Food: Fuel of Life

You are what you eat. In the last 80 years, we have transitioned from food brought fresh from the fields and pastures to our tables, to a society who's main association with food is specific photos or brand names on the packaging in the supermarket.

In growing our own food and buying local, we know not only where our food comes from and support the people in our community who bring it to us, but also get fresher, healthier and more nutritious and compatible food that our body recognizes and knows how to digest.

Organic

Food produced without

• Conventional pesticides
• Artificial fertilizers
• Human Waste
• Sewage Sludge
• Food additives
• Ionizing radiation

Permaculture

All permaculture design is based on three ethics: Care of the earth (because all living things have intrinsic worth); care of the people; and reinvest all surplus, whether it be information, money, or labor, to support the first two ethics.

Permaculture is a design system that encompasses:

1. permanent agriculture
2. permanent culture

• Recognizes that all living systems are organized around energy flows.
• Teaches people to analyze existing energy flows (sun, rain, money, human energy) through such a system (a garden, a household, a business).
• Teaches them to position and interconnect all the elements in the system (whether existing or desired) in beneficial relationship to each other and to those energy flows.
• When correctly designed such a system will, like a natural ecosystem, become increasingly diverse and self-sustaining.

[Taken from an article that was printed August 1994, in the Tucson Food Co-op News. ©1994 Katherine Wasser ]

Healthy Diets

Be sure to eat a variety of foods, including plenty of vegetables, fruits, and whole grain products. Also include low-fat or non-fat dairy products, lean meats, poultry, fish, and legumes. Drink lots of water and go easy on the salt, sugar, alcohol, and saturated fat. Good nutrition should be part of an overall healthy lifestyle, that also includes regular physical activity, not smoking, and stress management. If you drink alcoholic beverages, do so in moderation.

[From Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website]

Cleanse

Body cleansing or detoxification underpins many alternative medical treatments. Most of these treatments claim to rid the body of accumulated harmful substances, and their proponents maintain that a cleansed, detoxified body is able to heal itself of a variety of common ailments. Therefore, body cleansing is expected to lead to improved health.

[From wikipedia]

Raw

The consumption of uncooked, unprocessed, and often organic foods, as a large percentage of the diet. A raw food diet consists fully of foods which have not been heated above a certain temperature.

From RawFoodLife:

• Oils, animal fats, nuts and seeds are chemically changed by heating, creating toxic substances harmful to the body.
• You have more energy & vitality when you eat raw foods.
• You look better & healthier when you eat raw foods.
• You can lose weight quickly & easily without counting calories or limiting how much you eat.
• Many people heal chronic diseases by eating a raw, living foods - often in addition to fasting, juicing, exercising and meditating.
• Live, raw foods cleanse the palate so foods taste better - everything tastes so good that you probably won’t even miss cooking!

 

[From wikipedia]