Food Policy at IICD, Michigan

At IICD we are striving for healthy and active lives with which we can contribute to the poor people in the world. What we are demanding from ourselves and from the people who participate in our program, needs strong and healthy bodies and souls.

We are living in a society where food is not equal with what our bodies need and being a 100% healthy is not a state most people ever will come in. Due to excessive amount of refined sugar, corn syrup, corn starch and synthetic chemicals and hormones, most foods we buy in the supermarkets are not very good for us, in fact this food takes our energy away and makes us unhealthy. We are used to looking at health as a stage of not being sick, but at IICD we would like to promote health as being 100% healthy, full of energy, happy with life and with solid perspectives on what we want to achieve.

At IICD we want to eat and promote real food, so this is the purpose of the “IICD Food Policy”.

 

Garden Farming

We strive to grow all our own vegetables and fruits organically. It will take some years before we can be 100% self sustainable, but we have started. This means that during growing season we will not buy vegetables with few exceptions and we will grow enough vegetables to preserve for the winter. We have a big vegetable garden, bees and this coming spring we will plant 50 fruit trees, nut trees and berry bushed in the IICD Food Forrest,

Everybody living at IICD is taking part of our food production be it in the garden, with the bees and in the kitchen.

 

  

 

What we do recognize as food

There are certain kinds of items that are sold as food and also normally recognized as food, but the fact is that these items do not do anything but fill our stomachs with empty calories and even harm our body, because it is highly refined and or filled with artificial chemicals.

We acknowledge that some of the food items we do not want in our kitchen are delicious and have their right in smaller doses. We see it as your free will to choose what you eat and we will not ban these things from the IICD Community, but we do not recognize them as food, and therefore will not use our food money to purchase them. We see these items as candy and will therefore suggest you to buy them for your pocket money, if you need them. The same goes for fast food and cigarettes.

 

What we do not see as food and therefore will not have in our kitchen:

 Sugar- refined

 White rice

 White bread

 White pasta

 White flour

 Bleached flour

 Processed food like can food, premade food, premade sauces etc.

 Toast bread

 Jam with sugar

 Box cakes

 Cereals containing sugar

 Peanut butter with sugar and added oil

 Vegetable oil

 

Organic staples

We have decided always to have plenty of organic staples in the food pantry. And we will encourage everybody that cooks to use it plentifully. It is healthy food with good nutritional value. It is cheap and you will most likely eat a lot of beans at your project, so it is good to adjust to it while at IICD.

If you do not know how to cook with these kind of foods, IICD has a lot of good cookbooks and the staff is always willing to give advice.

 

What we always will have in store:

 2-4 variations of organic beans

 Organic green and red lentils

 Organic garbanzo beans

 Organic quinoa

 Organic brown rice

 Whole wheat flour

 Whole wheat pasta

 Honey

 Organic oat

 Sunflower seeds

 Flax seeds (best to grind them before use to get optimal nutrition from them)

 Unsweetened coconut flakes

 Wheat germs

 Canola oil for cooking

 Olive oil for dressings

 Many spices

 

The Food Group will shop for other food items weekly.

They will be open for your suggests for the menu.

 

Homemade food
In a culture where we are used to cooking premade food, easy to go, or Ramen noodles and toast bread, it can seem like a waste of time to put any effort into cooking from scratch, baking our bread, and making granola.

For many coming to IICD cooking might also be a new experience, and skills can be gained that you can use the rest of your life.
We believe the time in the kitchen producing healthy and tasty food served with love to all of us, is time well spent.

Food we produce every day or weekly which are not part of preparing the meals:

 Granola for breakfast

 Marmalade

 Bread from whole wheat flour

When we bake a cake we can use honey/stevia and whole wheat flour

All our meals are made from scratch

The IICD Community organizes around the food production both for the meals and for producing granola, marmalade etc.

 

Milk:

We always have cow milk and organic soy milk.

The milk is for the cereal in the morning and for coffee and tea

It is not healthy for people to drink cow milk, and we should actually not buy it. But there are different opinions and research of the need of milk, so we keep it for now, but make sure we have an alternative in soy milk.

A bit to think about: Human beings are the only mammals who drink milk after getting it from the mother’s breast. And NO other mammals drink other species milk. Why is it that human beings are so different?

We can get plenty of calcium from green vegetables. Think about the elephants, they do not drink milk, but have very strong bones.

 

Meat:

Most meat produced in the US is of very bad quality and full of artificial hormones and other chemicals, beside the fact that the production methods are a torture for the animals. Some calculations show that if the whole world cut down on 1 meal of beef a week, the global temperature will drop with 2 degree Celsius. So this is another good reason for not eating beef.

Of these reasons we only eat meat (and not beef) without hormones and grown in a responsible way. This also means that we do not eat much meat, but get most of our proteins from other sources.

We eat meat maximum 3 times/ week

We eat fish 3-4 times/ week