Our Dinner Schedule and Principles Offered by Weston A Price

Why do I feed these offal foods to my children? How could my husband agree to such treatment? What does this look like in practice, via our dinner schedule!?  Ahhh, I thought you’d never ask.

Well, you know that happy nerd emoticon? The one I said I liked. When I was in 4th grade, I really wanted glasses – so much so that my mom bought me a pair with clear lenses. And I actually wore them. I think I must have wanted something cool to go with my neck gear.

And I must have been wearing those glasses in 2012 when a dear friend suggested that I read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price.  Dutifully, I checked it out at the library.

High on life

Before I had finished reading the prefaces, I was impressed with its significance.  The day I finished it, I rearranged the pantry (ie. dumped the white flour and sugar) and after finding a semi-local source of raw milk, drove a couple hours to procure it on the farm.  Slowly, I started incorporating more of these principles.

I can hardly quantify the benefits that these changes have brought to our family. Four healthy children. Enough energy to enjoy them.  And enough laughter to keep my marriage in good working order.

I once heard Sally Fallon Morell talk about how the properly nourished body actually produces small quantities of compounds found in cocaine, marijuana and opioids; that healthy people are literally high on life. Haha! I love this. Join me!

So what could Price possibly have said?!

Here’s what he said.  He said that he traveled the world over, and found several groups of healthy peeps.  All pretty isolated.  He documented the people and places. Then he took food samples home, measured nutritional values of these foods, and compared them to modern (at the time) options.

All in all, he found that these diets varied tremendously: some were heavy on plants, others on animals; some offered mostly cooked foods, others mostly raw; some had milk and/or grains, others did not; some had fruit, other didn’t. Yet, despite this variety, they all had healthy teeth.  Price noted that teeth are the only internal part of the body that one could see from the outside, and were indicative of the health of the person as a whole.

They all ate differently. How is that helpful?

Despite the variation in diet, there were some key principles.  I could talk and talk about this stuff, but I’ll try to do this real quick:

1. There were no refined or denatured foods.  Just the real deal, fresh and local – whatever it may be.
2. They all ate animal foods. And when animals were slaughtered, the whole animal was consumed – organs, fat, skin and bones.
3. The food was nutrient-dense.  Specific translation: 10 times the fat-soluble vitamins (A, D and K2) as American food in the 1930s, as well as 4 times as much calcium and other minerals – no doubt higher factors would be found today.
4. Every culture ate some of their animal foods raw. (!) This was a deliberate practice, despite cooking other foods.
5. Fermented foods were used. No surprise here since it’s a great way to preserve food without modern appliances. With added enzymes, beneficial bacteria, and improved nutrient density to boot.
6. Seed foods (nuts/grains) were carefully prepared to increase the bio-availability of nutrients.
7. Total fat content varied a lot (from 30-80% of the diet), but none of the diets were high in protein.

Mother nature at her finest. Truly.

(Many thanks to two noteworthy organizations that keep this information alive. The Price Pottenger Nutrition Foundation (PPNF) keeps this work in print, and maintains archives of Price’s work, among other nutritional pioneers.  The Weston A Price Foundation (WAPF) disseminates practical information for living in accordance with Price’s findings. Sally Fallon Morell, the founding President of WAPF, offers a complementary understanding of dietary and nutrition principles in the first 70 pages of her book Nourishing Traditions.)

In practice, ie. our dinner schedule

Cooking with these principles in mind is beautiful, delicious, and connects me with the land and the seasons every day.

However, even while I believe some of these principles to be supremely important, I wasn’t serving them as often as I’d like. A few years back, I decided to create a dinner schedule so that I would be sure to capture the most important elements every week.

Since then, I’ve found that having a schedule settles everyone and helps me get started on any given day. Here it is:

• Monday: liver night (or any other organ, but usually liver). Start the week off with the most sacred and nourishing of traditional foods. My grandma did this and I think that most people of a certain generation remember it.
• Tuesday: leftovers from the weekend.
• Wednesday: soup night, ie. a vehicle for homemade bone broth, usually prepared on the weekend.
• Thursday: raw meat night.
• Friday: seafood night.
• Saturday/Sunday: whatever I can find at the farmer’s market, but at least one large roast or braise is in there.

How does this look in your home?  Is there one change you can make to better align your family’s health with these principles?