This posted started when I saw the words clean eating scroll across my screen after mediating and it triggered the need to make a point.
Clean eating is not a new concept; Just a repackaged one born out of a culture of lazy nutrition and over consumption
It is a sentiment that I’ve said over and over to friends and associates since the clean eating movement re- debuted on the health scene. When traveling outside of the United States, “clean eating” or in this case, real eating is just a way of life. The more you travel away from modern culture, the more real food you tend to find. And by modern culture, I mean fast food, foreign food imports and bad habits.
I’ll start with my food influences. I am of African and African American descent. My father was born and raised in Burkina Faso and my mother wasborn and raised in Harlem then the Bronx. I’ve always teethered on both sides of the food movement; one that subscribed to original soul food from Africa, the peanut sauces with spinach and fresh chicken. The other side of my life was suffering soul food, an adaption born of slavery. The former (original soul food) energized me, always started with fresh food (sometimes even frozen), no preservatives or plastic. The latter (suffering soul food) made my hyper, tasted soooo good (maybe too good), gave me the itus, and made me a little chubby.
I think in many cultures, both paradigms exist in terms of the “old” way focusing on fresh, local produce. While modern ways of “convenience” creep in to make every tastier, quicker, faster…lazier. To cook a real meal can be all of those things but it takes some thought and know how. A shift needs to happen where involving the family in the kitchen is the highlight of the day. We get to relearn how to use our stoves versus popping something in the microwave.
We’ve become a culture of fadists skipping from one fad to the next. From fitness to nutrition, everything has a digital infomercial. You’ve heard the definition of insanity before: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Yet our current result is this dilution of what being healthy is. You don’t just wake up and say: “You know, today I just need to cleanse. I am going to juice all day” then go back to the same ways you ate before the next day. That is insane. I’ve experienced my own cult like addiction to following a trend of the new in-health rage. We all have. But then you get to wake up and say: my body is my guiding spirit. Listening to anything else will land you in a heap of parasites, candida, fatigue, and emotional roller coasters.
Yes, the clean eating movement is absolutely necessary. It’s a term I use often because it is a necessity and useful. We just got caught up in the “easy food” life and generations are suffering for it. #CleanEating should serve as a reminder that getting back to the basics is what is going to save out poor, nutritional ways. But I think it needed to be said that clean eating is not new. It has always been here.
