Honest Food: "Dirty Dozen" and "Clean 15" Foods of 2012

My Journey to Honest Food

The Environmental Working Group has issued its 2012 list of the twelve most pesticide-laden fruits and veggies, and also its 2012 list of the fifteen least-contaminated fruits and veggies. For the most part, produce was tested after washing and peeling.

The Dirty Dozen

Listed in order of contamination, from worst (apples) to least (potatoes), but ALL are heavily contaminated; recommended that you buy and eat only ORGANIC from this group...

1. Apples
2. Celery
3. Sweet Bell Peppers
4. Peaches
5. Strawberries
6. Nectarines (imported)
7. Grapes
8. Spinach
9. Lettuce
10. Cucumbers
11. Blueberries (domestic)
12. Potatoes

EWG's "PLUS" Category:

Green beans and leafy greens (like kale, collard greens) didn't meet the criteria for the "Dirty Dozen" list, but they were commonly contaminated with highly toxic organophosphate insecticides, which are toxic to the nervous system. Over the last ten years, these insecticides have been, to a great extent, removed from agricultural practice, but they have not been banned, and so are still showing up on some items.

The Clean Fifteen

Still showed pesticide and chemical contamination, but in the lowerst amounts of all produce tested; while the best is to buy and eat only ORGANICALY-GROWN produce, if budget restrictions affect your family, the "Clean Fifteen" are your safest choice of conventionally-grown produce...

1. Onions
2. Sweet Corn (*IllinoisLori warns to be careful, though, that you are not getting GMO corn)
3. Pineapples
4. Avocado
5. Cabbage
6. Sweet Peas
7. Asparagus
8. Mangoes
9. Eggplant
10. Kiwi
11. Cantaloupe (domestic)
12. Sweet Potatoes
13. Grapefruit
14. Watermelon
15. Mushrooms

The Environmental Working Group also tested several vegetables in baby food this year:

Produce & Pesticides in Baby Food:
Green beans tested positive for five pesticides.
Pears found 92% positive for at least one pesticide residue.
Sweet potatoes came up cleanest.

EWG recommends consuming only organic in the "Dirty Dozen" list, and I would add the "Plus" category as well. EWG says that there are a wide range of health problems connected to pesticide exposure, including cancer, hormone disruption, skin/eye/lung irritations, and brain toxicity.

You can view the full EWG list at www.ewg.org/foodnews

(Source: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/765987 )

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Friday FarmGirls: The Pantry Purge

This post is part of the FarmGirl Friday Bloghop! Click the graphic to join! 

Week One of my eight-week, life-changing adventure was completed with the pantry purge.

My objective was to read the labels on everything and get rid of anything with synthetic oils (the "hydrogenateds"), additive sugars (dextrose, glucose, HFCS, CS, etc), and ingredients that you wouldn't find by themselves on the grocery store shelf (chemical cocktails, basically). Oh boy, was this one fun!

Fortunately, my pantry wasn't cram-packed full...I was in need of a minor shopping trip before this little exercise, and now I'm really in need of one! This is my "before" photo.

I grabbed a grocery bag for items that were unopened and still fresh, for food pantry donation. (I know, they have my "targeted ingredients" in them, but not everyone cares about such things, especially when hard times befall, and they just want and need something to make a meal with. This will do, and I think it's better than throwing it in the trash at this stage.) I also pulled my trash can close, and ended up grabbing a large, "contractor bag" size trash bag since my kitchen can filled up too much and too heavy. Better to double up the bag for strength!

Since my youngest is diabetic, we do need to keep rapid-acting sugars on hand for treating hypoglycemia, as well as what we call "fast carbs" which are the simple starches like saltines, oyster crackers, raisins, etc. I was delighted to discover that these things did not have hydrogenated oils in them, nor the additive sugars! Hooray! So I didn't have to feel badly about keeping them around...not that I really would have, we need them, but it was a little "victory" to have no need for justifying their presence!


Our favorite breadsticks, Alessi's, made the "good" list:

This herb stuffing mix, which has been in many a casserole and on my Thanksgiving table forever, did not:

The opened bag of stuffing went in the trash, and the unopened, not-yet-expired bag went in the donation sack:

How did two different containers of turkey gravy fare?

One stays:

One definitely goes:

At the end of my pantry purge, all of this was "faux food," headed for the trash bin (the organic corn chips on top were not exactly "faux," but they were stale, so they went out!):

This is the "donation" bag:

And this is what's left of my pantry!

A couple of friends have asked what program my husband and I have chosen...it's the PATH Healthy Eating Curriculum by Dr. Will Clower, from his Mediterranean Wellness plan. I just love the photos they have at the website!



I don't really need to be taught about synthetic ingredients, I already know and understand an incredible amount. But I really wanted something that my dh could work through to understand all of this, and that would give me daily and weekly assignments to kind of "kick-start" my overwhelmed and over-burdened mind and body into action on what I know and long to do, but just couldn't seem to begin.


So far, so good.

Tomorrow I'll go to the store and look for "clean foods" with recognizable ingredients to build up my pantry. Then on Saturday, I'm off to the farmers' markets for the fresh stuff, which is just beginning to show up in our area. My tomatoes are looking good in my garden bed at Christine's home, so I hope to have a decent tomato harvest to eat and put up for wintertime, Lord willing!



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My Journey to Honest Food: Sugar Purge PLUS FFG Update

My Journey to Honest Food...

 

Over the last five-plus years, I've learned a LOT about "Honest Food." I've devoured countless books...magazine articles...blog posts; I've visited numerous "Honest Food Farms" and made new friends there. My family has eaten 100% grass-fed meat for years, unless we've eaten away from home, and mostly organic.

But, the real-life-with-skin-on-it, 100%-Honest-Food way of eating has never before happened in our home. I am still overweight, and feeling sicker and sicker every day. My joints ache, and I have trouble falling asleep, all the time. If I eat "artificial food product" (called "faux food" from here on out) from a fast-food place, my gut reacts badly within about a half hour, and I "clean out." (Eeeeew...but hopefully that's a gentle way of saying it.)

Folks, this stuff we buy and eat from the grocery store aisles and the restaurants "just ain't normal," to use Joel Salatin's phrase! And it makes us all very, very sick. I'm feeling it, big time. Despite my knowledge, though, I've been too overwhelmed and low on energy to really enact needed changes.

Until now.

My dh and I share a birthday week. For our birthdays, we've enrolled in an online class together that will take us through an eight-week lifestyle makeover. We do daily lessons and assignments online. It costs us $17.50 per week, so over eight weeks, it comes out to $140.00.  I figure that if we can "rescue" our health, we'll save a whoooooooole lot more than that in medical bills, so we consider it a good investment, in both time and money. 

This week's assignments have to do with understanding what "faux food" does to the body (we already understand it), and then identifying faux foods in our home, and dumping them in the trash. We are to go "cold turkey" off faux foods. 

This afternoon I was tired from cleaning out my basement storage area, so I decided to go through my spice cabinet and get rid of imitation flavoring bottles and seasonings that contain chemicals and sugar. Um, yeah...wow, there were a lot of them! My sink sure smelled nice as I dumped vials of flavored propylene glycol down the drain!  :-)  I soaked the labels off of the sweet little bottles, and washed them clean. Chemicals all gone! Time to celebrate with an iced-coffee to which I added a couple of drops of pure orange oil.

The "old me" might have said, "You paid good money for those flavorings! They're so sweet-looking, all those pretty colors! What a waste!" But you know what? I feel somehow "liberated" from them! I plan to make some yummy naturally-flavored Italian oil using the organic herbs I'm growing this summer, and once it's nicely flavored, I'll transfer some into these little extract jars that I've washed out and removed the labels from, put a pretty new label on each of them, and give them to sweet friends as healthy holiday gifts, along with some homemade italian bread and fresh-grated parmesan cheese. 

Mostly purged...a few more things have gotten the boot since!

It is just a spice cabinet that has been rid of all "faux-ness," but it is only day one of our adventure, and I had to begin somewhere. Now I'm going to get some of my organic, 100% grassfed steaks out of the freezer, rub them with a little organic olive oil, and season them with created-by-God-alone spices, then put them on the grill for a low and slow cook...just what grassfed beef likes. A salad and some delicious bread to go with them, and we've got dinner!   

I am in a purging mode in many areas of my life, it seems! I have a deep, deep, heartfelt desire to downsize everything...our stuff, our house, our excess weight...and I've been going through my house looking for stuff for a garage sale that I'm doing with Christine tomorrow. I am turning over the key to my mil's house to the Estate Seller and her crew next Monday, now that we've retrieved family-heirloom items from her home. I have a used curriculum sale going here. The purge has begun in earnest.

For my Friday FarmGirls at Heart friends...no meme today, just an update: MY GREEN BEANS ARE PLANTED!!! Better late than never, right? Also, I'm going to let my FFG posts be, from here on out and until further notice, part of Deborah Jean's Friday Farm Girl Blog Hop...click the link below to visit and add your post onto her meme, too!

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TPP: Will the Piles Ever Diminish?

Get out your "to-do" list, roll up your sleeves, share the ongoing fruits of your labor, and encourage others along the way! 

Join the Project Party by adding the icon above to your post and linking it back to this blog, then sign the "Mister Linky" below so we can find you!

My little upstairs office and also the guest bedroom are still filled with boxes of stuff. I don't call it clutter, because it isn't clutter. In my mind, clutter is mostly "junk" that should become garage-sale-material or trash-can-filler. My stuff, on the other hand, is piles of used (and some unused) homeschool curriculum that I've pulled from the shelves and the bins, plus bags and boxes of Nathan's insulin pump paraphernalia and other diabetes supplies that I haven't yet put away (we need to go through everything that's already in the supplies cabinet and check dates, then put it all away with the oldest stuff in the front, so we use it first).  Just as my stuff is "scattered about" my house, I am taking my photos of it and "scattering them about" this post. See...if I can post my "before" photos, you can, too!

I did get through my parent's stuff which was in piles on my office desk (their medical needs are fairly extensive, so the paperwork that I have to deal with is, too), so that's a plus! But the desk is still full of other stuff to deal with. My nursing license has expired (oops!), so I need to deal with that (I think I get a grace period, I just have to pay $20 more in the renewal).

I also added heftily to my Used Curriculum Sale this week, and that little task ate up much of my free time. I still have more to add, but my neck and shoulders are knotted up pretty badly from too much computer work, so I have to take it easy.

My plan for this week (today, in fact!) is to take the curriculum and sort it by subject area/sale area, then re-box it, so it is easy for me to find items that people want (they are all over everywhere right now, some upstairs, some in the basement, and jumbled together in boxes with no particular order), and to gather my empty boxes (that would make good shipping boxes) together so that they, too, are all in one place with the curriculum, so it's fast and handy for me to decide how to package things.  

I hope and pray that I will actually have some "after" photos to share next week! Much to do...much to do. What are your big projects this week? Need a little nudge to get going on something? Join the Project Party and share it in a post...then link it up below so we can cheer one another on!

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Precious Reminder Before Fathers' Day

I wanted to share this post written by Mrs.White at her blog, The Legacy of Home...

With Father's day coming up,  most of us think about shopping. This has seriously tempted me to spend, or I should say . . .  waste. . . money.

Why is it so easy to go into any mall, or department store, and buy a present? Yet, at the same time, it siphons hard earned cash out of the home's funds. 

When I was growing up, we children...

Read the rest of this beautiful, thoughtful post HERE...be sure to subscribe to Mrs. White's posts, they are always encouraging and uplifting!

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More in my Used Curriculum Sale!

Just a quick note that I've been adding more items to my used curriculum sale! Click on the graphic above or HERE to visit the sale page!


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FFG: Holding On vs. On-Hold?

"There is rhythm to being a farmgirl. It is the rhythm of working hard when there is work to be done. It is the rhythm of finding joy in the "doing" of the work. It is also the rhythm of slowing down to enjoy each moment." 
~Rene Groom

To join the Fun of Friday FarmGirls@Heart, please include a link to my blog in your post, or grab one of my FFG buttons for your posts and to place in your sidebar! You can grab code HERE.

I'm in a bit of a muddle regarding my Friday FarmGirls meme. I resurrected it this season at the request of someone (how sweet!), but I'm having trouble getting a weekly post together. You see, I'm in a season of "non-farm-i-ness"...a short season of such, I hope, but a season, nonetheless.

 
It's been a time of college graduation...then adult-child-launching...then high school graduation...and now college registration and massive administrative and organizational work...on top of which I am still managing finances and bills for my parents and the estate sale and then home sale of my mother-in-law. I feel like I am trapped firmly in the hole that is the "overstressed suburban lifestyle," with no end in sight.

 
I have to plant green beans in my raised bed at my friend's house...only it's going to be in the upper 80's to 90's for the next few days. Not exactly bean-planting weather. Will it matter? I guess I can plant my seeds and find out. My herbs are still alive, and all my flower pots still look nice...I suppose that's something, only I don't think of it as part of my "farmgirl" nature. They are part of my "suburban" persona. It's what we all do out here...plant flowers each summer. The older I get, the less excited I am about them. They are pretty, don't get me wrong...I enjoy pretty! But I crave a different kind of connection to God's created order, and I just can't have it right now. 
 
I haven't cooked much this week (we've been out of town or visiting friends), I haven't made anything by hand, I haven't planted my beans yet...and I'm not feeling very farmgirl-ish. I think that FFG may need to go back to sleep for a while longer. To the sweet reader who requested it, there's one more "Mister Linky" to use today if you would like...perhaps in the future after I've shifted through this phase of my life and into my next one (it'll be a big shift, I'll be an empty-nester), my farmgirl heart will be fulfilled and I'll have something to blog about. I may write my own "FFG" posts here and there as I accomplish things, but I'll put the meme back on hold. For now, I need to turn my attentions to simply capturing Serenity in the Suburbs again.
 
I could use some of that.


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Honest Food: "Organic" No Longer to Mean "Organic"

My Journey to Honest Food...

I had a feeling this was coming. If you haven't been paying attention to your food sources, you'd better start. Brands like Kashi, Burt's Bees, Cascadian Farms, and others found in your "organic" food stores have long been owned by giant corporations like Clorox, Kellogg's, General Mills, and so on. And now, the "organic" label will be nose-diving into non-trustability. Take the time to read this, and be educated:
http://www.polyfacefarms.com/2012/06/01/from-joel-salatin-june-1-2012/



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TPP: The Administrative Office

Get out your "to-do" list, roll up your sleeves, share the ongoing fruits of your labor, and encourage others along the way! 

Join the Project Party by adding the icon above to your post and linking it back to this blog, then sign the "Mister Linky" below so we can find you!

My goal from last week was to get my office back in order. I would say that I am 75% of the way there! I do not have photos to show yet, I'll wait until I'm 100% done :-)

 

I needed to accomplish a couple of other things this week, and I have:

#1) Do a power shop at Costco and Meijers for necessary "bigger-ticket items" that Bryan would need for his new apartment...things like a vacuum, a toaster oven, iron, casserole pans (Pyrex-type stuff) and storage bowls, etc. Bryan is now moved in and seems to be all set...Lord, I miss my son. (*sniff*)

 

#2) Re-arrange Nathan's transcript to reflect his new courses completed and updated GPA (it went UP a little bit, PTL! He went from a 3.85 to a 3.87...sweetness). He has his academic advising fall semester course registration appointment at U of I's College of Engineering tomorrow, so he's bringing this copy of his temporary transcript along for reference. The official transcript is due to them in early July, and Nathan should finish his final courses (American Literature and New Testament Studies/Hebrews) by the end of June...whew! His college transcript from our community college was sent by them today. The administrative work to get from homeschool high school into a major top-tier university has been something else, I'll tell ya what! But he is so excited, and we, as parents, are so delighted.

 

But the main thing that brings us joy is, as Scripture says:

 

"I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth." (III John 4)

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