Welcome to my Nourishing Traditions © blog!
I am looking forward to this opportunity to write about my favorite subject: healthy food! I’ll be doing lots of updates on the science of nutrition, traditional diets, raw milk, meal planning and interesting recipes. I’ll be discussing the need for healthy animal fats in the diet–for everything from cellular energy, to protection against cancer, to an upbeat, happy mood. My new blog also gives me the opportunity to write about other subjects that interest me, including farming and gardening, children, science, music, language and literature (especially Shakespeare). I am looking forward to this new venture, and especially getting your comments and feedback. Coming soon: a series on genuine Southern cooking and a series on fermented foods from around the world–plus my heretical thoughts on feeding babies. Stay tuned!
Sincerely,
Sally Fallon Morell
Pancake Batter
One of the most versatile and successful recipes from Nourishing Traditions is the pancakes. Freshly ground flour (spelt, emmer or soft winter wheat) soaked overnight with equal parts of yogurt or kefir serves as the base for delicious, light tasting and highly digestible pancakes.
Gizzards, The Gateway Organ Meat
Have you ever wondered how animals without teeth chew up their food, especially hard foods like grains? They actually have an internal grinding apparatus, called the gizzard.
Milk and Water Kefir
Kefir grains are a wonderful way to culture raw milk because they are not temperature sensitive—for yogurt and other cultures, the milk needs to be heated and kept warm for the culture to work.
True Blue Zones: Loma Linda
So far we have looked at four “blue zones,” regions that have lots of long-lived people: Sardinia, Okinawa, Costa Rica and Ikaria. What have we learned so far about the characteristics of these nonagenarians?
Maybe the most important thing is to live in a place that ends with the letter A. Just kidding.
True Blue Zones: Ikaria, Greece
Tourism in the Greek island of Ikaria got a big boost when scientists determined that Ikaria was a blue zone—an area with a large number of long-lived inhabitants
True Blue Zones: Costa Rica
The Nicoya Peninsula is a fertile rectangle of land on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. Since the arrival of the Spaniards, the region has hosted herds of beef and dairy cattle. Many tropical fruits thrive there, including citrus, mango and papaya.
True Blue Zones: Okinawa
In my last blog, we began a discussion of blue zones—regions with a lot of centenarians—as popularized by Dan Buettner in his book The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest. As we saw in his chapter on the Sardinian blue zone, he leaves out considerable information that contradicts his premise, namely that the longevity diet is one that contains a lot of vegetables and only small amounts of meat—that’s lean meat, not “processed meats that are filled with fat.”
True Blue Zones: Sardinia
Often when I present information on the work of Weston Price, I get feedback that goes like this: native peoples on their native diets, high in animal foods and animal fat, may have been attractive and healthy when they were young, but they did not live into old age. If you want to live a long life, you need to eat a diet that is low in fat, low in salt, high in plant foods and rich in dietary fiber, in short, the penalty for a long life is adherence to the sad and unsatisfying diet foisted on us by the Diet Dictocrats.
Find Real Food App, Part II
In my last blog, I introduced the Weston A. Price Foundation’s Find Real Food app, the online version of our Shopping Guide. The Shopping Guide and App are unique in many ways.
Find Real Food: The Ultimate Healthy Food Grocery Shopping Guide
Many years ago, a member of the Weston A. Price Foundation named David Morris, came to us with the idea of a shopping guide, which would only list foods that met our Wise Traditions guidelines. He even went out and found the funding for us to print the first issue—that was in 2003.
Update on Bone Broth
"Broth is the new juice," is the saying on the street. Indeed, interest in genuine bone broth is taking off, thanks not only to my book Nourishing Broth, but also to several other great books on the subject. And the number of artisan companies making broth is growing, as a quick look at the Weston A. Price Foundation Shopping Guide will show.
WAPF Membership Campaign
Do you drink raw milk or purchase food directly from a farmer? Have you switched to butter or started cooking in lard? Are you reading labels more carefully these days? Or drinking kombucha instead of soft drinks?
State of Illinois Still Poisoning Male Prisoners with Soy Diet
Early in 2005, we received a telephone call at the Weston A. Price Foundation office from an Illinois prisoner, Larry “Rocky” Harris. Mr. Harris had a tough, desperate-sounding voice, and something told me I needed to listen carefully. Larry is a “prison lawyer” who helps fellow prisoners write grievances and complaints and advises them as to their legal rights.
Bringing Up Baby, Part IV
“Food before one is just for fun.” That’s the philosophy for feeding programs that place a few raw vegetables on your baby’s high chair tray; other groups do stress the important nutritional requirements for babies and toddlers, but follow this with recommendations to feed rice cereal and pureed vegetables. Dear parents, your growing baby needs much more than vegetable slices or rice cereal!
Bringing Up Baby, Part III – Baby-Led Weaning??
Recently I visited Whole Foods in Washington, DC and went upstairs to the cafe area to eat my lunch (cheese and homemade pate) before shopping. A woman with a baby of about eight months old came in and sat at the table next to mine. She ate a meal she had purchased at the deli. But what did baby in her high chair get? A few pieces of green pepper and cucumber on the high chair tray. When she left, those vegetable slices were scattered on the floor, with no evidence that baby had eaten much of anything.
The Weston A. Price Foundation is dedicated to teaching Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts. The Foundation depends on memberships for its educational activities. You can become a member by visiting westonaprice.org and clicking on Join Now.