Despite my best efforts, I have just never been able to muster the self control to commit to any sort of long term diet or completely eliminate certain foods that all the experts tell me (and rightly so) are quite bad for me. I just love delicious tasting things way too much, and I have come to terms with the fact that I will never successfully convince myself to permanently part from a pint of triple chocolate fudge ice cream, or the perfectly grilled cheeseburger, or an MSG-laden bucket of Pad Thai. Sorry. It’s just not going to happen. What I think I have been able to successfully convince myself of, however, is reserving food that ought to be for special occasions for just that - special occasions. And for me, at least, the only way I have been able to do this is observing how much more I enjoy eating wholesome food on a daily basis. The only diet I try to keep is basically made up of two parts: 1) Cook and prepare the meals my family eats almost entirely myself (that is to say, very few takeout or frozen meals). And 2) Ensure that the ingredients of said meals are 100% that thing, avoiding additives, preservatives, and all of the variations on sugar and corn as much as possible. Following this “diet” means I feel better, I think better, and perhaps most empowering of all - I know better.

Since beginning to take more seriously the kind of food I put into my body, I have become a much more educated eater and food preparer for myself and my family. And as we all know, the more educated we are in a given field, the more creative we are. The more we are able to continue to challenge ourselves and grow in our abilities. As I have grown more and more intentional about the “realness” of the food my family and I eat I have in turn been able to vastly broaden my horizons in the world of food. My ambitions have turned to things like how we can grow some of our own food, drinking raw milk and making as much out of the cream as I can, how to bake all of our own bread, press our own noodles, simmer our own bone broth, researching and budgeting for owning our own laying hens and broilers, and what kind of investment we’re able to make buying a quarter of a cow from a local farmer. These are just a few examples, but each of them has more closely connected me to what my food actually is. And this connection is something I have begun to believe is absolutely essential to the pursuit of an intentionally lived life. An understanding of what we’re eating and how it came to us is something that makes each of us more human.

If we’re being honest, though, it can be incredibly difficult to know what you’re eating. As a twenty-first century American, there is little doubt that you have been bombarded with propositions about appropriate food consumption habits for your entire life. There are a few older folks still among us who may have been born and remember a time before food advertisements and constant health claims began, but they are a dwindling portion of our population. Most of us know no differently than to be constantly subjected to new marketing regimes orchestrated by giant food corporations, always claiming the newest, healthiest, most convenient, most delicious meal or snack solution. But despite the fact that, as a culture, we are obsessed with health, fitness, and “whole foods” we, on the whole, understand far less about our food than our ancestors. Most of them were much more connected to the food that they consumed because it was more likely that they had been present for some or all of the process of raising that food, and they were certainly more in touch with the process of preparing the food they consumed. But now, our main source of information about our food doesn’t come from planting it, raising it, harvesting it, or even preparing it. It largely comes from the businesses that want us to buy it from them or their lobbying arm in Washington D.C. This means that despite being culturally obsessed with food, we actually have very little unbiased, honest information about it.

Now, to be clear, I am absolutely not an expert in food science. But I will direct you to someone who makes food science and food preparation very approachable: Michael Pollan. My introduction to his research and healthy insights came with his book Cooked. I have since enjoyed most of his other works on the modern diet as well -- I strongly recommend The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, and his short, concise collection of Food Rules (there are several others, but these are his best in my opinion). However, it is still the first book of his I read, Cooked, that has made the most lasting impression on me, mostly because of its incredibly simple thesis: If the only change Americans made to their diets in the coming year was to cook all of their own meals, our fractured relationship with food would largely be healed. The population on the whole would be far healthier, families would be stronger, and our knowledge of what we were eating would be far greater.

I strongly encourage our readers to adopt this philosophy. For my part, it has brought a fulfillment to my vocation as a wife and a mother that I could never quite have predicted. It brings me a deep, abiding joy to pull together a delicious meal for my family that is nutritionally sound and fills our bellies. There is a very particular kind of satisfaction I find when I am able to nourish those I love. But as previously stated, we seem to have found a way to be obsessed about food and calories in this country, without actually having grown more knowledgeable about food itself. I would strongly caution against adopting whatever food-fad might be most influential at the moment. However much scientific gloss these fads may use to promote their message, they frequently miss out on the whole picture, and often result in people giving up on the absurd and rigorous standards of said fad within a few months or years. How many people do you know who have been following the Atkins diet since 2002?

Working to incorporate real food into your life does not need to become stressful. Here are a few foundational principles to ground your efforts, and from there figure in all of the flexibility you need as you gradually incorporate real food back into your family’s life. (1) purchase as much as you can from your local farmer’s market, (2) learn how to bake your own bread (prioritize wheat flour (need some tips? Start here! : (insert link to sourdough piece)), (3) prioritize grass-fed, pasture-raised meat, (4) look for organic and locally sourced everything. (5) But! Don’t be fooled by the constant use of the term “organic” these days. Organic twinkies or potato chips are still twinkies and potato chips. For myself, I simply try to evaluate whether I ought to purchase a particular item by asking - “How real is this?” Pollan has an easy rule to follow: if it’s something your grandmother or great-grandmother (depending on your age) wouldn’t recognize as food, it’s probably best avoided.

The increased amount of time food may now demand in your life doesn’t stop at the checkout lane of the grocery store. If you invest more time (and maybe more money) in the food you are buying, you will almost certainly be spending more time in the kitchen preparing it. Though I don’t appreciate what they’ve done to the definition of “food”, it is truly remarkable to me how successfully food corporations have convinced us to let them do the cooking for us. In several of his works, Pollan cites the perfect example of this found in a Kentucky Fried Chicken ad campaign of the 1970s in which billboards were produced that simply pictured a giant bucket of mouth-watering chicken and the words “Women’s Liberation”. KFC wasn’t the only restaurant group or food production company to sell this message, but they might very well have been the most blunt about it.

A generation or so ago, we, as a society, caved to the marketing schemes of these companies. We started to believe what they said about not having enough time to make a meal for our own family. This is largely a reflection of the fact that we bought, wholesale, the message that there should be no second thought about women working outside the home. And if mothers are busy with their own careers, children may as well be signed up for ten weekly activities. That is to say, the collapse of the ritual of an entire family having dinner together every night came at the same time we began to culturally endorse the spreading of our family hither, thither and yon. Coincidence? I think not.

Yes. Making a meal from scratch will take time out of your day. It will take effort, patience, and creativity. It may even mean you must sacrifice what you would rather be doing with that time. But we must remember, that every meal is a labor of love. It is something that brings us together, and something that, especially as a wife and mother, we ought to be making the time for. The meal’s place in the life of a family and a community must be guarded as a sacred event. It is a way to enjoy both the earthly and the transcendental. What is a meal then? Is it just a refueling of our energy stores? Or only an opportunity to indulge? Is it something we make, or is it just something we heat up? Only when we near the holiday season are we reminded in commercials that laboring over a meal that is then shared with family is something special. The tone of said advertisements seems to indicate that these opportunities are rare. But if that is true, it’s only because modern life has made it rare. It should be at least a weekly, if not daily occurrence.

Coming together and being fed by the work of each other’s hands bears great worth. Anyone who has prepared a full meal from scratch knows this. There is a greater gift of time and self that has gone into the preparation of such a meal. But even what it means to cook “from scratch” is difficult to achieve in this day and age. How many sauces or soups, salad dressings or meat glazes, and frozen, pre-packaged wonders do we rely upon in modern life? I’m not here to give anyone a guilt trip. I think there are times and places for putting the conveniences of modern life to good use. But that doesn’t mean we have to allow it to become our normal fare, and I fear that the reality is that there are many people who don’t know how to make more than a handful of meals completely from scratch. It’s this lack of knowledge, the breakdown of the relationship we as a human race have always had with the food we eat, and therefore the meals they are part of, that is the true crime.

There are a number of things that make us human. Here at Penelope’s Loom it can be easy for us to get caught up in the intellectual or spiritual facets of our humanity. But if we only had to worry about our intellect and spirit we would be angels, not men. We have a third dimension to us as humans: our body. This too we ought to care about, because, as Christians, we know our very God took on the flesh of humanity, ennobling it. As a man, Jesus Christ did normal, human things, as well as Godly things. Some of the most human things He does in the Gospels involve food: eating it, providing it, or using it in parables to explain higher truths. Food sustains us and gives us nourishment, but it’s also something that we gather around in communion. We come together as communities over a meal to celebrate, to grieve, to discuss, to feast. Christ commences the full gift of Himself in His Passion with the Last Supper, as He gathers with His apostles to break bread with them. Could there have been a more sure way to sanctify the act of gathering together at a meal?

My friends, we must reclaim the family meal as an integral institution within our homes, and as part of that we must in turn commit to giving our families true food to eat. Real food means real food preparation and learning a thing or two about cooking. There are an abundance of excellent cook books, and there are multitudes of food blogs and Youtube channels that will teach you more than you need to know. You can even reach out to me or Katie. We are not going to promise you our expertise, but we will promise you our time and effort.

A reincorporation of real food in our meals reinforces several very important, very human things in our day-to-day life. It reconnects us to the land that this food comes from, and hopefully, if we are able to eat locally, this means land that is out our back door. In the best case scenario, this makes us more active members of our community and local economy. Preparing our own food and being intentional about what we buy also asks a greater gift of ourselves to others, and especially our families. There is no way around it, this method of family feeding is harder than many modern alternatives. It is not easy to plan out your family's meals scrupulously and then make the time in your day to prepare them. But it is more than worth it. Making this choice for your family is one of the most evident and active ways you can care for your family, body and soul. Additionally, cooking means working with your hands. I have said it before and I will say it again, we need as many opportunities to work with our hands in modern life as we can find. This kind of labor is good for us, and it is good for others. Full meal preparation forces you to manage your time better, rather than allowing your time to manage you. We must learn the importance of prioritizing meal preparation, as well as the following enjoyment of the meal.

All of these things are good in and of themselves, but they point to something better. Healthier bodies, stronger families, and knowledge of what we’re putting into our bodies all help us to become more human. This knowledge is empowering. You do not need to be subject to the whims of the food industry or even the enticing layout of your local grocery store. You have the ability to not only say “no” to all the things the corporations are trying to sell you, but to make things that are even better. This is what has helped me to stick to this “diet”. I’m not often tempted to buy something I shouldn’t at the grocery store or fast food restaurant because I am able to make food that is so much better in my own kitchen. Other options don’t appeal to me because, honestly, they usually sound pretty gross.

It is time to reexamine the role that food plays in our lives. Something that so obviously sustains us should also demand proper priority and management in our day to day habits and routines. If we cannot even be bothered to care about what we nourish our bodies with and how we go about eating our daily meals, it should come as no surprise that we cannot be bothered to properly manage and prioritize relationships with family, friends, and our Creator. Reexamining our relationship with the food we eat leads to a reexamination of our humanity, a study that needs constant attention.

Why Real Food Matters