Cooking and nutrition have always been my hobbies. Growing up, my parents grew their own vegetables and fruits. We had chickens for meat and eggs. Dad raised a cow or two for meat and dairy. In summer, my mother and several other ladies would have canning parties. Each woman would take items from their garden and preserve them through canning. The home made apricot preserves were my favorite.
My lifestyle doesn't allow time for a full garden but I do enjoy growing my own herbs and I have a few fruit trees. I also collect old cookbooks and enjoy trying authentic cooking styles. While living in Hong Kong, I was introduced to a whole new world of new culinary adventures. Not only did I discover new types of foods, but food preparation was elevated to a completely new level as I watched delicious food being prepared in ways I would never have imagined. In Asia, they take the term "you are what you eat" literally. Even the snacks are healthy and natural. I took what I learned in Asia and began to build on it to develop my own cooking style.
I became aware of genetically modified fruits and vegetables in the late 1990's but it wasn't until I connected red meat with my stomach issues that I learned about genetically modified meats. I am not Catholic but I do like the concept of Lent and each year I sacrifice something for Lent, using the money I would have spent on that item for charity. Six years ago, I began having stomach troubles. I was treated for ulcers and nervous stomach without success until one year I gave up red meat for Lent. Once I stopped eating the red meat, my stomach troubles completely disappeared. I have been meat free and without stomach issues ever since.
I hesitate to label myself as a vegetarian, although I am about two steps short of that label, because I come from a long line of hunters. However, hunters live by a code of ethics. Kill with mercy and eat what you kill. Based on what I have learned about meat production and meat processing in our world today, neither of these codes apply.
I am not a vegetarian but I am no longer a true carnivore either. Occasionally I will eat chicken and fish if they are purchased from a reliable source and I still eat dairy. Eliminating red meat wasn't as difficult as I initially thought it would be and my meat free diet actually compliments my adventurous culinary spirit. In fact, my new eating style forced me to think outside of the normal roast beef and potato menu. I have always enjoyed cooking and I love good food so eliminating red meat also meant that I had to learn to eat outside of my comfort zone because I will not settle. My meals need to be healthy, but they must be enjoyable too. Anyone sitting to dinner at my table will not find grilled steak but they may find things like Jambalaya rice with prawns, a salad of mixed greens and roasted beets, steamed vegetables, barley salad, or salmon steamed on the grill with corn and hot bread. I have never had anyone finish a meal at my table and say they missed the read meat. Not once.
I am at the half century mark now and my blood pressure is normal, my cholesterol is normal, my blood sugar is normal, and my overall health is above average. While I have friends who are taking medications daily, I have no health issues. I attribute this to what I choose to put on my fork. All of us are busy so we are inclined to take short cuts at meal time. However, we have a responsibility to take ownership of what we put on our plates. After all, we are what we eat.
How could it be that the price of gas and the price of our food are correlated? As gas prices rise, so do food prices. This is largely due to confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which are the factories that produce our meat. Cows raised in CAFOs are "grown" on a bed of corn, and the corn they eat is grown on petrochemical and pharmaceutical farms.
The fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides used on these farms are generally oil byproducts. The more oil that's used -- both by way of gasoline-driven farm equipment needed to process such massive monoculture crops and the increased use of these chemical inputs -- the more expensive the meat raised on CAFOs becomes.
These factory farms are producing "Frankenmeat" that destroys our bodies and degrades our environment at an ever-increasing cost. We must ask ourselves every time we shop, "What is the real cost of cheap food?"
Industrial food production doesn't just require more energy and contribute to global warming, it also exposes us to harm because the foods we eat contain altered proteins, fats, and sugars, as well as unhealthy antibiotics and hormones.
Pharmaceuticals have become essential to our "modern" food production. Of the 24 million pounds of antibiotics produced each year in this country, 19 million are put into feed for factory-farmed animals to prevent infection (which results from overcrowding) and to prevent cows' stomachs from exploding as a result of the excess gas produced by fermenting corn in their rumens, the first chamber of a cow's stomach.
Hormones in our food supply create similarly severe problems. They are typically used to promote rapid growth of our feed animals. They also promote rapid growth of little girls' breasts, which is why we see 8-year-old girls going through puberty and an increase in reproductive cancers such as breast and prostate cancer.
The truth is that we consume far more animal products than our bodies need. In the China Study, Colin Campbell from Cornell University showed that animal protein might dramatically increase the risk of cancer. (I)
Mark Hyman, M.D.
Huffington Post Article
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