Our journey to real food started when our son, Luke, turned 4 months old and his pediatrician told us he was ready for solid food. Up until that point, motherhood had not been that complicated. But deciding what to feed my son (and how to get him to eat it) quickly became the most stressful aspect of parenthood. It also forced me to evaluate my own eating habits. For the first time in my life, I started buying organic foods. I made vegetable purees and froze them in ice cube trays. I organized my freezer into “green” and “orange” zones, and instructed my husband that in the event something ever happened to me, he and Luke should have at least one orange and one green food each day. I had an excel spreadsheet where I recorded Luke’s intake of grains, legumes, dairy, “super green” veggies, vitamin A, vitamin C and meat and egg intake. Just when I got the swing of baby food, my son found his voice and began expressing his dislike of Brussels sprouts and love for French fries. And because he was underweight, I often caved in to his demands for more mac ’n cheese in lieu of broccoli. Where did I go wrong?
When our second child, Lauren, was nearing the solid food stage, I picked up a book in the airport called In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan, and I became a convert to the real food revolution. Suddenly, everything made sense to me. Webster’s dictionary lists one definition of “revolution” as “a procedure or course … back to a starting point.” Eating the foods that our ancestors ate in the same way they ate it, meaning food in its unprocessed, purest state, purchased from local farms, is not only good for you, but it is good for the planet.
Pollan’s book gives an excellent history of how the Industrial Revolution, food manufacturers, lobbyists, politicians, nutritionists, journalists and advertisers created what is today’s “Western diet”, which has led our country to lead the world in chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer. Pollan explains that the Western diet of processed foods and meat with lots of added fat and sugar is known to make people sick, and wherever in the world people gave up their traditional way of eating and adopted the Western diet, the chronic “Western diseases” soon followed.
The book convinced me to change our ways, but then the challenge became how to do that. The “Real Food Matrix” listed at right are some of Pollan’s suggestions for eating a traditional diet. But I still needed to know how to fit a traditional diet in a modern lifestyle. If I shouldn’t take a sandwich of Oscar Myer deli meat and Kraft cheese singles to lunch, what can I pack in my lunch bag? Should I ditch 1% milk in favor of whole milk for the whole family? Would my great-grandmother have made pancakes or waffles? Through this blog, my goal is to share what my family has learned to help others make the transition to a traditional, “real food” diet too. By nourishing our families, we can make a healthier America, one meal at a time, one day at a time.
