eating healthfully takes time

No beating around the bush - navigating this crazy world's food system, and eating healthfully, takes time. 

All the reading and research take time.  Granted, I love food, and the food system interests me, not in the least out of a sense of concern and self-preservation.  Every time I find out something new and relevant about diet or food I try to incorporate it into my ways of shopping and cooking.  That makes things more complex - discerning fact from fiction, understanding what particular research results and dietary recommendations actually apply to my family, sourcing new items, and finding ways to prepare additions to our food selections.

All the shopping takes time.  I go to a lot of different places to shop as reasonably as possible, for as much variety as possible, to buy as locally as possible, to get the most organic and least sprayed foods possible, to buy pastured meat and eggs, find the most healthful seafood, and to research and buy those items I cannot find locally online or through my food coop.  It takes time.

All the preparation takes time.  Cooking from scratch takes time, no way around it.  Most of my meal prep time goes into preparing produce since I often make several vegetable dishes, some raw, some cooked.  But I, too, use short cuts - see an earlier blog post, hurry-nights, on that - my own fast food ways.  And I love leftovers, frozen for a later point in time, or simply for lunch the next day. 

Ultimately, you, the consumer, are responsible for discerning what information is relevant to you, what is healthy for your body, what diet makes sense, what food items to buy, and how to prepare them.  Make no mistake, the current food system is not designed to provide you with the most healthful food, but to make money by selling you product - product earns more than produce.  Hence big-ag and big-food's cat and mouse game with you, the consumer, to manipulate you by hiding facts that would prevent you from buying more of their stuff.  Spend some valuable time to read between the lines and dig deeper.  Whole unprocessed foods have no hidden agenda, only packaged and processed foods do. 

invisible magic

The invisible aspect of our life frames and informs the visible or material aspect, the one you can touch, feel, smell, hear, and of course see.  But the more shallowly we live, the more we rush, the less we reflect on this unseen part because we lose awareness of it, and with it the ability to shape the material part of life consciously.  Then you end up getting lived.

Meaning, love, or empathy are all invisible.  Yet they are what make life bright and satisfying, fuzzy and feel-good - you know, meaningful. Anxiety, fear, and worry are also invisible.  They, of course, also inform how you perceive and interpret the world.  While pesticides, radon, and most air pollution cannot be seen, and neither can the micronutrients, trace elements, and minerals in our food, those can all be measured with our modern scientific methods, while the others are more elusive, they can't.  How would you quantify meaning or worry?  You can't, it's qualitative.

But the invisible is just as real as the visible, even though our current science has no good way of dealing with it.  The invisible reflects in, and informs, the visible, even though you can't see it with your eyes, smell it, touch it, hear it, or feel it.  I'm sure you can agree that love is real, that abundance is real.  When you have love in your awareness, the world appears loving; when you have abundance in your awareness the world appears abundant.  To live consciously with the invisible you need to awaken, to dig deeper, to slow down and reflect.  Then you become aware of how it influences your visible reality, how your thoughts, your fears, your exuberance all alter your reality, actually create it, in a profound way.   

inspirational food

Food can be inspiring in so many ways, and this is the perfect time of year to relish your relationship with it.  Food is such a fundamental aspect of aliveness.  During the week, when dinner preparations are often rushed, food is more nourishment than mindful celebration.  But during the holidays, when we make time to shop, prepare, invite, and share, food becomes special in so many ways.  Let me count the ways.

Then food is festive and cultural.  We relate specific holidays with specific food traditions, family traditions, cultural traditions, and also ethnic traditions, and it becomes festive when it's special and prepared with great care and mindfulness. The English have their Christmas turkey, Americans their Thanksgiving turkey and pumpkin pie, the French their Christmas oysters and foie gras - they are all special, festive foods because we said so.  Our stories and memories (and their cost) have made them so.  Being German, hazelnuts have a distinct Christmas taste to me because of all the German Christmas baking that involves roasted hazelnuts.  Our amusing family tradition is to drink Coca Cola while we decorate the Christmas tree, the only time of year I'll buy and drink Coke (I'll spare you the history) - so now I find Coca Cola festive (and it can't be Pepsi).  And for once it's a cheap treat.  My husband's Italian family traditionally made the special Christmas Eve fish dinner.  That is festive to them because it's the only time of year those recipes are prepared.  What is your special holiday tradition?

Abundance of food on the holiday table, even though we are no longer hunter-gatherers who don't quite know where our next meal will come from, is still important for many of us, although we now live in times of overabundance and overindulgence.  While most of you who read this are not wanting, it's good to be aware of, and grateful for, all this plenty.  How reassuring and wonderful that we have more than enough food.  I love leftovers, the result of all that abundance.  As the leftovers disappear from the fridge, so the memories of that special meal recede slowly into the everydayness.

Conviviality during holiday times is perhaps the most important food related aspect I connect with.   Those without family around can become depressed because they know everyone else is gathering with family and friends and they are left out.  You can make a lonesome person truly happy by including them around your family table.  My mother-in-law used to always invite a lonely mystery guest or two.  Being with family and friends around a table and sharing delicious food is simply warm and fuzzy, the best.

Then there are those expensive and exclusive specialty items you wouldn't serve at a regular dinner party - oysters, lobster, that special roast or meat cut, tiny jewel like vegetables, that exquisite dessert.   This holiday season eat deeply, with an awareness of all these many wonderful aspects surrounding your food experiences.  It will make your memories richer.

gender fluidity's significance

In the Western world we are coming from a long mainstream tradition of two distinct genders.  So it is not difficult to understand the underlying cultural resistance in general, and that of more conservative people in particular, to the expansion of gender boundaries and the diversification of family structures. 

However, many indigenous cultures are way ahead of us, and have lived with three, and even five, genders forever, modeling a non-binary gender system.  Not that there is necessarily total acceptance on all fronts, together with complete equality of status and full legalization.  Minorities always seem to have it rougher, unfortunately.  But the fact that these gender fluid roles exist in other cultures openly, and are part of the cultural fabric, is cause for reassurance. 

While their situation is not easy - they are pioneers in many ways - the role gender fluid people have accepted to play in our culture is extremely valuable.  They model a more open and accepting gender definition; they show us that people don't only come in black or white, but in all colors of the rainbow; that families don't have to be wedged exclusively into the mom/dad/kids model, but that the idea of family can also encompass all colors of the rainbow so to speak (see a previous blog post on increasing family structure fluidity).  After all, love is love, human is human, and on a spiritual soul level there is no gender, period. Besides, we all carry our individual mixes of feminine and masculine in us.  Some women are extremely feminine, others much less so.  Some guys are real he-men, others feel more comfortable expressing their feelings.  It's about defining the boundaries less rigidly, allowing for more fluidity, no longer boxing people into a simplifying and simplistic gender definition that is becoming quickly outdated.

We live in culturally extremely creative and exiting times, if perhaps unsettling for more traditional thinkers, when many values are being questioned and redefined, and boundaries pushed out. If we can begin to see the humanness in whatever expression people chose to live, the sheer endless creativity we humans are able to express, we are better for it, we'll have expanded our tolerance and our consciousness. 

Remember, on the food front we have moved so far beyond meat and potatoes in just a century.  We now have so many wonderful choices from all over the world, and we are so much richer for it.  You don't have to like it all.  But let your mind be blown open in amazement and wonderment and acceptance at the beauty and diversity of the human condition and its incredible diversity.

presents or presence?

I suppose you expect presents for Mother's or Father's Day, for birthdays or the upcoming holidays.  But do you really need more stuff?  Indeed, some stuff is nice and can temporarily make you feel good.  We equate presents with the conveyance of love.  But is receiving stuff really equal to the love and appreciation we ultimately crave? 

Presence instead of presents, true presence and undivided attention, expressing appreciation for you as a person, is ultimately so much more meaningful than stuff.  Presence speaks to your emotions, and feeling emotionally supported and appreciated, feeling truly heard, is the best present.  A heartfelt visit with your elderly parent or aunt or grandmother, or neighbor, is probably ultimately more meaningful to them than some quickly dropped off tchotchke.  True presence and attempting to connect, and emotionally support, your teenagers, is so valuable in helping them navigate a challenging time in their life.  Your college kids home for the holidays, your grandchildren visiting and spending time with you, your grown kids dropping in for an unexpected visit, an surprise visit from a dear friend - those are the things that truly warm the heart.  Presence, being in the present with the other in appreciation, is priceless.

 Also take a look at a previous related blog post - less gifts more love.

feminine rising

Despite much noise out there from the other side, the feminine is rising.  The French leftist daily Libération just wrote that the French language deliberately removed all feminine semantics starting in the 17th century.  Only when the feminine is becoming more prominent would such research even be conducted and published.

The confluence of sexual harassment revelations, not only in the US but in Europe as well, is a sign of the feminine rising.  Whether in the corporate or entertainment world, in politics, on college campuses, the revelations are accumulating, flying open, and are no longer able to be contained.

Among millennial parents a lot more intentional co-parenting is happening.  And in my larger social circle I have watched how a proportionately very significant number of women are divorcing and becoming independent later in life, asserting their power, freedom, creativity and courage.

These developments are of course threatening to the white male power base and eroding its stronghold, hence it all plays out in real life and time like a cultural tectonic plate shift.  A better yin-yang balance is better for the environment, better for our culture, and healthier in general. 

powering down

"Den Computer herunterfahren," means shutting down the computer.  However, the literal translation from German to English is "to drive it down."  Just like a computer powers down slowly - you hear it doing all kinds of internal things for a while before it actually shuts down for good - we need in-between spaces between high-powered activities and slower ones.  A normal mortal can't go directly from a corporate meeting into meditation.  Neither can we go from work mode to evening mode, or from evening mode to sleep mode, without a gradual slowing down mechanism.  Otherwise the more frenetic frequency bleeds into the slower activity, and prevents us from being fully present in the now, like when my husband's work experiences from the day keep popping up in our evening conversation.

After I shut my computer for the day I create a transition period by sitting down and looking at the newspaper, perhaps having a sip of tea, before going into dinner prep mode.  Before turning the lights off and going to sleep I usually read in bed, if only for a few minutes, just to slow down further.  Before beginning a meditation you slowly and gradually turn inward by becoming more aware of your breath and turning away from external stimuli.

You probably need the same in-between space in the morning to power up, whether it's your coffee ritual, your wake-up shower, or the morning commute that takes you out of home mode into work mode.

It's good to become aware of these transition modes, to traverse them with awareness, and enjoy the powering up or down.  It helps to transition from one particular Now into the next particular Now without having a foot left in the last Now.

water is amazing

What do holy water and homeopathy have in common?  The late Masaru Emoto wrote several books on his famous water experiments that showed how water supposedly could be "programmed" with a message.   Lynne McTaggart, journalist, and author of several books on intention, also conducted a series of water experiments with the help of a team of scientists, as narrated in her most recent book The Power of Eight.  Those experiments seem to indicate that water reacts to intent or consciousness, or can carry a message.

The idea behind holy water in church is the same, to imbue water with the frequency of universal love, and use this water to bless the members of the congregation. 

Now we're on to homeopathy.  Mainstream scientists and medical researchers have always had a problem with homeopathy, which uses remedies in such minute concentrations that the original substance can no longer be detected with regular scientific testing methods.  Moreover, and here is where homeopathy goes completely against the grain of mainstream beliefs, the greater the dilution, the greater the potency and effect of the remedy.  I have experienced myself how potent, effective, yet gentle, homeopathic remedies can be, especially in the higher dilutions, and when diluted in water.

It seems thus that water can carry a message, a message in the form of a frequency imprint that our body's electro-magnetic system is able to decipher and use. You may have heard that something is held in the cellular memory.  Given that our body is made up of around 60% water one wonders whether all our thoughts and beliefs are held specifically in the water of our cells.  Any thoughts?

better wine

Glyphosate residue in my wine?  Quite a while ago I expanded the organic conversation by writing about organic seeds and organic cut flowers.  Organic wine is another area to expand your organic awareness to.

Just like organic produce, organic wine comes from grapes that have been grown without chemical fertilizers and pesti/fungi/herbicides, all of which inevitably end up in your body, and on top of it leave of course the soil contaminated. 

Organic wines have been shown to have up to one third more of the much talked about longevity promoting antioxidant resveratrol (and which you could ingest in pill form - but it's so much more enjoyable in the form of red wine).  Organic wines are also chemical contaminant free, and, depending on the wine, may even be without those added sulfites (the less of those the better as well - that stuff adds shelf life but not health).

Because organic wines are now available for the same price as conventional wines (yes, indeed!), I have switched over to buying organic wines and bubbly exclusively.  It's better for my health and it's better for the environment and it does not cost any more money.  No reason to buy conventional.

A1 or A2

Food is a minefield these days.   Now I am learning about the two different milk proteins, A1 and A2 casein, that cows exhibit based on breed.  It so happens that the Northern European cow breeds, Holsteins, Friesians, and Ayrshires, mostly produce the A1 protein, which, as Steven Gundry reports in his The Plant Paradox, supposedly wreaks havoc in the pancreas and is likely a major cause of Type 1 Diabetes.  Most cows in the US, Australia, and New Zealand are of this type unfortunately.  Therefore, neither their milk, nor their cheese, yogurt, butter, or any of their other dairy products (save sour cream, cream cheese, or heavy cream) are beneficial to us, according to Dr. Gundry.

Goat and sheep milk, and their dairy products (eat more chèvre or feta), are free of this protein, as are all Southern European cow breeds' milk products.  If you or your children drink fresh milk, consider looking for A2 milk.  When buying cow milk cheese and butter look for products from France, Italy, Spain, or Switzerland, countries which prefer other cow breeds, all of which have the A2 protein.  I'll let you know about my six-week trial diet.