What food can – do for you

 

 

Hi, I’m Jutta, a passionate lover of good food, an enthusiastic cook, with a penchant for wandering the markets for the best and discovering restaurants. I currently live in Berlin, I love the sea and I love to talk. I was born already endowed with a fine palate, so my favorite place was the kitchen, helping my father spice the most delicious sauces. My father is a chef with a lot of ingenuity, faculty my three sisters and I have inherited. No distance is too far to buy the best bread, cookbooks replace detective stories on the shelves, handling pots and pans means creative pleasure, and subsequently, food is much appreciated.

But the real understanding of what the kitchen is all about, took a few more years. At that time I lived in Barcelona, I was in an “uncomfortable” situation and I was looking for some kind of “balance”. First I signed up for a Yoga class, then I wandered into a bio shop for the first time and found myself in front of a pile of packages full of grains placed on wooden shelves. I was very happy that these packages were labeled with the name of their content and instructions for its preparation…..because I had no idea! The key experience for my culinary understanding was a weekend cooking course with Montse Vallory, as well as, reading the book “El poder curativo de los alimentos ” / Food and Healing , which convinced me – and it was a discovery for me – of the physical and psychological effects on our health. After many forays into different culinary worlds, many experiments with new dishes, readings, and detailed ponderings, I came to the conclusion that the best diet and nutritional choices are a personal matter, and that we all have to individually find our own way! Trust yourself.

This blog is a sister-coworking project. Heike, chief fotogapher, made all this beautiful pictures and Antje gave the first impulse to get this started and invented the name. Here they come:

 

 

Heike Fähndrich, the youngest sister of the a passionate lover of good food and enthusiastic cook. Living with her husband and two sons in Düsseldorf, Germany. Her focus as a professional freelance fotographer has been the portrait photography and recently, because of her own food passion, she started with these food pictures, really yummy!

 

 

 

Hello! I’m Antje, Jutta’s younger sister. There’s only 11 months between us, but in our family I’m the third one of four daughters, what we refer to as a sandwich, so you can already imagine where I get my passion for food from.

Food and me:

Food was not only a passion; it was also part of a fight for survival in my family to make sure I got the fattest potatoes and the most succulent slices of roast beef. The first one to get back from school was the first one to eat, and if you had classes till 2 or 3 then you missed out entirely. All that was left were leftovers.

My life in a nutshell:

I just made a complete newstart in the bavarian metropoli Munich.

I am a single mother with a ten-year-old daughter and I work as a manager, a situation I can assure you is not particularly conducive to the most relaxing of lifestyles. These circumstances, alongside a certain degree of impatience and a tendency to set myself high standards, with the usual existential crises thrown in, have put my immune system to the test on more than one occasion. The consequences: over the last year my body has made it quite clear that it has certain limits.

One question after another: Why?

How many times do we start to ask ourselves questions that really matter and what a pity that we don’t do this beforehand: What or who is to blame when the early symptoms of a serious illness emerge? What have I done wrong or what I have done differently to everyone else? Will I get better? What can I do to participate actively in the healing process?

And as often happens, there is no single correct answer. Traditional medicine, for example, says that I have just been unlucky and that scientifically speaking there is no proof to suggest that the psyche, stress, food, etc. have a role in the development of illnesses. Alternative medicine, on the other hand, inquires into every minute detail and always ends up examining, in the last instance, the body’s own defences: the immune system. If this is too weak, illnesses have a free reign. And that was how it was in my case.

I quickly replaced most questions I was asking (such as the thousand “whys”) with strength, energy and a strong will to keep going forward. I needed a clear outlook. And just days after being diagnosed I started to look to the future: only to the future. My only wish was to get better.

My perspective

I had never been particularly interested in the question of food before, basically due to a lack of knowledge. But the truth is that it has played a vital role in all of this. I devoured book after book on the subject. I completely removed sugar and carbohydrates from my cooking. Never again! But I was too radical. I could not keep up with the standards set. Nevertheless, I started to observe myself and to note what my body can tolerate and what it can’t, what gives it energy and what takes it away. I started to realise that fruit, vegetables and dairy produce came from the local area and I started to buy organic produce. I also started to buy meat only when I knew where it came from.

I have included new, healthy foods into my daily diet. For example, I drink a glass of hot water with ginger or a hot lemon every morning, and I have added nutritious oils, millet, quinoa, bean sprouts, herbs, maple syrup and berries to my diet. I shop more conscientiously now and I have learned that food can bring us many delights and is not just about pasta (even though I could kill for it today!) or bread and cheese.

And ever since then I’ve become more and more interested in it. And I hope that this website will soon inspire many more people like me. Food can really help us to achieve so much! And above all, it is fun, not just because it is healthy, but because it brings our taste buds many new experiences that we can barely imagine. I have discovered food and cooking in a completely new way. –

What food can – Motivation:

Many people only change their diet after suffering a serious illness or other vicissitudes. What food can wants to trigger a change in this: it wants to motivate, stimulate interest, create awareness, eliminate prejudices and provide alternatives for a healthier diet, before entering into an extreme situation.

Sustainability around food, kitchen and purchase is very important for us. All of us can contribute every day to conserve the gifts from nature, use them in a proper way for us now and preserve them for the next generations. Both subjects, food and sustainability are closely connected to eachother. All over the world. Therefore we run this blog in german, english and spanish.

Some issues to think about:

The food we eat has a direct effect on our bodies’: health, well-being, immune system, vitality and mood. This has nothing to do with esoteric subjects or tall tales, but it is scientifically proven and we can verify it.

Food alone can’t cure serious diseases such as cancer. But it can help us approach, time and again, a state of optimum health. It is impossible to maintain a constant state of optimal health, as this is influenced by many factors.

Good nutrition means self appreciation, awareness, interest, responsibility and joy of living.

It takes more effort to cook than to heat up ready-made meals in the oven or buy fast food, but the effort is worth the while! Only if we invest well, we can achieve positive results in the long run: our own health and that of our dear ones.

Cook what we, our families or our friends like best. What food can will tell you what effect food and ingredients have on our system. Let’s substitute the “unhealthy” ingredients with other more healthy ones, or regularly take advantage of ingredients with curative properties for the preparation of our dishes. It’s not necessary to change our diet drastically. On the contrary, the goal is the successive integration of valuable nutrients, without having to give up our favorite dishes.

We must avoid extremes. Nature works like a pendulum; it finds equilibrium while swinging from one extreme to another. Diet can exert a balancing effect, and also help avoid the extremes.

Let’s show interest in what we eat, since our body uses these substances to produce new cells and much more. For our body to perform its functions for many years, it must produce between 10 and 50 million new cells every second. In theory, every 7 years we have completely renewed ourselves.

Important: there is no diet that is always right. Each individual has to find the ideal diet for himself and always adapt it to his current circumstances. We know what is good for us and what we need. Let’s trust our own wisdom.

Research: the large multinationals in the food industry invest a lot of money in research to develop food in accordance with the new consumer habits. What we consume today are “functional foods”. The change that is taking place now, and that should last another 30 years, seeks “medical foods”. The genetic code will determine which foods we should eat to have good health, and the doctor will prescribe these ready-made foods that will be for sale. Let’s not disable or deprive ourselves of our own wisdom and autonomy.

Advice: Whatfoodcan.com is not a professional nutrition counseling. In case of long lasting sickness and serious diseases please turn to a doctor.

* Annemarie Colbin, El poder curativo de los alimentos, 2004