The Ancestral Food Fridge

I’ve been eating ancestrally for the past 15 years and the contents of my fridge reflect that. Ancestral eating is a way of life, rather than a strict set of rules, but there are certain things that you’ll often find in both mine, and other ancestral eaters’ fridges. This list in a great way to understand what the ancestral diet is, so let’s break them down:

Ferments

Fermentation is a backbone of the ancestral diet and you’ll always find ferments in an ancestral fridge.

Mine has vegetable ferments such as sauerkraut, dairy ferments like milk kefir and yogurt and fermented condiments including garlic and miso. Along with this, my fridge door houses drinks (made fizzy with the help of natural probiotics) like water kefir and, my family’s favourite, boza.

The actual fermentation of all of these happens on my worktop. Once the food or drink has reached the flavour and acidity I’m after, it goes into the fridge, where the cold slows the fermentation right down. That means it’s ready to enjoy over the coming weeks without changing too quickly.

My family don’t eat huge quantities. Instead, a spoonful of fermented vegetables alongside a meal, a glass of water kefir or a little boza as a nourishing snack brings variety, depth of flavour and living cultures into everyday eating.

If you’re new to fermentation, water kefir is one of the easiest places to start. It’s a naturally fermented, lightly sparkling drink that’s simple to make at home. If you’d like to explore one of the world’s oldest fermented grain drinks instead, have a read of What is Boza?. If you’d prefer to have a go at vegetable fermentation, check out my Super-Simple Sauerkraut.

In addition to these edible ferments, I also store my sourdough starters in the fridge in between bakes – this makes them much easier to manage. I detail my process in my pay-what-you-can mini-course Make & Maintain a Rye Sourdough Starter

Raw Dairy

There is always some dairy in my fridge and, if I can source it, I choose raw milk products.

Most of the dairy sold today is pasteurised, a process born of the industrialisation. Raw dairy, by contrast, feels like a living food.

If raw milk isn’t available where you live, check for cheese instead, some are made with raw milk. You can also use traditional milk fermentation practises to make yogurt or kefir which can add multiple benefits to carefully selected pasteurised milk.

In addition to fermented dairy I also almost always have butter for spreading and cooking and very regularly cream too, which is served with fruit and goes into dishes such as stews and risottos.

Meat and Offal

Rather than choosing only the standard selections, popular in supermarkets, the ancestral diet uses a variety of meat, including lesser-known cuts and offal. These bring variety in terms of flavour and nutrients as well as often being the economical choice.

In my fridge, you’ll often find joints that require long, slow cooking, bones waiting to be made into stock, liver which will become pate, along with favourites such as sausages from my local farmer.

There’s also usually a lot of previously cooked leftover meat – they are especially valuable because they can make lunches or snacks quick and effortless.

Here’s my popular recipe for slow-cooked beef heart. The leftovers can be made into multiple meals. I talk about how I do this in practise in this podcast episode

Saturated Fat

Butter, tallow (from cows) and lard (from pigs) are always in my fridge, each kept in its own container and ready for cooking.

These traditional fats have being used to cook family meals for generations. I use them to roast vegetables, to fry eggs, in sheet pan dishes, to start soups and risottos, in stews, and also to fry pancakes. I also spread butter or lard on bread.

Unlike the seed oils that have become common in modern kitchens, these are the fats my ancestors would have recognised. Having them ready makes it easy to cook almost every meal with traditional fats rather than reaching for industrially processed alternatives.

I render lard and tallow myself at home from locally produced fat that I buy directly from my farmer. Here’s an introduction into rendering in your own kitchen.

Seasonal Vegetables

The contents of my vegetable drawer change with the seasons. For me, in the northern hemisphere, in winter it’s likely to be cabbages, root vegetables, leeks and hardy greens. Spring brings asparagus and fresh herbs, summer means tomatoes, courgettes and cucumbers, while autumn sees mushrooms and the last of the beans.

In an ideal world I’d grow all of these myself, but not all of us have the space, time or resources to do that. The next best thing is to buy locally whenever possible. Seasonal vegetables that haven’t travelled far are often fresher, taste better and support local growers too.

Condiments and Flavour-Bringers

Alongside mustard, horseradish and mayonnaise (often homemade) you’ll often find preserved lemons, fermented garlic, miso, chutneys, Worcestershire sauce and fish sauce in a fridge of someone who follows an ancestral diet.

These aren’t there because ancestral foodies cook elaborate meals. They’re there because a spoonful of something savoury, tangy or deeply fermented can transform a simple plate of meat and vegetables or a bowl of soup into something far more interesting. I regularly use miso in dishes such as this Breakfast Bone Broth Bowl.

Lots of Leftovers

Perhaps the biggest difference between the fridge of a family that eats an ancestral food diet and the average modern one is the number of leftovers.

A bowl of yesterday’s stew. Half a roast chicken. Cooked vegetables ready to become tomorrow’s soup. Stock cooling after making broth. Rice awaiting a teatime salad.

Cooking larger quantities saves time, reduces waste and means nourishing food is always within easy reach.

Many of our best meals begin not with a recipe but with opening the fridge and asking, “What can I make with what’s already here?”

A Fridge Full of Possibilities

People often imagine that an ancestral diet requires a fridge and pantry full of unusual ingredients. In reality, my fridge contains remarkably ordinary foods.

The difference isn’t so much what is there as how it’s been produced, how it’s prepared and how it fits together. Traditional fats instead of industrial oils. Fermented foods instead of ultra-processed snacks. Leftovers instead of ready meals. Seasonal vegetables instead of packets that have been shipped half way around the world.

Every fridge tells a story. Mine tells the story of a kitchen where food is cooked from scratch, fermented foods are always close at hand, and yesterday’s meal is often the beginning of today’s.

If you’d like a deeper look inside two ancestral food refrigerators on opposite sides of the world listen to What’s in our Fridges? from Ancestral Kitchen Podcast.

You Might Also Like:

Twenty Steps to an Ancestral Kitchen – this free PDF download with an informative resource list can be found at the top of any page on my podcast site.

5 Simple Ways to Start Cooking Ancestrally

What Does Eating Ancestrally Mean?

What Ancestral Eating Isn’t

I often get questions, such as: What’s the difference between ancestral and paleo? Does an ancestral diet include grains? What foods can you eat on an ancestral diet? And what did our ancestors really eat?

Their answers are more complex – and, often, more interesting – than many articles online and in books would have you believe. They also give each of us, no matter where we live, what our health goals are and how much money we have, a positive way out of our society’s unhealthy, industrial food world.

The ‘ancestral diet’, as I see it here at Ancestral Kitchen, is not a rigid set of rules, but a way of learning from the wisdom of food traditions that nourished generations before us. Rather than cutting food groups, worrying about calories or following the latest trend, this way of eating turns to traditional food cultures for its foundations, practises and inspiration.

In this guide, we’ll explore what an ancestral diet is, what foods it includes, how traditional peoples prepared their food, and how you can begin eating ancestrally in your own home.

What Is the Ancestral Diet?

The ancestral diet is an approach to eating based on traditional foods and traditional methods of food preparation. It does not prescribe a single list of approved foods. Instead, it asks us to consider and learn from how people ate before industrial food production transformed the food supply.

>> What is Ancestral Eating? (Ancestral Kitchen Podcast episode)

Not all traditional cultures around the world ate the same way. Scottish crofters, English farm labourers, Mediterranean villagers and Arctic hunters all ate different diets. Yet certain principles appear again and again:

• Real, minimally processed foods
• Seasonal ingredients
• Traditional animal fats
• Fermented foods
• Home cooking
• Time-tested methods of preparation

The ancestral diet is therefore best understood not as a set of rules but as a philosophy of food rooted in history, tradition and practical kitchen skills.

Ancestral Diet Foods: What Can You Eat?

One of the most common questions people ask is: what foods can you eat on an ancestral diet?

No traditional food group is excluded, which means the answer is surprisingly broad.

Animal Foods

• Meat
• Fish and shellfish
• Eggs
• Organ meats
• Bone broths and stocks >> Bones & Water: The Magic of Stock (Ancestral Kitchen Podcast episode)

Dairy Foods

• Milk
• Cream
• Butter
• Cheese
• Yoghurt
• Kefir

Vegetables and Fruit

Fresh, seasonal produce formed an important part of many traditional diets. Depending on the season, foods were eaten fresh, dried, fermented or preserved.

Grains and Legumes

• Oats
• Wheat
• Rye
• Barley
• Peas
• Beans

Contrary to popular belief, grains and legumes have played important roles in many traditional diets. But they were rarely eaten as they are today – ancient varieties were standard and special preparation methods, which we can easily recreate in our modern kitchens – were employed to make them more nutritious.

>> Baking with Ancient Grains (free 30-page downloadable guide)

Traditional Fats

• Butter
• Tallow
• Lard
• Dripping

>> The Fats We Love, The Fats We Leave (Ancestral Kitchen Podcast episode)

Ancestral Diet Foods: A Historical Perspective

The Industrial Revolution began in the UK in the late 1700s. Ancestral food encompasses the food ways and traditions that came before it. Many modern discussions of ancestral eating focus almost exclusively on what stone-age man ate, missing the nigh on 5,000 years between the end of pre-history and the beginning of industry. In those 5,000 years our ancestors practised local, sustainable food ways that enabled their communities to thrive.

Fermented foods, slow-cooked stocks, nose-to-tail eating, saturated fat and sourdough – these were routinely part of traditional food cultures right up until industrialisation.

Over that time, there was never a single ancestral diet. Instead, there have been countless ancestral diets shaped by climate, geography, culture and available ingredients.

What Did Our Ancestors Really Eat?

Our ancestors ate what was available to them – the land shaping their diets.

In Scotland, oats formed the foundation of daily life for centuries – porridge and oatcakes sustaining generations of families. In parts of northern Europe, sourdough rye breads were staple foods. Across much of the Mediterranean, bread, legumes and dairy products featured prominently.

Most traditional diets included a mixture of plant and animal foods. Meat was often valued and celebrated, but in many communities it was eaten less frequently than modern assumptions suggest.

The ancestral diet is about recognising the common threads that connect traditional food cultures around the world: real food, careful preparation, seasonal eating and practical kitchen wisdom.

Traditional Food Preparation Is Central to the Ancestral Diet

When people discuss ancestral diet foods, they often focus on ingredients. Traditional cultures, however, paid equal attention to preparation. Their methods included:

• Fermenting
• Soaking
• Sprouting
• Culturing
• Slow-cooking
• Drying and preserving

A traditional sourdough loaf differs significantly from a modern industrial loaf. Likewise, a long-cooked bone broth is a different food to a powdered stock cube.

Understanding these methods helps us appreciate that the ancestral diet is about more than simply choosing different ingredients.

Why Fermented Foods Matter in an Ancestral Diet

Fermentation appears repeatedly in traditional food cultures around the world.

Milk became yoghurt and cheese. Vegetables became pickles and sauerkraut. Grains became sourdough breads and porridges.

Fermentation preserved precious food harvests, improved flavour and made food more digestible, Cheese and salami are just two examples of how it also created entirely new culinary traditions.

>>What We’re Fermenting Right Now (Ancestral Kitchen Podcast episode)

Can Grains Be Part of an Ancestral Diet?

Yes. History tells a much more nuanced story than many modern diet debates.

Many traditional societies relied on grains as staple foods. Oats sustained much of Scotland. Millet was integral to many communities in Africa and Eastern Europe. Heritage wheat featured prominently across the Mediterranean and Middle East.

The much more useful question to ask is not whether grains were eaten, but how they were prepared.

>> Baking with Ancient Grains (free 30 page PDF with instructions and five recipes!)

Is the Ancestral Diet the Same as Paleo?

No. While the two approaches overlap in some areas, they are not identical.

Many traditional cultures consumed dairy foods, grains and legumes.

The ancestral diet draws inspiration from a wide range of traditional food cultures rather than attempting to recreate a single prehistoric menu.

What Does an Ancestral Diet Look Like in Practice?

An ancestral diet can be a lot simpler than you may imagine. Here’s an example of what’s eaten in my house:

Breakfast

Sourdough porridge topped with soaked nuts/seeds, cream with optional seasonal fruit.

Midday meal

A slow-cooked beef stew served with ancient grain sourdough bread.

Supper

Eggs scrambled in lard, millet cooked in bone broth, seasonal salad.

Snacks

Cheese, oatcakes spread with butter, soaked nuts/seeds, seasonal fruit.

An ancestral diet is nutrient-dense, delicious and satisfying – yet it need not be complicated. Leftovers regularly feature in our meals and foods are often repeated. The aim is not perfection or historical re-enactment. The goal is to bring traditional food wisdom into modern life.

>> A Week of Ancestral Meals: What We Really Ate (Ancestral KItchen Podcast episode)

How to Start an Ancestral Diet

Many people ask me this question! I like to suggest picking one thing that appeals to you and starting there. Below is a list of places you could begin, each followed by a resource of mine which will help you get going:

• Learn to make stock >> Bones & Water: The Magic of Stock (Ancestral Kitchen Podcast episode)
• Create a sourdough starter and learn how to bake a loaf >> Make & Maintain a Rye Sourdough Starter (pay what you can mini-course)
• Ferment some vegetables >> Super-Simple Sauerkraut Recipe (blog post)
• Cook more meals from scratch. >> Preparing Nutrient-Dense Meals from Scratch Every Day (Ancestral Kitchen Podcast episode)
• Replace ultra-processed snacks with traditional foods (blog post coming soon!)
• Swap out industrial seed oils for traditional fats >> How to Render Fat at Home (with Q&A) (Ancestral Kitchen Podcast episode)
• Ferment your morning oats >> The Best Way to Soak Oats (blog post)

Small steps are the key to making sustainable change. If you’d like a guide to help you get started, download 20 Small Steps to an Ancestral Kitchen from the top of any page on website of the show I co-host, Ancestral Kitchen Podcast.

Frequently Asked Questions About the Ancestral Diet

Is the ancestral diet the same as the paleo diet?

No. The ancestral diet takes a broader historical view and includes many foods that traditional cultures ate, including dairy products, fermented grains and legumes.

Can you eat grains on an ancestral diet?

Yes. Many traditional cultures relied heavily on grains such as oats, rye, barley and wheat. Traditional preparation methods were often as important as the grains themselves. >> All About Grains: Preparing, Processing & Digesting! (Ancestral Kitchen Podcast episode)

Is sourdough part of an ancestral diet?

Absolutely. Sourdough is one of the oldest and most widespread traditional methods of grain preparation.

Can you eat dairy on an ancestral diet?

Many traditional cultures consumed dairy foods, particularly butter, cream, cheese, yoghurt and other cultured dairy products. They traditionally ate non-pasteurised milk >> Raw Milk: Our Ancestral Heritage (Ancestral Kitchen Podcast episode)

Are potatoes part of an ancestral diet?

Yes. Potatoes have nourished traditional communities for centuries and fit comfortably within an ancestral approach to eating.

Can you eat rice on an ancestral diet?

Yes. Rice has sustained traditional societies across Asia for thousands of years and remains one of the world’s most important staple foods.

What foods should be avoided on an ancestral diet?

Most people focus on minimising ultra-processed foods, industrial seed oils, sugary soft drinks and highly refined snack foods.

Do I need to make everything from scratch?

Although we can all get passionate about making change, trying to do everything at once is, as I know, a recipe for disaster! Start with one practice such as making broth, baking sourdough or fermenting vegetables and build gradually.

Final Thoughts: What Is the Ancestral Diet Really About?

At its heart, the ancestral diet is about learning from the generations who came before us.

It is not a rigid meal plan; there is no list of forbidden foods.

Rather, it encourages us to explore traditional foods, traditional preparation methods and traditional kitchen skills.

Whether that means baking sourdough, making broth, fermenting vegetables, cooking with traditional fats or rediscovering regional food traditions, the goal is the same: to bring the wisdom, joy and flavour of real, ancestral food into our modern kitchens.

More Resources:

Ancestral Kitchen Podcast has over 130 episodes focusing on all aspects of eating ancestrally in our modern-world kitchens.

If you’d like some recipe inspiration, check my stash here.

The Ancestral Kitchen Challenge is a fun, no pressure way to explore an ancestral diet, giving you achievable goals to work at in your kitchen.

But I don’t spend my whole life in the kitchen! Instead, it’s well-loved routines that help me to provide nutrient-dense food at our table day in, day out. Like a comforting blanket or favourite meal these rhythms create backdrops to my days and serve myself and my family well – ensuring that what we are eating supports both our values and our health.

In this post I’ll share the daily, weekly and monthly routines that keep mytraditional, ancestral kitchen running. In doing so, I hope you’ll see how rhythms have such horsepower and be inspired to work with them in your own home.

Daily routines in my Ancestral Kitchen

Soak/Ferment Oatmeal

During the week we usually have oatmeal (called porridge here in the UK) for breakfast. I prepare this the night before by soaking rolled/flaked oats in water. Most often I include a live starter and/or some phytase-rich, freshly-ground flour.

You can watch my You Tube video Healthy, Fermented Oats here.

If you prefer to read, this post How To Make Fermented Oats will talk you through it.

Time needed: 5 minutes

Result: Delicious, healthy breakfast every day!

Make Tibicos/Water Kefir

As a family, we drink 1 litre/quart of Tibicos (often known as water kefir) every day.

My son (who is 10 years old) is in charge of this process. Once a day he strains the jar of fermenting water kefir into a swing top bottle for a second fermentation, adding flavourings (like fruit and ginger). He then prepares a new jar, using sugar, water and our water kefir grains, for a first fermentation.

To see how check my post How To Make Tibicos (Water Kefir).

Time needed: 5 to 10 minutes

Result: A litre of probiotic water kefir everyday.

Cooking!

I prepare three meals a day from fresh, local ingredients. That does not, however, mean that I spend hours and hours in the kitchen every day.

Breakfast:

Our breakfast most days is oatmeal. This takes 15 minutes to cook.

Main meal:

Our main meal is at noon and usually consists of previously-made bread, seasonal vegetables and either freshly-cooked (or leftover) meat/fish/eggs or frozen food prepared on previous days. I usually start preparing this meal about 45 minutes before we eat.

Evening meal:

We eat our last meal of the day around 5pm. This is lighter and often consists of grains cooked in stock, seasonal vegetables and cheese or eggs. This meal usually takes around 30 minutes to prepare.

If you’d like to hear me talking about how I do this, you’ll enjoy my podcast episode Preparing Nutrient-Dense Meals From Scratch Every Day.

Time needed: 1 1/2 hours

Result: 3 meals a day

Weekly Routines in my Ancestral Kitchen

Roll Oats

Home-rolled oats taste much better than those that have been rolled industrially. Once a week we roll a kilo (about 2 pounds) of oat groats in a manual Marcato Marga grain mill. This provides our oatmeal/porridge for the week. If you wanted to do this process more quickly, you could buy an electric flaker. See my post How to Roll Oats at Home for more details.

Time needed: 30 minutes

Result: The oats for our breakfast all week taste great!

Make Oatcakes

Flatbreads are so versatile and the traditional British flatbread, oatcake, is something that I make every week. It’s great as a snack, a compliment to soup or a quick supper. I make oatcakes once a week and store them in an airtight container.

You can follow my recipe for Traditional Scottish Oatcakes here.

Time needed: 30 minutes hands-on

Result: A container of oatcakes that will last all week.

Process my Kitchen Waste into Bokashi Compost

Cooking with real food everyday means that I have a lot of organic food waste. I recycle this waste into amazing soil for my plants using the bokashi compost system – a clean, simple method that uses the power of fermentation to produce compost quickly. It can even be used in an apartment!

Daily, I collect waste in a caddy on my kitchen counter. When this is full, I transfer it to my bokashi bin and layer it with a bran that has previously been inoculated with lactobacillus. Once a week I drain off the liquid, which I used to water my plants. Once the bin is full I leave for two weeks to ferment before digging into my garden.

Listen to the lowdown on bokashi here.

Time needed: 15 minutes.

Result: Much better/happier vegetables and plant; they grow so well in bokashi!

A Trip to the Farmers Market

The majority of the food that comes into my house is from my weekly local farmers market. We look forward to this as a family trip out – it’s time together outside and there is always good conversation to be had.

Time needed: 2 hours

Result: A fridge/freezer full of the food that we will eat that week; virtually no need to do any other shopping.

Milk Kefir

As well as water kefir, we consume milk kefir. Once a week, I decant a litre/quart of milk into a glass jar and add in some milk kefir grains. This is then a hands-off ferment, taking 4 to 5 days to complete. During that time, I stir it once a day. Once it is finished, I strain it through a plastic sieve into a fresh glass jar and conserve the milk kefir grains in a small amount of water in the fridge until next time.

Time needed: 5 minutes

Result: Probiotic-rich milk kefir all week.

Kefir Cheese

Cheese is one of our more expensive purchases, and to help with the cost, I love to make a simple kefir cheese at home. Using fresh, very creamy milk, I decant a litre/quart into a glass jar and then add milk kefir grains. I stir this daily, watching for when it starts to separate. Once I see the whey in pockets distinct from the curds, I stir it well, looking for and picking out the kefir grains, then strain it through a cheesecloth. This leaves me with cheese in the cloth and whey in the jar.

I use the whey as a starter for fermented drinks or cook grains and it.

Time needed: 15 minutes

Result: Inexpensive cheese for a week.

Make Sourdough Bread

We eat sourdough bread made from the ancient grains spelt and rye every day. I make these once a week, ideally both on the same day so that I can efficiently use our oven.

Ancestral Kitchen Podcast episode: Your Sourdough Questions Answered

My e-book: Spelt Sourdough Every Day

 I freshly-grind flour for these breads using my Mockmill

My post all about the Mockmill is here.

Time needed: 60 minutes hands-on

Result: Sourdough bread at every main meal.

At the same time as making our sourdough bread I will also refresh my sourdough starter.

Refresh my Sourdough Starter

I maintain a thick, low-hydration, wholegrain rye sourdough starter. I love this method because it gives you a really active starter with very little fuss. I keep it in the fridge most of the time and only refresh it once a week – usually the evening before I make sourdough bread

How to Create a Sourdough Starter

Time needed: 15 minutes

Result: A sourdough starter without having to worry about it for the rest of the week.

Make the Probiotic Millet Drink, Boza

My family love the home-made probiotic drink boza. It’s gluten-free and dairy-free – I started making it for my son who, early in his life, had a dairy intolerance. Now, my whole family adores it!

To find out what boza is, read my article What is Boza Drink?

Boza is how I usually start my week. I cook up the millet on a Monday morning and, by Monday evening, I’ve blended all the necessary ingredients and the drink is fermenting on my counter. It’s usually ready to tuck into by Wednesday.

Time needed: 20 minutes hands-on

Result: A delicious, inexpensive probiotic drink that is dairy-free.

Make One Batch Meal

Once a week I will take more time to prepare food, making four or five servings at one time so that I can stock our fridge/freezer with quick, nutritious meals.

I usually choose dishes that will cook without me having to give them much hands-on attention like a big pot of soup or a slow-cooked stew.

Here are two examples:

Chicken and Vegetable Soup

Beef and Barley Stew

Time needed: 2 hours hands-on

Result: A meal that day plus 3 to 4 further ready-to-go meals for later in the week.

Monthly Routines in my Ancestral Kitchen

Make Bone Broth

Bone broth is one of the fundamentals of a traditional food diet and it is so cheap and easy to make. I buy bones for next to nothing from a local farmer and, in addition, I save the bones from any whole meat that I cook, keeping them in the freezer until I’m ready to make a batch of broth.

I use the slow cooker to make bone broth, putting in the bones, some root vegetables and water. I set the cooker to low and leave it for 18 to 24 hours before straining out the protein-rich, delicious broth.

Podcast episode: Broth Q & A

My 5 Favourite Ways to Use Bone Broth

I store about a litre/quart of broth in the fridge (with the fat cap still on it to help it last longer) and freeze the rest.

Time needed: 1 hour hands on

Result: Broth for a month, ready when I need it.

Make Sauerkraut

Most meals are better with sauerkraut! Not only is the flavour profile delicious, but you’re adding a spoonful of live probiotics to your plate. Sauerkraut using my method is super-simple. I make it this way once a month, leaving it on the counter to ferment before I transfer it to the fridge the following month, when I make the next batch.

Super-Simple Sauerkraut Recipe

Time needed: 45 minutes

Result: Probiotic-rich sauerkraut for 4 to 6 weeks.

Home-Render Lard

I am a lard lover. We use lard to cook with, in breads and pastries and we spread it on sourdough bread (as you would butter) before sprinkling with salt!

Supermarket lard tastes horrible. Home-rendered lard made from the fat of well-fed pigs is a completely different food. It’s also very economical and easy to make. I source back fat from our local pig farmer and I use the slow cooker to render it into lard.

How to Render Lard (in a Slow Cooker)

Time needed: 2 1/2 hours

Result: Delicious, economical, sustainable fat that will last 1 to 2 months.

Purchase Grains and Other Foods in Bulk

Our house is very small, yet we still find enough space to store our grains for a month, which I purchase in bulk. Our supply includes whole spelt grain, whole rye grain, whole millet grain, whole oat grain, Scottish oats (called oatmeal in the UK), linseed (flaxseed) and nuts. Bulk purchasing means that I’m not worrying about running out of grains and also saves me so much money!

Time needed: 1 hour

Result: A cupboard full of grains that will last at least a month.

Bringing Routines into Your Own Kitchen

As with any other long-term journey, bringing ancestral food routines into your own kitchen is about picking up one thing at a time. You may want to do it all (I always have done and am sure I always will!) but in my experience that results in overwhelm, which does not help. Select one thing that you would really like to make part of your kitchen rhythms and focus on it exclusively until it feels a natural part of your life and then move onto the next. Good luck!

For more inspiration you can listen to Ancestral Kitchen Podcast. In particular the episodes 20 Small Steps to a Ancestral Kitchen and the Ancestral Kitchen Challenge contain lot of step-by-step inspiration.

You might also like:

My Favourite Kitchen Equipment

1/ Ancestral eating isn’t eating the way your ancestors did, regardless of where you live.

Ancestral eating is about eating the food that is local to you. Food that can be sustained naturally and well on the land around you.

It is not eating what your ancestors ate, regardless of where you live; that is the science of nutrigenetics which recommends you eat a certain way based on your inherited genes.

For example, if you lived in the centre of America and yet had ancestors that had lived in coastal Japan, nutrigenetics may recommend that you eat a diet high in seaweed and other staples that are ancestral to that area of Asia.

Ancestral eating, however, would say look at the land surrounding you and see what it has traditionally and can naturally sustain and eat that.

2/ Ancestral eating isn’t necessarily eating the way your great-grandparents did.

Michael Pollan famously said in 2008 “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food.” Often this sentence is used to define ancestral food.

Over 15 years after it was written, for many of us (especially those of us in America and the UK), our great-grandmothers were eating industrially-made food. I have several cookbooks from the early 1900s which include margarine in their ingredient lists and indeed Crisco, the industrially-processed replacement to ancestral fats such as lard, was launched in 1915.

Even if we are eating foods our great-grandmother’s would recognise, such as beef, pork and eggs, the animals who produced that food are eating very different things to what they would have been fed in the past. And our vegetables and fruit are now being sprayed with chemical concoctions that didn’t exist back then.

For me, ancestral eating means pre-industrial food systems. We look to the foods that sustained our ancestors before profit became the thing that drives mainstream food and before global transport came into the picture.

3/ Ancestral eating is not eschewing all modern conveniences.

Just because we take the inspiration for our food supply and preparation methods from those who came before us doesn’t mean we cannot use the options that the modern world has given us in the kitchen.

Let’s take the example of grain. In the past, our ancestors would have toiled for many hours hand-working grinding stones to make flour for bread. Now we have companies that have developed compact ecological stone mills for grinding grain at home. These modern mills do the job in a fraction of the time.

We stand at an amazing time: we can have the best of both worlds. We can judiciously choose a way forward that both cares for and ensures the survival of our race yet doesn’t see us spend our whole day on food preparation.

4/ Ancestral eating isn’t a romanticisation of foodways of the past.

It may feel good to get closer to our food; to get our hands in the soil, to grow our own vegetables, to bake our own bread but ancestral eating as a way of life does not romanticise the past.

As residents of developed countries, we live with unprecedented abundance. The people who came before us rarely experienced this; so many of them struggled throughout their lives just to have enough food to survive.

We can be inspired by the food wisdom of our forefathers – the way they cared for the soil, the way they preserved food, the way they wasted so little – whilst also holding both respect for their tremendous battles and gratitude for our own situation.

5/ Ancestral eating isn’t about excluding grains.

The Paleo diet excludes grains. Ancestral eating doesn’t.

It is said that farming grains began 12,000 years ago. Eating ancestrally (being defined as being inspired by pre-industrial food systems) can incorporate grain-eating. As with other food groups, we look to the wisdom of the past to understand best practice. Our ancestors most often processed their grains before consuming by soaking and/or fermenting.

6/ Ancestral eating isn’t an excuse to sell you supplements.

A journey into ancestral food will often educate us about nutrition and in doing so it’s all too easy to get persuaded into the purchase of expensive supplements. Indeed, an Internet search using the terms ancestral food will relatively quickly bring results that talk about supplementation.

Sometimes supplements can be useful. And sometimes they can be produced sustainably. However, the tenets of ancestral eating revolve around careful selection, sourcing and preparation of foods and it is absolutely possible to eat ancestrally without supplementing your diet with powders or pills.

Further resources:

My article: What does Eating Ancestrally Mean?

Ancestral Kitchen Podcast episode: All About Grains

Looking back over what I wrote, I’m astounded: it’s an incredible amount of work!

Yet this is a fraction of what women did in the home just a few hundred years ago. Yes, there was ale, a lot of ale, but there was also making bread, dairying, looking after children, cleaning, tending to the garden and animals, ensuring everyone was clothed and much more.

And in pre-industrial households, it’s not as if the men didn’t work! Partnerships were very practical, both sexes depending on each other to subsist. Some tasks were generally undertaken by women (because of their physicality or nature), some by men.

The household was a unit of economic value. Society lived by that value.

That all changed with industrialisation.

At that moment, we began to outsource women’s and men’s household work. That outsourcing was mainly organised by men who started doing it ‘more efficiently’ and for a profit. House-holders then had to travel outside the home to work.

No more preparing breads with the best available ingredients, no more home-brewed ale, no more keeping animals, no more drinking fresh milk.

Fast forward a couple of hundred years and we now have mass-produced, foreign-flour bread with a list of additives as long as our arms, packaged in plastic (that ends up in our fish) and transported across countries in polluting lorries.

Instead of home-made ale we have homogeneous beers. We have wines made of grapes whose natural yeasts are killed before being inoculated with lab grown cultures. We have global brands of sugar-filled soft drinks.

And the Western world is full of disconnected, dissatisfied people with ever-decreasing health. I know that you know it’s not a coincidence.

And yet in our world at large, women who decide not to ‘work’, to instead stay at home and care for their children, tend a garden and make meals from fresh ingredients are lost members of society, literally deemed (until very recently in the US at least) unemployed because they don’t make an economic contribution.

I am thankful that there are women and men out there who are shouting as loud as they can about the value of home-making and I want to add to their call.

What can I do?

How can I amplify my voice and the voices of so many women, like me, who know the value of this work and want the world to realise what it’s ignoring, what it’s devaluing, what we’ve lost?

These are questions I ask myself every day.

As well as moving back to the UK this summer, my husband Rob and I have decided to home-school our son, Gabriel. One of the biggest factors in this decision has been how much we value the work that we both do in our home. We want to pass these important skills onto our son.

Yes, we want him to know how to read and write and yes, we want him to know that he can pursue the things that light him up, but we also want him to know what it takes to run a household sanely and healthily.

We don’t have a daughter; we’ll be passing what society deems women’s work on to our son. Because there’s a bigger issue here than how work was, is or should be divided between women and men. Taking responsibility for all the facets of personal and societal health within the home is important and society has devalued and pushed it away for too long. We want it to flow through the veins of our child notwithstanding his gender.

So that, as well as being able to turn his hand to making traditional ale at home, he will also know how to how to bake proper bread, how to feed himself well, how to work with the ingredients around him, and how to provide for himself.

In order to turn around the numerous problems our modern Western society has, we must begin to value again the life-giving, holistic work that has been carried out by women and men for thousands of years inside the four walls of the home.

p.s. If you’d like to have a go at the ale, I’m enthusiastically behind you. There’s an ale and brewing thread on the podcast patreon forum (you can join here for just $5 a month) where I can provide additional support and guidance.

Why so much lard?

Because, next week, we will leave our home and travel to Britain for just over a month. I am looking look forward to the trip in so many ways – seeing friends and family and reuniting my son, Gabriel, with his grandparents, but, being away from our kitchen is a challenge for me.

There are some mainstays of our diet, like lard, that are difficult to source away from home and I’m busy preparing the essentials that we’ll pack into our two suitcases to help us eat well when we’re away. I’ve spent long stretches of time away from a ‘home’ kitchen, without the luxury of a car boot, living out of suitcases and I’ve still managed to feel good about how I’m eating and the food I’m giving my family.

In this article, I’ll outline some cornerstones to eating ancestrally away from your home and give you examples from my own kitchen that you can take away and use for yourself!

Eating Ancestrally Away From Home:

1/ Work out what’s important to you

2/ Choose where you stay carefully

3/ identify where you can compromise most easily

4/ Think about your ‘essential’ equipment

Let’s look at these one by one:

1/ Work out what’s important to you (and use that to guide your choices)

What are the foundations of your diet? Are they easily accessible in the location where you’ll be staying? If not, prioritise taking these.

For us, the three most important daily inputs that are hard/expensive to replicate when we’re away are probiotics, sourdough bread and good fat. Hence, these are the three things I focus on.

Probiotics

The two easiest probiotics from our routine to travel with are sauerkraut and water kefir. Here’s how I organise it:

Sauerkraut: A month before we go, I make a special two-kilo (four-and-a-half pound) jar of sauerkraut which is destined to be transferred into a tightly-locking food container and travel with us in our suitcase. I always wrap this food container in a plastic bag (or two) and tie tightly because air pressure changes cause containers to leak and I don’t want sauerkraut juice all over my clothes!

Water Kefir: The night before we leave, I prepare four tablespoons of water kefir grains for their journey! I mix up a sugar/water solution and put it into small jar, adding the water kefir grains and screwing the lid on tightly. I then wrap this jar in a plastic bag and seal it tightly. The jar will nestle in the middle of our case (ideally surrounded by socks…I’ve never had one smash this way!).

When we arrive, I buy two two-litre water bottles and drink/decant the water. I cut the top quarter off one of them and discard it, using the bottom three-quarters as the container for my water kefir’s first ferment. I fill it up with sugar/water solution, add my well-travelled grains and cover it with whatever I can find (a cut-up bit of plastic bag, a face towel, some kitchen paper). The second of the two water bottles becomes the container for the kefir’s second fermentation. I use these plastic bottles over and over for the duration of our trip, often transporting them from kitchen to kitchen if we’re moving location.

Sourdough bread

In order to continue to make good quality spelt and rye bread whilst away I do two things:

1/ Pre-order local flour to arrive in location where I’ll be

2/ Take my sourdough starter with me

I also often take a lightweight silicone loaf tin with me for baking.

It is very possible to take sourdough starter on a long journey. Refresh it, at a low hydration (70% hydration works for my rye starter), just before you go. When you arrive check how it’s doing and refresh again if necessary. (If you want more information on creating and maintaining a rye sourdough starter, check out my pay-what-you-can course here.)

Making sourdough bread with flours from many different locations has taught me so much about uniqueness and beauty of grains and helped me become more intuitive, less perfectionist baker. I’d recommend giving it a go!

Fat

This year we will take around two kilos (4.5 pounds) of home-rendered lard to England with us. Ideally, we’d have more, but we don’t have the luggage space, so I’ll be very deliberate in my use of it (and we’ll supplement it with bought butter and olive oil).

In order to get the lard to our destination, I freeze it before we travel. As I pack our suitcase, I deliberately reserve a space for the lard. It is, along with our toothbrushes, one of the last things that goes into the case before it’s zipped up!

2/ Choose where you stay carefully

Prioritise getting a kitchen!

It is challenging enough to be away from home and eat ancestrally, but to be without a kitchen makes it so much harder. Go out of your way to look for places to stay that have kitchens. Here in Europe, we would choose to stay in an AirBnB over an hotel because this.

If you are staying with friends and/or family, and the kitchen that you get to use is not so well-equipped, ask people if they have things you can borrow – a blender, some jars, loaf tin. Sharing what you make with them as a thank you is a beautiful exchange!

3/ Work out where you can compromise most easily

Trying to make our diets 100% perfect 100% of the time is such a stressful endeavour! Being out of your home environment is the time to compromise.

For example:

• When we’re travelling it’s harder to access raw milk, so we will either avoid milk or opt for good-quality pasteurised milk.
• My energy is limited; when we travel, I don’t often do the research/travel to get local meat. This is the time when I will consciously use other sources. We (shock, horror!) will go to supermarkets, choosing the least harmful produce we can find there.

4/ Think about your ‘essential’ equipment

Simple, good equipment can completely change our experience of cooking. What small tools do you use in your kitchen that you’d be lost without? Consider taking them with you.

Travelling (often with just one family suitcase for a month’s trip) I have become very selective with the equipment that I take with me. Here’s what’s going in this year:

My knife: Being able to work efficiently in an unfamiliar space is important. I find it incredibly frustrating using other peoples knives, and have my own that I take with me. If you are flying, remember to put this in your hold luggage!

My small funnel and my plastic sieve: These are essential for my water kefir making process. They are tiny and fit easily in my suitcase.

My small digital scales: I weigh ingredients for bread, and I’m constantly surprised how many kitchens don’t have good scales.

The luggage for our trips is often made up of a large percentage of food and kitchen equipment! This means that I have to take less of everything else, mainly less clothes and less shoes (on our last trip, I wore the same sandals every day for five weeks). This is, as a practice, really eye-opening. On my return home I often wonder why I need all the other things hanging in my wardrobe and, this way, I always feel good about the effort I went to to secure food for myself and the two people I love most in the world.

Happy travels!

P.S. If you want to hear more about travelling and eating ancestrally, check out Ancestral Kitchen Podcast #47 ‘The Christmas Survival Guide’ (where we talk about travelling and, in particular, cover scenarios I haven’t here like staying as someone’s guest and pre-ordering a lot of food) and also #15 of Kitchen Table Chats (where I go in depth into our logistics for our trip last year), the show that goes out to supporters of Ancestral Kitchen Podcast. To get access to this second one (plus so much more support) join the ‘companionship’ level of our supporters group on Patreon here 

Been meaning to try that new ferment? Find a bread recipe for your family? Tackle that recipe you’ve been avoiding?!

Looking for ideas, support and encouragement?

The Ancestral Kitchen Challenge is here to help. My podcast co-host, Andrea, and I came up with it in response to all the messages we’ve received from people who love cooking ancestrally and want to do more of it. It’s a at-your-own-pace challenge with 22 prompts:

You can download the challenge prompts to pin up in your kitchen here. You’ll find a work-in-progress note sheet on the second page, where you can jot down your ideas, plans and hopes for the challenge.

Listen to the episode of Ancestral Kitchen Podcast that accompanies this challenge.

These days, our food is in the hands of large corporations, run by men, whose aim is to make money.

Yet food is so much more than money. The way we feed ourselves, our families and our communities is do-or-die fundamental to our bodily and mental health, our communities, our economies and our environment. Up until a few short generations ago the ways we produced food enhanced those things – our meals were made from what the local land could give and prepared with handed-down wisdom.

Since money took the reigns, that has slowly disintegrated. And with that disintegration, we have lost so much. So much health, so much connection, so much empowerment, so much knowledge. And at the same time as that loss, we have been slowly destroying the very source of our life, the soils, the earth, the environment.

Eating ancestrally aims to turn this around. By choosing to step out of the industrial food system and instead learning from, practising and eating the way our forebears ate, we can reclaim our kitchens, our health, our supply chain and our community. All whilst knowing we are doing something that given half a chance can restore the health of our world.

In practise, eating ancestrally means looking at how pre-industrial cultures found, grew, prepared and ate food; before profit and planes came into the picture. When human health and keeping the land fertile mattered.

There is a lifetime’s worth of wisdom in the kitchens of our past. Here’s how to bring some of that to our modern fingertips:

Eat what is local and in season

Our ancestors ate the food that the land around them could provide, in the season it could naturally provide it. They did this through necessity – being responsible for your own food is arduous and they knew working with the seasons would not only provide for them but also respect the soil. Eating ancestrally in a modern kitchen means following this strategy. If you live by the sea, include locally-caught fish in your diet. If goats and sheep thrive on the hilly landscape around you, cultivate, or look for local, meat and dairy. Summer fruits are to be enjoyed and preserved in the warmth, whilst winter ushers in new crops and dishes suited to the cold.

Cook meals at home, from scratch

Until recently, the hearth was the centre of a home. It was a place where ingredients were lovingly prepared for the table, from scratch, with wisdom learnt at apron-strings. When we eschew mass-produced food, our kitchens come to life – becoming the centre of the magical transformation of fresh produce into healthy, life and joy-giving meals.

Consume animals raised and fed naturally

Pre-industrialisation, animals were raised in the landscapes that they were most adapted to, and they ate what those environments provided for them. This is a world away from the grain-fed, feed lot animals that the coming of mass-transportation heralded. The nutritional profile of and farming practices that surround locally-adapted and raised animals, fed on foods they evolved eating is invaluable to personal and environmental health. Eating ancestrally means striving to serve this type of animal produce at our tables.

Eat all the animal

Traditionally, where animals were available to our ancestors as food, they were prized. This meant using every single part of them. The muscle meat yes, but the innards, the head, the bones too. An ancestral kitchen sees dishes with an array of offal, stock made with bones, and fats rendered to use in cooking.

Use real fat

Along with the whole animal, comes the fat that our predecessors were able to produce from it. Lard comes from pig fat; tallow from a cow. These fats are ready to use in the kitchen with minimal processing. They differ vastly from the highly-processed mono-cultured vegetable oils that have glided onto our supermarket shelves the last 50 years. Animal fats sustain us, give our brains the food they need and they need no other processing or packaging than what can be done in the tiniest kitchen.

Process grains

Our ancestors started to farm grains over 12,000 years ago, but it was likely they were eating them long before then. They would not, however, recognise the array of grain and bread products available to the average shopper today. Grains have historically been eating processed – i.e. fermented (think sourdough), in order to neutralise the toxic compounds they can contain and pre-digest them making them easier on our bodies.

Include fermented foods in your diet

Every long-lived culture has included some from of fermented foods in their diet. From sauerkraut, the fermented cabbage, eaten with meats in Germany, to kimchi, yogurt and kvass – these foods preserve fresh ingredients but also, importantly, provide live probiotic bacteria on a regular basis for our guts.

Modern science is just beginning to show us how important so many of these things are for our health:

• That sourdough bread is easier to digest and healthier than packaged bread
• That offal contains more nutrients than any other part of an animal
• That eating fermented foods regularly can change our microbiome and therefore our immune system
• That time spent in the kitchen is good for our mental health and binds together our families
• That local and seasonal foods are higher in nutrients

Our ancestors did all these things, yet they had no science. They just knew it made sense.

Eating ancestrally, for me, means taking a stand for my health and the health of my family, caring about my community and doing what I believe will create a better world. And all this whilst I’m joyfully in the kitchen, hands wrist-deep in bowl of local grain sourdough.

Below are articles whose information I used in the bullet points towards the end of this piece:

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/organ-meats#TOC_TITLE_HDR_7

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/07/fermented-food-diet-increases-microbiome-diversity-lowers-inflammation

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/feeling-down-scientists-say-cooking-and-baking-may-help-you-feel-better-180961223

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/07/the-importance-of-eating-together/374256

https://www.eufic.org/en/healthy-living/article/are-seasonal-fruit-and-vegetables-better-for-the-environment

Real food – food good for us mentally and physically and environmentally – is not produced in factories by profit-driven companies. It is grown and reared by individuals who care, offered to the community and then kitchen-crafted into delicious, health-giving food. This cycle is full of connection; real people, and when we sit at the table to eat, our bodies and souls are truly fed.

Sometimes, the processes involved in cooking from scratch in this way can seem overwhelming. I want to make it as easy as possible for you. Because it’s worth it.

So here are 5 simple ways to start cooking ancestrally.

1. Make stock

Why?

Stock is magic – it’s making something deeply nutritious out of ‘waste’. Saving and cooking bones gives us a tasty base for many other dishes but also feeds us with essentials minerals and the incredibly-healing gelatin.

The simplest way:

Buy whole organic chickens. After you roast them, save the bones (along with any bits of skin/tendons attached) in a bag in the freezer. When you have a good amount of bones put them in a big pot with water, an onion, some celery and a carrot and bring this to the boil. Turn it down as low as you can and cook it so the water barely shows any bubbles for at least 12 hours.

Once it has cooled, drain the contents of the pot through a sieve. Drink the stock or use it as cooking liquid for grains such as rice, or as the base for a stew.

2. Eat organ meat

Why?

Organ meat is the most nutritionally dense part of an animal. And yet it is part of the 50% of the animal that routinely never makes it to our shops. Ancestral cooking is about respect – and eating all of an animal respects the sacrifice made.

The simplest way:

Out of all offal, liver is often seen as the most accessible. Chicken liver is milder in taste than that found in other animals. Get hold of some chicken livers, chop them and add them to a dish such as bolognaise or chilli.

3. Embrace fat

Why?

Fat is amazing. It carries flavour, making dishes taste good, keeps us fuller for longer and also carries essential vitamins that aren’t so easily available elsewhere – like A, D, E and K.

The simplest way:

Choose foods that haven’t had the fat stripped away. Buy whole milk, chicken with the skin on and red meats that are marbled with fat (if you can’t find fatty beef cuts in your supermarket, use the opportunity to seek out a local farmer and buy directly). Include these whole foods in your meals.

4. Ferment

Why?

Our gut, and the biome it contains, is the master controller of our health. Anything we can do to support the good bacteria that live there is, I believe, one of the most important health steps we can take. Fermented foods are packed with probiotic good bacteria.

The simplest way:

Make sauerkraut. All you need is a cabbage, some salt, a large glass pickling jar with a lid, a knife and a bowl. Click here to be taken to a post talking you through how.

5. Soak your grains

Why?

Grains contain a chemical called phytic acid. This stops you absorbing minerals. If you soak grains prior to cooking, you can deactivate much of this phytic acid. And in the process you soften up the grains too, which’ll make it easier for you body to absorb them.

The simplest way:

Think about what grains you want to cook the following day. Before you go to bed, put these grains into a bowl, cover generously with slightly warm water and add a couple of tbsp of an acidic liquid (lemon, vinegar, whey, yogurt, sourdough starter). The next day, before you use the grains, drain and rinse them. Cook them as normal.

If you’ve got question on any of these steps, feel free to contact me. You can do so via my Instagram account @ancestral_kitchen or by commenting below.