Wise Eating

Just before Zander was born, early in 1999, I saw a bumper sticker that read, "If you eat, you're involved in agriculture."  Over the next few years, as I considered this simple truth, I changed the way that I eat and feed my family.  A lot.  LOL  Mostly, I decided to stop paying farmers who destroy the living soil with chemicals.  To this day, we eat almost all organic.

Since then, I've continued to grow in awareness.  I find different ways of seeing become complimentary in neat ways.  For instance, in the macrobiotic tradition, it's important to eat foods that are in season.  This makes sense to me, as someone who believes in interconnection.  Naturally the foods that grow now are the ones most likely to nourish those who eat them.

And in raw food circles, there is an idea that fruit juices are more for cleansing and vegetable juices are more for building.  This clicked for me when I realized that the sensations I associate with hunger are sometimes a need for calories, and sometimes an awareness of cellular shift.  There is a discomfort, I find, involved in becoming more healthy.  The body is used to it's state of being.  Anything different, even if better, takes a while to become familiar.

Then I read a scientific report on health in general, and the really cool findings of what happens when people become agrarian.  The general state of health in newly agrarian peoples goes down considerably.  The results are pretty amazing, actually, even creating significant genetic alterations in just one generation.  I haven't made a deep study out of it, but it seems to me that the reason would be two fold.  First, the people are moving less, since they can and must stay near their fields.  And second, they start eating the same foods more often, and a narrower range of foods overall.

I also believe that the plans Nature/Spirit makes for us are always wiser than the plans we make for ourselves.  For instance, I notice that there are more fruits available in the summer and more vegetables available in the winter.  Zander and I have noticed that we don't like the a/c or the heater much, so we've been experimenting (pretty successfully, I might add) with acclimating as much as possible to the current weather patterns.  And it makes us hungry to be colder.  The body uses more calories, I suppose.  Thus, winter vegetables are useful, both in season and more likely to build than cleanse.  And in the summer, then fruits and light foods delight us more.  When the days are warm and lazy, it's the perfect time to cleanse.

So consider the plans laid for you in the long, slow Grace of Evolution.  I hope you eat what is both good for you and good for the earth.