Eat Your Colors: Eggs

Britt keeps up with the food hippie stuff more than I do, but I have heard from time to time that the new trend in deciding on what type of diet one should be eating is to "eat your colors."

The main intent of this notion is that each color in a food represents a different vitamin or mineral and that by eating a variety of colors you are also consuming a variety of necessary nutrients.

This seems awfully simplistic but as a ceramic artist I am accustomed to the visual cues that certain mineral oxides display in a given clay body or glaze recipe. While these days we order mined or purified forms of minerals (red iron oxide, cobalt, potassium carbonate etc.) from specialty shops, in the initial stages of glazing ceramic objects early peoples had to rely on the naturally occurring mineral deposits found in trace amounts in the materials around them.

In fact, the first glazes weren't even applied to the ceramic objects at all, but rather each object was given a vitreous, glossy surface simply by the ash from the wood used to stoke the fire achieving such high temperatures that it began to melt and left behind trace minerals such as calcium and potassium, which when left to cool, hardened to a glassy finish.

Because of my background in ceramics as well as my identity as a Catholic I have a intimate understanding of the hidden inner essence of things which are often only hinted at by outward appearances.

That being said, the thing which finally convinced me to foot the bill for cage-free eggs wasn't animal rights, wasn't ecology, but rather it was the fact that factory produced eggs have less food in them.

Sure, a dozen cage-free eggs is still 12 eggs as much as a dozen industrial eggs. But within each egg which came from a chicken who was allowed to actually walk around and maybe even scratch around to eat a bug or two there is a substantially larger amount of nutrients.This became most evident to me when I compared a run of the mill, industrial egg to one of the cage-free eggs we purchased. The color difference was striking, the yolk of the industrial egg literally paled in comparison. It was yellow, barely yellow, where as the cage-free egg was what one might call orange.

According to Real Food University , which sites studies from two articles published in Mother Earth News, an egg produced by a pasture raised chicken versus an egg produced in an industrial egg factory contains:

• 1/3 less cholesterol
• 1/4 less saturated fat
• 2/3 more vitamin A
• 2 times more omega-3 fatty acids
• 3 times more vitamin E
• 7 times more beta carotene
• 4 to 6 times as much vitamin D

Of course, as with all dietary guidelines, understanding vocabulary is half the battle. I mentioned above how we had decided to switch to cage-free eggs over standard industrial eggs. However, after re-watching The Natural History of the Chicken (a splendid and highly entertaining mini-documentary by the way) I saw a scene of a huge industrial barn swarming with chickens and lamented the practice to which Britt said, "yea, well that's technically cage-free."

Sure enough, the rolling lush green hills littered with frolicking chickens which I had imagined was an utter fantasy compared to the actual practice of cage-free egg production. Now, don't' get me wrong, when given the option between a cage of chickens huddled unhealthily close together who are never allowed to walk around or even touch solid ground and the crowd of chickens I saw milling around the floor of the vast barn complex, I'd gladly choose the latter, however its still not quite the ideal I had in mind.

In comes Val, our new Transylvanian Naked Neck, and her lovely large brown eggs. Because we were saving some to give to the priests who serve our parish we actually had yet to eat any of Val's eggs until this morning. Charlotte eagerly helped crack them and was excited to make breakfast with me, however we only had two of Val's eggs to the third egg I added to the skillet was one of the cage-free eggs we had bought. The difference was stunning, in fact I had flashbacks to the day we compared industrial eggs to cage-free eggs. The difference was so stark that while our typical breakfast conversation is Charlotte asking for more "yellow egg" (yolk) today she was asking for another bite of "orange egg."

I'll give you 1 guess as to which 2 are Val's

Why are Val's eggs so much deeper in color? Because not only is Val not confined to a tiny cage, not only is she allowed to walk around and scratch up the dirt to eat bugs and rocks (both of which have a wide array of mineral contributions to her diet) but she also gets to see the light of day. Whether you care about humane animal practices, if you care about your food you'll quickly realize that a happy chicken, is a productive chicken, in both the quality and quantity of her eggs.

I can only imagine what it would be like to compare Val's egg to an industrial egg, it would be like seeing a yolk's ghost.

Moral of the story? Don't just eat your colors. Eat vivid, deep, rich colors, because there's more food in there than their pale counterparts.

The Makings of an Artist

We're having quite the busy week here on the LAC home front, so please forgive our brief absence.  My cousin moved into town with her 2 young girls close in age to ours and we've been enjoying the play dates and dinners and trying to help them get moved in as easily as possible. 

 St. Charles Boremeo by Gwyneth Holsten was commissioned by us for our daughter Charlotte

We also got to have dinner with our wonderful friend, Gwyneth, to talk about art and Christmas presents!  Gwyneth Holsten is probably the most talented person I know, and she's made art for both our family and our friend's for quite awhile. We're hoping to start a local artist's cooperative with both her and Mark Thomason, another family friend/artist, and maybe a few others.

St Joan- Painting on Canvas by Mark Thomason

But, just so you don't think we've abandoned ship....

We spent money.

Wait, what?  What did I just say?  We broke a rule!  Yep, we did.  Well, actually, we didn't exactly.  An unwritten rule that Joey and I agreed on at the beginning of the month was that if we found something that we've been looking for at an unbelievably low price, that it would be stupid and prideful to pass up that opportunity just for the sake of the "experiment".  Specifically, we've been looking for a new wheel for Joey's studio because his has been unbalanced since we bought it 2 years ago, and we don't have the equipment or the mechanical aptitude to fix it ourselves- which leaves us only the option to get it professionally centered, and we haven't found anybody in the area willing or able to do that for us without great effort or expense.  So we decided to look for a totally mechanical wheel (instead of the kick wheel that he currently has).  With a centered wheel, Joey should be able to throw several pieces a day, which should amount to money in our pockets by the end of the month if we plan things right. 

Apothecary Jars by Joey

But really, since it was a business expense, does that really count?  :)

So hopefully in the next few weeks, Joey's Etsy store will stop making that annoying cricket chirping sound and get filled with beautiful mugs and bowls and the like in order to help us on our journey towards true sustainability.

The Experiment

Welcome to our new blog!  We're a young family, with two beautiful daughters, and we're both educated-and unemployed.

We're Joey and Brittany, married in early 2009 while Joey was finishing his degree in ceramics and philosophy while Brittany was working as a non-profit social worker.  We've never expected to make a lot of money doing the things we love to do, and still don't.  But after we had our 1st daughter, Charlotte, in November of 2009, and we realized that it would cost us money for Brittany to continue working with daycare and travel costs, so we became a no-income family.  We were lucky enough to have the remainder of Joey's school and some of our basic living expenses paid and saved for, but we never expected to have to live on that for this long.

Joey graduated in December of 2010 with a BFA in Fine Arts  and a BA in Philosophy-aka "bartending".  In the first few months after school, we worked hard looking for a job for him, but realized quite quickly that this was not likely in this economy.  In the 8 months since graduating, he's had 2 interviews. 

But life is good!  We've grown as a family so much!  Brittany's learned how to cook everything from scratch, we've given up soda, and take out pizza, and lots of other "luxuries" that most people our age consider "essentials".  But in all this, we are still finding ourselves part of a very consumeristic society.  If there's something we need, we head to the store- the thrift store usually- or onto amazon.  We research and we fret over that last penny, but we still go over our budget.  We're just too comfortable with the availabilty of our credit card.

So we're starting a family experiment this month to kick start our new blog.  We're going to spend no money for the month of September!

The Rules
For one month, we will not buy things.  Paying our electric bill, obviously, does not qualify as buying a thing.  Going out to eat, on the other hand, does.

We will be paying our recurring monthly bills during this month, but we will be trying to keep them as low as possible.  Quick showers and no more AC and a few more rules should help.  We'll be comparing our water, electricity and phone bills at the end of the month to see how we did.

We will attempt to feed our family on no money, but will allow a small budget for fresh fruits and vegetables to keep our family healthy and strong.  We will not compromise our Real Food values in the interest of free food.

Our first resource for food will be what we already have in our house (and no we didn't stock up on anything, except butter which was on a great sale this week, beforehand).  We will eat from the back of our pantry and freezer and from what is left of our poor little garden before we buy anything.

Our second resource for food will be bartering.  We have a farmer's market near us on mondays and tuesdays with a farmer we've already established a bartering realationship with who will be a good go to for this.

It there's still something we need, we will purchase it at the lowest price possible.

We won't just "hold off" until October 1st and go on a spending frenzy.  We will genuinely attempt to source out those things that we would otherwise purchase in a free or nearly free manner.  For example,  Joey is currently looking for lumber to build raised beds for our gardens for next year, and Brittany is looking for things like a yogurt maker, and books.

Necessities don't count.  If we need to purchase medicine, we will do it.  If we have to go to the doctor, we will go.

In the end, the goal isn't to spend no money, but to not make purchases. 

The reason people buy things is because it's convienent.  The less convienent something becomes, the less expensive it becomes.  That's the society we belong to.  We don't want to do things, so we pay people to do the things we can do for ourselves.  But our goal isn't to remove ourselves from that society (go "off-grid") but to find our resources through the community we live in, in as low impact a way as possible.

Want to follow us on this journey and see just how good (or poorly) we do?  Jump on board and see Our Live Active Culture in action!