Check me out!

Katie over at Kitchen Stewardship is featuring yours truly  in today’s  installment of Real Food Faceoff!

If you’ve come here from there, please jump into the comments on Pride and Prejudice, Mega Family Style. There’s a great conversation going on!  Also check out my food rules and recipes on the right sidebar  You can read about my food stamp challenge, 40 weeks of grocery lists and menus or check out my money saving tips!

You can read all of Katie’s questions and my answers below, and make sure to click through see my Face Off partner, Make At Home Mom‘s responses!

• How do you describe the way you eat when someone asks you to define your food?

I tell them it’s real food.  It’s not full of bad fats, fillers, and multiple chemicals.  We still eat processed foods and convenience foods occasionally, but see them as treats, not staples.  We eat food that doesn’t taste like packaging.  We eat a traditional down-home diet.

• What was/is your major incentive for living a real food lifestyle?

Health.  Fake chemicals, colors, etc. have a very immediate and detrimental effect on one of my children’s health; I worry about the effect of  GMO crops, HFCS, etc. on long term health.  Also, finances.  It’s cheaper to eat unprocessed foods.  A bag of apples is the same price or cheaper than a bag of Oreos.  Hamburger Helper made from plain noodles, a little milk, and spices from the cupboard is cheaper (and tastier) than the boxed version.

• If you only had energy for ONE make-from-scratch food, what would it be? Is your preference for taste or health?

Salad dressing.  It is impossible to find a bottled dressing that doesn’t have MSG, soybean oil, and/or food coloring.  A good friend shared her salad dressing recipe and it is sooo much better than anything I’ve ever had out of a bottle!

M&M cookies – I LOVE them.  I don’t let the kids have them because of the colors, though… I eat them after they go to bed, LOL!  Also, coffee.  I’ve cut back on coffee but I doubt I’ll give it up altogether.  For me it’s more than just the caffeine – it’s the taste, experience, routine that all go together.  I’ve been drinking coffee since I was a little girl – my mom used to give us what was basically coffee flavored sweetened milk in a sippee cup!  Now I drink it black or with a little cream.

• What’s your favorite real/traditional food?

Yogurt.  I’ve been making it long before I ever heard of the real food movement!  I’m the pickiest eater in my family.  The rest of them love fermented foods.  My husband loves pickled everything – kimchi, sauerkraut, vegetables, even pickled eggs and he’s actually the sourdough maker in our family.

I don’t like the taste of butter!  I grew up on Country Crock margarine and real butter just has too much flavor for me.

• What’s something you remain afraid to try?

Kombucha. I’m fascinated but terrified.

As I said, I am still learning the ropes of the real food/WAPF diet.  However, we’ve taken baby steps for health for the last few years.  After I eliminated artificial colors, sweeteners, lard substitutes, and MSG from our diet, I worked to eliminate trans fats. This year I am working on high fructose corn syrup, and I’m paying more attention to GMO derived ingredients, including canola, soy, and corn derivatives such as caramel coloring and maltodextrin.

• List your top 3 baby steps to move from a Standard American Diet to Real Food.

Personalize it, prioritize it, put it into action.

Personalize it – think carefully about your goals in regard to eating real food and improving your family’s health through nutrition. What does your family need?  What do they like to eat?  What is the most important?  For my family, eliminating neurotoxic foods (yellow #5, red #40, MSG) was a top priority.

Prioritize it – I don’t think most people can go from making hamburger helper from a box, eating Chips Ahoy!  and serving chicken nuggets to the real food lifestyle overnight.  Baby steps are key, especially when other people (spouse, children) are along for the ride.  Make a priority list of which steps you want to implement, with the ones making the most impact first.  Maybe you’ll start by switching to organic milk and produce (or, from organic milk to raw milk).  Maybe you need to start by weaning your family off ofhigh fructose corn syrup.  Prioritizing will help you focus on making one important, sustainable change at a time.  In my case, we eliminated fake chemicals (colors, sweeteners, MSG, etc.) first, then worked on transfats, then on high fructose corn syrup.

Put it into action – jump in and get started!  If you make a commitment to organic food, you may need to do some research to find a market where you can buy a wide variety of those foods.  If you want hormone free beef, you may need to find a supplier.  In my case, I drive to a large market about 15 miles away because they have natural, antibiotic free meats and a large selection of organic produce.

• 8..  What is the worst food (or “food”) a person could possibly put into their systems?

Trix, Fruity Pebbles, or other highly colored processed sugared breakfast cereals.  I now think they have negative nutritional value!  (But I do let the kids pick out a “treat” cereal on their birthday.  I just don’t kid myself that it’s nutritious or a good breakfast.)

• If you had only $20 to spend in a week on real food, what would you buy and what would you make?

This actually has happened recently, after my husband lost his job and we were waiting for over 2 months for our food stamp application to be approved.  With $20, I would buy dried chickpeas, pintos, brown rice, garlic, onions (an onion makes everything taste better!), whole wheat flour, corn tortillas, palm kernel oil shortening (for frying), oatmeal, plain yogurt, milk, and spend the rest on produce, including tomatoes and peppers.  I wouldn’t buy organic produce at that point, going for quantity over quality. Assuming I could use spices already in my cupboard, we’d have curried chickpeas and rice, falafels on pitas, pintos and rice, bean burritos with salsa, tostadas, and chickpea salad (cooked chickpeas with a tomato/cucumber/onion chopped salad).  Breakfasts would be oatmeal, and lunches would be beans and rice.  Snacks would be apples or other fruit.  Yogurt would be used as a condiment for falafels and burritos, and I’d make a spread for pitas with yogurt cheese and garlic.

Eating healthy means eating real food, stuff that my great grandmother would know how to cook and that you don’t have to read directions on a box for.  I have an older Joy of Cooking.  It means buying ingredients and making them into a meal, instead of buying a “meal” some factory has put together for me.

Dried beans.  They have way more protein than tofu, are super cheap, store forever, can be made into anything (appetizer, dips, main dish, side dish, casserole, soup, even dessert!) and the variety is amazing.

You have to plan ahead, which is not my strong suit.

I’m teaching my kids how to cook for themselves.  Even my 7 year old can fry an egg, which is helpful when I’m around but not available.  He can make himself breakfast while I feed the baby, help the littles get their food, or do other kitchen work.

I think some organic foods are more important than others.  I try to buy things on the “dirty dozen” list organic..  My kids adore apples, and eat at least one per day.  I try to keep only organic apples around, because it’s a high volume food (and on the dirty dozen list).

I would only buy organic citrus if I were making anything from the peels.  But I don’t buy organic bananas or oranges as a rule, because the thick peel is removed.  Organic bananas are also grown in a different habitat than conventional bananas, which may have environmental implications.

I also try to balance organic with seasonality.

I always get hormone free milk, but I don’t always buy organic milk.  My family is part of the WIC program which provides vouchers for milk (but not organic milk).  As part of my Real Food Manifesto, hormone free foods are more important to me and my family than organic, and I have to work with the food available to me.

My next step is to buy organic dairy products, especially butter.  My reading has lead me to believe that this is important because butter is basically a concentration of milkfat, and also concentrates any impurities or chemicals the milk may have had.

Hmm, not much, actually.  I never buy swiss chard because I grow it, prodigiously, in my garden.  However, my family uses food stamps right now and I cannot spend those at farmer’s markets or to get beef straight from the ranch.  I have to buy almost all of our food at the conventional market.  So, I have searched out markets that carry local, organic, and healthier foods and drive several miles to shop there.

I order stuff I would never make at home, either because it’s too involved or I don’t have the skills.  Sometimes I’ll order something I have been wanting to make at home, so I can see how the “pros” do it.  My husband hates lamb, for example, so I would never make that at home, but have ordered it at a restaurant.  And I almost always order enchiladas at the Mexican restaurants.

Get a cookbook that tells you HOW to cook with ingredients.  For me, it was a slightly older version of The Joy of Cooking.  I get frustrated with my other cookbooks, like Better Homes and Gardens, etc. because often they’ll throw in convenience foods that I don’t use.  I need to know how to make cream of mushroom soup, not recipes calling for it out of a can.  My Joy of Cooking also has lots of info about the foods, how to store it, how to cook it, how to keep it as leftovers, and more.

Other books that influenced my real food journey:

Eating Well for Optimum Health, Andrew Weil, M.D.

Why Your Child is Hyperactive, Benjamin Feingold, M.D.

Food as Medicine, Dharma Singh Khalsa, M.D.

In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan.

There are also some spiritual and theological books and articles that I have read that help me put food into perspective.

Gluttonyis not just overeating; it is making food your idol.  Changing the heart in regards to food, and its place in our lives, must come before changing our food habits.  I am a Catholic, and some meditations on Lenten fasting also had a profound influence on me.

Real food doesn’t have to break your budget and tastes so much better!