This past month's focus on food has been such a delight. I have much more to say about the challenges and discoveries made during this month, but I thought I'd hand the mic over to some fellow nutrition experts to share their wisdom on seasonal eating and what nourishment means to them. Amy Bondar, Malcolm Saunders and Luka Symons are three amazing Calgary-based colleagues/mentors/friends who have taught me so much about nourishing not only the body, but the mind and spirit as well. Check out their work and their beautiful responses below.
Amy Bondar is a Calgary-based Nutritional Therapist, an Eating Psychology Coach and a Demartini Method Facilitator. She's also a wicked ass workshop leader and her Weekend of Nourishment was a most amazing addition to my Month of Food! Held in the spring and fall, it's a must-do for anyone looking to create a healthy relationship with food. Find her at amybondar.com
Why is seasonal eating important to your personal health approach?
There is a perfection to what mother-nature provides for us at each season and when we align ourselves with this wisdom, we give our body what it needs to stay balanced, prevent illness and optimize our health. Going back to the wisdom of nature is a beautiful way to eat. It’s simple, it makes sense and it works!
What are your favourite spring/summer foods (herbs, food, drink, whatever you use to support seasonal eating?)
In Spring, I love getting into all of the bitters, astringent and pungent vegetables to help break up mucous from the winter, burn excess weight we accumulate over winter, to cleanse the body and reawaken energy. My favorites are pea shoots, microgreens, sprouts, ginger, baby bok choy, Spring lettuces. I also love putting doTerra lemon essential oil in my water to stimulate detoxification and support cleansing.
Summer for me, is all about fruits and refreshing salads. I love taking in all of the cooling sweet fruits that we only get once a year (cherries, nectarines, peaches, plums, apricots etc.)
Do you have any spring/summer-specific health-sustaining habits that you try to hone?
I always kickstart Spring with a cleanse. Not only do I change my diet to align with Spring, I also incorporate herbal formulas that support cleansing and detoxification of the main elimination pathways – the liver, kidneys, lungs, skin and colon. I love doTerra and use the Cleanse and Restore Kit. It is gentle, effective and I feel amazing at the end of the 30 days. In the summer, I do my best to chill out, be spontaneous, play, take a break from routine and too much structure, be outside and enjoy the season. Leave all of that necessity for the Fall/Winter!
What does nourishment mean to you?
Doing what you love that feeds your soul. Time with my kids and husband, inspiring, educating and guiding my clients, time in nature, walking my dog, going to the spa, journaling, doing a great Barre class, and enjoying amazing, whole, vibrant, colorful food that has been grown and made with love. These are all ways I find nourishment.
Do you think food and spirit are connected? If yes, how do you personally experience that connnection in your daily life?
The food I eat is an expression of my spirit. When I am inspired, doing what I love, fulfilled and grateful, my food will be vibrant, colorful, energetic and vital. My food reflects the level of energy I feel in my life, but it also gives me the energy to do what I love to do.
What are the practical ways in which you maintain a healthy diet? Especially when you're busy?
Food prep is key. The weekend is about making enough proteins to draw on for the week, having the right vegetables to make great salads, ensuring I have easy-to-grab fruit, nuts and making hummus, protein balls, and a soup or a one-pot meal I can draw on for the week. It doesn’t have to be difficult, just simple, clean, whole, healthy and energizing foods to give me the energy and satiation to do what I love to do.
Malcolm Saunders is the Founder and Owner of The Light Cellar, a beautiful super food shop and elixir bar based in Calgary. He also coaches entrepreneurs in conscious business practices, has authored a great little book, The Elixir Life, is a delightful public speaker and teaches amazing classes on everything from raw chocolate-making to fermentation to intuitive eating. Get more info about all things Malcolm at malcolmsaunders.com
Why is seasonal eating important to your personal health approach?
Food contains nutrients that are appropriate and helpful for your body to thrive during that season.
What are your favourite spring/summer foods (herbs, food, drink, whatever you use to support seasonal eating?)
I love herbal teas like nettles, and of course I love eating berries that are in abundance and any other fruit that is ripe during that time. The taste of a tree or berry ripened fruit and berry is incomparably so much more delicious and nutritious. I also love using herbs like mint and I hibiscus which are very cooling and refreshing.
Do you have any spring/summer-specific health-sustaining habits that you try to hone?
The biggest one is getting out into nature. Especially wild crafting and foraging, but even if I’m just out in nature just learning about new plants and interacting with the ones I know, be it harvesting berries, picking leaves or whatever the season offers. Food nourishes us in two ways - one is by the act of eating and in consuming the food and receiving what it has to offer. The other opportunity for nourishment is going out into nature and interacting with the plant which provides that food, be it planting, tending or picking - there is a connection that happens.
What does nourishment mean to you?
It’s beyond being just “full”, which is so often the benchmark for our culture has when it comes to mealtimes. Nourishment is about a deep sense of satisfaction, being fully nourished by all the major and micro nutrients of the food, the ones we know about and the ones we don’t know about which food contains. Mindfully eating real food prepared in loving ways is how we truly nourish ourselves.
Do you think food and spirit are connected? If yes, how do you personally experience that connnection in your daily life?
Absolutely I feel they are connected. Probably one of the best illustrations is food grown and prepared with love. There is an experiential difference between that and food grown and prepared with other ulterior motives like profit. Profit is not bad, but when it’s the only motivation behind food this is where we can go terribly wrong. We have a saying in our culture about mom‘s home cooking, homemade, handmade with love, is best. We may not have the words or science behind it but we all know and have experienced this food and the depth it provides. Food that is infused with a loving spirit is far more life giving and nourishing.
What are the practical ways in which you maintain a healthy diet? Especially when you're busy?
Elixirs are one of my top ways because not only can I get in nutrients as I would a smoothie but I can bring in the herbal component from adaptogenic plants and medicinal mushrooms to support me in the busyness of my day.
Luka Symons is a fellow Holistic Nutrition Consultant, Founder of good food + you, a Fermenteur, a Whole Foods educator, a friend and basically a Foodie Mastermind. Find her at lukasymons.com, follow her online and if you're in Calgary, be sure to attend any of her amazing classes!
Why is seasonal eating important to your personal health approach?
Eating seasonally invites variety into your diet, and gets you focusing on those foods that are ripening closer to you. This allows for a shorter distance of farm to plate, which cuts down on emissions for one, but allows the plants to ripen longer in the ground or on the vine. When the plants ripen in the garden longer, you get a more nutrient dense food. Say for example a tomato; if you're eating a tomato in early February in southern Alberta, that tomato has been brought to you from lands far, far away. The tomatoes were picked long before they were ripe, and were allowed to ripen on the truck on the way to you. When you eat a tomato in late July from your CSA veggie box, that tomato was allowed to ripen on the vine and picked a day or two before being shipped to you. That tomato will have a higher concentration of vitamin C (one of the last nutrients to develop on the vine. That tomato in February that came to you via two continents? Didn't get the time to develop the vitamin C.) but will also have a deeper more 'tomato-ey' flavour. That's because you're tasting the nutrients, and the sugar content. When it tastes better, that's the sweet flavour calling to you. That sweet flavour is Nature's way of signalling the fruit/veg is at peak freshness!
If you eat with the seasons, you do also eat more variety. Each season calls on different foods, and rotating your foods is an important part of getting a variety of nutrients in to your body.
What are your favourite spring/summer foods (herbs, food, drink, whatever you use to support seasonal eating?)
HERBS! I have perennials that come back every year in my garden. I leave green onions in late fall and allow them to self-seed so there is a massive amount of green onions coming up in early spring - they go in EVERYTHING. I also have chives, and sorrel which is a lemony spinach-like green. I keep thinking of new ways to incorporate them in to our meals. I also have lovage, a brilliant perennial herb that comes up year after year. It's halfway between parsley and celery, and just a wonderful flavour. That too finds its way into everything. In years where spring is lagging, (like this year!) I was sprouting seeds like mad and eating sprouts on everything I could think of.
I do not feel particularly called to drinking cold fermented beverages in the colder months. I concentrate on tea blends that either I put together, or find about town. Warm teas are a daily occurrence when the times are colder. I transition to greener teas as the temperature warms, drinking things like nettle and peppermint as the base, and adorning with flowers dried from last year's garden. This just makes me feel like I'm prepping for gardening again - revisiting with my flowers. Cheesy, but true.
As the weather warms, I'm all over consuming fermented colder beverages and water over the course of the day. Water kefir is tops for me, and kombucha is an almost daily occurrence too. This year I have felt a particular pull towards kombucha, more than before: I think it is because I am working on really tuning in to what my body is asking for. Spring is the season of the liver, and kombucha is a wonderful support to the liver's detoxification process. It feels so right to down some buch in order to support what my liver does all the live long day. Love live the liver!
In the hotter summer months, I eat as much as possible from my little garden out back. Over the years, I have only added in plants that will share food with me when I grow it. In June there are the Honeyberries (a brilliant addition to the garden - adding 2 more bushes this year!), in July and August the sour cherries. As soon as the petals are ready, there are calendula petals and nasturtium flowers and leaves that work their way into all kinds of foods. I eat a lot of pesto in deep summer - just feels like you can really pack a punch in a small amount of food, and the flavours are so divine.
Do you have any spring/summer-specific health-sustaining habits that you try to hone?
SLEEP! This year I'm working on increasing the amount of time I sleep, getting to bed earlier and prioritizing this important task. I am also really carving out some time each evening for something I want to do, whether it's gardening, or reading a good book with a good cuppa at my side. It has to be non-work related.
On the daily, as the temperatures are warming, I also really make sure to get at least a full hour outside during the day somewhere, or more when I can. It is typically a dog walk with my fam, or some frisbee golf with the dog and fam, or plunking away at the ever-encroaching quack grass-ridden garden beds out front. Weekends are spent outside as much as possible. I mean I do run a wee business, and so much of that time is spent staring at a screen - this year as the warmer climes swoop in, I feel a real pull to spend more time outside. That's what I'm doing this year!
What does nourishment mean to you?
Loaded question. And such an important thing to consider, and everyone's answer will be different!
For me, nourishment means a few different things. 1. We need to eat to deeply nourish the cells of our bodies. 2. We need to eat to deeply nourish the bugs of our gut. 3. We need to eat to deeply nourish the soul - this means JOY. So nourishment means looking after our bodies and nourishing them with an eye to including those nutrient dense foods that give us the ingredients to do all the work our bodies want to do (our body will always choose life!), and this includes eating those foods that will help look after the bugs in our gut (micro biome, collection of bacteria fungus and yeasts that reside in our intestinal tract - our multi tasking super star gut guardians!). This means eating lots of plants. But it also means nourishing your soul, and working on JOY. What brings you joy? we need to nourish our souls with the good things. And no one else can tell you what that is for you - you have to choose it for yourself. Cultivate Joy.
I would also rather NOURISH my body as opposed to punish it with food restrictions. Sure, there are some foods my body has a hard time with. While I omit those foods most of the days (because I know I have lots of stairs to climb in the coming days - for me, some foods really impact how my knees function) but on some days, you can be sure I'll be eating some of those foods because they fall in the category of JOY. BUT NOT EVERY DAY. I veer towards the positive as much as possible, and on a conscious level. It's an important way of living that I have worked hard at including - again working on that joy. So nourish with the good foods, the good connections with some good people. And reach for joy.
5) Do you think food and spirit are connected? If yes, how do you personally experience that connnection in your daily life?
Ay. Absolutely so. I see it in my garden - how the plants' life forces are impacted by the weather, and by my work tending to them. My calendula last year were flowering, and some of the petals were spontaneously turning into full flowers and then flowering on top of the initial flowering. I had never seen that! I think it was the earth's life force (oh things are shifting right now!) and my life force and that of the flower, and we were all just riffing on each other. It's one of the ways I think of playing with my food, this gardening thing I do.
I think of food as ways to bring earth spirit to me and help fuel my body assisting in keeping me connected to the earth. Every meal there is a blessing shared, in thanks for the foods I am about to eat. I sometimes feel like I get to revisit the plants from my garden (they really feel like my friends! HA!) when I consume them over the winter months, based on my harvesting and preparation of them in fall. Might sound loopy, but there is a sense of what the light and temperature was like at the time I would have prepared that food, and it comes through while I am preparing the meal months later. I think that is the connection of land and spirit and food and earth and me. And it really invites me to meditate on it all. It's why I love gardening so much, and I think of food preparation as an extension of that.
6) What are the practical ways in which you maintain a healthy diet? Especially when you're busy?
One of my favourite people on this planet, Monica Corrado once said 'Bless it and get on with it.' I hold that truth every day. I eat as best I can, when I have time I try to make extra so that I can freeze it for easy meals down the road. I can't tell you how much soup is in my freezer, and how often I am grateful to have a single portion of soup as an easy lunch option when getting lost in my work at the screen. I choose those foods in our home to be the best versions we can afford at the time, prioritizing good meats and fats, eating as seasonally as possible (which really helps reduce the grocery bill - when you eat seasonally, the produce is cheaper!).
I meal plan, albeit begrudgingly. As much as I recoil at the thought of meal planning, it really does simplify things for us in our home on weeknights. It saves me a half hour of scouring the fridge/freezer/pantry to think of something to make for dinner; it reminds me what kind of prep needs to happen when or what kind of meat to take out of the freezer too. This meal planning idea also helps keep weekday evenings a bit more sane - I put down on my meal plan all of our evening activities, and plan meals accordingly. Busy nights call for meals to be pulled out of the freezer that only require a reheat. Days where there is no school and little taxiing around town call for a bit more prep, perhaps a roasted chicken for dinner. Those kinds of ideas.
I also keep good things in the pantry (cans of sardines, coconut milk, popcorn, loads of herbs, dried greens from my garden, dried tomatoes from my yearly haul from BC every summer, nori paper) and good things in the freezer frozen into ice cube sizes (pesto, roasted pumpkin, blitzed cooked lentils, pizza sauce). It's amazing how much this small variety of foods can be quick and easy jump off points for meals down the road... Pesto really elevates leftovers when you put them in a pot with some good meat stock. Soupe Pistou is a popular item chez nous!
We stock up on 1/4 share of a cow and 1/2 share of a pig every year, and getting bulk orders of pastured chickens from a local farm a few times a year. I just joined a coop food buying club where one person organizes the orders and we buy all together. Brilliant affordable prices for the good stuff, like butter, maple syrup, olive oil, sprouted spelt flour, sprouted tortillas, herbs, spices, etc. But it does mean I have two big chest freezers in my basement. And they're always full.
I also do bulk prep of foods, those things that are in ice cube trays. In the summer, I bring back 120 pounds of tomatoes grown in the interior BC and spend a good week prepping them for the freezer (roasted tomatoes, simple basil tomato sauce, dehydrated tomatoes, pizza sauce, Mexican red sauce, plum tomatoes frozen into medium ziplock bags - they equal a can of tomatoes and are half the price!). So going with the seasons, and harvesting accordingly and batch prepping items when there is time and energy. I do recognize that my partner has a full time job, which allows me to spend extra time on our food prep in our home, but it is what sustains me as a person, and really deeply nourishes my family. It is something we prioritize in our home, and is how it was in my home growing up too. What you put in your mouth three or more times a day has a MASSIVE impact on your quality of life. I aim to make this a good life.