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the naked FOODS cookbook THE WHOLE-FOODS, HEALTHY-FATS, GLUTEN-FREE GUIDE TO LOSING WEIGHT & FEELING GREAT margaret floyd | james barry New Harbinger Publications, Inc. Introduction to Eating Naked efore you roll up your sleeves, throw on an apron, and get down to business, let’s sort out a few details about what all this naked stuff is about. B If you haven’t yet read Margaret’s first book, Eat Naked: Unprocessed, Unpolluted, and Undressed Eating for a Healthier, Sexier You, this chapter will get you up to speed on what we mean by eating naked. For those of you who’ve already read Eat Naked, this chapter is a review of the basics, with some new ways of framing the conversation to make it even easier for you to identify naked food. Eating naked is all about eating clean, whole, unprocessed food. This means food without all those unnecessary extras that expand our waistlines and damage our health, such as pesticides, additives, and preservatives; in other words, that long list of unpro- nounceable ingredients on food packaging. Four simple questions can help you determine whether something is naked or not: 1. Where was the food grown or raised? 2. How was the food grown or raised? 3. What happened to the food from the time it was harvested until it reached my kitchen? 4. How was the food prepared? Let’s look at each of these in detail. Introduction to Eating Naked Where Was the Food Grown or Raised? Key Principle: The Closer It Originated to You, the More Naked It Is. You’ve likely heard that local produce is a good thing. It is, and that’s because when it’s local, it has usually been allowed to ripen before being picked, and thus has more nutritional value. Local food is often fresher since it didn’t have to travel as far to get to you. This also means it feeds your local economy and doesn’t have as much of an environmental footprint. Now, if you live somewhere that has a prolonged growing season, obtaining local produce year-round is much easier than if you live somewhere with interminably cold winter months. That’s okay. You can get healthy produce in a couple of ways. For one, frozen produce is a good alternative to fresh produce. Frozen produce is picked at the peak of season, when the produce is at its tastiest, and then flash- frozen very shortly after harvest. Depending DIY Naked Food Storage—How to Make Your Seasonal Produce Last All Year If you want to be as naked as possible and are looking for a do- it- yourself strategy to sustain yourself through the winter months on local produce, here are three things to try. 1. Devise your own cold storage. The goal of cold storage is to keep produce dormant. As such, temperature and humidity are key. Cold cellars or storage must be dark and ventilated. Note that fruits release ethylene, which speeds up the ripening process of vegetables, so the two should never be stored together. 2. Freeze your own produce. Freezing fruit and vegetables yourself can take a little work, but if it means you’ll get your local produce even during the cold months, it’s well worth the effort. Check our resource page on www.eatnakednow.com for a step- by-step guide to freezing your own vegetables. 3. Culture your fruits and vegetables. Culturing is a natural preservation technique that not only preserves the food but also enhances its nutritional value. This is different from canning, which uses heat that damages the delicate nutrients in the produce. The only exception to this is tomato, which has a nutrient called lycopene that is more bioavailable when the tomatoes have been cooked. Natural culturing uses beneficial bacteria, which eat up many of the sugars in the fruit or vegetable, to create lactic acid, which then preserves the food. No heat is applied, and the process adds loads of enzymes and probiotics, and increases the content of some vitamins. We explain more about culturing in chapter 4, “Better Than Naked Food- Preparation Techniques,” and we’ve included many recipes that use these techniques in the recipe section. 5 the naked foods cookbook on your location and the time of year, sometimes (and somewhat counterintuitively) frozen produce is actually the better choice. Freezing is one of the easiest and least damaging ways of preserving food, and, when done just after harvest, it preserves most of the nutritional value. The key is to find frozen produce that is just the produce, without sauces or flavor- ings. That’s where the un- naked “overdressed” stuff creeps in. If the frozen food aisle leaves you wanting, don’t sweat it. Some types of food fare really well in cold storage and so can be found throughout the off- season. And if you need to buy produce that was shipped from far away, so be it. It’s not the end of the world. Ultimately, it’s far more important that you eat the produce regardless of its origin. So far, we’ve been talking only about produce, but eating locally spans all types of food. Don’t forget your local egg, dairy, and meat farmers, especially the smaller ones special- izing in pastured poultry and eggs, grass- fed beef and dairy, and pasture- fed pork. Many farmers are now selling their naked meat and eggs at farmers markets, and so these deli- cious, nutrient- dense foods are becoming even more accessible and easy to find. How Was the Food Grown or Raised? Key Principle: The More It Was Grown in Harmony with Its Natural Environment, the More Naked It Is. The next question to ask is how the food was grown or raised. The most naked food is grown in harmony with its natural environment without any synthetic chemicals, hor- mones, or antibiotics. In the case of anything plant- based, such as produce, grains, nuts, beans, and seeds, this means grown organically or, even better, biodynamically. Like organic farming, biodynamic farming doesn’t use any synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, or pesticides. Biodynamic agriculture takes organic agriculture a step further, recognizing and using the interconnectivity between the earth, plants, animals, humans, and the cosmos. It’s often described as “beyond organic” because it makes extensive use of specific farming techniques such as including fermented additives in compost, and planting and harvesting crops according to the lunar calendar. This means you’re getting food that was truly grown in harmony with Mother Nature and Her natural cycles. If you’re not able to find biodynamic food, certified organic is your next best bet. Certified organic means that an independent third party determined no synthetic chemicals were used to grow the food. There have been some complaints against industrial organic agriculture, since it still relies heavily on monocrops, which lead to soil erosion and are resource- intensive, but it’s much more widely available than biodynamic produce. 6 Introduction to Eating Naked When it comes to animal products— meat, dairy, fish, eggs, or any fats of animal A Note about Raw Milk origin—the most important consideration is how the animals involved are raised and Raw milk is milk that hasn’t been pasteurized. The heat of pasteurization destroys bacteria— both the fed. Naked animal products come from good and the bad— along with delicate enzymes animals raised humanely in environments and several other important nutrients. When milk that allow them to engage in their own comes from cows fed grain, raised in industrial natural behaviors and eat what they are feedlots, and milked in unsanitary dairies, pasteuri- biologically designed to eat. This means zation is critically important. But when milk comes cows grazing on grass, chickens allowed from cows living on pasture, eating grass, and part of small- scale and highly sanitary dairies, pasteuri- out on pasture to roam and peck for grubs zation isn’t as necessary. We drink raw milk from and insects, and pigs allowed to root and grass- fed cows since it’s the most naked of all scavenge. In many ways, these criteria dairy products, and you’ll see several of the recipes are far more important than whether an call for it. If you choose to drink raw milk, the quality animal product is organic or not. of the milk, the health of the animal it came from, When it comes to animal products, and the cleanliness of the dairy are of paramount importance. Be safe and do your homework before “organic” simply refers to the feed and consuming it. what, if anything, the animal should be If you’re interested in the topic of raw milk, see treated with should it become sick. There the “Resource” section at www.eatnakednow.com are also requirements for access to the or the discussion of naked dairy in Eat Naked. outdoors, but they are minimal. In many cases, being organic doesn’t mean the feed is based on what the animal was biologically designed to eat. For example, in the case of cows— ruminants that eat grass— the "organic" label may mean they were fed organic corn and soy, not the grass their stomachs were designed to handle. It’s more important that the cow eat grass than that the feed be organic yet inappropriate for the animal to begin with. That said, if you’re not able to find grass- fed beef or pastured chicken or pork, organic is the next most naked option. We recommend that you steer clear entirely of any animal product that doesn’t have this as its minimum standard.

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