Through the Cooking Glass

My kids had one of those marshmallow/rice-crispy dessert thingies this morning at church.

I got to thinking about those. Basically what those are is melted marshmallows mixed with Rice Crispies. Would my great-great-grandmother have been able to make those? Nope. They are made from a highly processed cereal and a highly processed “candy.” Each of those things are made out of highly processed other ingredients (the marshmallows are largely corn syrup from corn). When my great-great-grandmother was alive, Rice Crispies hadn’t even been invented.

This is how people cook these days. For most modern home cooks, raw ingredients are the things that come in boxes at the grocery store. They take highly processed foods and then process them some more. For my great-great-grandmother, raw ingredients were things that came out of a field or garden – with the exception of sugar and flour. My great-great-great-great-grandmother probably wouldn’t have even had those.

While I actually quite like those Rice Crispy treats, for the most part foods that are made with raw ingredients that come out of the ground or from some animal instead of a factory are far better not only in the health department, but taste, texture, and smell. Now I’m unusual in this regard because the vast majority of people have become so accustomed to processed foods that they actually prefer them. Velveeta is a prime example. I still don’t understand how anybody can confuse that stuff with cheese…

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I’ve been meaning to post about life expectancy since a friend asked me about it recently. Now I don’t have to. Bryan has posted an excellent analysis of the situation.

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No, I’m not talking about keeping food fresh.

For me, staying interested in something can sometimes be a struggle. For me it is important to keep things fresh and new in order to hold my interest. That sounds odd coming from a blog about tradition as it relates to food. Yes, I want to follow wise traditions in my cooking, but for me that means learning new things (we’ve been too familiar with unwise traditions).

So how do I do it? Well, I don’t always succeed, but I have a simple technique for keeping things fresh. My family isn’t too thrilled about it because they are not adventuresome when it comes to food. But I attempt to try making 1 new thing per week, or at least every other week. If we decide we don’t like it, I don’t make it again. If we do, it gets added to my repertoire.

Last week I tried whipped sweet potatoes. These are essentially mashed potatoes with sweet potatoes instead of regular potatoes. I threw in some salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and milk and I really liked them. Nobody else did and so I probably won’t keep them in my repertoire.

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Most people I know decide what food to buy by comparing prices. If you have two chickens of equal weight and one costs $1 more than the other, the cheapest one is by and large the one that gets purchased. A chicken is a chicken, right?

Even many of the people who purchase organic foods spend the extra money not for a better chicken, but for the absense of synthetic chemicals.

What most Americans overlook is the issue of food quality. There is a difference between the $6.80/lb sirloin steak I buy from my farmer, and the steak that costs less than half of that from Wal-mart. While yes, the steak straight from the farm doesn’t have the bad chemicals or growth hormones, it is also grass fed, which means that it is drastically higher in omega 3 fatty acids, CLA, and a list other nutrients too long to list. Likewise, organic vegetables aside from being free of pesticides have also been shown to be as much as 30% higher in various nutrients than conventionally grown produce.

The fact of the matter is that your body wants and needs these things. Most people don’t notice an immediate difference in how they feel or how their body operates and so figure why spend the extra money. I’m here to tell you that it does make a difference over time. It requires consistency.

We are willing to spend money on expensive homes and cars, sophisticated home theater systems, clothes, lawn-care, computers, jewelry, and $5 Starbucks coffee, but we are unwilling to spend a little extra on the food that goes into our bodies. As long as it tastes the same who cares, right?

Your car will last you maybe 10-15 years. Your home theater system will be obsolete in 5 years. Your computer will be obsolete the day after you buy it. Your clothes will be out of style next year.

Your body will be with you for a lifetime.

Where should you spend your money?

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When food is produced in mass quantities and shipped all over the world, the chance of national or global contamination scares is high.

ConAgra Defends Pot Pie Health Alert

(Just more evidence to demonstrate that it is not raw milk that is dangerous, but our industrialized food system…)

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The local food movement seems to be growing rapidly. I happen to be an advocate of buying locally produced foods.

It seems there are a variety of reasons for eating local. However, the most popular reason is not my primary reason. Often people advocate local foods because it is better for the environment, e.g it reduces the emissions produced by transportation. That is a noble reason, but it’s not my primary reason. (Note that eating globally rather than locally serves to give more people jobs. Eating locally might actually take a job away from some poor person in some third world country who really needs that job. There are always trade-offs.)

Another popular reason is to support your local economy. This again is not my primary reason. It’s a nice thought to support your “neighbors,” but in a national or global economy, everyone has the same level of opportunity as everyone else, they just have to compete on a much larger scale. If company X in California does it cheaper and better than company Y in Michigan (I live in Michigan), I’ll buy from X every time. If Y wants my business it needs to produce a better product so it can compete rather than laying guilt trips on me to buy local.

The bottom line is that eating locally is healthier. When food is transported long distances it requires extended storage, transport time, and shelf-life. Nearly all the bad things that are done to foods are done to increase shelf-life. Fat hydrogenation, preservatives, pasteurization, and refinement all increase shelf-life. Produce is picked green, refrigerated, and gassed to turn ripe colors at the end of its trip. The produce you buy in the grocery store is unripe and nutritionally inferior to ripe produce. Food not purchased locally is much likelier to be mass produced for a national or global market and whenever things are mass produced corners are cut and the quality goes down.

(Now there are exceptions to this. Some foods naturally have long shelf lives if handled properly, such as whole unmilled grains, tubers, roots, or dry goods like sucanat. Seafood is an essential part of a healthy diet and simply may not be available locally.)

It all comes down to quality. Most food that is produced on a national (or global) scale and shipped around the country (or world) tends to be of a lower quality than food produced locally by small producers who focus on quality. There are some exceptions, but in general, food, by its very nature, is of a higher quality when it’s local.

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Here’s a great introduction to why I eat the way I do. The thing that concerns me most about today’s diet is the cumulative generational affect. That is, a population continuing to eat denatured foods for multiple generations will become progressively worse with each generation… The sins of the fathers will be visited upon the third and fourth generations.

What does this say about the future of America?

You can read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (the book mentioned in the video) online.

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I’ve been meaning to write this post for some time now, but Jenny did it for me:

Food and Money

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In a previous post I made it sound as though I am a proponent of the local food movement. In many ways I am, but I believe that it can be taken to an extreme. There are problems with a 100% local diet.

For example, Weston Price found that healthy land-locked societies went to great lengths to get food from the ocean. Being from the great lakes region (Michigan), I am aware that in the past the region was known as the goiter belt because of a deficiency of iodine. Most goiters are caused by iodine deficiency. One of the best places to get iodine is from ocean foods.

Not all traditional diets are healthy. There are some that are and some that are not. The health of the population of those eating traditional diets may very well depend on its location. Price found that those near the sea were nearly always more healthy than those that were not.

I try to eat as much local food as possible because it’s fresher, more nutrient dense, and just plain tastes better, but there are some foods you should eat that simply are not available locally.

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The major problems I see with the American diet are:

• Dead food – everything is killed to death. There are no beneficial cultures left after we’re done with the food and many nutrients are gone. e.g. canned food, pasteurized dairy, etc. Antibiotics exacerbate this problem.
• Nutrient deficient food – the soil is depleted. We use synthetic fertilizers and never put back nutrients into the soil. We kill the beneficial micro-flora in the soil with pesticides, further depleting the soil (a recent study showed that organic vegetables were about 30% higher in various anti-oxidants than their conventional counterparts). We raise meat on corn (not their natural diet) raised in nutrient deficient soil. We eat refined foods that have no nutrients left. We eat low fat or low carb foods that have all the good stuff taken out.
• Poor assimilation – since our gut flora is out of whack from anti-biotics and dead food, we have a hard time assimilating nutrients. We have also neglected the wisdom of our elders in food processing techniques. We go for fast foods when we should use slow techniques that make foods more assimilable. We should ferment or sprout our grains especially. Beans require extended soakings. Nuts should be soaked as well. Some foods actually require cooking to be edible (e.g. potatoes).
• Untried foods and methods – we eat a lot of new-fangled foods that have had no long term tests. Traditional foods are foods that have been used for hundreds or even thousands of years with no ill effects and even some benefits. Some new-fangled foods may be OK, but we really don’t know. E.G. canola oil, soybean oil, synthetics, genetically engineered foods, etc.
• unripe food – we eat a lot of unripe food because it has to be trucked in from half-way around the world. Unripe food is lower in nutrients and doesn’t taste nearly as good as fresh ripe food. Food is picked early when it is still green and then refrigerated till it gets to the grocery store. It is then gassed to to cause it to turn a ripe color even though it’s not really ripe. It’s far better to eat locally grown fresh food when it is in season. During the winter we can eat grains, beans, meat, and winter vegetables like winter squash, potatoes, etc. I’ve recently been studying the art of root-cellaring. The Chinese would teach us to eat foods in season because the seasonal foods better fit the yearly cycle of our bodies.
• Government emphasis on hosed up food pyramids – In reality low fat is bad, low carb is bad, red meat is good, etc…

What it boils down to is that we’ve thrown out all our food traditions.

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