Challenge week 1: Buy irish produce only (vegetables)
A little story of how I got here...
When I was in my twenties food wasn’t an interest to me, besides just following a diet every now and then to lose weight. I wasn’t thinking about anything like healthy foods… quite the opposite! My basic diet on weekend evenings was diet coke, beer, and peanuts. Yes, peanuts, in large quantities! At my friends there was always a bowl of peanuts waiting for me. I did have stomach aches every now and then but never really paid attention to them. When I wanted to lose weight I went on a low carb diet - some of my friends might remember me saying: “no carbs at night!”
When I moved to Ireland, my dear friend Pepa, an avid cook, gave me my first cookbook for my birthday: Jamie Oliver’s 30-minute meals. I enjoyed looking at the photographs in the book, they gave me a lot of peace… strange, I know. I got curious about the recipes and started cooking them. I started enjoying going to supermarkets and shops to find strange (to me at the time at least) ingredients like sriracha, tahini, burrata, turmeric… I discovered cooking calmed my brain after a day dealing with difficult-Irish-English. Cookbooks and cooking became a gateway into my own inner world. If i was stressed or tired I would sit at the kitchen table and just look at cookbooks and mark the recipes I wanted to cook.
I really got into it, started a love story with Ottolenghi, oh what an artist he is, he combines ingredients creating the most delicious flavours. It was so much fun to cook all that nice food, and even more so to eat it. I also found that dinners were the moment that John and I had in our day to catch up, so it became a little ritual to always have dinner together, savouring new flavours. We still have this ritual, dinner is a sacred family moment - less peaceful with our 3-year-old daughter at the table now but still, a special time of the day! Increasingly, I enjoyed more cooking something new and nice than going out for dinner (more on this on some other blog).
I then thought I could try to see if I could solve my tummy issues by changing my diet. I tried everything, out of curiousness. I was using my body as a mini-Lab, to see what worked. Over time I reduced meat intake, consumed little to no-white carbs or refined sugar. Later on, I tried no dairy and did a vegan diet - I have to say I really felt great! Tummy issues were almost gone. But whenever I went back to Argentina to visit, where I found difficult to cook my food, and ate whatever was available (but in a more mindful way) I noticed that my tummy wasn’t that sore. I later discovered that my stomach aches were more related to anxiety and nerves than anything else (also more on this on another blog!)
Anyhow, I became very curious about food and the effects on my body. After much testing and trying I came to realise that what I needed was food that wasn’t processed - as much as possible. I tried making yoghurt, but I realised that Ireland makes good quality organic yoghurt that is worth paying for rather than making it at home. But pretty much everything I try to make at home (more about this yet on another blog). This was also increasingly informed by the macro figures about the effects of processed foods in our world - the numbers are shocking, check these facts out:
· Worldwide obesity has nearly tripled since 1975.
· 39% of adults aged 18 years and over were overweight in 2016, and 13% were obese.
· Most of the world's population live in countries where overweight and obesity kills more people than underweight.
· 39 million children under the age of 5 were overweight or obese in 2020.
I found in Michael Pollan huge inspiration. I loved his books and started following his book, Food Rules : “eat food, mainly plants, and not too much”. It has been a journey of discovery. I complemented this by paying attention to my body and how it feels before and after eating - in fact, at the time of typing this I feel my body quite shacky, nauseous, heavy, bloated and sleepy! (Last night I had a dinner birthday party with friends, we followed all the rules except “not too much”! But Pollan also recommends to break the rules once in a while :) Anyway, on listening to the body, I read Charles Eisenstein’s The yoga of eating. And this made SO much sense to me. As everything, I’m learning things are connected: we live in a modern world, that doesn’t have time to cook, we eat at our desks, watching TV, walking, etc… no wonder we are disconnected of what we eat and how it makes us feel. We also eat so that we don’t feel difficult feelings. Anyway, trying to pay more attention to how I feel after eating has become the best strategy - and I still fight with myself to eat slowly, haven’t done much progress on that front.
How does all this take me to the challenge of eating local Irish produce? Well, everything I read about food and how to eat was more about our own individual wellbeing. My food journey was accompanied by a greater mindfulness of how connected we are to everything. So, if that is true, looking after my own self would certainly help all that everything. That mindfulness made me curious about how what we eat affects the environment, animals, water use, energy, and other fellow human beings. I started looking at who the losers and winners in the global food system are. Increasingly I realised that how I felt with what I ate was important, but also started getting concerned and interested about how Earth and everybody involved in the food system were affected too. It started feeling wrong to eat a pineapple from the opposite side of the world, that had been picked when it was still green, put into fridges to keep it “fresh”, wasting so much energy… and then eating it in Ireland, so disconnected to that fruit’s origin – however, economics might argue here, and I did argue with myself: isn’t it better to support the developing nations that produce and sell those fruits by contributing to their economies when we buy their produce? I could cover this question in yet another blog. I just couldn’t ignore the fact that forests around the world are shrinking water is becoming even more scarce because of some of our food choices: for example, the global obsession with avocado. Our obsession with this fruit is causing intensive farming and water-shortages in Mexico. Like that, there are many other stories.
When I became a more conscious eater, I started buying fruit and vegetables that were not exposed to pesticides. And I made an effort to buy what I considered local, but what is local? Local is a subjective term… If you live in New York and buy something from the same country (even though it might come from the opposite coast) is it still local? When I went to Argentina, I bought fruits and veg that came from other provinces, in my head, that still was local, despite how large Argentina is and the many kilometres fresh food was being transported. But Ireland is a small country so surely I needed to make up for that, so then, I extended my definition of local to Europe, not the nation where I lived. In the end, Europe is almost the same size as Argentina!
The more I got into the topic of food and environment, the more I realised that probably, eating as local as possible, could be one of the things we can do to avoid destroying our world. At the same time, I discovered local farms in Ireland that are making a great effort to grow toxic-free fruit and veg. Supporting them and challenging myself to see how long I can survive consuming in this way, gave me the idea of the challenge. Who else would like to join me? Hurry before we get into the winter, and we only find potatoes and cabbage! Oh, food preservation is a topic that naturally follows this challenging experiment… again, more on that soon!
