Episode 135: What should I feed my kids when questions of what is in our food plasters the news?

INTRODUCTION AND ANNOUNCEMENT
Hi and welcome back. I just want to remind you that you can get all of my homestead science books on my website and many on Amazon for a new way of teaching agriculture to today’s youth and aspiring homesteaders by focusing on small-scale farming and self-sufficiency. If you’re a school, co-op, or retailer and need invoicing, please feel free to reach out to me directly.

TRAVEL PLANS AND RECORDING CONTEXT
So hi guys! I am probably going to keep this short tonight. I say tonight because I’m recording the night before this is supposed to come out because I am flying to South Carolina tomorrow. I’ll tell you all about that here in a little bit.
And I always say I’m going to keep it short when I’m busy and I never do, but I think I’m actually going to try tonight because I also don’t have a voice. So I’m just getting that bug that everyone’s been passing around and all my hold on I gotta check my audio real quick yeah uh no we’re good okay so it’s been mild for them so hopefully it’ll be mild for me because I’m traveling this week and that’s always really hard and I’m speaking this weekend and so yeah hopefully I don’t kill my voice tonight with you guys although you are 100% worth it don’t let anyone tell you different.

DAIRY OVERFLOW AND NEW CALF
So this week uh man I have been buried in milk I guess buried’s the wrong word I have been drowning in milk as I I think I told you guys a couple weeks ago I hope I told you guys a couple weeks ago if I didn’t Blue finally had her calf and it’s a little heifer thank goodness we’re so excited and I couldn’t stand it I named her Feta she’s so cute so we have Blue cheese and Feta cheese now and Blue is giving us so much milk we’re getting almost three gallons a day while calf sharing and we still have Bailey’s milk which is a gallon and a half to two gallons a day while calf sharing and even though we’ve built up a good customer base we don’t have enough customers to get rid of all this milk this fast so I have been really pushing my dairying skills and it’s been a really fun opportunity because Bailey’s milk I’ve told you guys on the here before but I’ll just kind of go over it again Bailey is a Belfair which means she is half Dexter half Jersey which her milk is the most amazing flavor but it’s partially homogenized so I can’t which means that like the fat globules for the her butter fat is all mixed into her milk which is probably why it tastes so good but any cream that I like uh skim I’ve like never been able to make butter or whipped cream it works great for cheeses or if I’m making you know like coffee creamer or cooking with it as cream it’s wonderful but I just have never been able to use it for you know butters and whipped creams and like I said it worked it’s been fine for cheeses but oh my gosh we made mozzarella this weekend and I just love the texture so much more with the heavier fat so I think we did like five rounds of mozzarella and then we with a couple of them we chopped them up and did fried cheese curds because it just sounded fun the rest we haven’t done anything with yet it’s still sitting in the fridge I’ve done a bunch of yogurt and I made butter and whipped cream and the kids made pudding and ice cream and oh buttermilk I can’t even list everything we did like it was bordering on ridiculous and there was still like I still didn’t even use everything we had in the next day like the fridge was full again so really need to work on that like we’re even giving away some milk to some friends but that’s been it’s been fun getting to try all the new things I haven’t gotten to try yet like I was actually squealing for joy when we got butter again because we haven’t had butter in almost two years since before Blue’s mom passed away we got butter from her but we never really liked the flavor of her milk or butter I don’t know we never could figure out why I mean we we really didn’t like the flavor of her milk at the beginning and then we added some vitamin e and it helped with oxidizing the minerals or the oxidization of the minerals in her feed and that helped but we still had always had a bit of a metallic taste and it just like really turned us off and Blue’s is not that way so we’re really excited.

SEASON CHANGE AND GARDENING PLANS
We are fully like in mud season now in Idaho I did see that there’s a little bit more of storms coming in but we are heading back east for a couple weeks and it’s supposed to be like 80 out there so I have no clue what to pack it’s gonna be a fun one and I probably should be packing so we’re leaving tomorrow but you know there’s that and yeah we’re starting to see some green grass and I’m just really excited because we’re heading into spring I haven’t started any of my seeds yet which means I have no onions or celery this year which are two of my favorites so I’m probably gonna have to buy some onion starts but I think I’ll be back early enough in March to start my tomatoes and stuff and still have all of those do pretty good because I’ve started tomatoes like way late and still done well but just been it’s been too busy around here too crazy like with the overflow of milk then I need to keep my back room cold so I can use that for like my yogurts and my buttermilks that can be at like a slightly warmer temperature but even with the temperature is coming up my cold storage isn’t as cold so but then that’s what I turn into my seed starting room so it’s just been it’s been a mess lately like to say the least.

BUSINESS FRONT AND UPCOMING EVENTS
But on the business front oh my goodness I have some such exciting things that some of them I can’t share yet or I’m just not ready to share until I have them lined out but we like I said we leave for South Carolina we’re going to the great homeschool conventions in Greenville South Carolina and I’ll be speaking doing a workshop on Thursday afternoon or evening so hopefully anybody who’s around gets to come on Thursday and see that but if you’re not for some reason make sure you stop by the booth if there’s anything you want to know I will be happy to fill you in on anything that you missed then from there we’re heading up to DC which I’m going to circle back to the DC trip because that was thrown in last minute and then next we’re going to be in London Kentucky for the I always say this wrong the Bushcraft Home Setting and Preparedness Expo where I’m going to be the keynote on homeschooling so that’s going to be really exciting and she does this fun like meet the author coffee each morning so I think that’s going to be a really great way to connect with a lot of people on the author list when a lot of times I’m kind of you know like I’m a speaker I’m a vendor but I think sometimes it’s kind of missed that I’m an author too I mean I’ve written 20 something books at this point just because you know I haven’t been you know published through a big publishing house or something doesn’t make me any less an author and so I’m excited to kind of be highlighted that way and I’ve chosen to not go through publishing companies as of right now because a lot of my books don’t fit that just don’t fit any publishing company because I am creating something new I do have my book like my Raising Self-Sufficient Kids and it’s been really popular and there might be a place for that in the future and it’s not off the table but yeah that was like a choice but it is kind of cool to get highlighted as an author for an event so that was kind of where I was going with that.

DC TRIP SETUP AND INVITATION
And then so the DC trip so my daughter and I are flying out for 12 days to the east coast we’ve had this plan for a while we knew both events were happening and we were like oh cool we’re gonna get like five days in between the conferences to just like drive around and check things out and listen to audiobooks we found an audiobook on the American history of cheddar cheese so like if that doesn’t scream what big nerds we are yeah we’re pretty big nerds so I’ll make sure I link that because I know all you are going to run out and want to buy it immediately yourselves okay I don’t know if I just disappeared for a second but I accidentally touched my screen and then I have been putting out there a lot that I’m really interested in making some changes in agriculture and rural education just you know I think there’s a need for it especially in this new administration with a lot of the power going back to the states and the concerns of college being ran by AI and just a lot of statistics that I’ve been looking at with rural education and rural employment and the statistics of what the mastery of certain skills that students are getting in like secondary school like high school and I just have a lot of thoughts on how we can make that better and I already have a really good stance for that with my homestead education science program you know teaching agriculture science with more of a small scale focus a focus on self-sufficiency and this isn’t like a plug for my curriculum this is that I wrote this with a mission in mind that I felt like more people needed to know these skills not just from I’m gonna major in agriculture and get a job in ag but from a that I can just literally feed myself and create that generational sustainability that has just really gone away and so I’ve been putting that out into the universe a lot lately for lack of better definition and I’ve came across a few entities that we are going to be partnering together and I’m on some things and some things we aren’t and some things we just have the same goals but basically one of the conversations that I had led to my daughter and I being invited to DC for national ag day with the national president of the Grange.

THE GRANGE, RURAL COMMUNITY, AND PROJECT SUSTENANCE
I don’t know if any of you are familiar with the Grange it was formed in oh I want to say 1867 after the civil war as a agricultural like brotherhood and it’s stayed really prominent in a place where rural people can gather together have a place to be lobby for agricultural things that are important to them and you know during the 20s and 30s when they were really trying to revitalize rural life and help with the Great Depression the Grange had like really integral parts in that and now that it is you know we’re kind of past all those things and a lot of like the importance of ruralness and community has gone away but so many of us want it back and the Grange is kind of like we’re here for it like we’ve been here we don’t plan on going anywhere but we have something that we can offer and that is education and community and so that is something that I have been trying to push as education and community on this rural level especially with an influx of people moving back to rural communities like I think it’s the biggest push back to rural communities it kind of since like post-World War II when people could start living in more suburban homes because of the cost of homes and cars but really like in 1908 or 09 something like that was the first time there was the biggest shift from more people living rurally to more people living urbanly and I think that over the last few years between COVID and telecommuting and just kind of like an acknowledgement of what’s going on with our food and schools and people homeschooling and just a shift in society I haven’t seen like actual stats on it but I feel like a lot more people are moving rurally and if not moving rurally are definitely embracing that generational sustainability that we’ve lost and that’s it’s really exciting but yeah I mean I’ve seen it through the Homestead conferences I’ve seen it through podcasting and homeschool events and so yeah the Grange and I have been talking for about a year now about how we might be able to make some changes and like I said I don’t know what that’s going to look like at this point but I did want to share with you that we’re going to be there and that we’re going to be there as guests of the Grange my daughter and I both she’s going to get a lot of really cool opportunities with the Junior Grange and we’re not Grange members and never have been my grandparents were and I’m sure a lot of you are thinking like you mean that whole building down the road that nobody uses yeah that building but there’s more to it and there always has been it’s just taking a shift now and so and they’re actually really embracing this sustainability super well they call it project sustenance and it’s all about being able to rely on your community and taking care of yourself like food wise financially so I’ll go ahead and like just kind of link the Grange but they’re trying to do more at the community level where you’re not going to see a lot of that on their main page unless you’re looking into that project assessment stuff which they have outlined really well so I’m going to be sharing as much as I can we’re going to have a lot of great opportunities where we’re going to the USDA we’re going to Capitol Hill and just meeting with a lot of really influential people so this is going to be it’s going to be really awesome and like I said I’m going to share as much as I possibly can I don’t know what all I’m allowed to share or what I’m even going to have the opportunity to share because I’m going to be busy engaging versus videoing but we’re going to do what we can I’m hopefully I might do my podcast a day late next week so that at the end of National Ag Day if I’m not dead there’s always a possibility I’m just going to be exhausted I’m going to try to at least do a short podcast letting you guys know how it went because it’s it’s a pretty big deal so especially with where we’re at today and with so many things and getting to go to DC like now that some things have changed I’m pretty excited.

FOOD MOVEMENT AND LAB-GROWN PRODUCTS
But something I’m not excited about is things that this food movement food I don’t know food’s going in like two really opposite directions right now one is the direction that like kind of all of us are going like wait a second we don’t want it if it was processed at all we want to grow it ourselves we want to buy it from our neighbors we want to know what’s in our food and then there’s still this huge push for lab-grown items I can’t even say food because it’s not food it’s I’m like my stomach turns a little bit thinking about it it reminds me of whatever grew on a petri dish when I used to work in the food labs when I say food labs I’m talking like I worked in commodity plants where it was just straight almonds but you know you would I could grow like mold spores off of it and stuff and we just had to check like a level but they had some of them hadn’t even gone through processing yet so like don’t be grossed out by that comment so yeah we’ve already talked about the lab meat now they have lab milk and it just feels so obvious what they’re doing because you know there’s the egg shortages and there’s the meat shortages and now the avian flu is getting into dairies and oh suddenly we have lab-grown milk what is that and I don’t I you can’t do anything with it you can’t make cheese you can’t make butter I I moving on.

CONVERSATION WITH MY DOCTOR AND MOMS’ FOOD ANXIETY
Where this kind of brought me is I was at my doctor’s office the other day and I have a really great doctor she’s not a homeopath doctor or like a functional medicine she’s just you know a regular general practitioner but she’s super big on natural health you know personal choice those types of things so we had a really long chat because we’ve seen some really awesome things happen with my labs lately like my cholesterol is down like 150 points from where it was when we ate all processed foods so just really exciting things to see and so we were chatting on that and you know how we handle things with our family and how there’s like what’s the word for like moderation we have a couple things that we take western medicine or medications for and then there’s a lot of stuff that we’re like no thank you we have that under control through our food and other choices and it’s really great to have a doctor that supports that especially with our kids but she said she gets moms and all the time literally upset because they don’t know what to feed their kids and I’m not saying like they don’t know how to feed their kids I think I mean there’s food everywhere I’m saying that they are so like unindated with social media and all sorts of other things that are just telling them basically not to feed their kids anything you can anything that everyone else considers food you know so then there’s these moms like slaving in the kitchen trying to make homemade fruit snacks or whatever so their kids have something to eat and it’s just really like I feel bad for them because I remember being there like when my son first got diagnosed with autism you know there was all like you have to take all the gluten out of his food you have to take all the dairy out of his food and I was really trying to follow every diet that I thought was good and you know dyes were just kind of like starting to be talked about as whether or not they were bad or affected like you know autism and ADHD but yeah I didn’t I just didn’t know like what to feed him I mean we I don’t want to say we ate super healthy but just because the way I was raised like we always like killed our own food like we went hunting we grew our own a lot of our own vegetables even at the time I was in college but I was an ag major and even though yeah ag is one of the big culprits that we’re dealing with right now the school I went to we had an organic dairy and they sold direct-to-consumer meat out of their slaughter plant so you know just kind of a different vibe there I guess and so we were still eating pretty good but it was stuff like I’d like I’d want to do a pizza on a Friday night for the kids or maybe I’d have a couple friends over for a study group or something we’d want to do a pizza and I was worried that is there going to be gluten in his crust and it’s going to like affect my kid and I mean when they were babies I made all homemade baby food and it sounds like a lot but I would just spend a few hours on a Sunday and do it and actually went pretty fast or you know whatever leftovers I had from dinners throughout the week I would like when they were really little like if they weren’t too seasoned I’d blend them and put like a little rice cereal in it and then store it in little cups in the freezer so it really wasn’t that bad but you know as they got older they wanted to eat the same things that their friends were eating and they were going to preschool and I was a single mom and I had to pack a lunch for them every day and it’s really hard to you know be able to do meal prep when I’m taking 24 units at a time in college as a science major and had an internship and I was raising these two little kids by myself yeah they definitely got fruit snacks in their lunch and it is what it is I don’t think that it has ruined their health in any way because I was on board for natural and homemade foods for them kind of right away and so we’ve been able to keep that level of moderation for a lot of their life but thinking about moms right now that are learning about you know stuff with some of the vaccines I mean I mean I don’t even feel like it’s a controversial topic at this point when literally their people are coming out and saying like yeah they’re like we lied to you sorry things like learning what seed oils do to us and food dyes and the plastics that they’re putting in the food and are the emulsifiers and the shelf life stuff and literally what food is by the time it you know you buy it in a box like I look at cereals and they’re you know toting them as whole grains and everything and it’s not and that’s gotta be so hard as a parent especially like maybe a new mom one that hasn’t had like been exposed to like I guess like kind of the homestead movement or didn’t grow up in that way of any sort like that’s got to be really overwhelming and they’re probably asking them you know yeah every time they go to the grocery store what do I feed my kids so I realized that like a lot of my stuff is wow that’s probably a question that a lot of moms have and probably even a lot of moms that listen to this podcast and because I have those moments still myself but I do have a few more years experience I do a little more research I work with a lot of people who are promoting and explaining some of these things so if I can kind of break it down for you I hope that I can be that person.

GOOD, BETTER, BEST FRAMEWORK FOR FOOD
So right off the bat I was taught several years ago that when you’re looking at pretty much everything like food cleaning supplies you know the material clothes that you wear all those things use the good better and best method so good is fed yeah try not to feed them mcdonald’s every night but if you’re able to get you know maybe some better you know like I don’t say better quality because we’re looking at good right now if your kid eats chicken nuggets like a glass of milk and a mandarin orange every night for dinner they’re fed they’re not starving to death and there’s probably still some good things I mean there’s good things in mandarin oranges there’s good things in milk especially if you’re doing raw milk and there’s depending on what chicken nuggets you buy like yeah they’re probably fine too you know especially if it’s like a store-bought one like I know that sounds strange like if you’re getting like a tyson chicken one and not a like basically whatever they have at mcdonald’s just at home so really consider that like especially if you have a picky eater just make sure they’re fed you’re it’s all gonna like work out maybe and that’s where I kind of go to the like where it goes good better so better would be like if you have a kid that only wants to eat yogurt work on getting them the best yogurt you can go organic less sugar sweeten it with honey those types of things you know the same thing with the vegetables like yeah we should be eating organic of course I mean now we’re learning even that organic isn’t even as good as we thought it was but you know if you can get your kids to eat tomatoes or apples or whatever or yourself but you can’t afford organic that’s okay like just just get fed and the better quality that you’re getting fed even better but yeah like I said try to try to be organic try to get whole foods try to get you know the chicken nuggets that are all white meat or make them yourself buy chicken breasts and cut them up and fry them or bake them even better but you know if you fry use lard or beef tallow don’t be using the seed oils and honestly as long as you’re just aware you’re going to be doing better so don’t stress yourself out you’re not intentionally killing your child and you’re probably not killing your child anyways I mean especially if you’re acknowledging that there’s bad stuff out there in these foods as long as that’s not the only thing they’re getting it hasn’t your their your body has a way of cleaning some of these things out and I’m not condoning not making sure your kids are eating the right thing but your health your mental health affects your physical health and if you’re stressing about it and then if you’re trying to push your kid to eat things they don’t want to eat their mental health is being affected and then maybe they’re not eating at all so then their nutritional health is being affected so I mean just kind of look at the bigger picture because as long as they’re getting fed you can start working other things into their diet and this will kind of change as they get older I promise it does especially if you keep pushing it I mean if you just allow the fruit snacks all day like yeah they’re only gonna eat fruit snacks until they’re 16 or older you know but if that’s a luxury and then the rest of the time you’re keeping what they’re eating a little bit more level then you’re probably gonna be all right so then best and I’m not saying we do best all the time we do a lot of best because we grow all of our own food not all of our own food most of our own food and then the food that we grow like our pigs I buy all of our grain locally from local grain mills so I’m not saying that that means they’re 100 perfect but they are all non-gmo feeds and I feel better about it because I know the area that we live in I know the farmers I know the levels that they’re spraying and that type of stuff and it just it makes a difference I’m not saying there’s none of it but there’s not a lot of it you know we like I was saying earlier we make a lot of round cheeses and butters and we have our milk and I buy even our own flour I buy locally from a local flour mill we grow our own beef chicken pork as much as we can pork we grow a lot more of because if anyone listens to has listened to this podcast for any length of time you know that all we have is pigs and actually this year we’ve because we went dry with the cows last year then we like missed a year on beef so we didn’t have any beef to butcher this year so yeah we’ve been buying some beef my husband went to the store today and he’s like oh my gosh they have these packages of beef on or a burger on sale for like five dollars for two and a half pounds or something should I get them and I was like sure like yeah grab a few he’s like they’re six I’m getting all six I’m like yeah go for it because you know yeah it’s makes it at six or five dollars or whatever it was I mean that stocks our freezer and it may be on the better realm because I’m not buying burgers at McDonald’s but it’s not the best because it’s not like the non-gmo grass-fed beef that we grow at home so you just kind of have to look at it that way.

GROCERY STORE STRATEGY AND MAKING FOOD FROM SCRATCH
So you know I hear like you know when you talk to a lot of people they’re like stay out of the center of the grocery store because that’s where all of the processed foods are stay on the outsides which is the vegetables the meat the cheese even the breads and I have to laugh because when I go to the grocery store because I buy or I grow most of those things I actually do spend most of my time in the middle aisles because really the only thing I need need are spices and maybe a couple of boxed things once in a while or you know we still do things like I just have a thing for Doritos on barbecued cheeseburgers so I figure you know if I make my own buns and we grow our own beef and I put some Doritos on there like you’re just gonna look the other way for me all right because I think it’s delicious and so we’re still we actually spend more time in the middle aisles because of everything that we have at home from the outside aisles but if you’re somebody who is not growing everything at home stay out of those middle aisles like yeah you’re still gonna have to go in and buy your spices or whatever and I don’t I buy a lot of mine online I love Redmond’s Real Salt I actually I have a discount code for you guys I’ll put it in the show notes because we use that exclusively I buy it in like 50 pound bags I use their seasoning salts their garlic salt they even have a popcorn salt that is amazing it’s really like ground super fine and it’s hydrophilic and so when you make popcorn that’s really dry you can put that over it and it sticks and so then I can use less butter and stuff which I mean not that I have a problem with butter but sometimes you just want a snack that isn’t greasy and so yeah we I mean we use it for curing our bacons they have like electrolyte drinks all sorts of things and so definitely if you need a good you know spice or a place to get your salt I definitely suggest Redmond’s it has a ton of minerals in it and the flavor is amazing so like my husband who watches his salt intake because of his liver he can still season his food with Redmond’s and not need as much and so it lowers the amount of actual sodium he’s getting so that’s super awesome although if you are watching sodium you’re probably never going to get too much just by using a salt shaker it’s more the sodium that like comes in canned foods and things like that so yes stay on the outside of the store make sure you’re getting you know your fruits your vegetables your meats cheeses dairies yogurts all those things those are your core foods really you don’t need any of the rest maybe bread or the flour to make your bread and you’d be really surprised how many different meals you can make with just those basics I mean if you buy a box of cereal there’s one thing you can do with it you can well I guess I don’t know you can put milk over it maybe you can put it on yogurt I think that’s about your your options and whereas I can take a gallon of raw milk and a loaf of bread and a pack of sausage or something and make two or more meals with it or you know if I have the flour to do bread I mean goodness I can make that stretch all day long maybe two days depending on what I’m doing with it and you’re probably thinking like you’re crazy but I mean yeah if I have a couple pounds of sausage for our family size that would really be all we needed maybe some eggs and I’m not just eating breakfast three meals a day you know we had a pork roast the other night we did it in the crock pot as like a pulled pork we did pulled pork with beans and cornbread and canned apple like home canned applesauce the other night for dinner the next night we made buns and had sandwiches with it and then we skipped a night and did tacos and then the next night we did loaded baked potatoes with pulled pork like over the top of it and that was one roast did all those meals and the only things extra I mean I had a few things in the pantry like the applesauce and we made the homemade cornbread we made the buns and put some cheese over it and I did buy that cheese because we’re just getting back into cheeses again but you know that’s something from the outside of the store and yeah then the potatoes cheese sour cream and the pulled pork on top of it and it was absolutely delicious that was four meals that we probably spent well I mean the roast we grow our own but I mean you can still buy a roast like that for like 20 bucks maybe less and then you add in the other stuff I bought I mean yeah you’re looking at I mean depending on your family size like $30 for three four meals and we actually ended up freezing some of the pulled pork so yeah that’s going into another meal and that includes like you know I bought 15 pounds of potatoes for a buck 50 so we did the baked potatoes but those potatoes are going to last for several more meals but yeah if you go into those center aisles you spend the same amount and you get like one meal out of it like and I mean think about how people say like don’t buy kids toys that are like based on tv shows or something because it takes all the imagination out of it you know buy them toys that they can use their imagination think of food is the same way you know if you’re only buying box macaroni and cheese yeah like for that night it’s cheaper because you know like a box of mac and cheese is a dollar which you’re not even getting a whole pound of pasta where I can go over to the pasta aisle and get a pound of pasta for a dollar and a block of cheese and some milk and like I do pasta one night and then my block of cheese and milk can go you know with something else like you know add some tomato sauce and I have tomato soup you know with cheese on top like that’s I’m getting two or three meals for such a small amount comparatively to what you would need to fill up that many people with those boxed foods that aren’t that good for you anyways.

STOP TRYING TO RECREATE BAD FOODS AND USE LEFTOVERS
Stop trying to recreate bad foods so what I mean by that is the mom who’s making fruit snacks because that’s what her kid will eat just stop it because then you’re gonna get exhausted you’re gonna give in and you’re gonna buy fruit snacks I’m not saying I’ve never made like a fruit like let’s see I used like it wasn’t gelatin pectin I used pectin and made like a fruit snack kind of thing as a holiday treat it wasn’t something that we’re eating every day not to say we never eat fruit snacks but when you’re trying to recreate these things that never should have like been in front of your kids in the first place you’re just gonna burn yourself out because there’s just not a way to sustainably do that there’s a lot of other options that you know I do say like fed is best but there comes like a and you know your three-year-old has been like I’m not saying starve your three-year-old but eventually like you’re like no we don’t have fruit snacks you can have an orange and if they don’t want an orange then they can have dinner and just not have a snack like they’re not gonna starve to death you know yeah three-year-olds when they’re hungry get grumpy but is that fruit snack really filling them up or is it just giving them that sugar and red dye that their body is craving because they’ve been getting it so just ask yourself those things we did some of that when we first switched to all natural because it was really hard to switch a family of eight from eating things like mac and cheese and fruit snacks and I’m using those as an example because they’re so common but I mean I’m sure you could list a hundred other things that you’re doing something similar with and so I had to like you know adjust us slowly and so for some things I did try to recreate while also trying something new completely and you know yeah it didn’t it didn’t happen overnight it’s been eight years and now we have a groove and we make so much of our own but you don’t have to do that either and like I said it’s everyone’s like well but the healthy food’s more expensive honestly it’s really not because it’s gonna fill you up more it’s probably gonna last longer as far as meals go like you could buy a can of soup for gosh I think they’re three dollars now for like a can of like chunky chicken noodle soup or something where I can make like I can take a chicken home with some veggies and seasoning and make chicken noodle soup even my noodles if I need to I mean they’re like a dollar if you buy them or if I make them myself I don’t want to say they’re free because I buy my flour and I have eggs and it takes all day but I can make a bunch and make it last but for I don’t know 15 dollars I can feed the entire family plus have broth for a couple more nights possibly even have more chicken where we can do chicken sandwiches the next day or egg rolls sometimes there’s enough that maybe I can use it for like a chicken pot pie so I’m getting two or three meals out of one chicken and several vegetables for $15 versus a can of soup for three dollars it would probably take like one of those each for everyone in my family so I mean right now there’s six of us in the house so that’s $18 for one meal that probably isn’t that great for us and we’re probably still buying like something to make sandwiches or have rolls with it or something like that so it’s just not it when you look at it that way it’s not worth it I mean yeah when you run to the grocery store by yourself and you’re just like oh I need some lunch yeah it’s probably cheaper to go with the can of soup because you’re not going to go back to the office and you know boil a chicken but if you’re doing that in advance you might have already had it in the freezer or something ready to go and once you get into that groove you find that you’re not having to seek those things out all the time because you already have them and that’s another one is save all your leftovers if the chicken you know if you only have a little bit feed it to the chickens or your dog or whatever if you have a lot then go ahead and package it up whether it’s like tonight for dinner we had a chicken pot pie that we made a couple weeks ago we ended up not eating the second one until we froze it if you’re if it’s just a like one serving it doesn’t matter like package it up and freeze it because that might be your lunch in two weeks instead of running to the store for that can of soup.

AVOIDING MAINSTREAM INFLUENCE AND TREAT CULTURE
So I’m just like checking my notes because I really wanted to make sure that I took some time to make sure that you’re that I covered all this stuff so one of them actually had it done further but avoid the mainstream influence so when we’re talking about recreating bad foods for your kids if your kids don’t even know about them then you don’t have to feed it to them I mean yeah they still go to the grocery store with me and they see it but if they don’t see it as an everyday thing like yeah every once in a while I’ll see like fruit snacks on sale and I’m like yeah let’s go ahead and get some like it’s a treat or we’re going for a drive and so like it’s our drive treat but they’re not going to public school where they see every kid with a fruit snack in their lunch box every single day and you know I’m sending my kids with oatmeal or something I don’t even know like I don’t know what I would send them with like I guess an orange like I’d send them with an orange and we’re lucky that even our homeschool co-op is very similar and all the families pitch in and so there’s a couple moms that will make snack for everybody and nobody uses that stuff so like it’s kind of cool like my kids don’t see a lot of that outside of the home you know so it’s not an everyday thing they don’t see it as a food group they see it as a treat you know and we’re seeing a lot of changes coming so this is going to be easier for all of us to kind of stay on top of a lot of states are banning the dyes now I think federally read for is banned don’t quote me on that one it’s one of them though you know with RFK he’s really you know some people are concerned about what he’s doing I am you know I feel like from my standpoint if we’re looking for food freedom and we have someone in there that is mandating things does that take away from those of us who want food freedom even the whole food sector I don’t think it does but yeah there is that fear that if he’s going to ban red dye 40 is he also going to ban raw milk I don’t think that’s the case but I also feel like it could be opening the door for that those types of regulations hopefully there’s you know you have to have a certain amount of proof of like long-term effects or something like that before because I raw milk is not the same as red dye 40 like and you know there’s a lot of people that are concerned about raw milk and I do want to address that one what most people think of when they think of raw milk is the milk out of the raw tank at a dairy like a commercial dairy like I wouldn’t feed that to the pigs like it’s it’s pretty bad and then it goes you know into the milk truck and then it goes to the creamery where then they strain it and pasteurize it and do all those things that makes it air quote safe to drink but of course now that we’ve learned so much more where then there’s you know our dairy where we sanitize our milking equipment every night in the mornings we clean our girls teats really good and then we hook up the inflations and it’s a totally closed system where the milk goes directly into our milker it’s not exposed to anything at the barn which we have an open milking parlor because that’s just what we have to work with it does have a couple walls there to keep wind and stuff as an issue out but yeah there’s no exposure to anything at the barn because once she’s done milking you know we just pull the inflations off and they like bend over so then we set them in the cleaned cart that we clean like once a week and it comes back to the house and then from there we strain it so because every once in a while there’ll be like a hair stuck to one of our girls teats or something and that’ll show up in the milk but other than that it’s a really clean product compared to what people are comparing bulk tanks and dairies to being and it’s like i said it’s a totally different product it’s coming from totally different animals on totally different feed regimens and medication regimens and all those things so like there are some dangers once in a while with raw milk not coming from a clean source and a few people have had issues with food poisoning and i think about 10 years ago i think a kid died so that’s that is concerning i’m not taking that off the table but when you look comparatively at some of these other mainstream products and how many people have died from that and the effects of things like red dye 40 like the cancers and the behavioral issues that’s causing you know if you have a child that actually doesn’t have adhd and they have a sensitivity to red dyes and so then now they’re being pumped full of amphetamines that they don’t need because they don’t actually have anything like that and their behavior isn’t getting better because that’s not actually the problem so then they’re getting they’re consuming the red dyes like with breakfast every morning in their cereal and they’re going to school and they’re acting a fool and then they’re getting put on meds and the meds don’t work so they’re upping the meds and then they’re doing a different med and like the long-term effects of that i would much rather maybe occasionally have a stomach upset from my milk than to have the long-term reoccurring effects that are happening from these dyes so that’s just my little soapbox on that one because i was actually anti-raw milk for a long time i was a food safety specialist i read all the scary stories and was like oh my gosh it’s killing children and you know it’s not i mean yeah i killed a child like 10 years ago and it was the practices it wasn’t the milk but i’m not even i guess what i’m trying to say is i’m not condoning children dying from milk but i am saying that the story was presented in a way that made me be like raw milk no not happening even when we bought our cow well i was pregnant my husband had was still like very much in the worrisome stages of his liver cirrhosis and we had a like a one and a half year old so we low temp pasteurized for about a year and then as health got better i wasn’t pregnant anymore the little one got older we tested it a little like okay we know our system is clean let’s try like mom’s gonna drink like a glass of milk and see how it affects her you know and next thing we know we were like oh this is fine and then you know of course more research and stuff too.

UPCOMING COOKBOOKS AND HOMESTEAD KITCHEN RHYTHM
So i am coming out with cookbook not to kind of be like oh it is an afterthought this was something that’s kind of just been like on my heart for a while because so many people have asked how we healed ourselves from my husband or my husband healed from liver disease and it’s kind of been an up and down for me and this cookbook is not going to be how to heal yourself from liver disease and after my last baby and all the steroids i had to take i put on a bunch of weight so it’s also not a weight loss book and i’m not going to try to pretend it is because yeah when you put on that much weight you can’t even pretend like that it is literally like a home cooking cookbook but if we’re going to go on my weight like they always say like never trust a skinny cook so you’re good like these are going to be some yummy foods but what it is is this cookbook a lot of people it wasn’t like i said it came about because people want to know how we healed from the liver disease or how we’ve kept our bodies and stuff healthy through food and you know eliminating toxins and stuff like that but how do we do it in a way that still tastes good that our kids still want to eat that we can have people over for dinner and they don’t they’re not wondering why like you’re feeding them like cardboard gluten-free bread or something which we’re not gluten-free like these are just real home cooking completely from scratch options and i say options because you know in the recipe book it’s gonna have things like one of them strawberry shortcake we love strawberry shortcake so yeah i much prefer to have strawberries out of my garden i bake i bake homemade shortcake and then i do whipped cream from my cows like yay but sometimes it’s the dead of winter and i don’t have any of those things and i am well i guess i could still bake the cake but i’ll stop at the store and they’ll have strawberries on sale with like those little like cakes you can buy heck yeah like we buy those whenever they’re on sale because it’s just such a fun easy dessert and of some of the desserts out there i feel better feeding them to my kids so the recipe will you know have what you put in it but then it’ll list what page you can go find how to make homemade homemade whipped cream with cream either that you buy from the store or from your cow which is different because everyone’s cow is different i actually was having a chat with somebody online today about how everybody has to handle their raw milk differently because of like just climate and animals and what their feed is and everything so that’s how that book is going to look i’m calling it grandma’s old cookbook rhythm of the homestead kitchen and actually i have total of like two of my grandmother’s recipes so that would be a very short cookbook if it was just from that but the reason i’m calling it that there’s going to be a whole explanation on this is that we have lost that generational sustainability so yes i’m not a grandma kind of not really i don’t know i’m 41 so i don’t know if it counts and he’s not my kid but my husband’s stepson from his first marriage doesn’t have children so i guess like for my cookbook it works but it’s more that i’ve taken the time to research cooking methods research the rhythms relearn how to cook in a way that we don’t live in the kitchen but we probably eat a lot like our grandmothers and our great-grandmothers did because a lot of our grandmothers were like putting vienna sausages in gelatin and i don’t know what was going on with that so i have things that are a little better and like i said i’m there’s a whole section on that that i explain why even though i call it even though i only have two of my grandmother’s recipes they were the most important ones to me and i swore that i would never share them not to her just to myself and then i realized that so many people don’t know don’t have these skills they weren’t passed on even some of them weren’t passed on to me i had to figure them out research learn them and not just from cookbooks like literally i have read books about just how women did things in their kitchens and learned that rhythm and that’s what i’m going to be sharing with you guys while you’re waiting though i do have another cookbook that i came out with right after we switched to everything homemade because i ran all the numbers of what it looked like because we were really like it was expensive to try to switch to all natural all homemade before we started growing our own food so i ran all the numbers to know exactly what it looked like so i knew what was worth it to us and what wasn’t and i put that into a cookbook about five years ago and that’s still available on my site it’s called homemade cost cutting and i’ll go ahead and link that in the show notes it’s only seven dollars so it’s a real quick download and it’s how we saved twenty five hundred dollars a year on groceries by going all natural no coupons no packaged foods and honestly in today’s economy that’s probably 35 or 4500 just you know from five or six years ago so definitely go check that out i’ll link it all in the show notes.

FINAL ENCOURAGEMENT AND RULE OF FIVE
I know it’s easy to say like don’t worry but I feel like we just learn about new bad things every day so just stay ahead of it acknowledge do your research moderate read more than just what they used to say foods were good for read more than what they’re telling you foods are good now because sometimes i trust those sciences just as much as i trust the old sciences really honestly like eat your foods as close to the way god made it and if you are processing in any way like yeah i’m not gonna go like just eat raw meat i’m gonna cook it or i’m gonna you know but i’m not going to bring it inside and freeze dry it and grind it and mix it with something and reconstitute it into like a burger patty with a whole bunch of emulsifiers and things that you know make it stable and the right color and you know caramel to caramel coloring to make it brown still and well it lost all of its flavor from being freeze-dried so i’m going to put sugar in it no none of that like i’m literally going to you know like we butcher at home we bring the meat in we grind it we freeze it and then when i want tacos i thaw it out and i have the meat and literally there’s been nothing done to it except for just chopping it down and cooking it so you know just kind of think about that like how many steps away from original are you i think they call like degrees of something or something like that but yeah i mean just think about that like if you can count the steps away from original like more than like your hand then you know the five fingers on your hand maybe you shouldn’t be eating it and that’s i guess where i end on that one so we’re gonna go the rule of five if it’s five steps away from the way god made it we’re not gonna eat it all right keep growing.