It's Not A Fad (This Is How We Eat Now)--Part II

I was raised to chase down healthy foods and eat them for awhile.  Commitment has always been the thing...it's that eclectic living that causes me trouble every time, my parents' fault.  Ha!

Our foray into healthful eating began when dear hubby and I took a nutrition class on the Hallelujah Diet.  Our teacher, or health minister, is absolutely vegan.  That means she wouldn't touch an animal or its by-product to her lips unless threat of death was involved.  She is also 85% a raw foodist.  Our class was wonderful and we believe we were taught the absolute truth.  The problem was, we just couldn't hang--our kids begged for comfort food, we began cheating one night a week (pizza maybe), we began cheating on weekends, weekends began starting on Thursdays and lasting until Tuesdays.  We liked the beliefs, the practices and the recipes.  It was the impulsive trips to McDonalds that did us in.

Next we started thinking that meat (and eggs!) might be okay if you raised it yourself on healthy stuff, like grass, and didn't give it antibiotics.  Then we discovered sushi.  We added cooked crustaceans and bi-valved mollusks to our list of acceptable food items.  Over the years since our nutrition class, we have considered ourselves (for a spell) raw foodists, vegans, vegetarians (vegans with wiggle room), semi-vegetarians, natural foodists, fruitarians (more fruit than veggies in the vegetarian diet), pescetarians (vegetarians who will eat fish), and pollotarians (vegetarians who will eat chicken).  We like the Japanese version of the macrobiotic diet best--but that's food for the next post.

The bottom line is this:  I am very conscious of the garbage available for our consumption.  It is pretty and sparkly and delicious.  Much of it is also filled with chemicals and animal by-products that could kill us.  On top of that miserable fact, the marketing ploys for this stuff are aimed straight at seducing my children. Their bodies are growing and are super vulnerable to toxins.  So, in light of that, I read all labels, consider all warnings even if they sound a little kooky, research new products, and try to balance my family's meals and snacks.  We also eat some of this terrible stuff--knowingly and sometimes with reckless abandon--just to stay sane.