Organic- Farm to table…What’s the big deal

Well for quite some time I was a little unclear about what it all meant. It wasn’t until I started noticing some issues with my health that I really dug into the importance of Farm to table and organic. I started to look into some things I was experiencing and discovering that a lot of them simply came from tainted avenues of eating. So my mission for quite some time has been to clean up my eating by cutting out the middle men as much as possible.

I began to go to the butcher shop for my meats. Why you ask, because the butcher is the one that sees that fresh meat after it’s demise. The butcher usually knows when the animals life was taken and the farms feeding and care practices for the animals they raise. This is also the only way to make sure your getting fresh meat, meat that has never been previously frozen. Meat that has not been in a factory freezer for months and has been injected with chemicals to make it last longer in the store. Not to mention meat that has been chemically color treated to make it look younger than it is, or made to look more like what you’d expect.

I have been eating this way for years and I can tell you that you taste some of the differences and feel some of the cleanliness to organic and farm fresh eating immediately. The more time you spend eating clean the more you start to notice the chemically soaked food. This is especially important for the popular foods that we eat. Often times these are the foods that have the heaviest concentration of chemicals sprayed on or injected into them. I can now tell if something has pesticides on it when I eat it, there is a taste that will stand out when you stay away from it long enough.

I found out long ago from unconventional methods first and then finally through conventional methods that I am allergic to wheat. For years I thought I had a milk issue but none of my test came back that way. It was interesting for me to learn that I just have an issue digesting pasteurized milk. I can’t digest it at all. Raw milk goes down just fine with no issues. So, I had to avoid any pasteurized milk products because the way they process it makes it impossible to digest.

This topic is one that has been made to be very complicated when it is really super simple. We are organic beings, meaning we are made of materials that cannot be created by any chemical materials. We are made of naturally occurring materials that create of like kind. We are not the product of any chemicals. This is what we need to keep in mind for our fuel. It also needs to be made of its own kind, not having interference with chemicals and laboratories.

This means on the topic of fruits and veggies, that GMO food is not organic. GMO stands for genetically modified organisms. You ask, well are foods labeled GMO, the answer is yes and no. You know those annoying stickers you peel off your fruits and veggies? They are an undercover way of labeling them GMO or not. There used to be an index available to tell you the number sequence to uncover that. GMO foods are manipulated in laboratories to have whatever sustaining qualities they would like it to have and anything else they are secretly doing to it.

That makes foods that are not labeled organic dangerous to our organic bodies as some of these foods could be undercover GMO and in most cases they are drowned in pesticides.

Buying organic is important for all of your food, but the most popular foods especially. To avoid the price difference find a local farmer that doesn’t use pesticides and grows his crops organically. Find a farmers market and search out some there, but lastly don’t buy more that you can typically eat in a weeks time. I for one am big on buying a lot of fruits and veggies and wasting them because I was too ambitious about what I was honestly going to consume.

When it comes to meats and dairy they are a totally different ball game. It is very important for them to be organic but also for them to eat a diet of what they would normally have. For example cows eat grass, not corn or grains. So, if you eat beef you need to be eating organic grass fed beef. What this means is that I want beef that has no antibiotics, or growth hormones, or meds of any kind. Fish don’t eat soy or corn so, you want to eat wild fish, not farm raised. You want uncured meats, which means no chemicals like nitrates. You want your milk to be from a grass-fed cow and not homogenized or pasteurized. This one is the one that really annoys me because they actually try to feed people the bacteria scare story. Drinking raw unpasteurized grass fed milk has all the components needed to not only digest the milk but to truly provide you body with very good nutrition and body repair food like collagen. I challenge you to try some, if you usually get an upset stomach like I used to, you will be pleasantly surprised. The milk that is on our shelves now is not only homogenized, but ultra pasteurized to the point that its junk food. It has nothing in it to be of value to our organic bodies. Next they will want to pasteurize breast milk.

As for packaged food items you want to see as few ingredients as possible. The ideal is 2-3, but not more that 5. Also, make sure the items you buy don’t have a lot of sodium and make sure the salt source is sea salt. Kelp seasoning is another great addition as it provides more minerals than just iodine. Sodium from any other source will just drive up your blood pressure. Purchase seasonings with no salt or sodium so that you can control the amount of sodium you add to your diet. Be careful of going over 60mg of sodium in any item you consume with 1-3 servings. Of course watch the sugar and avoid things that add a lot of unknown chemicals to the ingredients.

I know we all get more and more busy everyday but try to explore some easier options for cooking so that none of these unknowns are served to you when you eat out. Make time to plan out your meals and join a co-op and utilize some of the food delivery options to get good clean foods to fuel yourself with.

May your journey bring you all you desire!