Why we eat the way we do

"You still won't live forever, you know!"

Yeah, we know. What we eat won't allow us to live forever. There isn't even any real assurance that we'll live a moment longer, regardless of how we eat.

So, why are we so careful about what we eat? What makes it worth our while to seek out high-quality, local grass fed meats, milk and eggs, and organic, locally grown biodynamic vegetables? Why do we grind our own organic flour, bake our own bread, drink raw milk, and try to stay away from what our family refers to as "plastic foods"? (Refined and processed foods, hydrogenated fats, corn syrups, sulfates, MSG, sprayed on vitamins, genetically modified food products, and the like.)

As we have said, we don't necessarily think it will help us to "live forever" and it certainly isn't to save money. Biodynamic vegetables and grass fed meats are more expensive. Fresh foods are often more expensive than canned and processed foods.

So then,...why?

First and foremost has to be overall health.

Rod can't eat commercially produced meats and milk. Those seem to be largely responsible for the downturn in his health since he arrived in America, or perhaps more correctly, for his inability to recover from setbacks to his health that come with aging. Within a year of arriving, he found that his blood pressure had sky-rocketed, injuries that he sustained weren't healing, and his energy levels and ability to focus had fallen through the floor.

I had been more interested in vegetarian cuisine (though I wasn't entirely vegetarian) before Rod's arrival, but he is a dedicated omnivore and so we ate more meats together than I had before. The switch to larger amounts of meat had some effect on my health, too.

When we realized what meat was doing to us, we tried more vegetarian foods and while some of Rod's health issues changed, they didn't resolve entirely. The obvious next plan was to try foods more like what his body was accustomed to. Grass fed, antibiotic free meat was still the standard in Australia, so that's what we tried. Rod's ability to bounce back has improved dramatically.

While we don't expect to live any longer, we do hope to be as healthy as we can be, to be strong and hale enough for as long as we live to live productively and to continue to make a contribution to the world. (I sometimes joke that my goal is to leave the healthiest corpse the coroner has ever seen. )

Second, of course is taste. I have thought of myself as a "foodie" for decades. I love good food, I love to cook and I love to eat. Biodynamic vegetables just taste wonderful! Grass fed milk and meat and pastured eggs have a depth of flavour that is just amazing. They taste like the foods I ate as a child!

Bio dynamic vegetables and fruits are raised based on the idea that flavor and nutrition are imparted to the food by the living processes within the organism. Those foods that taste best to to the unjaded human pallette are most appealing because they are the freshest and offer the most dense nutrition. Modern food production tries to replace this living flavour (reduced by chemical fertilizers and mostly removed by hyper-processing) with magical chemicals that imitate natural flavor, but since we have adjusted our palette to natural foods, the chemical imitators taste just nasty.

Third, the way we eat reflects our belief that eating is a political act.

By choosing locally grown bio-dynamically produced vegetables and grass-fed, pastured animal products, we can opt out of the industrial agribusiness model that has been closing down small independent farms for decades. We can support a more humane way of raising food animals, in which the animals live a happy life, true to its species, before becoming our prey, rather than spending short lives of malnourished misery in conditions that transform our farming facilities to prisons and death camps.

In choosing locally grown foods, we support our neighbors and we develop a relationship with the people who grow our food. We can know exactly where our food comes from and exactly how it's grown, because if we have a question, we can ask the farmer. If we have a doubt, we can visit the farm to discuss our concerns.

In eating locally and avoiding grain-fed animals, we reduce the amount of petroleum involved in our food supply and reduce the amount of chemical pollution in our waterways and air.

We also reduce the impact of our omnivorous ways on the world. When cows eat grass, when chickens eat bugs and seeds and grass, when sheep eat what they find in the fields, when pigs can forage, when our prey eats what they're supposed to eat, the grains our farmers grow can go directly into the human food supply in their traditional forms. When animals range over the land, their waste is returned to the land to act as a natural fertilizer for the grasses and herbs growing there rather than being washed into, and poisoning, our waterways and as a bonus no chemical fertilizers are required to grow their food.

There are lots of good reasons to eat the way we do, but it is more expensive. Since we are also living on one moderate income, we have made some accommodations to our meals to reduce the amount we have to spend for our healthier diet. We work to wring every last drop of value out of our food by making broths from the part of the vegetables we don't serve and from the bones left after a meal. Those broths become the basis of flavour in our cooking, as the basis of all of our soups and sauces and to add a new richness to our grains. They are truly amazing tasting and they add to the sense of "fullness" that comes with eating nourishuing food. Even better, because our food is highly nourished as it grows, the broths are a rich source of additional nutrients themselves.

One unexpected side-effect of preparing highly nutritious meals is that we find that we are eating a lot less food than we once did. Rod's need for the nutrients in meat is largely satisfied by bone broth in an otherwise vegetarian meal and a casserole that would once have served us for a meal now serve us for two or three.

There are a lot of reasons for our food choices, but I think it can be summed up by the philosophical statement that eating the way we do supports the principle of wholeness and wellness that we try to make central to everything we do. And it tastes good.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!