Home Grown

In an earlier post I shared how I spent some time in Jamaica in the month of February. Before setting out for the trip my fear was that I would not leave home to end up sick far away from home as I wasn’t feeling the best. Well it wasn’t long before my worries about being sick faded away. Perhaps it had to do with eating foods straight from the ground and the trees and fish right from the ocean. No pesticides here….

This is the famous Jamaican Ackee. In the photo below I thought the birds had left it like that, but I was told this is how it is when it’s ready to be picked and eaten.

The flower above is from the Okra plant, and down below is the Okra.

I don’t think I’ve ever tasted Jack Fruit, but this is what it looks like and how it grows.

I got a chance to eat plenty of green bananas, breadfruit and yams. Below we have the green bananas and breadfruit.

After consuming a lot of these foods and feeling my energy levels increase, I decided to look at the properties of the breadfruit only to find that it is one of the super foods and it is a good source of energy, fights infections, fights diabetes, helps your digestion, provides the body with omega 3 and 6 fatty acids. So if you’re one of those people in the West Indies who don’t think too fondly of the breadfruit you may want to give it another chance.

These are peas. This is where the green peas and the dried peas come from.

The above pod is from the pea tree.

Below you have almonds. I remember as a young child we would wait till the almonds fell from the trees, then we would eat the outer skin when it was riper, then we would get a stone and pound the almond till it cracked open, and then we could eat the nut on the inside. There was no buying almonds in the store, they came straight from the tree.

Now these one I was told are used for making palm oil. I don’t know too much about them.

For the four weeks of my holiday we ate lots of fish straight out of the ocean. I have had some bad experiences from fish before, but not this time. Not when they were straight out of the ocean.

So for a while now I have found that when I eat the right foods, they diminish inflammation in the body and therefore diminish the use of certain medications. On the other hand if I do eat sweets and a lot of processed foods, the opposite can be true, and I would be left with a body wracked with pain.