consciouseating By my defi nition sustainable nutrition also means what you
Go Green &
Eat Your Greens! Sustainable Nutrition
for You and Our Planet by Dr. Samadhi Artemisa, PhD, AP
enjoyed eating fresh kale, collards, cucumbers, green beans, Swiss chard and spinach right from my garden. All the stems and leaves are so juicy and plump, just bursting with nutrients! Some of the collard greens are as long as my torso. I am a petite woman but that is gigantic in terms of vegetable measurements. Some of the leaves are almost two whole feet long! Now that gets me excited about eating lunch! How many times we hear phrases “eat foods that are in season” and “shop locally.” What is actually in season? Our grocery stores offer strawberries, apples, pineapples, lettuce, cucumbers, squash, cabbage, tomatoes and mangoes all year round—yet each of these has a distinct harvest season, usually only a few months long. While these trendy phrases sound like the right thing to do, why should you seriously apply these as lifestyle habits? It is so easy to buy convenience foods, fast food, packaged food and prepared food. Every time you eat something you have a choice. Is the
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food you are eating going to give something to your body or rob something from your body? Our food choices affect our individual health and the health of our Earth. Sustainable nutrition means what you eat sustains or provides for you.
16 Central Florida natural awakenings
magine walking up to a bountiful, lush garden and picking anything you want to eat. If you had been with me any day over the last three months, you could have
are eating doesn’t harm our planet. There is an overwhelming amount of disposable packaging being used every single day—and for some of you at every single meal. A patient came in to see me and had just come from a neighboring “green” restaurant close to my offi ce. She sat with me and ate her lunch while we chatted before her appointment. I was shocked to see that for that one meal she had a plastic cup with a plastic lid for soup, a plastic plate with a plastic cover for her entree, a plastic spoon and fork, a single serving drink in a plastic bottle, a paper bag and two napkins. When she fi nished eating she asked where the garbage can was and I said, “I will recycle those,” and I did. I washed and reused all the plastic items at least one more time before their fi nal destination in the landfi ll or the ocean. How many times a day do you use something in a plastic, non-recyclable package and throw it away? Where is AWAY? There is no AWAY. Our plastic debris just gets broken down into smaller and smaller bits and ends up polluting the deepest oceans on our planet.
Every time you eat something you have a choice. Is the food you are eating going to give something to your body or rob something from your body?
Vegetables Vegetables have the best
fl avor and most nutrition when they are eaten fresh. Fresh means right from your garden or right from a farm. Manufacturers suffocate our vegetables in styrofoam packaging with plastic wrappers, most of which are non-recyclable and harmful to our ecosystems. I began teaching myself how to cook when I
was in my twenties. Now I prepare all of my own food, eat from my garden, pick my food from local farms and haven’t eaten at a restaurant in over fi ve years. My deepest relationship with food came over the last six years when I went through my Doctoral Holistic Nutrition program and simultaneously became a gardener. Until I had a garden I didn’t know that turnips and rutabagas had green leafy tops, did you? They are not sold that way in stores and yet so much of the nutrients are in the green leafy tops. For optimum nutrition buy root vegetables such as turnips, carrots, radishes and beets with the tops still on them. The leafy tops are completely edible, although quite bitter. All greens provide us with the dark green pigment called chlorophyll which is a blood purifi er. The bitter fl avor tells us they are also liver cleansers. Popeye the Sailor had it
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