Image from this Treehugger article; I love that this pic shows a healthy cow, raw milk, and lush grass…all vitally important for real food and real health!

I decided to do a series of posts on the subject of real food and what it means to me, including what I’ve learned and am learning as I go along, and also giving as many suggestions, ideas, resources, links, and recipes as I could. This way, if you’re just starting on this path, you can see what worked for me, take what I say as one of many approaches to the topic, and hopefully find what works for you.

So to start off, what is “real food?”

To me, real food is…

• Fully natural, unprocessed, and whole
• Lots of animal fat that feeds our bodies & brains
• Cooked at home, often using traditional methods/recipes
• Often referred to as “staple” foods
• Healthy animal products such as unpasteurized milk (cow or goat), raw milk cheese/cream/yogurt, pastured butter, grass-fed meats (including organ mats)—the key is finding products from animals that have been very well-cared for; my ideal is to find a source where the animals are respected from birth to death, even in how they are killed, as the Native Americans did (more soon on how an animal lover like me “deals with” eating animals)
• Fermented foods made at home so that they are not pasteurized, such as sauerkraut, sourdough, yogurt, kiefer, and the like (results of my efforts to come! I’m just starting to learn how to make all this)
• Food that retains as much of its complete nutrient profile as possible (now more important than ever because our soils are so depleted that even our most nutritious food isn’t as nutritious as it was fifty years ago)—better, oh so much better, to get our nutrients from foods where they exist with a whole host of other substances that help them work properly in the body
• To quote Michael Pollan, real food is “food that your grandmother would have recognized as food”

And real food is NOT…

• processed or packaged in the way we usually think of processed food, i.e. cheap boxed or canned “food” that makes up 90% of supermarkets; exceptions would be frozen organic veggies, organic/non-GMO flours, certain real butters, those sorts of things
• combined with any derivative of corn, soy, or wheat (high fructose corn syrup, soy lecithin, etc); these are the most GMO’d crops in the U.S. and the most heavily subsidized, hence their addition to almost every processed food in this country (more on all this at a later date)
• sprayed with chemicals
• injected with drugs
• pasteurized
• irradiated
• has had any of its genes modified

As I write out these lists, I realize that there is much to say about all of these things! So I’ll just go one step at a time over the next few weeks.

Let me admit right now that it might seem that I made a lot of my real food changes pretty quickly; some of the changes were fast, but actually all this started for me several years ago. When I made quick changes, it was because I would get mad at some particular part of the industrial food system, my rebellious streak would kick in, lol, and I would refuse to eat things on principle. But I know that that is NOT how most people go about making changes. I know it can be hard. So if you’re just starting to think about food issues, I can suggest starting like I did:

• Start reading labels. EVERY SINGLE ONE. I didn’t have a choice in this one, as I’d developed a peanut allergy and so had to know if there was any chance of a trace of peanuts getting into my food. This is what got the ball rolling for me. READ EVERY LABEL! I can’t stress this enough. Even my roommate, who tries to eat real food most of the time, still tries to “get away with” not reading all labels. She assumes that certain things are ok. But that leads to her buying something, such as a new flavor of tea she was excited about, and when she brings it home, what do I do? I grab the box to read the ingredients. Sadly, I see that this tea had a soy-based ingredient, something we both are trying to avoid at all costs. She was really angry, at needing to read ingredients all the time, at how hard it is to avoid soy, and at me for pointing out the soy, lol. But you know what? If you really want to take control of your health, you MUST read ingredients and KNOW what you’re putting your body. It sucks that we have to be so diligent. It sucks that industrial food systems make it this tough. Of course, they make it tough because they want you to give up and eat the crap anyway…but I won’t go off on that soapbox here. And getting mad is a good thing, since it helps you make changes. You SHOULD be mad that soy is in everything. You SHOULD vote with your dollars by not buying things that have ingredients in them that you don’t want in your body. So if you do nothing else…start reading labels. It’s the thin edge of the wedge, as the saying goes.
• Sort of part & parcel with reading labels is reading some food issues books & watching a movie or two on the subject. If you haven’t yet, please at least skim through Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser or The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan; both are chock-full of information. It might even take awhile to read through them, since you might want time think and process as you go through. I know I did. I’d sometimes stop reading for months because I’d be so disgusted and angry at the whole food mess that I’d just prefer to pretend none of it mattered. But the seeds were planted, and the seedling of food discontent was growing (yep, I just had to use a plant metaphor…heh).  As for movies, try Supersize Me or Food, Inc (recently nominated for an Oscar!).

And that’s enough to begin. The idea is to start really thinking about what’s in your food, what it can do to you, and about all the interconnections between soil and plate. That’s where I started…and while it didn’t happen overnight, here I am, a few years later, a committed real foodie (or is that just committed? ).

I’ll talk more in future posts about how cholesterol is good for you, why I’m convinced real food can significantly heal most modern degenerative diseases, lots of ways to incorporate real food into your life, and recipes that I like to make. Yep, all this means learning to cook and plan, and I used to loathe the idea of both. But now I love cooking, probably because the power I feel over my own health and well-being is so utterly, completely worth the extra time and effort.

This post is part of Fight Back Friday for February 5, 2010!