Sadee and John and I were chatting last night - over cocktails and chocolate pudding.  (If you don't know who Sadee and John are, then you didn't read the first issue of our magazine!) It seemed a fitting way to discuss the next issue, which is centered around the idea that You Are What You Eat.

Sadee, as she often does, boiled it down to the idea that your cells need to be fed something that they recognize. Something that, essentially, speaks the same language they do.  But, if you walk through the aisles of the grocery store, or peer through the grease-laden windows of blazenly neon fast-food restaurants, what you see are food-style-products that have been mechanically and chemically manipulated to imitate food. But your body doesn't know what to do with them - they aren't similar.

I have often explained this idea to my daughter in a couple ways.  First, imagine that you are an art-lover, and are going to a convention of art-lovers that's taking place in China. You are the only one there who speaks English. Even though they are discussing something you know a lot about, that you love, you can't absorb any of the information because it is in a different language. So it is with food that has had it's whole elements - the one's nature made it with - stripped away from it, or manipulated for longer shelf-life. The information is all there, but your body can't get it. 

On that same front, your body needs nutrients to "go." Your car needs "nutrients" to go. Your body is natural, it needs natural nutrients in order to perform. Your car is mechanical, it needs mechanical nutrients in order to perform.  Putting a bunch of chemicals in your body and asking it to perform makes about as much sense as putting some free-range eggs and an apple in your car and asking it to perform. 

I am convinced - and have found some great writers to support the idea in the next issue of the magazine - that many of our health problems stem from the fact that we have stopped putting real food in our bodies. As fat as we are, we are starving for real nutrients. And that starvation is causing us to under perform physically, emotionally, intellectually and everything else. 

I know that when we adopted our "Little Farm" way of eating - all natural, full of healthy natural fats, nutrients, whole foods and mostly free of chemicals - we all lost weight, felt better and were just plain in better shape. 

And on that foundation, we are able to do things like drink dizzying pink drinks and eat chocolate pudding when we want to, because our bodies are strong enough to handle it.

Let's get the real fats back in our foods, real nutrients, vitamins and minerals from food grown in nutrient rich soil without chemicals.....  You know, how they did it hundreds of years ago. Whole, fresh, seasonal, local and HEALTHFUL. And delicious.

(And now, I have to go drain the lard that I've been rendering for the last 48 hours, because it's time for fried chicken and biscuts!)