Day 11: Nourishing Food

This post is part of “30 days of Giving Thanks” To read more within this series, click here.

“Let food be they medicine and medicine be they food.”

~ Hippocrates

I’d bet that you were expecting me to hold off on giving thanks for food until the official “Thanksgiving [feast] day.”

Surprise!

Today I am attending a conference about traditional food. You might be thinking cornbread and chicken, but not quite. It’s more along the lines of the above quote. Imagine homemade chicken broth, grandma’s pickles, cod liver oil, homemade cheese and yogurt, raw milk, and eggs from pastured chickens.

A dentist in the 1920s name Weston Price noticed that his patients were suffering from higher and higher incidences of tooth decay. He wondered if people who ate their native traditional diets also had tooth decay. He traveled all over the world to find isolated peoples who had not yet come in contact with westernized foods. I believe he called them “displacing foods.” In any event, all these cultures ate different foods, but he noticed many common threads. For instance, all of these people ate the whole animal—fats, organs, cods’ heads etcetera. They all had a “sacred food” that they gave to nursing and pregnant mothers as well as small children. None of them ate processed foods in any form. Their teeth were perfectly straight inside broad beautiful faces that were alight with cheer. Tooth decay was practically non-existent. Tuberculosis, another common blight of the day, had not reached these villages either.

As soon as the “modern displacing foods” came into their village, the next generation experienced rapid tooth decay, depression, narrowing of the face and tuberculosis.

[Now, let me make one thing perfectly clear—everyone is entitled to eat the food they want to eat. I mean, I drink Starbucks chai about once a week, that’s not exactly a health food. This is not a point of me passing judgement on how people eat or live.]

The point of this post is to express my gratitude that God provides for us so many nourishing and healing foods. I am grateful for organizations like the Weston A Price Foundation that seek to educate people for better health.

God not only gave us a planet perfectly suited for life, but foods that enable us to have abundant life.