No Matter What You Eat, Choose the Highest Quality of that Food

Eating quality foods is the best strategy we can use to improve our health and lives as well as the health of our planet.

Endless nutritional studies have proven that the diets of cultures that keep traditional diets of fresh, whole, & local foods are dramatically healthier than diets of cultures relying on mostly refined or mass produced foods.

Quality can mean: fresh, organic, lovingly made, homemade, locally produced, free of pesticides and herbicides (these are anti-nutrients and disease agents), free of antibiotics and growth hormones, heirloom varieties, nutrient dense, free of artificial ingredients.

Higher quality food means greater nutritional value. Food provides your body with energy and information. When you eat a carrot, the Beta-carotene in the carrot tells the body how to see better at night, the antioxidants in blueberries demonstrate how to keep your blood healthy and flowing, the B vitamins in brown rice chat with the nervous system on how to relieve depression.

So if your food is telling you its story, don’t you want to hear a happy one?

If your tomato was grown in depleted soils, it doesn’t have much to tell about minerals and vitamins. Through its taste you learn the tale of high acidity rather than natural sweetness, and if it was sprayed with pesticides and herbicides, your body ingests carcinogenic information.

There is more than just nutritional value in your food. There is life experience.

If the chicken you eat was conventionally raised, she probably never saw sunlight, never stood up straight because her cage was too small and crowded, was never healthy enough to grow feathers, was heavily fed with antibiotics and growth hormones so that she could survive long enough, and was then killed in the most inhumane conditions. We all know what it feels like to hold stress and fear in our own bodies… so how much energy of stress, tension and fear do you think you will be digesting in that meal?! As best as you can, replace poor quality meats with ones labeled free range, organic, grass fed, antibiotic and hormone free.

If your tomato was mass produced, picked and packed by underpaid workers, chopped in a machine with a thousand other tomatoes and slapped onto your fast food bun, the cellular information it contains will not be too different form that of our poor chicken. All this information lives inside your food just as surely as you live inside your body.

If your food could verbalize a story about its journey from the seed to your palate, let it be as fairytale-like as possible, filled with care and consciousness.

Upgrade any way you can: whether through choosing higher quality, through adding some Vitamin L (love) to it by preparing the meal for you and your loved ones or by simply expressing gratitude by saying grace before you chow down.

If you want your food to help you feel healthy and happy, you have to start creating it in that image.

Brown Rice & Veggie Nori Rolls

Prep time: 10 minutes

Assembly: 5 minutes

This recipe is a great way to incorporate them into your diet. The rolls are easy to pack up for kid's lunches or to take with you where ever you go. Be creative and experiment with different ingredients like smoked salmon, tofu or other vegetables.

1 – 1½ cups cooked short grain brown rice

1 teaspoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
2 sheets roasted nori
½ seedless cucumber, cut into matchsticks
1 carrot, cut into matchsticks
½ peeled avocado, cut lengthwise into thin slices
Sushi mat (a thick but flexible piece of paper can work here as a substitute)

Rice:

* Place rice in a bowl.

* In a small bowl stir together vinegar and soy sauce.

* Pour vinegar mixture over rice, tossing gently with a large spoon to combine.

Sushi Roll:

* Place sushi mat on a work surface with slats running crosswise.

* Arrange 1 sheet nori, shiny side down, on mat, lining up a long edge of sheet with edge of mat nearest you.

* Using damp fingers gently press half of rice onto nori in 1 layer, leaving a 1 3/4-inch border on side farthest from you.

* Arrange half of cucumber in an even strip horizontally across rice, starting 1 inch from side nearest you.

* Stack half of carrot just above cucumber in same manner.

* Stack half of avocado over carrot in same manner.

* Beginning with edge nearest you, lift mat up with your thumbs, holding filling in place with your fingers and fold mat over so that you are rolling the nori away from you. Make sure to keep the ingredients in place and that the rice sticks together.

* Open mat and roll the nori log forward to seal with its border.

* Transfer roll, seam side down, to a cutting board and let it sit for a few minutes.

* Make second log in same manner, then cut each log crosswise into 6 pieces with a wet thin-bladed knife.

* Serve with wasabi paste, soy sauce and ginger