Small Changes and Big Quantities...

Two things that have been on my mind lately and I have been talking about with various people a lot -- the topics of small changes and big quantities.

First, small changes.  I hear a lot of variations of this same idea, which boils down to the same thing: "Karen, you are out of your f*ing tree if you think I'm going to (fill in the blank). Usually it's something along the lines of:  cook from scratch, drink raw milk, can, ferment anything, etc. etc. etc.  I am (insert a reason here) too tired, too busy, too something."  That is totally o.k.!  It isn't like some magic fairy came to my house and taught me how to ferment sauerkraut!  I am always learning and trying new things.  It has been a very gradual process.  Baby steps tend to stick better than huge changes anyway.  Some things have worked for our family and some things have not.  I just try to do BETTER.   Just better, not perfect.  What can you do better? Give up 1 junk food item?  Try a new healthy recipe this week?  Kick the pop habit?  Get rid of as much processed food as you can and you will be miles apart from the average unhealthy American.

The second thing I wanted to touch on is quantity.  If your family eats a lot of something, it might be worth making from scratch or improving in some way.  Conversely, if your family never or rarely eats something, why bother?   A couple examples:  we rarely eat ketchup. I think we ate all of 1 bottle last year.  So I just buy the Trader Joe's kind without corn syrup.  I'm not going to worry about a bit of sugar the one time a month my kids eat ketchup.  But we eat a lot of mayonnaise, so I make my own. (Plus it tastes 100 times better than the crap from the store.) We eat about a pint to a quart a month and more frequently than that in summer.  We don't eat lunch meat so I tend to make a lot of tuna salad, egg salad, etc. plus salad dressings and potato salad in summer.   Another example is meat.  We also eat quite a bit of meat, so we eat high quality meat.  Nina Planck states in her book Real Food: What to Eat and Why that it is more important to eat organic meat than organic produce because the toxins accumulate in the animal tissues and the higher on the food chain, the more concentrated the toxins become.  So we spend a greater portion on our food budget on healthy meat, eggs, and milk and don't worry as much about organic produce.  We do eat a ton of apples and bananas and mostly buy those organic.  We get good plums for a couple weeks each year at the farmers market and buy on taste. I don't give a Fig Newton if those plums are organic or not.  Those plums are just darn tasty and 8 non-organic plums a year aren't going to hurt a soul.

My two cents.  Input?