I recently joined a group of bloggers that want to blog about food everyday for 90 days. The goal is to make sure I blog each day and it be about food. I am going to join in and blog about my quest to feed my family "real food" and not anymore fake foods.
People tell me "you sure talk a lot about cooking and healthy foods" and it because "You just love to cook!"
Actually, No I love to eat. I love eating healthy good foods that make my body feel strong and energized. Don't get me wrong, I like everyone has had my share of McDonald's Big Macs. But more and more I find I crave healthy natural food that I make myself. Yes, I can taste the difference between those $6 organic free range chickens. They just taste so much better. So I find I'm having to cook more in fact almost everything when I can, so I will know where my food came from and what is in it. I recently saw a news report on how some fast food places sell meat that contain only 18% meat. What? Only 18% meat, what is the other 82% of your burger made of then? After much reading and research the best answer I can come up with is it's FILLER! A large amount of by products to bulk up that 18% meat filled burger. Delicious. No, more like YUCK!
So yes, while my family gave up fake fast food long ago, I then became more educated about how more of our proceed foods we buy at the grocery store are NO LONGER 100% FOOD? Things I thought were real food, but then I found out were not. So as I shopped I would read all labels on things from the store. Store bought frozen meals have so many ingredients I stopped buying them all together.
Then I watched an episode of Bill Maur on HBO, and he was discussing how more and more our foods are having non food ingredients added to make food last longer, or his example was an ingredient at Subway sandwiches that was also found in yoga mats and in the soles of our shoes. When asked why this product was used in subway's breads it was to make the bread breadier. Breadier is that even a word? I thought bread was flour yeast, water, eggs?
This is my point I feel that American's eat so many pre-made, box foods, packaged dinners you open and microwave but is it real food? In my opinion so much food isn't real food anymore. And I question is the fake foods we feed ourselves and our families making us fat, giving us diseases like diabetes and worse killing us from it's fake ingredients?
It's not as easy as I thought It would be to make sure 100% of what we eat is all natural, real food. It sounds weird and should be the opposite, but go try. For one week read everything you put into your body, even down to ketchup and salad dressings. There is so many ingredients I cannot pronounce let alone know what it is or means, and if I don't know what the word means I figure it's fake. Un like butter, eggs, salt sugar and flour.
I read a lot of articles from fellow foodies, who also want to feed their family real, natural and organic food too and stumbled upon reading about how a mother did a test on an ice cream sandwich bar she bought from Walmart. The ice cream sandwich sat outside on a table for 24 hours and she realized that the sandwich had not melt. She left it another day and no change. The ice cream remained in form and it still looked liked a ice cream sandwich. Even at 4 days no change. She began a quest to look into the ice cream she bought for her family and found even when she bought what he thought was expensive and "the best" ice cream it too contains ingredients that's make ice cream not melt. Its a fake edible plastic. So sadly, it was the last store bought ice cream we had. Now we make our own, or have to spend $8+ on a 1/2 gallon of local made ice cream. But for me I cannot stand the thought of eating and feeding us food I cannot pronounce or know what it is. Even if it's in my favorite, ice cream.
So The quest to stop feeding my family any fake foods and dedicating a lot of my time and energy into cooking all of what we eat went into full force. It's challenging, not always easy but at least I know what we are eating. In future articles I will write blogs on how I do this. How I cook some things in bulk and freeze them for later meals. I plan on blogging on specific recipes my family loves. And how to articles, on learning to make and afford organic foods year round, even on food stamps!
I try to grow as much of our summer and winter veggies as I can too. Even if you have a tiny little area, you would be surprised how much you can get from one zucchini plant, one cherry tomatoes plant, kale, and carrots! You can always do more, but most people can grow at least that. Even just in buckets. There is something extra special about planting a seed, watering it and watching it grow, to then give you the most amazing tasting produce, I have to garden! It's essential to me.
As for eating meat I have to admit we do eat some store/farmers market bought meat, and I don't go out and kill it ourselves like I wish we would. But I do try with the little meat we do eat, to buy it local know the farmers who raised them and know they lived a healthy happy organic life. Yes, I have to pay shoot 5x more for that meat, but have you seen the you tube videos of chicken breasts being injected with some kind of fluid to make the chicken breast 3x bigger. Organic free range chickens breast are no huge at all. I don't even know what they inject in the breast to make it bigger. It makes my tummy churn just thinking about it.
I cannot promise that my blog will contain pictures on every article, but I do plan on trying especially when I do recipes to try. I will also do my best to write in correct grammer and punctuation but if that sort of thing bothers you, you may not like my person STYLE of writing. I mean no disrespect, I just like to blog how I want to blog. and getting my blog out everyday for our 90 day food blog challenge is super important to me.
Thank you for reading my blog and I hope you enjoy them and continue reading in the future.
Mahalo Lea
#foodblogchallenge
