There is a post below on the limited visual experience of eating locally in the winter. Yes, even in the Bay Area where so much is available year round from not too far away, shopping at the farmer’s markets reveals growing seasons that limit choice and we saw, color. We have gone beyond emerging from spring, but the Bay’s summers are so weak that something about about winter seems to linger. Despite the fog that cools off the end of an otherwise nice warm day (not to mention that we’ve had rain storms much further into the year than anyone here is used to), there are many colors popping up in the market now: luscious reds of of strawberries and cherries, oranges and purples of apricots and plums, yellows of summer squash. We’re certainly out of the limited palate of winter meals.  But even with all this new color it’s that bright green of Spring that I really love.

Nothing quite does this special Spring green like fava beans. But boy are they work. I brought home three pounds of fava beans from the market at a deal as it was the end of the day and the farmer had to move them. Reluctantly I took them home, mentally clearing at least an hour from my evening to make them into something edible. After popping the beans out of their thick pods, they must be blanched in order to get the tough skin off. But of course, don’t let them get too comfortable as they shouldn’t get mushy.

Once the blanched beans have cooked then you have to pop them out of their skin, which takes a certain touch but is easy to get a hang of. At this point you start to realize that you’ll have a lot more going in your compost than in your belly from the whole process.

So much packaging for something so small. But that color! And the flavor and texture is fresh and springy as well. Many fava bean recipes are for a kind of fava (or broad) bean humus/puree. I can’t imagine how many you would need to process to get enough for a dip. I like to mix them into a larger dish to spread them out. A soup works as did just tossing them in a pan with onions and mixing with brown rice cooked in stock. I had one piece of bacon that I sliced thin and cooked up as well…It actually did a great job of rounding out the grassy-ness of the beans for a touch of richness. It was a pretty simple meal for all the work. I know favas are useful for nitrogen fixers in the soil and so I am glad they are being grown by local farmers, the color is lovely, and they have a long and rich culinary and cultural history in the Middle East and Mediterranean. They have compounds which for some can actually cause health issues (which is why you won’t see any fava bean recipes in Nourishing Traditions). They are not the easiest of foods, but I am always happy to see them, and even use them once in a while, because it’s finally Spring which means we are onto the abundant variety and ease of summer foods!

                          

Over the past few months I’ve changed my relationship with these sourdough beasties I’ve befriended to leaven and flavor my baked goods. I’ve both expanded the amount and variety of goods that I can make with them and I’ve let the little things be warm and active for longer periods. That is to say by keeping my sourdough active I’ve been forced to bake more with it and have thus figured out new and varied breads that can be made as sourdough.

The whole point, for me, of baking with sourdough is to use a biologically diverse population of microbes to populate the dough I make to allow a slower rise through fermentation. This process is active and alive and breaks down the stuff in wheat that is hard on human digestion (gluten) or makes other things (like minerals) inaccessible through human digestion (phytic acid)

Percentage of Phytic Acid

Time (hours)
—- Yeast Fermentation
___ Sourdough Fermentation

For more than you probably want to know about phytic acid and the extra measures you could go to to eliminate your intake of it go here.

The fact that phytic acid is in all foods that are originally seeds (grains, nut, legumes) and that it binds to certain minerals and nutrients in the body and essentially flushes them out, doing the body little good, is a fact that is not debated. What the impact is of the amount eaten on the body’s overall health is not agreed upon. But just think of how many seeds we eat: wheat, corn, soy, nuts. Since these foods are present in practically every meal, I like to error on the side of caution and avoid the anti-nutrients as much as possible. Here is a nice outline of why a sourdough ferment of grains is good for health (In fact that blog, just linked to, is one I’ve just discovered, and it full of great sourdough recipes. I haven’t tried any yet, but plan to…check it out!)

So that’s the motivation in trying to replace as many baked-goods as possible with their (I think more delicious) sourdough versions. Once you get beyond artisan crusty bread loafs from a good bakery it is hard to find an array of true sourdough items. Even if you find something that is “sourdough” that doesn’t necessarily mean that all the flour has gone through a minimum four hour ferment, a lot of sourdough is added as flavor.

As usual the best control over health, quality, and taste is just to make it at home, not to mention the saved plastic packaging and inexpensive ingredients which may make the cost of the homemade lower (though it depends on what you were buying). Below are some of the snacks I’ve put through the sourdough process. And I should mention that the recipes for these lovely eats all come from the same book, Wild Bread by Lisa Rayner. For the most part I like her recipes, but she is vegan so she often suggests Earth Balance over butter which to me is a very unwise substitution. It just boggles me that one can be so into natural and whole foods but prefer a product that requires a laboratory to make and comes in plastic over one that can be made and eaten out in a field.

In addition to getting a new book that expanded my sense of what I could do with my sourdough, I also starting using it (the starter) a bit differently. First of all I started a whole wheat starter from my white one, so now I have two (The whole wheat is local from Massa Organics!) I keep the whole wheat one dryer (or stiffer, or to get technical, at a lower hydration- 75% which would be 3/4c water to 1c flour. 100% is an even one to one.) I also stopped putting the starter in the fridge after use. I keep some in the fridge for back up, but I keep the active one warm and fed…that way, when I want to bake I don’t have to back track the time it takes a cold starter to get going. If you keep your refrigerated tarter fed consistently you can get it going in 8hrs but it’s hard for me to remember to do so if I don’t see it. (Ofen it would be a two day process just to be able to use the thing…) Rather than get the out-of-sight-out-of-mind problem, I leave them out, which reminds me to feed them, which gets me to bake.

Crunchy whole wheat crackers:

There are fewer and fewer aisles in the grocery store I even go down at all and the cracker/cookie aisle is one of them. Even if natural or organic it’s still just plan old cooked wheat (or popped rice) and it just doesn’t do me much good. But crackers are great! For homemade hummus, tuna salad, or a sharp raw cheddar. If you already have made your own pizza dough, crackers are just as easy.

These are a 100% whole grain cracker  The recipe uses only 6oz of starter plus 8oz of any combination of tasty flours you might have such as rye, spelt, kamut. (I’ve used various mixes of wheat, rye, spelt as that’s what I tend to have on hand. The majority of the dough has been wheat though). (Also added is 2 Tbs olive oil, 1/2 tsp salt, and just under a half cup of water.)

After the dough is mixed and kneaded into a stiff ball it can sit for a few hours. (Lisa Rayner says you can let it sit for as little as 20 minutes, but that time frame doesn’t really do the fermenting job. I just let it go until I notice it being bigger…about four hours.) The dough is rolled as thin as you can manage onto a floured board and/or on parchment paper without going beyond the point that you can lift the strips onto your baking sheet. I had tried baking just the rolled out dough, figuring I could just break it into crackers after it cooked…but it ended up too uneven, not crunchy in the middle and burnt on the edges, so it is worth it to cut and cook strips…they can be a very rough cut.

This is a good opportunity to train your nose to when something is done. The crackers should be checked after five minutes and rotated and shaken around. They should get all the way to a nice caramel brown…but the tipping point to burnt is quick…so keep a careful eye (and nose!) I added Celtic sea salt and sesame seeds to the top before cutting the dough…lots of possibilities with toppings.

Everyone has these nostalgic foods from childhood that they just can’t help feeling great when they eat them. I am all for having good emotional memory with food…but often the actual substance from the past isn’t really all that great (in taste or health). I grew up in a very whole foods lacto/ovo/fish vegetarian household that didn’t include really any junk food. I could be easily motivated to do something if it involved some sort of illicit food…like a McDonald’s Egg McMuffin (though we still got it without the bacon/sausage). So, I’ve taken this childhood reward and made it the kind of thing I still want to eat.

The dough is the standard “artisan dough” in the Wild Bread book with a whopping 20 oz of starter, just about 7 oz of starter under 3 oz of water and 1.5 tsp of salt. This mixture rises in a bowl, then gets rolled out and cut to rise again as muffins.

Then the fun part! The muffins like fat pancake on a lightly buttered griddle. I ended up cooking them longer that this photo shows. In order to get them cooked through they should have a decent amount of color on both sides.

Then I cooked up an egg. This trick above doesn’t really work all that well, maybe if the ring was oiled better. The other option might be to make bigger muffins. I break the yoke after it cooks for a bit so it isn’t too drippy for the sandwich. Add some raw jack cheese, oblong fried potato cake not included and I certainly earned it!

Below shows the basic loaf bread I’ve been making on a weekly basis (give or take). It’s the same dough as the English muffin. I use a mix of my whole wheat and white starter and use either fresh ground wheat berries (also from Massa Organics), or fresh ground spelt, or just Massa’s flour which is ground fresher than anything else you can buy. This is a pretty similar recipe as the Nourishing Traditions loaf made in this post, but you can see how it’s lightened up a bit. This has to do with an even wetter dough and also a double proof, once in a bowl and once in the buttered loaf pan.

It’s a pretty nice, go-to whole grain loaf for toast and snacks. But I am pretty excited about trying this one from the recently discovered Wild Yeast Blog. I think something even lighter would do us better for sandwiches (the bread below is pretty limited to open-faced, which are delicious. Two pieces at once would be a mouthful)

This bread is a sourdough “quick bread” in that it is made from a batter and is not kneaded. But no, it isn’t quick.

A few words on the time it takes to make these baked goods: This point is related to one of Michael Pollan’s new food rules that you can eat junk food, just make it yourself. When you cook at home you can control ingredients and you don’t have access to the kind of processing or additives that happens on an industrial scale. You also find that “junk foods” take a long time to make and are energy intensive, versus simple whole foods. As I write this post I am actually taking a week without dairy, sugar, or grains. This is just a just an opportunity to eat really simply and avoid foods that can be harder on digestion than others.

I think taking a break from anything you eat a lot of is probably a good idea…seasonal variation does this with fruits and veggies and even some meats and certainly pastured eggs, but the constants can be…well just that. Really milk and grains would be more seasonal in a more locally-based food system.

I don’t know if I would go as far as saying the foods that you do the least to are the foods we should be eating. That essentially would be advocating a raw diet. I do think human digestion needs some careful processing to break down cellulose and other compounds we don’t have the stomachs for. But it is true that many of the foods you can eat “whole” are good for you and the more “whole” you eat a food the faster it is to eat it. An apple can be picked and eaten right at the same moment. Meat- well a life is made and raise and then killed, but after that it’s pretty much eaten as is. Bread on the other hand, even good, whole grain, naturally leavened bread goes through a number of steps. This isn’t a hard and fast rule by any means but the point is if we limited our baked-good intake to sourdough bread we made at home, we would probably eat a lot less bread and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

So, I’m happy to have created a system with bread that is rather self-limiting and happy to be taking a bit of a break…but also really happy to get back to baking soon. This bread below could be adapted into any number of quick bread loaf pan recipes like banana bread. I’ve just done this cinnamon raisin version and it’s lovely, moist, sour and delicious. I am pretty sure it could also be adapted into muffins, which is an experiment I am excited about and will certainly share. I’ve never seem to come across a true sourdough (that is, fully fermented) muffin recipe. I think it might involve some baking soda…but well see. Stay tuned.

                          

The writer of my book turned out to be Shannon Hayes. An amazing women and great writer who turned her commitment to her household and her curiosity about this commitment into a book called Radical Homemakers. (I mentioned this upcoming work here, and it is basically a thesis of what Michael Pollen mentions when he talks about labor/time/gender and the ways in which these are linked to how we eat (see below) The history of the development of consumer culture and the creation of cheap food is also addressed in an article I wrote, which can be read here)

I don’t even need to give a summary as she has done so for Yes! Magazine and you can read it here. She also wrote a piece for the Chelsea Green Blog- read here. The themes are very Mind-to-Mouth and I hope you all take the chance to read Hayes’ work.

                          

Or, at least that’s the irony the media was presenting. How could a disease that is linked to modern vices of fast food, smoking, and a sedentary lifestyle be found in ancient people?

The answer is pretty clear, in that heart disease is more often described (at least by Dr. Weston Price, if not others) as a disease of civilization. Old or new, doesn’t matter.

Here might be why: Whole foods are pretty fool proof health-wise. Processed foods, while tasty, break up the pairings that the body needs to process the food effectively.  Once consumed, these products can be damaging to the whole system, but they are luckily not too easy to come by for most of the world throughout history…unless you have slaves to mill you lots of white flour, or live in modern America with cheap oil and low wage jobs.

This is to say that heart disease might be better characterized as a disease of cheap labor.

For some reason many of the reports I read last night suggested that we don’t know a lot about what Egyptians ate, though that doesn’t seem to be true as they kept great account of daily life through writings and art. We know, for example, that servants ground flour, the more refined the better for the upper-classes. None of the coverage thus far has mentioned this fact, they seem to just put out there that we know Egyptians ate beef, goose, and lamb, all, they point out, fatty foods. I hate to think this will be used as more fodder against healthy traditional fats, when refined carbohydrates clearly had a large role to play in the diets of these deceased elites. (I also read that they fed the chaff and bran from the wheat to livestock, so they may have also suffered the consequences of grain-fed beef)

(Why they point first to fats, when Egyptians arguably invented bread, is beyond me, but this shows the bias against fats in discussions of health. Refined grain has been linked to heart disease because it lacks Vitamin B which help to regulate a certain amino acid(homocysteine).  It is hypothesized  that when this amino acid (homocysteine) is out of whack, it can break down cell walls…which cholesterol then comes in to fix…thus we blame the firefighter for the fire. (from Real Food: What to Eat and Why, By Nina Planck) This is just one of the many ideas about why we have heart disease)

When you have to grow/raise/process/cook all your own food, there isn’t really time to make things fancy, or overly refined. To eat like a peasant doesn’t necessarily mean to be undernourished with low-quality food (although it certainly has meant that for some throughout history) I see eating like a peasant to instead be the antithesis of eating like a king- depending on others, who get too little pay, to process food to a point that it is too rich or refined to eat everyday. Kings can get away with it only to a point when it catches up with them.

Maybe its our democratic foundations, but the modern American food system has made it possible for all our people to eat like kings, relying on underpaid workers to provide for refined palates. It goes without saying that this is catching up with us as well.

One of the co-authors of the study speculated “perhaps atherosclerosis is part of being human.” This is a sad conclusion since plenty of groups throughout history have thrived with an absence of chronic disease. They avoided processed food and the social/environmental/health consequences that go along with it.

I was happy to see that I was not alone in my reaction: see some kindred comments here.

                          

I had fun showing off my artisan multi-grain sourdough bread but it took three days of my visit to prepare and was gone in a few hours. Wanting mama and all to have the most nutritious bread I decided to try a more quick and dirty recipe.

I prepared a quart of my starter and then mixed it with about 6 cups of spelt flour, the recipe (from Nourishing Traditions) said to rise from 4 to 12 hours depending on the temperature. I let it go overnight, which was probably too long as it got a bit deflated. I didn’t have loaf pans, so they were kind of batard style loaves. The shap of the slice wasn’t ideal but the flavor was wonderful and went great with the raw cream cheese spread I made.

As soon as I got home I started on another batch. This time I started with spelt berries and ground the flour myself. It sounds like a job for a toiling little red hen, but it’s just an electric gadget and doesn’t take any effort, but yields the freshest flour you can get, ensuring no rancidity. Spelt is a nice grain for home grinding because its gluten level perform like an all-purpose flour, which is actually a mix of soft and hard wheat. So, unless you want to grind two different grains, spelt is a lot simpler.

In my first go at grain grinding I just followed the directions and ground the whole berries on the finest setting, which gave me two distinct layers of flour, a fibery hull and a fine powdering flour. I used it as it came for the bread, which turned out delicious and hearty. After some expert advice, on the next batch I first ground the berries on a coarse setting and then ran it through again on the smallest setting which gave me a much more even flour and more flour per cup of berries (which seems to be about 2.5 c. of flour to 1 c. berries, but it depends on your grind- I am still working out that ratio)

The recipe called for the dough to be soft and easy to work with. To knead Sally says to stretch and fold, a different kneading process that I usually use.

I have now made three batches of the bread and the best results actually came from making the dough in my Kitchen-Aid mixer with the dough hook. The pictures below are from the batch made by hand, and it turns out beautifully, but the mixer does allow a wetter dough since you dont have to add more flour to be able to handle it. This was my fist time making dough with a machine and it left me standing there watching it, sort of wondering what I should do while it worked. It was strange to not be able to feel the dough change. So, I am still a bit conflicted about the thing. I was also hesitant to do sourdoughs in metal, but apparently it makes no difference.

Cooked in a loaf pan, this bread makes a great homemade substitute for sliced sandwich bread. Not the handsomest, but probably the freshest, healthy bread you can get in your mouth.

                          

This summer I spent a lonely week with a terrible cold. I passed the time watching the first three seasons of Bewitched, the old sixties sitcom. I got through so many episodes because, as the show progressed, I felt like I was getting a different impression of Samantha Stevens than I had ever before (since watching Nick at Night as a kid, that is).

I think we now have something to learn from Samantha and her struggle with the instantaneous rewards of her magic. As a witch, Samantha has the ability to conjure up whatever she would like, anytime, anywhere. Her magic makes life fun and easy, and who would give it up? Many critiques of the show lament that in a burgeoning feminist era Samantha is forced by her husband to give up her magic, and thus her independence, to be the picture perfect suburban housewife. This point fails to give Samantha agency over her promise to stop using magic for everyday things.

As I lay on my couch sick as ever, home alone, wishing I hadn’t made so many dishes fixing myself chicken soup from scratch, I saw that Samantha (magically immune to mortal sickness) wanted to work, she wanted to do things by hand with her own skill and body. By (trying to) give up her magic she was claiming her independence from her mother, her upbringing, and- importantly, from the instant, no effort life that sixties consumer culture was selling to women.

There is an interesting mess of consequences that came from the post-war production of consumer goods and technology and the intense marketing of these products to women. This marketing, combined with women being interested in, and allowed to, or obligated to work outside the home, successfully undermined the skill of the domestic realm while also allowing women to expand outside of it (the home that is). It is relevant to us now because most of us are living without necessary skills to live a life that is not dependent on consumerism. We have to buy things from other people, usually large companies to cover our most basic needs.

Knowing the role of marketing, pushing tv dinners and touting new gadgets, in the Bewitched era I think it is commendable for Samantha Stevens to pursue a more hand-made life. Granted, at those time she back-slides and does up a whole clean house, new dress, and elegant dinner in one nose twitch, the audience was more entertained and probably reassured knowing that, while maybe eating their tv dinners, even the best wives wouldn’t do all the work if they didn’t really have to.

Is Samantha Stevens a good example of how we should live today, no. But I think she is an unexpected reminder how liberating and often positive it can be when we don’t always take the easy way in life, especially when it comes to our kitchen and our food. We are happier people when we put time, effort, and skill into basic tasks and the fact that we do very little of that puts us in an interesting mess indeed, and the history of all that is something I plan to explore/discuss further (sneak preview…new book called the Radical Homemaker, learn more here).

                          

I haven’t the technology to share the photos yet, especially of our road meals. The night of day two we had a grand meal at a friends farm with fresh caught crab, home made sourdough bread, abundant greens with eggs from roaming chickens. For breakfast we had oats with fresh goats milk. This meal was probably the best we will have on the trip and reminded me how much better food from a home kitchen is. We haven’t even been able to soak oats, although we are still carrying our soaked/dried nuts, so we get some whole foods with some careful preparation. Even our food made on our feather-light alcohol stove is better than what we find in cafes around. Lots of sardines to and almonds dipped in honey!

Time to write and update is limited, and will be more fun with pictures, so hold tight until the last week of July.

Until then happy home-cooking, simple living, and enjoying the power of your feet to get you to beautiful places.

                          

Baking with sourdough really is the best example of how much time it takes to make the best food. In fact its really a lot to ask; to keep something in your fridge that is essentially another mouth to feed, to keep track of one more thing, and to use it in a bread that takes over a whole day, often three to make. The cost of the flour alone makes me wonder if its worth it just to buy the beautiful $8 levain breads from the farmer’s market or the notable local Acme bakery. So maybe its just for novelty that I keep making this three-day bread.

The last time I went through the process, with the concern that after the second day it wouldn’t rise and it would all be ruined; the ten-minute kneading; the planning (once having to come home from work to bake my bread so it wouldn’t proof for too long), I thought that maybe specialization is a good thing when it come to baking. I pictured the adept bakers with their hundreds of proofing loaves, their active starters that are fed every day, and thought when is it that consumer culture hinders healthy food and when does it help it? I think everyone should make most of their own meals, working with other people, using their minds, hands, and fresh, real food- but does everyone need to make their own bread all the time?  Well clearly no, even in my Utopian real-food world, where people don’t work too long for so many things they don’t really need, -things that make them neither happy nor healthy- and where they put time and care into food, there would still be specialization of some kind. There is a benefit to becoming an expert at something and sharing your products and having a clear purpose. The problem with our current approach is that in giving over most of our food preparation to specialized producers we have lost skills that keep our minds and bodies active and the the quality of our food has suffered.

So, until my real-food utopia I am going to keep developing these disappearing skills, if only for the fun of it.

The recipe for this one come from my stand-by Breadtopia, with the cheery and informative videos. What I really wish he had though, and what I am finding impossible to find, are other types of baked goods and breads (like muffins, scones, banana bread etc) that use sourdough for proofing and fermenting, not just for flavor.  I am going to try this pizza dough recipe with a longer, overnight, rise and see how it goes.

The other option for quick breads is to buy sprouted flour (okay, the real other option is to sprout the grains yourself, dry them, and grind them into your own flour). Nourishing Traditions’ recipes for quick breads call for freshly ground flour (not sprouted); this is because pre-ground flour (sprouted included) is often more rancid than we realize. And apparently bread from freshly ground flour is beyond in flavor. Grinding your own flour isn’t as laborious as it sounds, since its really a process of pushing a button on an electric grain grinder. After grinding the flour NS has you soak it in buttermilk, kefir, or yogurt overnight (or for 12 hours). This addition of acidity does that neutralizing work to the nutrient blocking acids in grains (read more about that here. While the recipes say you can also use whey or lemon juice, its pretty clear that the outcome is not as tasty with this alternative.

So, I have to admit, I haven’t yet tried this technique. This is primarily because of the extra expense of cups of high quality dairy. I came up with an alternative I will try and then share; Bob’s Red Mill makes a buttermilk powder, just dehydrated, so I can make the amount I need store the rest. The whole package  makes six quarts for ten dollars.

I have some muffins and biscuits planned using this strategy, so stay tuned.

Also! Not that there is a lot of eating out going on these days, but we did go for Ethiopian food recently and I was very pleased to realize that the bread, Injera, which makes up the bulk of the meal, is made with fermented teff grain flour. So you can eat out and still get with real, live food- this chance is of course higher when you seek out restaurants serving traditional foods.

Sourdough Breakfast:

                          

2009! Expect the unexpected

A very happy new year it seems to be already- so many possibilities and new opportunities for change. After a few weeks of vacation from the computer and lots of reading I have some major resolutions about diet and eating. I think the goals I have set forth are logical extensions of the basic Mind to Mouth premise: eat the best food even with limited resources by being creative and having high standards. There really isn’t any way around the fact that optimum food comes from your own kitchen and takes some skill and time to prepare. This is a deterrent for many and a challenge for most but I think it is important to be honest about the fact that each step towards convenience is a step away from health.

Here’s why that is: The best food for you is higher in nutrients than energy, so you can get your daily load of vitamins, minerals, digestive enzymes without going over the limit of calories we need everyday (which isn’t much compared to the opportunities we have to consume them) So a variety of high nutrient and relatively low energy food is the right balance. High energy foods are those that are more active and alive or at their peak of freshness, this all equals a relatively fragile food. Fully ripe fruits and veggies, sprouted seeds and grains, fresh oils, sourdough breads, fermented drinks, fresh meat, fish and eggs. These are optimal foods and don’t tolerate much processing, storage on shelves, or travel time. (Well stored fats (without exposure to light and heat) and highly stable fats (saturated, like lard or coconut oil), properly stored raw but un-sprouted seeds and grains,  properly stored  root and winter veggies all are good foods that last and good foods can last longer via freezing and home canning methods.)

Why are active and alive foods best? Because food should be pulling its own weight when you eat it and adding to your body’s store of the vitamins and minerals you need to live. Foods that are not active don’t bring along with them the enzymes and nutrients your body needs to function and to process food. If food is not adding these things then the body has to use its stored up enzymes and nutrients to make up for it. Intuitively we can see how this depletes our health over time. Refined wheat and sugar have no vitamins and minerals to contribute so they pull from our bones and teeth and other sources. A diet of only cooked food adds no enzymes needed for digestion so our body has to provide those as well overworking our pancreas and under-nourishing our other organs. Whole fats have a lot more going for them then we have been led to believe and are crucial in our body’s ability to absorb vitamins and minerals. So you can understand what a mess we are in if we are giving our bodies food that deplete its stores of vitamins and minerals and additionally not eating the fats necessary to provide more. As we look at where we are generally this new year it is easy to see parallels between how we behave economically as a nation and how we eat; we want to spend resources we don’t have and don’t want to be responsible for adding to the savings.

But like with the economy our body’s balance sheets eventually catch up with us and we realize we must change.

The great thing is that we do know how to prepare foods to be active and to provide us with the right balance of vitamins, minerals, and enzymes without getting too many calories to do so. It takes the right balance of raw, naturally processed (fermenting and soaking), and cooked foods. To boot humans have been eating food optimally prepared for much longer than we haven’t. So the right diet is out there, we just have to reallocate our resources (time and money) to get to it.

I’m looking forward to sharing the strategies and practices I am learning to make sure I get the most bang for my buck in the foods I eat; not paying for food that is going to deplete me, and taking the time to get my food to the point where it can give me its full potential and of course be the most delicious! A taste of what’s brewing so far:

A half gallon of raw milk sitting with a sealed lid on my counter (!) to sour and separate into whey (used for future fermenting and activating of other food) and “cream” cheese (really the starting point for any cheese, but a little funny with nothing done to it). I’ll post that process in the next week.

A kombucha mother waiting for the right sized jar to start making fermented tea

Oats soaked overnight (and longer for tomorrow) in a water and yogurt mixture for an activated breakfast porridge.

I purchased lard from the farmer’s market and have it in the fridge for a whole fat option for frying and baking

My kitchen has seen the end of bottled salad dressing which pretty much uses exclusively soy or canola oil which are both highly processed and fall into the category of asking too much of the body rather than contributing good stuff as it goes down. Homemade salad dressing is too easy- just put olive oil and vinegar with sea salt and pepper in a jar and shake, only get fancier if you’d like. The money saved is noticeable.

That’s a pretty good start for 2009 so far I think. Stay posted and share thoughts. And for the source of my kitchen revolution start here.

                          

Wheatley’s work focuses heavily on leadership in and organization of the workplace. Particularly after reading Steven Greenhouse’s “The Big Squeeze” it is clear that most people’s jobs are like cogs in an awkward machine. If companies were to move into a more 21st century understanding of human potential and the important of relationship many of the problems in the treatment of workers described in Greenhouse book would be addressed.

In Michale Pollan’s most recent book “In Defense of Food; and eater’s manifesto” he describes the problem of nutritionism, which is basically a reductionist approach to food- an appreciation of only their specific parts (some isolated nutrients) and not of the relationships of those parts or the food’s relationship with our bodies’ systems. The video below talks about the book’s concepts generally but addresses the problems of reducing a carrot down to simply beta carotene that leaves us with very little understanding of the value of this vegetable. Worth watching.

In addition to needing better understanding of our food, our food system as a whole could improve with some of Wheatley’s ideas about organizations and leadership. Currently there are at least five agencies that have some role in regulating food and none of them work with each other (big surprise). Huge improvements would be made with greater communication between these agencies and a better understanding of the relationships between their various goals and interests would lead to a system much more in line with reality.

The approach to organizations and leadership that Margaret Whealey believes in is coherent and intensely positive. Recent events, like the election of Barack Obama, indicate to me that we are more than ready for a similar approach in our various efforts for change.