Veggie Daddy Rule #5: Know Thy Food Source

"The stuff we throw away is what we're paying for...the packaging, printing, manufacturing, warehousing, refrigeration, and distribution. After all this has been paid off, there's not much money left for the actual ingredients in the food. This is why most processed, packaged, and prepared foods are full of chemical flavors, colors, and empty calories created to make actual food ingredients go further. Another reason for enjoying more whole, fresh, raw foods straight from the source." -- Ani Phyo, author of Ani's Raw Food Essentials.

Got this from Chapters for ten bucks. Good deal, I must say.

Veggie Daddy Rule #5: Know Thy Food Source

Veggie Daddy Fun Fact: Thomas F. Pawlick from The End of Food says the Canadian potato has lost 100% of its Vitamin A. This doesn't just apply to potatoes, but all of our fruits and vegetables, grains, and even our sodium-solution-pumped meat has lost massive amounts of nutrients over many years. Synthetic fertilizers are a big part of the blame, the food industry as a whole, but we, too, are a big part of the blame. We choose to buy inferior food. My guess is that this could turn around if we started to pay more attention to where our food comes from: who's growing it, who's making it, who's selling it, and who's buying it. And don't forget the most important question of all: What is in it? Take the Slate quiz and see how well you do. Our food has become so alien to us, we need the food companies to come up with a fancy brand name in order to tell us what it is we're eating. If the Slate quiz makes anything clear, it's that the food we are eating is not food at all. So, again, if it's not food, what in God's name is it?

That fruit you're buying that was shipped from God knows where isn't getting soft because the fruit is being harvested when it is barely ripe. Then the fruit gets subjected to bouts of toxic polyethelene gas as if in a modern-day Auschwitz re-enactment in order to "ripen" the fruit in the "ripening" rooms on the trucks as they get shipped thousands of miles to our favorite grocery store. The fruit looks amazing, and then we take it home with us and bite into that juicy tomato, which isn't juicy at all, it just looked juicy, and it has no flavor at all, it just looked like it did. What is happening to the food? It's being gassed to death in trucks. Do you think this gas might affect our health? I'll let you figure that one out.

Synthetic fertilizers only focus on three nutrients (the classic NPK formula) when we actually need seventeen essential nutrients to grow our food. Monsanto is trying to sue farmers for trying to steal their seeds as the genetically modified crops inadvertently contaminate organic, non GM crops. "The major biotech companies currently own 50 percent of the world’s commercial seeds, and we certainly don’t want to get into a situation where a few chemical companies own all our commercial seeds," says Andrew Kimbrell, founder and exec. director of the Center for Food Safety. Seeds aren't very profitable until you find some way to patent them. Now they can make you bank. Now you can "smile as you kill" as you join the others at "the top of the hill." 

Yet we must stay low to the ground and eat low on the food chain, foods close to the earth, as local and organic as possible. I just learned that genetically modified food is still considered organic. This is a joke. And the joke's on us. Thomas, a guy I know from down at Harbourside told me to Google "Cow Human Hybrid" and "Spider Goat". When I get the time, I will, but from what he told me last night, we are in serious trouble. And at the rate we are currently going, we are letting these people control our entire food supply. When will we TAKE THE POWER BACK? Only time will tell.  

Eat B(right),

Veggie Daddy

And don't forget Veggie Daddy Rule #4!

The More Real Food You Eat, The Less Food You Will Eat

FOOD DIARY

Dinner time! I made this dish here, an Indian-style braised-cauliflower with a Basmati rice pilaf and toasted slivered almonds on the side. It was soooo good, all four of us ate it, and I had two helpings.

So right now, I am so sated by all the nutrient-dense foods I've had today that I don't even have room for the carrot cake that my wife somehow dropped out of her ass when I wasn't looking. I don't even know when she made it, I didn't see her do it. She's quick and sneaky like that. And she's not even supposed to make anything on Mother's Day, but there you go (shrug.)

Here's the cake which I am too full to eat right now:

And now for another Veggie Daddy Fun Fact:

The more nutrient-dense foods you eat, the more sated, full, you will actually feel, so much so, that you can't even eat a piece of carrot cake even though you only had a few pieces of apple and peanut butter for lunch, as in my case today. (I also had another peanut-butter and chocolate muffin on the way to Cost-co. Yes, we shop at Cost-Co. The horror, I know.)

But it's the truth. When your body gets the nutrients it needs, as opposed to many of the empty calories I used to eat with all of the processed non-foods that I see so many people throw in their grocery carts, that I used to throw in our grocery cart for years, your body will send a signal to your brain that you are done, finito. And you will eat LESS.

Tonight, I enjoyed the dinner so much that I think I ate to 90-95% of my capacity, most likely because I skipped lunch and thought it'd be fine to eat a bit more for dinner. Though, when it comes to eating, I know I shouldn't listen to my brain on an intellectual level but on a physical one. Nevertheless, eat more I did, and now I'm done. Totally sated. So stuffed I can't eat home-made carrot cake. Even though I hardly ate any lunch. Which leads me to my...

Veggie Daddy Conclusion:

If you want to lose weight, eat more real food, and thus you will automatically eat less.

This is true for me anyway because I have been (mostly) a vegetarian for the past ten years and ate loads of processed food for all those years. I couldn't gain any weight, no matter how many cookies I ate, but I also never seemed to feel full. I was always hungry, constantly. And now I know why: I was eating empty calories, my body wasn't getting what it needed, just what it thought it wanted, er, craved.

I craved cookies, ice-cream, butter, cheese, I ate eggs, drank milk with my cookies, and I always complained to my wife how the vegetarian dinners never seemed to be substantial enough for a growing boy like me. (I weigh 140 lbs. and I'm 6 feet tall.) I was always hungry. And whenever we went to the grocery store, I'd throw in lots of shit in the cart, and our grocery bills were always more when I went shopping with her. Lots more. That's rarely the case now. On both counts. I eat way less and we spend way less, and I feel more sated than I ever have in my whole life.

This is why I am writing this blog, to just share what I have/am discovering. I think it is amazing and I would like to pass it on.

So, the more real food you eat, the less of it you will eat, and so you have no choice but to lose weight. You don't even have a choice on the matter because your body, once sated, will not let you go past the mark. Perhaps this is what Buddhists mean by enlightenment. Once we become conscious/enlightened to the essential Buddha-nature that surrounds us everywhere, it becomes almost impossible not to see what lies down in the murky depths, what has always laid down under the murky depths of what we call reality, which is really just The Matrix, you know. I digress...

At Cost-Co, here is what we bought:

Canola Oil

Soy Sauce

Dempster's Ancient Grains Bread (processed)

Carrots

Red Grapes

Fry's Cocoa (processed)

Larabars (processed)

Gala Apples

Raisins

Dried Mangoes (processed)

Pistachios (the label of which says allergy warning: contains pistachio nuts)

Butter Lettuce (not to be confused with butterface)

Pineapple (Grill 'em and top with ginger ice-cream)

Avocados

Bagels (processed)

Dried bluberries (processed)

Bill total: $130

We also went to Dominion, bill total: $81.

So we're spending $210 this week on food. We have spent an average of $700 on food for the past three months for a family of four. This average also includes anything else you care to buy at Dominion that is non food-related, like cleaning supplies, toiletries and the like. (We don't every buy cleaning supplies, though, highly toxic and a big waste of moulah.)

So, $700 a month for a family of four, shopping at Dominion, Cost-Co, and sometimes Sobey's.

The only reason I mention this is because I want to dispel any myths right now about how it costs so much to eat real food. As you can see, this is clearly not the case. By the way, do you know how much you're paying for food each month? If not, I strongly encourage you to try it out. It was pretty revealing for me.

Eat B(right),

Veggie Daddy