Sustainable Eats

It all began with grains.

“Annette, I love going to the store.” my neighbor confided in me one day. “I could spend hours checking out the new foods they’ve come up with and how they package them. In college I’d spend Friday nights cruising the snack and cereal aisles sometimes studying them all.”

Just the thought of this struck horror in me. I dreaded any trip to the store. I hated the hurried label reading while the kids whined and fought, begging for things they had never even tried solely because of packaging that promoted Superheroes or cartoon characters. I dreaded the fights we would have over what to buy and how much, who wanted something from the deli, or bakery case, or worse yet, the candy placed at child level near the checkout stand.

My neighbor frequently phones me to tell me she is making a Costco or grocery store run, just as I used to do for her. “Do you want me to pick up anything for you?”

A year ago, I would have gladly accepted her offer. But these days my fear of the grocery store comes not from the experience of shopping with small children but from the actual items grocery stores sell.

Reading the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and hearing the long list of recalled food items alerted me to the very real dangers inherent in our food system.

I had been doing the best job I could scanning box labels for known toxins but the bulk of those ingredients were things I had no clue about. I had just accepted that I would surely have heard or read something about them if they were dangerous. But Michael Pollan’s explanations of the processes packaged food undergoes in the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma shook the sleep from my eyes and firmly replaced it with a mother’s rage. That rage was so deep and focused that it led me to make a New Year’s resolution so extreme it turned our lives upside down.

On December 31, 2008 I vowed that for all of 2009 I would not give a single dollar to a food company. I swore from that point on, all food that my buying power supported would come directly from raw ingredients that were as in season, sustainably farmed, and as local and organic as possible. This was pretty extreme given that I had never even made pancakes from scratch or made a successful loaf of whole wheat bread. But hell hath no fury like a mother pouring over a long list of recalled processed foods.

I knew my kids would surely revolt over the lack of bunny crackers, breakfast cereal and string cheese. My husband began referring to this as my “crazy bus” but he agreed to take out the lawn and replace it with a large vegetable garden which even my bread-baking neighbor dubbed my “mid-life crisis garden.” My husband duly created plans for the new fence and garden boxes but I noticed he had labeled his grid paper Experience Garden Project as a riff on Paul Allen’s “out there” music museum. And every time I mentioned a new idea – putting fruit trees in the side yard or getting chickens he would say something like “next stop on the Crazy Bus.” He was pretty adamant about not getting chickens.

Was this plan of not supporting big agriculture too crazy? If you ever have a need for brainstorming the wackiest ideas with no thought for reality then I’m with you. While other people might be sitting around debating about why something might not work I’ve always just jumped in and tried without much thought. Sometimes this has served me well and other times it has made for some epic debacles.

All I knew was I had made up my mind and there was no changing it. I was done supporting the current food industry, conventional farmers and large organics who operate like conventional farmers. No more giving money to companies that make processed foods containing ingredients I couldn’t buy myself or meat farmers who don’t pasture their animals or feed them based on the animal’s natural diet.

Just let anyone try to change my mind. My husband knew better. All jokes aside he agreed with me in principal and continued work on the garden. The kids had no idea what they were in for.

***

Fast forward one year. It’s been so long since the term crazy bus has been mentioned now that I can’t recall the last time I heard it. This way of life has become totally normal for my family. No one has revolted over a lack of bunny crackers or hot dogs. Chickens happily cluck in the backyard and give us eggs. We eat year round from the veggie garden and are expecting our first fruits from the trees in the orchard. Our winter pantry is still well stocked with a wide variety of foods and the freezer is full of local meat. We’ve wanted for nothing. We haven’t supported seed or food companies that we don’t agree with. And our grocery bill is significantly less than it ever was. We’ve voted with our hearts, hands and stomachs.

I thought my children would hate this experiment of giving up the grocery store but they are very proud of their city farm. They love the chickens, collecting eggs, picking me vegetables for dinner, and selling surplus produce and fruit. They love to give neighbors tours of the garden. They are connected to real food in a very real, very intimate way.

Those tours of the garden ultimately lead to tours of the pantry.  I’m not honestly sure what people envision when they imagine my food stores. They must think I’m some kind of urban survivalist because everyone wants to see my setup. After finally reading my blog and realizing what I’d been up to, even my parents phoned to ask where I was storing all this food.

My mother had a huge walk in pantry, the size of my bathroom with shelves on both sides and the back wall. The shelves were loaded with cake mixes, pudding mixes, crackers, cookies, chips, Costco-sized bags of Nestle chocolate chips, breakfast cereals and all other manner of foods that you find at chain stores. That couldn’t be further from my pantry.

My kitchen cupboards contain lots of glass canning jars. Quart size jars of whole grains which I fill from my grain mine downstairs, jars of dried fruits, local dried beans, granola, popcorn, homemade fruit leather, homemade beef jerky, and local nuts for snacking. There is usually one kind of homemade cracker, breadstick or homemade granola bar on hand too. I have more cupboard space now than I did before.

Real, nutrient dense food doesn’t require much storage space.
My downstairs cupboard is lined with beautiful home canned jars of fruits, jams, jellies, pickles, sauces, salsas, chutneys, stocks, applesauce, and canned tomatoes. My mother-in-law came to visit not long ago and said “You have no food!” Believe me, we have plenty of food. We finally have nothing but food. But this wasn’t always the case.

What drove me to this? I try to remember the exact instance that pushed me over the line. In truth there were so many pieces of information that led up to this decision that it’s hard to recall.

When my oldest was born he had reflux and that started me down the path of researching diet and all the many ways it could affect health. As he turned into a highly intense toddler I continued that research into all the ways diet could affect behavior. As time went on I converted my shopping list from conventional foods to natural foods to organic foods. It didn’t happen overnight.

In reading books like The Ominivore’s Dilemma I finally realized that you can’t buy any processed foods regardless of corporate stewardship pledge or organic labels and think the ingredients are benign. Sadly, without a degree in chemistry it’s not possible to know how those long-winded ingredients are made, and not even biologists know what they do to the body long term.

Just when you think you know to cut out MSG it gets renamed hydrolyzed protein. How can you keep up with an industry that spends an obscene amount of money on spin doctoring and lobbying each year?

I finally realized I can’t. I was done trying. I refuse to sit idly by feeding my kids packaged, nutritionally-bereft foods any longer.

Meet my kids, Pickle Man and Pancake Boy.

Pickle Man flirted with eating strikes as a toddler, at one point plummeting from the ninety-fifth down to the fifth weight percentile and prompting our pediatrician to send us to the local children’s hospital to get help from a nutritionist. Their answer was to give him special canned drinkable meals made entirely from synthetic ingredients.

I smiled while I listened to their advice but when I got home I was irate. I crumpled the recommendation slip up and threw it away. Instead I came up with my own diet, loaded with butter, organic heavy cream, organic pastured bacon and egg yolks.

I found ways to disguise those into foods no toddler could refuse – eggnog, pudding, bread pudding and smoothies. In no time at all his weight was back up and he started trying new foods. From there he’s never looked back.

He’s come to love anything sour or salty or sweet or all of the above and will try anything once. He voraciously eats pickled or lacto-fermented anything and sips shots of local apple cider vinegar.

Pancake Boy, on the other hand started off as a great eater and at some point just stopped. He would still eat any manner of snack food from the grocers but not anything else, save for pancakes and oatmeal. At the same time this was happening, the peanut recalls were taking place and every day there was a new list of snack products marketed towards kids included in the recall. So I stopped buying snack foods.

Pancake Boy was my second muse for seeking out the most nutrient dense foods possible. With snack foods out of the picture he refused to eat anything but pancakes. I decided if he was only going to eat pancakes then by golly they were going to be the most nutrient dense power pancakes possible. Only I still didn’t know how to make pancakes without mix.

***

As I got deeper and deeper into Omnivore’s Dilemma I became increasingly angry at the restaurants and food companies who used such questionable ingredients, especially in foods marketed to children with still developing nervous systems and brains. My children.

This was during the week between Christmas and New Years and I used my extra time around the holidays to read and research. I spent several nights into the wee hours reading online the differences between various grain grinders and finally placed an order for one.

From now on I wanted to know the source of everything we ate. I thought and burned all week on food and how disconnected we had become from its source.

I had finished reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle a few months prior. The book initially excited me just thinking growing all your own food was possible but I had no outlet for that excitement. I was disappointed and de-motivated given that I live in the city on 1/5 acre lot, 30% of which was too shady to garden and 30% of which was house. I would never have enough land to raise chickens or turkeys or grow all our food like she did.

Here it was December 31 just a few weeks after a record snowfall had covered the front lawn. I hadn’t even made jam that summer let alone put up anything that would make the basis for a meal. The meager peas and beans I had been able to grow in the shady backyard were long gone.

But what if I gave up on growing all our own food and just bought it from local farmers? I could do that so I made it my New Year’s resolution. I would start cold turkey the next day and vowed not to give a single dollar again to a processed food or large agricultural company.

We had little freezer space but I had been canning jams and pickles for years. Never mind that jams and pickles are but a small part of a balanced meal. I was undaunted and had a plan, as fuzzy as I was on the details.

So the first Saturday in January I bundled up and shopped at my local farmers market for the first time ever. The prices were staggering. The first order of business for the kids – applesauce. With few apples left I snatched up boxes of them and they weren’t cheap. Nor were they the right kind for applesauce but they were better than nothing. In the next few weeks I put up 80 pounds of apples by saucing and freezing.

Once the grain grinder was on order I realized I had no clue where to get the grains, or what to do with them. So I placed a large grain order from Bob’s Red Mill which wasn’t local but it was organic and the bulk prices were amazingly cheap. Then I scoured the internet for whole wheat recipes and ordered a few whole wheat baking books.

The grains arrived before the grain grinder and the box weighed 80 pounds. I was floored at how much stuff I got for a mere $100. For someone who had been paying $6 per loaf of whole wheat bread at the bakery that was a boon.

My journey began with grains. In a sense it’s because grain is the food with which we’ve become the most disconnected.
I had quite a few bread making flops but each week I made adjustments to the flour to water ratio and tried new techniques and soon I was making amazing fresh baked bread that caused everyone in the house to come running when I pulled it piping hot from the oven.

We frequently would shape half the dough into a loaf and use the other half for cinnamon rolls or teddy bears or bread sticks. The kids loved this new form of play dough that they were able to eat once it came out of the oven and I loved how they were connecting with their food, from grain to bread.

But my greatest triumph was making freshly ground whole wheat, nutrient dense pancakes for Pancake Boy. I tried adapting recipes that called for all purpose flour and they never came out light enough for my liking. And then I read something on the Weston Price website that talked about soaking grains overnight in acidic medium to unlock more of the nutrients and make them easier on your digestive tract.

For grins I soaked my freshly ground spelt in buttermilk overnight. The pancakes were lighter than air, fluffy without being dough-ey and crisp on the outside. They actually improved when frozen en masse and then popped in a toaster. Healthy and convenient – a bonus for me. I bumped up the number of eggs and swapped seed oil out for high lauric acid coconut oil. The buttermilk and the eggs increased the protein percentage for a pancake that stayed with you until lunchtime but didn’t bog you down.

And Pancake Boy loved them. We all did but he ate them sometimes three times a day. If that was all he was going to eat I was actually okay with that. Despite his eating strikes and refusal to eat most other foods he is following his own growth curve with no signs of trouble. No prescriptions for fake food this time!

I was flush with success from bread and pancakes and the reaction they had elicited from my family. They wanted to help choose what was next out of the oven and they wanted to help make it. This was getting fun. And we were starting to see some real savings on our food bill in the form of crackers and cereals and bread that I was no longer buying.

After experiencing savings in baked goods and snack foods I was starting to get sticker shock buying produce and cheese at the farmer’s market. So I put those next on my list of things to conquer.

There were still 3 months left until spring. Lots of time to design my grocery store in my current lawn space. I had never gardened for true sustenance before so this would be one heck of an experiment. Could a small scale gardener manage to grow enough food to feed the whole family year-round? I was about to find out.

If you want to find out too please follow along with my blog and we’ll figure it out together.

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