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
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
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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?
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.
“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!
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.
In
my last blog I began a discussion of infant feeding practices, addressing the question of
when to begin solid food. In this instance, my views are in accord with those of conventional organizations, namely that for the majority of babies, four to six months is the right age for beginning foods other than breast milk or formula (that’s homemade baby formula, based on raw milk).
As for
what to feed baby, here I am mostly in
disagreement with conventional advice.
A recent online discussion that took place at
NourishingOurChildren.org has made me realize the need to reiterate our (mine and those of the Weston A. Price Foundation) recommendations for infant feeding.
Shortly after my book
Nourishing Traditions came out, I participated in an interview with Roger Windsor, editor of
Spectrum Magazine. The journal had a vegetarian, macrobiotic bent, but Roger was kind enough (and intrigued enough) to introduce
Nourishing Traditions to the public through the pages of his journal.
(By the way, Roger began eating meat, including liver, after the interview; he saw his health improve, sold his magazine, and for many years kindly donated his services as copyeditor for
Wise Traditions, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation.)
Dear Mr. Trump,
Congratulations on your election to the U.S. presidency. You campaigned on a slogan of “Make America Great Again,” proposing to create more jobs for ordinary Americans.
This is a laudable goal but unfortunately, it is not enough to make America great again.
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.