The Cost of Real Food

Real, nourishing food isn't cheap- it is ridiculously expensive. But, when you have allergies like we do, it's not an option to eat grains, loads of beans or meat that contains hormones just to save our budget. We regularly spend around $1,000 a month to feed two toddlers, and 2-4 adults (depending on how often my parents are home).

This is not because we eat fancy imported foods- it's because the items we do purchase are produced without additives and chemicals that would make us sick.

Enter: becoming a "localvore" but with a few exceptions. It helps us eat in-season and . I am working to source all of our food locally, whether that's produced on our farm, in our region or just available locally, like at this local gem, Jack's Country Store. {Yes, I'm biased. That's my family's store.}

Native cultures thrived and subsisted on the foods available locally for a very long time. We are blessed to live in such an abundant area that has fresh fish, shellfish, herbs, mushrooms, berries, wild ducks and geese, deer and elk more available.

We also have great soil on our farm that produces delicious vegetables and a few orchard trees for apples, cherries, and plums. We have room to raise our own meat, and have started with chickens and ducks.We can also get local raw honey and organic cranberries. We have great local sources for raw milk {cow and goat} but I dream of having our own dairy cow and both steers and pigs for meat and adding our own bees for honey.

That leaves just a few things to bring in from non-local sources, like bananas, coffee and chocolate {responsibly produced, as this article highlights the importance for doing so}, nuts, seeds and coconut products, but reducing our reliance on those as well.

I'm going to work on relying more heavily on first the items that we can produce on our farm, hunt or gather locally, then purchase from local farms and stores before shopping online or elsewhere. As I get this figured out, I will be posting recipes, tips, local bounties and always welcoming suggestions.

The Foods We Do Eat and Why

What "do" we eat?

As I covered in this previous post, my family avoids a lot of different foods, and for good reason. We don't tolerate them and have pretty severe reactions. I had to start reading every single label and start making my own substitutes. Either products weren't available at a store or they are ridiculously expensive.

Here's what we do eat: fresh, frozen, and dried organic (or un-sprayed) produce, pastured eggs, pastured/wild meat, soaked and dehydrated nuts, raw dairy, real fats like butter, coconut oil, and avocado oil, organic seaweed, coconut milk, spices, and herbs. I make our baked goods from blends of coconut flour, tapioca starch, arrowroot starch, and blanched almond flour. We enjoy raw cocoa powder and Enjoy Life Chocolate, and stick mainly to organic maple syrup and local raw honey for sweetening. I do use some Wholesome Sweeteners items for powdered sugar and cane sugar. I incorporate a lot of homemade bone broth and stock as well as grass-fed gelatin. We don't eat many legumes, but when we do, they are properly soaked for 12-24 hours to release the phytic acid, as explained here.

I limit what we eat that comes from a can. Yes, there are many organic options in canned goods, but cans are still lined with other questionable chemicals, as noted here. Because I cannot always source them otherwise, I buy coconut milk, fish, and water chestnuts in cans. For everything else, I opt for jars or skip that item.

The list of what we can and do eat allows for delicious, nourishing food. I work to balance our sugar with protein and fat (like cooking fruit in butter and serving with yogurt, meat, eggs), ferment many items (like vegetables and mayonnaise), and season everything well. It doesn't have to be fancy or complicated, just good, real food.

I have found a lot of information and understanding by studying Weston A. Price and reading the benefits of the Paleo diet. Pinterest is a phenomenal resource for finding recipes and inspiration by querying "WAP" and "Paleo."

I will start saving our recipes that we do enjoy in a recipe section on this blog, and link it once it is started.

The Foods We Don't Eat and Why

Our journey to our current food philosophies started when Halle was 6 months old and had a very stubborn diaper rash that I could not clear topically. Being exclusively breastfed, I needed to address my diet to see if something was triggering the reaction. I cut gluten and soy and within a few days, the rash disappeared. Great! I tried reintroducing them a couple of weeks later and was in gut-wrenching pain within half an hour of eating a Reuben sandwich that I couldn't move from the couch for most of the night. That was the last time that I purposefully ate gluten or soy. Any accidental exposure for me since then has resulted in nearly-immediate intense pain for me, and a rash shortly following for Halle.

When Macy was younger, she had pretty strong emotional reactions. I tried gentle parenting methods, I tried time-outs, I tried reasoning with her (I say "I" because as a stay-at-home-mom, I am with her nearly every waking moment. Ben tried the same). Nothing seemed to help. She was starting to hurt herself when upset- pulling her hair, once gnawing aggressively on her crib so hard that I feared her teeth were going to be damaged. She would scream at you over seemingly nothing, sprint across the house to push Halle over and run off laughing, start laughing uncontrollably for a half-hour at a time, and melt into a puddle on the floor, crying.

I was told that it was just "typical toddler behavior," "the terrible two's," "just normal," but I didn't buy it. She seemed to have more reactions after eating, and then I read this article and for the first time, understood that food can cause a behavioral or neurological reaction. It doesn't always cause a digestive upset or rash.

Macy's reactions aren't to the extreme as the child in the article linked above, but I knew that something was amiss and immediately cut gluten and soy from her diet as well and she seemed clearer with fewer meltdowns within the week. And then she got a serving of goldfish crackers. She screamed, she hit, she refused to get into her car seat, she could not listen to any basic instruction for several hours. That sealed it: no more gluten or soy for her. Her body cannot process them and it causes her distress. It's not worth it.

In the year since those first eliminations, we have also expanded to our diet to exclude all grains (even soaked, soured, sprouted and organic), hormones, chemical additives, antibiotics, gut-irritating ingredients like carrageenan, guar gum and xanthan gum, pesticides, dyes and most food in cans.

We don't feel deprived. It is rare that there's a food we can't eat that I have a craving for, but those items just aren't worth it to us.

The Beginning...

We all have to start somewhere, right? Well, my somewhere is right here.

This journey has been amazing. I never thought that I would love to spend so much time being dirty raising girls and animals, trying to provide as much for our family as we can {every step counts} and still wanting more. More animals, more gardens {those silly squash need their own space}, more time to manage everything, more time and ability to absorb more knowledge, and more happiness that comes at the end of a dirty day on the farm. 

In the past two years, we have radically changed our diet to cut out all grains, pesticides, gut-irritating additives like carrageenan, guar gum, and xanthan gum, hormones, and chemicals that just don't belong in our food system to start with. The girls and I eat strictly pastured, wild, and organic foods or we get sick. I have digestive reactions, Halle gets rashes and Macy has behavioral reactions. 

Cleaning up our diet helped me address the way we clean ourselves and our house. Our skin is our largest organ, so we don't put anything on our body that we can't or wouldn't eat. This means that I make nearly all of our lotions, sunblock, and topical ointments out of edible ingredients, we use castile and homemade soaps for washing our bodies, and we clean with the basics like vinegar, baking soda, essential oils and a phosphate-free dish soap.

We started restoring the farm to a farm by adding our first flock of birds this spring that we hatched ourselves, followed by two more groups that we ordered from hatcheries, then added a fully-grown flock of runner ducks this week. I have grand plans of adding goats, pigs, cows, geese, and sheep hopefully by next spring {ha, wishful thinking, but a girl can dream, right?}

Thank you for reading. I am excited to start this new adventure in blogging and share with all of you!