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Hi, there. You're new here; I'm new here. Because this is my first time doing this. I feel the need to make that quite clear.
With that, I come to you humbly - as a wife, a mom, a daughter, an employee, a consumer, and a creator. I work very hard to ensure the latter is truer than the penultimate.
This brings us to this blog, this website, and why you're reading this. I'm not a foodie, a home cook, or a food expert. Maybe you're like me and want to learn how to bring more unprocessed food into your life. Or maybe you're already doing that, and you can give me a few pointers. Whatever brought you here, I'm glad it did.
Food was never a centerpiece in my life. In fact, it was a nuisance. The time it took to prepare and then, ugh, actually sit down and eat - I had stuff to do, and food was slowing me down.
But after a few months of learning and falling in love with unprocessed eating, I now enjoy preparing foods and sitting down to eat. And then I realized food was slowing me down. On Sundays, you will find me in my grandmother's red and white apron making food. Preparing dried garbanzo beans to make hummus, smashing old bananas from last week to make muffins for the kids' breakfast, and finding recipes for whatever arrived in my weekly farm share.
What served to be the domino that started me down this very surprising pathway was the book Kid Food by Bettina Elias Siegel. It triggered a series of other books that launched me into seeing food as a sacred part of our lives, not a passive event we have to do three times a day.
We've been conditioned to believe that food manufacturers have our best interest in mind fortifying our cereals with iron (gee, thanks), adding real fruit to yogurt, or providing whole grain bread with a laundry list of unpronounceable ingredients.
We've spent decades asking nutrition labels to tell us a food's health value, completely ignoring the list of industrialized food-like substances that can just as accurately share what we're putting into our bodies. As consumers, we're pushed to the center aisles of grocery stores, searching for the nutritional value that's already neatly packaged in whole fruits and veggies in the produce section.
But don't think all is dandy in the produce section. We sell ourselves short when buying produce at the grocery store, and I'll get into that in a future post. This is what inspired our family to invest in a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program.
This mindset around eating unprocessed is all about getting back to the roots (eh?) of food and bringing myself and my family closer to nature. Just as important for me, it's about shortening the food supply chain - the distance, time, and energy it takes for food to reach your table - and being better stewards of our environment as a result. It's about changing the story my children have been told about food. I want my family to enjoy an array of foods from cultures whose cooking has sustained generations. I want to continue to feel the slowing down-ness that going unprocessed has provided me. It helps me be a better thing to all the people I'm the thing to.
What I want to share with you, dear reader (I've ALWAYS wanted to write that!) is that if someone like me with zero interest in cooking managed to find herself in an apron on Sundays prepping homemade foods, maybe you can see it's totally doable. What's more are the unexpected additional benefits that have made this so very fulfilling, like saving money, having more energy, and experiencing deeper connections with people. The trite phrase "If I can do it, anyone can" is an overwhelming understatement in this case.
Thank you for joining me on this exciting ride! If this is your first stop on your own journey, be sure to check out other posts to see how I try things like baking bread for the first time. And say hi in the comments below to let us know you're here!
Happy unprocessed!
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