Feeding My Family on the Cheap

I couldn’t post about what we eat and exercise without addressing the need to change the stereotypical American diet.  Americans are suffering from diseases expounded upon by unhealthy food choices at wild rates.  Our children are being affected by diseases that were usually common in adults.  In eastern Kentucky, we are seeing large increases in diabetes and heart disease.  The food and diet industry want us to believe that it is from consuming too much fat.  Fat period.  Blanketing the word.  Not distinguishing between types of fats.  Then, there is the amount of refined sugar we consume, and high fructose corn syrup.  You gotta love those new commercials.  It’s okay in moderation. 😉

In December, I found myself very ill.  When I came out on the other side of that sickness a month later, I was twenty pounds lighter and feeling weak.  I wanted to regain my health and strength.  I wanted to use this opportunity to explore the food I was eating and what I was feeding my family.  I wanted to be a healthy mother and example for my girls.  I have been thinking about food all my life.  I’ve come from finishing whole bags of Oreos with my Dad on our weekends together, to being a self starving athlete passing out on the hardwood, to an overweight and depressed college student, to again a food controller, then motherhood, and now real health.  The first thing I did when I needed to regenerate myself was to grab my Nourishing Traditions cookbook, by Sally Fallon.

I had attempted a Traditional Foods way of life right when I discovered I was pregnant with Ivy.  Unfortunately, all day morning sickness took over and I just couldn’t stomach a change.  This time I was ready.  It always intrigued me when I thought of what my ancestors ate.  My mountain ancestors ate what they could grow or raise before the introduction of processed and shipped in foods.  They cooked with lard, used whole milk and butter that was not pasteurized and was fresh.  They ate meat with every meal when it was available either through livestock or hunting.  They sweetened with molasses, sorghum, and honey (until refined white sugar was introduced).  Our people ate three full meals when times were good, consisting of a meat or two, several vegetables, and cornbread or biscuits.  Of course, there was the desert on the occasions of special times and company.  They ate until satisfied, and most did not become overweight.

I wondered how they managed this, and always thought it was because they worked all day.  That they did, but it was in intervals of hard work and easier day to day type chores.  It wasn’t like the quick intense workouts we do today.  What they did do is eat their portion of real whole foods that they worked to raise and prepare without the ease of ready-made things.  They weren’t putting ingredients into their body that they didn’t recognize.  So, after reading Nourishing Traditions, thinking of how my people did things, and what my body told me I needed, I decided to go with my family toward real, natural, and when available organic foods.  No pre-boxed, half-cooked, freeze dried, corn syruped, bleached flour, vegetable oil, soy laden dinners.  Whole food, scratch made, all the time.

Now, we are not a family with money by any means.  We pinch pennies and do without what many families consider musts.  We are creative folks and both of us have chosen to make our creative endeavors our life’s work.  I decided to give up teaching middle school to stay home with my girls, and it has meant we have had to cut many corners.  Moving off-grid was our first step to cutting high expense.  Also, off-grid/country living is home to us.  In moving off-grid, you also make some sacrifices.  Good roads, television(okay not a sacrifice), luxury living, and natural food markets.  As I have mentioned before, organic foods are few and far between here.

To begin looking into this for yourself, you might want to visit the website of the Weston A. Price Foundation (www.westonaprice.org).   Keep in mind these are recommendations based in part on science and in part on traditional folkways.  I have adapted these recommendations to what is available financially, culturally, and geographically to my family.

Here is how I buy food with around $250 monthly to feed 3:

• I purchase as much Full Circle brand foods and produce I can from the local chain of grocery Food City.  Full Circle is the brand of organics that they carry.  In produce, I try to keep in mind what most Appalachians kept in their garden.  We did this while choosing seeds for our garden too.
• Raw dairy products are something I have yet to find, so I make due with organic dairy.
• There are no organic meats to be found.  We eat wild game that my family hunts.  I look for meats that are free-ranged, antibiotic/hormone free, and generally as well kept as possible.  I buy Gerber chicken, Laura’s Lean Beef, and Full Circle Salmon brands.  For breakfast meats I buy Swaggerty’s Natural MSG free sausage and Oscar Meyer Natural Bacon free of nitrates and MSG.
• I try to stay away from too many grains.  I am able to find organic corn meal, wheat flour, and spelt flour in Bob’s Red Mill brand.  The rest of my grains I buy from Yoder’s Bulk Foods in Hindman, Kentucky.  The store is ran by a local group of Mennonites.  Oatmeal and Cornmeal are our favorite grains or grain-like products.
• I sweeten only with the following: sorghum, molasses, organic/local honey, raw honey, organic agave nectar.
• I cook with only the following: lard, extra virgin olive oil, coconut oil, sesame oil, bacon drippings, whole butter unsalted.

That is the basics of what I  do.  Everything in my kitchen is hand-made unless there is another more Traditional Food type option available to me.  I cook two meals a day and lunch is often left-overs.  We eat a lot of nuts as well.

Now, you may think that this costs more than your typical American shopping expenses.  However, even I was surprised by a recent shopping trip I made with my sister.  She bought mostly pre-packaged, ready made, and non-organic food stuffs.  I bought all organic or natural.  We both spent $125 for our carts of groceries!  I stayed away from the middle aisles and stuck to whole foods.  You can eat this way on a tight budget.

Some other things we are doing to cut costs is grow our own garden and hopefully we will be getting our own laying hens.  Another plus to living off-grid.  I’ll leave you today with our most recent gardening delights.

A Man and His Tiller

Hoe Hand to Add to My Writer's Callus

Potato Planting at Dusk in Pajamas

Spotlight Appalachia – 20/20 and Bill O’Reilly

I’ve started this four times and stopped each time disgusted with trying to explain who I am and why I am proud to be a mountain woman from eastern Kentucky.  At this point that is not the piece I want to write.  What I do want to address is how my homeland became to be portrayed in only a negative light, and any positives ignored.  I also want to explain why Bill O’Reilly can stuff it, and I will choose to raise my children here because I do feel like it is the best place for them.
First, our portrayal on 20/20.  I’m probably not going to be popular for saying this, but I found it not too far from truth.  They showed people in real situations.  All the residents in this area know these situations exist.  As far as the Mt. Dew mouth, we all have seen people put Pepsi and whatever in baby bottles.  I just saw a mama the other day giving Mt. Dew to what looked to be a 5 month old at Wal-Mart.  I grew up drinking almost nothing but pop.
What we need to keep in mind is the journalistic intent of the piece.  They wanted to show the real poverty and problems in the area.  Not the normal people and the great programs going on here.  That doesn’t get ratings.  Think about what you chose to watch on TV… see?  What I wonder is where are the resources for the people they showed?  Where are the neighbors who can offer rides?  Where is the boy’s community when all is said and done after he played his heart out for the team?  I’m sure there has been intermittent help, but the fact of the matter is (you all saw the mansion and sub-urb like neighborhoods) there are those who can help living right in the mountains.
Now, aside from those they chose to show.  I want to talk about how our people got in the shape many are in today.  It has come from capitalism and a trade of real culture for “pop” or commercial culture.  Appalachians are a people who came to the mountains by choice.  They were seeking solace.  A place to breathe and live the type of life they felt they should.  No compromises.  We brought to the mountains rich traditions in storytelling, music, cooking, religion, and just plain living.  We worked hard and helped one another.  We stuck together.
Then, they found the coal and came in making a hardworking people empty promises of a life more leisurely.  They paid only scant prices for mineral rights, destroyed water, and left people who lived a subsistence lifestyle with land that was raped.  Next, they offered real wages to our men, when they found they couldn’t farm their land.  What they gave them were shanty houses, and scrip.  This plunged them into poverty that they couldn’t endure because the subsistence way of living was not supportable in a coal camp.
This went on and on.  I could go into the dangers, the health risks, and many other things, but I won’t here.  I’m not trying to make broad generalizations about the coal industry.  I’m a coal miners daughter.  Speed this up to the present.  Eventually, in the pursuit to be more like the outsiders, so they wouldn’t think we were stupid, poor, or outlaws we started devaluing our own unique culture.  The stories weren’t looked on as important, the young people didn’t want to know how to tend a garden, and the music became embarrassing to many of them.  What did they want?  Abercrombie and Fitch, Super Wal-Mart, a nice golf course.  Am I saying these things are the devil?  No.  But, when you replace the “who you are” with a capitalist version of “who you should be” we are beginning to strive to attain the unattainable.  We lose hope, forget who we are, and lose self confidence.
I am not born of a backward and stupid people who are too dumb to rise up out of a mess.  I am not born of a shallow sort either.  I am born of a head-strong people who have been burdened, tricked, and manipulated by empty promises.
What do we do?  We pick back up what is ours and teach our children that they are somebody outside of what the media tells them they should  be.  They are storytellers, artists, musicians, farmers, woodworkers, hikers, geologists, biologists, archaeologists, dancers, dreamers, and doers.  We share with them where they are from, and help them decide what they will do with what is given them.  We help them see that being unique is a positive, money is not everything, and to be proud that they can live with nothing and everything all at the same time.
I choose to raise my girls here because this is where I was raised.  I was not raised middle class, but I was raised knowing education, respect, and morals were important.  I was raised in a place where people stop to help when you are broken down on the road.  I was raised in a place where going to church could be as wondrous as a concert.  I was raised in a place where I could be comfortable being all alone on a hillside, and so could my mom with me being there.  I found God in His creation.  I didn’t need someone to tell me my worth.  I saw it all around me.
I want my girls to have the same things I did.  I have been to the city and came back home.  It was too general and cold for me.  Not that there weren’t many great things too.  I have an advanced degree that I am thousands of dollars in debt for, and I still say the most important things I learned, I learned right here on my mountain, in its hollers, and playing by its streams.  I learned how to be from my elders who gave a great example.
It is my hope that my generation and all those after it will embrace our cultural heritage.  I hope we will learn to be who we are while coexisting with what is around us.  I hope we become a people who want to share ourselves with others.  I want the miners to be respected for what they do.  I want outsiders to see that they are even more apart of what is happening in these hills than even we are.
And I want people who don’t know what they are talking about to keep their mouths shut.  I want us to stop trying to defend ourselves saying we didn’t grow up in a holler, trailer, running barefoot, drinking Mt. Dew, but to realize that there is nothing wrong with most of that, and what is wrong can be changed.  It is not the summation of who we are.
This was a rambling mess because I’m trying to write and be a mama at the same time.  I’m sure it is also a wonderful first post (note I’m a bit sarcastic).  Go ahead.  Find my loopholes and make your comments.