Other Projects

Hello! It's been so long since I posted on this blog that the babies I made soup for last spring just had their first birthday and took their first steps. Oops. Sorry. I know that many people still come to this blog and read the archived posts. Google says 2,500 of you came last month! I could go on and on with the list of reasons why I haven't posted in the last year, but suffice to say my energies have moved on to other projects.

See, I do eat! I just am writing about food elsewhere

I would like to point you towards at least one of those projects. I write regularly on another blog that has more of a spiritual focus but in my life spirituality and food are intimately linked. This lunar year (autumn 2011 to autumn 2012) I have been doing monthly posts on Jessica Prentice's book Full Moon Feast. I know many people who are into Nourishing Traditions are discovering Jessica Prentice's amazing work, so you might find some interesting stuff over on The Wheel and the Disk. Click here for the main page, here for all posts related to Full Moon Feast and here for all the posts labeled "recipes".

I am also still active on the Discussing Nourishing Traditions listserv. Feel free to join the group and reap the benefits of all of our collective wisdom about Traditional Foods by going to this website. You can also search our public archives at www.onibasu.com

I hope this year has been full of good food and good friends for all of you. I may post again to this blog, but I may not. The future is an unwritten book. I'm glad you all still enjoy my writing and find it useful.

Thanks!
Alyss

Starting Out with Eating Traditional Foods

Eating traditional foods means eating foods the way humans have eaten for thousands of years, eating foods that were around before foods were made in factories or heavily refined. It means eating healthy, natural animal and vegetable products, eating animal fats and bone broths, eating fermented vegetables, focusing on sourdough breads and generally eating real food. It's really not weird, but it is a little outside the mainstream in many American households.

Anne Marie of Cheeseslave.com is hosting a Real Food Wednesday Blog Carnival and so I decided to write a bit about how to eat traditional foods on a budget. When most people first decide to eat real food they run into one major problem: real food is expensive! We quickly realize that eating a healthy, traditional diet rich in animal fats, properly treating grains and a variety of cooked, raw and fermented vegetables goes a long way towards making your family more productive, happy and generally healthy but man, what a price tag! You can buy Hamburger Helper and Campbell's soup for pennies, especially with coupons and in store specials. Grassfed meat, raw dairy and organic produce are rarely part of a blue light special and always come at a premium price. A good diet lowers long term medical costs, increases your energy and ability to do the work and play you want to, and can increase children’s learning and future abilities. How to get this magical diet on a budget (and we all have a budget) is the key to making the lifestyle change stick.

Here is my collection of ideas for transitioning to a more traditional diet and for doing traditional foods on the cheap. This post will explore a couple of ideas to get yourself ready to transition into a traditional diet. My next post will be list of hands in the dishwater, feet on the ground how-to tips on making your kitchen healthier and your wallet a bit happier.

First and foremost: Educate yourself. There are lots of free resources for information out there to help you learn about traditional diets and their benefits. Check out books like Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions, Jessica Prentice’s Full Moon Feast, Sandor Katz’s Wild Fermentation and Nina Planck’s Real Food: What to Eat and Why from your local library. If they don’t have them ask about interlibrary loan.

Read articles on websites like the Weston A Price Foundation site, the Price Pottenger Nutrition Foundation website, and Nourishing Our Children. You can also join online communities focused on traditional diets. The yahoogroup Discussing Nourishing Traditions and the forums at Cooking Traditional Foods are some great ones but there are LOTS more out there.

When you are ready to start making a real change in your kitchen, then make two lists. One of things you already do “traditional food style” in your kitchen and one of things you really want to do better. The first list may include things like “We like butter”, or “I make a point of shopping at farmers markets” or “We choose low sugar foods whenever possible.” Little things make the biggest difference.

Make the second list no more than one page, or maybe 30 items long to start with. Once you have brainstormed the list then prioritize it. This will become your roadmap for converting your kitchen. You can’t do everything at once so you need to focus on some aspects of a traditional diet before you can focus on everything else. For example, some families have prioritized access to and consumption of raw milk. They make a point of joining a herdshare or a raw milk car pool. They learn to make yogurt and kefir and drink lots of raw milk. Other families, due to finances, health, or just preference, prioritize soaking all grains or learning to make their own fermented vegetables or beverages. Your first priority may simply be learning a couple simple, from scratch meals and scheduling family dinners. You can’t do it all so choose your battles. You’ll enjoy your new foods more if you aren’t feeling overwhelmed by everything else you haven’t done yet.

In the next post I'll lay out my in the kitchen tips for making real food work in your budget.

My Story

I grew up eating more or less real food. My dad had gone to culinary school and enjoyed cooking with real ingredients and interesting flavors. Apparently my first "solid" food was chioppino. I remember eating lots of broccoli and Indonesian fried rice and lots of real meat in real gravy. I certainly ate my fair share of top ramen and Campbell's soup and also suffer from an emotional addiction to Velveeta macaroni and cheese, but all in all it was mostly real food.

When I graduated from high school I became a vegetarian as part of my exploration of eastern religious thought. The friends I made in the college dorms were all vegetarians and we had lots of good years learning to cook, exploring vegetarian cuisine and hosting lots of dinner parties. I learned to make Thai yellow curry, to enjoy whole grains like kasha and bulgar and how to cook spaghetti sauce for a party of 18.

I was never a very "good" vegetarian, though. I would get drunk and eat summer sausage, or get sick and "give in" to a can of chicken soup. I missed the flavors of meat, and felt that eating all that brown rice and tofu couldn't be the be all and end all of nutrition. Sometime during my junior year in college I found the book Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon at the health food store. I went back to the store three or four times to sit in their cafe and read the book because I didn't have the money to buy it.

The principles laid out in that book seemed to make so much sense to me. Sally Fallon and her co-author Mary Enig use the work of researchers like Weston A. Price and Francis Pottenger to lay out a healthy, traditional-type diet for modern Americans. Price studied the diets of groups who had never eaten "modern" food in the 1930s and discovered key components of all traditional diets. Pottenger conducted research on the effects of nutrient deficiency on health and disease. Both concluded that high quality meat, saturated fats, vitamin rich dairy and/or seafood along with nutritious vegetable matter comprised the most beneficial diet for humans. It simply made sense to me, despite my years of vegetarianism. Meat, fat, and dairy are high octane fuels, vegetables and grains, despite their many benefits, are mostly fiber and carbs.

During the next year I moved more and more away from vegetarianism. I continued to eat my brown rice but chose not to eat tofu anymore. Eventually I quit the ruse all together. I claimed that I was "giving up vegetarianism to become a hedonist". It was another year before I had my own kitchen to cook in how I wanted, but I certainly started down the path of hedonism that first summer. Hamburgers and fried chicken never tasted so good!

In the years since then I have learned more and practiced more cooking a traditional diet. I am still a long way off from an "ideal" diet, if there even is such a thing, but I like how I feel, I like what I eat, and I think it is as good as I can do right now. This blog will be an occasional foray into what's going on in my kitchen. I hope to post recipes, musings and goings on. I'll also show off some of my other favorite real food bloggers, 'cause there are a lot of them out there.

Happy eating, and go drink some cream!