Having limited food options is often a common problem in college. Its hard enough to eat “real foods” on a daily basis, and being a broke college student with no kitchen in sight doesn’t make it any easier.
As I think about the past few Thanksgiving’s, sweet memories of long, blissful days in the kitchen fill me up with joy. The days when I used to help my mom slave away in the kitchen in attempt to create the best dinner for our family. It almost became a ritual of ours to make dinner together, to go to the store and buy fresh ingredients and make our big meal from complete scratch. These were the days when processed food wasn’t consuming our diets, these were the days where we ate real foods.
We can’t deny that there is serious problem with the way we eat when something as simple as a french fry contains over 30 ingredients and almost every single one of them is not even a part of a potato. THAT IS GROSS. We continue to allow ourselves to shovel mouthfuls of hormones, dangerous bacteria, and antibiotic filled food with countless amounts of additives and preservative. It is fair to say that we are living a processed, unnatural food epidemic trapped by our economic system.
The food industry has tricked us into believing that we can feed our bodies industrial, nutrient-depleted food-like substances filled with endless empty calories. Unfortunately, we have began to accept that added chemicals, sugars, and processing can replace the natural made foods we ate hundreds of years ago. With our constantly busy lives, it is too easy to buy a pre-made, quick meal instead of buying all the separate ingredients and make a fresh meal from scratch… because who has time to that?
Back then, all food was simply organic and fresh. It was locally grown, fruits and vegetables were seasonal and all food was essentially JUST food. Now, less than 3 percent of agricultural land is used to grow fresh the produce that should be accounting for almost 80 percent of our diet. The average American typically needs to eat five to nine servings a day of fruits and vegetables, but all we are left with is industrialized, processed food lacking nutrients.
With Thanksgiving coming in a few hours, it is time to take our kitchens and our REAL homemade meals back. It is time to rise above the typical college diet and stop buying pre-made gravies and stuffing, to stop buying a six dollar apple pie at Walmart, and to start making CHANGES in the way we eat.
Although, it is easy to blame to food industry for the way we eat, we as customers, we as business owners, as college students, as mothers and as fathers have the ability to take back that power. Transforming the food industry may seem like a monumental, large and undertaking task, but it isn’t. The problem starts with small insignificant things like what we fill our shopping carts with, ours fridges, and our cupboards with. What we choose to make in our kitchen’s, what we choose to snack on when we are bored or hungry and what we choose to put into our bodies is where the problem stems. Even though deciding to eat that bite size Twix bar seems so insignificant, it is the small choices we make every day that will either make or break the monolithic food industry.
It is impossible to rewind 100 years ago to how they were but that doesn’t mean we can’t modify how we eat today. Our bodies were designed to run on REAL food, that’s why it is SO important to simplify our way of eating, to “Unjunk” our diets, and to completely detoxify our bodies.
Today, we get too caught up in going on diets, taking pills that might help us loose weight or make us “feel” more energized and enhance our well being, but with REAL foods there are no diets. There is no calorie counting, no measuring fats, carbs or protein grams. Choosing quality WILL be worth it in the long run. The only thing more important than what you take out of your diet is what you put in your diet. If you begin to add in the good stuff, there won’t be room for the bad.
So in the spirit of Thanksgiving just around the corner, I encourage everyone to start choosing simple foods such as fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, ect. To cook with healthy oils instead of something like pam spray (olive oil, fish oil, avocado and coconut oil), To eat whole grains, beans and lean animal protein including small wild fish, grass fed meat, and farm eggs. To promote the “real food” revolution, and to remember that even as a broke college student, simple is better.