The Nourished Kitchen

The movement to a whole foods, minimally processed diet is a well-needed food trend. The more I have read about food and nutrition, the more and more apparent it becomes that many of our modern health ailments are because of poor nutrition and diet. What does it take to give up our convenient foods and eat only locally grown, in-season, organic foods?

The Nourished Kitchen by Jennifer McGruther is perhaps one approach. The book is beautiful with lots of full color pictures. The book is mostly a recipe book, but there is some discussion on her philosophy of food. In some ways I would consider McGruther a food purist in which she searches for food that is as close to the farm as your own backyard. It's the idea that you know the farmer and how he raised or grew your food before you purchased it. In some cases you even do it yourself.

In an idealized world, we would be able to do all of this. The reality is that many of us are not close enough to a farm or a farmer to really know. We could make some efforts by shopping only at farmer's markets, but even that can be difficult. It's not to say that many of us are unwilling to trade our convenient life, but those who live in large cities there are many challenges to sourcing this kind of food. Even for me living in a rural area, it's not so easy to find certain foods directly from a farmer or to even grow certain foods. For example, I can only grow lettuce a certain part of the year and it is nearly impossible to grow peaches due to the elevation of my area. At the end of the day, we can only do the best we can to achieve such a lifestyle. In other words, I felt a bit of guilt that I couldn't achieve such food purism from reading her book.

Many recipes in the book call for "exotic" ingredients that may be difficult for the average person to obtain, like real lard direct from the farmer without any pasteurization or processing. Some recipes have no pictures and call for ingredients I've never heard of or have never seen. Some recipes could use some extra instruction, such as step-by-step pictures of the process. The recipes may be simple, but for newbies more instruction would be better.

The book is inspiring, I just wish it had a bit more practicality for the rest of us.