Growers and Grocers

INTRODUCTION
prag•mat•ic - Pronunciation Key: (prag-ma-tik), adj. Dealing or concerned with facts or actual occurrences; practical.

Given the choice, most people and nearly every parent we meet wants to live a cleaner life. They wrestle with their food decisions and even make attempts at living an organic lifestyle.

Many take to reading online or at the local bookstore; they’ll visit a health food store or two and make an admirable attempt to clean up their eating habits and their lifestyle. Nearly everyone fails. Why?

We know the scenario all too well. It goes something like this;
say that a young mother of two small children reads an article or somehow comes across the valuable information that her children might be at risk for certain diseases from the foods they are eating. This mother reads volumes of articles on premature development, better known as precocious puberty, growth hormones in food and meat, pesticides and chemicals.

She is alarmed, and rightfully so, and is most certainly not wrong for doing what she does next. She visits her local health food store and finds an organic mothership full of food purists, each of whom has a different opinion on the many supplements and products that she needs to buy to keep her children alive.

$350 and five scary stories later, the young mother leaves the store feeling overwhelmed and confused and scared to feed her family anything at all.

Later that night, after a tasteless meal of freezer-burned organic meat and soy products, she sits at her computer researching better foods to feed her children. How can people eat this stuff? She thinks, there must be a better way.

She is worn-out and has spent her entire monthly food budget at once on products her family won’t touch and after having read every web page on the toxic effects of nearly everything she feeds her family, with warnings on every product in her household, she has no thought on what to do next or how she can possibly afford it.

Determined to improve her family’s health, she slaves in her kitchen for hours preparing complicated organic dishes in the hope that it is something she can bribe her family into eating. She gives up her manicures and hair cuts, stays away from the mall and instead buys pricy organic soaps and shampoo and squeezes money from the already very tight family budget in order to try and meet this expense. And she keeps on trying in spite of her children crying at the table, her husband complaining constantly about money and the strange food. Her two year old stages an all-out hunger strike in demand of French fries from the minivan car seat yet she remains unshaken.

She spends hours unsuccessfully trying to convince her daughter that the meatless sausage is “just like the real thing.”

Two weeks later, done in and downright smelly from lack of a good deodorant and the fear of using anything with chemicals in it, she is starved for chocolate and something that doesn’t upset her stomach. Defeated, she finally pulls into a fast food drive-thru just to stop the madness. As the French fry bags crinkle in her children’s hands, failure and relief wash over her like the shower she so desperately needs.

The addiction is strong and it will win - if you let it. We are used to fast and convenient foods. Many of us were raised on these new and exciting products. The problem is that we were never told what the price was for all this convenience. The fast food habit is extremely difficult to break. Multi- million dollar marketing campaigns of these products makes it even more difficult for families to overcome the hurdle.

What went wrong? Why did this well-intended parent, who knows better and is willing to try to change, fail? Pragmatics. The 80% Solution.

The 80% Solution is a nutritional program that Rosas Farms developed after failing a number of times with our own attempt to clean up our diet. So how would we solve the problem? Why was such a simple thing proving to be so difficult?

Raising our own all grass fed organic cattle on our farm gives us the cleanest meat available on the planet. But what do you do if you are a city dweller?

Each time we visited an organic trade show or picked up a book on organics we would learn of new and alarming things we should avoid. We were determined to improve our lifestyle, but ultimately just gave up from overload and the expense.

Customers that come to our farm have shown us everything from magnets to special juices, holistic oils and herb tablets. None of these things seemed to us to be anything more than snake oil products and none of them appealed to my very pragmatic and skeptical personality. They didn’t pass the “stink test.”

Our background in medical research has taught us to take a hard look at what we’re buying. We just wanted to go to our favorite store that we know and like. We didn’t want to feel like we were in a strange country with weird food.

We became exhausted and were unhappy with the daily life changes we had to make in order to make this change. We felt like we were living someone else’s life and that in order to be healthy, we had to be hippies or purists.

There are really wonderful zero impact things that some people do and I admire people that sustain this lifestyle for their efforts. For us, it is impossible. We need to use some commercial products in order to sustain our lives. We try to make do with as little impact on us and the Earth as we can manage - pragmatically. But realistically, as parents and farmers, medical research specialists, authors, national organic consultants, business owners and Board of Directors for non-profit organizations, we can hardly show up to meetings without a shower, smelling like patchouli and goodness knows what else in our hemp sandals.

All kidding aside, this raw image is still to this day the picture of what most people think of when you say “organic.” Tree huggers are those eccentric foul smelling people with no creature comforts and nothing good to eat in their fridge; aka “The Crunchy Granola People.”

The conventional set believes that everyone desperately needs a haircut at their house. There’s no TV or telephone and their clothes and bedding have a weird smell somewhere between Cumin and Lavender.

We can tell you with 100% certainty, this is not our house.
Now we really like hippies and Fleetwood Mac is one of our favorite bands. We own more than one soy candle and you won’t find any pesticide anywhere in our house. We recycle and use as little of our natural resources as we can. Still, we had to come up with a solution that was genuine enough to actually make a difference without being uncomfortable, causing us to give up. We knew this had to be a permanent life change, we had to “retrain our food brain.” Henceforth -the birth of The Rosas Family 80% Solution or the practice of “PRAGMATIC ORGANICS.” Our family goal is to live as clean as possible but to aim for 80% organic and clean whole foods. We don’t try to pretend that we can be purists, we can’t and let’s face it, and we all have enough rules in our lives. That is why there are no “Rules” here, only solutions.

Until recently, organic or clean foods were not available mainstream. Times have changed. The fact is that we can indeed be hip, clean and healthy and have lives that we consider normal and still live pragmatic organically. The 80% solution is one that is affordable, really “doable” and fun.

Some days we miss our mark, we succumb to that diet soda or the non-organic hot fudge sundae and that’s OK - it really is!! Some days we overshoot, we ate brown rice, veggies and tofu all day, but generally we eat about 80% organic and live as clean as possible with as little impact on the Earth as we can manage without having to send out a search team for our missing sense of humor or having to take a second mortgage to pay the food bill.

To begin with, we always advise those who are interested in changing their nutritional lifestyle to follow these 10 easy steps, developed by Rosas Farms.

1. Set An Example
Don’t be a hypocrite. If you want your child to eat organic vegetables instead of ice cream, show them that you’re willing to live healthy 80% of the time for the sake of your well being and longevity. Teach them by example that food is life. Stop living to eat and start eating to live, your entire family will benefit. If you retrain the food brain to think about food as a vehicle for health and safety, it is much easier to learn to like the foods you once thought were health foods. You will be amazed at how horrible a fast food burger tastes when you haven’t had one in six months. If you give your bodies a chance they will tell you what they like and reward you for making good choices. Teach your children about risks and benefits and why the food you’re offering is a better choice than what might taste good right now. Remember, you don’t have to eat the elephant in one bite. Long lasting changes are the small ones we make, little by little. We’re not suggesting you become purists. It’s OK to have your 20% of food that isn’t so hot. Just make sure it really is 20%. You’ll find you want that 20% less and less as time goes on.

2. Stock your Fridge
One of the main reasons families fail at healthy eating is convenience. My husband and I spend two hours every other week preparing large amounts of a few simple recipes. Visit Organic Chef Monthly for ideas.

We freeze the meals in sizes that work for our family and they are handy and ready to heat up when someone is hungry or it’s dinner time. If you know you’ve got something healthy and quick already in the fridge, it’s much easier to bypass the fast food restaurant and head home to eat together. Families complain about the cost of organic ingredients and better food, but many find that with a small amount of time management and smart shopping, they not only feel better, they will also start saving money and time in the long run. A few hours spent wisely each week will give you the freedom from waiting in line at fast food restaurants, picking up trash out of the minivan and vacuuming up french fries from the back seat. Organic milk and a homemade meal with pragmatic foods is a huge bonus.

Snacking is inevitable, so stock foods that your family can eat. Organic blue chips, organic applesauce in single serve containers, cottage cheese, yogurt, apple slices, oranges, bananas, an occasional organic frozen pizza, organic microwave popcorn. We even have organic spaghettios and Mac and Cheese. Just remember that organic doesn’t mean low calorie. Read your labels. The calories count!

3. Read labels to avoid the Big Three.
Avoiding the “Big Three” is key for Pragmatic Organics. High Fructose corn syrup is in many foods. There is only one rule here - JUST DON’T BUY IT! No negotiating here. The devastating effect of this evil super sugar includes obesity, premature maturation and diabetes. You wouldn’t inject your child with the plague, don’t give them this garbage either.

Hormones and Antibiotics. The majority of these horrible additives are found in meat, proteins and dairy. WHENEVER it’s possible, you must buy organic or hormone and antibiotic free milk, meat, eggs and fish. Avoid farm raised fish and go for the wild caught. Most farm raised fish is unhealthy.

Trans Fat and Partially or Wholly Hydrogenated Oils. Keep them out of your house and out of your body. This disgusting artery glue loves to hide in cookies, crackers and ANYTHING creamy. Expeller pressed is fine.

4. Don’t Label Foods- Just ” Retrain The Food Brain”
When your family eats by the Pragmatic Organics Solution, you won’t have to label foods good or bad. Children will understand that there are foods that are OK all the time and foods that have to be part of their 20% time. Foods are never off limits, just limited.

5. Eat Together.
The sad truth in this country is that far too many young children eat most of their meals in a carseat staring at the back of their parent’s head. The psychosocial impact of not having this family interaction is devastating. Children learn from reading their parent’s faces, from speaking to them directly and from watching how and what their parents eat. Do you really want your child to remember that you ate with one hand on the wheel, one hand on the phone and reached into a paper bag for your family meal at night? PLEASE don’t tell me you don’t have time. If our family can do it, your family can too. If you make the time, you will have the time. We invest in savings, we buy insurance, we take our children to the dentist and the doctor because it is the right thing to do. Eating together is the right thing to do - just do it.

6. Shop Together.
We give our children allowances to encourage self discipline. We let them make good and bad choices when it comes to money, school and life. Eating is life and is no different. Shop together. Discuss why an item is put in the cart or why it is vetoed. Allow the children their 20%. That means one cookie - not a bag. Allow them to make choices and listen to them when they are telling you what they want. Then find a healthier solution. Don’t say NO and leave it there. Tell them no - but offer an alternative product. For example, no conventional pizza rolls, but you can have organic pizza once in a while. No sports drinks, but you can have some orange juice and club soda. No candy, but we can make an exception and have a scoop of good ice cream once in a while.

7. Don’t reward with food.
Use love, not food or money. It goes a long way. Your kids want you, not a candy bar. Don’t overfeed children junk out of guilt for not being there. Be there instead. It’s a life choice. Watch a movie with them instead of taking them for pizza. Yes, it takes longer- but we all want the best for our kids.

8. Cook with your Kids - and friends!
When you plan the meals that you will cook and freeze for the next couple of weeks, get the entire family involved or if you’re single, a group of friend. Share the food - share the love - share the recipes.

Take your favorite recipes and update them with ingredients that don’t contain the big three. Most recipes can easily be adapted to the Pragmatic Organics Solution. If you’re having trouble with a conversion, e-mail The Organic Chef at chefal@organicchefmonthly.com

Let everyone pick a dish they like the best and make it in large quantities, then portion it out and freeze. Cooking skills, measuring, chopping and estimating are great life skills for everyone. Too many of our kids have no idea at all what is in food or how to make it.

9. Watch what you DRINK!
Most JUICE IS JUNK FOOD, and it’s loaded with calories. Eat the whole fruit, organic whenever possible and if you must drink juice, keep the portions small. Four to six ounces of organic orange or apple juice is enough. Soda has to be limited to extremely small amounts if you allow any at all (we don’t). Sports drinks are off limits, except in rare circumstances. Water is inexpensive, good for you and easily available. Unsweetened ice tea is also fine. The amount of calories most people drink is staggering.

10. Control Your Portions.
Enough is Enough. Get a grip on portion sizes. Meat should be no bigger than the size of a deck of cards. For pasta and rice, ½ cup is a serving. Load up on the veggies; make them organic if at all possible to avoid cancer causing pesticides.

We’ve spent a decade educating and talking to families on our farm who ask “how do you do it?” More of our pragmatic secrets, survival tips and even the recipes are all available on our websites for you. We sincerely hope you take into practice our ideas and that you improve your lives as we have.

We also hope that you will have some of your own ideas and share them with us. Laugh and be realistic. Loosen up without letting go of the lifesaving changes that can prevent you and your children from suffering preventable diseases or untimely deaths. We promise it won’t hurt a bit.