Good food is very often, even most often, simple food.

Anthony Bordain

I am by no means the epitome of health. I struggle daily with food choices, am overweight, and an insulin dependent diabetic. I do know that the better I eat, the better I feel, and I wanted to share a small glimpse into our journey to being an “ingredient household”.

How It All Started

Many, many years ago I was bored and looking for something to watch on tv. I stumbled upon a documentary on Netflix called Food, Inc. For the first few minutes, I seriously considered shutting it off. It was all “hippie” nonsense and organic eating and eat more plant based, and so on. Not really my thing at that time. Ok, not my thing at all. However I really was bored, so I watched on. The more I watched, the more I realized they were not villainizing the meat industry, which is what I thought in the beginning. The whole documentary is centered around buying local, fresh, as organic or natural as possible, produce and meat. Talk to the people raising your beef. Shake hands with the families growing your veggies and fruits. Ok, I can get on board with that.

The film went into how our food is processed from meat down to the packaged food we buy in the stores and dove into the preservatives used to keep those foods on the shelves for extended periods of time. I’ll be really honest, after watching the entire documentary I didn’t want to eat anything. I was so thoroughly disgusted at what is done to our food in this country, that I started down the rabbit whole of research trying to decide what was the best for me. I started shopping all organic and even went vegetarian for about a year. I am not a vegetarian… it didn’t work for me at all, however many people have success with it.

What happened as a result is I learned how to cook, I lost 40 pounds, and I started to feel amazing. It lasted quite some time, and then the budget took over, and I started slipping back into old habits. Fast food, convenience food, and pre-packaged snacks. I felt awful, I gained my weight back, and a few years later, I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes. Talk about an eye opener!

Starting Our Family

When I met David, I wanted to impress him and cook for him. He decided I was on ok cook… that’s a lie, he decided that I am a pretty good cook, and really supported me going back to scratch made meals and shopping healthier with more wholesome ingredients. I really started to enjoy my time in the kitchen and experimenting with recipes and I haven’t really slowed down since. If anything it’s gotten more intense.

When we found out our oldest daughter was on the way we were beyond excited! It came to a scary slow down a few weeks after our first appointment when they called to tell me that I was diabetic, and likely had been for many years I just didn’t know. I was mad. So mad. I wasn’t surprised though. I was (and still am) overweight, and it ran on both sides of my family very heavily. There is such a stigma surrounding diabetes, that I don’t like to talk about it much, however I will say it is extremely genetic. No matter how healthy my children eat, or how much they exercise, they have a 80% chance of being diagnosed with diabetes as adults. That has pushed me even further into my whole food journey. The less our food is processed, the more health benefits it contains, and as a mother I want to give my children every step up that I possibly can.

Another thing that is so important to me is teaching my daughters how to cook. If they hate it and never want to cook a single meal as an adult, that is perfectly fine with me, but they will know how.

The last point that really drives all of this home for me is the change in behavior in our kids when they eat things that I don’t typically keep in our home- mainly foods with artificial coloring in them, and more specifically, red dye. I am not that mom that is going to exclude my girls from participating in school parties or eating a fun snack at a relative’s house. I’m just not. What I do is buckle up and wait for the aftermath… I’ve noticed it a little over the past year or so with our oldest, but let me tell you, after her classroom Valentine’s Day party last week with pink and red everything we had a wild night! She gets so wild, completely stops listening, and gets hyper beyond anything I’ve ever seen. Yes, sugar will do that, and the excitement of the party, but so will red dye. Next time you are in the grocery store, I challenge you to look at the ingredients… red dye, specifically red 40 is in so many everyday snacks.

What is an Ingredient Household?

This is a new term to me, and I heard it on TikTok of all places, but I grew up in one of these so called ingredient households and didn’t even know it. An ingredient household is one where there are minimal pre-packaged snacks or foods, but there are always ingredients to make snacks and meals. For example you would be hard pressed to find a package of Chips Ahoy cookies in my pantry, however I always have everything stocked to whip you up a batch of chocolate chip cookies. You are also very unlikely to find Cheez-It crackers at my house, but just let me grab my food processor real quick and I can make you a batch of cheese crackers. Would you like traditional or sourdough?

An ingredient household is usually a cleaner eating environment when you are talking about preservatives and food dye, however it does take a certain amount of planning and prep to keep it going. I have a pretty good rhythm going now, but when we first started making this move I felt like I was in the kitchen all day every day and nothing really got accomplished. My trick is to pick a day or 2 each week and restock our pantry. I batch things together that are alike and use a lot of the same ingredients, like muffins, cookies, and crackers on one day, then bread, bagels, and seasoning mixes the next day.

There are some snacks that I buy for the sake of convenience and packing little lunches. I do however shy away from anything with artificial colors, flavors, and large ingredient lists. Nowadays we consider a handful of grapes to be a sweet treat, and they definitely hit the spot!

I am working on researching more about food dyes, but until then, read the labels, friends, read the labels. I aim for dye free and 10 ingredients or less, ideally 5, but that’s hard to do.

~Tara