S3 E4 – Sourcing Vegetables w/ Tyler Boggs

Welcome to

The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 3: Real Food on a Budget. We’re dedicating this season to discussing an aspect of natural healing that often gets left out of the conversation: affordability. We’ll be chatting with experts and peers from the AIP community about how to best balance money with your health priorities.

This season is brought to you by our title sponsor, The Nutritional Therapy Association (NTA), a holistic nutrition school that trains and certifies nutritional therapy practitioners and consultants with an emphasis on bioindividual nutrition. Learn more about them by visiting NutritionalTherapy.com, or read about our experiences going through their NTP and NTC programs in our comparison article.

Season 3 Episode 4 is all about the best ways to source produce — veggies and fruit — with budget in mind. This is a deep dive into all things produce sourcing! We cover our personal sourcing tips and how we personally save money, and we chat with our guest, Tyler Boggs of Heart2Heart Farms, about the benefits of CSAs and how to source your fruits and veggies if you can’t afford organic. Scroll down for the full episode transcript!

How to listen:

If you’d like to have our podcasts sent directly to your device, subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher!

If you’d like to download the .mp3, you can do so by following this link.

If you’d like to play the episode right now in your browser, use the player below!

Full Transcript:

Mickey Trescott: Welcome to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast, a resource for those seeking to live well with chronic illness. I’m Mickey Trescott, a nutritional therapy practitioner living well with autoimmune disease in Oregon. I’m the author of The Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook, and I’m using diet and lifestyle to best manage both Hashimoto’s and Celiac disease.

Angie Alt: And I’m Angie Alt. I’m a certified health coach and nutritional therapy consultant, also living well with autoimmune disease in Maryland. I’m the author of The Alternative Autoimmune Cookbook, and I’m using diet and lifestyle to best manage my endometriosis, lichen sclerosis, and Celiac disease.

After recovering our health by combining the best of conventional medicine with effective and natural dietary and lifestyle interventions, Mickey and I started blogging at www.AutoimmuneWellness.com, where our collective mission is seeking wellness and building community.

We also wrote a book called The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook together that serves as a do-it-yourself guidebook to living well with chronic illness.

Mickey Trescott: If you’re looking for more information about the autoimmune protocol, make sure to sign up for our newsletter at autoimmunewellness.com, so we can send you our free quick start guide. It contains printable AIP food lists, a 2-week food plan, a 90-minute batch cooking video, a mindset video, and food reintroduction guides.

This season of the podcast, real food on a budget is brought to you by our title sponsor, The Nutritional Therapy Association.

Angie Alt: A quick disclaimer: The content in this podcast is intended as general information only, and is not to be substituted for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Onto the podcast!

Topics:

1. Budget friendly sourcing of produce [2:14]

2. Personal sourcing tips from Mickey and Angie [8:40]

3. Guest interview with Tyler Boggs of Heart2Heart Farms [14:22]

4. Personal approach to budgeting for produce [18:54]

5. Produce scoring stories [24:24]

6. Sourcing when you can’t afford organic [29:45]

7. Benefits of a CSA [34:01]

Angie Alt: Hi everyone! Angie here. Welcome back to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast season 3. How are you doing, Mickey?

Mickey Trescott: I’m doing great, how about you Angie?

Angie Alt: I’m good. I’ve been flying around to the West Coast a bunch, but I am home today and ready to chat about our next topic.

Mickey Trescott: I know, Angie’s been like a little ping-pong ball, back and forth.

Angie Alt: It’s been kind of crazy. I just traveled out to the West three times in three weeks, you guys. But I’m ready to do it. Anything for the cause. {laughs}

Mickey Trescott: {laughs}

1. Budget friendly sourcing of produce [2:14]

Angie Alt: Ok, so today we’re continuing our discussion related to the topic this season, real food on a budget. This episode is going to be about how to source produce. From veggies to fruit with a budget in mind.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, so we really wanted to take a deep dive into all things produce sourcing. Because there’s kind of a lot of nuance here. So if you guys have the Autoimmune Wellness Handbook, you will be familiar with the concept of good, better, and best that we talk about when it comes to food sourcing in general. But we kind of wanted to go over it in terms of produce.

So what this means is that you have a few different layers of quality that you can choose to buy your produce. So instead of saying everybody needs to buy the highest level, and this is the only way to heal. We’re kind of presenting a variety of ways that you guys can plan your sourcing. So that you can make the most use of the resources that you have.

So first category is good. This is for those of you who can’t get all organic fruits and vegetables. What we recommend doing is to start with the Environmental Working Groups list of dirtiest and cleanest produce. If you guys do a quick Google, type in EWG dirty dozen, and clean 15, you’ll come up with a cute little chart where the Environmental Working Group has tested all the fruits and vegetables in production in the US, and they’ve identified the ones that have the highest chemical residue of pesticides and stuff.

So, this is a really great way to kind of prioritize your fruit and veggie choices, right Angie?

Angie Alt: Yeah. Well, this is a way for you to kind of get the max out of the foods that you can afford to buy organic, and kind of be really strategic about those purchases, so you’re not having to spend so much money on totally organic and utilizing the research to do that.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah. So the 2017 dirty dozen list; I have it pulled up here. They don’t have the 2018 list out yet. I think it’s coming out soon. But the dirty dozen. These are the fruits and vegetables with the highest amount of pesticides. Strawberries, apples, nectarines, peaches, celery, grapes, cherries, spinach, tomatoes, sweet bell peppers, cherry tomatoes, and cucumbers. We know you guys are probably not eating tomatoes and sweet bell peppers, if you’re on AIP. But those are going to be foods that have the highest pesticides. And you know, some of those are pretty surprising to me. Like cucumbers, I maybe wouldn’t have thought. But you know, those are the ones that were tested.

The clean 15 list has avocados, sweet corn, pineapple, cabbage, sweet peas, onions, mangos, asparagus, papaya, kiwi, eggplant, honeydew, grapefruit, cantaloupe, and cauliflower. So these were the vegetables that were shown to have the least amount of pesticides. So they might be ok for you to get conventional.

So some things like cauliflower, or cabbage, or onions. These are vegetables that are AIP friendly. Avocado. I buy conventional avocados a lot just because they’re on the top of the clean 15 list, they don’t have a lot of pesticides, and also they have a nice thick skin. And organic avocados; super expensive.

Angie Alt: Super expensive. Yeah, I do totally the same thing. One thing I didn’t realize, though. I hadn’t realized that cauliflower was on the clean 15 list, and I’ve been buying organic. So I’ll probably switch up. Because I like to use a lot of different cauliflower in my cooking.

Mickey Trescott: Yep. Yeah, so in addition to the dirty dozen and the clean 15 and kind of being able to prioritize there; something else you can do is watch for some sales on organic local in-season produce. So it’s usually way more economical to buy this way and checking out frozen vegetables. A lot of times freezing preserves nutrients, and is also lower cost. So if you guys are just getting started with upping the quality of your food, some of those recommendations might work for you.

Angie Alt: Right. So moving onto the better category. So this is the next step up in terms of budgeting and sourcing. If you can avoid some organic produce, you can focus on organic versions of those on the dirty dozen list. And round out a variety with the non-organic fruits and vegetables from that clean 15 list that we talked about. And you can shop at your local farmer’s market, and look for great deals on organic local produce.

If you focus on the local produce, the idea here is that you might find that your budget actually accommodates more of the organic. Because you won’t have the shipping cost as part of the premium you’re paying at the store.

Mickey Trescott: And then the best. So if you’re going to go all out and get the best produce you possibly can, which we recommend over the long term the more you can shift that budget to kind of up the food quality all across the board, you would be getting all, or as much of your produce as possible, organic, local, and in season. A great way to do this is by joining a CSA, which stands for community supported agriculture. This is when you pay the share of a farmer’s produce at the beginning of the season, and then the farmer has that money to invest and creating that harvest. And then you pick it up weekly. Sometimes they’ll deliver it to you. And then filling in whatever you’re not getting there with a variety at the farmer’s market co-op, natural food store.

I would also add her that the very, very best is actually growing your own. Right? So if you have complete control over all aspects of producing your food, that’s the most sustainable and it’s going to be the freshest. It’s going to be, obviously, the most in-season because you don’t have all the tricks that all the industrial even organic food growers have up their sleeves. And it’s going to be really convenient; it’s going to be right at home.

2. Personal sourcing tips from Mickey and Angie [8:30]

Angie Alt: Right. So great option if you can do that. So maybe we should talk about how we source our produce, Mickey.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah. So I live in Willamette Valley in Oregon. I live in an area where I can grow a lot. And actually something that I am striving to do better every single year is to become more self-reliant and grow my own food. So, we have a big herb garden that we use year-round. I grow lots of greens like kale, chard, lettuces, and zucchini.

Something that I learned, even when I lived in Seattle in the city when I really didn’t have a lot of food budget for good produce, was I actually found a chart online that said the most expensive produce per ounce from high to low. And actually, the highest cost that we pay in the store is actually herbs and greens. So things like cilantro, rosemary, thyme. And then the greens like the baby lettuces, spinach, kale, chard. And those are actually the easiest things to grow and they take the smallest amount of room. They don’t need a super deep bed. A lot of them can be grown in pots. So those are things that I prioritize growing just because of cost.

Another thing that I do is I pick my own in the summer. In the summer, there’s a crazy bounty of things like berries. My husband and I will go to the farm and we’ll pick pounds and pounds of blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, and then we’ll freeze them. And like right now, it’s the middle of winter, and we still have a bunch of frozen berries from the summer. Something else we do is we harvest persimmons from a persimmon tree in the winter, and so kind of the flip side.

And then I have different produce sourcing depending on if it’s summer or if it’s winter. Because even though we live somewhere that food grows, it’s not totally year-round. So in the summer, that’s when it’s amazing bounty all the time. I like to go to the farmer’s market. I haven’t been doing a CSA the last couple of years because I’ve been traveling so much that it’s a little complicated trying to figure out what to do with that food. I’m considering it this year because I’m not traveling as much.

In the winter, I fill in the gaps with like a Fred Myers, which for those of you who don’t live in the Northwest, it’s kind of like a Walmart. I don’t actually have a great specialty grocer where I live. I don’t have a Whole Foods, or even a Sprouts or Trader Joe’s. So actually surprisingly, they have a pretty good selection of organic produce in the winter. It’s the same industrial organic stuff that you find at Whole Foods. Honestly, it’s a lot cheaper because it’s not in a fancy store. But that’s where I kind of round out my produce when I have to.

Angie Alt: Awesome. So, I also have a mix, depending on the season. In the summertime, I get 100% organic CSA from my local farmer. The same farmer that I get most of my meat from. And she grows a bunch of different herbs, greens, onions, some fruits. Honestly, there’s a lot of nightshades in that CSA, but my husband and daughter can enjoy some of that. or we share it with neighbors or friends.

Even when I travel, I like having the weekly CSA. I usually arrange with a friend of mine who also enjoys this quality of food and have her pick up my CSA, and basically share it with her family. Like a little gift to her when I’m traveling.

And then in the winter, I mostly use Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods, and I get a combination of organic and non-organic fruits and vegetables. Usually based on that Environmental Working Groups guide. I don’t grow a lot of my own, because I live in a pretty urban/suburban area and I don’t really have a space for that. I have done a little bit of pot gardening in the past. Growing some greens in pots and stuff on our balcony. Mostly I stick to purchasing from my local farms, or the Trader Joe’s/Whole Foods combo. So that’s it. That’s my produce sourcing.

Mickey Trescott: Awesome. I think it’s good to just share with people the different ways that we get our hands on this stuff. I am blessed to live kind of in farm country, but I also don’t have a good grocery store right by me. So by necessity, I’m forced to be a little more self-reliant. And Angie, I know you have a lot of options as far as stores around you, and you can actually leverage that and shop around. It’s more convenient for you to kind of see where you can get for the best price.

Angie Alt: Right. Right. Ok, so that’s it for the first half of this episode, you guys. We’ll be back after the break with a guest who is going to help us expand these ideas. He’s kind of amazing. We can’t wait to share.

Mickey Trescott: A quick word from our title sponsor this season, the Nutritional Therapy Association. The NTA empowers it’s graduates to source, prepare, and integrate a variety of well-sourced plant foods as part of a nutrient dense diet. For example, did you know that the betaine in beets aids digestion? Chromium in romaine lettuce can help regulate blood sugar? And that brussels sprouts have been found to boost beneficial gut bacteria? Through their nutritional therapy practitioner training program, which I took in 2012, and the nutritional therapy consultant program, which Angie took in 2015, the NTA teaches students to use foods therapeutically and focuses on building foundational health by integrating customized diets based on everybody’s unique needs.

For more information on the NTA’s nutritional therapy programs, and to access their free 7-day 101 course, check out their website at www.NutritionalTherapy.com.

3. Guest interview with Tyler Boggs of Heart2Heart Farms [14:22]

Mickey Trescott: Alright guys, onto our interview for today. It’s just Mickey for this segment. Today we are speaking with Tyler Boggs, one half of the duo behind the incredible Heart2Heart Farms here in Oregon, with his wife, Elizabeth. Tyler and Elizabeth started raising animals and growing food after they converted to a real food lifestyle, but found that it was difficult to afford it. Not only did they start their farm to produce food for themselves, but they passionately developed a barter and work-trade systems to allow those in need to feed those they love.

A few short years later, Tyler has never been happier, sharing what he has and providing a sanctuary where people can nourish their bodies, minds, hearts, and souls. Other than being a good husband and father, there is no higher caller in the world to him than that. Thank you