March Resolution

We’re doing monthly resolutions this year and so far we’ve been rocking it! In March, we’re dropping processed foods.

In January, we quit alcohol. The kids excelled at that one ;). In all seriousness though, it was a lovely reset after some hectic holidays. In February, we dropped social media for personal use. James still uses it for work. I still technically have an account but I have removed all the social apps from my phone. If I visit, it’s an intentional logging in while on my computer. What I expected to be difficult has been so, so nice. The world is still on fire but it’s not bombarding my brain every 30 seconds. I’ve gained literally hours of brainpower back everyday!

Shopping the Perimeter

The specific goal this month is that we’ll be shopping the outer edge of the grocery store only. The processed foods generally sit in the center, the outer edge is the produce, meat, dairy and bakery. No single department is without flaws but our focus this month is cutting out the entire middle section.

We’ve actually been doing this for a couple weeks already and it’s been going well. Our grocery bill has shockingly gone down quite a bit, from $150-$200 a week to $68-89 a week already. Even with eggs as high as they are, we seem to be saving money (our chickens started laying again too, that helps!).

Before I upset anyone with some perceived high horse, I definitely understand that being able to do this is an incredibly privileged place to be. It takes way more time to prepare food from an ingredient pantry than in a heat and eat pantry. It also tastes a whole bunch better though in my opinion! If we needed money so much that we had to be a two, full-time adult wage family, I’m not sure this would work out. Thanks to this wee old tiny house though, and some decisions we’ve made earlier in life about budget and lifestyle, we both have a bit of spare time in our days and evenings which helps us eat well.

Inspiration

This move was inspired by MasterClass. I gifted myself a years subscription to Masterclass for the holidays and it’s something I have been able to pay attention to a whole lot more without social media (yay for February’s resolution). There are SO many great Master Class sessions available. The one in particular that inspired this was the session with Michael Pollan, who is the author of The Omnivores Dilemma. It was really great.

It refreshed my memories of an intuitive cooking class I took with Hazel before we left Boise. The theory behind that being that there are only a few number of actual foods that we make and they can all be broken down. Breads for example are ‘x’ parts powder (flour), ‘x’ parts liquid (water, milk, eggs) and ‘x’ parts fat (oil, butter). Once you know the basic formulas for the food you can start messing with the types of flour, liquid and fat to make it come out differently as well as adding extra flavors like chocolate chips or garlic (bread, muffins, focaccia, etc). I thought the class was wonderful and it really helped break my cooking style down to the basics. It also makes it so much easier to adjust for things like celiac and lactose intolerance. Because of that class, I generally use raw ingredients and fresh produce instead of processed food anyway. But I can definitely do better.

The Catalyst

James has seemed to develop some food allergies (to at least garlic and onions, my favorites, gah!) in the last couple years. We have been doing what we can to balance those and have spent a fair amount of time learning about how to rebalance gut health etc. We have found out he’s not actually allergic to those veggies but likely the preservatives they use on those particular veggies. When I had the kids I went from peeling fresh garlic to getting those pre-minced jars of it. I can’t do that anymore. Fortunately though, fresh garlic is still ok! That’s kind of made us re-think everything we have let slip from fresh to convenient.

The kids help

The kids are also helping cook every week so that convenience factor can kick off the table so they can learn to cook ‘right’ before they add other flavor of convenient.

It started in fall last year when I asked Miles to help me with something in the kitchen. He was in a spicy phase and scoffed back something about that being a girls job. If you know me you know just how ‘not well’ that sat with me. He not only helped that night but that night he was also given one day a week, every week, that he gets to cook us dinner. We also made some family adjustments.

I typically do the lions share of cooking in the family because I like it, not because of my ovaries. I’m convinced that James would be content to eat granola and PBJs his whole life. Cooking has never been a priority for him, at least until Miles made that comment, which I’m sure is based off of his interpretation of his observation. But no more!

James now picks a meal to make every night and is a pretty damn good cook when he wants to be. I love it! Miles picks a meal for me to teach him the skills to make. My plan was to cover the rest because Hazel has busy weeks with school. She got jealous though, she likes to cook, too. Now she gets one meal a week to prepare and I cover the remaining two.

As it turns out, Miles enjoys cooking as well! I’m glad we got the opportunity to experience that comment because it has changed our food dynamic quite a bit in this house. And with less focus on dinners for me, I get to put more love into lunches and breakfasts, which they seem to enjoy.

Plant based

James and I both tend to gravitate to a plant based diet, though we are far from calling ourselves vegetarian. After watching a documentary on gut health which stated a goal of eating a variety of at least 26-30 different vegetables per week (to get the biodiversity needed for a healthy gut) we count our veggies and tend to add them in everywhere.

We have been doing the best we can to eat what is in season, even though that isn’t always easy to tell at the grocery store when you can basically get anything at any time. We have been filling our cart with more items from the produce department than anywhere else.

The kids are suckers for pasta though, and mac and cheese, and convenient canned fruits to throw together quick dessert cobblers and whatnot. The kids typically eat highly processed cereals for breakfast, or easy oatmeal packets. Lunch is a snack from here or there, or worse, conveniently packaged foods to stash away in a lunchbox all day. So even though we are pretty good at dinners, the other meals have room for improvement!

With no processed foods, they have already been enjoying their bacon and egg breakfasts though.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That’s a quote from the MasterClass that Michael Pollan did, he’s distilled his whole of his research down to those seven words. They aren’t something you ALWAYS have to do to remain healthy, just guidelines he uses to help people make good choices day by day.

The first part is to help you remember that if you can’t pronounce an ingredient, is it really food? There’s a lot of preservatives and, while they have a purpose, maybe that shouldn’t make up as much of our diet as it does. There’s idea is you should eat foods that are actual food, where you can say all of the ingredients.

Second, he talks about how it should take you the same or more amount of time to eat the food as it takes you to make it. Eating slowly helps your digestive system. We tend to eat too much, too fast so the thought is to SLOW it down so we don’t eat too much to the point of being overly full.

And last, most of our diet should come from plants. I do make us eat meat at least twice a week because the kids start to miss it when we skip it for too long. We try to eat more plant based protein though because we prefer the clean up and there is far less of a gross factor in cooking.

In general, we (humans) are omnivores but we (in America) tend to lean MUCH more to the meat end of that scale than we do to plants. We largely skip over plant based protein altogether. Biologically though we should be eating far more plants than meat, like Grizzly Bears. He goes further into this science and a lot has to do with how the ag industry is out of balance. Both in environmental impact as well as economic impact. Certain foods (meat) are often subsidized while others (plants) are not. This has led to us eating and producing far more meat than humans should be eating.

As the granddaughter of a cattle farmer, I feel like I shouldn’t say much more than that because I am not actually anti-meat. But I believe it’s true, we’re out of balance and it’s not healthy. If you go out to eat you can likely find several meals that don’t even include a plant that would count as a veggie (rather than a carb). You would be hard pressed to find a plate that doesn’t include a meat though (this is changing in city centers but I’m in Idaho, we’re very meat based…).

So, that’s where we’re heading this month

I can’t say I’m not excited at how much processed sugar these kids are going to be NOT eating too, as a side effect of this choice. And dyes. I would love it if it was easier to avoid those ‘staples’.

It also turns out that pasta is extremely easy to make, it also just takes time. We’ve done it twice in the last two weeks and it was pretty fun and tasted great!