About the author: J. Natalie Winch lives in southern New Jersey, not far from where she grew up, with her husband, two children, and dogs. When she isn’t mothering, teaching, grading, or making lesson plans, Natalie runs the Hebrew School at her synagogue, coaches soccer, teaches lacto-fermentation classes, writes the occasional entry for her blog Food Empowerment, and fights the dust bunnies that threaten to take over her family room.

About the book: After an exhausting day at work, hitting the drive-thru or nuking a pre-fab meal is all too often the go-to decision for feeding a family. Cooking a meal from scratch using fresh ingredients can seem beyond the average person’s time, energy, or financial means. But with mounting evidence pointing to processed food and our industrial food system as the culprits behind many of our nation’s health problems—including obesity, diabetes, and cancer—it’s now more important than ever to be fully informed about what goes on your family’s dinner plates.

If you’re ready to take control of your food choices but don’t know the difference between grass-fed versus grain-fed, pastured versus free-range, or organic versus sustainable, read this book to discover:

• How to create your own thirty-month plan to convert your family from junk food to real food, without a revolt!
• Recipes and advice on planning and prepping meals so you can make homecooked a habit for your family
• Instructions for getting the most out of produce using techniques such as lacto-fermentation, dehydrating, and canning
• Introduction to the world of farm-direct sales, including tips on locating local farms, seeing through marketing buzzwords, and shopping with CSAs Ditching the Drive-Thru exposes the insidious hold the commercial food industry has taken over the fast-paced lives of the average American and the danger these processed foods and diet plans pose to our health, environment, and emotional wellbeing.

Learn how to break free from the grind and return to a simpler relationship with food from farmers, not factories, and home-cooked meals that are created in your kitchen, not on a conveyor belt.

Review: While reading books such as Fast Food Nation, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Sugar Fat Salt have been quite eye opening, none of them offer tips about the nitty gritty of making a change from processed to whole foods. Ditching the Drive-Thru is filled both with information that will encourage readers to want to make the switch and information about how to undergo said switch.

It’s not like author J Natalie Winch is a health-care professional, but she neither presents herself as one nor writes as if she is one. Quite the contrary; she states it outright in the first sentence of the book that she is not a pro but that rather, she is a mother who wanted to help her family become healthier. This sets the tone for the entire book, both in the content as well as in the style. I felt like I was chatting with my passionate, opinionated friend

It takes a big change in our patterns of thought and patterns of behavior to be able to change the way we perceive our relationship with food. Winch takes us along the path she has treaded in the hopes that we, too, will be inspired to do the same. Non-judgmental but unapologetic, she shares her reasons why she went au naturel without coming off as a know-it-all. She is confident is what she knows but seems comfortable in the limited of her knowledge and open to learn more. If you are a disbeliever in the dangers of processed foods, this book is not for you—reach instead for one of the others I mentioned earlier in this review. But if you are convinced that there is a need for profound change in our diet but don’t quite know where to start, or have reached a plateau, then this is the book for you.

Purchase links: Amazon, Barnes & Noble