Eat Your Veggies!

EAT YOUR VEGGIES!

There is just about nothing in veggies that isn’t good for you. Raw, that is. If you have digestive trouble, it may be caused by myriad things, or just one. It doesn’t matter. Get out the cutting board and a knife or mandolin. Start with fresh cucumbers and tomatoes. Add some basil or cilantro or parsley (all three would be best). A little sea salt and maybe a pinch of pepper. Dash of oil and vinegar, or just vinegar if you’re feeling like you need a little zing.

Fresh food from the garden! Bowl by Paula Moran

When you shop in the grocery store, remember what you went in to get. Don’t buy the stuff in boxes with all the packaging and additives. Think about it. You’re paying for garbage. You don’t want the cardboard, and you don’t want your insides to look like cardboard. Get fresh. You’ll feel so much better. If you need energy for exercise, or energy for mental tasks, your body works best on things that give you clean energy, vital fluids, and organic live enzymes.

If you’re buying food grown in poor soil, or food that comes from plants grown in sterile ground, you don’t get trace minerals if they aren’t there in the first place. There’s no fusion there, so if it doesn’t have those minerals, there is no way to magically get them into the veggie without them being in the soil. Think about it. Plants can be fed to fruit – to flower and thus be harvested. But that’s like putting gas in a diesel engine. Like putting dirty clothes in the washer with no soap and expecting them to come out clean. OK, you got me there, I have done that.

If you are going to eat, you should make every bite count. Make it healthy. Make it vital.

Although I like to buy everything organic, I can’t find organic sometimes. If I can’t, and it’s on the Clean Fifteen list, I will buy it. Not so with the Dirty Dozen. I change the menu. Here’s the list (from EWG – Environmental Working Group):

Dirty Dozen:

1.       Celery

2.       Peaches

3.       Strawberries

4.       Apples

5.       Blueberries

6.       Nectarines

7.       Bell peppers

8.       Spinach

9.       Cherries

10.   Kale/collard greens

11.   Potatoes

12.   Grapes (imported)

Clean Fifteen:

1.       Onions

2.       Avocado

3.       Sweet corn

4.       Pineapple

5.       Mangoes

6.       Sweet peas

7.       Asparagus

8.       Kiwifruit

9.       Cabbage

10.   Eggplant

11.   Cantaloupe

12.   Watermelon

13.   Grapefruit

14.   Sweet potatoes

15.   Honeydew melon

So why would I buy something organic from the list below? Because I also want to consider the workers and the soil they’re grown in. Do we harm others with growing with pesticides? Yes, it’s not always about what I’m putting in my mouth. It’s what else was impacted by my buying the item. Do the banana bags laden with pesticides end up in the river? Do the growers have to wear masks? Then it’s organic for me. We all should be thinking about the consequences of our actions as much as we can.

Eating seasonally and locally helps that too. Imagine planting a lovely sage in your backyard. It’s cold and wet. Sage doesn’t like it. It doesn’t grow well. It wants more sun and less water. It’s not happy, it’s not healthy. It gets bugs. It rots, and dies.  Eat food that’s happy where it’s grown, and not picked before it is ripe and trucked or flown hundreds or thousands of miles.  It’s more vital, and it will feel better when you eat it. I won’t go into the idea of planting when the moon is waxing and harvesting when it wanes, but cycles are important to our bodies, in the same way we wake in the morning and sleep at night.

Taken with my camera through the telescope!

Sorry, shift workers, you tend to have your own special problems that are not just physical. Shift working (Nurses Study) showed that working opposite this impacted people far more than just having your body working opposite the normal cycle. It also affects socialization, communication, depression, and a whole host of other processes, not just metabolism.

When I get up at my cabin north of Willits, I walk outside and pick fresh blueberries. Then I saunter (depending on what I’m wearing) down to the vegetable beds and check for any fresh strawberries. If there aren’t any, I may have a cherry tomato or two. Lunch can be a cucumber salad, or tabouli, with fresh parsley and tomato, with lemon juice from freshly picked lemons. With weather in the 90’s lately, I rarely turn on the stove (I may grill something outside), so an enormous salad with feta cheese and kalamata olives hits the spot. I walk around the house visiting various herbs for a snip of this or that. Parsley, cilantro, fennel, sage, marjoram, thyme, sorrel (yum) all go into my salads. I think tonight it'll be kale salad with lemon and feta and pine nuts. I find that there is no slowing me down when I eat like this.