LILL's LIST

My 17 yr old son is trying to eliminate artificial flavors and colors from his diet. He’s noticed that they aggravate his asthma and make it harder for him to focus. We’ve always read labels, but lately we’ve been poring over them like government lawyers looking for loopholes in fine print. After squinting at hundreds of bags, packages, boxes and jars, we’ve come to the following conclusion. The best way to get food that doesn’t have (as my son would say) that toxic crap in it is to get food in as close to its natural state as possible.

Granted, it would be best if we raised our own chickens and vegetables, kept our own milk cows, and ground our own grain and coffee. However, not all of us have the room, the time or the inclination for farming. So, short of cooking a chicken that was walking around in the henyard this morning, how do we get food in its natural state, not to mention not packaged in plastic?

One thing I’ve done is request freezer paper for my meat, rather than plastic film. Most supermarket meat departments have it. And if you ask them to, they’ll wrap your chicken legs or beef roast in it. If they don’t have it, ask them to stock it. You’d be surprised what supermarkets will do to retain a customer. They could even advertise that they have it for other eco-mindful customers.

Of course, the best way to be sure that your food is as pure as possible is buying organic. But what if, like us, you can’t afford the higher prices? Well, we compromise by buying our meat, milk and fruit organic whenever possible. My kids have grown up on organic milk and hate the taste of non-organic. I do too. It tastes flat, maybe because the cows have been eating grain, not grass. The milk we buy comes from cows who spend most of their time out to pasture and get silage in the winter, not corn. Actually, lately, organic milk isn’t much more expensive than non-organic.

For meat, we buy organic chicken, beef and pork, usually when it’s marked down on Sunday. Most supermarkets have a day when they mark down meat and will gladly tell you when that is. Just ask. If you’re lucky enough to have a natural foods supermarket nearby, they also mark things down, especially when they near their sell-by date. We don’t buy ham, bacon or hot dogs, except when the unprocessed ones are marked down. All of these meats are high in nitrates and salt.

Neither do we buy frozen dinners, chicken products like nuggets or patties or anything else covered in breading and fried. Have you ever looked at the list of ingredients in most processed frozen foods?  The picture on the cover shows a piece of chicken, some mashed potatoes and some green beans. Yet, the list of ingredients is ten inches long and you can’t even pronounce some of the words. Is it worth it for convenience, not to mention is it worth paying the high price of frozen dinners? I don’t think so.

Instead, we just overcook. When we make a meal, we make more than we need. The excess goes into our version of frozen dinners. Only, ours are more flexible, because we freeze the items separately in glass containers. So, one container will have four chicken thighs that have been cooked in BBQ sauce. Another container will have oven-browned sweet potatoes, onions and white potatoes drizzled with olive oil. Other containers hold rice pilaf, pasta with sauce or veggies, so that we can mix and match to our hearts’ content. Let’s see Marie Callendar do that!

It would be nice if we could buy local produce year-round, but in Maine, except for cold-weather greens, that’s not possible unless you have your own greenhouse. (Eliot Coleman, the author of several good gardening books, has one about growing your own veggies year-round, but so far we haven’t gotten motivated enough to do it. You might like to try.) So we try to buy veggies that have the least amount of pesticides used on them. Here’s a link to the Environmental Working Group’s list of veggies with the least and most amount of pesticide residue. You can even order a pdf file of it to take with you when you shop.

My shopping cart looks a lot different now. It has far fewer processed items in it and more fresh produce. Even with the many organic and natural items we buy, my costs haven’t gone up nearly as much as I thought they would. Actually, some weeks, we spend less, because we find bargains and mark-downs. What’s in your shopping cart?

Related posts:

1. What’s Eating You – Or Vice Versa?
2. Why Organic Food Is Becoming An Even Better Choice