It’s Day 1 of getting my system back into balance!

Some of you are probably asking why on earth people do stupid stuff like health diets and cleanses.  Everyone’s reasons are different, but I’ll tell you mine.

I do diets/cleanses like this because I feel so much better afterwards.   I am currently showing big signs of being out of balance, as in major cravings for sugar and sweets, experiencing aches and stiffness in the mornings, weight gain, and increased brain fog.  Eliminating sugars and grains while taking certain supplements resets my system.  Most noticeably, I have more energy and easily keep my desired, natural weight.

Hopefully, some of you are joining me.  C’mon, it’s fun!  There’s always a good reason not to, but let’s all just join hands and say, “There’s no time like the present!”

Okay, forget about the joining hands part.

Even if you planned to start but you’ve already goofed up, get right back into it.  It’s all good.  And, yes I know that there are wedding receptions and graduation receptions and barbecues and parties and so on and so forth all on your calender just smirking at you, threatening to destroy any attempt to stick to an eating plan, BUT you can totally do it.  And just think how much better you’ll feel when everyone else is complaining of aches, pains and gained weight.

I’ll share what I’m doing, but if you are on any diet/cleanse, you need to pay attention to your body and do what works for you.

I normally follow a strict MEVY (Meat, Eggs, Vegetables and plain Yogurt) plan, and it works great.  It is also really, really difficult.  I’m trying something a little different, and hoping I still have similar great results.  Usually when I am simply re-setting my system I remain on the diet for abut 2 weeks.  But in lieu of this food list change, I’m planning to be on it for about 4 weeks.

The food list of what I can and can’t eat is pretty long, so I will just link to it.  Illegal/Legal food list.

I begin the day by drinking a glass of water with a slice of fresh squeezed lemon.  This helps balance my pH.  Sometimes I cut out coffee, but this time I’m staying on it.  We’ll see how it goes.  Interestingly enough, after having the lemon water today, I didn’t crave my coffee, and ending up drinking less than I normally would.  (My normal amount is 1 1/2 drinking mugs, or 4 cups according to the coffee pot measure.)

Tonight I will take 7 drops of melaleuca alternifolia essential oil in a capsule, and will continue to do so for about a week.  This has always worked really well for me in killing candida overgrowth.  I’ll also be taking a probiotic, Life 5.

I’m actually looking forward to this.  Knowing how good I’m going to feel even by the end of this week makes all the discipline and restrictions bearable.

I recently came across a new label, born out of the attempt to define a “new” group of people, particularly but not exclusively women, who are embracing home, green living, social justice, and responsible consumption.

They’re being called femivores, and they’re creating ripples of change not only in families and neighborhoods, but also in schools and workplaces.

At first glance, it would be easy to accuse these individuals of not appreciating the great strides made (supposedly) under the banner of feminism and equal rights for women.

Except that most of them do not fit into the categories our culture likes to cram homemakers into – the elite upper-class who stay home because their husband can afford it and who fritter their time away on shopping and spa treatments, and the religious Bible-thumpers who subjugate women to a silent and subservient role of servitude and passivity.

The problem with those definitions of homemaker is that they’re a result from the underlying mentality that clouds our views of economics and of domesticity.  What I mean by that is, we tend to view our entire lives with a consumeristic mentality.

Homemaking is seen, by and large, through this lens.   There is the ever present push for purchasing goods and services; groceries, clothing, transportation, appliances, medical, etc.  Then shuttling children to and from activities and classes we paid for; school, music, sports, etc.  Even our downtime is usually through purchasing something; movies, restaurant meals, entertainment devices, etc.

Betty Friedan brought this to light in her startling book, The Feminine Mystique. She wrote about the dissatisfaction housewives felt as their lives; built around getting married, prettying up a home, and having babies; felt meaningless.  She was right, in one sense.  The mindless acts of shopping and taxiing children can cause a women to wallow in unfulfilled potential, as they cease to contribute to anything beyond giving credence to the consumeristic mentality on which their lives were based.

And so, women in large part left the home and joined the workforce.  And yet, as we have seen, they too have not escaped the pervading consumeristic mindset.  Just as housewives sought to find purpose and identity through purchasing, now businesswomen needed to rely on even more purchased goods and services to maintain their lifestyle.  Labor and time saving appliances are even more in demand, as is more professional clothing, another vehicle, more take-out meals, gym memberships to offset the desk job, and nicer vacations because, heck, after all that working she deserves it.

So where are we now?

Women constantly battle between two paths, which they believe hold opposite benefits;  The workforce, where they can achieve financial independence and success.  Or as housewife, where they can fill their need to nurture and create a haven of sorts.

But are these virtues so different and opposite?  Must a women give up one for the other?  And that’s where the femivore comes in, as she says a firm and cheerful “No!”

The femivore is neither a housewife nor working mom, at least not in the usual stifling definitions.  It’s not really about a rejection of those things, as it is in the embrace of something different.  Instead of being controlled by a consumeristic mindset, they seek to live in such a way that relies less and less on purchasing and consuming, and more and more on family, community, environmental health and social justice.

In our city of Flint and nationwide, there is a lot of talk about building communities, eating local, nutrition, caring for the earth, health, reusing and recycling, going green, and on and on and on.  Everyone knows why we need to be concerned about these things, but not many know how we’re going to do it.

You can talk all you want about how our current economic system encourages poor nutrition through the flood of processed foods, fast foods and soil damage, harms the planet, splinters families by separating them most of the day, supports the mistreatment of animals in factory farms, contributes to the health crisis with drug advertisements and unaffordable medical care, blah blah blah blah blah.  You can create community gardens, allow farmer’s markets to accept food stamps, preach about the problem of childhood obesity, try to attract whole food groceries into urban neighborhoods, blah blah blah.

But who is going to take those assets and turn them into practice?  How will that carrot actually get into the stomach of a child?

The fact is, our culture has forgotten the basic skills that even make it possible to live an economically productive life, let alone a ecological sustainable one.  The majority of people are still going to choose a purchased meal over a home-cooked one, because of the lack of time, skill, and cost.   Of course, femivores understand that knowing how to produce food and prepare it actually saves time and money, savings which are compounded over time when factors such as health are considered.

While many may still turn up their nose at the idea of having chickens, growing gardens and baking their own bread, it is truly the progressive and forward-thinking individuals who recognize that not only are these things rewarding, they are vital to our families, communities, and yes, the planet.

(These are written in no particular order. So #1 is no more important than #56. If a product is mentioned, I am not getting compensated from some company to review or rave about their product. I’m just a mom sharing, well, things I wish I would’ve known about a long time ago.)

TIWIWKAALTA #8  ~ Avoiding food with dye is very important to the health and well-being of my children.

People often mention the effects that sugar has on children.  Most notice that some children become hyper and difficult to manage after eating a sugary treat.  But, in my experience, the problems probably arise from the dye in that food, as much if not more than the sugar.

I remember the first time the relation between food dyes and hyperactivity clicked in my mom brain.

It was Angel Imp’s birthday, my fourth child.  I don’t remember the exact age she was, but it was quite young since she chose a Blue’s Clue’s cake from the grocery store bakery.  Usually, I make a homemade cake with better ingredients, like honey or  unrefined cane sugar, but I remember life being busy and full and I thought, “well, it won’t hurt just this once.”

This particular daughter was known to occasionally have crazy periods where it seemed she had no control over her own body.  I could only describe it as energy times 100, as she practically bounced off the ceiling.  Shortly after we cleared up the cake and ice cream, it began.  My Angel Imp turned into Monster Girl.

Not again! I thought, dreading the approaching bedtime hour, where I knew she would continue her tornado-like state until she collapsed with exhaustion.

The next day, I happened to notice that her bowel movements were blue.  As in bright, Blues-Clues blue.  Ew, I frowned.  That stuff can’t be good for little bodies. Then the light came on.

I watched her closely after that, and the connection between food dye and her behavior became undeniable.  I began reading ingredient labels even more carefully and discovered that practically everything has dye in it.  Pickles, purchased baked goods and dough, and cereals all had to go.  Some colors affect her more than others, with blue and red being the worst.

Now, I see children acting like orangutans on crack and I realize it’s no wonder.  They likely just had a snack of packaged cookies with a handful of “fruit” snacks, all washed down with a glass of Kool-Aid.  Ack.

I think of the kids labeled as ADD, ADHD, or just “troubled” and I wonder how many had Lucky Charms for breakfast.  Even the roll in their school lunch probably has dye in it.  Their strawberry milk certainly does.

It is interesting to note that food dyes did not seem to have any significant effect on my 3 older children, at least not enough that I noticed it.  So it’s not like dye has this effect on every child.  (Which is why the FDA still allows dyes in food; Any study performed that does show a link also has a number of children who are not affected.  Just enough to ignore the facts, I guess.)

But, knowing how dye can affect someone so visibly, do I really want to ignore the possibility of it causing currently undetected consequences in the health of my other children?

1997 Graduate Student Research Project conducted at the University of South Florida linking artificial food additives to ADD.

Diet and behavior in children. Center for Science in the Public Interest

2007 study linking hyperactivity and food coloring.  Psychiatry Online

The Truth about Food Dyes.  CBS news

Another mom’s personal story regarding food in Gradual Change.

All right, I could post links all day.  Just Google, “food dye effects on children”.  You’ll have lots to read.

If you knew me several years ago, you’d remember me as a kombucha brewing, kefir guzzling, goat milkin’, wheat grindin’, as-granola-as-they-come hippie chick.

I still am, but much to my chagrin it is to a far lesser degree.

I have several things to blame for this.

(It’s not my fault, after all.  Tsk.)

First, moving to a different home is hard on my scobys and living grains, as they tend to be forgotten in the hoopla and chaos.  If they do survive the cooler ride, settling into a new place still upsets my routine of making batches with them. If things like that aren’t used occasionally, they tend to die.  So suffice it to say, between two moves and a baby being born… yeah.

Then there’s the hard to accept fact that our raw cow’s milk supply ended.  So that means no homemade yogurt or kefir.  Yeah, I still get raw goat milk, but I just don’t like to make cultured foods with that.   Speaking of, I have to admit that I don’t even drink the raw goat milk anymore.  There.  I said it.  Oh, my kids and hubby inhale it still.  But, me…?  I don’t know if it’s just that my taste buds changed with this last pregnancy and never went back, or if it’s because the herd is no longer 100% LaMancha (they are known for their mild milk) but… Ew.

Probably the biggest factor is our ever widening circle of friends and people we hang with.  No longer are the majority of them health freaks just like me.  For most of my friends, their idea of a balanced diet is to have something from the 4 standard food groups every meal; Dye, HFCS, MSG, and partially-hydrogenates.   (If you don’t know what those are, consider yourself an example of what I’m talking about, since you likely eat them all the time.)  So, when we get together (which is often) I tend to just eat what they are having or have brought, as not to step on any toes.  Unfortunately, I see some of that sliding into the rest of the week.

There’s another side effect to eating and preparing food with this larger group of people, and that is the fact that I have started to buy more packaged food (to save time) and also prepare food differently.   Why use my more expensive ingredients for those who do not care or appreciate it?  So, for the first time in years, I often purchase store bought baked goods and have white sugar and flour in my cupboard to use when making things for people other than my family.  But, of course, I and the children eat it too, and it just opens the door to continue in that direction.

And last but not least, living so close to restaurants makes it far too easy to grab take-out or fast food, and I could easily justify it.

So you see my great quandary.

Oh, I still grind my own wheat.  Sometimes.  I still bake homemade bread from scratch.  Occasionally.  I still purchase most of our meat and poultry from local farms who don’t use hormones.   I limit packaged foods.  And last year I still managed to grow a lot of produce despite where we live.  But there are so many things that I have let go.  And, really, there is no excuse.

Friends who have more recently learned about whole foods, and soaking grains, and sprouting, and culturing, and canning, and natural fermentation, and sourdough starters, and on and on, have sparked my interest in these things once again.  It has challenged me to brush off those dormant skills and put them to good use.

So if I seem a little more hippie the next time you see me, tell me so.

I’ll be thrilled.

Remember when I posted this picture?

Well, here is where I posted my Summer Pizza recipe!

Popular debate about nutrition definitively favors the health benefits of organic, free-range, and antibiotic-free foods and names processed foods full of sodium, preservatives, and fats as a cause of the major health problems among Americans today. I say, “that is great!” To be healthy I simply need to consume organic, local, grass-fed products…that are WAY too expensive to buy on my grocery budget. So what is my family to do? We can’t afford to buy everything organic, so how do we choose what to buy?

Assessment: Which Organics to Buy, Which Ones to Let Lie

I have decided to do a triage. That means assess which expensive organic foods have the most health benefit over conventional foods and buy the foods that give my family the best “bang for my buck.” I have added a bit of value assessment to the mix, which means we’d like to eat animal products that are raised humanely, and this counts as an “added health benefit.”

I am asking these questions about our food to decide if we are going to buy expensive organic:

• What values do we hold about what we are consuming?
• What do we use most?
• What will bring us the best health benefit?

Here is my top 10 list of foods we use most frequently and why I chose organic or conventional

1. Beef, Poultry, Pork: Grass-Fed

We want to perpetuate humane treatment of animals and avoid eating grain-fed, antibiotic/hormone treated meat. The prices per pound is pretty affordable if you buy larger quantities. Last year we paid about $4 per pound for beef. That is very expensive for ground beef, but for T-bone stakes, that is a steal!!

2. Eggs and Butter: Conventional

The way conventionally raised egg-layers are treated here in the US is deplorable, but we consume too many eggs and too much butter to be able to afford grass-fed products.

3. Cows Milk: Conventional

I don’t like how the conventional dairy farms typically treat their cows but we consume 3-4 gallons per week which makes buying solely organic cost prohibitive. Sometimes we do buy organic milk and I feel bottle weaning is near so and after that we’ll go organic again.

4. Rice: Conventional

We eat a Korean glutenous sticky rice that is very different from what you find at the grocery store. I have yet to see any Korean grocer carry any organic brand. We consume a lot of rice, so if I was able to find a suitable organic substitute, I’d like to make the switch.

5. Flour: Organic, unbleached (bread, whole wheat, white, cake, semolina)

I end up using a lot of flour in both cooking and baking. We enjoy waffles, pancakes, and tea breads in the morning for breakfast. And I enjoy making dumpling skins, fresh pasta, and tortillas from scratch. So I chose to buy the more expensive organic flours. I am working to find it in bulk to see if I can get the price per pound down a bit.

6. Fruit: Organic, some conventional

Again, fruit is something we eat a lot of. We are also trying to eat what is grown locally, and what is in-season to be more eco-friendly. The organic watermelon we ate last night was heaven! Other fruit like bananas, I chose to buy conventional. Bananas aren’t sprayed with chemicals as heavily as strawberries for example, so I feel I can spend the money on eliminating more chemicals by buying the expensive strawberries and saving 30 cents per pound on bananas.

7. Coffee : Organic, fair-trade, shade-grown

I am the only one in the family who regularly drinks coffee at home so this decision only really impacts me (and I am trying to cut down.) The time I spent in Mexico I worked with indigenous people in their coffee fields. I didn’t understand their organic, shade grown operations until now. I know it is highly unlikely I’d ever brew a bean from their field, but I really want to support small growing communities like theirs.

8. Honey & Sugar: Raw, organic

I am trying to steer our family away from refined sugars, and they are everywhere! I feel less sugar is better for our bodies and the higher price of raw organic sugar and honey will be a helpful deterrent.

9. Oil: Conventional…but less processed

Organic oil is just too expensive for my budget when conventional oils are already expensive. That being said, I am switching what types of oils my family uses to ones that aren’t extracted with hexane gasses, bleached, or hydrogenated. Natural oils are soooo much healthier for our bodies.

10. Snack foods: Organic

Organic packaged snack foods are very expensive and not very good for the environment in my opinion because of all the throw-away-packaging. But the convenience for school snacks and lunches-on-the-go cannot be beat. (Even when I buy the big bag of popcorn I find myself throwing away the greasy Ziploc bag I used once to hold the small portion.) My goal is to choose healthy foods for my family to eat, and I feel the organic snacks are the way to go. Because snacks are discretionary, if we don’t have the budget, we will not buy it.

:: :: ::

Open Access to Variety, Or Stick to the Basics?

I am certainly spoiled because I grew up enjoying apples off-season, or an orange grown no where near where I live. We are lucky to have access to foods which aren’t native to our local and I would like to perpetuate that access. It is hard for me to imagine the narrow diet we’d eat if we only consumed foods that were grown, or made from things grown, in this climate. No more grapefruit, sniff, sniff. Nevertheless I know that this open access kind of diet philosophy is why our nation grows conventional veggies and fruits with little to no nutritional value that are covered with pesticides and require lots of fossil fuels to be shipped all over. So bad for our bodies, so bad for our environment…maybe we should just stick to the basics.

We are doing what we can and it is a place to start. I feel an overall conscious switch to a “getting back to basics” approach to eating will help guide us.

Ask, is this food processed? Did it touch a machine? Was it packaged in someway? Does it appear that way in nature?

I am sad that we are not able to garden or to afford a better diet, but I am thankful for the abundance we have at the ready, and the thoughtfulness of those around us who care so much growing healthy, natural foods.

Resources

Where do you find these healthy foods? I found my local meat producers at www.eatwild.com through their wonderful directory of farms. I found some of our local produce at www.pickyourown.com through their directory website and this site also offers tons of canning tips, freezing tips, and recipes.

So how do you make food choices for you and your family? How do you decide what to buy? Do you have any great tips on where to find community resources? (I am personally interested in knowing how you found a food buying co-op.) Leave a comment here and share your thoughts and experience with others! Happy Organizing!

Abbie Park is a stay-at-home mom who lives in northern Virginia with her husband, 3 year-old son, and 18 month-old daughter. She enjoys cooking, crafting, and organizing. Her blog, Organizing-Life.com, offers tips about how to organize the home, schedules, and budgets. Follow along her journey to a organized, frugal, green, back-to-basics lifestyle.

Thanks to Amy from Mia Cucina Su Cucina, an extremely talented foodie who resides in sunny California. She is a constant source of inspiration for me in the kitchen, as well as a sweetheart who I am blessed to call a friend.

She brings us a mouthwatering, family friendly dessert recipe perfect for summertime!

Rhubarb pic link http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuart_spivack/

Growing up in the Mid-West, rhubarb was plentiful and everyone either slowly cooked it down in simple syrup or baked with it. My Mom would cook as much as she could and then freeze the rest. Rhubarb plants have large leaves that are somewhat triangular shaped with long fleshy stalks. The flowers are small, greenish-white to rose-red, and are grouped in large compound leafy clusters arranged on a stem that is composed of a main branch or a complicated arrangement of branches.  A number of varieties of rhubarb have been domesticated both as medicinal plants and for human consumption. While the leaves are toxic, the stalks are cooked for their tart flavor.

In 1993 I move to Southern California and in the spring of 1994 I started looking for rhubarb. I could not find it anywhere. I inquired everywhere I went and most people had no clue and the ones that did were from the Mid-West. Come to find out, it is too hot here in Southern California to grow rhubarb. A few years later, I finally found it at the farmers market and it was a $1.00 a stalk. It takes about 8-10 stalks to make a dessert, so I would get enough for one dessert and I would savor it until it was gone. In the past couple of years, it can now be found more readily at the farmers market. The price has come down significantly since the early days when I first found it.

This year, my doing without a lot of rhubarb came to an end. My children were visiting my parents that live in Michigan. Towards the end of their visit I ask my Mom if she would send in my boy’s luggage enough rhubarb for me to make a Rhubarb Strawberry Crisp. She said she would and I settled in and waited for my boys return. They finally came home and I felt like it was Christmas morning as I opened up the luggage and I found enough rhubarb for about 3 Crisps. I later found out that my Dad sent the stalks of two large plants.

I have an acquaintance that lives in Canada that until this year she had never had rhubarb. She purchased some and she had to taste it to figure out the flavor, what a shock that was to her taste buds. She did a bit of research and cooked savor dishes instead of sweet. She first cooked the rhubarb in simple syrup and then added the syrup to her marinades and used the pulp in her chicken salads. The dish she made that sounded the most interesting to me was her Baked Garlic Rhubarb Wings with Sweet & Sour Sauce. If you would like to try her recipe, here is the link to her blog: Gourmeted

The following recipe is one that I pieced together for my Strawberry Rhubarb Crisp. It is fabulous topped with a scoop of strawberry ice cream. Enjoy!

Rhubarb Berry Crisp
Topping:
½ cup unbleached all purpose flour
½ cup (packed) brown sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
½ teaspoon cinnamon
¼ cup (1/2 stick) chilled, unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
2/3 cup old-fashioned oats

Filling:
1 ½  to 1 3/4 cups sugar (depends on sweetness of berries)
1/3 cup Instant ClearJel, cornstarch or quick-cooking tapioca
5 ½ cups chopped fresh or frozen rhubarb
1 ½ cups strawberries (sliced) or raspberries

For topping: Mix first 5 ingredients in the food processor. Add butter and pulse until mixture resembles coarse meal. Add oatmeal and pulse 3 times. Cover and refrigerate.

To make the filling: Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Stir together the sugar and thickener in a large bowl. (Do not skip this step if you use ClearJel.) Add the fruit, stirring to combine. Let filling stand for about 5 minutes. Spoon the filling into a 9-inch pie plate.

Sprinkle the topping over the filling and gentle pat it down. Bake until rhubarb is tender and juices bubble thickly, covering the crisp loosely with foil if topping browns too quickly, about 45 minutes. Transfer to a rack. Cool 30 minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature.

One word: Yum.

I have another recipe up at the Real Food Revolution.

I couldn’t decide whether to label it as a dessert treat or a snack. It satisfies my sweet-tooth, while still being filling enough to be a nourishing snack.

I made up a double batch and it was still gone that very evening!

Remember when I was complaining about most frugal websites advocating unhealthy eating?

Carrien from She Laughs at the Days invited me to shut my mouth and do something about it.  Okay, so she actually invited me to become a contributor to her awesome Food That Nourishes site, The Real Food Revolution.

So my first post is up, after many hours of internal debate and oh-my-land-what-in-the-world-do-i-do-for-my-first-post quandary.  If you’ve been over recently, I likely served this so at least you know I actually eat what I write about.

So go peruse The Real Food Revolution.  She has some fantastic recipes on there already, as well great information and tips on healthy eating.  I especially love the posts under How we think about eating category.