Deep Nutrition Food—We believe in deep nutrition. Bone broth, offal, heirloom vegetables grown in non-depleted soil, pasture eggs. We believe in it for practical reasons. Once you start eating nutritious food, you find your health improving. You find the flavor satisfying. Once you start eating nutritious food, you find yourself craving it.
Even — drum roll— liver jerky, no joke. The body knows.
Deep Nutrition is Long Term Thinking
People eat all sorts of things in an emergency, it doesn’t have to be full of vitamins. Weevily wheat and shoe leather. Any port in a storm. The long run doesn’t matter if you don’t survive the short run.
But in the long run, calories aren’t enough.
Deep nutrition is long term thinking. You are storing up in your body health now so you can maintain your physical wellbeing in the decades to come. Let’s go farther. Deep nutrition for your children is generational thinking. Because pregnancy and conception are so demanding and so life-defining, and so dependent on the health of the parents, deep nutrition is even multi-generational thinking.
Include Nutrition in your Food Stores
Earlier we suggested you cushion you and your loved ones against the coming crises with a little bit of food stores. You have some different good options, but the cheapest ones in terms of calories are rice and beans. If you haven’t yet, give it a run down.
Rice and beans with salt is the short term. It will keep you fed. It will not be a disaster nutritionally.
But deep nutrition it isn’t and that’s ok, deep nutrition isn’t the point.
Let’s do talk deep nutrition food stores though. Is there a way to survive and thrive? Obviously storing months worth of salad isn’t practical. What is?
Let’s go through three options. The best option is last.
Multivitamins
The quick answer is multi-vitamins. They can be cheap, they store well, and they are compact.
They aren’t ideal. Bio-availability is an issue. Even more of an issue is the lack of some nutrients. Real food contains a bunch of minor nutrients that won’t be in a multivitamin, including nutrients that science hasn’t even discovered yet.
But an important steading principle is that good enough is good enough. Multivitamins aren’t ideal, but they are probably good enough.
Canning bone broth
Bone broth is delicious and highly nutritious. Rice and beans cooked in bone broth are almost a gourmet meal.
You wouldn’t want to buy bone broth. But if you are the sort who cans, bones are cheap from your local butcher (usually free). It takes awhile, but the results are worth it.
You get delicious, highly nutritious broth. The downsides are all the effort involved and how much space bone broth takes up to store.
Liver jerky
This is a much better option than you think.
We are not liver fans. Not many people are. It was a shame to let all that good nutrition go to the dog whenever we butchered an animal, but let it go to dog we did, because we couldn’t stand the stuff.
Then a friend suggested we make some liver jerky. We gave it a try. Would you believe it, the results were surprisingly good! We can’t tolerate liver but we can tolerate liver jerky, especially in the small quantities you want to eat the stuff. We even find ourselves craving it sometimes. We assume when we are low on nutrients of some kind.
Then we tried liver jerky dried at a low heat, below 115 degrees, to better maintain the nutrients. The flavor was even better.
Liver is cheap from the butcher (often close to free). Its easy to jerk. It slices easy. And its easy to store. We keep it in our freezer to be safe but it could be kept out. It doesn’t take much space because you don’t need much liver jerky. An ounce or so a week.
We have gone from giving liver to the dog to actually asking the butcher for liver. Our kids eat it without complaining and ask for it sometimes when theyhit a growth spurt.
You owe it to yourself to try this. You may be surprised.