Building A WHOLE FOODS PANTRY

We are about to take a deep dive together into building a real food, nutrition-focused, functional pantry. My goal is to help you form new or richer relationships with the food that can most help you sustain good health. This is paramount:▸ inspiration for eating healthy starts with knowing your food—not necessarily knowing it like I do but forming your own personal relationships. Once you learn that adding a half teaspoon of turmeric to your coffee can curb your knee pain, or that two brazil nuts daily will supply you with enough selenium to fuel your thyroid, you may find it easy (and empowering) to add kitchen allies like these into your routine. This pantry section is brimming with health tidbits like that—and you don’t need to memorize them, as they will be here for you to come back to again and again, taking in more with each visit! (And it’s all indexed for your easy access.) As I researched these sections for more than fifteen years(!), I traveled down exciting roads that read like an adventure novel—roads filled with violence, persecution, perilous travels across oceans, perseverance, innovation, and adaptation.▸ The story of the plants and animals we eat mirrors our own story through time, as we have evolved together and are responsible for each other’s survival. Perhaps we have never given much consideration to how our food makes its way to our local farms and supermarket shelves; however, each plant has a reason it has continued to be cultivated and harvested over the centuries, and each animal has a reason it was hunted, bred, or fished. Some of these foods have been with us for many thousands of years, while many other species have been left in the past. The distinction between food that has been left behind in history and food we continue to cultivate is where the story gets captivating—and where our ancestors have much to teach us. In these pantry sections, I share some of my favorite folkloric and historical food-facts, but mostly I focus on each food’s nutritional highlights, healing applications, and cooking tips. In my categorized lists of food items that I would love for you to taste, use, and stock in your home, I include the ingredients that we can most readily get in the US or which have gained popularity here. This means that there are many worthy and worthwhile foods that don’t get highlighted in this section, so please know that these lists are a beginning and not an end. One of the ways I have grown my own knowledge of and love for a large variety of foods is through the study of other cultures, attempting through immersion and skill-sharing to understand what foods they value. In the following sections, I weave in the worldly wisdom that locals have shared with me, calling on my own adventures through India, Brazil, Israel, Peru, and Costa Rica.

I have worked with every single ingredient in this pantry section, and I share my sincere appreciation for every fruit, vegetable, spice, seed, grain, and more, as well as details on which pantry items are best to avoid. I hope my words inspire and even lure you to perceive and appreciate these foods in a new way, thus finding more motivation, joy, and ease in eating a whole foods diet.

Why Prioritize Whole Foods & Build a Healthy Pantry? This chapter reads like an encyclopedia, more or less, of whole foods.▸ A whole food simply means a food in its whole form, containing only one ingredient: an apple, a piece of fish, a grain of brown rice, a carrot. It does not mean that we can’t juice them or chop them, cook and combine them, or smother these whole foods with delicious sauces. A food in its whole form has all of its nutrients intact, giving us the greatest health benefits possible from that food. When we start to extract, pulverize, press, polish, fortify, and package our foods, we lose vitality every step of the way.▸ Processing and refining can make that simple food into a stranger to the intelligence of our bodies, wreaking havoc in our guts and in our cells. Moreover, when we eat whole foods, we get to experience the taste of that food in its pure form, and our taste buds are thereby conditioned to enjoy and expect that. Eventually, when we are used to eating an amazing whole foods diet, processed food becomes too sweet, too salty, too fake, too processed!

Remind Me Again: What’s the Problem With Processed Food? Overly-processed foods are depleted of their nutrients and enzymes. For instance, when you eat pretzels, bread, or crackers made with “enriched flour,” the flour has been pulverized, stripped of all vitamins, and then chemically infused with synthetic forms of other vitamins. In order to metabolize food like this, your body must deplete its personal store of essential nutrients and enzymes. In excess, processed food will decrease your enzyme output by stressing out the pancreas. Processed grains also have much of their fiber removed, which means they release sugar into the bloodstream much faster. This low-fiber/simple-carb combination often leads to problems with insulin levels. These kinds of processed foods will also hurt the healthy bacteria in your gut, further damaging that delicate digestive garden. Most packaged foods use the cheapest ingredients available, which results in a product made with bad oils (not just hydrogenated oils but vegetable oils like canola and safflower), GMO corn and soy, and way too much refined sugar. Processed foods often have additional ingredients that are harmful to your brain and the rest of your body, like MSG, artificial colors and flavors, and a wider range of preservatives.

But I Don’t Think I Could Live Without Processed & Packaged Foods...I hear you—me, too! I do feel that there is room for selective packaged and processed foods in a healthy kitchen; this makes our lives easier and more interesting! It’s fun to buy an exciting Thai marinade or hot sauce. I love it when my boys get excited about a boxed brownie mix or bag of gluten-free pretzels. And of course, I don’t expect people to be milling their own grains for flour or making their own condiments (but more power to you if you do, and I actually have a few easy DIY condiments for you to try, page 840!). The goal here is to try to use packaged or processed foods as accents in a whole-foods-based diet, and to come to it educated and informed, with the privilege to actively decide what you put into your body.

THE PANTRY SECTION IS ORGANIZED LIKE THIS:

• Fruit - page 156

• Vegetables - page 170

• Grains - page 194

• Bean & Lentils - page 206

• Nuts & Seeds - page 210

• Fats - page 218

• Sweet Sources - page 232

• Herbs, Spices, Roots & Shoots - page 242

• Pantry Odds & Ends - page 286

• Healthy & Sustainable Animal-Based Protein Sources - page 304

HERE ARE SOME ADDITIONAL TIPS FOR EATING A WHOLE-FOODS-BASED DIET

• Shop the Perimeter of Your Grocery Store and the Bulk Section. This will ensure that your cart is filled with fruit, vegetables, whole grains, beans, nuts, whole dried fruit, dairy, meats and fish.

• Plant and Pick Your Own. We don’t have to grow our own food to understand the source but planting some edibles in your yard or going to the farm to pick some for yourself really does enhance your relationship with that food. My younger son loves to harvest anything he can, and what he harvests he will eat with wild abandon. I have found that giving our kids a context for their food source has impacted them greatly. It’s our job to teach them what real food looks like and that we are what we eat!

• Choose Foods That You Can Picture Being Grown, Harvested, or Caught. We can imagine an orange growing, but not an orange-flavored drink. You can picture a happy free-range hen laying her eggs but not entering her nest and producing “egg beaters.” You get the picture.

• Choose Food Products That Have the Fewest Ingredients. If you read a package’s ingredients and see many words that you can’t pronounce, it’s probably not a great choice. I search to find bread, crackers, or chips that can impress me with the smallest and cleanest ingredient list.

• Keep It Varied! For instance, you may say that you get benefits from nuts because you eat almonds, which are great for you. Yes, they are amazing little packets of energy, but there’s a treasure chest of different nutrients awaiting you from pecans, walnuts, pine nuts, pistachios, and brazil nuts. Go for different colors, and try veggies that you have never tried before when they come into season. Joining a farm co-op or CSA can really stretch you to find new ways to eat interesting foods (like, what the heck am I going to do with all this rutabaga?!).

• Use Jars for All of Your Bulk Items. This is my number one pantry organizing tip. I like the standard wide-mouth canning jars of various sizes (they all have the same lid size). I use them to store all my grains, nuts, beans, dried fruit, herbs, and spices. Not only does it keep things neat, organized, and easy to see and stack, but it keeps these foods fresher and away from plastic.

• Order Special Items Online. I order seaweed, hemp seeds, brazil nuts, sprouting mixes, and some other goodies online rather than trying to find the right kinds in the grocery store. I like thrive.com for many items. I get seaweed from MaineCoast Sea Vegetables. If you are ordering spices, I suggest teaming up with a friend or three so you can order in bulk from Frontier Co-op (www.frontiercoop.com), since you may not have a need for a pound of cumin!

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