27 May Cooking is a Political Act
I bet you have eaten some delicious home-cooked holiday meals lately. You are more new-age than you realize.
Did you know that eating home-cooked food is a cutting-edge revolutionary act?
The typical packaged food in the grocery store is strikingly lacking in nutrients. People who live on packaged, processed foods will become sick or fat or both. Processed foods can make big profits for large corporations, but have little benefit for you. Sometimes I think these items are not food at all, but edible junk.
Would these corporations continue to make a profit if we quit buying what they sell? Would they continue to be powerful and influence our government officials? They are only wealthy if we make them so.
So if you quit buying ready made, non-nutritious fast food and processed food, you cut into the bottom line and the corporations will change. The power is actually in your hands. If you cook your own food, and refuse to buy packaged junk, you take control over the big corporations. You are part of the revolution to healthy food.
You can quit giving your hard earned money to the big food corporations that are killing us.
True health comes from eating real, whole, fresh foods. If you cook, then you can make sure that’s what you eat. It doesn’t have to be super expensive and inconvenient. For example, consider what you would pay for a bag of potato chips. At Walmart, it’s about 41 cents per ounce, or about $4 for the party size. At that rate, a 5 lb sack of potatoes at the grocery store would cost $32! You pay a fraction of that. And real potatoes offer vitamins and phytonutrients, while potato chips offer very little.
Suppose you dropped your soft drinks and diet drinks from your shopping list. What a savings and at no loss of nutrition.
The trick is to make cooking real food convenient and cost effective. Here are some tips.
Soup is fast food. Soup makes vegetables taste so good, you will eat way more than you usually do. Freeze your leftovers or eat them for the next day’s lunch. My freezer is full of quarts of broth, and containers of leftover soup. I pick the meat off the bones that I use for making broth, and save that in the freezer too. So I always have healthy food in the house and don’t feel desperate for the drive through.
Salad in a jar. Yes, making a salad can take time, but it’s a time saver if you make several salads at once. Layer the salad in a jar with the dressing first, than the hard vegetables, then the soft vegetables, then the protein, then the leafy greens. Now you have a grab-and-go meal with no excuses.
Subscribe to a cook-your-own delivery service. They can be a little pricey, but remember you have more money in your food budget now because you no longer buy chips, sodas, and other junk. Real foods are pre-measured and mailed to your house with instructions. You usually have some control over your choices if you like to eat paleo or vegetarian. When you prepare the meals, you’re learning about cooking procedures. It’s like enrolling in cooking school. After awhile, you might apply what you’ve learned to food you buy yourself.
Slow cookers. Fill your crock with your ingredients at night and stash it in the refrigerator. Slip it into the cooker in the morning. At dinner time, your food is ready.
Hire somebody. This is also a pricey solution, but what will your savings be in medicine, doctor bills, home health, nursing homes, and so on, that you won’t need to pay for in your future? Maybe a college student could give you a couple or so afternoons a week to put together a soup or stew for the family.
Get the family involved. Give children real responsibility for a part of the meal. Supervise for safety, but let the child have choices and an active part in the meal preparation. This way, they are more likely to enjoy the process and eat the good-for-you food. My son loved to peel sweet potatoes at an early age. Tearing lettuce is easy, and so is grating carrots.
I’m a National Board Certified Functional Medicine Health Coach, and I consider health coaching part of the revolution. I’ll help you find ways to put your money where it benefits you more than the big corporations. Let’s change the world together. Contact me. We can set up a free 15 minute phone call, or you can buy one session and decide to add more.
How do you manage (or struggle) to cook healthy meals? Let us know in the comments.
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