We Can Do Butter!

Lela Buttery

THE HEALIST BOOKS

Santa Monica

2013

COPYRIGHT

2013 by Lela Buttery All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the US Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher and author. The Healist Books 1223 Wilshire Blvd, Box 201 Santa Monica, CA 90403 Visit our website at www.thehealist.com. The Healist Books is a division of The Healist. The Healist name and logo are trademarks of Prevention Futures LLC.

Published in the United States of America ISBN 978-0-9899695-1-2

Cover design: Jacqueline Domin Cover photo: Anja Epkes Cover photo bandana: WILL Leather Goods

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

We believe its time for enlightened practitioners and empowered people to share their unique wisdom and experience on topics of chronic disease prevention with readers in the burgeoning, tree-friendly eBook marketplace. From manuscript writing to book design to e-publication to digital marketing, we create books that educate the public about lifelong wellness.

The Healist Books is the publishing division of The Healist. Want to be a Healist? Join the movement to lower chronic disease rates through education and self-care. Sign-up for our mailing list.

DISCLAIMER
The content found in this book is for informational purposes only and is in no way intended as medical advice, as a substitute for medical counseling, or as treatment cure for any disease or health condition. Always work with a qualified health professional before making any changes to your diet, supplement use, prescription drug use, lifestyle, or exercise activities. Please understand that you assume all risks for the use, non-use or misuse of this information. Be a responsible reader! If you have any questions concerning your specific circumstances, we encourage you to contact a licensed practitioner such as a naturopathic physician, integrative or environmental medical doctor, systemic dentist, nutritionist, herbalist and/or homeopathist, as appropriate for your query. Be advised that this book has not been pasteurized, nor have the statements in this book been evaluated by the FDA.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to my friends and family who have supported me in getting my thoughts and passions on paper without killing any trees. Special thanks to Marni Borek and Camilla Griggers at The Healist and The Healist Books for believing in me and the We Can Do Butter lifestyle. To Marni for her marketing insight and acumen, and to Camilla for help finding the words, images, and for her countless hours editing and kitchen taste-testing. She helped me write this book faster than I ever could have on my own. A big thank you to Frankie for his love and support throughout this process; he was there for me with validation at crucial moments when I could have lost momentum. Thanks to my friend Mary at The Healist for getting me ready for publication, and thanks to my friend Mel for getting me organized and tech savvy in the twelfth hour. They both tasted the butter, believed in me, and rolled up their sleeves to get the work done. My heartfelt personal gratitude grows every day for my partner, who not only supports my every endeavor but also is my biggest advocate. He believes in me, dreams with me, and gives me the space to pursue those dreams. And most of all, I thank God for giving me divine guidance, education and intuition those higher orders that have made me and my life so essentially Buttery.

FOREWORD
During the time it took to bring We Can Do Butter to digital press, I was blessed to experience a deep immersion in the culture of real food and the politics of real food rights. Throughout the journey, I witnessed Lela Buttery be a voice of both reason and passion, balanced together in right proportion, as well as pragmatism and faith, in equal measure. As Executive Editor at The Healist Books, it is an honor to help bring such a timely message and voice to readers around the country, and the world. There has never been a more important time to nurture our natural food web and take personal responsibility for sourcing and preparing quality foods that are high in nutrients, free of chemical and synthetic toxins, and expressive of the genetic diversity nature intended. Turning around chronic disease rates will be impossible without this fundamental food issue being resolved on a grassroots level. For that reason, I can honestly say everyone should read this bookfrom policy makers who have seen the light to educators and students who want to take a position on the quality of food on campus to parents trying to feed a family on a budget to single people who need to learn the daily practice of cooking real food as an expression of self care and love for the planet. All of us have an irrevocable investment in doing better with our food, or doing butter as Lela says, starting now. This book shows you how and explains why in the special voice of a biologist who has a compassion for people and planet, who also happens to be a private chef committed to feeding healthy, wholesome food to friends, family and community. In that regard, this book is part of the abundance of our time and is meant to be shared. Camilla Griggers, PhD Executive Editor The Healist Books September 2013

TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1: We Can Do Butter
FOOD FIGHT THE PROBLEM THE SOLUTION

CHAPTER 2: Good Bacteria & Gut Health

BALANCING ACT SUGAR CRAVINGS CULTIVATE GOOD GUT FLORA

CHAPTER 3: Read The Labels

SMART EATING GET BACK TO HEIRLOOM FOODS WHY LABELS ARE SO IMPORTANT AVOID GMO FOODS

CHAPTER 4: Eat Enough Good Fats

BUST THE NON-FAT MYTH GOOD FATS BALANCE HORMONES LOVING FOOD PLANNING SOURCING PREP, PREP, PREP

CHAPTER 5: Plan, Source, Prep

CHAPTER 6: Spontaneous Cooking

COOKING AS A DAILY PRACTICE STARTER TIPS FAMILY FOOD TRADITIONS

CHAPTER 7: Buttery Basic Recipes

BREAKFAST RECIPES Frittata Quiche Grandma Cronins Spelt Biscuits Kefir Seed Mixture BIG MEAL RECIPES Lelas 1-Hr Roast Chicken Turmeric Chicken Salad Curry This! LIGHT MEAL RECIPES Chicken Broth Soup Ceviche (citric acid cured fish) Herbed Salad Greens About the Author Resources

CH 3

Read The Labels

Read labels as if your life depended on it. Because it does. In this chapter, I explain USDA and FDA labeling. Most people know that natural is little more than marketing. But did you know organic as now defined by the USDA can include some pesticides and doesnt always guarantee non-GMO? The responsibility to know what youre putting in your body ultimately falls on you. Read the label!

SMART EATING
Humans have amazing brains with a large processing capacity, but we only utilize a small percentage of that capacity. Neuroscientists tell us we typically use well under 10%. Our brains tend to think the same thing over and over and over again. If youve said something out loud, youve probably thought it a hundred times at least, maybe thousands of times. With that said, when we give our brain something new to think about, weve given our brains a new neural pathway. That means weve created a new recognition and cognition pattern. Potentially, a new behavior pattern. In the United States, weve become a society in which packaged foods are the norm, and thats the neural pathway that most of us have established. Looking at unprocessed real foods, choosing those foods over packaged foods, and cooking with those fresh whole foods can be unfamiliar to many people. If you are one of those people, youll need to create new neural pathways to recognize whole foods as the preferred source rather than something in a package. It means seeing pasta sauce as fresh tomatoes, garlic and herbs, not a can on a shelf. The first time I picked up a guitar and tried to make the shapes of the chords with my fingers, I felt completely disoriented and discombobulated! I remember very distinctly thinking, I cant do this! But practicing and practicing and returning to it over and over,

I notice now I can switch chords with ease. Its the same thing if you have never cooked with farm fresh foods before, your brain has no pattern for that and it feels complicated and confusing. But with practice, it becomes easy and simple. Remember, all the information that Im about to share with you might seem disorienting and unfamiliar at first, yet its been around forever and its nothing new. Our ancestors utilized all these foods in their raw heirloom forms; its only as industrial society tried to make access easier and production bigger and faster that we made eating for nutrients more complicated. We lost touch with the real impact of this kind of processed food on our bodies and environment. Happily, I can see were finally moving more and more from a processed food model back to a traditional whole food model where food is your medicine and where people are not disconnected from the food web. To grow this sustainable food web, more people need to stop seeing food as a frozen TV dinner, because that disconnects people from our natural biology and from the natural food ecosystem. The more you use traditional whole foods as your natural medicine, the more you realize that the food you eat gives you the life force that makes you human. Real food systems provide medicine, life energy, and sustainability for generations to come. If you get this, your life becomes more simple and you can consciously cultivate smart eating practices into a lifestyle rich in nutrients and low in toxins. Thats the least we humans can do, since doing that much only makes us as smart as chimps who have developed effective social systems for testing food sources for toxicity and nutrition before everyone in the pack starts chowing down. Today, in the artificial food environment we have created, smart eating often starts with carefully reading the labels before you make a purchase. Youll find yourself rejecting many packaged food products, and more and more, choosing whole foods from farmers at the farmers markets that dont even have a packaging label, because they dont have any packaging! Be your own food scientist. Do your research before you decide what to eat or drink.

GET BACK TO HEIRLOOM FOODS

For a lot of people, the shift from processed to whole foods may be a journey of surprises. Let me share a typical story. A new friend asked me to help him learn to shop for food, sharing that, even though he was 25 years old and a former decathalete during college, he embarrassingly had to admit that he didnt know how to cook. That lack of knowledge really became apparent to him when he fell in love with a woman. Sadly, the relationship collapsed when they tried to live together, and he realized later looking at old video footage at the time how skinny, pale, dehydrated and malnourished she looked just before their breakup, and how skinny and dried up he looked as well. My new friend confided in me his sadness when he realized he didnt

know how to feed and nurture the person he loved. Nor did he know how to take care of himself. So he asked me to take him to the local food coop and teach him how to shop for healthy food. I asked him what he wanted to cook, and he said he wanted to eat a hamburger. So we went and looked at the choices in the meat section, and he sort of randomly picked up a package of ground beef that said All Natural on the label. I asked him to pick up a package next to it that said Organic Pasture-Grazed Bison, No Corn and to compare the info on the labels, and then choose. After reading and comparing labels, he chose the organic pasture-grazed bison burger that was not finished on corn, meaning the animal was not fed corn (possibly GMO) before slaughter. Then I asked him what else he wanted to eat, and he said he wanted to get something to put on his hamburger, so he walks over to the produce section to the tomatoes and picks out a big, perfectly round, deep-red tomato. I asked him, Why did you pick that tomato? He laughed and said, Because it looks like a tomato! Right there I had a huge epiphany. That big, perfectly round, red tomato was what was familiar to him because when he looked at a book when he was a kid that shape and color and size was what he was told a tomato looked like. I immediately went over and picked up a bulbous, asymmetrical heirloom tomato that was a combination of orange, green and yellow, and I brought it over to him and said, THIS is the tomato you want to buy! He was shocked! He said, I would never have picked that tomato on my own!

I explained that the irregular shaped tomato I picked is an heirloom variety, and that ALL tomatoes originally looked like that. But with hybridization and gene splicing, we have engineered tomatoes to look uniform. When uniformity became the norm in our minds, we lost something important in our food web. We lost diversity. By the end of the 19th century it became the norm in urban areas in the United States that you could open up a carton of eggs and expect that all twelve eggs would look exactly alike. We wanted uniformity and found comfort in consistency. But if you look at nature, there is nothing that is exactly like everything else. If you randomly sample a group of humans, no two are exactly the same. And that difference is good. Non-conformity is not only okay, its preferable.

In fact, its essential. Not just because the genetic diversity in heirloom foods makes them more nutrient dense and taste better, but because gene consistency, or monogenes, is a recipe for bad mutationnot the good kind of mutation that gave us thumbs, but the bad kind that causes species to be less adaptive, less resilient to disease, less likely to survive, more likely to have a shorter life span. With diversity comes a larger gene pool, allowing less resilient genes to recede and more resilient and adaptive genes to become dominant. So, whenever you have a choice, choose heirloom foods. Theyre easy to spot: they all look different. And the farmers markets are full of them.

WHY LABELS ARE SO IMPORTANT

I hope you can understand at this point in the book why labels on foods are so important. When I go to the grocery store, Im constantly reading all the labels, because those labels have a neural pathway for methey mean something. If a label says, 100% organic, I

should be confident that that tomato, wheat or corn has had no exposure to synthetic fertilizer or pesticide and is not GMO. Should be. But with any regulation, loopholes exist, and there are opportunities for getting around rules. For example, did you know organic according to current USDA rules means the land could have been farmed with pesticides 3 years earlier? Labels are not guarantees, and it is also important to note that nature doesnt exist according to our rules. Pesticide plumes drift in the wind, and GMO crops can contaminate non-GMO farms through cross-pollination. By unleashing these crops into the environment, we have made it practically impossible to ensure that certain crops are GMO free, especially commodity crops like corn and soy. Because the integrity of the individual farmer is the very best guarantee I can get, I rarely go to the grocery store and instead find most of my food at the farmers markets where I can speak directly to the farmers. So what am I personally looking for at the farmers market? Im looking for heirloom varieties that have been grown in the purest way possible, by a farmer I trust. Healthy soil and land with supported biodiversity is essential for truly nutritious, naturally grown food. I want the biodiversity of nutrients in my body without chemical inputs and without genetic corruption. I believe that the same diverse vitamins, minerals, microbes and genes that make these plants more pathogen-resistant, adaptive and resilient, in turn give my body what it needs to be more pathogen-resistant, adaptive, and resilient. Extending that same logic, I do not want to take into my body hybridized, monoculture GMOs. For all these reasons, I encourage each of you to get to know what you are putting in your bodyin fact, know intimately what you are putting in your body. Read the labels on everything, and read them carefully. Talk to the people who source your food. Ask questions. Pregnant women especially should be vigilant since what they eat affects their fetus at the most vulnerable time of development. Its important that we each individually understand the terminologies used in labeling, and also realize that as more and more terms become defined by the USDA and FDA, more definitions as we know them become denatured so to speak. Let me explain. Lets go back a couple hundred years ago to the 1800s. Farmers farmed via the moon in extremely fertile soils, like what we know today as nutrient-rich farming, what you would think organic should be. But back then there were no labels. Today, our government via agencies like the USDA and FDA needs to define these terms because they want to establish a system of best practices and checks and balances. So today the USDA defines

words like organic. Of course, in the process of defining terms like organic, lobbies can weigh in on the side of commercial agriculture and the commercial food industry, and politics get involved. As a result, today the word organic means that through certain loopholes, food with the organic label may contain some pesticides. Similarly, free range now means that a chicken can turn around in its cage. Grass fed can mean finished on corn and given antibiotics. What this means is that the burden falls heavily on the shoulders of consumers to read the labels carefully and to be educated before they make choices in the marketplace. For those who have a tolerance for government speak, you can read the USDA Organic Production and Handling Standards summary for yourself. So what does the word natural mean today to the USDA? It just means that it comes from nature. That means you could find an element that is a known carcinogen in nature in foods marketed and sold under the label All Natural. Like nitrites. And by the way, why would any company include such elements in foods labeled natural? Well, because they make damn good preservatives! Sometimes Im afraid were so full of preservatives that when we die we are not going to return to dust like our ancestors! With that said, I encourage you to do a simple observational experiment. Take a processed commercial breakfast tart, you know the ones that are in a package and never go bad, a phood product that you can find in the back of your car trunk after a year and when you open it, its still good. Ok, be your own food scientist. Do the fly experiment.

Take the processed breakfast tart home and put it on the counter, and then next to it put a natural unprocessed food, like a slice of apple or a piece of steaka fresh whole food. Put them on the counter side by side. Observe. I guarantee you no fly will land and hang out on one of those foodsthe processed one. Let the fly, one of the oldest and most resilient forms of life on planet Earth, decide. It should mean something that flies dont view the processed breakfast tart as a food source. Why, then, would humans? Arent we, at least, as smart as a fly? I challenge people to look at everything that comes in a package, and ask yourself if a food could come in nature like that. If something is in the shape of a circle or square, ask yourself what parts of nature got processed to make that shape? Or if theres a coating on

it, what had to happen to the original food source to make that coating or that color? Check the label and see if there is a long list of chemical additives. Or even one chemical additive, like aspartame. Putting those chemicals in your body is not enhancing the health, vitality and resilience of your body, and can be detrimental in the long term. Obviously, we want to put real food in our body that enhances our biochemistry, which means gives us the nutrients that we need for our chemistry to function, to give us brain power, to make energy, to escort toxins out and flush metabolic waste, to fight infection, and produce and balance hormones. Foods that are processed and have synthetic chemicals in them, such as transfats, are not recognized by our bodies on a molecular level, meaning we have no receptors for transfats nor any way to process them. Our bodies naturally view transfats as poison and create inflammation to try to handle them. If this inflammatory response happens for breakfast, lunch and dinner day after day, week after week, and month after month, your bodys only choice is eventually an autoimmune disorderwhere your immune system is in a chronic state of creating inflammation and creating antibodies against yourself. Often this process starts in the gut. This is why bioavailability of nutrients in the food we eat is integral to health. If a food is packaged, you should read the label. If you find an ingredient that you cant pronounce and you dont know what it is, dont put it in your body.

AVOID GMO FOODS

I do not personally recommend eating any genetically-modified organisms or GM foods. For all the reasons Ive stated, I support GMO labeling, and Im quite aware that many countries including Brazil, China and all the countries in the European Union require labels on GMOs. Russia banned GM corn imported from the U.S. and Japan banned GM wheat. France has banned GM corn since 2008, and in 2012 French scientists published findings from a study showing rats fed Monsanto GM corn developed cancer tumors and other complications including kidney and liver damage. The French study sparked attacks from Monsanto and commercial agricultural stakeholders, but public concern over the safety of GM crops has continued to grow. In the U.S., agribusiness is fighting labeling requirements because the record shows when GMOs are labeled; consumers in the marketplace tend to avoid them. Thats peoples natural intelligence coming outtheir intuition. Think about it. We now have genetically modified crops engineered so that an herbicide is put into the DNA of the seed, supposedly allowing the crop to tolerate more herbicide. There are several problems with this thinking. First of all ask yourself, do you want to eat the DNA of a plant that has an herbicide in it? I dont. This thinking has also encouraged farmers to use more and more of the herbicide glyphosate (in Roundup) on cash crops like wheat, risking herbicide contamination of

consumers when farmers spray close to harvest time. Ask yourself, do you want to eat a plant that has been sprayed with more herbicide than any plant in the past? I dont! In addition, case studies are coming in that show GM crops are actually associated with more plant diseases than natural seed crops, and the heavy pesticide spraying can create pesticide-resistant insects. In India a tragedy is unfolding as many farmers who used GM cotton seed found their crops performed worse than the local heirloom seeds, causing these farmers to fall into economic despair and commit suicide because they had borrowed heavily to buy the expensive GMO seeds. Also in many cases monoculture agriculture with trans-genetic crops suffer more during dry periods, accentuating drought-related soil damage like we saw in the sun-baked Midwest during the 2012 drought. These monoculture GM crops dont have the versatility of a natural prairie, or of sustainable farms that mimic a natural prairie in plant diversity, in the ability to withstand dry spells or wet spells, or in soil rejuvenation and conservation. In contrast, industrial agriculture kills the biotic community in the soil structure that is living and textured. Without that natural biology and organic matter, you lose the soil structure and end up with a mechanically compacted layer of dust that creates the possibility of drought and dust bowls without the constant input of irrigation and plant cover. Why? Because without organic matter, nutrients and diverse soil cover, the soil loses its capacity to hold water, because its the pore space of organic matter that holds water in the soil. Just adding fertilizer and water to a dead media does not recreate living soil. As a result, the bioavailable nutrients once there for our ancestors in the soil and in plants that grew from that soil are no longer available to us.

As the land becomes more and more dead, these agricultural farming practices end up permanently damaging natural resources, causing us to lose not only precious mineralrich topsoil but also more and more fresh water sources, and increasing, not decreasing, the risk of food inflation. Entire lakes, riverbeds and streams can dry up, making previously habitable ecosystems uninhabitable to native species that once thrived there. Inevitably, food prices will spike in scenarios like this, exactly the opposite of claims that without GMOs we cant feed the world. Another problem is these huge monoculture crops have to be artificially pollinated, creating a need for commercial bee operations where bees are denatured, shipped around the country, fed artificial food, and manipulated in their reproductive process. These artificial interventions in the natural life cycle of bees are devastating our bee populations which are already struggling to survive under a constant barrage of pesticides. Bees are one of the major pollinators for a variety of crops that have sustained humans for millennia, including apple trees, almond trees and avocado trees. Obviously we cant live without bees. But we can live without GMOs. Genetic modifications of fish species create similar problems and pose similar dangers to the natural food web. Compare the genetically engineered salmon in this photo to the smaller wild Atlantic salmon of the same age (courtesy of AquaBounty Technologies).

This picture exemplifies the quandary weve reached with the current commercial food system. The thinking that bigger is somehow better, and that man can out-perform nature is inherently flawed. Its not about quantity; larger is not better. Its about quality. That is where we need to focus our attention. Its about the nutrient value of the wild salmon vs. the farmed GMO salmon. The model we have now of fast-food, commercial packaged food products, commercial factory farms and genetically modified foods is not working for humanity because it doesnt embrace, nurture or even utilize the food web that sustains us. In fact, it degrades it. Humans may be apex predators on top of the food chain, but without that food web, we

will surely go extinct. We cannot live outside of a thriving dynamic sustainable food ecosystem. Creating a new system of genetically engineered transgenic synthetic foods will result in larger impacts on the environment and human health than an age-old system being refined and perfected. We all need to understand the full implications of altering nature in this way. We are essentially changing our own biology, transmuting life itself. Farmers are being coerced by powerful commercial food lobbies that determine farm subsidy agreements and by corporate pressure to pay shareholders to overproduce GM corn that cant be used as human food but only as animal feed or as additives like high fructose corn syrup. This is only one example of the commercial degradation of the American food system. There are ancient systems that have been in place for millennia that provide healthy food and sustain soil and water quality. These are tried-and-true systems, and all we have to do is use them and perfect them. I like the saying, There is nothing new under the sun. We really dont have to create something new, certainly we dont need a pseudo-solution that is not really a sustainable, viable solution because it depends on technological interventions that can affect the biosphere in negative ways. Look at the example of spraying DDT over farmlands, wetlands, bird sanctuaries, national parks, beaches and even suburban neighborhoods in the 1950s and early 60s in the United States. DDT was not the solution at all. A potent carcinogen, in the long run DDT created far more problems than it solved. And yet it was aggressively marketed by the agriculture industry. We have to learn from our mistakes and self-correct, learning respect for the undeniable laws of our own biology and that of the planet, and not be fooled by marketing. We need to be careful not to repeat the past.

For all these reasons, I dont believe genetically modified crops or GMOs are a viable solution. I dont buy the marketing that genetically engineered crops will solve the world hunger problem. That was what industrial agriculture said about DDT back in the day. But there are too many cons in the cost benefit analysis. The marketing for GMOs pushes out the message that quantity is the issue. But its not. Its not that simple. Historically, farming for more quantity has meant more waste, less nutrient dense food, more chemicals, more ecological damage, and greater risk of drought. And economically, it has reduced the number of farmers in the total population. Industrial agriculture has denatured the food ecosystem to the point that its taken a toll on our personal health and is overwhelming our healthcare system. Look at childhood and adolescent obesity and diabetes rates. Look at heart disease and cancer rates. No wonder even Walmart now has an organic section! Everyone knows we have a problem and we have to do better. Its so obvious; organic food coops are bursting at the seams compared to twenty years ago. The real solution is more nutrient-dense foods free of toxins, so that people can eat less, get more essential vitamins, minerals, good fats, and proteins, and fewer poisons that tax the immune system and liver. Its the quality of food that really matters, the quality of the soils we grow our food in, and local access to those fresh quality foods. What we really need are distributed sustainable local food ecosystems. Lots of them. In as many locations as can sustain them. The public is catching on that if commercial mega farms ship 500 million eggs to market, one day, something is going to go wrong and there is going to be a recall. A recall of 500 million eggs is built into a system that produces 500 million eggs. The topper is, I wouldnt choose to eat those eggs in the first place! Why? Because they are too low in nutrients for me to waste my time and money. Primates in the wild exhibit what scientists call smart eating. They systematically choose quality food sources low in toxins and high in nutrients, and avoid foods that are high in toxins and low in nutrients. Why wouldnt we do the same? By the way, theres a great chapter on smart eating in Janine Benyus book Biomimicry that helped launch a new scientific discipline to study nature's best ideas and then imitate these designs and processes to solve human problems. Furthermore, eating smart means eating less. It means you can eat one fresh egg from a quality heritage hen that was fed and raised properly and get more nutrients than 10 poor quality eggs from commercial hens fed GMO soy, penned and deprived of movement and sunlight, and given antibiotics to deal with chronic infections, then refrigerated for weeks before they get to your table. As a young kid I remember watching the Miss American Pageant on TV as the emcee asked each contestant the question, If you were Miss America, how would you solve world hunger?

To this day, I feel this is the greatest question of all time. I remember seriously pondering that question from that moment on. For whatever reason, it resonated deep inside of me. I guess that implies that I imagined myself as a Miss America contestant one day! Or maybe even Wonder Woman. Maybe deep down I still do. Because I never stopped thinking about that question. I took it off with me to college to study biology. I looked for answers in the field. And I found them. The answers are starkly clear. They include the heirloom seed banks popping up all around the world. They include sustainable farming practices, farmers markets, coops, Community Supported Agriculture, and food clubs. Everyone needs to make the personal choice to use their food money to support these farmers and practices. Its a choice, a right, and a responsibility. Large corporations say: give us billions of dollars in food subsidies every five years, and we will create more and more synthetic foods that require more and more pesticides and herbicides and petroleum to run the mechanized agricultural system and the gas-guzzling transportation and delivery system that accompanies it. And I say, more low quality food is not the answer! From my point of view as a biologist, you can see why I think we absolutely need GMO labeling, because we need quality 100% organic non-GMO farming. We need sustainable local food ecosystems in place everywhere possible. I hope you can understand why going to farmers market is so important. If youve never been, go and youll see why they are so popular, literally popping up everywhere across the U.S. because of a growing demand for quality foods that are whole, simple and nutritious. In contrast to quality farm fresh foods, packaged items and desserts should be viewed as treats; theyre special, and in a way theyre cheating. If you eat a dessert after every meal, guess what, its no longer a treat; it has become your diet. If you eat something every day, the appeal has been routinized and normalized. Desserts should not be a normal part of your daily diet. Nor should any kind of packaged, processed or fast foods. Especially because those are the foods where you commonly find GMOs. A word to parents: hungry children will eat anything. You have to take responsibility for that; after all, you are the adults in the relationship, and therefore you are the ones teaching food patterns for lifelong wellness. When I hear a parent say that their kids will only eat pasta, French fries and chicken nuggets, I always am quick to add, Thats because thats all you gave them! What children need is real food.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I love all things related to food and science, and have since I was a small child. Being an environmental biologist and successful private chef are one and the same at this point in my life. Combining these two loves has led me down the path to what I call the Do Butter lifestyle a simple way to live a healthy sustainable life by valuing quality over quantity and making conscious choices in the marketplace that support local food ecosystems that are free of GMOs, pesticides and herbicides. Lela Buttery lives in Venice, California where she is LAs Food Sourcerer and a private chef. A natural communicator and educator, you can find her teaching cooking classes, in the ocean leading dive tours, and speaking to the public about living a butter life and always striving to do butter. She also spends her time with her favorite fireman, tending her garden and walking her dog. Lela cooks daily. Follow her kitchen and environmental adventures on her blog at LelaButtery.com