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…

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.

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?

Weston A. Price’s book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration first demonstrated to me that many traditional diets (though not necessarily all) promote extreme health. Modern trends in heart disease, obesity, cancer, and other diseases demonstrated to me that the modern American diet has serious flaws. Though not the first sign to me that wanton disregard for tradition can create problems, it was one of the most important.

I recently read “The Lessons of History” by Will Durant (which I highly recommend). Will Durant spent the majority of his life studying history and wrote a multi-volume set of history books that are approachable by armchair historians like myself. “The Lessons of History” is a unique book in that Mr. Durant condenses the lessons he learned from history into a single, concise volume. One of the overarching themes of this book is that civilizations come and go and they follow a predictable cycle from rise through collapse.

For as knowledge grows or alters continually, it clashes with mythology and theology, which change with geological leisureliness. Priestly control of arts and letters is then felt as a galling shackle or hateful barrier, and intellectual history takes on the character of a “conflict between science and religion” Institutions which were at first in the hands of the clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control and become secular, perhaps profane. The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and — after some hesitation — the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anticlerical. The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea. Conduct, deprived of its religious supports, deteriorates into epicurean chaos; and life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike, to conscious poverty and to weary wealth. In the end, a society and its religion tend to fall together, like body and soul, in a harmonious death.

The problem is that at the hight of a civilization, the “intellectuals” feel wise enough to judge and discard the traditions that formed their very civilization. As Will himself once observed, “What is wisdom? I feel like a droplet of spray which proudly poised for a moment on the crest of a wave, undertakes to analyze the sea.”

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…)

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.

One day we decided to get on the scales. That caused a great deal of weeping and wailing and a sudden drive to lose weight. We leaped on the low-fat bandwagon with a vengeance. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to have very much affect at all.

At some point along in here we ran across low-carb diets. My first exposure to low-carb (or moderate carb) was through Barry Sears’ Zone Diet. At the same time I was reading that, my wife was reading The Carbohydrate Addicts Diet (CAD). Atkins came along later on after Shari had built up a resistance to the CAD, but the CAD worked miraculously for quite some time. Eventually Shari switched to Atkins and I found that a moderate-carb approach worked well for me.

What the discovery of an alternative diet theory did for me was to confound my faith in science, or rather scientists. While some scientists had come up with a theory that seemed to work quite well for us, others insisted quite vehemently that such a theory was wrong. Scientists had “religious” quarrels just like Christians did and who was right was anybody’s guess.

Additionally, it drove another nail in the coffin of the Seventh-day Adventist prophetess Ellen White, who claimed you shouldn’t eat animal products. There is no way you can eat low-carb without ingesting some type of animal product.

I had already had my Christian faith confounded and now my faith in science (or at least scientists) had been confounded. What this did was to leave me hanging out in space with no real firm belief in anything. I hung on for a bit like that, but this was the inevitable turning point that made me decide that I needed to do some serious thinking and figure out the truth.

To be continued…

What does this say about the future of America?

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