This year, my husband Trent and I decided to make a big change. Starting January 1st, we packed up everything in our pantry with more than three words in the ingredients list and donated it to the farm for the chickens. The chickens, I should mention, have never seemed happier.
If you’ve been following along in our homesteading Facebook group, you know I’d been working up to this for months. But after the holidays — which, let’s be honest, were a carb-and-chemical free-for-all even in our house — I knew it was time. It started when a woman named Heather in my Moms Against Seed Oils group (she’s an acupuncturist in Portland, absolutely brilliant) explained the three-ingredient rule. If a packaged food has more than three ingredients, she said, it’s basically a chemistry project. I went to check the back of a granola bar in my pantry and counted twenty-three ingredients. Twenty-three.
So what made the cut? Real butter (one word, one ingredient — perfect). Honey from our neighbor Ed’s hives (one word, one ingredient). Bone broth that I slow-cooked myself from the Thanksgiving turkey bones I’d saved in my chest freezer. Eggs from our own girls. I kept my sourdough starter because technically it’s just flour, water, and time, and time isn’t really an ingredient.
There were some gray areas. I’ll admit I kept the sea salt. Technically it has the word ‘salt’ on the label, which is one ingredient, but also I reasoned that salt isn’t really food — it’s more of a mineral, and our bodies literally cannot function without it. My sister-in-law Megan, who works at a pediatric office and is basically a nurse, agreed with me. She said the rule is for processed things, not elemental things. That made sense.
What went was harder. Olive oil — turns out it’s rarely actually olive oil, according to a food blog a friend of mine shared. The olive oil industry is apparently one of the most corrupt in the world, and most of what’s sold in American stores is diluted with canola or soybean. I had four bottles of it. They went to the chickens. I also got rid of all our baking soda, which I know doesn’t technically have more than three words on the label, but when I read about how it’s actually mined — like, from the ground — I realized I’ve been trying to move away from mined ingredients this year as a general principle. That felt right.
The kids were dramatic at first. Our oldest Sage (she’s eight) asked if we were going to starve, which broke my heart, because no, sweetie — we are going to thrive. I explained that once you clear out the toxins, your body becomes more efficient and you actually need less food. I think she’s starting to understand. She did ask yesterday if Grandma Lorraine’s birthday cookies ‘counted’ and I had to tell her that no, we don’t count exceptions, we make choices.
Trent has been a champion through all of this, though I did catch him with a protein bar from his truck console last Tuesday. When I asked him about it he just said ‘I had a meeting, Brooke.’ I’m not going to be the wife who monitors her husband’s snacks. But I did leave a printout from the Weston A. Price Foundation on his nightstand, and I think he’s coming around. I noticed he skipped the creamer in his coffee yesterday and used raw milk from our share. Progress.
If you’re thinking about making a change in 2025, my advice is to start small. Start with one shelf. Flip every package around and read the back — like, really read it. If there are more than three words in the ingredients list, put it in the donation bag. Your body will thank you, and it will know. It always knows.
Also, if anyone in the Asheville area has a lead on grass-fed, locally sourced tallow, please message me — I’m trying to move our whole kitchen off store-bought fats by Easter.