Chapter 23--First Week Of The 90 Day Challenge--Eat Like Your Grandma and Agriculture Is In Bad Shape In My Opinion

Chapter 23--First Week Of The 90 Day Challenge--Eat Like Your Grandma and Agriculture Is In Bad Shape In My Opinion

Good Sunday morning to ya! How the heck is everybody?  How is the weather everywhere?  Here, in NW Oklahoma, we have had almost a picture perfect July for us.  With the exception of about 5 days when it was just hotter then HELL, its been a great month.  We have received more rain then usual and temps this last week have been way more then bearable.  We can always use more moisture but for this time of year its been great.  I wonder what August is shaping up to be like? 

Lets talk about the first week of our 90 Day Challenge--Eat Like Your Grandma.  If I was going to sum it up, I would say , its hard!!  Now we didn't start this challenge necessarily to go on a diet, or totally change up our eating habits.  Maybe that's the problem. Both Deb and I are carrying more weight then we want to and don't have the energy levels that we want for each other either. We have long thought about all the processed foods that we consume and realize, that just can't be all that good for us.  Our eye opening though, came when we realized just how much processed foods we really ate.  It will sneak up on you in a hurry.  All the added salt, sugar and fat that is in a can, or a box, or a packet of whatever, really adds up in a hurry at the end of the day, week, month and year. We knew for sure we drank way to much pop.  I've been off of caffeinated pop for about 45 days now.  I miss it, I wont lie.  A good ice cold Coke or Dr. Pepper still would taste great but I just can't drink them anymore because caffeine seems to be a trigger for my blood pressure to go crazy! However we, Deb and I, still drink way to many decaf sugary drinks. Also, grab a can of veggies or fruit, or snack foods or cereal or, or , or, well the list just keeps going.  Grab it and look at the ingredients. Also look and see how many milligrams of salt, units of fat and how much sugar is in everything and I mean everything.  Then you add in our sedimentary lifestyle and it's no wonder, we as a general population are over weight and out of shape.  This household is right there with everybody else. So last Monday, we were starting a new adventure for 90 days.  Seriously, how hard could eating like your grandma be?  Eating things that she would recognize as food.  Limiting the processed, high salt, high fat, high sugar types of food couldn't be that rough could it?  Well I'll tell ya, for the first week it has been harder then we expected. 

Now to clear some stuff up before we go any further.  Some of you may say, but our grandparents ate high fat, high salt and high sugar diets.  Well in a lot of aspects they did. But you have to remember in a lot of aspects they didn't as well.  Did they eat salt pork, huge meals with high carbs and gallons of coffee and copious amounts of red meat?  Well if they were lucky they did! They also exerted a lot more then we do today, just in daily activities.  They also raised and processed a good amount of their food.  So almost everybody, back in the day, had a garden, raised animals for their own consumption and hunted and fished as well. So they head fresh produce to eat. They had food stored in their cellars that they had canned to last them through the winter.  They processed the animals that they hunted and raised and then salted and cured before the days of refrigeration.  What does that mean? Well, that means they controlled the curing process.  While a lot of salt goes into curing, they didn't use near as much per pound of product as we do today. Heck, even back then salt cost a lot of money, that most people didn't have.  They got by with what they had and with what they could. 

So we wanted to eat real food.  Made from scratch, wholesome, nutritious food for our bodies.  We soon came to the realization that is really hard to do out here.  No kidding people, it's hard to even find the amounts of food that you can kinda feel good about eating in stores out here.  Even for a week. In a normal year, we could have all the fresh produce out of our garden, we and 1000 other people would need.  Not this year though.  It has been a historically bad year for gardening in this area.  Between hail storms, pests and hot windy days early in the growing period, about everybody's garden has been a failure this year.  It just is what it is, this year.  So every Saturday we go to our local famers market.  We had intended to be selling there too, but even if we can't, we want to support the other gardeners that are.  The problems is there just isn't a huge selection of things to choose from.  So we went to Dodge yesterday and decided to go by Dillons and get fresh produce from them.  Now they  are a huge box store, but they usually are a good source of fresh veggies and fruit to use as sides with meals.  Well, they didn't yesterday. Their supply was really slim and what they had really didn't look good as far as quality goes.  So, we have run into some challenges this first week, even getting a good supply of food to hit the ground running with this 90 Day Challenge.

Our other main hindrance this week, was realizing we are busy and don't have the time to eat right.  Now I know that's an excuse. But about Thursday it dawned on me just how bad we were doing.  I'll give you one example, but there was probably 100 other examples of the same thing this week. Wednesday, I was working hard outside.  Do you ever get in the zone, when you are doing chores or a task and everything is going right and you just don't want to stop, because if you do, you are afraid you killed your momentum?  Well those days are really far and few between here, but Wednesday was one of them.  I was going good, getting things accomplished and I look at the clock on my phone and Hell it was 3 PM and I hadn't even ate lunch yet. So what did I do?  I came in, looked around in the frig and in the cabinets, didn't find anything that looked like it would fit in our challenge and grabbed 2 or 3 handfuls of potato chips and some salsa, not even homemade salsa, and that was my lunch.  That was an epic fail and kinda knocked me in the head about how tough this challenge really is. 

So how do we improve going into this second week. Well meal planning will be a must.  If we are organized this will be a lot easier.  We did pickup a turkey breast to cook and slice to make sandwich meat out of.  Turkey isn't my favorite thing to eat, but if the right spices and seasonings are on it, it isn't too bad. We will just have to make sure the seasonings we use have less then 5 ingredients in them.  That's kind our rule on what we consider processed versus unprocessed. Deb will also be cooking a ham off of a pig we raised and processed, for sandwich meat as well.   We also are canning green beans and corn.  We can control everything that goes in those cans,  and after all, fresh veggies or canned veggies you do yourself, taste better then anything you can buy at a store.  With the way this first week went if I had to grade ourselves I would probably give ourselves a D, passing but just barely!  Here is to a better week on the challenge.  Our struggles this week really lead me into the second half of what I want to talk about on this blog chapter.  Ag is in a bind. 

I have been doing a lot of research about our 90 Day Challenge.  Internet searches, YouTube Videos, reading articles and the like.  In fact I've probably read more over the last 10 days then I have in the last year.  One thing became very apparent, nobody, that I could find, has done this type of eating regime before. Now they have done parts of it.  Maybe eating unprocessed foods but doing it as a vegetarian.  Or eating this way partly to lose weight.  Well, obviously I'm not a vegetarian and we aren't doing it as well to lose weight on a diet.  While we need to shed a few pounds, we are doing it more as a lifestyle change. That's new as far as I can find. The other thing that came to be very apparent is that while agriculture should be a united family, growing and raising feedstuffs to feed ourselves and the world, we really are just a dysfunctional bunch of bitchers!  Case in point, we are about as united in what we do as a whole, as NOTHING and I just don't get it.  While doing research for our challenge, I really couldn't find the info that I wanted to do our challenge.  What I did find was the biggest bunch of backstabbing crap I've ever seen and to the general public who might have a motive  or just wants to learn about food and how its raised, we are just letting them down and pissing down our leg over the whole argument. You hear in fighting between small producers versus large producers. Fighting between backyard gardeners and large corporate vegetable growers.  You hear people bitch about the Tyson's of the world and will only eat pasture raised poultry that they think are sustainable, humanly raised  and in their own words, green.  You hear about the arguments that government subsidies only help the mega producers and leave the smaller producers high and dry. You never hear about small producers, large producers and everybody in the middle united on a single topic and it hurts everybody involved in agriculture.  A couple of years ago, Oklahoma had a right to farm state question come up on the ballot.  Nay sayers came out against it, saying it only helped corporate ag and would drive small family farms out of business.  Now, as a small family famer who lives on farm that has been in our family for over 100 years, I would classify their statements as horse pucky. Their side was a lot more organized though, then Ag's was, and that state question went down in a ball of flames.  Why did that happen?  Because we can't get organized to save our own lives or to get out of our way. We have people wanting to eat healthy, buy locally, have a relationship with the person and the farm that raises their food but we can't plug the positives of our own operation.  No, we have to downgrade and talk about how the other people raising food are doing it wrong.  If you don't think I'm right, just spend a couple of hours on YouTube and watch videos.  These are the same videos our customers are watching too.  I've been on both sides of the issue.  I've been a contractor with a huge corporate company and right now we are trying to start a small vegetable and meat operation by the shoe strings.  You know what both sides have in common.  Well, one, its hard work whether your big or small and 2, we, both sides of agriculture show about as much unity as Congress does! I can't help but think if we could get on the same page, there is enough market share to go around for everybody. Each segment targets totally different people.  There are a lot of people interested in buying from people like me.  People that have a hands on approach to their products.  But if we are being honest there are a lot of people that can't afford to buy the products we raise and have to go with the more mass produced foodstuffs, canned or frozen, so they can make their dollar go further.  I get that. If people involved in agriculture would be more willing to tote the advantages of their operations and less willing to downgrade other people farms and operations, we as an industry would be so much further ahead!

I'm asking for a little help in getting this blog out in front of more people.  If you think your time spent reading this chapter was worthwhile, please share it on social media with your family and friends.  I appreciate all the help getting the word out!  You can keep up with me on Facebook.  Either search for my name, or find OKredneckfarmer.  I'm also on Twitter with the handle@OKREDNECKFARMER.  Occasionally I'm on Instagram at dvcowboyz. You can also email be at bodarkspringsfarm@gmail.com.  Until next time everybody, have a great rest of the day and a better tomorrow!