How Do I know It's Food?

How do we tell the food from the non-food? You know that joke when looking at the cereal aisle in the grocery store, it might be a toss up whether the box or the contents provide more nutrition. I don't know if someone has tested that!

Last few weeks, I got obsessed with sprouting, especially things on my grain list for Type A. So I started a little buckwheat farm. After a week, that thing wouldn't stop. I ate 3 inch sprouts that were pretty tasty all week. They just kept growing, new ones coming. In the photo you can see the little hulls dangling on the ends. About ten cents worth of seed and I had salads all week. Interesting! Then amaranth and chia for cereal. That took care of two thirds of my meals, which left Quinn's Wrap Shack and a couple friends' soup/stew gifts to round out the week. I probably spent under $10 for food. But the big payoff was how good I felt. That bulge in my belly went away and my guts were happy.

Remember chia seeds? Among his Elvis memorabilia, my friend Fran had an Elvis chia pet which was too cool to be believable. What got lost in the 'chia pet' frenzy was the high nutritional value of chia. It was considered sacred for that reason in Mexico and parts of South America, yet another gift from that region. Soaked in a little water, chia can be added to anything-bread, cereal, waffles, smoothies. It seems to enhance flavor as well. Just getting started on this project. I can get a close to a gallon of chia seeds for $4.37 from Azure Standard and I use a couple tablespoons for a serving. That comes to 1.7 pennies per tablespoon. I defy you to find a bigger nutritional bang for your buck. The complete protein is super portable since you can eat them any way you want. Amaranth costs half that but it takes more so it comes out about the same.

The former sacred cows of nutrition are justifiably under attack. Milk, whole grains, fresh greens and vegetables (non-organic). When do the sulfites, pesticides and herbicides in commercial produce cancel out the nutritional value. Is anyone doing the math? GMOs, growth hormones, anti-biotics, ultra-pasteurizing and preservatives have unbalanced the nutrition in dairy products. I didn't even count the herbicide and pesticide dose from the cattle feed. I don't see that commercial dairy products even qualify as food anymore.

In a brilliant marketing move, the dairy industry has shifted the blame onto the consumer. Lactose intolerant. Interesting. Pasteurizing while important for sanitation, killed the digestibility for most adult and many infant humans by removing the enzyme that allows us to digest it. A calf could not get anything out of her mother's milk if passed through the gamut of pasteurizing, homogenizing and hormone enhancing that has been the recent fate of all commercially available milk.

I'm going to continue the optimum diet experiment. What I demand-freshness, affordability, and maximum nutritional wallop. Check out alley grazer for more ideas on that.

The question for me is, even if the food has maximum value on all these scales, can my particular body digest it? Is it food if I get nothing out of it? There is so much more to nutrition than what is in the food, though that is the first hurdle for sure. If it isn't there in the food, I'm not going to manufacture it out of thin air. Might have to question that presumption as well. Still, it is good to look at everything involved from when the substance enters my lips to all the work those nutrients do and how, in my specific human body. More on that next time.

Happy Eating!