“We remember an afternoon we spent at a café on Avenue B on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where we sipped coffee and tapped away at our laptop keyboards. From the corner patio table we noticed the driver of a Sysco truck making a food delivery to a run-down deli. When he was finished, he crossed the street and walked two storefronts further down to deliver the same food to a fancy, expensive health food restaurant. Witnessing this was like having a piano dropped on our heads. We realized that food eaten out is all the same. No matter how it has been dressed up, unless produce is certified organic, it can be assumed to contain pesticides and/or be genetically modified. And conventional meats are heavy with hormones that affect our own. Most of the conventional food we eat comes from a truck like the one we saw that day in New York.

Our experience that afternoon was one of the mounting reasons that led us to change the way we were living. We started wondering what healthy food really was, and we set a goal to obtain it. Today at our New Mexico homestead, we make cheese from the milk of a local cow named Princess and eat vegetables from our own garden. Wild game comes to us from the nearby open ranges along with wild-crafted plants that we forage for food and medicine. Our kitchen is a reflection of our wish to avoid highly processed foods, additives, preservatives, pesticides, hormones, and GMOs.”

Wendy Jehanara Tremayne, author of The Good Life Lab, is guest-blogging at Powells.com all week: http://powells.us/14uNuev