Real Food, Right Side Up Again… A Health Coach & Farmer View of the Corrected Food Pyramid

It wasn’t until my wife and I started talking seriously about children that I paid attention to food in a way that felt almost embarrassing. Before that, I did what most people do. I tried to feel decent. I tried to keep enough energy to make it through the long middle of the day without becoming a stranger to myself and when I went overboard, I assured myself my “young metabolism” could take on just about anything. But once pregnancy and little bodies entered the picture, “decent” stopped being a category. I started asking a different question… what foods actually build and maintain a human being well.

That question narrows your life. It makes you less interested in cleverness and more interested in outcomes. I read late at night with the kitchen light turned low… books, articles, old dietary traditions, newer research… the kind of scavenger hunt you do when you are trying to love someone you have not met yet. The voices disagreed about plenty, but a few themes kept resurfacing in different languages. Nutrient density mattered. Fat-soluble vitamins mattered. Minerals mattered. Protein mattered. Ethic mattered, and whether drugs and chemicals were residual in the foods really mattered. The older food writers were not timid about fat, and they didn’t speak about animal foods as a guilty indulgence. They talked about egg yolks, broth, liver, kidney, marrow, butter, tallow… and deep colored berries that taste a little wild, like they remember the hedge row in August.

The question stopped being theoretical one night as my tea steamed and the kids slept soundly. Where do you actually buy that kind of food?

I can still see the grocery aisle… fluorescent light that makes everything look faintly sick, cooler doors with packaged goods fogged with fingerprints, a cart wheel that thumped every few feet like a mild accusation. I was looking for something simple, almost absurdly simple… animal fat that felt honest. Not a spread. Not a bottle of oil with a health halo. Just fat… from an animal that lived like an animal, that wasn’t injected, and that lived a stress-free, ethical life, making the land better than it was before it grazed.

The more I searched, the more the aisle began to tell a different story.

Plenty of calories, plenty of packaging, plenty of “options”… but very little I could trace back to a life that made sense. Even when labels sounded reassuring, the details dissolved the moment you tried to hold them. Better according to whom. Raised how. Fed what. Handled how? Transported how far? It felt like being asked to purchase integrity from a shelf in a culture that didn’t have any.

That aisle did something to me. It made me realize how much of modern eating is really a negotiation between convenience and trust… and how often the burden of that negotiation gets pushed onto a tired person trying to do right by their family.

So I went deeper.

I studied nutrition in a more formal way. I earned a Primal Health Coach certification along the way, not because a certificate makes anyone wise, but because I wanted a framework sturdy enough to hold fear and responsibility without collapsing into internet noise. The more I learned, the clearer one thing became. The problem wasn’t that people were lazy or ignorant. The problem was infrastructure. You can’t consistently eat real food if real food is hard to find, hard to verify, and priced like a luxury.

That is how our farm began.

Not as a hobby dressed up for photos. Not as a lifestyle brand. As a response to a real need in our own house. We started with animals we could manage with our actual hands… poultry on pasture, pigs raised in the woods, lambs on grass. We set rules that felt almost old-fashioned. No drugs. Period. No chemical fertilizers. No herbicides. No shortcuts that turn land into a factory floor. And most of all, constant rotation around the farm to fresh grass for the benefit of the animal, and for fertilization of the tired and abused land.

In practice it was less romantic than people imagine. Mud. Frozen hoses. Fence that never stays fixed. Predators that don’t care about your ideals. Winter that makes you question whether water should be allowed to turn solid at all. But it also returned something I hadn’t expected… the sense that nourishment isn’t a concept. It’s a relationship. It’s land, husbandry, weather, patience and the sacrifice of convenience… and a chain of decisions that either leads to honest food or to a label that asks you not to look past the cartoon of smiling farmer in front of a sunrise.

Recently I watched a new federal nutrition graphic make the rounds… an updated version of the old food pyramid, flipped from the emphasis many of us grew up with. I’m not naïve about government messaging. It is always an alloy… science, politics, compromise, the desire to make one picture speak to millions of very different lives. Still, seeing the official story drift back toward protein and whole foods felt like a quiet relief. Not because a chart is the be-all-end-all, but because it hinted at an admission… the previous era’s confidence didn’t match the lived results.

For years, fat became an easy villain, no - THE villain. Cholesterol became a cartoon villain, the mustached thief who tied the helpless damsel to the train tracks. Eggs became a punchline (their good, their bad, their good, their bad!). In that climate, refined starch could sit at the center of the plate wearing a health costume, while a satisfying breakfast was treated as suspect. I don’t say this to resurrect old arguments for sport. I say it because many people were made to feel that their bodies were the problem… when the problem was often the kind of food the system made easiest.

This is where the public conversation about nutrition tends to get strange. Studies become slogans. Observational research, which can be valuable, gets treated like a verdict. Correlation takes on the moral force of causation. People point to big population data and announce a single clean scapegoat… or they point to one famous long-running cohort and treat it like scripture. Meanwhile, any clinician who has sat with real patients knows that context matters. Age matters. Metabolic health matters. The difference between a person eating eggs with vegetables and a person eating eggs on top of a sugar and flour base matters. There is a difference between commercially produced eggs and local, pasture-raised eggs. Red meat from a drug-saturated CAFO is not the same as red meat from rotationally grazed regenerative cows. One pattern is a meal. The other pattern is a commodity that destroys our environment and our body… with awfully pretty packaging.

Out on a farm, you learn quickly that bodies are not arguments. They respond to satiety. They respond to steady blood sugar. They respond to meals that end the question of hunger instead of provoking it. They respond to foods that reduce inflammation, not provoke it. You can watch the difference in a single day. A breakfast built mostly on refined carbohydrates tends to send people searching by late morning, bargaining with themselves, and rummaging. A breakfast with real protein and real fat tends to quiet the noise. And over time, we learn that the question isn’t, how MUCH can I eat without becoming sick, but how LITTLE can I eat and still maintain maximum health and resilience.

I think about that now in the same place the whole story began… not in a policy document, but in a marriage turning toward children. When you are trying to care for a pregnancy, for an infant, for a toddler… you don’t want ideology. You want nourishment. You want food that feels like it is actually made of something and made in a way that lets you sleep at night. You want the kind of simple steadiness that lets a person get through a morning without their mood and their hunger dragging them around like a leash, without the quiet, step-by-step damage to the body that happens over years of eating highly processed and manipulated chemical foods.

If you want to read your way into this conversation, I still think a few writers are worth spending time with, not as prophets, but as companions… Mark Sisson for a clear modern articulation of the Primal approach, Sally Fallon Morell for the older pantry and the unapologetic return of traditional fats, Michael Pollan for the food system story most of us half know and rarely face, and perhaps best of all, Lierre Keith for the ultimate argument that refuses to keep the moral questions at arm’s length.

But the real test doesn’t happen in a debate. It happens on a Tuesday morning. A warm pan. Two pasture-raised eggs. Something dark and green if you have it. Leftover potatoes if you don’t. Fruit on the side. A meal that feels almost too simple for the amount of calm it creates. No french toast. No bagels. No fake maple syrup.

Sometimes I think back to that grocery aisle and feel a kind of tenderness for the person I was… trying to buy integrity under fluorescent light. That was the moment I learned that nourishment is not just a personal choice. It’s infrastructure. It’s land. It’s husbandry. It’s a chain of decisions that either leads to honest food or to endless, expensive guessing.

The shells crack easily. The yolks hold their color. The house goes quiet for a few minutes. Breakfast does what it is supposed to do… it feeds you… and then it gets out of the way.

Over years, that daily choice adds up. Not into perfection, not into immunity from whatever life brings, but into something you can feel… steadier energy, a clearer mind, a body that isn’t always negotiating with hunger. We can’t control everything. We can control what we put in the pantry, what we put in our bodies, what we make ordinary for our children.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. Buy local when you can. Know your farmer if you can. Shop the edges of the store and treat the middle aisles like a place you enter on purpose, not by habit.

Avoid ingredients you can’t pronounce or labels with more than 3 ingredients, and if a food shows up in bright cardboard with a long list of promises, it’s worth pausing. Very often it wasn’t designed to make you strong. It was designed to sell well.

Author bio
Blake Ragghianti is a regenerative farmer and certified Primal Health Coach. He also continues a career in premium boutique distilling. He is a father of three and now raises nutrient-dense food with his family on a regenerative farm rooted in ancestral principles and respect for land, animal, and human. (primalhealthcoach.com)