Our (more or less) Organic Family: Renewing the Commitment
Our family has been striving for a mostly-organic, local-when-possible, planet-friendly, and heart-healthy diet for years – ever since our first baby was born. Still, we occasionally need to review guidelines for good food choices, just to keep us on track.
Doing Good Together’s Executive Director Jenny Friedman’s quote in this month’s newsletter gave me just the motivation I needed to refresh my family’s food choices.
Fresh, local, nourishing foods are good fuel for our bodies, and they’re healthier for the earth, too. In fact, there are a host of ethical and environmental issues that arise from the way our food is produced, including the chemicals used in agriculture, the impact of factory farming on animals, and the sometimes unfair treatment of farm workers. Discussing these issues with your children can help you make healthy food choices – for both your family and your planet.
This particular newsletter landed in my inbox on a particularly unfortunate food day. We had just dined on crepes and nutella, a smattering of fresh fruit shipped in from thousands of miles away, and, I am reluctant to admit, bacon. Miss Kindergarten took one bite of the bacon and announced, “I don’t think this is very healthy, and I think I don’t want to eat animals anymore.”
There is nothing like the wisdom of a five-year-old to make me recommit to organic, seasonal, local, and unprocessed as the basic principles for healthy eating.
Sadly, I could hear our budget groan at the prospect. While I do believe better food is worth a bit of extra expense, we’ll soon be a three child household. Just think of the milk we’ll go through (at $6 per gallon!).
Fortunately, a number of tricks and tips are available to help us all become more savvy consumers. Learning them, reviewing them, and modeling them will help instill these good food rules as instincts in our children.
So many resources abound, I’m sure you have your own. Feel free to share. I have consistently found the following three to be extremely useful:
- Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual by Michael Pollen. He’s the king of exposing the frightful intricacies of our food supply system and reminding us all what a joy real food for real people can be. This tiny book seemed almost, well, unimportant when I first purchased it. Now it sits next to my cookbooks waiting patiently for those inevitable moments of embarrassment when I realize we’ve slipped from our usual high dietary standards. In fifteen minutes, I can scan Pollen’s food rules, read the most relevant of the time, and re-commit to better habits.
- Fresh Choices: More than 100 Easy Recipes for Pure Food When you Can’t Buy 100% Organic by David Joachim and Rochelle Davis. Looking for that list of sustainable seafood? That list of produce that must be organic (versus the ones you can compromise on because they are consistently grown with fewer chemical… ahh, the bluebery). Or do you just want the fantastic recipe for Baked Chicken with Honey and Apple which transforms easily into the best chicken soup in the world? This book is thoughtful, inspiring, and delicious.
- Serving Up the Harvest by Andrea Chesman. The gem is designed for the backyard gardener, CSA enthusiast, or farmer’s market frequenter. This book offers a wealth of information about the vegetable itself, along with wonderful recipes. This week we planted much of our backyard garden indoors, and pulling this book out renewed my hope that those inert-looking seeds will provide feasts in the months to come.
By necessity, the girls grocery shop with me, and to make it less boring, I give them jobs once we arrive. Between the grocery store scavenger hunt and our time cooking together most weekday nights, I’m certain that my food choices and habits will have a big impact on their future choices and habits. Clearly, it’s worth the effort to self-correct every now and then.
Tags: Healing the Earth
