Good Food is Everybody's Business
“Ways to improve health and happiness by eating home-cooked real foods” continues with suggestions that are pertinent on the path of eating and cooking healthier real foods, perhaps you will remember a few forgotten gems and/or find a useful new suggestion from this next list.
I’m inspired in this moment to discuss the topic of cooking meals, as it’s one that’s near and dear to me. With Monday, October 24, 2011 officially having been designated as Food Day, the time is ripe. The focus is to bring cooking – not just anything, but real food – back into home and hearth across America.
The default that rules the game of American food and health is our culture.Unchallenged, one’s environment wins (in determining our lifestyle) and lower income areas are supported with ubiquitous fast-food crap. At best, the corporate guise of care under the name of nutritionism tries to educate, through advertisements, food packaging labels, magazine and news stories of the latest wonder food component.
There are two basic pathways that birth and cultivate a relationship with real food, and they augment each other. I categorize one as the external way, and the other as the internal. These two pathways eventually converge, creating the larger “journey-road” of healthy eating and a lifestyle for wellness.
How many times have you heard this question, “With all the scientific information we now know about nutrition, how come Americans are heavier and unhealthier now than ever before?” The answer is the same as it ever was: because we overeat, we eat a ton of crap food, and don’t sufficiently exercise. We know it and we’ve known it for a long time.
Organically grown, local, whole, affordable, planetary stewardship, food justice, sustainably farmed, humanely raised and slaughtered, slow cooked and seasonally eaten, nutritionism, vegan, healthy lifestyle; these are just some of the words that come to mind around the elite conversation of How, What, When and Where we eat these days. There is so much to talk about, and these words do not exist in isolation of one another.
Dump the chemical laden, sugared, salted, fat filled, fake colored, processed and fast food junk as much as possible, and gradually move toward whole, unprocessed, seasonal, organically grown or raised as often as doable. Spend your organic dollars on animal products, if you eat them.
I am still in the middle of a typical supermarket. I’m incredulous over the 100’ long, 7’ high wall of “beverages” called Sports Drinks and Vitamin Water. Equally, at another supermarket I’m appalled by the energy zapping multitude of convenience refrigerators and end of aisle shelf displays these liquids occupy. And I’m not even including the aisles of sodas, tea drinks, and fake juice drinks. Wow!
