Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Those are the openings lines from this article on nutrition from the New York Times, which I've been reading this morning and nodding my head at. It's what I've always believed -- that the human body is best served by eating the foods it was designed (by evolution) to eat: real, whole foods, and the sorts of whole foods that can be naturally digested. In other words, foods that your body can utilize in their raw form. These sorts of foods include meats, eggs, fruits, vegetables, and not much else. We could argue dairy -- I mean, it CAN be consumed raw. But did the ancestors that developed our digestive system have access to dairy? Were they out milking mammoths? I'm guessing not. I remain on the fence about dairy. But we can all agree that grains and legumes (i.e. beans) can NOT be digested without cooking them. So what makes us think that they could possibly be good for us to eat?

Real foods. As in NOT pre-cooked, pre-packaged, pre-processed foods. Not the sorts of things that are loaded up with sugar, salt, chemicals, preservatives, colors and flavors (artificial OR natural).

And in this day and age, in this polluted over-medicated world we live in, I'll take it one step further -- organic foods. Or, better, foods that you grow organically yourself.

I've undertaken an important project this year. I'm attempting to grow all of our own foods. Or as much of them as I can. Chicken and lamb -- that's a given, although I've not quite been able to bring myself to butcher, clean, cook and eat a chicken yet. (We have a butcher do the lambs for us.) Eggs, check! Beef -- well, we don't have room for cattle. But I DO know a farmer who grows his cattle holistically, and I'm comfortable buying a side of beef from him when he has one available. And this year I'll be bringing in a dairy ram to breed to my ewes so that we'll have a future ready supply of fresh sheep's milk for our dairy needs -- milk, butter, yogurt, cheese. So plenty of animal protein available.

But the majority of our diet should be PLANTS. Meat is good, but overdoing it is not. We were developed as hunter-gatherers, and given that we were hunting with rocks and sticks, my guess is that we weren't eating meat nearly as much as we were eating fresh fruits and veggies. So, gardening comes into play -- I want to grow plenty of good veggies for fresh use during the summer and to freeze for use the rest of the year. We don't own fruit trees (and probably won't, we need the space it would require for pasture for the animals at this point), but there IS an organic orchard about an hour from here -- I could certainly stock up there this fall, and can enough to take us through the rest of the year. Or, the grocery stores are now carrying a pretty good supply of organic fruits and veggies. And, even more appealing, there are lots of wild blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries growing in the woodlands around here. Strawberry plants in my garden are a given, as are Watermelons.

Now, about that "not too much" part. I can see that being a problem for me, and most of the western world. Overeating, even of good, healthy, whole foods, is not good for your body. And probably accounts for a lot of my excess baggage. Oh, I like to blame my hormones and the fact that I carried two enormous babies to term at an age where some women are becoming grandmothers. But with my extremely active lifestyle (and let's face it, with all the manure slinging I do, I should be downright buff!), there's only one thing accounting for the roll around my middle (and my arms, and my thighs....), and that's an excessive intake of food.

Of course, it's easy to KNOW how to eat right. It's quite another to actually do it. As I sit here sipping my hot chocolate (from a packet with questionable ingredients in it) and munching a handful of bright orange powdered Sun Chips (what IS that powdery stuff, anyway???), I wonder just how much hypocrisy I'm capable of. (But hey, it could be a diet coke and a handful of pork rinds, so I guess it could be worse!) We've stock piled a lot of CRAP in our cabinets and freezers. We're working our way through them. The really atrocious stuff is being fed to the pig (poor Pig!). The rest is slowly being consumed by us, and is not being replaced. Eventually we'll get to the point where there's only healthy (TRULY healthy) foods in the house, and then I'll have no choice but to grab a glass of water and a handful of walnuts when I sit down to type.

It's a work in progress. But understanding human history and biology and how they, by necessity, relate to nutrition and health is the first step in the right direction.