A Dietary Journey from Cheap Junk to Affordable Health Foods TPS-0015

I'm no chef. I am no nutritionist. I'm a bit of a health nut and have gone through many phases of development in terms of my nutritional IQ.

I've been somewhere between the starving student, bachelor, dorm sort of diet meaning, the ramen diet. I evolved from that diet of my teens and twenties, lots of flour, lots of sugar.

My teeth are, are alright, they could be a lot worse.

I didn't even get fully de-sugared until only a couple years ago now.

I blame myself for not being more enlightened with that. I'm very jealous of generations coming up where they were already raised with sugar alternatives and and more consciousness restrictions around processed foods and grains.

I think we'll have a much more robust society after the paleo diet really proves out over time. Maybe it will be one of the only things that'll allow us to survive as a nation.

I don't wanna get into the politics too much. I wanna make this a little bit more fun.

Now that I'm responsible for my own meals, it's been an experimental evolution on my own as an adult. As I've grown more conscious, I've gone through stages of strict vegetarianism to mostly vegan, but not being religious about it.

Now I'm pretty strict paleo and against added sugar, vigilant against even sugary analogs like honey and agave nectar.

I'm very big fan of stevia. I'm very big into fresh fruit, I'm now very cautious about dried fruit and juices.

For years I've lived out of buckets of pre made food.

Back when I was feeding chickens. I would go and buy bulk quantities of chicken feed. It just made sense for me to be cost efficient and mix up my own feed.

So that was a charming thing that people would joke about and then eventually I did have a business where we exercised our new rights to sell food out of a home kitchen, thanks to the Cottage Food Act.

I'm not picky about having different things to eat everyday, if I eat the same thing every day I'm totally fine with that because I'm on a budget, and I wanna be able to spend the time and spend the money on other endeavors, on other investments and so that I can just dial in the the food aspect of life.

In the survival movement they say, eat what you store store what you eat as a mantra and then eventually grow what you store and grow what you eat.

Thanks to the proximity to the Los Angeles downtown, food district, the bulk food distribution district where all of these shipments from all over the world of produce and dry goods arrive at the central hub.

There are places where, if you know where to go, you can get wholesale pricing discounts as a walk-in customer without even a corporate account.

You don't have to buy pallet loads, you can buy pallet loads, but you can also get one item at a time.

It's like retail nested within wholesale. A lot of times that's disallowed, just because they don't want to nickel and dime.

But there are a few places where they do act as a wholesale outlet to retail consumers.

I had already been evolving my feed recipes through those wholesale outlets. I would buy the ingredients for my feed at 25 and 50lb bags of ingredients at a time, and then mix them into buckets, using the mylar bags, and oxygen absorbers to keep out the sunlight and keep them in a low oxygen environment so that they would be less conducive to pests living in there.

You can extend the shelf life of virtually everything, it doesn't mean you can make stuff last forever that wouldn't last forever, otherwise, there are certain oil seeds and nuts that will go rancid no matter what over time.

But you can slow the process in some cases, significantly.

Many other food products have an intrinsically longer shelf life because they have less volatile oils.

That's the system that you would use, mainly to keep moisture and oxidation and bugs and critters and rodents out, so that you could have decades worth of a timeline of food storage.

That's good for everybody anywhere in the world. That is the strategy that is really battle tested for people who wanna be more resilient.

To make this more of an entertaining story, it started out back in 2011, I would say where I was turned on to one of these places downtown, where you could buy the 25lb, 50lb bags of dry food.

For me, it was all to just make my own trail mix.

I'll find the cheapest ingredients, and I'll make my own trail mix, and that's gonna be great.

So beyond my breakfast food, my trail mix was also something I would eat as a snack.

So wake up and have a bowl of it in the morning, that was breakfast.

If I had fresh fruit to add to it, great, but at least there's just that staple of of a bowl of this breakfast meal.

Then it's something to eat by the handful throughout the day as a snack.

My staple nighttime dinner food would be sprouting.

Mostly it was a sprout mix that I used for years of sunflower seeds, brown rice, peas, lentils, and garbonzo beans.

For years and years I was in sprouting in jars. I hand made and sold sprouting kits with quart jars and would personally maintain several jars at a time looping through and rotating.

Using the bucket storage system to give myself months and months of food self reliance forward with having numerous buckets at all times.

I was growing the sprouts on a daily basis and making a sprout soup every day.

When they had been growing for several days and were bursting out of the top of the jar. I would take a serving of them out, boil them and let the rest continue to grow.

I was able to do this without refrigeration, so it was a great way to have fresh food.

I got way into sprouting. I was doing workshops. I was selling the sprouting kids. Eventually when we had the cottage food permit, we sold the sprout soup mix.

Then there was the breakfast and snack food mix that we sold by the bucket and sourced all organic ingredients, and did the same with the sprout soup mix.

So the ingredients of the morning feed was just the cheapest tolerable mix of bulk ingredients, and it just defaulted to oats, raisins and pumpkin seeds that I would then mix with ginger powder and cinnamon powder.

If you've ever had a raisin bagel or toast that had raisins then you put cinnamon and butter on it...

With the trail mix, if you add whatever type of milk or milk substitute to this bowl of otherwise dry trail mix, you get this effect of it being a great sort of granola cereal, granola bowl experience.

Then also a versatile dry trail mix experience you would just wash down with water throughout the day.

Obviously, there's no sugar added there, it's just the dried raisins, then you have the flavoring of the cinnamon and the ginger, which together the way it sticks to the raisins it's amazing. It's almost like ginger candy at that point. You're having this full sweetness coming from the spices.

The spices have their own amazing effect. To me it was a real breakthrough and a simple formula for myself to just always look forward to it and be happy about.

That has evolved as I have become paleo, very strictly. I no longer do the sprouting of legumes and grains, as much as I felt like I was being somewhat paleo compliant by doing the sprouting and therefore taking essentially a grain and turning it into a micro green at that point after sprouting.

I realize that for me now, I'm at a point where it's not sensible for me to be cooking all the time because I'm totally off grid, because of all of the fires so I have shifted my lifestyle away from sprouting and boiling sprouts in a form of soup.

I had already quit that and gone full paleo, just knowing that there's issues with legumes. I think I have cumulative issues in my digestive tract from the bad diet growing up.

I realize it's wishful thinking to hope that just sprouting the grains and legumes is going to exempt me from the ill effects on the gut, on what the toxins can do.

I did enjoy it and it was the sweetest spot as far as the bang for the buck financially to just add water to dry food and make it grow to several times its original size and volume.

Then to have it come to life and have all these more dense nutrient profiles.

I'm always going to be evolving and re adapting, certainly sunflower seeds for me, that's a sweet spot where I would continue to sprout sunflower seeds because they're edible for most people raw sprouted and they're not considered a grass grain.

I'm not trying to be religious about whether it's paleo or not. But I know the difference for myself, what grains do to me. I'm aware of the chemical defenses that grains have, and that legumes have against being consumed by animals like me.

They're designed toxins to give you a negative reaction, to make you wanna leave them alone.

I've joked with this before about people who are vegan or people who are paleo, or fruitarians...can't we just simplify it and say, let's have a so called "it wants to be eaten diet"? There are a lot of foods out there that nature produces where it's good to go as is.

It doesn't require cooking. It doesn't require processing. It's not toxic. It doesn't require any additional processing to make it palatable or digestible safely.

I guess it doesn't work if you say it wants to be eaten, because if you're also hunting meat, then the animals prerogative is to not be eaten.

But as far as filtering out what seeds to eat and what leaves to eat and whatnot, there's an interesting approach.

The more food you eat that wants to be eaten, it's probably a good thing.

Given the design constraint that I do not wanna be cooking everyday, it's not efficient or practical for me to be running a stove, I drink cold tea or sun tea.

In the desert, it gets hot enough to make some good soup.

You can do a lot with solar cookers, if I wanna have soups, and if I ever do need to boil stuff.

Where things are at now, as I went paleo, I started to do more oil pulling and have more conscious oral and dental self care and wisdom. I phased out the oats because they were just sticking as a paste in my teeth.

When I was pre paleo, it seemed so healthy, such a no-brainer that you would use oats to replace a lot of other processed flour type foods. It's better than the worst of other things. But I discovered, very sadly that no, it's not just a fad diet the paleo thing. The oats were really tearing me up, and I would never know until I stopped.

It was a good ten years of that being my staple, it kept me alive. But it did irritate my digestive system and jeopardize the health of my teeth and gums.

I've had to regain ground in my dental health sphere.

I was also realizing a lot of these carbohydrates, in the blood they become fungus food. They can feed candida.

I finally actually fully went cold turkey breaking up with all added sugars after I had major systemic candidiasis during a summer when I had a lot of landscaping work to do.

I was literally falling apart from the inside out.

That's had never happened before. I cut a corner by experimenting with adding dried figs, I was believing a fallacy that dried fruit is natural sugar, it's not adding sugar, so it's great. But I was really overdoing the dried fruit aspect.

I also was cutting the corner that I could only get these figs candy coated, it didn't take long before it compounded against me.

In this the heat of the summer and working conditions, it gave me rashes all over. It was terrible.

Also there was a woman in my life, we were kind of forming a pact to break the sugar habit. I wasn't a big candy addict, I wouldn't consider myself a sugar addict, for me it was easy to switch over.

It just became a lot more about removing the grains, removing extra carbs and adding more canned fish meat, which is not everybody's preference, but it's cheap.

It's best to buy lower on the food chain to avoid what's called biological magnification, where toxins accumulate up the food web in the ocean or in the body of water, concentrating in the higher trophic levels.

So it sounds weird to be eating bottom feeders, though bottom feeders accumulate the least of the toxins. So I'll let you do your own research.

My saving grace for my gut healing, because I can't afford to do the ancestral diet, which would have a lot of bone broth.

Maybe I will eventually set aside the financial resources to go hardcore ancestral diet with all the bone broth. I do believe in it. I was exposed to it by a dear beloved who got way deep into that path.

Healing the gut from all of the traumatic wounds it's experienced from the standard American diet, I know there's merit in that, I've experienced it.

Though right now, I'm in a transitional state still of trying to build my own little ecotopia from scratch.

I'm not gonna allocate the resources, I don't have the infrastructure or wanna build infrastructure to be very high maintenance, it's gonna take slowing down a lot of other things to do that.

So I'm hoping that my strategy now will allow me another few years of getting away with forestalling the inevitable, which is more time and more money doing the more ancestral diet approach, with a lot more bone broth.

For now living out of buckets is still working.

It's come down to having phased out the oats and upgrading to almonds, which maybe don't agree with everybody. I'm not making any statements as to how ethical or how sustainable these things are. They just happen to be what works for me.

Eventually I'll be growing all of my own everything. None of those questions of fair labor practices or sustainable agricultural practices will apply at that point. It's gonna be, how fair am I to myself as the labor and how sustainable are are my own horticultural practices?

Until then, I'm on the continuum of moving everyday from living out of buckets to living out of my own produce, my own gardens, and I'm very much more satisfied.

I feel a lot better having traded out of the cheaper products for a little bit more premium products.

There were a few years pre-covid, when I was very much a green apple person. I would eat organic apples with almonds in the morning and was less reliant on the all dried trail mix. Though covid got me back into the dry mix exclusively.

My lunch and dinner evolved as well from the sprouting to a combination of sardines and I home made tahini powder.

I would buy raw sesame seeds and grind them into a powder, it tends to oxidize a lot faster after you grind the seeds into a powder so I would grind two or three days worth, at a time.

It's not exactly like a tahini, where it's super oily, my grounds were very dry so if I would add coconut oil. That's really been the staple, then add whatever salad greens and herbs I have going at the time.

I've pretty much maintained for myself a nonstop supply of greens for many years. There have been lapses in time between my gardens if I've had to move or whatever. Then I would substitute canned vegetables, though essentially the night time, or PM feed has been, a staple of ground sesame seeds, then adding the pumpkin seeds to that as well, sometimes grinding them together, which is amazing.

It's been a shift from sprouting and cooking grains and legumes to grinding raw seeds and nuts.

That has been a paleo informed transition and has also been a factor of having more financial stability. Because when I was doing just grains and just legumes, that was when I was the poorest, that was a good ten years of being just completely dead broke.

Back then, when I looked at the price of 25 lb of almonds, that was just so far out of reach. For now it's not a problem, so I spoil myself a little bit.

I'm definitely not as spoiled as I will eventually be when I can afford more fancy ancestral diet ingredients, even better when I can grow it all, have the animals and the fodder I'm growing for the animals, have everything fresh, everything homegrown, then there's no excuse of money.

I've been close to that level before, though I've had the rug pulled on me so many times because of politics or relationships or whatever so now I'm finally in a spot where I feel I can rebuild.

I don't think I'm gonna go into business doing any kind of cottage food sales, probably ever again. But I can talk about the legacy, and I can share the recipes, and I can certainly have private parties where I cater to my friends.

They've always been smash hits, even when they were not as paleo friendly as they could have been.

Now that they're more paleo friendly, it's just even more of a better experience.

I should say I was afraid of raisins and dried fruit for a while after I had that bad experience of the rashes. I felt I had been too cavalier with the dried fruit so I kind of backlashed against them, though now I they are my daily staple again in moderate amounts.

The trail mix is really the best compromise in my experience as fresh or canned fruit is less portable. I don't wanna have a lifestyle where, where I have to load canned food into a bug out bag. I want dry food that's calorie dense, I just have to be careful about the dry fruit ratio.

I'm very hyper vigilant about fungus on the toes, about jock itch, about eczema, about any of the aches or rashes that would come from too much sugary food products circulating in the bloodstream and feeding candida.

The last thing that I want is an immune system that's busy fighting candida when it should be at its best shape, to fight all of the corona virus mutations.

It's important to remember, with dried fruit versus fresh fruit, you can eat easily, far more dried fruit in one sitting than you would ever be able to eat, or stomach of the same fruit in its fresh form, because it's tiny, because it's concentrated, it might even taste better.

So it's just a little bit more of a dopamine hit to wanna eat that dried version of it, but it adds up fast, and that is super concentrated sugar.

It's not as healthy as you would hope it to be. I've done the math before to say, okay, realistically, what, what would it look like?

How much weight of a dried fruit could I eat to be exactly what I would be maxing out on in its fresh form? It's surprising.

Eventually I'll get back to more fresh fruit, when I'm able to grow it in abundance.

But for now, I just have moderate that dried fruit intake.

I have a daily regimen of a bowl in the morning of this trail mix that has dried fruit in it, but I have to be careful about continuing throughout the day to just throw handfuls back whenever I wanna snack.

I said to myself, this time, at the very least, if you're gonna take the gamble of adding the dried fruit to the bowl in the morning of breakfast, at the very least, you need to be extra diligent about brushing teeth immediately after, because those sticky dried fruit bits are gonna feed the bacteria that are gonna break down the teeth and give you cavities.

So now I have been, I've limited myself to only the dried fruit serving in the morning unless I work really hard and feel the need for more, then immediately after I will brush my teeth with coconut oil.

I do oil pulling as well, there are different permutations of that. It's helped stopped some areas of very serious tooth decay that would have led to very costly and very painful outcomes.

I feel like I've maintained this delicate balance, and the last thing I wanna do is regress and have sugar attached to my teeth breaking them down and resulting in infections down into the pulp and causing me a severe pain.

The last thing I wanna do is have emergency dental work done in the middle of a pandemic. If there's anything I can do to prevent that, if it takes eliminating added sugar, drastically reducing any sugar, including and dried fruit...

Appropriate teeth brushing, and getting even more religious about oil pulling and making sure that having that layer of oil coating the teeth and swishing it around and maintaining that effect.

It's been my saving grace. That's how I protect myself, it's a layer of defense of my precious and aging teeth and gums.

I said to myself, okay, if you're gonna bring back in the dried fruit, you're putting your teeth in danger, you're putting your bloodstream in danger of candida growth. You better not let it creep up on you again.

Some day I'll have the dream life of all kinds of berries, all kinds of fruits, all kinds of seeds, all kinds of nuts and, and all kinds of meats growing here. That's paradise.

Until then I'll just continue to hack together a low cost diversified diet. I've found ways to hack biodiversity in my horticultural with stem and branch cuttings, root cuttings, transplants, grafts. I've managed to be a really good bio hacker when it comes to gardening and adding a lot of diversity to what would seem to be a boring staple food diet.

Staple bulk dry food hacks will save a lot of money at the grocery store, and horticultural hacks will save a lot of money at the plant nursery.