I only go to Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods for things I CAN’T get at the farmers market, so that’s where you should do most of your shopping, especially since you have access to them!  These days, many farmers markets take food stamps, so find out which organic farmers do, and stick with them.  Local, and in season is the way you want to eat all year round!

And organic is incredibly important unless you want to ingest a ton of chemicals.  Pesticides, chemical plant food, GMO’s, you are risking ingesting all of them if you don’t go organic, and depending on what study you believe, you are opening yourself up to all kinds of health risks by doing so.

But you don’t necessarily have to find a farmer who is certified organic.  Many farmers don’t want the hassle of going through all the red tape and fees the government makes them go through to get certified, so they just practice organic farming without the certification.  You have to talk to the different farmers at the farmers market and ask them questions about how they grow their food, they’ll be happy to tell you!  Much of the food I buy is organic, but not certified by the government to be organic.

By the way, it’s grass fed beef you want, not grain fed.  Grains are bad, grass is good.  Again, it’s important because cows aren’t designed to eat grains, they are designed to eat grass.  Think of grains for a cow as processed junk food is for us.  They eat grains (and soy), and get fat, and sick.  Plus, most conventionally sold beef is from cows that are packed together in feed lots, they never move, and disease spreads everywhere, so they are pumped full of antibiotics (the biggest use of antibiotics aren’t for humans, it’s for animals sold for meat).  I don’t want to eat beef from a cow like that.  Do you?  The answer to that question should answer how important it is to eat grass fed beef.

Chances are there is a farmer at your local farmers market that sells grass fed beef.  Seek them out and see if they accept food stamps.  If not, keep looking.  And there’s always the internet, where I bet with a little research you could find an online grass-fed retailer who can help you out with your food stamp problem.

And one more thing you can do to insure you getting organic food is to grow it yourself!  There’s nothing better than eating food you grew yourself.  And you don’t need a big backyard, get creative with whatever space you have, and bring in planters if necessary.  Hydroponics is also very popular these days.  Just don’t use any plant food, pesticides, or gmo seeds and all your food will be organic!

Actually the link I gave for grass-fed beef, Topline Foods, is working on getting pasture raised chicken, but they don’t have it yet.  The only place I’ve ever seen pasture raised chicken is at a local farmers market.  $5 a pound for a 3 pound pound chicken.  But at $15 bucks I have piece of mind about what I’m eating, so to me it’s worth it (see my article about how to afford paleo while eating $15 dollar chickens and baking $19 loaves of bread).

I have seen pasture raised eggs on rare occasion at Whole Foods, for a whopping $10 a dozen!  But I found a farmers market that has them for as “little” as $6 a dozen (for years I was paying $8 a dozen at my farmers market).

If I were you, I’d do exactly what you’re doing regarding chicken and eggs.  Find the best choices available in your area.  For my first year on paleo, until I found my regular farmers market, I ate the same chicken you’re eating, and it didn’t kill me or make me sick.  Cage-free, free-range, or any other fake name (those terms mean almost nothing, folks) isn’t nearly as good as pasture raised, but the fact that it’s organic, and fed organic feed, is better than the farm factory raised stuff that is fed GMO corn and soy, and pumped full of growth hormones and antibiotics.  You’re doin’ good, Anon.  Keep it up, but keep looking to improve too!  Ugga-Bugga!

A lot of people call themselves “Primal,” which as far as I understand it is paleo with grass-fed dairy mixed into the diet.  A leader in this movement is Mark Sisson, of Mark’s Daily Apple, who I’ve spoken with and read on a regular basis.  He’s been nice enough to let me re-print some of his great articles on my dating site, SamePlate.com.

I personally don’t eat dairy because it has an acidic effect on the body, and I’m looking for a 70-80% balance of alkaline to acid in order to stay healthy.  All animal products and sugar are also acidic by the way, but dairy seems to be worse from what I’ve read.  The big four I like to stay away from are dairy, soy, grains, and legumes, especially peanuts.

I could go on and on about my reasons, and other things I avoid, but until you know more about the paleo diet, let’s save the questions for another time, Anon.  Here you go, read all about it!

Introduction to The Paleo Diet

http://www.earth360.com/diet_paleodiet_balzer.html

The Caveman Power Diet

http://www.cavemanpower.com

Cane juice, or evaporated cane juice, is a marketing ploy by many food companies to list a sweet ingredient without saying the word sugar.  But it is absolutely sugar.  And sugar is toxic.  Even the raw organic honey I support as being paleo is still sugar, and it’s simply not great for us.  So eat it in moderation, along with organic fruit too.

Sugar is designed by nature to make us fat in the summer, buy gorging on sugar rich fruit to get us through the lean winter.  But we don’t have that kind of modern world, so now it just makes us fat all year round, and puts our body into an acidic state, and leaves us prone to sickness.  By the way, sugar is more addictive than cocaine!

I know not of this boxed coconut beverage you speak of.  The only beverage I drank out of a box was Almaden wine, when I was 16.

I’m talking about pure organic coconut milk, in whatever container it comes in.  When you grate coconut flesh, and squeeze it, the liquid that comes out is coconut milk.  If you take that pulp, and some liquid remains, that’s coconut cream.  If you remove even more of the liquid, then you have coconut butter.  A lot of people don’t realize that the only difference between coconut milk, cream, and butter, is the amount of natural water in grated coconut.

When I first went shopping for coconut milk, I could not find any brand pure enough for me to call paleo.  Even the organic brands contained guar gum, xanthan gum, or other additives.  So what I do is I buy pure organic coconut butter, which only has one ingredient: coconut, and I add water to it to make it into coconut milk, or coconut cream.  Pure paleo, with no additives.  Plus, the coconut butter comes in a glass jar, so there’s no leaching of toxins from cans or boxes.

So whatever box or can you’re thinking of buying, please ALWAYS READ LABELS!  It’s a good practice to get into, because trust me, big food isn’t looking after your best interests.