farm:

  http://poststar.com/news/local/article_c9db015e-8fb6-11e0-8ff5-001cc4c03286.html