Satsuma Orange, Mango, and Pineapple Salad

Lunch time:

I took this picture outside because it doesn't look so good in the basement, which is where our kitchen is currently stationed. 

Talk about your fast food: 

Mango, satsuma (mandarin) oranges, and pineapple on a bed of Lolla Rosa and butter lettuce. Took all of 5 minutes to  make. The reason I threw these ingredients together is because of the food combining rules I mentioned awhile ago.

Oranges and pineapple are Acids and mangoes are Sub-Acids. They can play together. Lettuce cuts the sweet. This particular lettuce mixture is great with these fruits. You could also add celery to give it crunch.

Here's a pic of my Granola Girl eating it. If you look carefully, she ate all the satsuma oranges. These suckers are from Peru. (When you're in Newfoundland like we are, just about everything you buy on the rock is far away, so I don't want anyone wagging their fingers to me about carbon footprints. More on this later.) Now, who doesn't love mandarin oranges?

Don't forget to eat the colors of the rainbow.

Eat B(right),

Veggie Daddy

Overconsumption of Animal Protein Leads to High Blood Pressure

"Researchers say the pace of weight gain was both dramatic and disturbing."


No kidding.

What this article does not say is that eating and drinking too much animal protein is the main cause of this. You can read all about why in The China Study.

Why We Eat Crap: The Luciferian Bling-Bling

I don't usually go to the grocery store but I happened to yesterday, and I am just in awe of all the non-food that tempts us on just about every aisle in the store. It is so easy to just walk up and grab anything off of the shelf that promises to give us enormous benefits if we eat them. You have spaghetti that is reinforced with Omega 3's, packaged, sugar-laden cereal that promises to have loads of fiber and Vitamin C, Kraft Peanut Butter that is not peanut butter at all, and too many other non-foods to mention. But that is what they are: non-foods. And they are very attractive. And we are throwing them into our grocery carts day after day, hour after hour. We are completely buying into the bluff.

But can we really be blamed? Of course not. We're only human after all. Who can resist a nice, cold Nestle Toll-House ice-cream sandwich on a hot day when offered? Not me...I love ice-cream, cookies, wine, beer. The list goes on and on. When tempted with the de-lish, it is so hard to resist. Especially when it is staring us in the face as we hungrily stroll up and down the aisles of a well-stocked grocery store. We are dazed, shocked, really, by all the "good" food we can eat. But it is not food at all. It is imitation, fake food. But it looks so good, so yummy for the tummy, we want to eat it anyway. We even (and this shows just how far gone we really are) want our kids to eat it, too. Not just that, but we think our kids should eat it. We think this food is actually good for them.

Let's call this phenomenon the Luciferian Bling-Bling, the art of razzling and dazzling your innocent subjects into dutiful submission as they blankly and thoughtlessly reach out for whatever it is that's being sold. It's not that we are stupid. We know deep down that buying Oreos and Pepsi for our kids might not be the best thing for them. Stocking up on chips, soda, and frozen, antibiotic-laden, dead red meat with nary a real food that awaits us in the produce section to be found in the cart--we know this isn't the best for us. So why do we do it? Because of The Luciferian Bling-Bling. We simply can't help it. Or can we?

We clearly aren't thinking. We are not conscious. We are forgetting that these food giants like Kraft and Del Monte really are jolly green giants, relative to us. They hold an exorbitant amount of power and wealth. And we buy into the shit they are selling. And though we know deep down the food they all but shove down our throats is killing us, we give them our money, every single day. Why not just cut the middle man out and pay them to kill us directly, scratch the food altogether.

But the Luciferian Bling-Bling goes even beyond the giant food companies. If you look closely (and most of us don't want to) you will see the L.B.B. is what threads the fabric of our modern civilization together, it is the lubrication that keeps the cogs, gears, and motors turning--in the name of progress. It goes all the way down to the meat and dairy boards, the F.D.A., the U.S.D.A., the history of North America, the history of big agriculture, Monsanto, global food shortages, big Pharma, jobs, jobs, jobs, wealth, wealth, wealth, power, power, power. And we are little peons getting crushed in their hands.

It's not a conspiracy. The knowledge is out there. Read The China Study to get a real good look at how consuming animal protein leads to disease and cancer. Read In Defense of Food. Read Fast Food Nation. Watch Forks Over Knives. Watch Earthlings. Watch Food Inc. and King Corn. The knowledge is out there. It's just that so many of us want to stick our heads in the sand and pray to God we don't get sick, though we know deep down the odds are becoming ever greater against us. It's that so many of us are razzled and dazzled by the Luciferian Bling-Bling. We have all but lost the trail back to Eden, a land rich with fruits and vegetables that had met all our needs. Now we have to be fed by Kraft. We feed our kids Kraft as well. We'll come up for air every once in awhile, reading the news headlines of how 1 out of 4 commercial meats are tainted or mad cow, or hog farm waste run-off. Three year-olds have high blood pressure now. We get briefly alarmed, but it isn't long before the Luciferian Bling-Bling takes a-hold of us, and we stick our heads back into the sand and eat crap. Thank god the crap we eat tastes so good or we'd be really screwed.

Eat B(right),
Veggie Daddy

Breakfast: Orange and Grape Salad

Breakfast time, what to eat? I know the pineapple isn't ripe yet because I can't easily pick off any of the top leaves. I've got loads of oranges and I still have some grapes, so I threw this little fruit salad together:

Simple, easy, totally fiberific. No dressing, the juice of the oranges and grapes replace any need for a dressing. The greens cut the sweetness and vice/versa. And as I mentioned yesterday, oranges and grapes combine very well. 

Oranges belong to the Acid family and grapes belong to the Sub-acid family, which can both be eaten with a lettuce mix. I could have thrown some avocado in this as well, but I decided not to this morning. This also adheres to Veggie Daddy Rule #1. I always try to eat at least one meal that is completely raw, and breakfast is a great way to do this. It's easy to get in the habit of eating a large fruit breakfast, because you're generally going to have a veggie-type salad with your lunch or dinner.

Eat (B)right,

Veggie Daddy

Oranges and Bananas Don't Mix

Well, our kitchen is completely gutted and we had to move our culinary operations down into our cold and foreboding basement. But now that things have settled down, I think I can start blogging again.

Here is what I just ate for lunch:

What you see there are red seedless grapes, mango, and banana resting quietly on a bed of Cost-Co's Spring Lettuce Mix. That's it. All raw. All vitally alive. And please note there is no salad dressing. With all of these fruits, you don't need any salad dressing. Not only that but the greens cut the sweetness of the fruit and the sweetness of the fruit cuts the bitterness of the greens. It's a perfect harmony--no fats or oils. Completely Fiberific. 

By the way, I only just learned how to properly cut a mango. I was making it way too difficult on myself and actually kept trying to peel the whole thing. How stupid of me! Here's how to cut a mango to learn for yourself. See how simple it is?

Lately I have been very interested in learning about food combining, which foods go best with what. This is especially important when you're eating more raw foods together in a meal. I have known about the concept of food combining for a long time because my grandparents use to have food combination place-mats, but I never took any of it to heart--until now. 

What happened was I juiced an orange, pineapple and mango, then blended it all with a banana. Big mistake. It didn't go down well at all. What's up with that, I thought? It's all fruit, nice and alive, why doesn't my stomach like it? Well, after quickly doing a little research I learned one of the first rules about food combining:

Acid fruits should not be eaten with Sweet fruits. In other words, oranges and bananas don't go together like a horse and carriage. Acid fruits should be eaten with other acid or sub-acid fruits and sweet should be eaten with other sweet. Sub-acid can be eaten with either acid or sweet. 

Let's think of them as three families. Two of the families are like the Montagues and the Capulets, always at war with each other. Then there's a third family in the middle that plays with both sides, but never allies with them; they stay neutral. This neutral family is comprised of the sub-acid fruits. But the Acids and Sweets are at war--when eaten together, they can make your stomach do loop-d-loops. Who knew food could be so violent! 

The concept of food combining might seem pretty strange to someone who's never heard of the idea before, but most of us don't eat too many raw foods together, so why would we need to pay attention? Well, if you're starting to introduce more raw food into your diet like I am, you'll quickly see why you might need to start learning some of the basic rules. You can get all crazy with it, like anything, but this main rule is a great one to follow if you're just starting out. I am just starting out myself, too!

So let's quickly analyze my lunch up there and see why I combined those particular foods.

Most grapes are sub-acid, and mango is considered sub-acid to sweet. Banana is sweet, so we have a fair food combination between the neutral Sub-acids and the Sweets. Then I ate them all together on a bed of lettuce because lettuce (and celery) go nicely with fruits as I mentioned above. But don't eat Fruits with Vegetables; they're enemies, too, apparently. (Tomatoes and cucumbers don't count.)

Finally, this meal is completely fiberific, the importance of which seems to be way understated in our Western culture. The importance of eating whole foods lies in the fact that you are eating the fiber that comes in a whole food. Fiber acts like Dran-o does for a clogged sink: it de-clogs all the crap inside of us, literally and figuratively. From the research I've done, we could avoid many diseases if we just increased our dietary fiber intake. And no, fiber supplements don't count! And processed food? Fugghedabouddit.

Eat B(right),

Veggie Daddy

We've Lost Our Connection to the Double Rainbow, "Oh, my god"

FOOD DIARY


So for lunch today, my wife was home once again and ate exactly the same sandwich that she ate yesterday, as did my other little granola girl. I ate the braised-cauliflower leftovers.

Here's a picture of my hunter gal-therer showing the snacks we (the girls and I) ate after school:

Let's diagnose this plate, shall we? Let's see, we have pistachios in their shells, dried mango at 9 o'clock, raisins at the top, and those are those home-made Tamari-roasted almonds I've mentioned before, which you can make right-quick at home. Three out of four of those came from a package, but I don't know how many people would say these are typical snack foods they'd give to their kids, not to mention this particular gal-therer could be arrested if she were caught threatening the denizens of her school with wild offerings, recklessly waving bunched handfuls of almonds and pistachios like a puerile pirate.

I don't know, when I look at this picture myself, there's something very, er, non-North American about it, as if my daughter has been spending the last two weeks on a walk-about with Marlo Morgan (see Mutant Message Down Under) or the Tanzanian Hadza Tribe.



Perhaps it's because we forgot what it used to be like out there in nomad land as we scoured the trees and bushes before we learned how to make a spear. I wonder what we ate before we learned how to shoot a buffalo between the eyes with a well-honed arrow-tip. Did we just scavenge around eating left-over "roadkill" like the vultures? What drove us to hunting, I wonder. Weren't we just satisfied eating nuts and berries? Hmmm...



Veggie Daddy Fun Fact:
It took 150,000 years to learn how to sharpen one side of a spear. It took another 150,000 years to learn that we could sharpen the other side. From what I understand (from Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines) this is because the more technologically advanced we become, the faster time goes. So before the Industrial Revolution, there was a huge 5,000 year gap of technological advancement. Before the Industrial Revolution, the British didn't live all that much better than those of early civilizations 5,000 years prior. It is the Industrial Revolution which threw us out of the Malthusian Trap. So after the I.R., the time between significant events began to shrink exponentially, and so now, for us, time seems to actually speed up. I-Pad 2, Nintendo  3DS--we are like a gargantuan snowball careening ever-faster downwards, absorbing everything in our (some would say "destructive") path. Or are we rolling upwards? Are we rolling off a cliff?

So while time was uber-slow, molasses-dripping slow, and nothing significant ever happened, I have to ask the question, what did we eat during the 300,000 years it took us to learn how to carve a spearhead? Anyone? I imagine the meal must have looked something like the food on my daughter's plate, which looks...ancient. Like I can't identify with it, but seems somehow to make all the sense in the world if I think about it hard enough.

I must admit, eating kissed-by-the-sun dried mangoes (I'm lying, we bought them at Cost-Co--don't tell anyone!), pistachios, almonds, kissed-by-the-sun grapes (nope--Sunmaid!), choosing to consume such primitive nibbles as these does not come naturally to me. I have to actually make the conscious decision to go to the cupboard and eat these strange little pods that seem to have descended down from another planet. And why? We just aren't brought up that way, not the majority of us. And certainly, especially in today's world of blue dinosaurs bleeding their gelatinous insides into their instant-and-distant, runny oatmeal, neither are our kids.

Perhaps we've lost touch with our roots. Not all of us, though. There is now a small, very small, minority of us out there who are highly conscious of the fact that in our fast-paced, high-tech world, we have lost something big, something important, something like a connection to our ancient, ancient past, before the time that we hunted game with crude weaponry. We seemed to have lost the connection to the fact that we use to eat actual food, bright and vivid as a double rainbow, oh my god, and when we see something so colorful, we can only zone out on the literal acid trip we have riddled our bodies with when we eat non-food, processed food, food that has lost so much vitality that we must shoot them in their arms with chemicals and colors and pretend it is food that is alive, but is actually dead. And we do the same to livestock.

Veggie Daddy Fun (NOT FUN AT ALL!!!) Fact: 70% of antibiotics are given to our healthy livestock. 
I have actually heard it is more. Chilling...and so we're illing.

Veggie Daddy Parent Tip: Modeling, Modeling, Modeling

No, I'm not talking about walking down a runway pretending you're Pamela Anderson. If we want our kids to find this lost connection, we must model eating such real foods ourselves. We must let our kids see us enjoying the "fruits of our labor," and they too will follow. They, too, will begin to see, as they stroll through aisle after aisle of dead food on the shelves of the grocery store, that there is a true double rainbow of good food waiting for them, that there is a true difference between alive food that is bright and vivid as opposed to dead food that they have to throw thirty different additives to it so it actually tastes good, but mostly just tastes like sugar and high fructose corn syrup.

Veggie Daddy Rule #4: We must model eating b(right) food, and our kids will too. The kids actually want to.

Pick up an almond or a peach as consciously as you would go for a walk around the block or do a push-up because you know you have to exercise. It's not about eating right. It's about making the conscious decision to eat real food, pesticide-riddled or not. It is better than eating dead food.

Let's model eating food that has the real colors of the rainbow that nature naturally provided us while we were lying around in the sun wondering how to carve the other side of that spear, before we learned to hunt. EAT REAL FOOD the way nature intended and we can help our kids and ourselves discover our own (double) rainbow connection. Oh my god.

This rich, orange-colored butternut squash...

...became this butternut squash pasta bake spiced with chipotle pepper. It was quite good and can be found in the uber-cool cookbook, The Complete Guide to Vegan Substitutions.

The dish was good, but I would like to call attention to the colors of the squash when it was raw and when it was cooked. Notice anything different? Yep, the color is gone. Many of the best nutrients in raw food take a trip to Neverland once you cook them. The evidence is as plain as the taste of the glowing Kraft Dinner in your child's bowl. Even if you eat nothing raw all day, throwing in a salad, and there are so many kinds, with your dinner is a perfect way to get back to your roots.

If you would like advice on how to get your children to eat more real food, here is a little tip. And don't forget to model! Work it, baby, work it!

Why are there so many songs about rainbows

And what's on the other side?

Rainbows are visions, but only illusions,

And rainbows have nothing to hide.

So we've been told and some choose to believe it

I know they're wrong, wait and see.

Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection,

The lovers, the dreamers and me.

--Paul Williams

Eat B(right),

Veggie Daddy

My Granola Girl

Yep, this little chickie of mine LOVES granola. She just turned three. In that bowl there, we have oats, oat bran, sunflower seeds, almonds, maple syrup, canola oil, and soy protein powder. Sprinkle some hemp seeds over it, and you have a protein power-house, though protein has really become way over-emphasized these days. More on that later. This granola recipe is from one of the Mollie Katzen Moosewood cookbooks, of which there are many. I also threw some raisins in there to sweeten it up.

She used to eat it with yogurt for months, and then on a dime, she switched. She never asks for yogurt anymore, and we're not sure why. Now she likes it with the Almond Breeze almond milk, which we can buy in bulk at Cost-Co, so it's a big money-saver for us.

The other big money saver is making granola at home from scratch. It's easy and extremely cheap when you compare it to the store-bought granola. Try it sometime!

For breakfast, I had another big-ass glass of orange, lemon, and carrot juice. I peel the carrots because I find the outside layer can give the juice a bit of a dirty taste, so peeling them takes care of that right quick. And no, we don't buy organic too much. It's just too expensive here on the rock. I'll go into this more later.

The juice was uber-delish but when I opened the fridge, I realized I should have juiced some ginger in there as well. Ginger goes great with carrots, lemons, and oranges, so it'd be great in the juice, too.

That's all for now, gotta busy morning ahead of us; we have to move our kitchen into our basement because we are getting our kitchen re-done, which I also plan on blogging about.

Review: Remember Veggie Daddy Rule #1? Try to always eat with this rule in mind.

Eat B(right),

Veggie Daddy

Whoever Likes Vegan Cheese-Whiz, Raise Your Hand

FOOD DIARY

That picture up there, that was my wife's lunch:

Clearly that's a sandwich there, but inside there is a walnut-chickpea spread w/ cucumbers, tomatoes, butter lettuce, and banana peppers. She also had left-over beet salad. (She's rarely home for lunch so that was a nice treat.)

I just had leftover pizza and beet salad. Big-ass glass of water, and I was full.

My youngest, she also ate the walnut-chickpea sandwich. You know, little bites, nothing crazy-like.

At Snack, I had the last peanut-butter and chocolate muffin and I had a piece of the carrot cake I was too full to eat from the night before. The cake my wife made which she wasn't supposed to make because mothers shouldn't cook anything on Mother's Day, am I right? Right. Yet, she still sneaked that cake in there without me knowing.

I also had a pear, to keep with my eating-real-food-that-is-alive principle. I eat raw for breakfast and in between lunch and dinner. So, yeah, a pear worked great after eating a muffin and cake, all home-made, of course.

While I have you on the phone, I just wanted to do a little math. The big-ass glass of carrot, orange, and lemon juice I had for breakfast this morning would probably cost $4-5, perhaps more depending on where you're buying it. So let's take the conservative end of the spectrum and say it's $4. Now let's say you buy one of these every morning on your way to work or at lunch or wherever. Fresh squeezed juice of any kind is very expensive unless you make it at home.

So, fresh-squeezed juice every day for 30 days= $120. Nope, I wouldn't recommend it. That's just a little less than what we spend on all of our groceries every single week, which is about $175. We just weren't meant to buy fresh juice every day. So we make it at home.

Get an awesome juicer and juicing becomes a breeze. You can see a picture of our Omega juicer in my previous post.

We used to buy the Tropicana Orange Juice in the big-ass carton which they have now slimmed down to give it a nice sleek-but-we're-actually-screwing-you-over kind of look. It was $6.20 last time I checked, it could be more now. Go through one in a week with your family and you're spending $24/mo. on not-really-fresh, already nutrient-deficient orange juice. The longer it sits, the less nutrients it has, of course. So you're spending even more for juice of an inferior quality. It will never taste as good as fresh-squeezed juice seconds after you juice it. Never. And the more preservatives it has to "keep it fresh", the deader it becomes. And processed food? Dead as all get-out. Yet the companies sell it as juice. Save yourself the trouble and the money. Don't buy juice and keep it in the fridge unless you plan to use it in recipes or something. Or give to your kids for their lunches.

Here's what we had for dinner.

That's a Philly-cheese style slider with grilled peppers and onions. (From Vegan Diner.) Salad lightly dusted with hemp seeds. Power food! I ate two sliders, and I am stuffed--to 80% of my capacity, of course, following on with Veggie Daddy Rule #2.

"What the hell, is that vegan cheese-whiz?" you might be asking. Or "Is that some kind of crazy-ass vegan cheese?" you might also wonder.

Yes, it is, and it's something I don't think I ever would've eaten a year ago. It's made with cashews and it is truly awesome. It is incredible what you can do with cashews. Short of having sex with them, you can do almost anything!

Eat B(right),

Veggie Daddy

To Eat Living Food or Dead Food, That Is The Question

Breakfast time!

Here's a picture of a typical Veggie Daddy Breakfast:

I juice the carrots, the lemon, two oranges and voila!

I drink it up! YUM. (No animals were inhumanely slaughtered or treated in the making of this breakfast.) Took all of of 5 minutes to make. Meanwhile, my girls nibbled on grapes, cucumber slices, orange pieces, watermelon, and they each split a home-made, vegan peanut-butter and chocolate muffin.

Now I have to make the school lunch. Here it is:

My girl's lunch. The braised-cauliflower and Basmati rice pilaf from last night, carrots, cucumbers, and grapes, and a juice box, not that she needs it, but you pick your battles. I would prefer her to just drink water, but I'm not an extremist (shrug.)

Veggie Daddy Food for Thought:

They say you are what you eat, so you have two choices: 1) Eat food that is alive, which has color, vibrancy, and essential nutrients; 2) Eat food that is dead.

Let's not forget what we know from the first law of thermodynamics: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it can only be transformed from one state to another.

So it stands to reason that eating food that is alive with energy will keep us vital and healthy. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure that CAFO-related dead cows and chickens don't move too much. Perhaps it's because they lack vital energy.

Rudolf Steiner says some very interesting things about what happens when we consume dead flesh. He was pretty much what we know today as a vegetarian. That guy was way ahead of his time. But there were good reasons he didn't eat any meat. Hindus and Buddhists neither. Look it up sometime!

But even if you do eat meat as I did for most of my life, the more raw food you eat the better. Try to find a balance if you can. If it's only 10% right now, try to bump it up to 20% raw a day. As you can see above, I eat raw for breakfast and in between lunch and dinner. And the last time I ate meat was this past X-mas, so I know how good meat tastes. But we really should go easier on it, best to take it out altogether, which I'll discuss all the reasons for some other time. And remember, when you start to introduce more of the REAL FOOD into your lifestyle, you will notice incredible changes in what your body wants to eat. Trust me.

Finally, here's the picture of what I ate an hour ago. That's my girl reaching into the bag:

We ate Tamari-roasted almonds and pistachios. My little one ate the pistachios and honey pitted dates. YUM!

One last tip: I try to eat only raw food until lunch time. Raw food has the most vital (alive) energy of any food. When we eat it, that energy gets transferred to us. If the food is dead, then there's no vital energy there. Not a good match for us, I don't think.

And remember, when you eat fruits and veggies, it's a general fact that the darker (or more colorful) the berry, the sweeter the juice, but it's also the most nutritious. Beets, carrots, oranges, sweet potato--packed to the gills with nutrients.

Eat B(right),

Veggie Daddy

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