The concept of the “Empty Kitchen” is connected to the quality of fuel we supply our bodies with. Many, if not most of the foods we buy today at the supermarket did not exist one hundred years ago. The value of the food we consume nowadays seems to come more from convenience and flavor than its nutritional vitality.
In order to recover or maintain optimal health, we need to empty our kitchens of things that never spoil, are heavily processed or belong to a group of so-called “modern foods” like white flour, sugar, and industrial oils. Grains and dairy products in general, as being relatively new on the menu (only about 10 – 12 thousand years), can cause a lot of trouble for some people who are not very compatible with them.
The practice of “Emptying the Kitchen” is the practice of keeping at home, preparing and consuming mainly fresh foods that haven’t been heavily processed. When they come prepackaged, with ingredients including flour, sugar, oils, fillers, preservatives, emulsifiers, sweeteners, flavor enhancers, and many other unknown, chemical components – these are not natural foods.
What are real foods? Ask yourself: what would humans eat in the area where you live, before the development of agriculture, civilization, and industrialization? The answer is simple: for most of us, it would be: meats, eggs, some vegetables, some nuts, and fruits. It was not until we domesticated animals and plants, that we would start consuming other animals’ milk and a lot more plants, especially grains.
With many new, genetically modified seeds, we see a widespread intolerance to gluten and other common plant components.
Ancient Taoist insisted on the principle of Bigu – not eating grains, understanding the difficulties our bodies can have deriving nutrients from this particular source of sustenance.
Many of you might think that nowadays, preparing your meals from scratch would be too time-consuming. You couldn’t be further from the truth. While the process of cooking or baking might require more time, it is also time that can be dedicated to many other pursuits, and the food preparation itself rarely takes us more than 5-10 minutes.
Eating natural foods has an amazing impact on the quality of our health and wellbeing. When our body manages to rid itself of all the unnecessary substances that we insist on consuming but that have no place in Nature, new levels of energy, vitality, resistance to viruses and bacteria become our everyday experience.
