Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)
Originally uploaded by Eberly & Collard Public Relations.
Well maybe it is just the time of year,
Or maybe it’s the time of Man.
I don’t know who I am,
but you know life is for learning.
We are stardust, we are golden.
And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.
~Joni Mitchell, “Woodstock”
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This post is part of a weekly series prompted by the new Next Chapter Book Club featuring the Happy Book. Each Friday Jamie will be asking us what makes us happy, and anyone can participate!
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On February 1st, I cut gluten out of my diet, having just discovered that my poor immune system has a sensitivity to wheat. Figuring that I might find it easier to determine what contains gluten than what contains wheat gluten, I went gluten-free. On March 1st, I cut refined sugar out of my diet as well, figuring if I could cut gluten out — in many ways easier than I thought it would be — I could cut out sugar, too. It’s been a mighty learning curve already one week in, but with my Word of the Year, Self-Love, guiding me at every turn, I find myself repeating the mantra Progress Not Perfection. Here are some tales from the journey.
Patience Can Be Cultivated, and Food Prep is a Sacred Act
Patience is not a word most folks would apply to me, least of all myself. This impatience has meant that I’ve often simply not done things that would be well worth the doing, because I wasn’t able to slow down and throw myself into the task. One major thing that has made me impatient is food preparation. By the time I moved in with my then-boyfriend in my mid-twenties, I had pretty much convinced myself I was domestically challenged, and I was regularly thrown out of the kitchen. On my own now for many years, I carried that with me, and not having my mother to call for basic instructions, I stuck to the few things I knew how to cook. And spent far too much money on restaurants and take-out. Now that grabbing a quick bite to eat is difficult at best, fraught with worry over where wheat might be lurking (it is in the darndest things.. like cheese sauce!), food preparation is a necessity, at least until I become wildly rich and can afford a personal chef.
So I’ve been cooking. I have learned that I need better pans and a decent set of knives, and that I hate dishes. And I have learned that despite years of believing that I am totally inept in the kitchen, I am capable of cooking something yummy! Last week, I sat down to a wildly delicious meal that I had made, that gave me just as much pleasure, if not more so, than a meal at T-Bone’s. It wasn’t the most healthy meal: marinated beef tips, broccoli and pan fried potatoes made with olive oil and caramelized onions. It was my first time having any kind of fry since I went gluten-free, and it was my first time making pan fries. I fell crazy in love with them at first taste, and made a mental note that I’m going to try making sweet potato fries — considerably healthier — next. While eating this meal it occurred to me that feeding myself well — whether that means totally healthy or the occasional comfort food — is a totally self-loving act. In Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips, Kris Carr calls food preparation a sacred act. I didn’t believe her until I’d cooked several new-for-me meals from scratch, and gluten-free: orange chicken for Chinese New Year; egg drop soup and fried rice with veggies and shrimp on another occasion. I didn’t believe her until I learned the “right way” to cut an onion and I found myself crying with burning eyes in my kitchen, cutting enough onion for a week’s worth of meals. I didn’t believe her until I sat down with that wildly delicious meal and I felt so supported and loved by my food, for real. This is what I had been looking for from my food since it became an “interest” and not just fuel or a way to get Mom to shut up so I could get back outside to pay with the neighborhood kids. I saw that my body was a temple and it was well worth the time and effort — and, let’s face it, the FUN — of cooking something from scratch to fuel it.
We Are Always Learning, Whether We Want To Or Not
As long as we are here, we are learning something. Yet we all know people who stubbornly cling to old information or to things in their experience that they have come to understand as true, shutting out new evidence or anything reeking of something “new”. For a long time I avoided learning about nutrition because of the inherent frustration that no one agrees with anyone else! Instead I ate a whole lot of garbage and my body was learning, even if I wasn’t. My body was seeking to teach me, if only I wasn’t too stubborn to listen. And for a long time I didn’t listen, leading to poor health and pain and more misery than I care to admit to.
So I woke up one day and became teachable yet again. Co-creating with your body for its own wellness is simply smart. The past few weeks have found me in grocery and health food stores almost daily, often just on a field trip to read labels and note prices and.. learn. Gluten-free eating can be tricky when everything in your local grocery contains a Modified Food Starch or Maltodextrin. Maltodextrin is made from corn or potato starch in the US — if your item is not a food, however, (such as a supplement) or it is manufactured and labelled elsewhere, you may very well be consuming gluten.
When it comes to sugar there are so many names for it and it is hidden and many simple things we consume. For instance, my Pacific Foods Organic Free Range gluten-free Chicken Broth contains evaporated cane juice. And this is just another name for sugar. Check out the ingredients in your ketchup and pasta sauce next time you shop. Laugh yourself silly at the corn syrup that is in your salad dressing. Realize that we have bought and been sold a lie, by not reading our labels!
Being Willing To Do It Means Being Willing To Do It Badly
Few people get something right the first time they do it, and changing your eating habits is no simple task. One of the amazing things about food is that it really is a miracle and it really is medicine; no matter how many years of crap you’ve consumed, you can turn it around at any point and the food you consume today can begin to heal you! That is not propaganda. But there’s something else. There are a lot of folks out there has an idea of what diet or eating style is the magic bullet. And while it is wonderful that they’ve found the magic bullet for them, what we ALL need to realize is that our bodies are different; not just different from each other, but different even from itself at different times in your life. Consider this: Every seven years all of the cells in your body are replaced. We know life stages affect hormone levels, and also that everyone has different immunities and sensitivities. So the fad diet that everyone follows may not agree with you. While raw food is all the rage, Ayurvedic medicine tells me my dosha is Vata, and as such cold, raw foods are often intolerable; I already know this by how I feel when I eat them. I am not saying I will never try or go raw; nor would I say I will never give up meat. But for right now, I’m learning to cook, learning to navigate food, adding new foods to my diet but also continuing to enjoy red meat and fried potatoes. I am okay with this stage in my learning, because I am learning every moment, whether my meal looks like a breakfast of champions or a hilarious fakery of fast food. My message is this: Listen to your body, do not listen to guilt over your body not conforming to some ideals placed upon you from outside.
And that’s the very new way food is making me happy this week!
photo credit: 
