How to Start Eating Real Food When You Know Nothing
What is “real food?” Is fake food a thing? Yes, it is. But, the transition to eating real food doesn’t have to be complicated. To be honest, I’ve never been an excellent cook. Which is a disappointment, seeing that both my mother and grandmothers have always been able to turn out a delicious meal with what seems to be little effort. I started out my life as a homemaker using a lot of prepackaged foods such as boxed mac and cheese, pasta salad in a box, frozen chicken nuggets, frozen eggrolls and burritos, etc. Then, at some point, I learned about preservatives and artificial ingredients. By this time, I had small children and I wanted to provide them with nutritious food and get them started in life with healthy eating habits. I knew I needed to make some changes, but I didn’t know where or how to start.
I made simple first steps
We’ve basically always kept a garden, so we often had fresh vegetables available to us. Mostly green beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and squash. But outside of cooking some green beans with bacon or frying slices of squash, I didn’t do much “scratch cooking.” That needed to change. I knew I needed to step away from packaged food. This was before the internet was what it is today. In our area, the internet wasn’t very reliable, and we usually didn’t even have it in our home. Information wasn’t just a click away. I had to figure things out on my own, for the most part, using just common sense. I remember I started with macaroni and cheese. My kids loved it and I usually kept boxes of creamy shells and cheese on hand for meals. I decided to make it from scratch using only ingredients I could pronounce. When I shopped for pasta, I turned over the package and read the ingredients. If it had a long list of ingredients I couldn’t read, I passed on to the next package. I did the same with blocks of cheese. I kept it as simple as I could. This was the beginning for me. I didn’t dive into non-gmo or organic. Honestly, I didn’t even know what that was. I just knew I had to provide my family with less “junk.” I wanted to make “real food.”
Make simple changes in your kitchen
With all the information available to us today, transitioning our diets can be overwhelming. There are also so many dietary restrictions today that we have to be mindful of, which, I believe, stems from a lifetime of eating the wrong foods. Try not to be overwhelmed with all the options and ideologies out there. Turn off the internet and just think. What is food? Why do we eat food? What foods do we need nutritionally? Call a grandmother or older relative and ask them what they grew up eating.
My original thought, all of those years ago, was to take what we bought in boxes and recreate it at home with real ingredients. That was a good simple start for me. Then, as I began to learn more about healthy food, we made more changes and adjustments to our lifestyle to accommodate our pantry and our budget, so we could do the best we could do with what was available to us.
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