Book: Nourishing Traditions

I only thought it appropriate that I should share a few of my absolute favorite books for recipes, information, and wisdom.

And Nourishing Traditions must be by far one of my absolute favorites for traditional, whole food eating. It follows closely the wisdom and food rules set out by Westin A. Price and the Westin Price Foundation created in his honor.

The basic thought is something that is shared across all cultures. The simple fact that food in and of itself is healing, and can prevent, and even treat most any ailment. That the modern diet is obviously what is killing us, and modern medicines are only there to treat us once we are already sick, when we could be eating the foods that could prevent all this in the first place.

Simply by eating the foods our ancestors ate. And that includes the oh so forbidden animal fats. The idea that our ancestors had such shorter lifespans BECAUSE of these high fat diets is a complete misnomer. If you look at the facts, those people were dying from tragic accidents, diseases which we couldn't identify and therefor could not treat, childbirth, the list goes on. And of those that did die of natural causes, disease caused by obesity was probably few and far between.

I myself can look back at the records of my ancestors dating well back to the early 1700s and see family who lived well into their 80s and 90s. Even my great grandmother lived to see 102, still walking on her own 2 feet and still sharp as a needle. And I guarantee these people ate animal fats aplenty, cooking in lard, saving the rendered fats for use later, whole unpasteurized dairies, things that modern health tells us would shorten our lives drastically.

Instead they have us eating "low fat", chemically created and unnaturally occurring oils. But do you see us getting any healthier than our ancestors who regularly ate those things we now call poison?

I sure don't.

Of course they also ate a multitude of vegetables as well, with less meat. Meat being more expensive as it was in the past, as it should be. Meat producing factories have made meat an easily accessible commodity, and indeed we are eating more of it, and less vegetables than we aught to be. It is not the meats fault, but our own for eating too much, and too little of the mineral rich foods that comes in the form of veg.

So let me step off my soap box for this episode, and get back to my point.

This book is so chock full of wonderful, wholesome traditional foods, as well as uses for bits that are otherwise ignored or have been taught to us are "gross" (i.e offal). And along with it is information about just about every ingredients health benefits, healing properties and vitamins and minerals contained within.

I couldnt imagine my bookshelf without it.