Podcast Episode 22 - Interview with Molly McWilliams on Food

http://www.mdesignsmarketing.com
https://www.shugarysweets.com/swedish-meatballs/
https://www.yummly.com/
https://cronometer.com/
https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/organic/labeling
https://wholegrainscouncil.org/whole-grain-stamp
https://wholegrainscouncil.org
https://chrischickeringmusic.com/
https://www.buyfreshbuylocalcapecod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/BFBL-Covid-19-Food-Guide.pdf

Show more

https://www.thefamilypantry.com/
https://www.ewg.org/foodnews/full-list.php
https://www.fda.gov/food/buy-store-serve-safe-food/chemicals-foods-facts
https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/organic/labeling
https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/organic
https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org
https://www.dep.pa.gov/Business/Water/CleanWater/WastewaterMgmt/Biosolids/Pages/default.aspx

Elizabeth
I’m Elizabeth Rose, your hostess of this Whole Brain podcast. I’m here with Molly McWilliams and our theme that we’re going to talk about is food. Who doesn’t like to talk about food. This is episode 22 and it is designed to assist you in your daily, in the making of your daily creations. Hi Molly. Hi Elizabeth. Okay so just a very brief introduction of you and you can you can add more. Again our theme is on food and Molly McWilliams is the mother of two boys. How old are they?

Molly
They’re 10 and 15.

Elizabeth
Okay, 10 and 15, but I bet they eat like there’s no tomorrow. And she’s got a husband too. I bet he eats a lot too. And I’m calling you Molly. I’m calling you a food expert. I know you wouldn’t call yourself that but

Molly
Definitely not

Elizabeth
What is unique about you, Molly what is your work background and what are you currently doing and how do you know about food those are four okay what’s unique about you?

Molly
Well I like to do kind of analytical things but also creative things so a lot of my work and hobbies kind of mix together the both of those. So in my work, I have my business, and of course we help you with your podcast and we basically do graphic design, web design, and marketing. That’s my business, M Designs. And I know about food because I like to eat food, but mostly I would say that when I had my kids or when I had my first kid, it sort of became a hobby because all of a sudden I had to, you know, come up with three good meals every day. And so I started kind of learning more about cooking, but I guess maybe some of it started before that too.

Elizabeth
Well, we’re going to get into that. And this is just to remind people, this is the first segment. This is the Stop and Smell the Roses. And just to remind you, Molly, Stopping and Smell the Roses is about, well, the vibration of a rose apparently is really the vibration of love. So when you stop and smell the roses, you are raising your vibration or your frequency as we know. And also Stopping and Smell the Roses reminds us to become fully present in the moment and to slow down and to look for and enjoy the beauty of life, to take a moment to simply breathe, be and reconnect with the energy of love in the present. So I hope everybody is doing that.

Molly
Yeah definitely and I think it definitely applies with cooking and, you know, the aromas that come with food as well. I think one of the things that, you know, we’re all lacking is that slowing down sometimes when you have to cook something and you’re actually putting the work in and seeing what goes into something. I think that’s all part of that slowing down culture, you know.

Elizabeth
That’s beautiful. So what are you, Molly, currently grateful for regarding food?

Molly
I would say I’m very grateful that God has blessed me with a full freezer and fridge of food and we always seem to have a lot of it to go through and cook and create meals with. Seems to be, you know, just something that I’m pretty grateful for.

Elizabeth
We didn’t really talk about this in our precursor to this interview, but so do you, besides keeping your refrigerator full and your freezer full, is your pantry also full? I mean are you prepared in case anything happens?

Molly
Yeah, so I would say something that we like to do and one thing you got to be careful about with storing food is you have to use it too. So you don’t want to store a lot of stuff that maybe you’re not going to eat. But we have a lot of things like canned vegetables and pastas and rice and beans and things like that. And I think it could be used in an emergency situation, like remember during COVID when, oh my goodness, there’s nothing in the stores but also just when you’re sort of like out of ingredients we definitely use a pantry all the time because then you can always grab something if you don’t want to have to go out you know go go to the grocery store so we utilize a pantry for sure.

Elizabeth
That’s sweet right it’s so nice to have a pantry when we don’t feel like going to little thing. Mm-hmm. Right?

Molly
Yeah.

Elizabeth
So one thing that you said in the precursor interview was that you are grateful for the challenge of there is a challenge of there is a wide variety of food. You said something about that. You’re grateful that there isn’t the illusion about that and as prices go up and up and up you still have that to lean on.

Molly
So to talk about what I was saying with the illusion of a lot of options, I think there’s this illusion that there’s just so many things at the store that you could go out and buy and you know if you want to have Swedish meatballs for dinner you’ve got to go buy Swedish meatballs, meal or whatever. And I think that when you start to know about cooking, you can cut down on maybe some of the prepared foods or things that you don’t necessarily have to buy or productize and process because you start to know like that you just have to have egg noodles or you have to buy this kind of meat or whatever. And I’m grateful that I have the knowledge to, I feel like kind of see through that and plan recipes and meals with basic ingredients rather than needing to, you know, always buy a kit or something that’s maybe more processed. Does that make sense?

Elizabeth
Mm-hmm. It does make sense. And how did you learn about cooking and about food? How did you learn about that? You know, how do you recommend to our listeners to learn if they don’t know diddly squat about cooking?

Molly
Yeah, that’s a really good question because I think a lot of people try to look everything up online and there’s a problem with the fact that there’s just so much information online that you sort of have information overload. So when it comes to suggesting to other people, I’ll get to that in a second, I’ll start with what I know. When I was younger, when I was in fourth grade, I was actually, now they say you can’t have diabetes and then have it go away. I was overweight and they tested me positive for diabetes by my blood sugar levels. I don’t know exactly how you would say that if it’s positive or whatever. But it was basically I had diabetes and I had to go to a nutritionist to learn how to eat right and as a fourth grader, I had to lose 30 pounds. Now I never tested diabetic again so it’s not really in my medical charts or anything and everyone always says, that’s not how that works. But anyway, I know what I went through. And I had a great nutritionist that really broke it down by the nutrition label, which is probably a larger conversation than what we’re maybe going to get into right now. But it basically just looked at three basic things, the carbs, the fat and the sodium actually. And she had a building block kind of way that you build your meals. And from there, it basically created a balanced diet that allowed me to lose the weight that I needed to lose to be healthy. So that got me started in learning about nutrition labels. And I’ll just give you one example. One serving of carbohydrates I think was 15 grams. It might’ve been 12. Off the top of my head, I think it’s 15. But I learned that you could subtract dietary fiber from the carb to get the true amount on your body. So I learned little things like that from her. She was kind of like, um, it was educational. So that was when I was pretty young.

Elizabeth
Yeah, you were pretty young, right? To learn all that.

Molly
Yeah.

Elizabeth
But it

Molly
But I kept it up. So

Elizabeth
Yeah, it really stuck with you.

Molly
Yeah, yeah, I used it to learn how to build my kids school lunches and things like that and meals and it’s sort of like a regimen in my head like I remember because I memorized it like Carbohydrate carbohydrate fruit dairy protein vegetable like that’s how you made each meal the difference for dinner is there’s one carbohydrate I think it’s because you’re going to bed soon and don’t need it but it was this kind of an interesting thing and then

Elizabeth
do you have any kind of websites or books that you would refer people to on just basics of nutrition or you know since there is so much information on the internet where would you where yeah so go ahead where does one begin

Molly
I think that um recipe sites are a goodplace to start because I think cooking things from scratch to begin with makes your eating a lot healthier even if you’re making pizza or spaghetti or something that you might not think of as a healthy meal. An example of a website that’s really fun for that is yumly.com.

Elizabeth
What’s it called?

Molly
We can put a link to that. It’s called Yumly.

Elizabeth
Yumly?

Molly
And I, mm-hmm.

Elizabeth
Mm-hmm. We’ll put a link to that like you said yumly.com.

Molly
I’m just checking it’s y-u-m-m-l-y dot com and on this website you can actually create not just like a little account with your information but you can put your preferences and it helps you sort throughlots of recipes that are on other websites based on your preferences or flavors or what you have in the fridge. That’s one website that’s helpful. But I also think chronometer, C-R-O-N-O-M-E-T-E-R.com.

Elizabeth
Mm-hmm. Chronometer.

Molly
And chronometer.com, sorry, chronometer.com, you create an account. And I used this when I was eating vegan, which I don’t eat vegan anymore, but at the time I was interested in making sure I had enough of each of the different amino acids you need. I just wanted to make sure I was getting enough of the right kinds of protein basically. I’ve used it ever since just in general because it breaks down all the nutrition. You can set it to what the government recommends you eat or you can set it to what you want based on your health goals, whatever your doctor says.

Elizabeth
Wow, there’s quite the range of education that would be involved, I would think, in doing this, both, you know, looking at food, yeah, nutritional standpoint and looking at labels. Whatelse do you look at?

Molly
Well, and I know you also were asking the best way for listeners to start learning. So besides websites with recipes and ways to kind of count the numbers, the different nutrients and things like that, I think that practicing cooking is a good way to do it. And then when you’re purchasing your food, I can give you a couple of examples, but the USDA website is really good for certain things. Like for example, if you’re thinking about whether or not you want to buy organic foods oror not organic foods or maybe foods that are made with organic ingredients or maybe you don’t know the difference, they have definitions on here that let you know what can and can’t be done to food under different labeling. So I think that’s a good place to start. That’s basically an official list of the different maybe processes or chemicals that can be done to different categories of food. And then another thing is I would say there’s too many minute details to give every little thing here, but I’ll just give you another example. There’s little emblems you can look for on your packaging. So if you’re interested in eating whole grains, for example, because maybe you’re trying to lose weight and you want to feel fuller when you eat a sandwich, or maybe you’re just trying to work on your immune system. I don’t know, whatever reasons that you want to have the fiber or the whole grains. A lot of breads out there look like whole wheat bread. They’ve been colored brown, so you think that they’re healthy. But if you don’t have a little emblem on them that actually says whole grain, and they have different ones, some of them say 100% whole grain, some say 50% plus, and some just say whole grain, but either way, it tells you how many grams. And this one little seal, which you can look up on wholegraincouncil.org and then forward slash whole-grain-stamp. dashed stamp. If it doesn’t have this seal, you know, you might as well be eating white bread because it’s telling you that there’s not enough of the of the good parts of the grain left for it to do what whole grains do in your body.

Elizabeth
Do you think, Molly, that having a family has also inspired this for you? Has been an inspiration for you?

Molly
Yeah, definitely. Right? Yeah, because I didn’t necessarily need to do it just for myself before.

Elizabeth
And we’re going to take a little break right now, if that’s all right with you, and go to some music. Sure. All right, so we’re going to take a little break. We’re going to go to some music to entice and tickle your right brain from Chris Chickering and his album The Resurrection of Me. You can get all of Chris’s music and you can listen to it too on his website chrischickeringmusic.com. There it reminds you that Chris Chickering is a singer-songwriter, a recording artist, a best-selling author, and a social entrepreneur whose musical mission is to write and perform songs that speak to the core of the human condition. Here’s one of his songs. It’s the title track from the album again that I will say, The Resurrection of Me.

Chris Chickering
Downtrodden, giving up, forgotten Found my way all the way to the bottom Lost everything I thought that I could lose No hoping, give a damn, broken I’m broken, three-time loser with a subway token Walking like a dead man in my shoes But I swear I’ll find a way to turn it all around Cause there’s nothing strong enough to keep my spirit down Took a left, took a right Sucked a punch by the fist of life I’ve been down but you’ll see This is gonna be the resurrection of me, yeah, yeah, yeah Gold-shaded, sweet-hated, called a punk and a bum berated Never thought I’d be the one to lose my way But it’s alright, cause I know now Got another chance to pick it up somehow So brother won’t you hear me when I say I got a black eyed soul but I still got a lot of heart See it’s never too late to find a new place to start Took a left, took a right Suck a bunch by the fist of life but I found a way to get on my feet again A little shaky from the blows but I’ll be damned if it takes my soul Cause I’ve been down but you’ll see this is gonna be the resurrection of me Yeah, yeah, yeah The resurrection of me, yeah, yeah, yeah And I know they’ll always be the ones who got their doubts After all that I’ve been through, who’s gonna hurt me now? Took a left, took a right, sunk a punch by the fist of life But I found a way to get on my feet again I’ve been down but you’ll see This is gonna be the resurrection of me Yeah, yeah, yeah The resurrection of me Yeah, yeah, yeah Took a left, took a right, yeah The resurrection of me The resurrection of me, yeah

Elizabeth
I am here with Molly McWilliams. This is episode number 22, segment 2. We get to wake up and smell the coffee, which always means we’re going to take it up a little bit more. for all of you listeners with Molly and we’re going to talk about this restoration movement and the signature characteristics that I have come up with are how are we going to increase and raise our frequency and take it up a notch and upgrade all of our systems because we we don’t know what’s going on with their systems and the food system is a big one that we can talk about but in the restoration movement, Molly, if you would address kindness, respect, integrity or honor and strength if you have the time and how that applies to working with food. We sure would appreciate it. So you can talk about kindness first.

Molly
Okay, so I think when it comes to mind first is sharing. So I think that the more we can cook from home, the more we can be increasing the amount of yield we get. So for $20 cooking at home versus $20 maybe going out to get a quick meal for one, there’s a huge difference in the amount of a dinner you’d get out of that. If you’re able to maybe give a meal to somebody else that needs it or just kind of you could be kind to the environment too by you know making two meals at the same time and eating it tomorrow. There’s a lot of ways but that’s what comes to mind.

Elizabeth
Yeah sharing and that being a way of connecting with other people too that sounds very kind.

Molly
Yeah that’s a good point. Yes, because just the interaction too. Sometimes certain people you might know maybe don’t interact with people that much actually and bringing a little dinner over might mean more than you think to somebody that doesn’t see a lot of people during the week.

Elizabeth
Exactly. Exactly. So that covers kindness. We’ll move on to respect. How about respect, Molly? What do you see in terms of upgrading our respect?

Molly
Well, I think, again, not to harp on home cooking, but I think that’s a big part of the way we’re going to see, in general, being a more high quality, higher importance in our life is when it is home cooked and it has those good ingredients in it. And so I think when you’re making the food yourself, first of all, you may have a little more respect for what goes into a good meal, whether that means when someone else cooks for you the next time, or maybe when you do go out and you pay a little more because somebody did something that maybe you don’t know how to cook at home and have it come out the way you’d like it to come out. And I also think that our choices at the grocery store can show respect or disrespect for our economy or the environment, you know, because of what we choose to buy or where we choose to spend more or less in our diets and in our meal plans.

Elizabeth
So we can be overall more conscious about food than we think we can be. Yeah, that’s cool.

Molly
Absolutely, yeah. Raise our awareness a little bit about where it’s coming from maybe and what happened to it before we ate it.

Elizabeth
Right. I worked on a, this is years, decades ago, I worked on a vegetable farm and I was just amazed the energy that went into making and harvesting especially carrots and garlic. I was like wow this is a lot of work. But carrots were actually fun to harvest because you know they came out of the ground pretty easy compared to the garlic and they came in all different kinds of shapes and forms.

Molly
Yeah. And colors too. I can’t believe the variety of carrots that are out there. Purple carrots and yellow and orange, of course. And yeah, I bet you that working on the farm, it’s just the same way having to cook the food yourself. Even that’s another extension to it. I would say you’d probably have a lot of respect for when you actually yield a crop at all. I know farmers, there’s some kind of amount they have to expect to lose, you know, every year and I don’t think they’re often as profitable as people think too because things can happen and this is the real world and if the food doesn’t grow, you know, no farms, no food, right?

Elizabeth
Right. We didn’t talk about farmers market in our precursor interview, but do you have anything to say about farmers markets or community gardens?

Molly
Yeah, I love farmers markets. I haven’t been to one in a really long time, but I used to go to them on Cape Cod, which is where I’m from, and I was just always amazed at how much you could get for how little money money because a lot of the times they come with their whole bounty and at the end of the day they really need it to be gone and they’re also they have so much of one thing at a time it’s just given away for such a great price and I think it’s an awesome way to get food and that’s a community garden

Elizabeth
I would say I would think that farmers market and community gardens is a good way to share food too that would normally be very perishable and would rot if you hung on to it. You’re right. It’s like sharing with your neighbors a good idea.

Molly
Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly it. And that’s why like at the end of the day, they might be like, hey, you can have the rest of the corn for a dollar. And also what you just mentioned about the community gardens and also just the perishable nature of food. A lot of times people even just do a garden for fun and a lot of times you get a lot of yield of something that they can’t use all at once like 32 tomatoes or they’re all going to go bad in a week. And actually another thing on Cape Cod that they had that was pretty cool, I learned about this first from my college project. It was just a volunteer project we had to do and I ended up doing the community center, sorry not the community center, the food bank. They have a big food bank and speaking on respect to like a big thing they taught us as volunteers was that they always serve everybody with a lot of dignity and they have it all set up like a nice store, they even have a little clothing shop like boutique, it was really nice. But anyhow, I had done like a turkey drive and a clothing drive, I think it was a three-day thing. Well, we learned that they have their own community garden there and they actually have it like you might have in your town where you pay to have a plot, but what they do is the people that come and get to garden, they’re doing their gardening for fun or like a hobby. All that produce was actually brought right into the building and given out to the people that come to the bank for their food.

Elizabeth
That is awesome.

Molly
So it was all fresh. So yeah, it’s really awesome.

Elizabeth
It’s a way to give away and donate food without your ego being involved. It’s a way to move it forward. It’s a way to make others.

Molly
Yeah, yeah. It wasn’t a direct, yeah, it wasn’t a direct give and they just, you know, they harvested it at the facility and then, but the people that worked on it, of course, they were putting in their hard work, but they were getting the reward of having a nice garden to work on and, you know, knew they were doing something good for the community too.

Elizabeth
And you spoke about integrity also with food as far as home cooked meals and making food into meals that your family will enjoy.

Molly
Yeah, so if you can learn some basic cooking and how to do some different dishes up, you can always mix and match different ingredients. And one of the things you had asked me about in the pre-interview was especially with kids and I think healthy eating with kids in the house and some things that might help with that. So I think with the integrity of food, thinking about things like knowing how fresh the vegetables are that went into it, where if you maybe bought a chicken pot pie from the frozen department in your store, it probably costs $15. It’s probably pretty small. Who knows if they use butter? I mean, you can look at the ingredients, of course, but the point is there’s a lot more stuff they’ve had to put into that to preserve it and all that. You don’t really know where the peas came from, et cetera. Whereas you might be able to spend even less than that and make two chicken pot pies. But you’re shopping with kids, they might be like, I like chicken pot pie. My kids are older than that now, but of course when they’re little or even now,if you can be flexible in your meal plans and bring your kids along and say like hey we’re going to be making meat pies do you want to do beef or chicken you know give them two good choices my mom taught me that she’s a teacher and she taught me that you know sometimes to give a kid a little bit more sense of control or part of a process just to give them two good choices and let them make the final decision where you can.

Elizabeth
That sounds good.

Molly
I don’t know if that answers the question.

Elizabeth
That sounds really good. So the food pantry, the community garden, and the farmers market, people may say, they may think, oh, that’s not for me, that’s for people in poverty consciousness. Those are for people who are poor. That’s not for me. What would you say about that, Molly?

Molly
I would say, first of all, especially with the farmers market one, I would say it definitely isn’t. It’s inexpensive doesn’t mean cheap. It’s a great opportunity for anybody to connect with the farmers that are around them. You might be surprised. Cape Cod has a lot of farmers. They have a whole directory. Cape Cod’s just a tiny little place. Just imagine I’m in Pennsylvania, you’re in Santa Fe, and it’s just like there’s probably a lot more people doing a lot more things than you realize and what they bring to market is awesome. And then for the food pantry, I would just say, you know, I read something, I don’t know where I read it because it was a long time ago, that these days, you know, poverty isn’t something that some people have and some people don’t have. I mean, of course it is, but at the same time for the majority of us, it’s more of a phase that most people go through at some point. Like you might have a phase where you broke your leg and couldn’t go to work and you for an entire two months couldn’t, well, go to work and get your paycheck. So what do you do? Other than government programs, I guess the food pantries are somewhat connected. But I don’t think most people know that if you’re going through a hardship, you can literally go to a food pantry once and they’ll give you hundreds of dollars worth of food that helps you pay your bill that week or something. And it’s something that it’s actually, I have a friend here that volunteers at a food bank. You’re not taking away from someone else by going. Like there is so much food waste in this country. They are trying to give it away as fast as possible because it’s perishable. And people are trying to just use this food. So if you can use it, it’s like it’s gonna get eaten by the people that come and take it, or it’s gonna go bad and have to get thrown out. And that’s why Trader Joe’s donates millions of dollars a year of produce that they could sell as a little bit older produce and mark it down, but they don’t, they just ship it off to the food banks. And it’s like, it’s actually good for the environment to be using these things when you need it.

Elizabeth
That sounds really good. Also, can you, Molly, please speak to strength since you’re on a roll about how food can strengthen your body, your mind, your financial health.

Molly
Ok, yea, so food can strengthen your body, It can also make your body sick. So what you, you know, they say you are what you eat. You got to make sure you’re eating a balanced diet and eating foods that give your body everything it needs. Like for example, your brain needs certain fats and it needs certain amounts of certain fats. You need to have certain things to keep your stomach feeling good so it doesn’t feel like acid reflux or other problems like that and things to make your skin healthy. And if you’re eating all those vitamins and stuff and just having enough of all the right things, you can make your body a lot stronger. I think a lot of people these days eat so much. Americans are by far, a lot of us are overweight, but we’re starving on nutrition because you can fill up on potato chips and hot dogs and hamburgers and not really have all of the vitamins you need and still feel hungry because you’re lacking you know something you didn’t think to eat.

Elizabeth
So you are striving for a form of balance really with your eating too.

Molly
Mm-hmm yeah right right right and there’s a lot of diets these days that cut out your main food groups. I’m not talking about the food pyramid, but even more simple than that, it’s pretty much carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. And some of these diets that just take one of them off the table, I’m always wary of that because I feel like maybe you need to be making better choices, but you probably still need… Maybe not everybody wants the same portion of each it doesn’t have to be a third a third a third but you still kind of need all those building blocks because that’s how your body was designed to work.

Elizabeth
So I will say to you Molly what in terms of strength how does that influence your mental capacity?

Molly
So similar to the physical because a lot of our mental health is influenced by our physical health. Just for example, if your body is sore or you’re sick, you might also feel down or tired or whatever. You’re sort of feeling in your mind and in your mental state some of those things that are happening to you physically. So I would say the physical getting all the nutrition is important, but then the way it influences you mentally is when you are getting those things, you’re able to be awake at the right times without maybe having too many cups of coffee or sleeping at the right times without having to maybe take medicine that helps you get tired like some people do. And I think that mentally, just having that balanced diet, you can also relax about all the worries about food these days and diet. So if you’re just eating a balanced diet and you’re exercising, your body’s going to feel good because you’re getting what you need and it kind of can become sort of a natural rhythm. I think that just having those ingredients in there just like with the physical really wraps up like just putting you in the best place to have good mental health. It really puts you in a place where you can you know not get so stressed or maybe not be what do they call it hangry.

Elizabeth
Yeah stress is a good one. Hangry. Yeah. And how does this strength perhaps how does that affect your finances, your financial well-being?

Molly
Yeah, so if you’re used to eating out all the time, you can expect to pay $10 or $15 per person to eat a meal, and that really adds up into a lot of money, and it kind of becomes a habit. It’s not so good for your body, not so good for you mentally to always be rushing and eating out of containers, and then financially, you’re drained. And I think the more you know how to cook fast or you can plan ahead and maybe on a relaxing Sunday, chill out, but make some things that weekend day where you can eat them all week. Maybe you could be cooking some of the meats ahead or cutting some of the vegetables ahead. But when you start to put that food cooking into your schedule, you’re able to save money because you’re not scrambling when you’re super hungry for something to eat and just going to somewhere that you can buy it. I think it impacts you in that way. I also think eating what you need most of the time helps you not go for impulse buys too. Like if you’re already satisfied because you’re regularly, maybe you make a treat on the weekends or whatever, maybe it’ll help you cut down on just making bad choices in a pinch. Like, oh, I never get anything nice. I’m going to get this for myself. I think people do that they’ll buy a Snickers bar at the register.

Elizabeth
Right that’s probably why they put those Snickers bar at the register.

Molly
Absolutely.

Elizabeth
I want to say some of the happiest times of my life was when I was in a really good rhythm with food. I will say that. And cooking for many, there’s something about that that definitely brought me more joy. You know, cooking for my daughter, cooking for my husband, cooking for my mother-in-law, it definitely brought me more joy.

Molly
Yeah. Well, you’re creating something that people like and they say, that’s nice. Oh, I like how you made this. You get maybe a compliment, but you’re also slowing down. And like you always talk about on your podcast, the whole brain, you know, like you’re smelling, you’re feeling the different textures that you’re cutting. You’re using tools in your hands. You’re you’re creating something out of lots of little parts and it comes together into almost an art project. You know, it’s something fun.

Elizabeth
I have to kind of laugh because often you’ll say, I am cooking dinner right now. Okay, let’s not bother Molly when she’s cooking dinner. Now I’ll be even more respectful because I know that you really put your heart and your soul into cooking, it sounds like. And that segues, well I know you’re busy, that segues into my final question in this segment is how do you address the many needs of your own family in preparing a meal? You know, you’ve got your 10-year-old, you’ve got your 14-year-old son, they’ve got to have different needs, your husband must have different needs, you have different needs. How do you come up with a meal?

Molly
I think, first of all, the way I handle the many needs of the different people in my family are in a way by not necessarily changing too much for each individual person. And what I mean by that is my kids aren’t particularly picky kids, although they each have certain things they don’t like, but they truly don’t like them. And it’s not necessarily like a picky behavior. It’s just, everybody has some things that don’t agree with them. But I would say that we have had times where I’ve had to do things a little bit differently. And what I try to do is I try to plan a main core meal. And if there is a certain ingredient that someone really has a problem with, a legitimate reason that I know they don’t like it, I do try to maybe make that part separately and add it on after. But most of the time, I do try to serve one thing. And if… I mean, the kids are older now, and there’s a different level of respect to when a kid who’s 15 really doesn’t like something. You’re not going to be like, you have to eat three more bites, the conversation changes. But I think that in the same way that is how it maybe used to be when they were little, so they’re kind of not picky. And I think what I really do is it’s kind of like, well, you can take a no thank you serving, which is really good for kids to do. It’s not like they’re allergic to it. And if they’re going to go to someone’s house one day, you don’t want them to be rude and, you know, turn their nose up or be so uncomfortable that they don’t know what to do when they’re served something that isn’t their favorite. So I kind of handle it by, yeah, not, not handling that, I guess.

Elizabeth
Yeah. I can guess what a no thank you serving is, but literally what is it?

Molly
So, um, I don’t know where I picked up this term, but I really like it. And it’s kind of just like, you know, you went to Thanksgiving dinner and you’re really not into the creamed onions, but you know, the host that’s like her special dish. So that’s when you take the spoon and you take like three of them and you put it on the plate and you shut up and you eat them.

Elizabeth
Oh I like that.

Molly
Because that’s what grown-ups do and kids have to learn that one day they’re going to be those.

Elizabeth
So yeah they’re going to be the grown-ups right? Yeah. Okay well we’re talking with Molly McWilliams on food and she is a mother of two young men, but she has her husband too and herself and she’s very brilliant in the way that she puts together all of her consciousness and all of her thoughtfulness and all of her kindness and all of her heart into making meals for her family. Thank you Molly. We’re going to come back and do another segment because I I want to learn more. Here’s another song to continue with by Chris Chickering from the Resurrection of Me. That’s the name of the album. The name of the song is Shadow of Doubt.

Chris Chickering
Going over is only a ghost Just open a window when you feel the doors of all closed And just hold on Another day’s coming along, let it soak So hold out, there’s a lining of silver that traces the shadow of doubt Don’t turn away, oh now, don’t let the fear steal your chance And just hold on, another day’s coming along if you let it There’s a lining of silver that traces the shadow of doubt There’s another way, always another road So it’s steady on, and be good to yourself as you go Well, there’s a glow There’ll be rain in the wind It may blow you off course But don’t be denied of the destiny waiting at your door And just hold on Another day’s coming along if you let it snow Hold on, there’s a lining of silver that traces the shadow Hold on, another day’s coming along if you let it snow There’s a lining of silver that traces the shadow of doubt.

Elizabeth
We are back for segment three with Molly McWilliams, who is going to enlighten and empower us about food. And she has a great way to teach us, which is by giving an example about how we can budget and save money while making great food because it seems to me anyway that many individuals are very stressed out about how food is going up and up and up and up and up. So take it away Molly.

Molly
So I’m going to talk about just one example of a dinner that I could buy out at a restaurant that’s near probably many of your listeners, P.F. Chang’s. I’ve actually never eaten there because I go to a local Chinese food restaurant when we go out, but they have their prices online. So I’m looking at a bowl of fried rice that I could go get delivered to my house or pick up. And basically it’s 420 to 550 calories. So that’s not a lot of food. The price is $15.25. I’m going to propose that for the same price, I could feed seven people or more chicken fried rice, depending on how much chicken you want to serve in each serving, et cetera. But I’m going to go ahead and break that down. So when you make fried rice, the ingredients that you need are just a tiny little bit of oil. You probably only need about two, maybe two to four tablespoons. This is not a recipe, so don’t copy this. This is just kind of an estimation quickly. You use oil, you use rice. You could use white rice, you could use brown rice, but you’re going to use some rice that’s not pre-cooked. It’s really inexpensive, and I’ll get into these prices in a second. And then you’re going to be using probably some soy sauce and other spices and things that you like in your rice. And you’re going to be using some vegetables. You’re probably going to use some peas, maybe you’ll use some carrots, maybe you’ll use a little bit of bamboo shoots or something else, just some different vegetables. Either way, they’re going to end up being pretty inexpensive for each of the individual vegetables. And then of course, the chicken is probably the most important, I mean, the most expensive thing you’re going to buy, but also of course, the main meat in your fried rice. And then you’re going to use water, which you probably already have at your house, salt, other little things like that. But these are the main ingredients. So if you start to break that down, you have $15.25, and you’ve got to cook this for everybody. Even if I had to buy a whole new thing of oil, I would be taking away about $2.60 for a small thing of oil. And I would have to buy my rice to be about $2 for more than 12 servings of rice. I’d have to take out the money for this whole bottle of soy sauce, which of course you can reuse every time you make this, whatever other spices, it goes the same way, but I might spend $3 on that.

Elizabeth
What do you mean you can reuse it? Sorry, Molly, what do you mean you can reuse the soy sauce?

Molly
Well, if you buy for this recipe a huge bottle of soy sauce, but you’re only using whatever amount your recipe calls for, the next time you make the fried rice, you’re not buying the whole bottle. But I’m just, for this example, actually including the whole bottle, which might not be really $3. It might be a dollar depending on where you buy it, but I’m just kind of going heavy to show that in this example, how this could work. And then I might’ve broken this down a little bit too deeply. I would say I should actually, we will call the soy sauce a dollar, because I know for sure you can get a thing of soy sauce for a dollar. So I am going to add that $3 back in. So we’re going to take away a dollar for soy sauce. By the way, I’m down $9.65 left to spend out of my $15.25. I’m going to buy some vegetables. Maybe for this recipe, I’ll use some frozen vegetables and a bag of each frozen vegetables. A whole bag is about a dollar or $2. So I’m going to minus $2 total because I know I can get a mixed bag of peas and carrots, so I only need one bag. And then the big item that I need left is chicken. And I have $7.65 left. So the way this could be broken down is you could buy a bigger pack of chicken, Aldis near us, for example, they’re the same, well, they’re a sister company to Trader Joe’s, your listeners probably have at least Trader Joe’s or Aldi’s near them. You could buy a $15 pack of chicken breasts and you get seven. So I’m going to say that my $7.65 could buy at least half of that pack, which would be four, maybe five breasts. And if I did have to buy a smaller pack, maybe I’d get less. I might get only three or four breasts for the $7.65. But basically that’s what you need for that whole recipe but now you’ve spent $15.25 but you’re able to feed a lot of people and if you’re okay with having even less chicken you could really use the whole bag of rice a little bit more oil and feed a crowd for $15.

Elizabeth
That sounds wonderful. Yeah the lady up the hill would probably be very grateful to you for sharing that with her right?

Molly
Yes, definitely. Definitely, this is a great example of where maybe you only have a family of four and now you’ve made seven servings and you can give your neighbor a nice scoop of rice that like we see on the restaurant website, you know, you might have paid $15 or she may have paid to go get a nice meal for herself and she may not have a family or he or she, your neighbor who could use the little visit and meal.

Elizabeth
Absolutely. That’s a nice way to look at it. For those of us who shop mainly organic, what would you say?

Molly
I think this is a really interesting, when I was in college, this had nothing to do with nutrition. I was just in a communications class and we needed to write a speech, a research speech about a topic. And so I had done mine on food. And specifically one of the things I did research and was interested in what were the different definitions of what organic really means. And so this is definitely a topic that we could deep dive on in another conversation, point out that there are three distinctions of organic foods. And not only that, there are certain foods that are more important to eat organic than others. And the reason I say this is because I think a lot of people get it in their mind, they hear all the stuff about what they’re doing to food, which is a lot of the stuff is probably true. You might say, oh, those pesticides stay in the ground for a long time and they’re not good for kids, and that’s probably true. And there’s all this stuff, but if you’re going to pass up a non-organic apple and eat organic goldfish crackers, you probably missed the point because now you’re filling your body with little fast carbs and cracker snacks because they say organic on them as opposed to all the nutrition you’d get from the apples despite the fact that maybe it was dirty. So speaking of dirty, I’m going to start there and then I’m going to talk about what the distinctions of organic even mean and where you can actually read more about that. Would that be interesting to answer?

Elizabeth
Yeah.

Molly
Okay. So if you’re going to eat organic or you’re going to try to eat more organic foods and you, like everyone else, have a certain budget and you may have to make some sacrifices, I would say focus on the foods you’re eating as a regular part of your diet all the time. If you don’t eat bacon more than once a month and organic bacon is really expensive, you could look at it two ways. You could say, well, I don’t eat bacon very often, so I can splurge and buy the more expensive one because I don’t need to eat this every week and I can spend $8 and have a really nice meal with this organic bacon. Or you could look at it the other way around, which is I don’t live on bacon and I’m sure if my friend cooked me breakfast with regular bacon, I’m not going to die because you’re not filling yourself with this food all the time. But when you are eating fruits every day or throughout the week, vegetables and all of your staples, they have something called the dirty dozen, which is basically a produce ranking of the worst food to eat when they’re not organic. And so some of these foods include strawberries, spinach, kale, collard greens, and mustard greens, grapes, peaches, pears, nectarines, apples. And you can find more of this stuff online. You can just look up on Google, dirty dozen. You might find slight variations because different people have different ideas, but it’s basically, it has to do with how the different plants grow and some are kind of more protected than others from the actual things that make it not organic or make it organic. So sometimes if a pesticide doesn’t really affect the part of the vegetable you’re eating, it may be less important to not eat that food, but it doesn’t mean it’s not important at all. So it sort of helps you prioritize. Does that make sense?

Elizabeth
Yes, it does. And are there additional ways that you can, you know, it could be, maybe it’s just a mental Like for me, when I buy non-organic, say, vegetables, I will just use a tablespoon of bleach in water and I’ll just soak that vegetable or fruit, whatever it is, in that water and then I’ll soak it for another 20 minutes in plain water? Is there…

Molly
So, I have not heard of doing the bleach method and I don’t want to comment on whether or not that’s a safe method to do because I don’t know that it is, but I do know that they do sell veggie wash sprays. One of the places you can buy it is Trader Joe’s. I’m not sure where else you can buy it, but it’s something you can scrub your vegetables with. And I think that soaking, again, you might want to look up whether or not it’s recommended to soak, because I don’t know if then whatever you’re cleaning it with could get into it. But I do think that you’re right, washing it in some way, whether it’s soaking or scrubbing can help, yes. And I think knowing what makes it organic or not organic is important too, because there’s also such a thing as there are farmers out there that are doing everything they can to do a great product, but because of the legal distinction of organic, they can’t be labeled that way. And when you research into the individual foods you’re purchasing, you can find out like some farmers basically it’s organic, but they’re trying hard, but they don’t quite make the cut. And then there’s another side to the story, and maybe even though it is organic, there might be a reason that you prefer to buy the other brands. So I think it matters which foods and, you know, it can become a hobby or an interest to look into these things, or you can kind of create certain standards for yourself and just buy from certain brands that you know hold up those standards. So, do you have any questions about that before I talk about the three distinctions of organic that we have in our at least in our country?

Elizabeth
It does seem to me it does seem to me though you can do a lot of research and hopefully that sticks in your mind. That might be an issue for me but as it might be for other people too but it just seems like to gather information is a very very wise thing to do.

Molly
Yeah and just be aware of why something is something or isn’t something like you know we’re so easily fooled by marketing you know of course I’m in marketing but not the kind of marketing that I’m talking about where it’s sort of like you’re looking at a spin and it’s like well is it something that I’m worried about or is it just a word that I don’t like? Because sometimes if you find out, you know, what it is that they’re doing to it or not doing to it, it might not really be something that is an issue. And knowing those specific things can help you make the decision. And just remembering not to judge things just by the words that it says, but really, you know, just individually look into it.

Elizabeth
Right. Well, it seems like a combination of really using your analytical brain and your intuitive brain. Your left and your right brain. Yeah. The whole brain again comes into play here. But go ahead. Yeah. Speak about the three different type of organics. Because I think that would be very noteworthy for our listeners to hear.

Molly
You know, when we’re making our discernments on what we’re going to buy and eat, I just think we are often able to be kind of swayed by the marketing of things and kind of forget what certain words really mean. And like I’ll just give you an example. If someone said, hey, do you want to eat this food that has chemicals on it? You’d probably be like, ew, no, I don’t want to eat chemicals. But we forget all of the benign things that we actually purposely eat or drink that are literally chemicals because that’s what chemicals are. But we think chemicals are bad, because it’s like the marketing of, ew, nasty chemicals. But some things are just natural chemicals that we need in our body and in our brain, you know, and I think that’s just an example, but getting into these definitions, just remember like what do these different things actually mean? So I’m going to tell you the three different kinds of organics that you can read about on the USDA.gov website, and I’m actually reading this off of a page that we can link, but it’s under their rules and regulations regarding organic labeling. So, if something is called 100% organic, basically, this means other than the salt and water that are in it, it is 100% organic based on all of the standards that they have to follow, which we can look at in another link here that’s on this page, but it’s something that would be deep reading. They have a link called USDA organic regulations, but we’ll get into that in a second. But it has to be a hundred percent adhering. And if it’s a hundred percent adhering to those rules, it will say 100% organic. But when, yeah, but when it’s not quite fully organic, the next designation down is just organic. I don’t know if a lot of people realize that a 100 percent organic and organic are two different things. This is actually where it has a minimum of 95 percent organic ingredients, but it has that little bit of five percent wiggle room where it can have a certain additive or a certain ingredient that are not on that list, that don’t adhere to the list. So it means that it’s mostly organic. So the next distinction down, and by the way it doesn’t mean that any of these foods are bad, most of these kind of lower tier are people that are actually really trying to be respectful of the environment and the food and they’re just not there yet, but I think it’s important again to look into it. This next one’s called made with organic ingredients. It’s actually called made with organic blank. That’s officially what they’re calling it on the USDA website. But basically what they would say is this is when you are looking at a can of soup and maybe it’s a can of chicken noodle soup, but the chicken’s not organic, the noodles aren’t organic, but it says, made with organic carrots, peas, and onions. And that means that those ingredients are organic and it can’t even have the organic USDA seal on it. And then basically this is also where it contains less than 70% of what is considered organic. Then it goes even deeper with when you’re just listing specific organic in the ingredient list. That would be the example on their website is the ingredients might say water, barley, beans, organic tomatoes, and salt. That’s just letting you know that when you see those different distinctions, a 100 percent organic, organic and made with organic ingredients, or specific organic ingredients in the list, they’re not all equal.

Elizabeth

And are their prices different? Are the prices different for the 100% versus the…

Molly
It depends on where you buy it from and what the product is and what the sales are, because sometimes adhering more could cost more and sometimes it doesn’t. So it really depends on what the item is. So if being organic compliant means they had to use a field that hadn’t been used in X number of years, you know, for anything other than organic farming, maybe they had to purchase the land for more money. Maybe because I know that in the past, and some of these rules and regulations may have changed, and you should definitely look it up on the usda.gov website. But at the time that I had done my research for school, the government was giving out something, for example, called sewage sludge. And sewage sludge was something like we think about you put cow manure, because it’s poop, on the garden to help it be fertilized. And so they would give out this sewage sludge. Well, organic food isn’t allowed to use sewage sludge. Sewage sludge is what comes down the toilet. It could be chemicals that people pour paint down their drains and stuff like that. And there’s maybe a lot of reasons that you might not want to eat food that has that. So I think that if someone was trying to run their farm and they weren’t able to get this cheaper, basically manure, and I might be wrong to say fertilizer manure, but anyway, they might have to go buy something else that costs more. So I think it inherently could cost more, but I think it doesn’t necessarily have to be expensive. I think sometimes people forget that the old original farms were organic before we started doing all this stuff, and a lot of times they’re able to reuse and recycle things on the farm and do things in a more sustainable way.

Elizabeth
Like I said, Molly, I envision you doing YouTubes about shopping with Molly, you know, let’s go shopping with Molly. I think that would be really cute.

Molly
We’ll see, maybe. Yeah, but speaking of shopping, I think you had mentioned something about the prices too, not just whether or not different types of organic have higher prices, but I’d like to talk about ways we can deal with when something better does cost more.

Elizabeth
Okay, you’ve got three minutes to talk about that. Okay. Can you talk about three minutes, go.

Molly
So I think something that we talked about earlier on in the episode, like with the bacon example of foods that you maybe don’t eat all the time, that don’t fill your whole diet, just like with everything you eat, you can prioritize how important is it to you to have that food in your diet. And sometimes people, upon realizing what really happens to food and why it needs to maybe cost more for something of a higher quality, they might decide, well, I don’t need to have that in my diet regularly. But another choice is to say, well, it’s really important to me to always eat organic beef. And I know that maybe the organic beef costs one or two dollars more than the other beef that I want to buy per pound. And so I have a budget for my family and you might make choices to buy some organic beans or something else with protein to cook your meals even differently to get around the fact that yes it might cost more per pound but it is important to have it in your diet maybe even weekly. You can change your recipes to include maybe smaller portions of certain ingredients when you don’t necessarily need bigger portions to uphold all the nutrition. On the other hand, you don’t want to fill the place of maybe a protein-rich food with something sugary, but there are definitely substitutions you can make out there without substituting cleanliness of the food or processing of the food in order to make the meal cheaper without really changing the overall taste and flavor for your family.

Elizabeth
This all sounds very delish. Probably not a good idea to be hungry when we’re talking about food, just like they say, don’t be very hungry when you go shopping.

Molly
Exactly right because you’ll buy everything in the store or two of something and when you only really need one yeah.

Elizabeth
So the usda.gov we’ll put all the essential links and be below but you’re gonna I’m gonna ask you this question Molly which is the usda.gov is that a trustworthy site

Molly
it is if so the USDA.gov no matter what you might think of some of you know whatever whatever you might think about some of the things that they do to food this has our country’s official rules and regulations it has market news, it has how they do grading and standards. There’s a lot of information on here so that even if you don’t like what they maybe do to some of the food, you can find it out here. And that being said, the reason it’s also important to know what our country does when it comes to these organic foods is it’s not the same as other countries. So I did forget to mention that, but when you get organic food that’s been brought in from another country, it may not be at the same standard as what it says on this website. So this is referring to food here.

Elizabeth
It’s pretty strict then you’re saying the USDA.gov format.

Molly
Yeah, it’s pretty strict. It’s not necessarily… sorry I didn’t hear you.

Elizabeth
It’s pretty strict,

Molly
but you can also learn about things like the differences between those labels and other labeling, even like alcohol labeling and other things where maybe it’s not super strict, but at least you know what the rules are for the industry people that are creating these foods for us.Like, what do they have to follow in order to put it out in the market. And yeah, and I think it’s also important to understand like certain words that don’t have a legal distinction like natural. You know, if you buy something that says it’s natural, what does that really mean? And legally, unless they’ve changed it, you know, recently, it doesn’t really mean anything. Again, it’s kind of that marketing. So it’s important to know where we where different things stand.

Elizabeth
Well, you are very knowledgeable and I really appreciate you coming on the show today and talking about food, that’s our theme. This has been Molly McWilliams. Thank you again so much for sharing what you do know. It sounds like you know a lot and we could probably- You’re welcome. We could probably do a whole other segment, but we’re going to wrap up for now. Thank you again, and we’re going to put the main links for you to follow below.

Molly
Well, thanks for having me, Elizabeth. I appreciate it. It was fun talking with you today.

Elizabeth
You’re welcome.

Elizabeth
From the album The Resurrection of Me, the name of this song is Finding Out. You can go and find out more about Chris Chickering at chrischickeringmusic.com. He is a singer, songwriter, a recording artist, a musician, a best-selling author, and social entrepreneur whose musical mission is to write and perform songs that speak to the core of the human condition. That’s Chris. Enjoy the song.

Chris Chickering
You turn your head. I swear I have to catch my breath. I must confess I’m living for you now Without you here my life would be a wasted Mediocrity you found me in this broken world In a sky-high desert town I’m finding out There’s more to us than just a fleeting wild emotion You’ve taken hold and I’m finding out Your waves are crashing over me just like an ocean My soul’s been stolen I’m finding out I’m finding out You are that beautiful I was fine doing okay All alone in Santa Fe I really wasn’t looking for someone You walked in the room that night And blinded me with laughter light I swear that I’ve been staring at the sun And I can’t believe I’ve just begun Finding out There’s more to us than just a fleeting wild emotion It’s taking hold and I’m finding out Your waves are crashing over me just like an ocean My soul’s been stolen I’m finding out I’m finding out I’m finding out There’s more to us than just a fleeting wild emotion You’ve taken hold and I’m finding out Your waves are crashing over me just like an ocean But so’s this story My soul’s been stolen, I’m finding out There’s more to us than just a fleeting wild emotion You’ve taken hold and I’m finding out Your waves are crashing over me just like an ocean, my soul’s been stolen Finding out, yes I’m finding out You are that beautiful You really are that beautiful to me?

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