Leanne Palmerston's commitment to a healthy, wholesome diet was tested as she rummaged through her cupboards.
For nearly a year, the Hamilton resident had been weaning her family off boxed pizzas and other processed foods in favour of fresh meats and vegetables and whole grains.
Still, Ms. Palmerston hesitated before throwing away the remainder of the industrially produced food in her kitchen as part of a so-called “real food” challenge last month.
“I was like, I don’t know if I want to [get rid of it],” she says. “I was like, ‘Okay, I know … maybe I should chuck it, but maybe I should just use it up.’ ”
In the end, she purged her pantry of all refined sugars, vegetable oils and condiments, plus a leftover tin of Campbell’s soup. She replaced them with honey and maple syrup, coconut oil and lard, and homemade broth.
She's glad she did. Even the notion of industrially processed food now makes her squeamish, Ms. Palmerston says. “The idea of that freaks me out. It’s like mutant food.”
Ms. Palmerston is one of hundreds of converts whose devotion to the real food movement has been solidified thanks to the 28-Day Real Food Challenge, an online project started in February by food blogger Jennifer McGruther of Crested Butte, Colo.
The concept of Ms. McGruther’s challenge is simple: to get people to ditch packaged ingredients and eat nothing for a full month but real, or traditional, food, which she defines as food that is farmed and prepared using methods prior to the advent of industrial agriculture.
But as Ms. McGruther discovered from the reaction of participants, eating real food doesn’t always come naturally to people. It requires a complete overhaul of one’s attitude toward food, as well as kitchen skills that she says have been lost in recent generations.
“What was surprising to me is how many people simply didn’t know the basics of cooking,” says Ms. McGruther, who has been advocating eating real food for years and writes the blog NourishedKitchen.com.
Many participants were at a complete loss when she challenged them on the first day to rid their kitchens of all processed, packaged and refined foods, including boxed cereals, dried pastas, iodized salt, white flour and products made with low-fat and skimmed milk.
Leanne Palmerston shops with son Kieran at the Hamilton Farmers’ Market: ‘That’s our lifestyle now.’
“I got a large response from people who said ‘Well, what on Earth do I eat?’ ” Ms. McGruther says. “I … had assumed that people would be able to come up with something like a big salad, grilled fish or baked potato – all of which are real, traditional food. But most people had been cooking from packages and that was shocking to me.”
Each day, Ms. McGruther upped the ante, instructing participants to sprout grains to maximize nutrients, to mill their own flour, make their own cheese, create a sourdough starter and render their own lard.
She also taught followers to make yogurt and ferment vegetables into pickles and sauerkraut.
While certain real food principles, such as eating organic produce and grass-fed meats, are more expensive than conventionally farmed food, some of those expenses are offset by avoiding convenience foods like packaged cookies and cereals, Ms. McGruther says. She spends about $600 (U.S.) a month on food for her family of three.
Of the more than 900 participants who signed up for the challenge, Ms. McGruther estimates roughly 600 to 700 successfully made it through to the end.
Most who did vowed to continue following the principles of traditional food, she says, and many new participants have since signed up to recreate the challenge.
“It forced us to go the whole way …. That’s our lifestyle now,” Ms. Palmerston says, noting that the challenge prompted her to start baking her own sourdough bread twice a week and pushed her to try different cuts of meat, such as pork liver, from her local butcher shop.
