My Food Evolution

I began thinking the other day that a great topic for a blog would be the evolution of my food choices.  I've run the gamut from hardly any red meat and no seafood but shrimp, to vegetarian with fish/seafood allowed, to full meat eater.  I've gone from a boring diet consisting of eating the same things every day for weeks on end to cooking everything from scratch with variety being the spice of life.  I think my food journey has now led us to a point that I am very happy with.  A place where I feel my food choices are conscientious, have a purpose, and hopefully have the health of me and my family in mind.  It was a long and winding road that led to this point.

 I was never that kid that would only eat grilled cheese and spaghetti, although I did like me some enriched white flour spaghetti with sauce, hold the meat.  I just never particularly cared for red meat.  Chicken was OK, but never a huge favorite.  Turkey for Thanksgiving?  No thanks.  I loved raw vegetables, but nothing cooked, turned my nose up to steak and loved pizza, mexican, anything with cheese.  Spicy food?  Not for me, even mildly spicy things made me sweat and my nose run.

It was probably when I went to college and ventured into the culinary world on my own that I really began thinking about what I was eating.  Initially, living in a dorm with a shared kitchen with the entire floor and a microwave and mini fridge in our room it was what was fast, easy, and nonperishable.  So for almost an entire year I survived on ramen noodle cups for lunch and tricolor pasta with Italian dressing and parmesan cheese on it for dinner.  To add some variety occasionally I would hit up the Blimpie subs across the street or the Wendys in the student union.  If I remember correctly, by the end of my sophomore year I had changed my major to Human Nutrition, never realizing how fascinating I would find the topic.  Food mattered (yes, there is a similarly titled documentary that has greatly shaped my recent eating habits).  What we take into our bodies directly affects the functioning of all the systems in our body.  Without the proper nutrients the biochemical processes that our bodies are meant to perform on a regular basis for every single thing from taking a step to creating a thought to sleeping to filtering poisons out of our bodies, will not work as efficiently as they should.  I really started thinking more about what I ate and started the rudimentary process of picking out healthier foods.  That first step was mostly whole grains replacing white pasta and bread and replacing my cheese with lower fat versions and adding yogurt, which I'd previously hated, to my regular food intake.  I also now had an understanding of portion size and was educated on reading labels for things like sugar and sodium content as well as saturated and trans fats.  Little did I know this was just the tip of the iceberg for how I would scrutinize my foods later in life.

I had a spell in grad school as a vegetarian/fish eater.  I can't remember exactly how long it lasted, I would say a year to a year and a half or so.  It was not a hard transition for me, I rarely ate meat anyway and didn't really like chicken or pork.  I missed processed meats like lunch meat and ham.  I also went through a phase where I ate tuna with pasta every day for lunch for about 3 months straight.  I'm still worried that I've given myself mercury poisoning, although I did eat regular tuna, not albacore that's higher in mercury.  During my veggie days I learned to like tofu, but still wasn't super adventurous with food.  I ate a lot of soy replacements for meat.  Soy ground "meat," soy "chicken," soy "hamburgers."  Organic was just starting to become popular and as someone who was already big into the environment, I was all for organic foods as I could afford them.  Then I met my Cajun husband and began eating meat every day and developed a love for spicy.  Fast forward to today.

I'm not sure when exactly the full transition occurred, but somewhere between grad school nearly a decade ago and now I have become a food purist.  I still have my moments and places of weakness, i.e. we still eat at Buffalo Wild Wings nearly every week, I will sometimes get fast food if I'm on the road and starving (but not McDonalds, I'm boycotting them) and I do have the occasional deli meat.  For the most part I am eating in a way I would never have thought back when I was majoring in nutrition.  We are eating vegetarian 4 days a week, have fish 2 nights a week, and splurge with Buffalo Wild Wings (we will quit this habit someday, I swear) or I will make a meal with grass fed beef or chicken.  We eat tons of vegetables, mostly organic-I carry a card in my wallet to let me know which are the most pesticide laden fruits and vegetables and spend the extra money on organic versions of these and will be doing a better job hitting the farmer's market this summer for local produce.  My favorite snacks (I really love them and am pretty addicted) are dried seaweed and kale chips.  I garden organically, growing a lot of my own vegetables and herbs in the summer months.  We eat whole grains.  We hardly eat anything that comes from a box anymore, 80% of my shopping is done in the bulk foods and produce department.  We choose non-GMO (genetically modified organisms) products whenever possible.  I recently researched it online and found that Morningstar Farms (Kellogg) and Boca (Kraft) do not use GMO free soy, so they are out of my kitchen.  I will only choose vegetarian and vegan products that voluntarily will state on their label if they are GMO free since the United States refuses to require it.  Thanks to my daughter's dairy allergy I had to give it up to nurse her and now my husband is on the dairy-free bandwagon too, but my son is too addicted to dairy for him to be dairy free.  This once cheeseaholic doesn't miss it and I believe it has contributed to me getting down to within one pound my goal weight, a weight I haven't been in a decade, since I graduated from college.

It may seem complicated, it may seem boring, but after watching such documentaries as Food Matters, Food Inc., Dirt and Forks Over Knives I feel I am helping my family have a one up on a lot of the life threatening illnesses of our time; cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease.  And it's not boring at all.  Spices instead of fat and sugar give food flavor.  And really, how hard is it to shop on the outside of the grocery store, avoiding the processed middle aisles?  I have to admit I do have to go to the store a little more often or the produce goes bad.  But if produce rots in my fridge, I just throw it in my compost bin where it becomes beautiful fertilizer for my garden.  It's win, win.  What's next?  Our own chickens and harvesting our own eggs?  I can't wait to continue experimenting and learning.  This is how our grandparents ate, real food, not something created in a laboratory.  Everything goes back to the dirt, that's true about food and it's true about life.