Real Food Face-Off: Hartke is Online vs. Local Nourishment

 

This is truly fun stuff. I hope you are all enjoying sharing and reading others’ stories. It’s more than food, you know.

The reasons people come to eat the way they do pull in our faith, academics, marriages, sicknesses, and life goals. Our kitchens impact more than just our day-to-day routines and our health, but our emotional and spiritual fitness as well. Real food quickly becomes a way of life.

In any endeavor, it’s important to find a community of people to support and understand you. My hope is that in some small way, the online real food community can consider the face-offs a way to have a community meeting, a household gathering, or a fireside chat, twice a week from our computer chairs.

Visit the Real Food Face-Off Introduction page for a full list of all the participants and the complete list of possible questions. Each week, only a handful of the contenders’ answers will be posted here.

While you’re here, visit my real food post from today: Do You Know These 10 Tips for Even Better Homemade Chicken Stock? and my honest review of Charlie’s Soap.

Week Two B: Kimberly vs. Peggy

Kimberly at Hartke is Online! is a publicist for the Weston A. Price foundation and a blogger in the Real Food Media Network. She has some series on natural remedies that have caught my attention, and the best Roasted Tomato Soup recipe for summer produce.

Peggy at Local Nourishment is a mom who knows where it’s at. I love many of her posts because she writes from the heart, with the heart of a mother who is introspective, analytical, and just a bit cheeky. She always makes me say, “Uh-huh, that’s how it is here, too,” while giving me something new to ponder.

Below are the answers to some real food questions, in the bloggers’ own words:

How do you describe the way you eat when someone asks you to define your food?

My husband and I follow a low-glycemic, Weston A. Price diet. We first learned of the low glycemic approach from cardiologist, Dr. Arthur Agatston, who wrote the bestselling South Beach Diet. We lost 50 lbs between us by this approach. Now, we have transitioned to a real food diet as recommended by Sally Fallon, author of Nourishing Traditions and President of the Weston A. Price Foundation. Here is my blog post, How Nourishing Traditions Has Changed Me.

We make as much as we can from scratch, buy food without barcodes and are learning to eat locally, organically and seasonally.

What was/is your major incentive for living a real food lifestyle? (How did you come to eat the way you do?)

Keith’s father died of heart disease, mine of cancer. We follow our diet because the low glycemic diet is heart healthy, and the Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF) dietary guidelines, which emphasize nutrient dense foods, is perfect for cancer prevention. Current research has found that CLA (conjugated linoleic acid) is a major weapon in warding off cancer. It is a fatty acid found in 100% grassfed raw milk and 100% grassfed meat. Both of these whole, natural foods are promoted by WAPF.

By the ripe old age of 31, I walked with a cane, bent over like an old woman, in constant pain, on drugs, wishing for the shortest possible life. Browsing the library one day (almost 20 years later ), I saw a book and grabbed it from the shelf: Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. What I was living with daily sure sounded like physical degeneration to me! I read it, found the WAPF website and the Real Food Media bloggers and I was off!

If you only had energy for ONE make-from-scratch food, what would it be? Is your preference for taste or health?

I would make my own bread. I believe the act of kneading dough with my bare hands presses love into the mix. There is nothing more loving than the gift of warm fresh-from-the oven homemade bread with butter to your family.

Bone broth. Absolutely bone broth. It was the first thing I learned to do, had the greatest impact on my health, is the easiest thing in the world and a very delicious, nutrient dense food.

What food was your favorite that you no longer eat (or shouldn’t eat)?

Tomatoes. These days, I am following a strict no-nightshades anti-arthritis diet to help conquer knee-pain. This means no tomatoes, white potatoes, peppers, eggplant, paprika, cayenne, any plant from the nighshade family. I am sure my overindulgence in these foods in the past contributed to my knee problems, today.

I need to get off the coffee (again.) I don’t really miss anything else.

What’s your favorite real/traditional food?

Grassfed lamb. It used to be my favorite thing to have out at a restaurant, and now that we know several lamb farmers in our community, we indulge in this delectable meat at home.

Butter. Oh my goodness, butter. I could eat it plain. And do!

What was the hardest transition to make to real food?

The supermarket made me lazy. I went at least every two days, never planned ahead, often relied on prepared foods. Now that we source most of our ingredients (around 90%) from local farms and farm markets, I plan ahead, shop less frequently, and stock up.

I had to temporarily give up the luxury of asking one of the teens to cook! I’m still learning many of the techniques involved in real food cooking, so until I got to a point in the learning curve that I could teach it, it’s been all me in the kitchen, all the time.

List your top 3 baby steps to move from a Standard American Diet to Real Food.

1) Empty your refrigerator and pantry of the foods you now want to avoid. 2) Only allow back into the house, real food from farmers you have personally met. 3) Cook from scratch, every day, making extras to store in your freezer for future “quick” meals.

1) Read. Read everything. Read the Bible, Civil Eats, La Vida Locovore, food recall news. Read food labels, medicine product inserts, the newspaper, the Real Food Media blogs. Let it all soak in and breathe. 2) Pick something to change. Find a farmer’s market, skip the “boxes and bags” aisle this week, turn off the TV and eat one meal as a family around a common table. Find whatever issue speaks to you. Whatever you choose, just choose it and do it. 3) Repeat.

What is the worst food (or “food”) a person could possibly put into their systems?

I believe that we all need to be cooking with animal fats instead of processed vegetable oils. Dr. Weston A. Price discovered the vital importance of fat soluble vitamins, A, D, E, K, from livestock raised on pasture in the sunshine. Lard, beef tallow, bacon grease, ghee, butter:  these are life promoting real foods high in these powerful nutrients. Katie jumps in:  Check out the Fat Full Fall series if you don’t know what Kimberly is talking about.

That’s a hard question for me because it’s a moving target. But if I have to chose one food, I’d say microwave popcorn. Between the GMO corn, the hydrogenated oils, the dead salt, the chemicals in the “flavoring”, the even more dangerous chemicals in the popping bag and the microwave exposure itself, that stuff just screams “POISON!” to me. Katie again:  That was one of the 7 Foods Experts Avoid that I mentioned here.

Biggest drawback of real food lifestyle?

Those close to you will consider you nuts (health nuts, for sure), although those who don’t know you so well, will admire your convictions and think you are the smartest person in the world about nutrition. I think the latter is a wonderful tradeoff for the former. I blog to bring more people who don’t know me so well, into my sphere!

I’d have to say right now, with my large family, the biggest drawback is four (we have teens) meals a day, every single day, day in and day out.

What’s the most creative thing you do to make life easier in the kitchen?

I emptied the entire kitchen and reorganized it into “stations.” Next to the sink is my food prep station. Above the sink and dishwasher is my glass and dish storage station. The corner cupboard is my fermenting station, below it is my appliance storage station. On one side of the stove is my coffee & tea station, on the other side, the spice station. Next comes casserole dish storage above and pantry station below the counter and finally a baking station near the oven.

I guess my form of creativity looks to others like organizational skills. I have lists and schedules, calendars, menus, recipes and plans. It’s the only way I can keep up with all the soaking, fermenting, sprouting, slow cooking, marinating and shopping!

How important is organic food?

It is more important to me that the farmer uses true organic methods such as, compost and manure, integrated pest management and no pesticides. I find the organic certified label to be less important, since the government standards allow agribusiness farms that use petrochemicals and pesticides to qualify.

Because GMOs aren’t labeled, the only assurance I have right now that any food I buy from the grocery store is entirely made up of the ingredients listed is buying organic. Being a family with allergies, this knowledge is vital. But this “organic” issue isn’t as important to me as it is to buy from a farmer I know. That trust means more to me than any label.

Best book recommendations?

The Schwarzbein Principle is the book that turned me on to raw milk and the vital importance of animal fats in the human diet! Written by a former sugar addict, this is one of the best nutrition primers I have ever read.

Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price; Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig, Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes; The Crazy Makers: How the Food Industry Is Destroying Our Brains and Harming Our Children by Carol Simontacchi; Who Is God? (And Can I Really Know Him?) by David Webb (shameless plug)

Follow Kimberly on Twitter @kimberlyhartke.      Follow Peggy @wwwebbs.

I’d highly recommend honoring my real food guests with a visit over to their blogs, Kimberly at Hartke is Online! and Peggy at Local Nourishment. It was horrible deciding which of their answers to exclude. You must read more from these women! I’ll leave you with some advice about Real Food from Peggy:

Yes, it costs money. Yes, it takes time. Yes, it is work. It can be enjoyable work, a relaxing time and money well spent if you choose to prioritize it that way. It’s all in your choices. But don’t think that because you choose not to decide that a decision is not being made. Your purchases—every dollar—is a vote for more of the same.

Next up we have two Real Food mommies who know how to live simply and take good nutritional care of their young families. Be sure to come back on Tuesday for the next installment of the Real Food Face-Off, Donielle at Naturally Knocked Up vs. Lindsay at Passionate Homemaking. Sign up for a free email subscription or grab my reader feed to make sure you catch them all. You can also follow me on Twitter.

Special thanks to Jo-Lynne from DCR Design for the fabulous Face-Off logos. Please visit her if you are a blogger looking for design improvements!

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I appreciate you doing so if you’re buying online anyway, but I’d also recommend trying your local library first! Of course, if you’re going to shop at Amazon, you may as well try Swagbucks. I’m liking the gift cards to Amazon that are rolling in!