By Rianne Chittenden
Diving into this deep ancient system of medicine, Ayurveda, has taught us at Ahara Ghee how much every working piece involved in the food that ends up on your plate truly matters: The quality of the soil. The harvesting process. The way it is made. The intention of every person that touches any part. The quality of life of any animal involved. All of these components make up the vibrational and chemical structure of your food. Your digestive tract is about three times your height. What you choose to ingest passes through this long winding tube and your body does what can to process it and continually re-build itself. To say the food you choose is important, is an understatement.
Just as pharmaceutical pills send a cascade of chemical reactions through the body to deliver a certain result, FOOD does the same thing. Every bite of healthy food can be just as powerful as swallowing a pill, improving our health journey.
What doesn’t help on this journey are the claims that can be made on food labels. Many people are doing their best to make the right food choices and frequently are confused by lingo found on food labels. Food companies can put just about any words or claims on packaging and we have to decipher the validity of the claims. Most ‘food’ found on shelves today isn't made with the intention to nourish us but with the only intent to sell more.
Our business initially started as a way to provide high-quality ghee for our Ayurvedic Patients because it was hard to find then. We built our brand on principles we truly believe in: impeccable sourcing, artisan culturing, small-batch, flame cooking and labels you can actually trust. Our butter supplier has dedicated A LOT of effort and time to make sure they have the best animal welfare standards, the best grass-feeding practices and the strictest non-GMO standards in the industry. If you want to know more about what’s behind our labels, we go in-depth here.
The culturing process our butter supplier uses is most similar to the one described in Vedic texts (as close as you can get while meeting US dairy regulations). They use live cultures to first turn the cream into a type of yogurt, or curd. They let the magic happen overnight before churning slowly. The result is a super-flavorful butter, which makes excellent tasting ghee. The culturing process makes our ghee prebiotic, an added benefit not found in uncultured ghee (which is the most common found on the market today). This is why the sages found that culturing was of vital importance. THIS is what makes ghee so wonderfully digestible and medicinal!
We set out to make ghee as close to the Vedic recommendations as possible, and never sacrifice taste for price. We take our time. We chant mantras. We keep positive conversation and intention as we slowly transform our cultured butter into ghee.
In the end, we are an Ayurvedic food company. We have a fine balance of Ahimsa (doing no harm), Ahara (feeding the vehicle/container of the soul), our care for the Earth and our commitment to you. We promise to tell you the truth. We promise to do our best. We are here, for you.