This Friday marks the beginning of the 2007 Weston A. Price Foundation’s annual conference which I will be attending. The Weston A. Price Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to wise traditions in food and farming. Its founder, Sally Fallon, is a true nutritional and agricultural pioneer who has worked hard to shed light on long forgotten fundamentals of human health.
Weston A. Price, as many of you who are familiar with this site know, was a pioneer of human health. He traveled to the far corners of the globe, from New Zealand to the Arctic, from Africa to the Andes, in search of the common denominators of human health. The basic fundamentals of his findings are incontrovertible. The people he found living on their native diets just 80 years ago exemplified a level of human health now currently incomprehensible to modern man in the 21st century. All of the imperfections that we view as normal today ? from crooked teeth and less than perfect vision to degenerative illness of all kinds, were absent from his primitive study groups.
His research showed, to a degree of irrefutability, that the introduction of modern processed foods like white table sugar, white flour, canned foods, and commercial vegetable oils in lieu of wholesome animal products and properly cultivated whole foods of our ancestors, was the fundamental root cause of nearly all illnesses at the time ? not just chronic, but perhaps infectious as well. But as commercial entities began to witness the power of making nutritional claims for their products and pointing fingers at whole foods that had been eaten for centuries as the cause of newly emerging diseases, the research of Weston A. Price fell completely by the wayside.
That was until a revival of his work was built by the voices of Sally Fallon, Ron Schmid, and others associated with what is now the Weston A. Price Foundation. And this organization, along with Slow Foods, Eat Wild, and others, has created a revolution, moving slowly but surely, towards making truly nutritious whole foods of the utmost quality available ? along with accurate information regarding them.
Basically, this foundation serves as a beacon of light and hope for those who are genuinely interested in incorporating true nourishment into their day to day lives. It offers an escape from an overbearing food industry based on economic efficiency and convenience. It provides information on human health and what comprises an ideal human diet without the pollution of concepts such as marketability. It provides an alternative to nutritional science that has sworn allegiance to commercial interests. And it manages to do this while serving up an idyllic image of harmonious agriculture, the beauty of nature’s cycles, and the nostalgia of simple times when food was the familial, social, and cultural centerpiece of the human experience. It follows suit with the basic underlying philosophy cultivated by Price during his bold quest for understanding, ?life in its fullness is mother nature obeyed.
Needless to say, I anticipate feeling quite at home at the conference this weekend (11/9-11). I will be hearing a number of nutritional and agricultural professionals speak and present their views and findings. We will share healthy and balanced homemade meals. And in conclusion we will take a tour of several Virginia farms working diligently to provide for those inspired by the simple beauty of nature and nourishment.
Each day I will post a commentary on the discussions of the day, so please follow along to see what jumps out as being the most interesting and worthwhile information. Feel free to ask questions between now and this weekend that you would like me to consider while at the conference. I will be your personal reporter on anything and everything that I hear that pertains to your question. Email me or call me with them at sacredself@gmail.com or (808) 269-0369.
And to better get to know the Weston A. Price Foundation and the resources available in your area for ideal food, visit www.westonaprice.org