I just tweeted a cartoon of a “farmacy” (you get the idea) where the grower hands over a plush, green lettuce to a customer, accompanied by the advice to

“take one a day with tomato and cucumber”.

One very eager follower on Twitter right away responded:

“I don’t think farmacy can cure polio.”

Yes, granted. That’s true. And I’m so glad that time, resources and research effort have been invested to make modern medications available to us.

But there are so many diseases that only really show up after years and years of less than ideal eating habits. There are so many diseases with unclear causes.

The most basic and direct form of self-care happens…in the kitchen!

My grandparents are both over 90 years old. As farmers, they have had manual jobs all their lives. They went through periods where they didn’t have much to eat at all. But they always ate what they grew (or raised). They knew where their food was coming from. They had meat once or twice a week. They burnt off all those calories when working outside. They hardly ever sat down. Needless to say, they’re radiating health.

What if we were able to prevent just one or two things that later would be treated with medications? What if we were treating our food as our medicine rather than a culinary indulgence, something to delight the taste buds?

I’m always baffled when I read about “conventional” food, i.e. food derived from mass production. Would conventional food not be what my grandparents would recognise as food? Food how it’s been produced for hundreds of years?

To me, the farmacy is out there. Healthy food grows all around us, and it’s available. It doesn’t even necessarily mean to buy organic only. And it also doesn’t mean to obsess about – and spend a lot of money on – superfoods, no matter how tempting those benefits might sound (I’m the first one guilty…). Maybe it’s just as simple as this saying goes:

Don’t eat anything that has any ingredient your grandparents wouldn’t recognise.

To a long, healthy and happy life!

~ Andrea

Image credit here.