Detoxing your kitchen

My tips on creating a

health conscious kitchen

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“holy crap I own a lot of….crap”

Have you ever moved house and thought “holy crap I own a lot of….crap”?

It’s amazing how much ‘stuff’ we accumulate over just a short period of time. I have lived in a 1 bedroom in NYC for 4.5 years and let me tell you I feel like I am on a never ending mission to constantly remove items – let’s just say, they know me well at the local goodwill.

In the journey which we call life, we accumulate a lot - clothes, books, pieces of useless paper my tax accountant likes to call ‘important’ pfft - but one area of the home that we tend to neglect when we are on the constant journey to purge all of the useless shit from our lives is the kitchen.

What prompted me to write this post was when I looked in my fridge the other day, looking for somewhere to ram my bowl full of oats I was soaking and when I was pushing the door shut to make sure nothing else would fall out – to the judgmental eyes of my husband – I realized that the ‘shove and shut’ method that usually works well for me, would not play in this instance.

I needed a kitchen detox.

First shocker – I found a can of Pepsi and a red bull – that liquid poisonous crap I hadn’t put in my body in over 10 years WAS IN MY FRIDGE.

How the heck did this get here? And if I of all people, the plant-based preacher who annoys the crap out of everyone by telling them how to live their lives – had a can of soda in MY fridge, I began to wonder what everyone else was hiding back there.

Herein began my "let’s annoy Matt by pulling everything out of the fridge and pantry (I say pantry, but that’s cute. In NYC terms my pantry is otherwise known as an under-counter cabinet) and putting in on the countertop and floor" adventure.

So while I ended up with a couple of trash bags of food donations, frozen food waste for the compost collection, a bag full of expired flours with those stupid little bugs in it (I could google what they are but tbh I don’t really care) and a consolidated spice collection (I am one of those people who’s all ‘yes, I will need another cayenne pepper’ before actually checking what is up in the spice rack. Spoiler: I already had three half jars) I gots to thinking...

...why don’t I do this more often?

Apart from the obvious answer: because I am a lazy fuck, it made me question my own purchase decision making process as well as my whole ‘don’t throw it away it’s a waste’ mentality. I am one of those people who likes to NOT WASTE THINGS and respect our planet, so that means sometimes at the end of a weekend trip with friends I will put everything into a bag to ‘take home for later’, but given no one else wants that half eaten cheese or the red bull, I will take it myself rather than toss it – even though I KNOW I will not even eat it.

What in the world possesses me to do this? Oh that’s right the overwhelming amount of trash and FOOD WASTE we generate. I figure its better off in my ‘pantry’ than the bin. But no more. This is my guide to the kitchen detox.

You’ll Need:

Determination

Garbage Bags

Time

Non-judgmental husbands, ideally do this when they are not around so they don’t cry when you throw out all this crap

Method:

Set aside some time for this purge-fest. I prefer to do this in the morning after my workout when I am feeling all sparkly and better than everyone else for my perfect lifestyle choices. This is not something to do when you are either hungover or hungry.

No. 1

Get rid of anything that has more numbers rather than letters on the label. Tip the ‘food’ into the trash and recycle the box / container (please!). Do not fall for the ‘but I might need this later’ mentality like you do with your clothes and books – I know your sort – be ruthless.

Anything that is full of processed chemicals, sugars and other artificial ingredients is a NO GO for a healthy kitchen. Be rid of it.

No. 2

Scrutinize the labels if you are going to keep anything in a box or package. Ideally 80%-90% of the food in your kitchen is label free because it is a whole food (except for those little stickers they put on the fruit!). Be wary of the food industry tricks of the trade:

No. 3

Ignore “healthy” food claims you often see plastered all over the packaging in bright letters and go straight for the ingredient list. Food companies spend a LOT of money trying to confuse you into thinking something is healthy when it is not by distracting you from the actual ingredients.

No. 4

If you cannot pronounce an ingredient – and don’t be fooled by the fancy Latin names – or there are more numbers than letters, its going in the bin.

No. 5

Note the order in which the ingredients are listed. The most abundant ingredient is first, then listed in order of their descending inclusion in the food product.

No. 6

Be wary for the secret code words for sugar, there are over 30. Obvious ones are brown-rice syrup, corn sweetener / syrup, cane juice, dextrin, fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, maltodextrin; just to name a few. For a full list check here.

What to ditch:

Processed Sugar:

YAH we all know this. Cereals, flavorings, snack-foods and condiments. Do not forget the condiments. These are always massive culprits for hidden sugars. Premade salad dressings, mustards and ketchups all contain hidden sugars. Bye Felicia.

Bad Fats:

Fat has had such a bad-wrap, the 90’s scapegoat ostracized in the same way carbs and Brittney spears were. But not all fats are created equal. Good fats include naturally occurring fats from avocado, nuts and seeds. Bad fats wear a balaclava and hunt you in the night. JK. They include refined cooking oils like corn and soy, fried foods stored in the freezer (I’m looking at you hubs – I don’t care if you have Asian heritage, those dim sums are outta here!), margarine (seriously do people still eat this? If so, you have more to worry about than detoxing your kitchen please google how this is made).

These are trans fats that create inflammation and cause heart disease. Looks for the term “hydrogenated fat” which the FDA has declared not safe for consumption.

Artificial Sweeteners:

his stuff might seem like a good idea from where you sit on your sugar-free high horse, but trust me – they aint. Anything containing aspartame, NutraSweet, Splenda, or ending in with “ose” or “ol”, like sorbitol has got to be trashed. These sweeteners have been stripped of anything considered nutritious while also accelerating the aging process, causing inflammation, leads to weight gain and diabetes and are linked to cancer. YUMMY!

Best alternatives are naturally occurring, non-processed sweeteners like dates, dried fruit, coconut sugar, raw honey (if you are not vegan) and maple syrup.

Dairy:

Dairy is one of the biggest causes of inflammation in the body due to the presence of casein which is hard for almost all adults to break down. Add to this the ethical and health reasons why you should stay away. Cows are raised with hormones, genetically-modified feed and artificially impregnated all so you can gulp down a glass of its puss filled excretion created for the nourishment and growth of its calf, not a human.

I feel like the truth about dairy is finally coming into the spot light, so I will not dwell on this. There really is no excuse anymore, given the abundance of alternatives available. Mic drop.

What to Add:

Superfoods:

This is where you can go a little cray cray up in here, especially if you live near a wholefoods or surprisingly, a Fairway (their bulk section is quite good). Superfoods are all the rage, and for good reason. I like to by mine either online or bulk and store in air-tight glass jars. Some of the items I keep on hand for smoothies or salads are the obvious contenders – chia and flax seeds, hemp seeds, organic cacao powder, coconut sugar, maca, acai berry powder, hemp protein, bee pollen and nutritional yeast (both great sources of B12), Ceylon cinnamon (do not buy the generic ‘cinnamon’), turmeric powder

Super herbs:

I have spoken about the newest squad member (blog on 2016 wellness trends, if I could link to it I would but this website is a c.u.n.t and won’t let me), but super herbs have been long known for their healing properties in Eastern medicine but are only just making their way into mainstream culture thanks to people like David Wolfe.

Keep your eyes peeled for Chlorella, Zeolites, Astragalus Root, Shilajit, Gynostemma, Camu Camu Berry and Pearl just to name a few. My prediction is – Mushrooms will blow up in 2016.

Coconut Oil:

Yeah yeah we all know. Use coconut oil it will make you immortal and shoot rainbows from your eyeballs. Next.

Kimchi and other fermented products:

Fermented foods are GREAT for our guts microbiome. As more research is done on the gut, more and more scientists and health care professionals are realizing that our “second brain” is more intricate and complex than perhaps our “first brain”.

Fermented foods such as Kimchi, kombucha, Kifir, Sauerkraut and pickled vegetables provide an army of probiotics (Lactobacillus) to the gut that the microbiome feed off of. Mmmmmmm satisfied gut flora. Moving on.

Non-Wheat Grains:

While complex carbohydrates are only just beginning to shed their cloak of shame we as a western society threw over them in the 90’s, there are other forms of non-wheat carbs that should be shoved into the spotlight.

While we all know about brown rice (YUM!) and quinoa (surely we all know what quinoa is now right?), there are others which are great sources of amino acids, vitamin E and B-complex vitamins, such as kasha (roasted buckwheat), millet, teff, amaranth and sorghum.

Do not be afraid of carbs, we NEED them in order to feel satiated and lose weight. They are our bodies main source of energy, so do not deprive it of what it needs in order to thrive.

Dates, Nuts & Seeds:

Pretty self-explanatory no?

"I am so much better than everyone else..."

Ok so I need to wrap this up otherwise I will just go on forever. Long story short, do not overlook the importance of the food you keep in your kitchen in terms of your own health journey.

While I may not ever intended to drink that red bull, just its mere presence was weighing me down in the back of my mind, it’s like that top you keep even though you will never wear it – it brings me no joy having these unhealthy and toxic foods in my fridge, and just being rid of them made me feel lighter – in that return from the gym “I am so much better than everyone else sitting on the couch eating Oreo’s” kind of way. So get in there and clear out the food blockages taking up valuable real estate in your kitchen!

Image source: Roger Seller

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