The “Sustainable” Diet

I came up with this article, “The Sustainable Diet,” when I was writing Food Freedom: A Year of Growing and Foraging 100% of My Food.
The purpose was to create an accessible list of foods, including industrial food from the grocery store, that makes a complete diet, while being minimally destructive to Earth.

As compared to my own diet of 100% homegrown and foraged food, or my recommendations on how to eat a 100% local diet, this is designed to be much more accessible for those on their own personal journey of breaking free from the most destructive aspects of the global, industrial food system and taking back their health.

To write this article, I reviewed my 2016 article, From Clueless Consumer to Real Food Dude, and I found that this article can serve as the foundation for most people on this path who desire to learn from me. This article documents my journey, starting with:

“Many people around the United States could hardly fathom eating the way I do. Almost nothing I buy comes in a package. Almost everything is a simple whole food, rather than processed foods. While I’m preparing my food and after I’m done eating, there is usually no need for a garbage can whatsoever. I can pronounce the names of everything I eat and every word on the ingredients list, if I do buy something that even has an ingredients list.”

These are some of the key ingredients to a more sustainable diet, that is relatively accessible to many millions of US Americans. This is not a truly sustainable diet. At most US grocery stores, there is rarely a single food item being sold that is truly sustainable. However, if the entire nation gravitated towards the practices I share in this article, we’d be in a radically different place.

Read: From Clueless Consumer to Real Food Dude

Here are some of the Take Action sections from Food Freedom that are very relevant to this topic.

Eat Locally — Top Tips

Make the farmers’ markets a part of your weekly routine. Use findafarmersmarket.com to search for farmers’ markets near you.

Become a member of your local food co-op. Use www.grocerystory.coop to find your nearest food co-op.

Sign up for a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) share.

Purchase directly from farmers and gardeners. Make friends with the local food growers!

Eat with the seasons.

Try out the 100-mile diet for a challenge to get to know your local food system.
Read The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Eating Local and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle for inspiration!

When dining out, choose restaurants that source from local growers.
Buy homemade and cottage industry items.
Purchase locally crafted items, created with local materials.
Support small businesses, avoid large chains.

Reduce Your Waste Through Food

From over a decade of looking through thousands of trash cans, it is clear to me that what we eat and how we dispose of it is one of the primary ways we create trash. By striving for zero waste in our diet, we can drastically reduce our overall waste. Here are my top tips!

Compost. Keep it simple. Remember, Earth has been doing this for millions of years. Compost EVERYTHING you can! See the Empowerment Manual for my How to Compost Guide and for instructions on how to build a compost bin. If you can’t compost at home, join a community compost program or find a place to compost. Get chickens and turn your food scraps into eggs!

Buy just what you need and eat what you buy. Eating our food is one the simplest and most enjoyable ways for us to reduce waste.

Nourish yourself with parts of plants that you might be tossing out. Beet greens are my favorite green. Read The Zero-Waste Chef for comprehensive advice.

Buy unpackaged produce. Find this at farmers’ markets, direct at farms and in grocery stores that offer fruits and veggies without packaging.

Shop the bulk section. The bulk section at many food co-ops and grocery stores offers hundreds of unpackaged options, including grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, dried fruits, herbs, spices, herbal teas, granola, pasta and snacks. Many bulk sections even include oils, vinegars, olives, ferments, condiments, nut butters, kombucha and more! You pay by the weight and get just what you need.

Bring your own bags and containers to the market. Not only shopping bags, but also for produce and food from the bulk section.

Carry reusable dishes, utensils and a water bottle with you. Use these at restaurants and anywhere where disposable is being used.

When eating out, bring reusable containers and take home any extra food to enjoy later. You can even bring home the food scraps and napkins to compost.

Cook! Making nourishing and tasty meals is much simpler and time effective than many of us believe. Cook with whole, minimally processed, unpackaged ingredients.

Make your own food and eat out less. This is a simple way to control your waste, both what you see and what happens out of sight in the restaurant kitchen.

Say no to one-time use items! Ditch the tin foil, plastic wrap, disposable dishes and utensils, napkins, paper towels and anything that is designed to be used only once or a few times. There are reusable options for everything!

Follow the 7 R’s –– Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose, Repair, Rot and as a last resort, Recycle.

Grow your own food and forage, the most zero waste of all! Make humanure. Compost your poop!

Read Closing the Loop on Zero Waste: Living in Alignment with Nature by April Hepokoski and Zero Waste Home by Bea Johnson.

Talk to grocery stores about which foods they offer are local and encourage them to stock more local foods.

Share with your neighbors and your greater community!

Eating Whole Foods and Food as Medicine

Eat whole foods. That simply means foods in their whole, unprocessed form. Base your diet around whole foods — any whole foods — and you will be embracing thousands of years of the human success story. Fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, meat, whole milk and eggs — these are all whole foods.

Eat minimally processed foods. Processing is not inherently detrimental and, in fact, processing is necessary to preserve and store the abundance of the land. Even more so, there are numerous processes that make food more nourishing, wholesome, digestible and medicinal. Many minimally processed foods are one ingredient. For example: almonds into almond butter, wheat grains into whole wheat flour, and milk into butter. Minimally processed foods can also have numerous ingredients such as whole wheat flour, salt, rosemary and sesame seeds to make bread. Minimal processing includes chopping, blending, dehydrating, canning, freezing — all processes that can be done at home without any inaccessible technology.

At the supermarket, to follow this ethos diligently would mean looking at the ingredient list of every food you are interested in buying and only purchasing it if there are no ingredients that are not clearly a food to you. Just imagine, could you eat that ingredient simply on its own? Following this simple guideline would take care of all “natural flavors,” food dyes, emulsifiers, fillers, gums and synthetic vitamins. Any food that has a single one of these ingredients brings the integrity of the entire food into question for me. To take it even further, you can make sure that every ingredient is one that has been minimally processed; for example, whole wheat flour, not white flour.

One of the simplest ways to accomplish this mission is to purchase only unpackaged foods. There is only a small percentage of unpackaged foods that are more than minimally processed in most stores that offer unpackaged food. On the other hand, the vast majority of packaged foods are highly processed or ultra-processed. The bulk section at a food co-op or health food store is the center of a whole foods, minimally packaged and unprocessed diet for many people who eat this way.

Now, you can still have whole foods that are very nutrient deficient. A whole foods diet is taken to another level by sourcing food from anywhere that produces food with high integrity, with a focus on soil life, biodiversity and ecological farming practices. These foods can be many times more concentrated with different vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and all the nutrients you hope to get from your food. These foods won’t have pharmaceuticals and growth hormones in them.

“Eating the rainbow” is an enjoyable way to meet your goals of a balanced diet. Different colors represent different vitamins and eating the rainbow is a simple way to make sure you are eating a diversity of foods.

Most supplements and vitamins are not whole, unprocessed foods. With the deepest level of faith in this type of eating, they are no longer needed. And there are plenty of people who follow this today (like billions of humans have until now).

I don’t think people are particularly interested in eating most of the food-like substances that they do. It’s really the convenience that they are after. Eating solely off the land, I generally didn’t miss any particular food. What I missed was convenience. But, we can make our own convenience and people have been doing it for a very long time. We can process our own foods and we can package them up, creating the same ultra convenience that the supermarkets, delivery foods and restaurants provide.

With convenience, we are all seeking to save time. And giving up the convenience of the grocery store means that we are taking on the responsibility of managing our own time effectively. That is where bulk food prep and meal prep comes in.

If you are limited on time, you will find it very difficult to prepare breakfast, lunch and dinner each day. But if you prepare a large soup at once, it doesn’t take too much longer than preparing the same small soup. Then you can eat it for dinner every day for the next week. Once I started making meals in bulk in the spring of this year, my life changed dramatically for the better. Many people will food-prep for the week, not necessarily by making the meals in bulk, but by processing the ingredients on a Sunday so that they can be easily used at each meal during the work or school week.

A crockpot can save many hours. You can put all the ingredients in the pot in the morning and come home after a day’s work to a hot and ready meal. I embraced the Instant Pot and was able to put my meals together, turn it on, go to the garden for an hour or two and come back to hot food, without any concern of it overcooking. I generally embrace the least technology possible, but the crock pot/electric pressure cooker has been an invaluable tool for me.

In this realm, I also encourage the embrace of simple eating. Many people believe that our food needs to be complex in order to be loved by our guests. But there are so many foods that we can make that take very little time, yet yield the satisfaction we desire. We can even easily make our own granola bars, bread, chips, popcorn, ice cream, bone broth and so much more, without stepping into the world of processed foods!

Most who embrace this diet find that they have a lot less desire to eat out. One reason is it can be much more difficult to tell what’s in the food at restaurants, even when asking. However, there are many restaurants that serve truly whole foods, and what creates convenience is making them your go-to when you choose to eat out, rather than trying a new restaurant each week.

As I’ve said many times in this practice, our food is our medicine. However, there are many plants that are used solely for medicine and are not foods. Herbal teas, made of dehydrated or fresh herbs, were part of my daily medicine practice. There are many schools both in-person and online that teach this practice, including the Florida School of Holistic Medicine, People’s Medicine School, Chestnut School of Herbal Medicine and more. And there are even “Farmacies” that you can purchase this type of medicine from. Walden Farmacy is one that I visited that inspired me greatly. You can read Rosemary Gladstar’s Medicinal Herbs: A Beginner’s Guide to get acquainted and begin your practice. To learn more about herbal medicine, see the Introduction to Herbal Medicine in the Empowerment Manual.

When it comes to the ultimate food and medicine in one, we come to wild fermentation. The practice embraces that there is bacteria and yeast present in every breath we take and on every surface of food that comes from the earth. By working with this bacteria, we can transform our foods into being more bioavailable, digestible and nourishing. Wild fermentation creates probiotics and many ferments are shown to improve digestion and support a healthy immune system. In my opinion, wild fermentation is essential to a healthy gut microbiome. At the same time, fermentation often makes our food more tasty! Sauerkraut, sourdough bread, apple cider vinegar and pickled veggies are four of my favorite wild fermented foods and these foods require no fancy ingredients or expensive equipment. Read Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz — the Johnny Appleseed of Fermentation — to explore deeper. However, I have warned you that after reading this book you may start to love bacteria and no longer fear it.

When we bring this all together, this is convenience and comfort that doesn’t destroy our health in the long run. On the contrary, this is convenience and comfort that keeps us out of the doctor’s office. Imagine the nation we’d be living in if we embraced the simple practices of eating whole, minimally packaged, unprocessed foods along with using herbal medicine and moving our body? It would mean the crumbling of much of the destructive society we have today and the creation of a much more harmonious society. It would be a revolution.

Contrary to popular belief, when you bring this all together, this doesn’t end up being more expensive. It actually saves money. And I’ll tell you from experience, it’s really not as hard as the food industry has tried to convince us that it is to prepare delicious and nutritious food. Nature’s already done most of the work for us. We just have to keep it simple!

You’ve likely noticed that I do not adhere to or recommend any specific diet types such as paleo, keto, vegan or gluten free and there is very little food science discussed. Instead, I just focus on what billions of humans have done for thousands of years, eating whole foods from the earth. I don’t want to overcomplicate things or contribute to the confusion and overwhelm that so many are experiencing today. That said, there are a few resources for nutrition that I have found to be of high integrity that I’d like to share with you to explore:

Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon and her website nourishingtraditions.com for her take on nutrition and traditional diets.

The writing by Zach Bush, MD on the gut microbiome and The Good Gut by Justin and Erica Sonnenburg.

Glucose Revolution by Jessie Inchauspé, the “Glucose Goddess” as well as her sharing online about the role of blood sugar in our lives.

Traditional Ayurvedic food and medicine through The Ayurvedic Institute and online resources ayurveda.com