The Lost Art of Eating Like an Adult

Got What I Voted For Again. GWIVFA. It’s a popular meme on the internet. Trust me.

When Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. flipped the food pyramid, emphasizing that Americans should “EAT REAL FOOD,” I pounded out those six letters like my keyboard owed me money.

The new dietary guidelines promote eating protein at every meal, incorporating healthy fats from foods like dairy, cheese, and seafood, limiting processed junk and sugar intake, and offering a host of other common-sense suggestions.

This is what real food producers have been waiting for, especially small dairy farmers, ranchers, poultrymen, fishermen, and outfits that grow, raise, and harvest nutrient-dense, domestically sourced, and environmentally sustainable real food.

Outfits like the small business my wife and I own. We are commercial fishermen. We harvest sockeye salmon in Bristol Bay, Alaska. It’s the last productive wild sockeye salmon run in the world. Anyone who has picked up a copy of National Geographic or seen videos of the brown bears at Brooks Falls catching fish, that’s our river, the Naknek River, where we fish every summer.

It’s quite an adventure.

Learn to "cod." Shannon Ward

My wife is a fourth-generation commercial fisherman. In 2008, she began selling her catch directly at farmers markets. It was a matter of survival. Salmon prices from the major processors were at rock bottom, with the bulk of the premium products being shipped abroad since most Americans weren’t eating enough seafood.

Like a sensible young man, I ditched my dead-end newspaper career and married into the fishing business. I “Learned to Cod,” to borrow a pun. And our business is growing, with last year being our best one yet. After years of howling alone in the wilderness, it has been empowering to hear our message amplified by the administration’s Make America Healthy Again campaign.

Everyone is talking about it. From seafood industry marketing events to corporate processors’ letters to the fleet, from Facebook groups run by individual fishermen to the customers that we see on the ground with whom we interact.

We have gym bros who buy our salmon because they want to protein-max; pregnant mothers who want to avoid mercury and overly processed meats; parents of young, growing kids looking for omegas; elderly people concerned about bone density and aging, illness, and recovery. There’s also a lot of people wanting to be close to the source of their food, desiring to support those sources; people who wish for sustainability and traceability; and vegetarians/vegans who have done research and decided that our salmon fits their dietary needs without violating their reasons for avoiding meat.

Changing the Narrative

Our biggest hurdle is educating our customers on how to incorporate salmon into their diets. People are looking to better their lives in some way. And that’s a good thing.

Our story is one small piece of a larger puzzle, one that is interconnected with the overall scheme of the Make America Healthy Again project. But it all comes down to education. It’s all well and good to tell Americans to EAT REAL FOOD. But the problem is, do Americans even know what real food is?

One easy answer is to find a producer. Get your food from the source, or as close to it as possible. It is a niche community, but more and more people are sourcing their eggs and dairy, their beef, pork, and poultry, and their honey and vegetables right from the folks who are growing the real food and raising the animals.

If you are buying from the producer, they are very likely to share tips on how to prepare and cook their product. I have yet to meet a rancher who doesn’t know a thousand different ways to cook a steer.

My wife and I are constantly sharing recipes and ideas for using our salmon in every format: fresh-frozen filets, tinned salmon, smoked fish.

Fish tacos. Salmon salad. Sandwich filling. Rice bowls. Smoked salmon omelettes on top of twice-baked potatoes, in a breakfast scramble, and added to soup or chowder. Trust me: we can go on at length.

Fresh food and healthy eating is a family operation for this Alaskan fishing company.Shannon Ward

There are follow-on benefits as well. Our customers dig supporting domestic producers and small businesses. And in return, they can be sure where the fish they’re getting comes from. Traceability is very sexy. And we can give them the straight dope on where our fish were caught, the name of the river system, how we saw it, what happened to the fish after it was pulled out of the net and put on ice, and the amount of time between processing and freezing.

You don’t get that story from a corporate supermarket.

It can be intimidating. RFK Jr. is asking Americans to EAT REAL FOOD, after all. But for decades, Americans have not been taught how. It’s a lost art. In fact, they’ve been deliberately discouraged through multibillion-dollar ad campaigns by corporate conglomerates, many of which are foreign-owned or -controlled. Modern supermarkets push processed junk onto consumers. Cereal, potato chips, and processed sweets are peddled front and center in the main aisles while the healthier alternatives are shunted off to the sides. And often these “healthy” choices aren’t great, given how meats are handled or fruits and vegetables are grown with industrialized, lower-nutrient farming techniques.

There has been a multipronged effort to push processed junk on the American consumer, subsidized by the federal government and reinforced by our educational system. Even our pop culture has maligned eating real food, whether it’s morning talk show hosts from the ‘90s chortling about drinking Big Gulps or hipster websites mocking the notion of taking time after work to cook a real meal. Yes, it’s gonna take a lot of effort.

You Are What You Eat

Simple, fresh food. Shannon Ward

And for those who have not done it before, making the switch to eating REAL FOOD probably does seem hard. We’ve all become used to overpaying for frozen, premade slop and popping it into the microwave. But eating REAL FOOD is much cheaper than eating out or ordering from Uber Eats. And we all know that it is healthier too.

It might seem trite, but you are what you eat. My wife has eaten wild Alaskan seafood every day for more than two years for its health qualities. During the summer, I use salmon as fuel to help me power through stretches of 12- to 18-hour days or more, catching fish, pulling them out of the gillnet, and then hauling them. And neither of us is a spring chicken.

But I do know that when I eat our fish, I feel great. And I’m stronger today than when I was in my 20s, staring at a computer screen, churning out eight newspaper stories for the local rag.

When I eat the eggs our neighbors raise two blocks over, I feel great. When I eat the free range poultry that we get from our fellow market vendor, I feel great. When I get a half side of grass-fed beef from our local rancher, I feel great after frying it up. It’s like high octane gas in a sports car.

Meanwhile, when I eat some processed slop, I feel like crap. And it doesn’t take a nutritionist to figure out what your body is telling you.

It’s no wonder that we have an obesity epidemic. And it’s no wonder why so many kids are growing up physically and mentally stunted.

It is time to purify the ingredients that go into what we already eat. And the next step is giving Americans the tools to do it.

BIO: Donald Ward is a commercial fisherman, former newspaper reporter, and political writer. A husband and father, he splits his time between the Palouse and Bristol Bay. He and his wife Shannon own TwoIfBySeafoods, a small business which directly markets their salmon catch to customers.