In my blog hopping from various Christian, frugal, green-living, whole food preparing, home making women (at all different degrees), I have run into the book Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon one too many times to ignore. While I currently do not own the book (I hope to soon) and am reading copies borrowed from my mother and the library, I am quickly realizing why this book is so valuable to so many.Without going into a full description, Nourishing Traditions has the answers to 90% of the questions I grappled with from my daunting list. For the first 70 pages, the book gives a very straight forward look at fats, carbohydrates, proteins, dairy products, vitamins, minerals, enzymes, spices, and beverages. Sally Fallon sets aside the fad nutrition myths and what the "diet dictocrats" tell us to believe and focuses on the basic nutritional needs of cultures all around the world since time began. The rest of the 675 pages (except for the 50 pages of helpful references and indexes at the end) show how to incorporate these healthful habits into our daily cuisine. Each page of recipes has interesting side bars referencing cultures who ate these foods. The book is full of helpful tips for daily living, ways to get the most nutrients from the good food we eat, and strong motivation to change one's eating habits. It is The Joy of Cooking (an excellent reference book for every day cooking, by the way) for the whole food connoisseur. It will soon claim a prominent space on my limited cooking book shelf!
In case you haven't noticed, the book and media references on our blog link to Amazon.com. Any book that you choose to buy from linking from our blog, will earn us some small percentage toward our own Amazon book purchases. I guess I'm still a book seller at heart. = ) Feel free to ignore these links, but if you do decide to buy the book based on our recommendation, it would be a kind gesture to come back and link through us again. We don't intend to turn this into a "book blog," but as we both love books and music so much, it just happens to come up in our lives often. Thanks for being patient with us.
Not having read the book, I am curious what you would say to the comments in the 1 star section (on the Amazon page.)
ReplyDeleteI read that first comment on Amazon the first time I researched "Nurishing Traditions" and didn't know what to think. After hearing good things about the book over and over from people I trusted, I finally read the book (most of it anyway) myself. I think that the first reply to that comment (if you click on the comment's underneath it) sums up my feelings very well.
ReplyDeleteWhile I have not researched every stand Sally Fallon takes on food nutrition and take some information with a grain of salt (Real Salt(TM), anyway!), most of the charges that that particular reader wrote are a bit extreme and taken out of context.
What I keep coming back to, is that the way she suggests we prepare and eat our food goes back to the way our great grandparents did--which, in many ways, is similar to the way Biblical ancients ate--which is the way God gave it to us! She is a strong supporter of foods like kefir and pickled and preserved foods because they make nutrients more available to the body. Huh, people all over the earth have various methods of culturing milk and preserving vegetables in vinegar and brine--but only minimally in America anymore, since the refrigerator does such a good job.
Anyway, it's very interesting and definitely worth the time looking it up at the library at the very least.
hey andrea, i'm enjoying reading the "book reviews" and your daunting list got me "researching" a little and thinking a bit too. i didn't know you had links so you'd get amazon credits, i will DEFINITELY go through your blog to get books that come up, though i just saw "vegetable. . . . , miracle" (can't remember the full name) on a friend's bookshelf and will be borrowing instead of buying that one. . . thanks for your insights.
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