Healing Myself through Feeding Others

Something really interesting began to happen to me around the time I started going back to church, in January of 2022. I began finding little old ladies to feed in my community.

No, I’m serious. I began to collect them. Everywhere I moved, I collected another little old lady to feed, without fail.

You see, it all started with pickles. I learned how to make pickles from scratch for my very tall and hungry husband because he could eat half of a jar of pickles in a single sitting. In my journey to health, I decided if he was going to eat pickles, he’d eat homemade ones with homemade ingredients so that I knew he wasn’t mainlining Yellow 40.

I then made a jar of pickles for my elderly neighbor in our triplex, and baked her cinnamon rolls for her birthday.

Then there was another lady at church who ALSO got cinnamon rolls for her birthday.

Then my husband and I moved to a condo community where I collected a lovely Catholic woman who lived across the complex. She was disabled and just had knee replacement surgery when I met her, so naturally I offered to bring her a couple of hot meals while she recovered. In talking to her, she’d been living alone a very long time and got so excited about simple things like getting red meat to enjoy, which she generally couldn’t afford on her fixed income. I began bringing her over a hot dinner a couple of days per week.

Around this time, I began to learn how to pressure can.

I wished I’d known about pressure canning YEARS ago. You can’t can cheezits or fruit snacks or french fries or marshmallows. That may seem obvious, but there’s a point to me saying this. You can pretty much only pressure can what exists in nature (minus grains and dairy for the most part. I’m sure there’s cheats, but that’s the general rule).

Pressure canning is the art form of spending four hours in your kitchen over approximately fourteen bowls of ingredients and three pots of different flavored stocks and making endless combinations with them while micromanaging an extremely hot and pressurized container. My sweet husband quipped one time that I looked like I was directing a “food orchestra” with my wild spoon-waving and all of my ingredients chopped up, filling every bowl in the house. And I won’t lie, on pressure canning day, I occasionally get a little stressed. It’s kind of stimulation overload. My husband came in to make himself a cup of coffee and I yelled at him because one more device making noise would make me lose it.

That was a funny day.

Pressure canning is fantastic for buying lots of meat and veggies at once, and then preserving them to be shelf-stable for a couple of years. I have popped open a jar of chicken soup from over a year ago and it still tastes like the afternoon I made it. I am serious. Lots of people have concerns over botulism, but may I remind you, women were pressure canning in the 1800’s. If it seals, it’s generally safe. You can tell by how the lid sounds, If you flick the lid with your fingernail and it’s a light “plink” rather than a heavy “donk”, your jar is safe.

Yes, plinks and donks. I will die on this hill. Canners, back me up. Plinks and donks.

When my husband and I moved down to where we live now, in Olympia, Washington, I was able to return to the church I had originally found God in, given that we’d moved out of the area for a couple of years. This was such a blessing, because, again, I found yet another little old lady to feed, a precious woman to me who invited me into her home for scripture study in a women’s group a couple of years before. This year, however, she and her husband had been going to lots of medical appointments, and I began bringing them various jars of soups and stews to tide them over on busy nights.

My pressure canning has gotten extremely refined. I highly recommend the book The Canning Diva by Dianne Devereaux.

Recently, as I came to a Wednesday night prayer group with my church, I found myself talking about my health journey through food and my keto diet. I found myself counseling a young woman on fasting, and another woman asked me for advice on my keto diet, which I promptly spent hours typing up to send to her. I talk about my brain health-food health connection to anyone who wants to know my story.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I made contact with my neighbor, an absolutely lovely woman about my own age who works at home (and works too much) in a high-stress job. Me being me, I asked her about her diet, given how much I know about the link between mental health and what we eat. I offered to become her personal chef, and she happily and gratefully agreed!

I made my first food delivery to her midweek last week- flank steak and vegetable stir fry with brown rice, salmon, veggies and brown rice/quinoa, some keto chocolate fudge bars with dates, and a batch of egg and bacon muffins. Tomorrow I make her next batch of food- turkey pesto meatballs with spaghetti squash and a chicken verde salsa mexi bowl, with local butcher pork sausage and egg muffins for breakfast and a round of homemade lemon hummus.

This is all stuff that’s easy to make. Cooking is not hard. You just have to get to know your food.

Then today, as I went to the grocery store and was accosted by the Girl Scouts with their poison boxes (which, word on the street is that the Girl Scouts are being sued for heavy metal toxicity in their cookies, which is why I call them poison boxes), I decided to tell them about a ketogenic diet instead. The woman was floored when I told her that in me, it cured nearly everything. I then told her where to buy allulose chocolate (goalz.com, shoutout to the best chocolatiers on the planet) and she said I should become a nutritional life coach.

And now we have arrived here, to the exact moment that I am typing up this blog post.

People, I am telling you, what you eat, and what you don’t eat, will make the difference between you living a happy life and living a miserable one. There is no further black and white way to say this. WE ARE WHAT WE EAT.

Some of us are puddles of Coors Light and a pile of seed-oil fries.

Some of us are endless oceans of pepperoni and cheese.

Some of us are piles of sugar rotting us.

What are you made of?

I decided to become made of nature, and I am not lacking in goodies. My date bars with coconut sugar-sweetened chocolate chips and walnuts can rival any fudge in existence.

The closer we eat to nature, the closer we are to health. And when we cook in nature, and we give that nature away to others, what you are saying to them is, “You deserve to be nourished.”

It feels good to nourish others, as I have learned that all other people are really just a mirror of ourselves. By feeding others, we also make sure we, in turn, are fed, and being fed isn’t always food. Sometimes doing good works is spiritual food.

More on that another day.