Today my guest Annie B. Bond, author of True Food: 8 Simple Steps to a Healthier You. We’ll be talking about why slow, local, organic, and whole food matters—for both your health and the Earth. I met Annie many years ago when her publisher asked me to write the forward to her first book Clean and Green. Annie is the best-selling author of five books, including Better Basics for the Home (Three Rivers Press, 1999), and Home Enlightenment (Rodale Books, 2008). Her most recent book True Food (National Geographic, 2010), is a winner of Gourmand Awards Best Health and Nutrition Cookbook in the World. She was named “the foremost expert on green living” by “Body & Soul” magazine (February, 2009). Currently Annie blogs and leads the selection of toxic-free products for The True Find. www.anniebbond.com | www.thetruefind.com
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH ANNIE B. BOND
- Toxics Then and Now: Debra Celebrates Thirty Years in Print
- Toxic Free Valentines
- Great Toxic-Free Holiday Gifts
- Cleaning for Your Holiday Party – Before and After
- Toxic Free Cleaning Basics
- Natural Solutions for Bugs
- Healthy Halloween
- Tips for a Toxic Free Home
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Eight Steps to Improving Your Food Choices
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Annie B. Bond
Date of Broadcast: April 16, 2015
DEBRA: Hi. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free.
It is Thursday, April 16th. I got my taxes done at 9:33. I had to drive across the causeway to take it to the only post office that was open until midnight, but I got it in. There were all these cars and they’ve got people from the post office standing out to collect all the latecomers.
You would think they give us so many days, all of four months, you would think I could do it some time between January and April, but I ended up doing it on April 15th. Anyway, that’s all done now. I can put my attention on other things and so can you.
Today, we’re going to have a delicious show. We haven’t talked about food in a while. And my guest is Annie B. Bond. She has been on the show half a dozen times at least before. And we’ve been friends for very many years.
She’s written a book. She’s co-authored a book called True Food: Eight Simple Steps to a Healthier You. And I just heavily agree with every word that it says about the importance of these particular food choices that we’re going to be talking about today.
Well, we’ll just get right to Annie. Hi, Annie.
ANNIE B. BOND: Thank you so much for having me. I’m delighted to be here. And I think we’ve known each other for at least 25 years or something like that.
DEBRA: I think so too.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah, which sounds ages, but nonetheless, there we are.
DEBRA: Nonetheless, there we are.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah.
DEBRA: It just goes to show how experienced we are.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yes, it does.
DEBRA: Yes, it does. So I just love this book, True Food.
ANNIE B. BOND: Oh, I’m so glad. Thank you. That’s an honor.
DEBRA: Yeah. I should say that it’s an award-winning book. It won the Gourmand Awards Best Health and Nutrition Cookbook in the world.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah. That was quite a feat. I was very proud of that. That was great.
DEBRA: How does that happen? Did your publisher submit the book for the award?
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah, the publisher did. Yeah, that’s right. We were all invited to go to Paris to accept the award, but they didn’t fund us.
DEBRA: But did you go?
ANNIE B. BOND: No, I didn’t. It would have been a joy to go there.
DEBRA: Oh, what an incredible thing. But just to have the award is an amazing experience.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yes, it is. Yeah. And the book is an interesting book because – I wish I can tell you the history of the book at some point, but whatever you want to…
DEBRA: Just tell us right now.
ANNIE B. BOND: Oh, okay.
DEBRA: How did it get written?
ANNIE B. BOND: It started off as actually another. It started off as The Green Kitchen Handbook. Meryl Streep wrote the foreword to it. I wrote it with Mothers and Others for a Livable Planet. I worked with them in the early 90s and I actually was the founding editor of the Green Guide.
I guess the reason that I want to tell the story is just that Meryl Streep and Wendy Gordon got on the Today’s Show around Earth Day on 1989 and talked about Alar in apples.
DEBRA: I remember that.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah, exactly. It was the pivotal point. I mean, from that moment on, there was like a hockey stick of interest in organic food.
But Meryl Streep got pounced on like no other in terms of the science behind Alar in apples. It turned out that it wasn’t maybe a carcinogen, but it was a neurotoxin or something like that. It was really unbelievable how the industry came down on her. She was just trying to protect her four kids and was doing the best she could because she was feeding them apples three meals a day and that kind of thing.
So what happened is that Mother and Others for a Livable Planet, which is the organization that Meryl Streep and Wendy Gordon Rockefeller founded ended up getting scrupulous with their science around food. They trained me well at that time. I mean, it was really, really a valuable lesson.
Every single word that went into the Green Kitchen Handbook was vetted by all these food sites just because they didn’t ever want to go through what they went through with the alar in apple story. That’s the background about this book.
So then by the time we ended up pushing it out into a new version of the book, which became True Food, it was just great to know how well vetted the science was. That’s all I wanted to say about it.
DEBRA: I think that that’s really important and that’s something that I paid attention onto myself, to really make sure – and I’ll just talk about this for a minute just because it’s such an important point – really make sure what my sources are.
In the world of writing, there are first hand sources and second hand sources and third hand sources. And for our listeners, what that means is that the first hand source would be if I had an experience and I wrote about it or if Annie had an experience and she told me about it and I wrote about it. That’s first hand.
If you read something, say on my website, that is now second hand source if you were to then write it and say, “Debra Lynn Dadd says, ‘alar in apples cause…’” That is now second hand source. And it goes on and on and on.
Especially on the internet, what you see is a lot of information that has been pulled from other websites. That is actually really encouraged now. You can take courses in how to use other people’s information and repeat it on your site. And if you look up a subject, you’ll see that a lot of the websites say exactly the same thing almost in exactly the same words.
ANNIE B. BOND: It’s unbelievable, isn’t it?
DEBRA: It is because it’s just a waste of time when people do that. There is valuable information that people need to have. So I have been really careful in the past four or five years or something – more careful. Not that I wasn’t careful before. But before, I would sometimes be vague. But now, I know if I say this is toxic, I can show you the study. And often, if you look on my blog, you’ll see that I show, “Here’s the link to the study and here’s the link to a magazine article that’s easier to read about this study.”
ANNIE B. BOND: Exactly. That’s a really, really good solution for that. Certainly, in the news recently too is the value of science especially when talking about toxic. You need to be able to back it up so that you can hold your head up or you’re going to get attacked like poor Meryl Streep. I mean, that was really, really unbelievable and a very chilling message for people.
But you’re totally right about the internet. How many times have you been plagiarized? I’ve had an entire book almost plagiarized completely.
DEBRA: Many, many years ago, after my first book Nontoxic and Natural in 1984, in about 1986, I was watching TV and Ralph Nader was on and I know that he just took something right out of my book because I had written it in a very specific way and he just practically said it word for word on national television.
I was sitting there going, “What? What? That’s my formula. He’s just taking this information right out of my book and not giving me any credit.”
ANNIE B. BOND: Isn’t that something? Yeah.
DEBRA: It is something! I know and I can recognize when people have plagiarized my work. And I know you can too.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yes.
DEBRA: People just pick up this stuff and repeat it and don’t give sources. People really need to watch out for that and know what your sources when you’re reading something.
I think toxics are so important that if I say something is toxic, there’s got to be a study. There’s got to be some reason and not just because somebody said it and or it was on the XYZ blog. It’s because there’s actual science behind it.
And if there isn’t, then I say, “This person reported their symptoms were… “ or something like that. I don’t try to make it sound like…
ANNIE B. BOND: A fact.
DEBRA: A fact.
ANNIE B. BOND: For everybody or whatever.
DEBRA: For everybody, yeah. Anyway, we’re getting near to the end of the segment. We’ve already gone through a quarter of the show and we haven’t talked about your book.
ANNIE B. BOND: Oh, no. We haven’t even talked about food.
DEBRA: I know. But we said some other important things. So I’ll tell you what I want to do while we’re ticking down for the last few seconds here. First, I want to read something because this is just so wonderful. It just gives the flavor of what your book is about. This is a dedication I want to read for the listeners.
“To all people whose hands reached out to sow the seed, till the soil, pick the produce, snap the beans, remove the stems and make the meal.” I just think that that’s so beautiful. It really shows that food really is about all these hands and all these hearts doing these things to make the food that’s on your plate.
And we don’t often think about that. We’re going to talk about that today.
You are listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Annie Bond, author of many books. But today, we’re talking about True Food: Eight Simple Steps to a Healthier You. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Annie Bond. She’s the author of True Food: Eight Simple Steps to a Healthier You. And she also blogs and leads the selection of toxic free products for the True Find, which is at TheTrueFind.com.
Lest we go up in another tangent, I just want to say that I was looking at your blog the other day. There is so much good information in there. It’s so beautifully done.
ANNIE B. BOND: Thank you, Debra. Really, thank you so much.
DEBRA: It’s very aesthetically pleasing to look at the images and to see what you’ve said about all these different natural things. So good work.
ANNIE B. BOND: Thank you.
DEBRA: Anyway, let’s talk about the book. Let’s talk about the book because it’s so good. So there are eight steps here. Let’s try to get those eight steps in. So I think we just need to talk about each one of them very briefly. The first one is eat local food.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah. It’s interesting. Certainly we all hear about ‘eat local’, but there are some really interesting reasons why that many people don’t necessarily understand. One is certainly the amount of energy it takes to get a piece of produce to you. The [inaudible 00:15:19] further away in terms of gas and fuel.
One thing that a lot of people don’t quite realize is the difference in the nutritional value is the fresher the food is. So if you can go to a farmers market on a Sunday and the farmers will pick that food that morning, you’re getting much very, very vibrant energy that you wouldn’t be getting if it was two weeks old because it would’ve been shipped out from who knows where.
Another concern of food that’s shipped, especially from out of the country, is that they often carry what they call the circle of poison, which are pesticides and herbicides that have been taken off the market in the US and they’re still being used in third world countries. So we often then can get those pesticides anyway. They come in on the turnips or whatever that have come across the border.
So there are pretty good reasons to eat locally.
DEBRA: Today on my food blog, ToxicFreeKitchen.com, I wrote a post about heirloom tomatoes, just buying heirloom tomatoes, local heirloom tomatoes. Just over the weekend, there is a new market that’s opened here in St. Petersburg, which is about 45 minutes from where I live in Florida.
They have local organic heirloom tomatoes from local farmers. So I wrote a post about buying these tomatoes. And there is a little picture of the salad that I made out of them and some more information about heirloom tomatoes.
So having produce like heirloom varieties, which means that they’re ground from seeds that are passed down from generation to generation and not made by multinational corporations that make hybrid seeds, these are true tomatoes. Talking about the title True Food, these are true tomatoes. Whenever you see that world heirloom, that means it’s the true vegetable or fruit. You don’t get those at supermarkets where they’re being shipped in from other states or other countries. They’re just so beautiful. I love heirloom tomatoes. I use to…
ANNIE B. BOND: Well, they are just divinely delicious. One of my very best friends wrote the book The Heirloom Tomato and her farm is not far from mine. So I get basket of her heirloom tomatoes during harvest time. They’re wonderful. I’ll put the photos on the True Find.
I just want to tell a very quick story that might help people to understand the value of going for the heirloom plants. This woman’s husband actually is the one who has put the – if people have heard about the [inaudible 00:17:55]. It’s way up near the Arctic Circle. The seeds are being saved. So if anything, a catastrophe happens on the planet, all those seeds are saved there.
I want to just talk about the Irish potato famine quickly, which was when the Irish farmers depended on two varieties of potato or something. A blight hit and wiped out all the potato and they had this massive starvation. But if they had had a wide variety of heirloom potatoes, they would never have had the famine because at least one or two of these seeds would have been able to withstand the blight. And in fact, there is a seed in South America that happily withstood the blight of those potatoes, that potato blight.
So that shows, in a nutshell, how valuable and important the wider variety of seeds we have for any one species is unbelievably important because it could really stop a famine if you don’t wipe out. You’ve got resistant seeds to different diseases.
DEBRA: That’s so important. When I lived in California, I lived in a very local little valley where a lot of people knew each other. There was a woman there who was growing heirloom tomatoes and she had gone around to old families in the area and collected their seeds from the tomato plants in their backyards. And so we really had our own [inaudible 00:19:25] valley tomatoes. I had raspberry canes from my neighbors.
We were constantly swapping the vegetative materials between our gardens so that we could have just that local thing that was the exact plants that have been growing in our local area. It was just so amazing to do that.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah, that totally is. The other thing about eating a wide variety of tomatoes, for example, or a wide variety of food is that you get a range of nutrients that you wouldn’t get from those pink gas-ripened tomatoes that you can get on a grocery store in January.
DEBRA: What nutrients? There are no nutrients in those tomatoes.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah, I think there are zero nutrients. Right, exactly. My mother was wonderful at this. We had just a bounty of vegetables all week long, different every night. I always took that to heart, that that was really good for me growing up. I haven’t been as good as an adult, but I try to be especially in the summer and during harvest time.
But the more variety of vegetables you get, the more variety of nutrients you get and the healthier it is for you.
DEBRA: That’s right. That’s right. So I really want to mention that this book is not just about what we eat for our own health, but about supporting the environment, supporting earth and nature while we’re making our food choices which is so important because without the seeds being there and the plants and the soil and all of that, we would have nothing to eat.
I think that sometimes we forget that when we go to the supermarket and buy food and don’t have our hands on the soil and we’re not talking to the farmers and things like that. So this is just a very important book, very important.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Annie Bond. She’s the author of True Food – and it really is about true food – Eight Simple Steps To A Healthier You. We’ll talk more about the eight steps when we come back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re talking about true foods today with Annie Berthold-Bond, author of – I’ve known Annie so long. I said “Annie Berthold-Bond,” instead of “Annie B. Bond” or “Annie Bond.”
ANNIE B. BOND: You’re never supposed to change your name mid-career. I’m sorry I did. Oh, dear.
DEBRA: Anyway, true foods. So now we actually touched on step two when we talked about eat a variety of foods. So let’s go to step three, “aim for organic.”
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah. Well you talked about how important the concepts in this book are not just for health, but also for the environment.
One of the big crises we have with food production is the damage to soil. The reason you want to switch – I mean outside of for health reasons, for the health of the planet, you want to switch to farms that know how to build and grow soil, so that it’s very full of nutrients and that you don’t have these horrible wash-off of all of your topsoil, which is so key for growing food.
So organic farms are very mindful of the health of the land. And that’s what you want to be. You want to be able to support any farm that is supporting the land.
And also, I find it very important for myself to – I mean, our next step is to eat lower on the food chain. But it’s very important in terms of eating if you eat animal products to eat animals that have been raised in a humane way and on farms where they’re able to eat grass, be outside, get the sun, don’t have a violent death, that kind of thing. Not violent, but they’re not all pent up in a horrible situation.
I do eat meat and I have vowed and I have been very rigid about this for a very long time that I will only eat meat that comes from an organic farm.
DEBRA: Yes, me too.
ANNIE B. BOND: But the truth is that also then for health reasons. It was something that we couldn’t say in the 90s. I was telling you how strictly we’re about what science was available. There was enormous amount of controversy in the 90s about whether organic food is more nutritious. We just couldn’t say it was more nutritious at that time.
Since then, of course, there have been many more studies to show that organic food is being proven to be more nutritious for us. And so that’s a very nice update, a good reason to eat organic food.
But step four, which was eating lower on the food chain was a really interesting chapter to me to work on because that was really about the fact that it’s about the predator-prey. So it’s how much toxic material is stored in our fat.
There are a lot of reasons why organic is important for – or not eating as much meat is important for the environment and that kind of thing in terms of water usage and things like that. But in terms of health, as we hear toxic chemicals are all the way up to the [inaudible 00:30:05] and things like that, is stored in fats. And so the lower you are in the food chain, the less fatty animal parts you’re eating, the less contamination.
DEBRA: That’s right. They just accumulate. They bio accumulate. The toxic poisons go from – I mean, obviously, eating a plant even if it’s not organic would have less accumulation of toxic chemicals than an animal who eats those plants and gets all that toxic accumulation and concentrates it in the fat.
That’s another reason why it’s really important to eat organic as we start moving upto the food chain. But you can also just eat lower on the food chain too.
ANNIE B. BOND: Because even organic – animal fat doesn’t mean that it’s not going to have contamination because everything’s contaminated. That’s the thing. Yes. But it would be better.
DEBRA: At this point in time, everything is contaminated. Organic is a lot less.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yes, exactly.
DEBRA: And it’s not because they’re adding chemicals. It’s because the whole environment is contaminated.
ANNIE B. BOND: Right, hence the blubbers on the seals that the Eskimos are eating.
DEBRA: Yes. Okay so then step five is to eat fresh food.
ANNIE B. BOND: And there, you’re going to get all the vibrancy of the enzymes and the nutrients. So if you have a farmers market as I said or community supported agriculture – those are springing up all over the country. They’re called CSAs. So those usually work where you give a certain amount of money at the beginning of the season. And then you get deliveries every week or you go to a farm to pick them up.
This comes back to that heirloom tomato and the flavor in the – I can’t emphasize enough the difference in the taste of fresh foods than non-fresh foods.
DEBRA: I belonged to a CSA for a couple of years until I move to Florida. And in this case, the food is not just picked this morning. It’s picked an hour ago. It goes right into the baskets. You can go to the farm. Like the one that I belonged to. I could go to the farm anytime I wanted and work and see what they were doing. I got to know my farmer really well.
One of the best experiences of my entire life was the day that we had a dinner for all the organic farmers in my little area. There were about 10 or 12 of them and some of us from the CSA. We went around in an afternoon and picked up the produce from all the farms. And then we did all the prep work in this beautiful kitchen at the farm where we did the CSA. And then we served the farmers who had been – I’m going to start crying. They have been serving us our food all season. We served the farmers.
ANNIE B. BOND: Nice, very nice. That goes back to the hands.
DEBRA: Yeah.
ANNIE B. BOND: You’re honoring them, which is really, really nice. Even nuts and seeds, the fresher they are, the better they can go stale and rancid.
But I think one of the great things for me – and I’m sure everybody has experienced this – the feeling of how you feel after you’ve had a meal that is just full of all the antioxidants that come out of this kind of food. I mean, your whole body’s sings. And that’s what we want to have happen, our bodies sing because it’s so healthy for us.
DEBRA: I love that, “our bodies sing.”
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah because you can feel it. You really can. I can just feel about an hour later just, “Oh, it does these things through my body. The Antioxidants are really great.”
But I want to say something about frozen food. If I have a choice in the middle of the winter of choosina non-organic fresh food that is theoretically fresh – I live in Northern Upstate New York, so my winters are really deep winter – I will buy frozen food that’s organic because it will have been frozen at the time of the harvest and it’s going to be the best way to have the most nutritious food.
So you can find the dates. There are places where you can go online and find dates of when food is frozen so you can guarantee that it was done during the harvest time. That, I think, is the way to manage, trying to get as fresh food as you can in winters.
DEBRA: That’s a really good tip. I didn’t know that. We have to go to break.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Annie Bond. We’re talking about true food. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Annie Bond, author of True Food: Eight Simple Steps to a Healthier You.
It’s really such a great book because it really describes in general and in detail – I mean, we’re talking very generally to get through the whole eight steps during the show. But if you go to the book, each chapter, each of the steps is thoroughly explaining with lots of details and recipes so that you can understand the concept and also understand how to apply it in your life.
And I just want to read just a little quote. This book is full of what are called snapshots of comments that individuals have made who eat this way. She says, “Since eating only fresh and all natural foods, I’ve gained more vitality and feel like the bodily aging process has slowed way down.”
I was thinking as Annie was talking earlier about fresh food that we tend to reach for drugs or remedies or nutrition pills or some manufactured product that’s sold to be healthy. But if we really just eat good food, it has everything in it that our bodies need. Nature has designed food to be everything that a human body needs.
We tend to not eat the food and then look for some other kind of remedy. But if we would get more fresh whole natural local organic food in our bodies, we would feel so much better. And we do. I feel so much better when I eat it.
ANNIE B. BOND: It’s interesting. This is a really good natural segue way into the next step, which is step six, eat whole foods. I have a body that just need unerringly needs whole, whether it be clean air, full air, true air, true food or whatever.
DEBRA: Yeah, me too.
ANNIE B. BOND: And so I find if I eat processed food, I finish it and I’m immediately wanting to eat. I overeat. I need something else because it’s not a whole food. It’s not giving me the complete nutrients of whatever that food is.
I’ve been very depressed. The media is overloading me with horrifying stories about the ingredients in processed foods. And it just solidifies more and more and more how off track we are to live on processed foods for people.
But just from my own personal experience, I know that I eat more because if I eat processed food, I need a fuller nutrient. But there is just something about – my point was that the other thing about processed food is that we’re getting a lot of chemicals that are affecting our endocrine system from food packaging too.
So if we eat food that has a lot of plastic in it or canned food that the lining has these bisphenol A, these endocrine disrupting chemicals, it starts falling down our thyroids and the different parts of our bodies that help us with metabolism.
I think that it’s a very, very important to actually really try to draw the line and understand and try to avoid processed food. I think the signs just added up where it’s that now incontrovertible that we need to eat whole foods.
So the other thing I just want to say on the high side about eating natural food is that I’m always astonished at how sweet fresh produce is. I just can’t even believe it. Sometimes I’ll eat a fresh pear or something like that. And I feel like I’m eating a watermelon. It’s so sweet. It’s not like we need to buy sweeteners. These foods are sweet if you buy them straight out and fresh.
DEBRA: That’s right, they are. I noticed that when I stopped eating sugar, everything tasted sweeter to me. I mean, on my food blog a couple of weeks ago, I had a raw asparagus salad and I said, “This tastes so sweet” because it does taste sweet to me. I don’t have sweeteners, especially refined sweeteners I’m not dulling my taste buds anymore. And so I can just really enjoy the sweetness of food.
I want to just say one thing that I thought of. That is that even if you’re buying something – I was at a farmers market and I was talking to somebody about their pasta sauce, which tasted really good. I tasted every sample. So I started asking them questions. It just says ‘tomatoes’ on the label. And I asked them. “What about these tomatoes?” They said, “Oh, they’re only the finest Italian canned tomatoes.”
ANNIE B. BOND: Oh gosh, yeah.
DEBRA: Even though it says ‘tomatoes’ on the label, it doesn’t specify that it’s a canned tomato, so you’re getting all that bisphenol A.
ANNIE B. BOND: Isn’t that something? Yeah.
DEBRA: Yes. That just really stuck home to me that if you’re going to buy a processed food product, even if it’s organic pasta sauce or something, you just really need to check with the manufacturer and see what’s really in it as opposed to what’s on the label.
And I don’t think that they’re trying to cheat you so much as that there are standard laws about how food products get labeled. They’re following the law, but the law doesn’t say that you have to say whether it’s in a can or not.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah. And then another example would be I was really pleased with this gluten-free bread I’ve been buying that was delicious. It was very, very high in fiber. It was well-made. It wasn’t full of just starches and that kind of thing.
And then all the story broke about emulsifiers really contributing to obesity and leavening agents too. It was really a breakthrough study about two months ago or something like that. I went and looked at those breads that I’ve been so, “Finally, I found a high fiber gluten-free bread that I didn’t have to make” and all that kind of thing. And sure enough, there was one of these emulsifiers in it. I got it at the health food store of course and everything.
It’s just, once again, an example of – just don’t even take the chance, but make things if you have to. Use these ingredients that are long term considered safe.
DEBRA: Yes.
ANNIE B. BOND: They call them the GRAS materials. And they generally are regarded as safe. And it’s hard to go really wrong when you use those. But I don’t know. It’s not that hard to click from scratch. There are more and more whole food products that are processed available. But you have to read labels like a hawk.
DEBRA: It’s just a matter of checking out the materials in the ingredients and then you know. Unfortunately, things are not labeled the way they should be in my opinion.
Anyway, let’s go on to step seven, which is stock your pantry.
ANNIE B. BOND: I think that if we’re going to be trying to eat more whole foods and move away from packaged foods, having everything at your fingertips just becomes incredibly important. So that means cooking healthy meals is always convenient and nutritious. It also means that you have fewer packaged foods and fewer packaging and all that kind of thing, which helps the environment.
So all in all, you’re just stepping up into your meat-making. You have a healthy diet. So during harvest season, all you need to go out at is get a few fresh vegetables – not few, an abundant amount or whatever. And then you’ve got all the staples at home to make a curry or whatever you want to do. It eases the whole thing.
I guess one thing I just really want to mention, a real issue though that includes this packaging problem is that your pantry is not going to be full of plastic foods that you can throw in the microwave. There is a lot of research that is showing that, especially hot fatty foods –
I used to go on picnics all the time back in the 70s and I’d have cheese that I would buy. It would be in the plastic packaging. I always tasted the plastic in the cheese. You don’t want hot fatty food and plastic combined at all under any circumstances because the plastic leaches into the cheese. We just need to avoid as much plastic in our food as we possibly can.
DEBRA: Yes.
ANNIE B. BOND: So your pantry is with whole foods and things. You go to the bin section of the health food store and you buy your – what I do is I buy a bunch of – I have a ton of glass mason jars. I buy red lentils and they go into the mason jars. And that protects them from the moss and all that kind of thing too. And all my dry goods are in mason jars in a big cupboard I have.
And this is so easy. If I don’t have anything in the house, oh, my gosh, I just open the cupboard in there and I could make a nice dough with the lentils and then I got the herbs and spices and that kind of thing. It’s a real help to speed up the whole process of cooking.
DEBRA: I do that too. I make sure that I have all my spices and the dry ingredients and things so that all I have to do is be shopping for the organic meat and vegetables. And then I can make whatever it is that I want.
And I want to say something that I think is going to sound funny. Before I started stocking my pantry, I would go to my kitchen and I would say, “There’s nothing to eat” and then I’d order a pizza. I know we’ve all been there.
ANNIE B. BOND: We have! That’s so common. I mean, that’s exactly the funny thing. Yes.
DEBRA: I know. And I eat pizza and pizza and pizza and Chinese food and all this delivery stuff because I had nothing in my pantry. But because I always have food in my house now, because I always have food, it’s like I always have cold chicken in the refrigerator. I always have garbanzo beans in the refrigerator, I have these foods that are just my staples. And they’re always there and I always make sure that I don’t run out of them because if I don’t stock my pantry, I’d call the pizza. What else are you going to eat?
ANNIE B. BOND: I overeat, I really overeat if I don’t have that exact same situation. It’s really something. Then I’ve got all these wonderful whole foods that satisfy me…
DEBRA: Oh, my god! I wasn’t even watching. The show is over. I wasn’t watching the time at all.
Anyway, number eight is green your kitchen. Go get Annie’s book, True Food: Eight Simple Steps to a Healthier You. Thank you so much, Annie.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
