Spring-Greens Detox Soup

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posted on

May 13, 2025

Few things these days seem more important than keeping healthy and building our immunity. Taking good care of ourselves so that we can take care of others and live life to the full.

As we move toward a new season where we'll spend more time outdoors, we'll naturally peel off our cozy comfort-zone-hibernation-mode layers, literally and figuratively, and move toward summertime fellowship and FUN! Preparing our bodies for this more vibrant energy mode feels exciting and timely to me.

As a newer member of the team here at the farm, I am I learning new ways to prepare healthy meals at home and for loved ones nearby.

So I was thrilled to meet longtime Polyface patron saint (as our customers are affectionately called) Eleonora Gafton at a recent neighborhood delivery drop!

Eleonora is a Doctor of Clinical Nutrition professor and Certified Chef in the Nutrition and Integrative Health program at the Maryland University of Integrative Health.

As Dr. Gafton was picking up her Polyface order, we chatted about her upcoming class where she would use our food to teach students about cooking nutrient dense meals. She promised to send me a couple of her favorite recipes.

Eleonora grew up on an organic farm and winery in Romania and has fond memories of shopping at farmers markets with her grandmother. Meeting the people who raised and grew their food ignited her passion for natural food and led her to become the first female executive chef in a communist country.

She moved to the US to follow a job opportunity in Washington DC and quickly fell into a fast-paced career culture and "convenience" grocery store food trap where she'd buy boxed or prepared food labeled as "healthy".

Ten years later, her body "broke down" and she was diagnosed with cervical cancer that she believes was due to those food choices and stress.

And so began a slow and steady healing process to rebuild her body. She stocked up her freezer with several batches of bone broth, which was all she "could handle" with very low energy, post surgery and treatment.

All the protein she bought came from Polyface.

There was a major shift for her where she began to really understand the power of whole foods. Just seeing her transformation, her oncologist and surgeon was "blown away" that she'd lost fifty pounds of inflammation in a relatively short period of time.

With her own health restored, Eleonora is committed to teaching others how to build their health with nutrient dense food as medicine.

She takes the mystery out of using "all the things" - unusual cuts of meat and organs to develop beautiful and satisfying meals.

One fun culinary term I've learned from her is the word "schmaltz" - which refers to rendered chicken fat. It is made by slowly rendering chicken skin and fat in a pot over low heat creating a savory, rich fat with a buttery texture. I now love schmaltz! Gaining the knowledge that it's is so good for me to eat and learning how to use to it for cooking has been such a fun endeavor.

So please enjoy and share these recipes which were so graciously shared with us. Because there is nothing more immunity building than being in community and sharing a delicious, wholesome meal around a table - al fresco!

Find our new recipes here:

Eleonora's Chicken Bone Broth

Dr. Gafton's Spring Greens Detox Soup

Blessings,

Kristi

Chicken

Food Shortages

I'm in Oregon today speaking at the Azure Harvest Festival and a question from the audience during a Q&A stimulated a lot of discussion: "What do you think about the possibility and preparation surrounding food shortages?" David Stelzer, founder of Azure Standard, answered that the issue is not food volume, it's food nutrition. That was an interesting answer that has a lot of merit. As a nation, we are overfed and undernourished. This is the crux of the MAHA movement and the epidemic diseases we see in our country. At Polyface, we know the pastured meat and poultry we produce is far superior in essential phytochemicals and other nutrients due to the carotenes, exercise, and stress-free habitat we offer. You can taste the difference, feel the difference in texture, and measure it empirically. Perhaps my most poignant affirmation was our cat test. We purchased meat from the supermarket and offered our own for the four cats. They wouldn't touch the conventional meat (ground beef). Even though two plates and four cats would be much easier to accommodate if they spread out, all four crowded around the plate with our meat, eating it all and licking it up, before later sniffing and gingerly eating the supermarket counterpart. Since cats don't understand TV ads or USDA propaganda, they know what's good and what's not. We encourage anyone dismissive of food differences to ask their pets: you can trust them far more than doctors and experts. Yes, I get the nutrient deficiency angle on the shortage question. But I'd like to explore it a bit further. Right now, the world throws away more human-edible food, as a percentage of production, than at any time in human history. The planet is awash in food. Some 40 percent gets thrown away because it has a slight blemish, exceeds the sell-by date, or is tainted in some way. We have a fundamentally segregated food supply rather than an integrated one, and that creates a lot of unusable waste. The vulnerabilities of our food system, I think, are much more subtle. When I was in Uruguay two years ago, speaking at a conference, one of the other presenters was from Germany and showed a soil map of the globe. Not a single commercial agricultural region had a stable or positive soil trajectory. Every single area on the planet is losing soil; some faster than others, but globally our soil depletion continues without any sign of abatement. This is not a good trajectory. As much as the technocrats promise food without soil, that's not the way to bet. Soil is the skin of the earth. When it goes, famine results. The main difference now compared to centuries ago is that we have the capacity to move food around. Nobody starves due to a lack of food on the planet; they starve due to socio-political unrest and dysfunction. But what happens when massive areas can't grow anything anymore? Even being able to move food around doesn't help when there isn't enough. The soil trajectory does not look good. But at Polyface, we're building soil. Areas covered with shale (layered rocks) half a century ago now have a foot of soil on them. That's not the 3-5 feet that 150 years of inappropriate tillage eroded, but it's a build-back start. In addition to soil loss, as a planet we're seeing hydrologic decreases. The Oglala aquifer, which undergirds the irrigated agriculture in five states, has dropped more than 100 feet in the last half-century. At its current rate, it will be unpumpable in about 50 more years. Imagine if all those circular irrigation pivots in Nebraska and Kansas shut down. What then? At Polyface, we keep building ponds to inventory surface runoff. By definition, surface runoff occurs when rains come too fast at once or too much at one time for the soil to absorb it. Holding that and using it strategically in a drought is a way to reduce flooding during rain events and grow grass when it gets dry. This is one of the most landscape resilient techniques we can implement. Finally, major animal and plant diseases threaten the world's food systems like never before. African swine fever, hoof and mouth disease in cattle, and bird flu in poultry appear to be getting worse and covering larger areas. Why? We believe it's because chemicals and factory farming compromise the immunological systems in both plants and animals. Monocrops and chemical fertilizers wreak havoc on immune systems, opening the planet's food systems to new levels of fragility. In contrast, at Polyface, we believe happy animals and biodiversity offer the best antidote to immunological deficiency. Stress from unsanitary conditions, mono-species density, or dietary deficiency (rations or fertilizer) invites disease. Nature uses disease to cull the weak. Predators pick off the stragglers. This is the way biology works. But at Polyface, we keep these vulnerabilities at bay with compost fertilization, pasture rotations, and lots of species diversity, including pollinators and wildlife. Here's the point: the basic long-term vulnerabilities in the planet's food systems could all be reversed with practices Polyface uses every day. Looked at another way, the entire food shortage question could be answered if eaters and farmers implemented these ecological and immunological protocols, working together to rather than completely separated. We don't need to fall into an abyss of starvation. If we all simply began eating food from farms that build soil, increase water, and stimulate immunity, we could deliver a hospitable, abundant planet to our children. Reversing these trajectories wouldn't take much time or money. It takes intentionally-minded folks who connect the chain of sustenance from their plate to the planet. Polyface patrons do that. Thank you. Let's heal the land together. Joel

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Spring-Greens Detox Soup

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