The Conscious Consumer

No one cooks like my grandmother.  Her meals taste better than once a year celebrations or birthday dinner’s out; my grandma’s meals taste special.  She follows tried and true recipes and she cooks them with real ingredients: halved potatoes, plump tomatoes, celery, carrots or the like dropped into fat stock pots, casseroles dishes or a heavy cast iron pan.  That is all a whole foods diet is: fresh foods and old fashion scratch cooking.  Organics preferred and limited processed foods - I go for optimized flavor and nutrition packed ingredients.  Best yet, a return to comfort food fits any time or cash budget.

 

For most of my adult life I was the 21^st century homemaker.  I owned a scant number of cookbooks but all that boasted 10-minute meals, really concoctions from canned, jarred, and boxed ingredients.  Even as I rounded the corner to my PhD cooking seemed beyond my skill level.  I had little time and often little money to pull together sit down worthy meals.  Naively, I knew what canned green beans tasted like (tin) and iceberg lettuce (nothing) but it never occurred to me that their fresh and varied counterparts were a world of their own in taste and texture.  Over a span of five years a series of unrelated events had our family moving toward clean whole foods one decisions at a time.  The Foodnetwork eased the way unpacking the mysteries of cooking and presenting something novel and accessible - a shared adventure in new for an on the go family like mine. 

 

The desirer for quality foods brought me to organics.  I too once claimed that no difference existed between organics and conventional products.  The truth is more complicated.  There is no one answer – farmers, technique, seeds, soil all effect the nutritional value of produces.  That said for over 5o years now conventional farmers have concentrated on genetically engineering larger products - uniform for looks and alterations to make them more suited to shipment and the shelves/storage of stores all at the deficit of nutritional yields. The result has been a drastic decrease of nutrition of conventional produce as well as flavor.  By these facts heirloom (seeds from produce 50+ years old) and organic varieties offer greater nutritional value and full flavor. 

 

Organics

 

10 years + ago organics had no federally regulated standard, but now they do.  Stores like Whole Foods and Trader Joes -- bank on offering customers organic and GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms) and have everything to gain and maintain by making sure their goods meet the standards they sell, standards that differentiate themselves from other national chains.   While GMO’s widely compose most of the food in traditional grocery stores (80%),  by law Organics are non-GMO.  GMO’s are banned in most of the developed world.  The United States has struggled to regain trade agreements from even famine ridden regions of Africa who want nothing to do with these Franken-foods.   The fact is since GMO’s were introduced into our food supply, testable food allergies have risen by nearly 300%. Inadvertently and unexpectedly on a whole foods diet our family realized that my husband no longer suffers from IBS.  My Daughter’s lactose intolerance disappeared and I have been free of full body arthritis that had bothered me most of my life for over two years now (not so much of a Twinge). 

 

GMOS

Crops with GMO origins also require greater (and increasing) amounts of pesticides.  Pesticides are bad for the environment and us.  Pollutions - pesticides cause cancer in humans, learning problems, hormone disruption and studies have linked pesticides to the rabid death of wild life -- important members of our eco system (birds, bees, and fish etc) -- by the tens of thousands, and recent studies argue that they are mutating animals – creating such things as genderless frogs. GMOs are a dirty business second only to pesticides.

 

Taste & Nutrition 

Lets get back to what matters to most people – Taste.  The nutritional value of processed foods is lower than organic and  fresh foods but so is the taste.  Amping flavor back up most processed foods are laden with high sodium levels, processed sugar, and additives.  During one research fellowship I shared a beautiful home on several hundred breath-taking acres of upstate New York with the son of two successful French food scientists.  His mother had revolutionized additives in the 1990s and growing up, his parents forbid him to eat food containing them.  The Job of additives like MSG (Monosodium glutamate) is to poke at taste buds and trigger chemical reactions in the parts of your brain that register enjoyment.  They trick you into thinking you like food, that it taste good and oh yeah – that you want to eat more… and more. Ever had the inability to stop eatting Oreos or Doritos?  Bingo.

 

Here’s the funny thing:  strip away our advancements in food technology and you find out that fresh foods taste crazy good.  I’ll admit firs -t even as an adult I only ate a limited amounts of fruits and veg.  As a family we stuck to a short list of apples, bananas, grapes, and oranges, a bag of precut lettuce (light green and white), and broccoli.  As we made our first movements into cooking we sought out new recipes that had us looking in new sections of the produce department of our local Whole Foods.  These seekouts introduced us to rainbow carrots, the way carrots used to grow, vegetables that offer up even more beta-carotene, Vitamins B, C, E, and protein, fiber, magnesium, and potassium and the bonus antioxidants offered by red and blue vegetables than their orange counterpart.  It didn’t end there – our kids now bicker for the extra asparagus baked with a spray of fresh lemon.  We makeup salads with varied types of lettuce and bulk up on spinach in our lasagna and bok choy in our soups – add ins with Andi scores in the 700s and 800s (out of 1000). 

 

We discovered new flavors in old favorites – fresh organic pineapples have the tender juiciness you expect from canned fruit but a flavor that is equally sweet as it is tart and wonderful. Our girls still enjoy pears, apples, oranges, and grapes in their lunch and often share with friends who like trying exotic varieties with them.  Our fruit tray even trumped several cookie plates at grade school party.  

 

We have come a long way.  Just the other day over an empty canister of coriander my eldest remarked that for all her early life our spice rack was the exact same – 12 uniform glass tubes sitting in a small rack, dust covered, since we received it as a wedding present.  Now our spice “rack” fills an entire cabinet with color – Brilliantly yellow saffron, amber curry, peppers in white, black, red, pink salts, deep brown cumin, sage green fennel – a kaleidoscopic.   

 

Our relationship with food has altered greatly.  I’ve spent a lifetime committed to sugar substitutes and obsessed with all the wrong things – fat and calories.  Now we are teaching our girls about eating healthy well balanced meals, reinforcing those lessons in three yummy meals a day.  We still eat what we want only now our weekly menu is unlimited.  We eat things in season at their peak of Yum and Impact.  We let new finds like stripped tomatoes inspire tomato pizza pie or Heirloom Ashmead’s Kernal apples dictate the need to try our hand at dessert tarts.  Yet, because foods are not processed we control how much sugar, salt etc. are in them.  These are important lessons for a family plagued by diabetes and heart disease.  My life hasn’t changed. I am still crazy busy but by planning out our meal plans it has not impinged on either our time and grocery budget.  

 

Plan your Escape from Processed Foods

Try This:

 

Pick a day and take to the kitchen.  Just start pulling things together for the week basics to keep on hand.  My teen likes egg salad or shredded turmeric chicken breast for her lunch.  Our two girls and my husband choose a warm high protein breakfast for the week and we cook most of it Sunday night  - blueberry pancakes and chicken sausage are quick and easy to reheat in the morning.  I bake dessert by request (I love experimenting with Cupcakes) or a carbacious something, fresh bagels anyone?  The air fills with warm scents my family comes to the kitchen.  My husband, my daughters we gather, we chat, someone chops, someone mixes we touch base, we plan for the future.  Some times people ask if it is time consuming?  Not really depending on how creative things get maybe 2 hours a week. And if we weren’t in the kitchen together we would likely be scattered in the house, plugged into our own devices.  I’d pick this any day.  Actually, I cherish the time we spend together. 

 

There are also “less processed foods.”  My husband likes a premade lunch burrito (lol) but the ingredients lists Chicken, Black Beans, Rice & Cheddar.

 

Budget friendly: 

 

Any budget is whole foods friendly.  Studies show that when people face a scarcity (of time, money, food –love … anything) they start making poor choices counterproductive to the scarcity at hand.  By recognizing this you open yourself up to making Good Productive decisions and solving scarcity issues in your life!

 

Point Blank:  Processed foods are more expensive than whole foods.  We shop at Whole Foods and when possible only buy organic food.  While a lot of people think  Whole Food is too pricy for them we have made it our mission to come up with 100 meals for under $3.65 (with many meals far less expensive) a serving.  Whole Foods also offers a variety of high quality organic and conventional products as part of their instore line - 365- Check it out! See what you can come up with! I would also be more than happy to help people budget their grocery list! Drop me a line. 

 

In the mean time checkout my growning list of 100 mostly organic fresh meals for well under $3.65: Whole Foods for Less

 

Additional Shopping Suggestions:

 

• You are only as healthy as what you eat... and what, what you ate, ate.  A great deal of animal feed is corn.  Corn is cheap but of little to no nutritional value.  When possible opt 1st for grass fed & 2nd grain fed.  Your tastebuds  will thank you too!

 

• Try new cheeses.  You’ll find aged and or hard cheeses have a stronger flavors and thus require far less to get their flavor profile across.  You’ll need and eat less overall. They tend to makeup for their higher prices quickly

 

• Opt for Smaller Producers.  Every seed has a predestinated total amount of nutritional value.  It does not matter if a tomatoes seed grows to 2 lbs or only 10 ounces.  Smaller sized fruits and veg thus offer great nutritional value per bite.  2 small tomatoes are better than one larger tomatoes.  

 

• Try New Things when you see them.  Different colored fruits and veg mean different vitamins and health benefits by trying purple potatoes and cabbage or white asparagus you will introduce new flavor profiles to your repertoire but all nutrition.  

 

• Have fun with it.  Studies show people who take the time to make a nice meal enjoy it more, eat less and overall feel satisfied. 

 

• Think about packaging.  Avoid toxins, opting for boxed goods beans/soups etc instead of Canned, glass instead of plastic and products without extra unnessisary packaging.