Real Food

You might be wondering what "real food" is.  Real food is the food that our great, great-grandmothers ate.  It is food as close to its natural state as possible....food that comes from a plant or an animal....not food that comes from a factory.  Corn is a real food....corn pops...not so much.. Michael Pollan's new book Food Rules and Nina Planck's Real Food: What to Eat and Why both discuss this very concept.   Excerpts from the book Food Rules can be found here.  Some of my personal favorite Food Rules involve:

#1 Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. "When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes or eat something with 15 ingredients you can't pronounce, ask yourself, "What are those things doing there?" Good question, and you probably don't want to know the answer.

#2 Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce. (Always good to stay away from anything you can't pronounce.)

#3 Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot. "There are exceptions -- honey -- but as a rule, things like Twinkies that never go bad aren't food," (Contrary to popular belief..the preservatives in Twinkies won't preserve YOU.)

#7Don't buy food where you buy your gasoline. In the U.S., 20% of food is eaten in the car. (LOVE this rule.)

#11 Avoid foods you see advertised on television   (Since we don't watch television, that one is easy for us)

#19 If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant..don't. (Ha-ha...this is where it gets tricky).

#39 Eat all the junk food you want, as long as you cook it yourself. (Another one of my favorites...and of course home-made cookies are far, far superior to anything in a package...and who doesn't love baking cookies!?).

Rule #19 is especially near and dear to my heart, since my lenten sacrifice this year was to avoid processed foods.  Yes...that can get rather tricky at times, and I can't say that I've kept it perfectly.   Still, life is a journey, a learning process and we all grow.  It takes time to make changes.  

When I first starting getting into whole, real foods I'm afraid I spent way too much money on higher quality food.  It takes time to learn a new way of eating AND a new way of budgeting.  This year has been a learning process, as I've had to slash our food bill drastically while not sacrificing quality and still eating real, whole, foods in as close to their natural state as possible.   I hope to share some of what I've learned with you.