I’m new to eating a paleo diet. However, I am not new to eating healthful, whole foods in season and as local as possible! My teammate in life is an aspiring farmer, and his efforts have brought us to live on five different homesteads/farms over the past several years. We preserve the harvest, too: canning, freezing, lacto-fermenting, and drying. I grew up as a child of Minneapolis’ local foods and cooperative grocery movement. I even got in trouble my first day of 1st grade for “terrorizing” the other students- apparently I told them that the bananas they were eating with blue oval stickers were poison (my mom’s reason for never buying bananas with stickers at the regular market). For ten years, I have called my relationship to local, fresh foods my “health insurance policy”.
All this healthy eating still left me feeling blah, struggling with eating more sugar and refined foods than I wanted (though far less than average americans). So I looked to some friends who were trying a paleo diet, and discovering they had more energy! less body aches! they felt great! and then read “It Starts With Food” by Dallas and Melissa Hartwig. I decided to try the Whole30, their version of a 30-day elimination diet that targets reducing inflammation. I’m only a little over half-way through my first Whole30, and it has some ups and downs, but I can see this may be a more permanent shift in how I eat.
Which brings me to my dilemma: How do I eat this much meat, eggs, and fish in a sustainable way? How do I eat the volume of veggies it will take to fill a paleo plate through the winter without buying produce from California (or New Zealand, or Chile, or wherever)? Can I do it? And most of all: Is it possible eat this way and stay sane? I guess we’ll find out together, here.
Sustainable Paleo 