What we Eat

Eating better actually tastes better – and feels better - than eating the typical American diet. It is not about giving up anything, but about gaining a wonderful new world of tastes, smells, satisfying meals, and a body that feels like it is really working well.

So what is healthy eating?

1. Eating The Right Stuff

There are two ways in which we can dramatically improve our diets and our health:

Eating Organic

Eating organic foods is better for you, and a lot better for the environment.

Many research studies have found that a long list of chemicals used as pesticides, fungicides, and fertilizers, has demonstrated or suspected deleterious effect on our health, some so long term that we won’t know the extent of the damage for years to come. Eliminating these substances from our diets, regardless of the degree of damage they might do, will make a big difference in our health over our roughly 80-year lifetimes.

It is also well known that using chemical pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers depletes the soil of the full range of nutrients that it, and we, need for good health, and significantly increases run-off and pollution in streams and rivers.

The loving thing to do is to bring Christ to our tables and to our farms and stop harming our lands and ourselves. You’ll notice the difference in your body and your soul almost immediately

Take a look at these resources;

Google Directory Page on Organic Foods

United States Department of Agriculture National Organic Program – information on what ‘organic’ means, how it is certified, and how you can know if what you are buying is really organic.

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Eating Vegetarian, ... or eating less meat ... to save your heart and the land.

It certainly isn’t necessary to be a vegetarian to be a Christian or to live simply, however it does go a long way toward making us, and the planet, much healthier, so we will begin by discussing the vegetarian option.

A good example of why a vegetarian diet is good for you, is Dr. Dean Ornish’s LifeStyle Program. Dr. Ornish has done a number of well-designed studies on the effects of a low fat vegetarian diet on heart health, and he has found that this diet not only prevents heart disease in many people, but also substantially reverses the effects of heart disease in those who are already have it. His program (which also includes, exercise, spiritual practice, and therapy, in addition to diet) is the only program that has been proven to reverse heart disease. In addition to the improvement in heart health, this plan is a terrific weight loss program, which allows you to eat as much as you want and never feel hungry. It doesn’t get much better than that!

If you don’t want to plunge fully into a vegetarian diet, you can still do yourself and the environment a lot of good by simply eating less meat, particularly red meat. The much-publicized Mediterranean diet, as well as a number of Asian diets, includes a high proportion of vegetables, fruits, grains, and seafood as opposed to the typical high-fat, red meat-based American diet. Research has shown that Mediterranean-style diets result in a much lower rate of cardiovascular disease, cancer, and obesity and they enable a much larger number of people to live off the same amount of land: they offer good health, great taste, and sustainability!

Supporting vegetarian and low meat diets are these key points:

It is vastly more difficult, resource-intensive and energy inefficient to raise animals, particularly steers and other red meat animals, for our consumption, instead of simply eating the grains and other vegetables ourselves.
Raising animals to meet our protein needs, also produces a great deal of pollution. The methane produced by animals is a major contributor to greenhouse gases, and their grazing is often responsible for polluting streams and rivers.
Our bodies not only don't need meat to be healthy, but eating meat can cause significant health problems.

See the New Community Project pages What’s For Supper and Fast Food? Not so fast! for good discussions of these issues.

Here are some excellent websites on vegetarian eating:

The Christian Vegetarian Association – A non-denominational ministry of believers dedicated to respectfully promoting healthy, Christ-centered and God-honoring living among Christians.

GoVeg.com – A source for great-tasting vegan and vegetarian recipes, and information on all aspects of vegan and vegetarian living.

International Vegetarian Union – This organization promotes vegetarianism and has a large number of articles on almost everything having to do with vegetarianism, including the controversial article Was Christ a Vegetarian?.

The Vegetarian Resource – A non-profit organization dedicated to educating the public on vegetarianism and the interrelated issues of health, nutrition, ecology, ethics, and world hunger, and includes a large assortment of resources on vegetarianism.

Vegetarian Times – Information on vegetarianism, recipes, and an online store.

And, resources on Mediterranean diets:

Women's Heart Foundation - A detailed look at the basics of Mediterranean diets.

Mediteranean Diet Secrets - This site is chocked full of information and resources on Mediterranean diets.

Mediterrasian.com - A great site that offers information, recipes and other resources for both Mediterranean and Asian diets.

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2. Buying Food Thoughtfully

In addition to buying food that is good for us, we can be a big help to the environment and our communities by carefully considering where and when we buy food.

Buying In-season, and freezing and canning locally grown foods.

Many, if not most, of the foods we eat are shipped a very long distance to our tables. During the first half of the Twentieth Century we primarily depended on local orchards and truck farms for most of our fresh items. However with the rise centralized industrial farming, and globalized agriculture and their “economies of scale” in the second half of the Century, we now pay a large percentage of the price of these products in transportation costs. More importantly, we pay an even larger environmental price in the resulting pollution from diesel and jet exhaust, just getting it all here. This is not a small consideration, since this transportation puts billions of pounds of CO2 in the atmosphere each year, adding significantly to our global warming burden.

A large percentage of our real needs for fresh foods can be met by buying local vegetables during the growing season, and we can buy most meats locally all year long. Why buy chain supermarket tomatoes from Florida or California in August, when they are plentiful almost everywhere in the continental U.S.? It doesn’t make economic or environmental sense to do so, especially when you factor-in the fact that most local produce is going to be fresher and taste better than their jet-set cousins.

The problem can also be addressed after the growing season, by buying the goodies in the summer and freezing or canning them so you have them all year.

Church project suggestion:

Freezing and canning, although labor-intensive, is a lot more efficient and fun, when done in groups in a large kitchen such as those in the typical church building. When a group of families share the work of preparing and processing the produce in one kitchen that already has the proper equipment, and is easy to clean – especially with the extra hands – the work goes much more quickly, and it is a phenomenal community-builder.

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Buying Locally

Buying locally saves energy and reduces pollution:

The energy expended, and the pollution generated by shipping foods from coast to coast or half way around the world (now quite common) when those same products are grown and produced locally, is truly sinful. Unfortunately all of the extra costs for this unnecessary transportation do not show-up in the prices we pay for the food. If it did, we would buy much more locally grown food simply to save money. However, much of the added transportation costs are in the costs to clean up the environmental damage done by the pollution over the next several generations.

Again, this is NOT loving our neighbors! Forcing everyone to pay more for the clean-up of entirely preventable environmental damage, and to live in a degraded environment while they pay more - merely for our own convenience - is egocentrically thoughtless, and most likely not what Jesus had in mind!

Options for buying locally:

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)

At a CSA farm you buy a share of a local farmer’s harvest, and receive a weekly (usually) portion of that week’s harvest of whatever is in season. The weekly basket varies in both variety and quantity of food depending on the amount of the harvest for that week. Through this arrangement, the farmer has a customer base that he can depend on throughout the growing season, and customers (share owners) get a dependable supply of high quality and healthy food (often organic). Farmers often arrange drop sites that are close to groups of share holders, and where that isn’t done, shareholders visit the farm to pick up their goods.

Farmers markets

These are found in many communities. Here a number of farmers bring their produce to a central market each week. The benefit for shoppers in this arrangement is that it offers more flexibility, although it is a less dependable source of cash for the farmer. It brings you the same high quality locally produced food as a CSA, but in the variety and quantity that you chose rather than relying on the variety one particular farm is able to offer on a given day.

Find out more about CSA’s and farmer’s markets:

Local Harvest – Online store for local organically grown products and resources for finding Community Supported Agriculture farms, and farmers markets near you.

Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education – Find a CSA near you. SARE helps advance farming systems that are profitable, environmentally sound and good for communities through a nationwide research and education grants program.

Real People Eat Local - A Mid-Atlantic resource for finding and using local foods including farmer's markets and CSA's in the Mid-Atlantic region.

Locavores - A group of concerned San Fransico Bay area culinary adventurers who are making an effort to eat only foods grown or harvested within a 100 mile radius of San Francisco. This site is loaded with help and resources for people wanting to eat local.

Buying locally supports local businesses and communities: As discussed on our Community page, building community is critical to Christian simple living. One way to help build your community is to shop in, and otherwise support local business such as local farmers and markets as well as pharmacies, food coops, and other stores. Supporting existing local farmers will encourage more farmers to move into your area and increase the variety and quantity of fresher, organic, foods available to you. In this way, your community becomes more self-sustaining, independent, and healthier.

The biggest problem we have accessing locally grown produce, is that in temperate weather zones with four seasons, it is difficult, if not impossible to have fresh produce in the winter after the growing season ends. Normally the only option is to can or freeze as much as we can during the growing season. Of course this takes additional time and effort which not everyone is willing or able to do.

One way of approaching canning and freezing, as mentioned above, is to do it as a group at a central location such as a church kitchen. When a group pitches-in to pickup and deliver the produce and wash and prepare it, the work goes very quickly, and there are usually a number of “voices of experience” to guide the work and get excellent results. It only dirties one kitchen, which is usually easy to clean up, especially with many hands, and it is a lot more fun than working alone. It can even be organized as an assembly line, and over time, can become very efficient. It may also be possible to have farmers drop the produce right at the church on 'canning day' saving even more on transportation costs.

It might also be possible to use this method in preparing entire pre-packaged frozen meals like the new Assemble-your-own-meals stores such as Super Suppers, My Girlfriends Kitchen, and Dream Dinners. Over the course of a summer, if this were done on a regular basis, families could have a large cache of family-sized dinners ready through-out the winter.

We should also encourage the growth and expansion of local and regional commercial food processors who purchase locally grown foods. In the early part of the 20th Century, most food processors were either local or regional, but with industry consolidation most food production was nationalized. We can reverse that trend by supporting new local processors. A good starting place is your local agricultural extension service, as well as your state university’s school of agriculture to find out what programs they offer to support this type of development. Click here to find your local program through the United States Department of Agriculture Cooperative Extension System.

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