For over 2 years now I’ve been focused on trying to lose weight and get more healthy. It’s for a variety of reason, and yes, vanity is in the list. I started this journey by focusing on CrossFit, but over time I noticed that my lifestyle became more Paleo or Primal. I’ve also started to modify my exercise along the same lines of lifting heavy objects and slow steady movement. Hiking, biking, gardening, swimming, etc all fit into this pattern of movement.
As I got into this I realized how ridiculously sustainable this way of eating is. I eat animals (local grass fed for the most part) and a bunch of fruits and vegetables. The fat I eat comes from the meat, lard from the pigs I buy and some organic butter from the store. It’s super easy to eat within your local food shed when you eat like this. Oh sure I eat some things that aren’t local too, like bananas and sweet potatoes, but for the most part you can eat this way and eat seasonally. All it requires is putting up more than someone who eats grains, dairy and legumes, especially since the bulk of your calories come from meat and fat which are easily sourced locally. As opposed to a more plant based diet where grains are moved in from another location.
Living in Iowa I think about our agriculture. It mostly consists of CAFO hog operations, beef cattle raised on pasture (until they are a certain age and shipped to feedlots), confinement egg production, corn on one side of the road and soybeans on the other. If more consumers moved to a way of eating that was focused on a Paleo or Primal way of eating I can’t help but think of how much different our landscape would be. Would our soil be eroding down the Mississippi at such a horrific rate? (or see this article from the Des Moines Register) How much cleaner would our water be? How much more attractive would our fields be full of animals and natural plants instead of rows of corn and beans? Would we care so much about deer populations if they just ate the grass in our fields instead of the beans and corn?
It also seems like a fairly easy way to live over the long term too. I can grow a fair amount of the fruits and vegetables I would like to eat on a small plot of land around my house. (I live on 1/3 of an acre so it’s not like this land is huge) And with a small chicken coop it would be easy to raise enough eggs for us to eat. Where I would get tripped up is the meat, though I have to say I can buy it from plenty of farmers in the area, and if something like this were to happen the amount of farmer’s selling products in this area would increase exponentially.
Of course there are plenty that say that the most sustainable way to eat is to eat a plant based diet. I disagree. The amount of energy involved in raising the grains for that type of diet is immense. The energy involved in transporting those foodstuffs around the world is immense. The erosion, pollution, isolation of farmers, disrupting communities to grow on a larger scale and ag subsidies all conspire to make me think that eating a plant based diet is not the way to go. You can disagree with me, that’s fine with me. But for me, my health, my pocketbook and where I live, buying my meat from a local farmer and raising as much of my own fruits and vegetables as possible seems to be the way I can live and reduce my impact on the earth. It’s the diet that I think humans are evolved to eat. It’s sustainable in my mind. And it’s a great way to hedge against future food insecurity because so much of it can be raised locally.
Well, sort of Paleo. I have a plethora of apples sitting on my counter and I had a hankering for something special so I made some apple fritters. I followed this recipe and just substituted gluten free flour for the regular flour and doubled the egg. They turned out great. I had the oil a little hot so they were too brown, but otherwise they were pretty darn good.
I paired them up with a roasted in a pan chicken that we all really enjoyed. Recipe here. And, the soup base for some chicken soup is already in the pot and ready to be made!
