Diet debates

Guess who's been loving the sweet corn?

Meet this week’s vegetables:

• Sweet corn
• Cucumbers
• Basil
• Tomatoes
• Lettuce mix
• Chard
• Carrots
• Potatoes
• Summer squash
• Cipollini onions

As your farmers, we have the honor of intimate access to your food habits. Not only do we literally see which vegetables you choose to eat each week (and the volume), but many of you also happily share with us other elements of your eating habits. We get to know your preferences, allergies, dislikes, and — if you have one — your philosophy about food and eating.

Given that all of you are in the CSA, it’s not surprising that most or all of you make intentional choices about food. Clearly, most people don’t just “happen upon” CSA membership — it is often the result of research and a personal journey toward a “better” diet. Some people find us after having their first child and wanting to commit themselves to healthier eating habits as a family. Others have health problems they are working on. And, many others have simply found over the years that they deeply enjoy the basic pleasure of truly fresh, quality foods.

Whatever brings you to CSA membership, we are so grateful for your participation and grateful for every time that you share your thoughts about food with us. Again, this is a topic that has always been a part of the pick-up interactions, but the Full Diet CSA discussion has certainly brought up more pointed conversations, especially regarding animal products (as I mentioned in the newsletter two weeks ago). Many of our CSA members are passionately committed to a particular set of diet choices, either for health or stewardship reasons, and we get to hear about it, triggering our own thoughts on food and the role it plays in our life.

For our part, Casey and I have never committed to a specific diet plan beyond a strong preference for local, organic, whole ingredients. This goal represents complex values about health, stewardship, and fostering a local community/economy.

We’ve grown into these choices over the years, and we still occasionally eat items that aren’t 100% consistent — sure, organic crackers might fit part of the goal, but they’re still a processed food, often made with more ingredients than my preference (and usually much more sugar!). Of course, as farmers, we always lean toward veggie-heavy meals, because we love them and they are good for our grocery budget.

But, beyond these choices, we’re pretty democratic omnivores. Thanks to an absence of food allergies, up until recently, the only food item we actively excluded from our household was bananas (they give me migraines, but they’re also not local, so it’s a simple item to avoid).

More and more, being willing to eat the broad spectrum of food types is an unusual trait among the food aware. Within our CSA we have strong representation from many of the contemporary food “camps”: the paleo eaters (who forgo grains, dairy, starchy vegetables, and sugar but delight in meat), the vegan/”Forks over knives” eaters (who forgo all animal products as well as items high in fat), the Weston Price eaters (who are generally omnivorous but minimize sugar and emphasize fermented and traditional foods and like fat), and the gluten-free eaters (who forgo gluten cereal grains but eat plenty of alternative grains and may still enjoy sugary treats).

Am I missing anyone? I’m sure I am, but those seem to be the strong voices we hear from regularly. Happily for us farmers, all of these camps love fresh vegetables!

They also provide (fittingly) lots of “food for thought.” The main question that seems to come up for Casey and me is this: “Is there ONE best way for humans to eat, both for health and stewardship purposes?”

Obviously, this was the question posed in Michael Pollan’s famous tome The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but I feel like we’re dealing with new manifestations of the question one decade later. People are questioning the health of entire food groups: Animal products or not? Fat or not? Sugar or not? Grains or not?

These are fascinating questions, especially as our farm is setting as its goal to produce all the main food types (within regional feasibility) — on greater or lesser scales we are already producing vegetables, fruits, eggs, dairy, meat, grains, legumes, oil, and sweetener. So, to consider that one or more of these might be completely superfluous (or even unhealthy!) is … fascinating.

Honestly, we’re not in the market for a new diet paradigm. For full disclosure, our own sensibilities and goals make us most sympathetic to the Weston Price paradigm. We feel good about eating a broad range of fresh, healthy whole foods, with some fermented items in the mix. As the farm moves toward producing more of these items, we are excited to see a shift in our pantry as more whole grains replace convenience foods like pasta and crackers. We’re also excited about having plenty of raw milk products in our diet (right now our personal fridge contains homemade farm butter, soft cheese, hard cheese, kefir, skimmed cream, whole milk and yogurt). We feel like this is generally a good direction for us.

But we’re also not willing to dismiss the opinions of people whom we respect (i.e. YOU!), and we find the topic of food to be endlessly fascinating (no surprise there — this is our business after all!). So, we’ve been doing more reading and researching, trying to absorb the basic principles of each paradigm and see where they might actually overlap. The reduction of processed foods seems to be a generally good thing, as does the reduction of sugar. But clearly there are some direct disagreements too between the camps (especially around animal products).

Based on our own ideas and experiences, we find ourselves nodding at some elements of all the opinions and scoffing at others. At this point, we have no conclusions at all, except that it is all interesting and we wonder if maybe the point of being an omnivore is that there are many right possible ways to eat? Maybe in the end, there is one wrong way to eat — which is probably best described as the standard Western diet (high in processed foods, sugars, and salt; low in nutrient value). How we move away from that diet in a healthy manner could take many forms perhaps.

Anyhow, I thought others might find this conversation interesting, so I thought I’d share some of the resources we’re exploring as we have time. I imagine that if you’re looking for more information about healthy eating, any of these would have useful starting information.

You might also be wondering now: my farmers have time to read? Amazingly, yes. Even in late summer. We have less time than in previous parts of our life, and I certainly have more time to read than Casey does. But ever since Rusty dropped his afternoon nap in favor of an early bedtime, we have reclaimed our evenings for quiet Casey and Katie activities, which range from reading together, talking about ideas (such as these), to making food (yogurt! butter! cheese!).

Of course, the evening may change soon, so some of the items listed here may not get read for a little while longer. As I write this newsletter on Saturday evening, I am still very much pregnant. Hopefully I will need to update this before it goes to print this week, because we are getting anxious to meet this little baby!

We hope you have been loving the mild, gorgeous late summer weather, especially as many of you will be heading back inside with the start of the school season this week. This is our favorite time of year: so delicious and comfortable!

Enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
… and the rest of the farm crew!

~ ~ ~

Interesting diet resources

(We are not advocating the views of any of these. Also, some of these overlap in topics, but I put them in the best fit. Let us know of other items you recommend too!)

Vegan/”Forks Over Knives” camp

• The China study — T. Colin Campbell
• Forks Over Knives (movie)
• Forks over knives: the plant-based way to health (companion book to movie) — Gene Stone

Paleo diet camp

• The Paleo Diet — Loren Cordain
• The primal blueprint — Mark Sisson

Weston Price tradition

• Nutrition and physical degeneration — Weston A. Price
• Real Food: What to Eat and Why — Nina Planck
• Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food — Catherine Shanahan, Luke Shanahan
• Food Rules: A Doctor’s Guide to Healthy Eating — Catherine Shanahan

Gluten Free

• Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health — William Davis

Also of interest

• Pottenger’s prophecy : how food resets genes for wellness or illness — Graham, Kesten, Scherwitz
• http://rawfoodsos.com — fascinating blog by Denise Minger, an active opponent to the anti-animal product camp and also critical of wheat and “food myths” in general
• http://letthemeatmeat.com/ — another interesting anti-vegan blog, by Rhys Southan

Next week’s veggies: More of the same summery things!