Skip to main content

Food

This is what its all about really!  We are doing all this work because we want some control over what we eat and the chemicals and processes used to produce it.  My view of food is: the simpler the better.  We eat very little processed food and we are always trying to reduce that further. How did I get started with real food??





My definition of real food is: 
  • lots of fresh, organic, locally grown (or at the least, grown in Australia) produce
  • producing as much of what we eat as we can on our own property - and eating what we grow
  • free-range pasture fed meat and eggs
  • minimal sugar (particularly fructose), natural sweeteners - rapadura and honey
  • good fats and oils - coconut oil, macadamia oil, olive oil, butter, tallow/lard
  • natural unprocessed salt
  • soaked, sprouted and fermented grains, especially bread
  • If I have to buy something, then it must contain only ingredients that I recognise, although these days I make most of our food from scratch

Some great references are:

Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats (Sally Fallon) - for my chapter reviews see here

Sweet Poison and The Sweet Poison Quit Plan (David Gillespie) - more here on strategies to reduce sugar.  And more recently, Toxic Oil and Eat Real Food.


Apart from growing veges, keeping chickens for eggs and meat, keeping steers for meat and cows for milk, we also shop at our local farmers market, swap food through our local permaculture group and make a few other things ourselves:
For all my real food posts, click here, and join in the discussion.



Popular posts from this blog

Worm farm maintenance

I have had the worm farm for over a year now, and I have to say it’s the easiest and most convenient way I have found to make compost and to dispose of vege scraps and other organic waste. I have not had much success with putting everything in a compost bin, I find that the food scraps go all sloppy and don’t really compost properly. I have found that my current system works much better, all food scraps go to the worms and the compost bin is for weeds and manure. The worms are able to eat all our food scraps and convert it to compost and worm tea, and there is still plenty for the compost bin, but now its not full of sloppy food scraps. People often ask if its necessary or possible to have both a worm farm and a compost bin, and I think it actually works better for us.



The worm farm really requires very little maintenance.  All I have to do is tip in more food scraps every few days, drain the tea once a week or so, check that the top tray is damp (if not, tip in half a bucket of …
17 comments
Read more

Getting started with chickens - Tanya from Lovely Greens

Sign up for my weekly email updates here, you will find out more about soap and our farmlife, straight to your inbox, never miss a post!  New soap website and shop opening soon....

Farmer Liz: You will remember Tanya from Lovely Greens from the first series, she lives on the Isle of Mann and added chickens to her garden about a year ago.  You can leave comments for this post on Tanya's blog.



How many chickens (and other fowl) do you keep, what breed and what do you use them for (meat, eggs, slug control etc)?
Tanya: Around the same time that we were initially thinking about having hens another friend beat us to the punch. She went to the local pet store and bought a flat-pack hen house and chicken run combo and found a local farmer who had dozens of semi-feral chickens running around his property. One night he pulled three down from the trees and my friend took them home in a pet carrier. She named them Miracel, Carmen, and Geraldine and though they’re probably related they were all…
Read more

The new Eight Acres website is live!

Very soon this blogspot address will automatically redirect to the new Eight Acres site, but in the meantime, you can check it out here.  You will find all my soaps, ebooks and beeswax/honey products there, as well as the blog (needs a tidy up, but its all there!).  I will be gradually updating all my social media links and updating and sharing blog posts over the next few months.  I'm very excited to share this new website with you!


4 comments
Read more