The winter months are not especially conducive to healthy eating. During summer, my cravings usually lend more towards salads and fruit smoothies. But when it's cold out, all I want is noodle soup, baked goodies, and hot chocolate.
The problem lies in breaking old habits. Sure, our dinner vocabulary these days is not limited to meat-and-three-veg, but when one of the kids asks "what's for dinner?", chances are the response will be chicken, lamb, steak, fish, pork or sausages... Risotto or pasta may get a look in, but it would be a rare night when you'd breezily answer cauliflower or eggplant.
A big concern, every time, is the cost of the food you buy. Generally speaking, veggies are cheaper than meats. If you can only afford one, the veggies are your best bet.
Despite the cold weather, there are plenty of options in most super markets. Check to see if there are any farmer's markets open year-round near where you live. From my apartment in Northeast D.C., I have access to Eastern Market's weekend farmer's market as well as the inexpensive grocery store Aldi and therefore, I have no valid excuse to eat unhealthy.
Yanjun of NaturalNews.com said it well in a concise post, "Nine healthy winter foods to include in your diet," on November 8:
Being able to get fresh fruits and vegetables, even in the dead of winter, is a great advantage in today's world. Fresh fruits and vegetables are available year round, and these are the foods that are most likely to ensure health and wellness, as they impart vitamins, minerals and other beneficial substances to the body.
The nine foods that Yanjun thought important enough to base the post on are: Brussels sprouts, leeks, beets, kale, pomegranate, kiwifruit, persimmon, guava and pomelo.
One important addition to this list that I (and Kerri-Ann Jennings, M.S., R.D., Associate Nutrition Editor of EatingWell Magazing) would make is all things citrus:
Citrus fruits, including lemons, limes, oranges and grapefruit are at their juiciest in the wintertime and can add sunshine to the dreary winter. Citrus fruits are loaded with vitamin C--one medium orange delivers more than 100 percent of your daily dose (from the article "5 of the Healthiest Winter Foods").
This is precisely the time when your body needs as many vitamins and nutrients as it can get to fight off those inevitable bugs that spread like a winter wildfire.
Soups are a fantastic go-to in the winter. They are warm, comforting, filling, simple enough to prepare and just perfect for those chilly days. A variety of recipes will clear out all those unwanted or old (but not yet rotten) veggies in the bottom of your fridge.
Don't neglect good health simply because it seems so much more fitting to bake cookies. You and I both can begin winter healthy, happy and satisfied--and sustain that through the months ahead.
If you have never eaten kale before, you are missing out on a world of nutrition!
Kale is a superfood that will pump your body full vitamins, detoxify it, boost your entire circulatory system, and so much more! Beware that some types of kale taste sweeter than others. Whenever it's available in supermarkets, I get lacinato (or dino) kale.
My favorite juice recipe for kale is simple:
6-8 large kale leaves
1 cucumber
4 stalks of celery
2 granny smith apples
1/2 lemon
1 ginger knob (about the size of a quarter)
Serves two!
It can also be made into some fantastic tasting (and fantastic for you) salads. Some of those recipes can be found here. It will be like sending a cleaning crew through your body for somewhere between $2-$4. That can't be beat.
Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, I never lacked fresh fruits and vegetables. My mom is a fantastic cook and although we struggled to make rent many times, we never went hungry or lacked a range of healthy foods.
As I transitioned into college, I figured out that what my mom had made look so seamless was actually quite hard - eating healthy on a tight budget. It's especially difficult when there are no supermarkets nearby. I never had to face the reality of food deserts until I came to Washington, D.C. for the semester. From my apartment on the Hill, the nearest supermarket is 0.8 miles away, which means that I am not in a food desert. However, residents of Wards 7 and 8 have very limited access to healthy food and many struggle with food hardship on a regular basis, according to DC Hunger Solutions:
In 2009-2010, 37.4 percent of households with children in the District of Columbia said they were unable to afford enough food. This is the worst rate in the nation. The food hardship rate for households without children drops to 14.9 percent.
Why would average people - the broke college students like me, the single moms with two jobs, the recently unemployed, etc. - take the pains to pay for and prepare healthy meals when it's so much easier to buy fast food? When I come home exhausted from classes or work, I have no desire to walk a mile to buy lettuce and then walk a mile home to prepare a decent salad. Half of the time I don't even have money for that. All I want to do is grab a cheeseburger and kick back on my couch watching The Walking Dead.
What the District could really use is a convenient, close, nonprofit grocery store, like Fare & Square in Chester, Pa. - the first of its kind in the United States.
The Huffington Post reported about this:
The store is the brainchild of Bill Clark, the executive director of Philabundance, a nonprofit hunger relief organization. Chester has a 36 percent poverty rate and unemployment is 13 percent. Clark said at one time Chester had five grocery stores, but they all closed when the city fell on hard times after manufacturing virtually disappeared.
About half of the city's residents don't own a car making it difficult and costly to travel to a supermarket. As Clark put it: "To bring a gallon of milk is a hardship if you have to use two buses to get home."
As a nonprofit, Fare & Square offers lower prices for a healthy range of fruits and vegetables. Time will tell if this model is sustainable and can be used in food deserts across the United States.
Unlike a drought, the weather doesn't control the District's access to healthy foods - we do. I could go on a rant about how "we the people" have the power, but I'll spare you the cliche. On top of that, the District isn't even represented in the federal government. I don't trust the government to fix the mess that we're in anyway. It'll take some enterprising individuals and some start up funding, but if it can happen anywhere, D.C. is the place.
Steps are already being taken to increase the increase the inner city's access to healthy foods. One nonprofit organization is using land in Alexandria, Va. to grow food to be sold in food desert areas of Washington, D.C. There are plans in the works to build a massive urban greenhouse in Ward 8 by 2014, as reported by The Washington Post:
And while Ward 8 is desperately in need of jobs, as the average unemployment rate in Ward 8 in 2012 was over 22 percent (one of the highest in the country), this greenhouse isn’t really about jobs, despite how the event was spun. Yes, the 25 full-time jobs and 100 short-term construction jobs that BrightFarms is bringing is beneficial. There is no question there.
The real gift to the community, however, is the one million pounds of GMO-free produce that the greenhouse will generate – provided it actually gets into the homes of Ward 7 and Ward 8 residents living in chronic food insecurity. This is the real test.
None of these initiatives in and of themselves will cure the District's food dessert. But combined, there's hope. Healthier foods with competitive prices will make the people of the District healthier. Because proper nutrition is so essential to health, the effects of this will be far reaching. I can't predict the future, but I can imagine how much brighter our Nation's capital will shine if its people, all of its people, have the power to take care of themselves.
To see how prevalent food deserts are in the United States, check out this interactive map from the USDA Economic Research Service!
