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Pollan on a Roll

Monday, February 8, 2010

I have really been appreciating Michael Pollan’s recent tour circuit for his latest book Food Rules. With both The Daily Show and Oprah he has been hitting mainstream media with really important messages about food production and culture and is doing so is a way that is straight, truthful and ultimately seem easier for people to get and get behind (easier that is than maybe his past messages and others in the SOLE food movement. (That’s Sustainable, Organic, Local, and Ethical))

The best of these interviews so far has been with Amy Goodman and Sharif Abdek Kouddous on Democracy Now. They tell him at the beginning that they their “food rule” for him is “no sound bites” and he plays along (probably eager for the chance to elaborate really). Even if you have read his books and/or heard him talk, and he does do a lot of repeating, as I guess is necessary, this interchange is worth watching. As he does in the others, he really brings together the complexity of the food culture with clear ways out of many of the tangles we’re in but he goes a bit deeper than the rest and seems a bit more honest.

My favorite point is his mention of the feminist/labor issues around food and how processed food and classic feminism went, unfortunately, hand in hand due to the need for more income and less entrapment of women in a domestic role. I think this questions gets to the heart of our daily food life; who cooks for us, why don’t we cook ourselves, why don’t we prioritize the time and money to eat well? I really feel that addressing these questions and making changes that align with our heart-of-heart values with the answers can be really empowering, healing, and have great impact on the world.

My least favorite point is his use of the word “fat” as if there is one category and none of the members of that category have any distinction. I know he understands this because he is very current on the research on the role of fat in the diet. People generally understand that there a “good fats” and “bad fats” so he could just at least say “bad fats” but he could take it a step further and seperate out whole, traditional fats from broke, rancid, industrial fats. He does this already with meat. There is no such thing as meat as one category- there are animals that are eaten that have completely different diets and nutritional profiles even though they are technically the same animals. He explains that he eats less meat than he used to and he eats different meat than he used to (only grass fed for beef for example). I wish he would make the same distinction with fat. He mentioned that school lunches are so deplorable because it is the disposal method for surplus cheap food and because the meals have calorie minimums not maximums. He says the meals need to have less fat- well school lunches have low-fat milk, but we know that’s not really the best choice in terms of providing whole food. So schools have followed the low-fat mantra, but are still terribly unhealthy. He doesn’t really mean that they need less fat, they need like foods and chemicals that are contributing to disease and obesity in children, which is not whole milk- it is soda (which he does mention), and highly processed carbs, and industrial fats. I wouldn’t change much about what he said, and I don’t think he should bring down the ease with which he communicates by bringing this up in such a way (as I do), but it would help his message stay consistent if he would at least make a careful distinction in this regard.

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Waste Not, Want Not

Sunday, January 31, 2010

There is a real joy in feeling resourceful, even with simple things. One of my favorite things to figure out is how to stretch the use of something and my least favorite thing is to waste food. The main focus of all this writing here has been how to eat well on a budget, but this doesn’t start with buying cheap food. The goal in my relationship with food is to be able to get just what I need from basically the highest quality food I can find and then do the most I can with that food. The best example of this is paying 6.99 per lb for a pasture raised chicken and then using the meat for at least two meals (for two people) and making three or four quarts of stock. This creates lots of food with a higher up front cost but savings down the line and a serious prevention of waste- of food but also, especially important, food packaging.

I stopped buying pre-made breadcrumbs not right after Alice Waters told me to make my own (via her book The Art of Simple Food) but when I stopped (mostly) eating wheat/grain products that aren’t fermented or soaked. The whole wheat panko we used to buy came in a plastic container and didn’t really get used much anyway. Now, I throw the heels of our Alvarado St. Sourdough Sprouted Grain (double whammy) sandwich bread into a waxed paper bag. Last night was the first time I actually remembered that I had that bag of heels on the top of the fridge and also had a distinct use for tasty breadcrumbs.

Two heels made plenty of crumbs for a 1/2lb of fish (which is just the right amount of fish for two people, another reason not to balk that the high cost of sustainable fish per pound- you don’t need very much)

I used our sauerkraut pounder, the instructions I’ve seen say to use the food processor, but that was too dish-intensive for something supposed to be simple. You could also use an empty bottle. I have  seen recipes that advise for bread to not be totally stale, which mine was…it turned out fine. If you can’t use actually stale bread, than what’s the point?

As neat as I think the breadcrumb resourcefulness was, I think this post is really just way to get in a word (at last) about my love for the waxed paper bag. It is a great alternative to plastic, which, for many foods, performs better due it’s ability to keep out moisture but allow the food to breathe, especially important for bread and cheese. A good ziplock, plastic wrap, or aluminum foil alternative. I highly recommend getting a pack of these compostable, handsome, handy items.

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A dinner of a different color? Not until Spring…

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Our food in 2010 seems to be following a color pattern…

In Nourishing Traditions, there is one instance that Sally Fallon gives a thumbs up to the increased globalization (and industrialization) of food and that is to the availability of a wide variety of fruits and vegetables year round, which insures that people will eat enough variety of plants. (I’m not sure if she still holds this feeling as so much of her work involves supporting small farmers to provide ecologically grown local food.) Nina Planck also admits that she goes beyond the farmer’s market in winter to have a fresh green salad every day, for her it’s worth it. Ultimately I would probably make the same choice if I didn’t live in a place where lettuce is bright and happy all year, but I wonder if we are “supposed” to eat the kinds of food we are able to find in a given season. Not just to ecological or economic reasons, but because of what our bodies need at a given time.

I’ve tried to explore an intuition that the foods in season are just the foods our bodies need in a given season. That is, could it be that collard greens, broccoli, brussell sprouts and butternut squash, carrots, and yams are all available right now and such timing matches up with my body’s particular nutritional needs in the winter?

It isn’t really an easy thing to answer since people live in such different climates (around the world and different from their ancestry). Apparently, in Traditional Chinese Medicine “the foods that are natural to a particular season carry strong messages of Qi balancing and tonifying for that season.” (more on that here) From my limited understanding of this body of knowledge it seems that winter is yin, and balance is created by consuming yang foods. Yang foods are warming and include crops that take a long time to grow and those that are eaten cooked. This means that the food needed for balance in winter are just those foods that are available in winter, which would make sense

In western medicine terms winter means cold and flu season and SAD (seasonal affective disorder). Both of these issue can be valiantly battled through food, but it isn’t clear to me that the foods available in winter are uniquely rich in immune supporting qualities (for cold and flu) and omega 3’s, Vitamin D, and antioxidants (for SAD). They all have all these things, but not, it doesn’t seem, in special winter abundance.

So, there is some discrepancy on whether foods really appear during the season in which they are best for your body. But even if nature might not be writing me a seasonal prescription I still hold that eating in season is the best way to get the fullest variety of foods over the course of a year. Even though you might be getting less variety in a given season, you get more greens for your green because in-season food is cheaper and over the course of the year the variety is great because you are not just sticking to the veggies and fruits you are comfortable with, but are challenged to try favorite dishes with seasonal alternatives. Sally Fallon may be right that some people wouldn’t eat fruits and veggies at all in the winter if all they had only brassicas and roots to choose from, but maybe that’s only because they’ve never been challenged to go without. (I have to admit that I am still stuck in the naive assumption that fruits and vegetables are the only things that change with the seasons (besides getting venison at hunting season from family, crab for the first (only) time in the year around Christmas, and a limited supply of pastured eggs at the farmer’s market during winter). For a more complete understanding of the seasonality of food, I recommend reading this article from Mother Earth News by Joel Salatin the famous grass farmer.)

There is also the argument that seasonal veggies and fruits are more nutritional because the food is fresher; that is, you eat it closer to the time it was harvested and it was harvested ripe, which is when a plant is also most nutritious to those animals who eat it…clever plants.

In addition to my New Years resolution to eat more greens I am trying not to get too deep into the details of the nutritional profile for a given whole food. Basically, the  clearest way to talk about food in this culture is to use the terms and taxonomy of western science (The Chinese Medicine example above is a refreshing alternative, but unfortunately doesn’t translate as easily). But this view of food I think has obscured our understanding of what we eat, rather than expanded it. Michael Pollan dealt with this issue in his In Defense of Food, basing a discussion of the rejection of Nutritionism with a whole book about nutrition.  Ultimately a healthy relationship with real food will come from people not relying on lab work with fruit flies to tell them what feels good in their bodies. It seems that best place for this research is a kitchen counter or a table with loved ones. That all said though, if you are interested in knowing the nutritional profile (and much more) of a given food  I highly recommend this site (though their data on cholesterol is limited, like most healthy food sites). See what my orange and green winter meals are providing us here and here (respectively).

Also new this new year I started taking Cod Liver Oil (fermented actually). This is the only supplement I take and the reason is for the difficulty in finding food sources of vitamin D. From another Mother Earth News piece (about SAD actually):

Eat D-licious foods. Only a few foods contain much vitamin D. Sources of vitamin D include cod liver oil (1,360 IU per tablespoon); oily fish such as salmon, sardines and mackerel (about 350 IU per 3.5 ounces); eggs (about 20 IU per yolk); and fortified milk, soy milk and orange juice (98 IU per 8-ounce serving).

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Keep it together: The need for whole food

Friday, December 18, 2009

To paraphrase Michael Pollan from his latest book, In Defense of Food, science has figured out pretty well now how to take apart food (going so far as the nucleus), but we are lousy at putting it back together. Though the foods we’ve fashioned over millennia do a great job keeping us at our best, physically and mentally, the modern age has tried to prove that science and technology can do better. Starting with the creation of baby formula in the 1930s, consisting of cow’s milk, wheat flour, malted flour, and potassium bicarbonate, modern food science has tried to understand the chemistry of food and nutrition to manufacture and market accordingly. And the real question with all this fiddling is, what’s the advantage?

Increasingly we seem to learn that there is mainly only disadvantage in the heavy processing and even the fortifying of foods. The more we learn about what whole foods have to offer, the more we seem to figure out that our refined-then-”enriched” versions are weak or even detrimental in comparison. A recent study of folic acid fortification shows flaws in the thinking that a vitamin is a vitamin is a vitamin no matter what the form or context.

Whole grains and greens are rich in folate, a B vitamin which has shown to be protective against colon cancer and other bowel issues and is just generally important for overall health. Folate deficiencies also cause fetal neural tube defects and thus pregnant women are urged to take a folic acid supplement. Folic acid is the supplement form of folate, and (doctors urging aside) does not impart the same positive results for cancer risk and whole-food derive folate. In fact as a recent NY Times article outlines, folic acid enriched foods may increase cancer risk.

This particular study lucked out with an easy control group (nutritional studies are difficult because control groups are hard to maintain) for folic acid consumption because Norway do not enrich their food with it like we do here in the US (lucky for the researchers and the Norwegians too apparently)

Turns out that folic acid enriched foods, mainly grains and cereals…um eaten particularly by children, increase cancer risk. So…no advantage there at all.

(Careful readers will note that the study of B vitamin consumption was originally aimed at understanding the relationship between B vitamins and heart disease, not cancer. In the previous post, on sick ancient Egyptians, this relationship was brought up as the likely cause of ancient cardio problems as the Egyptian Elite ate refined grains and were deficient in B vitamins that keep in check an amino acid that breaks down cell walls (which cholesterol goes in to fix…) I will not be at all surprised if the findings for b vitamins supplements (versus the stuff in whole foods) fails to show an impact on heart disease, but that will not be a good enough reason to discount the relationship until they look at food in the form it should be eaten. Maybe a start in the right direction to show the relationship to cancer)

Okay, so food in its most whole form provides all the nutrition we need without the fiddling from food scientists. Lesson: Avoid food with health claims and stick to those that have no package at all. That said, there are ways to “enrich” whole foods yourself and that is by pairing them with foods that help your body absorb all the goodness. And yes, this point loops back to the point about good fat and it being important and not causing heart disease.

I recently read author Nina Planck’s Real Food, What to Eat and Why. Of all of the points she made, I think the rundown of the usefulness of good quality whole fats in the diet was the most important. So I am just going to quote her verbatim: You can keep this all in mind with any catchy “holiday health hints” or such that tell you not to eat your turkey skin or eat low-fat dairy.

Eating protein with fat makes nutritional sense, because all food, and protein in particular , requires fat for proper digestion. As we saw with “rabbit starvation, without fat in the diet, digestion fails and you starve, but not for lack of calories. What is true of meat is true of all fat-and-protein pairs. They go together. Consider, for example, two near-perfect foods: eggs and milk. Both foods are a complete nutritional package, designed for a growing organism’s exclusive nutrition, and must contain everything the body needs to assimilate the nutrients they contain. The fats in the egg yolk aid digestion of the protein in the white, and lecithin in the yolk aid metabolism of its cholesterol. The butterfat in milk facilitates protein digestion, and saturated fat in particular is required to absorb the calcium. Calcium, in turn, requires vitamins A and D to be properly assimilated, and they are found only in the butterfat. Finally vitamin A is required for production of bile salts that enable the body to digest protein. Without the butterfat, then, you don’t get the best of the protein, fat-soluble vitamins, or calcium from milk. That’s why I don’t eat, and cannot recommend, egg white omelets and skim milk. They are low-quality, incomplete foods.

In each classic pair, fats help the body assimilate, use, or convert essential nutrient.

Fat and protein
Roast chicken (with the skin)
Eggs (with the yolks)

Fat and vitamins
Vitamins A, D,E and K are fat-soluble, eat them with fat

Fat and Beta-Carotene
Buttered carrots
Collards with fatback
Spinach salad with bacon
Flank steak with arugula
Beef with broccoli

Saturated fat and Omega-3 fats
Fish with butter or cream sauce

Saturated fat and calcium
Whole milk
Yogurt, cheese, and sour cream made from whole milk.

Each new piece of research reminds me that the most we should do with food is grow it in healthy soil, and prepare it in a way that our bodies can best use it. For some things that means raw (like dairy and fruit), eaten cooked or raw with some useful fats (like most veggies and meats), or fermented (particularly cabbage and other meant-to-ferment veggies as well as grains, ie sourdough, and some legumes ie soy)

Here are some particularly delicious whole meals:

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We Eat Like Kings

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Up late last night washing dishes, I caught a report from the BBC on the discovery of heart disease in Egyptian mummies. My approach to eating is generally guided by the idea that eating real food is better for overall health and enjoyment and real food is traditional and old. Well mummies are nothing if not old, so what were they doing with this so called modern disease?

Or, at least that’s the irony the media was presenting. How could a disease that is linked to modern vices of fast food, smoking, and a sedentary lifestyle be found in ancient people?

The answer is pretty clear, in that heart disease is more often described (at least by Dr. Weston Price, if not others) as a disease of civilization. Old or new, doesn’t matter.

Here might be why: Whole foods are pretty fool proof health-wise. Processed foods, while tasty, break up the pairings that the body needs to process the food effectively.  Once consumed, these products can be damaging to the whole system, but they are luckily not too easy to come by for most of the world throughout history…unless you have slaves to mill you lots of white flour, or live in modern America with cheap oil and low wage jobs.

This is to say that heart disease might be better characterized as a disease of cheap labor.

For some reason many of the reports I read last night suggested that we don’t know a lot about what Egyptians ate, though that doesn’t seem to be true as they kept great account of daily life through writings and art. We know, for example, that servants ground flour, the more refined the better for the upper-classes. None of the coverage thus far has mentioned this fact, they seem to just put out there that we know Egyptians ate beef, goose, and lamb, all, they point out, fatty foods. I hate to think this will be used as more fodder against healthy traditional fats, when refined carbohydrates clearly had a large role to play in the diets of these deceased elites. (I also read that they fed the chaff and bran from the wheat to livestock, so they may have also suffered the consequences of grain-fed beef)

(Why they point first to fats, when Egyptians arguably invented bread, is beyond me, but this shows the bias against fats in discussions of health. Refined grain has been linked to heart disease because it lacks Vitamin B which help to regulate a certain amino acid(homocysteine).  It is hypothesized  that when this amino acid (homocysteine) is out of whack, it can break down cell walls…which cholesterol then comes in to fix…thus we blame the firefighter for the fire. (from Real Food: What to Eat and Why, By Nina Planck) This is just one of the many ideas about why we have heart disease)

When you have to grow/raise/process/cook all your own food, there isn’t really time to make things fancy, or overly refined. To eat like a peasant doesn’t necessarily mean to be undernourished with low-quality food (although it certainly has meant that for some throughout history) I see eating like a peasant to instead be the antithesis of eating like a king- depending on others, who get too little pay, to process food to a point that it is too rich or refined to eat everyday. Kings can get away with it only to a point when it catches up with them.

Maybe its our democratic foundations, but the modern American food system has made it possible for all our people to eat like kings, relying on underpaid workers to provide for refined palates. It goes without saying that this is catching up with us as well.

One of the co-authors of the study speculated “perhaps atherosclerosis is part of being human.” This is a sad conclusion since plenty of groups throughout history have thrived with an absence of chronic disease. They avoided processed food and the social/environmental/health consequences that go along with it.

I was happy to see that I was not alone in my reaction: see some kindred comments here.

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Keeping to real foods

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Two products have recently fallen out of favor in our house due to their being less “real” that we had previously thought. By real I just mean whole and tested through long term human consumption (think centuries). There are clearly some product that don’t fit this description that I still occasionally buy or eat- like gummy bears or cliff bars. But the following two products got the boot because they marketed as whole foods and there are plenty of alternatives that are just as satisfying.

The first was a goodbye to Nancy’s whole milk yogurt. (sigh) I love Ken Kesey, I love Oregon, I love their containers. What I don’t love   is explained in the letter below that I sent through their website. I’ll let you know if I get a response.

Unless they can prove some careful way of preparing their powdered milk I will stick to Straus, which uses just whole milk and cultures.

Dear Nancy’s,

I am confused about discrepancy between the statements on your whole-milk products and your website which denounce the use of thickeners and your ingredient list which has non-fat milk powder as an additional ingredient to whole milk and cultures.

After years of eating your yogurt I have now switched to Straus Yogurt, who has nothing in their whole milk yogurt but whole milk. I eat whole-fat products because we need the fat to absorb the calcium and other nutrients and because low-fat products are processed foods which I stay away from. A main ingredient of low-fat foods I am interested in avoiding is powdered milk, used often to add body and flavor to a depleted product. Milk should not be subject to high heat as it damages the fats. As explained by Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food “powered milk contains oxidized cholesterol, which scientists believe is much worse for your arteries than ordinary cholesterol.”

So, why on earth do you add powdered milk to your whole milk products? And even more confounding, why do you say in multiple places that you only use “pure milk” or that “Because we take the extra time to fully culture our products, they are naturally thick and creamy. We never add ingredients that are meant to stabilise or thicken dairy products.” While non-fat milk powder isn’t artificial, it is still a processed food that hardly qualifies as pure. You may be following the letter of your statements but not the spirit.

I have shared the switch to Straus yogurt on my food blog, www.mindtomouth.org, and would welcome your comments if you care to explain the reason that you use non-fat milk powder and whether or not you have an explanation as why its use is consistent with your statements about not adding thickeners and only using pure milk.

Regards,

Sage

Okay, the second one is tricky, and honestly I don’t feel like I’ve gotten enough good information to make a really informed decision about the use of this product. But I feel like the lack of consistent information is what has made me decide to just avoid it.

I was attracted to agave because it is cheaper than maple syrup and, honestly, I was being well-marketed to. Lots of natural processed foods had agave on the label and that made them easier to buy (like ketchup or cookies). I was eating it on waffles and yogurt (Nancy’s whole milk at that point…).

The Weston A Price foundation recently published a piece about agave in their journal that explained agave’s high fructose levels as just as detrimental to the body as the High Fructose Corn Syrup. Both were explained as subject to industrial processing and should be avoided. You can see that report here (its a pdf).

But I don’t like to just follow WAPF blindly, and after looking into the brand I bought (Madhava) it seemed like there might be two different products, the syrup from the Blue Agave, same as tequila, and the syrup from the Salmiana agave, and two different processing methods, Blue agave using heat and possibly chemicals to extract the syrup and the Salmiana syrup is apparently processed using ” gentle enzymatic action”.

So the controversy actually gets a bit weird and comes down to two or three people with known and unknown special interests. There is not a lot of neutral information about agave and quotes from various sources (health blogs etc) about its production seem too come back to the same two sources (see articles below). The biggest problem I couldn’t solve is whether or not agave contains starch. That seems like a pretty straight forward inquiry.

Natural News published two articles that cover the question of the quality and healthfulness of the syrup (everyone agrees that it is not a traditional sweetener as the process for extraction was developed in the 90’s, and I think this is ultimately why WAPF is opposed).

One, the anti-agave side, is written by Rami Nagel and based on information largely from this guy Russ Bianchi (who has some company, adept solution inc. that has no website…). Nagel was the co-author on the WAPF article which is also dependent on a good deal of information about  agave processing from Bianchi. (It was a bit frustrating to see a lack of more rigorous fact-finding on the part of WAPF who I depend on for reliable information, just goes to show to always check out multiple sources).

The other article is a rebuttal to Nagel’s piece written by the owner of Madhava. He seems to know Bianchi personally and have some negative feelings about the problems Bianchi’s opinions about agave has caused to the industry. His information is convincing, but vague- things like “enzymatic processes” are not explained in a functional way, so it leads me to feel there is more marketing involved than education.

At this point the whole thing became too much. I tried to parse out whether or not what I had been dripping on waffles was really going to hurt me, which seemed to come down how bad high level of fructose are for you, which seemed to come down to starch. Again, this could not be verified as there was too much conflicting information. The most consistent info did seem to come down in favor of agave, particularly on the glycemic index measure (which I think is misleading because it only looks at glucose, not fructose). I decided that just on the basis of it being a new process and a weird three-guy controversy I was just going to avoid it. (Not to mention the politics involved, and use of indigenous land and labor…)

Ultimately, I decided to put my mouth in charge and when I really really tasted the agave it just seemed a bit too intense. So raw honey and maple syrup it is. There is a positive side to these good sweeteners being expensive- forced moderation. I think that the taste-test is the ultimate lesson because many foods, not just agave, are mired in controversy (traditional fats for one) and it just doesn’t seem worth precious time to get caught up in the back and forth on the ever un-verifiable internet. I know that Straus tastes better than Nancy’s and Agave tastes processed and super sweet.

I think having good information about a product provides us with a much needed limit in choice when it comes to packaged food, but just a quick glance at the back of a product is revealing- if you need to research it, it is probably best avoided.

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All I need to do now is grow some spelt

Friday, October 23, 2009

This fall has been a hectic one but included the very fun task of making food for my friend who just had a first baby. Nursing moms (as well as pregnant ladies) are so fun to cook for because they eat a lions share, seem to especially enjoy eating, and really put that food to good use.

I had fun showing off my artisan multi-grain sourdough bread but it took three days of my visit to prepare and was gone in a few hours. Wanting mama and all to have the most nutritious bread I decided to try a more quick and dirty recipe.

I prepared a quart of my starter and then mixed it with about 6 cups of spelt flour, the recipe (from Nourishing Traditions) said to rise from 4 to 12 hours depending on the temperature. I let it go overnight, which was probably too long as it got a bit deflated. I didn’t have loaf pans, so they were kind of batard style loaves. The shap of the slice wasn’t ideal but the flavor was wonderful and went great with the raw cream cheese spread I made.

As soon as I got home I started on another batch. This time I started with spelt berries and ground the flour myself. It sounds like a job for a toiling little red hen, but it’s just an electric gadget and doesn’t take any effort, but yields the freshest flour you can get, ensuring no rancidity. Spelt is a nice grain for home grinding because its gluten level perform like an all-purpose flour, which is actually a mix of soft and hard wheat. So, unless you want to grind two different grains, spelt is a lot simpler.

In my first go at grain grinding I just followed the directions and ground the whole berries on the finest setting, which gave me two distinct layers of flour, a fibery hull and a fine powdering flour. I used it as it came for the bread, which turned out delicious and hearty. After some expert advice, on the next batch I first ground the berries on a coarse setting and then ran it through again on the smallest setting which gave me a much more even flour and more flour per cup of berries (which seems to be about 2.5 c. of flour to 1 c. berries, but it depends on your grind- I am still working out that ratio)

The recipe called for the dough to be soft and easy to work with. To knead Sally says to stretch and fold, a different kneading process that I usually use.

I have now made three batches of the bread and the best results actually came from making the dough in my Kitchen-Aid mixer with the dough hook. The pictures below are from the batch made by hand, and it turns out beautifully, but the mixer does allow a wetter dough since you dont have to add more flour to be able to handle it. This was my fist time making dough with a machine and it left me standing there watching it, sort of wondering what I should do while it worked. It was strange to not be able to feel the dough change. So, I am still a bit conflicted about the thing. I was also hesitant to do sourdoughs in metal, but apparently it makes no difference.

Cooked in a loaf pan, this bread makes a great homemade substitute for sliced sandwich bread. Not the handsomest, but probably the freshest, healthy bread you can get in your mouth.

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Would you just use magic if you could?

Thursday, October 15, 2009

This summer I spent a lonely week with a terrible cold. I passed the time watching the first three seasons of Bewitched, the old sixties sitcom. I got through so many episodes because, as the show progressed, I felt like I was getting a different impression of Samantha Stevens than I had ever before (since watching Nick at Night as a kid, that is).

I think we now have something to learn from Samantha and her struggle with the instantaneous rewards of her magic. As a witch, Samantha has the ability to conjure up whatever she would like, anytime, anywhere. Her magic makes life fun and easy, and who would give it up? Many critiques of the show lament that in a burgeoning feminist era Samantha is forced by her husband to give up her magic, and thus her independence, to be the picture perfect suburban housewife. This point fails to give Samantha agency over her promise to stop using magic for everyday things.

As I lay on my couch sick as ever, home alone, wishing I hadn’t made so many dishes fixing myself chicken soup from scratch, I saw that Samantha (magically immune to mortal sickness) wanted to work, she wanted to do things by hand with her own skill and body. By (trying to) give up her magic she was claiming her independence from her mother, her upbringing, and- importantly, from the instant, no effort life that sixties consumer culture was selling to women.

There is an interesting mess of consequences that came from the post-war production of consumer goods and technology and the intense marketing of these products to women. This marketing, combined with women being interested in, and allowed to, or obligated to work outside the home, successfully undermined the skill of the domestic realm while also allowing women to expand outside of it (the home that is). It is relevant to us now because most of us are living without necessary skills to live a life that is not dependent on consumerism. We have to buy things from other people, usually large companies to cover our most basic needs.

Knowing the role of marketing, pushing tv dinners and touting new gadgets, in the Bewitched era I think it is commendable for Samantha Stevens to pursue a more hand-made life. Granted, at those time she back-slides and does up a whole clean house, new dress, and elegant dinner in one nose twitch, the audience was more entertained and probably reassured knowing that, while maybe eating their tv dinners, even the best wives wouldn’t do all the work if they didn’t really have to.

Is Samantha Stevens a good example of how we should live today, no. But I think she is an unexpected reminder how liberating and often positive it can be when we don’t always take the easy way in life, especially when it comes to our kitchen and our food. We are happier people when we put time, effort, and skill into basic tasks and the fact that we do very little of that puts us in an interesting mess indeed, and the history of all that is something I plan to explore/discuss further (sneak preview…new book called the Radical Homemaker, learn more here).

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The itinerant kitchen

Friday, September 11, 2009

We were on foot for four weeks. We never stayed in one place longer than an overnight. Staying around would have meant less time on foot and more time in a hitched ride or bus as we only had the four weeks to get from San Francisco to Portland. The 27 nights went by like a dream really- we took it step by step. We would wake up, make oats, break camp, and affirm our task for the day; walk, go north. Ocean on the left, go legs go.

The best and worst part of the trip was eating. Walking meant we wanted and even deserved more food than ever, yet we had the constraints of what we could carry, what would keep well in packs, could be prepared easily on our one burner and two pans, and what we could afford. On top of that we still wanted to have food that was produced with fairness and health in mind for all involved. Believe me, that narrows it down and we made plenty of compromises.

The best meals were lunches. I think because they were the most nutrient dense. Foods that are ready to eat, which also has a lot to offer your body and tastebuds, are heavier than foods that take some preparation, mainly hydration and heat. Breads, meats, cheeses, snacks. So, we sacrificed some extra weight for really good and quick lunch food. Sardines in a can, a loaf of sourdough bread, a salami, aged jack cheese. Days just coming out of a town meant more fresh foods like avocado or other fruit.

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We ate oatmeal every single morning (we opted to forgo soaking, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be possible) . I would be sure to put the raisins or other dried fruit (A Sunkist medley was a particular treat) into the cold water along with sea salt to make sure it was tender and plump. Once the oatmeal was ready I would add a thick pad of cultured butter, raw honey, and sometimes peanut butter for a really dense start to the day. Instead of getting sick of this same meal, it was the one consistency in our life on the trail and I looked forward to it every morning. We would take our time to fill our bellies and drink a cup of tea before starting out.

Walking and sleeping on the ground and spending a month outside connected us to the natural world in a way we hadn’t experienced before. But we still carried civilization and modern life on our backs.  The experience of nature was closer than ever but it was still more of a shelter around us than our true environment. Everything we really needed we brought in from elsewhere. We drank water from the creeks, but always filtered. We picked out good flat spots to sleep, but always with a pad. We ate outside and cooked in the sand, but never ate food from the spot we settled. We had a few breakfasts with picked blackberries, some wild mint tea, snacked on salal berries while walking,  and we could have added wild nettles to our meals, but I was too uncertain.

Trail conversations often covered what we would eat if we hadn’t bought four days worth of food at the last town and hadn’t had full bellies from a roadside diner. Some backpackers who are out for weeks or months will use small game traps to eat fresh wild meat on the trail. I would be up for this approach and I am very excited to learn more about pack goats. Apparently a very pleasing companion, a good pack goat can carry some weight and provide fresh milk! Go out long enough and you could even have some fresh cheese. Willow-Witt Ranch knows all about it, learn more here.

We made do with what we know how to do, which is to buy the best food we can find for the money we have and make something good with it. A stay at Gospel Flat Farm in Bolinas provided us with garlic until we got to Port Orford Oregon and got more garden garlic from friends as well as some carrots for a fancier rice and beans. (Minute Brown Rice was a major winner in our book, not organic, and no Massa, but it met a need)

We had a little burner that used denatured alcohol to make a nice hot flame, but we would use a wood fire as much as we could, or sometimes as necessary when fuel got low. Every evening we would scope out a flat spot to cook, with as little wind as possible and plenty of little surfaces on which to set food and the cooking kit, and of course a rock or log on which to sit. Going up the coast meant a lot of beach camping and keeping stuff our of the sand was a big priority.

The best spots were campsites away from cars and roads that still had a nice set up for easier living, meaning really just a picnic table, and fire pit with a place for pots and a decent composting toilet. With the basics there, life on the trail was an absolute joy.

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The purpose of a challenge

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Challenges make a thing use its greatest capacity to complete a task or, even, to fulfill its purpose. Lacking a challenge, the thing might change its function or go away entirely, leading me to suspect that challenge is crucial to purpose.

Humans’ inclination to displace life’s challenges off of the body and onto a tool has shaped us from the beginning- most especially when it came to the challenge of eating.

Primatologist Richard Wrangham explains that the transition to cooking our food fundamentally shaped our bodies into what we are working with today, e.g. smaller mouths, smaller guts, punier teeth than apes. We have come to rely heavily on food processing (cooking, fermentation etc) for digestion.

So for better or for worse the human form was shaped in large part by processing our food, making digestion easier and leaving extra energy for thousands of years of other inventions, which are continuing to shape us in ways we don’t yet know. Which brings us to…the appendix!

The irony of the appendix is that it turns out to be much more functional to us than we thought, but may well be on its way out after all.

Scientists are continuing to find evidence that reveals the appendix as a useful organ, and not, as Charles Darwin assumed, just a remnant from past preference of plants. Studies from the last few years has show the appendix to be an evolved organ that houses good bacteria waiting to repopulate the gut after the system is flushed due to the presence of harmful microbes.

This use has been hidden from us since increased use of sterilization, clean drinking water and non-threatening foodstuffs has meant that survival in an industrialized world may be possible without an appendix. In fact the presence of the appendix seems to do more harm than good in clean conditions as they are finding a relationship between the inflammation of the appendix, which leads to its removal, and the fact that it is under-used.

As explained by researcher William Parker, Ph.D. (more from him here)

“Several decades ago, scientists suggested that people in industrialized societies might have such a high rate of appendicitis because of the so-called “hygiene hypothesis,”…This hypothesis posits that people in “hygienic” societies have higher rates of allergy and perhaps autoimmune disease because they — and hence their immune systems — have not been as challenged during everyday life by the host of parasites or other disease-causing organisms commonly found in the environment. So when these immune systems are challenged, they can over-react….

This over-reactive immune system may lead to the inflammation associated with appendicitis and could lead to the obstruction of the intestines that causes acute appendicitis…Thus, our modern health care and sanitation practices may account not only for the lack of a need for an appendix in our society, but also for much of the problems caused by the appendix in our society.”

So, what should we do with our vermiform organ? Use it or lose it?  “The function of the appendix could be rendered obsolete by cultural changes…” says Parker. “[Such changes have] left our immune systems with too little work and too much time their hands – a recipe for trouble.”

Cooking our food fundamentally changed the human body, and increased sanitation of food and drink seems to be on the way to do the same. But to just accept the obsolescence of this functional organ as a part of our ongoing evolution seems flawed. We can’t guarantee current conditions (not to mention that most of the world doesn’t experience such conditions) and we still are just discovering the power of the microbes in our gut as fighters of all sorts of disease; it seems hasty to just discount the thing entirely, though we often do since the appendectomy is the most commonly performed emergency operation in the world.

So, we should put it to use right?  Parker  posits that we should start challenging our appendix and the immune system generally with the tasks they are supposed to tackle. A completely great idea! However, I think he is looking to the problem for the solution…”If modern medicine could figure out a way to do that,” Parker says “we would see far fewer cases of allergies, autoimmune disease, and appendicitis.”

I think this dilemma provides a lovely analogy to the situation currently faced by the whole human body. We have these perfectly useful systems, well-adapted to deal with challenges of daily life for the last 499,950 years, give or take. Modern society has taken it upon itself to relieve us of these challenges, only to find out that they are entirely necessary!

In the case of the gut, we might try trusting our microbes to deal with the challenges they are capable of facing. Instead, we should rely on modern medicine to bottle up and feed us those very challenges it helped us/told us to avoid?

I say, start with what we have and use it as its meant to be used. Drink raw milk, dig in the dirt, eat fermented food, even get sick! Resist the obsolescence of the human body and challenge it to its fullest extent.

In that spirit, after the challenge of a long trek on foot (and embarking on the challenge of marriage) and a long break from the blog, I look forward to recounting the adventures and the lessons, along with continued thoughts from home kitchen. No longer the itinerant one below (for now anyway).

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