What I Eat (At Home)

After the yelling fest that happened at Free The Animal over white potatoes, I’m really hesitant to even refer to my diet as “Paleo-ish”. If there’s a nice, tidy word for not eating grains and legumes, I’m that. I suppose primal would cut it. At the moment, I’m not eating white potatoes and nut/seed oils. I eat a piece of gluten-free bread, a bit of rice or a gluten-free tortilla once in a while, but I stick to my rules about 95% of the time. Certainly, these rules make my diet weird to other people, but since I consume rather a lot of dairy, I cannot say that I’m following a Paleo Diet (note capital letters).

Anyway, I’ve done some analysis on my diet for April 18-24.

I have mixed feelings about logging what I eat into Fitday. I find that I do need to do it if I’m trying to do an under eating day, but otherwise, it seems to psych me out. If I’m not deliberately under eating, I just write down everything I eat. As it turns out, this week, I wrote down all five days I ate a normal amount. I swear, I did not fake this. It really is a coincidence!

Here are the individual days so you can see what I mean.

I really thought I ate more than an average of 2,000 calories a day. If you’d asked me, I’d have said it was closer to 2,200 or even 2,400, but I guess the “down days” really knock down the average.

Why the under-eating days? Basically, I spent about a month in St. Louis doing a lot of socializing and eating out at many different restaurants. In Virginia, I have a system to “eat clean” at every restaurant we routinely visit. Since I have celiac and Tino is a vegetarian, we don’t eat just anywhere, and I wind up asking a lot of questions or reading a lot of info on line. Anyway, long-story-short: I ate a lot of deep fried white potatoes, and I drank a lot of booze. I average out to about a glass of wine or one cocktail a day at home, but in St. Louis? I average out to more like double that, and most of it is not wine. Since I’ve been home, I’ve been doing kind of a bang-bang thing where if I’m over the trend, I eat very lightly that day. This has been averaging about twice a week, and I shoot for 1,250 calories on those days. I cut back across the board, but a lot of the cut comes from fats.

While I think it’s interesting to see a shopping list for someone who eats like this if you’re new at it, I was also really curious to see what my market order would look like for a week. I didn’t actually buy all of this in preparation for last week, this is what I actually ate according to what I put into Fitday. When I ate out, what I ate was easily reproducible in my own kitchen, so I added it to the order. I’ll cover my strategy for eating out some other time. I estimate the cost for this list between $60 and $75, and I do watch my grocery costs very closely, so I’m probably quite close on that number.

So, here’s the list. (This will pop-up a new window!)

I knew I ate a lot of produce, but wow, seeing them all on this list … the quantity really surprised me.
The asparagus and spring onions were from the Freight Station Farmer’s Market in Winchester, VA. I think that’s going to be our way of getting local veggies this year since we did not join a CSA. We are going there again today and will probably buy more from the farmer I bought from last time. As it turns out, she gets raw milk from Pine Grove Farm, and my dairy farmer had nice things to say about her. I was shocked to found out that West Virginia is one of those states where raw milk is illegal, like Maryland.

I had some help eating the pineapple, but it’s much cheaper to buy a fresh one if you want fresh pineapple at all. They were on sale for $3 at Wal-Mart. The bok-choy was similarly on sale at Wal-Mart for $1. Lemons and limes are consistently cheaper there, and often avocadoes are too. Yes, I buy stuff at Wal-Mart, and I even eat at McDonald’s (again, ingredient lists yield a strategy for this).

Here’s a quote from Ray Audette himself from this interview:

Q: Unfortunately the palaeo way can be an expensive one…..those who promote it are often seem to be affluent professionals with big incomes, able to afford lots of meat and organic vegetables. Do you have anything to share in terms of eating a healthy, paleo diet on a budget? How would the unemployed or student cope? Can we avoid being forced onto cheap carbs to survive?

A: I am very poor. I shop at Walmart and other supermarkets. I often eat at McDonalds. I don’t buy into the whole “organic” thing. I don’t find my diet to be a financial burden.

I’ve always seen organic as a big business, just based on how agriculture works in the United States. Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma just confirmed all my suspicions. Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods are not your friends – they are in it to make a buck, and organic certifications are what they are. At some point, I will discuss how I think organic has become a special kind of bullshit. Local and Biodynamic farms (like Polyface or the farm where I get my eggs, milk and now chicken) ALWAYS trump organic. Talking to the farmer is way more important than an organic certification.

I get a dozen eggs and a 1/2 gallon of raw milk every week from the same farm. The half and half is the first I’ve had in a while – I found a reasonable source for local, grass-fed half & half that is pasteurized in the normal way, unhomogenized and contains nothing but milk and cream. The net cost on the milk is $6 a week, the eggs cost $3 a dozen and the cream was $4 a quart.

The chicken breast and steaks were out of my freezer, and both were from Costco. I’ve used up all the chicken, and I’ve now replaced it with cut-up pastured broiler from the farm where I get my milk and eggs. Pastured chicken is not available consistently at a reasonable price, so I do sometimes buy antibiotic and hormone-free from the grocery store. My grocery store carries no ground beef that I’m willing to buy, so if I can’t make it to the butcher to get local, grass-fed ground beef, I buy ground bison. The ham was the last bit left from Easter. The summer sausage is locally produced by my trusted butcher who sells only local humanely-raised and slaughtered meat. She can always tell me about the farm and the farmer.

I am using Tamari again after not touching any soy (knowingly, anyway) for about 9 months. It doesn’t seem to be an issue for me, and it’s a really useful ingredient. I think that’s all I have to say for now. I will work on explaining *how* I ate all of this in my next post, but I really need to do some work for, you know, MONEY, so this is it for now.