Organically Aussie

Hi everyone! Thanks for coming in. For my first official blog post, I thought I’d share what my family eats and why choose to eat this way. So, my family chooses to eat as high quality as we can, so that usually looks like homemade sourdough breads, local grass fed beef and pork, free range chicken and eggs, organic dairy (raw dairy is illegal in Australia), and as much organic produce as possible. So, we live in regional Queensland, with our closest major city over 3 hours away, so shops are limited and access to organic and healthy foods is limited. Our beef and pork comes from a local farmer who does fully grass fed and finished, hormone free and vaccine free beef and pasture raised pork. Our produce comes from what we can grow ourselves and what we can get from the grocery store or the local markets, dairy, eggs and chicken comes from the supermarkets and pantry products come from either supermarkets or our local pharmacy that has a health food section.

So why do we choose to eat this way? Well, we didn’t until only a couple of years ago. It wasn’t until I learned of the benefits of eating better quality foods and the risks of eating the, what I call, the Standard Australian diet, which is basically the Standard American Diet. With the research I did, I came to the conclusion that the food pyramid is completely wrong. Rather than focusing on grains and carbohydrates, while limiting fats and only consuming low fat foods, we should be focusing on grass fed and finished beef, free range eggs (organic if you can afford it), organic dairy and homemade sourdough breads. A whole meal can be steak, avocado and sourdough bread, and that’s a perfectly fine and balanced meal. We choose to eat this way to nourish our bodies the best way we know how, and we want our son to eat healthy. We believe that the old saying “you are what you eat” is extremely true. When you eat highly processed foods, that are full of artificial sweeteners, seed oils, preservatives, colours and flavours, you are poisoning your body. Until the middle of the 20^th century, these things were never in our foods. Even our ‘junk’ foods in middle of the 20^th century were far healthier than the equivalent of today because the ingredients were far less processed than those of today. Don’t take my word for it though, there is plenty of research and information available online.

I am a big believer that if you choose to consume meat, you should consume as much of the animal as you can. For us, that means taking the bones and making bone broth, taking the fat and rendering it into lard or tallow, and though we haven’t done it yet, I would like to add organ meats into our diet too. I believe that if an animal dies for the purpose of you consuming it, you have an obligation to honour that animals life by not wasting it.

So what does a day of eating look like for us? Below is an example of what our days look like

You might think that eating like this is expensive, and it definitely can be. We live on a single income, so the only way we can afford to eat this way is to make as much as possible from scratch. We don’t buy premade snacks or baked goods, marinated meats, precut or prepared produce, cereals or premade breakfast items. I make EVERYTHING from scratch. My son doesn’t even like most packaged snacks anymore, and often asks for the “one mummy makes”, which just warms heart every time. We still spend quite a bit on groceries, because organic produce and high quality ingredients aren’t cheap, and my husband and I definitely consider it an investment in our health. As time goes on in this blog, I will be sharing my favourite and most used recipes. Now, all of that being said, we definitely still get the occasional treat, which could be going out for sushi, getting some chocolate, ordering pizza or a sneaky meat pie from the local bakery, but we don’t stress when we do that, because why stress when the majority of our diet is so healthy, the odd treat isn’t going to hurt.

Can’t wait to see you next time XX