Progress Report

So it's been about three weeks since I decided to curb my drinking, and it's been going really well. I haven't gone completely dry, I still drink wine, but I did manage an entire week without any booze at all, and I haven't touched whiskey for close to a month. I can't say I miss it at all. I feel pretty good. I can't say my sleep has changed. When I was up at my parents' house in NY, I stayed up really late painting and/or hanging with my friends almost every night, and my sleep cycle has remained as fucked as it ever was. Baltimore, in case you haven't been paying attention, is suffering from record-breaking heat, and that has certainly made me feel lethargic and sleepy. But I feel good otherwise, and I remember every evening, even fun raucous ones, with great clarity. So far so good.

Meat Heads

I read a lot of paleo blogs, and I find them all really interesting. However, I've noticed two things 1) most people approach paleo from the fitness and athletics perspective and 2) most paleo bloggers are married, live in the burbs, and often have kids. I don't know a lot of poor artists, metalheads, or long-haired hippies doing paleo, or at least none that are blogging about it. More importantly, I don't know a lot of chefs who are openly paleo.

I came to paleo after a few years of researching nutrition in order to avoid becoming diabetic like my father, but I've never been much of a health nut. I have never been a gym rat, I'm not by any stretch of the imagination an athlete, and my preferred exercise is long walks, lifting amps, and bike rides. I also pride myself on being a really great cook. I respect culinary traditions and the identity and values bound up within a culture's cuisine. My reverence for food is what drives my passion for paleo as much as my belief that it is the healthiest nutritional paradigm.

I will never ever ever be a raw foodist or do the 80/10/10 thing except maybe at some point as an experiment on myself because I love cooking. I think there is a lot to be learned from culinary traditions, and I find cooking to be therapeutic and meditative. I also believe that cooking developed for a good reason, that our ancestors weren't idiots, and that some foods need to be cooked to make their nutrients fully absorbable. Cooking is also like alchemy, it creates such wonderful fragrances and tastes, and I can't possibly give that up.

Aside from the paleo reasons for doing so, I largely eschew grains and legumes because I view them as filler, as nutritionally worthless dry goods that people use to pad out a meal when they're too cheap to eat or serve real food. I avoid sugar, not simply because of the diabetes thing, but also because I think it's a way for a cook to cheat, to disguise certain flavors, to get sweetness without proper caramelization, and to make a food more palatable without putting in the work to bring out the real flavors of the ingredients. I respect a cook who can take ingredients and make them delicious without adding too much to them. A good cook is patient, attentive, and trusts her ingredients. I often don't use any seasonings other than salt and pepper, maybe some lemon juice.

I think this culinary perspective is missing from the paleo movement. I saw Eric Ripert on some show the other night where he made market vegetables over a bed of cauliflower "couscous" - he had made faux couscous out of a head of cauliflower. I did this the other night, and it was incredible, almost like the real thing, except for the (duh) cauliflower flavor. His recipe was almost completely paleo (minus some canola oil which you can easily substitute with olive), fresh, simple, and vegan to boot! I'm not saying I'm going vegan, but it's odd that a celebrity chef accidentally (or not?) has created a mostly paleo dish, and the fact that it excited me, an enthusiastic carnivore, means a lot. It means that no matter your preferences and restrictions - vegan, raw, low-carb, etc - you can and should eat really exciting, fresh, well-made food that also happens to be paleo.

It also means that you don't have to be a power-lifter, a cross-fitter, and endurance athlete, or even go to the gym to enjoy and benefit from paleo. We aren't all meat heads.

Circle the Wagon

[This picture is an embarrassing reminder of what I'm like at a party]

On Independence Day, I went to the End of the World, the little grassy patch by the canal that separates the Bywater from the 9th Ward. I watched fireworks with a bunch of nice people and some new friends. Overall, it was a pleasant evening. The whole time, however, I was slowly sipping at my usual half-pint of Evan Williams, which I was mixing with water. I was also having some of the champagne that people were offering me. I wasn't aiming to get drunk, I never am, I just enjoy drinking, especially in social situations where I've become dependent on booze to take the edge off social awkwardness. I was on foot, having walked all the way from the Tremé because the bike I was borrowing got a flat. The night became blurrier and blurrier, and a friend suggested we go to get some food and wine at a nearby wine bar. When I got there, I snarfed down a sausage, despite the fact that it was on bread, because I had the drunk munchies (I usually avoid things that have even touched gluten), and I had a glass of wine from the bottle my friend bought.

And that's the last thing I remember before I suddenly found myself alone, walking in a completely unfamiliar part of town. New Orleans is a dangerous city, and it's really not smart to walk around alone at night, especially when you're drunk. Not too long ago, a girl was shot in the face just for wandering into the wrong neighborhood — the very neighborhood I was stumbling around in that night. I was very far from any of the areas I was supposed to be in, and I had no clue how I managed to wander so far off. I have no idea how close I came to death or violence, but with the help of a very special woman on the other end of the phone, I made it back to the house I was staying at safely. I woke up in the morning with the crystal clear knowledge that I had put myself in a completely unsafe and stupid situation that wouldn't have arisen had I been even slightly more sober. The painful fact is that I have gotten myself into similar situations before. I'm a pleasant drunk, I'm friendly and well behaved, I don't puke, and I usually just pass out before I do anything really retarded. I've always assumed that I posed no risk to anyone else. But I realize now that I've been putting myself at risk pretty regularly for a long time now, and it's getting to the point where it's impacting the people around me.

I have a drinking problem. I'll admit, every other aspect of paleo living has been pretty easy for me, and alcohol may not be completely verboten for most paleo folks, but I definitely drink too much. The minute someone I love says "Your drinking hurts me" is when I know I have to stop. I've managed to clean up the rest of my diet and quit smoking, and my drinking has been the elephant in the room considering how much I rant about health. I don't feel the need to be puritanical about drinking, and I don't intend to give it up entirely forever (I still believe moderate alcohol consumption is healthy), but I definitely need to press the reset button. I want to get to the point where I can have one or two glasses of wine with dinner and leave it at that (currently, I can down an entire bottle by myself). I want to be able to go just one night without a drink, which I haven't done since I cooked on the Lady Maryland about a year ago (I was completely sober for 10 days, then, and I didn't miss booze at all, so I know I can do it). I want to not feel anxious when there's no booze around. So tonight, I may have one drink to celebrate my last night in New Orleans, but when I get back to Baltimore, my main goal will be to sober up and make it up to all my loved ones who have had to drag my half-conscious body from a party, stayed on the phone with me while I wandered drunkenly in the streets, or otherwise had to put up with me when I'm wasted.

Definitely Food

One of the fundamental attitudes towards food most people have that I want to change is that it's fuel. I remember the movie Barfly, based on the writings of Charles Bukowski, where Mickey Rourke (as Bukowski's literary persona, Henry Chinaski) is rampaging through his run-down tenement building looking for a ham sandwich as he shouts, "I need fuel!" Well, that sickly, hungover, pot-bellied vision of humanity is apt, especially when people think of food as equivalent to gasoline.

But food is not fuel. Food is nourishment. When you put gasoline in a car, does the car integrate the gas into its body? Does the car metabolize and repackage the gas into new compounds that integrate themselves into the makeup of the car itself in order to keep it alive? Does the car grow and generate new tissue based on the gas it ingests? No. Because a car is a machine. The human body is not a machine, it is alive, and the food it eats is alive.

I can rant on and on about how the calories in calories out paradigm of nutritional thinking is flawed, but many other paleo bloggers have done it better already, so I won't bother. The point I'd like to drive home is that not all calories are created equally. If food were merely fuel, you could just eat 2,000 calories of anything at all and be done with it. It wouldn't matter at all what you ate, you could just down glasses of sugar water for sustenance, and stay healthy forever. But what sane person believes that you can do that? Obviously, what you eat - the quality of it, the way it was grown or raised, its freshness, and its compatibility with the human body - is way more important than how much you eat. Think long and hard about this, would it be better or worse to eat 500 calories of steak or 500 calories of high fructose corn syrup? Would it be better or worse to eat 500 calories of fresh vegetables or 500 calories of white flour? Even if you're not paleo, I think you intuitively know which choices are better.

So why are healthy foods better? Is it because of how much starch relative to protein they have? Is it the amount of fat or the lack thereof? Well, here's the other piece of the "what is food?" puzzle that I'd like to address. Nutritionists and even paleo people are way too stuck on the macronutrients we ingest. Macronutrients, for those who don't know, are fat, protein, and carbohydrate, the three main categories of food we eat. A sweet potato is carbohydrate. Table sugar is carbohydrate. Does this mean they're the same when it comes to our bodies? Gluten is a protein. Tuna is protein. Butter is fat. Margarine is fat. Is it all the same? Obviously not. I won't even get into talking about how micronutrients (minerals and vitamins) are more important because there are also those that think we can isolate the micronutrients and take them in pill form. We are only barely even beginning to understand how various nutrients work in concert in whole foods, and we are still discovering new vitamins and nutritive and antioxidant compounds in our food, and many supplements are turning out to either be ineffective or even downright unsafe. Why would you take resveratrol (which hasn't been proven to do anything in isolation) in pill form rather than just having a glass of red wine? Makes no sense.

Let's talk about T. Colin Campbell's book The China Study which contends that animal protein causes cancer. The vast majority of the research that his argument was based on was founded on studies that fed isolated casein (a protein in dairy) to rats, thereby inducing cancer. Forget that mice were never evolved to eat isolated dairy protein and that their casein chow also contained sugar, grains, and other processed food, but whey protein, another dairy protein, has been shown to reduce cancer. Therefore, whole milk seems to have a neutral effect on cancer.

Another example is fish. People make a huge deal about the mercury in fish, but studies have found that the presence of selenium in fish binds to the mercury, thereby making it harmless to humans. Therefore, most commonly available fish is safe for humans with regards to mercury. Fish with lower selenium levels, such as shark and swordfish, are more risky to eat because the mercury in their bodies exists in a much more toxic state. Also, people make a big deal about PCBs and dioxins in fish, but in reality, all other food is more likely to contain those toxins. Eat fish.

My point is that we're too reductive in our thinking about food. We're too focused on what food does and doesn't contain - the pollutants, the additives, the isolated compounds, macronutrients - that we lose sight of what real food actually is. Don't get me wrong, it's important that our food isn't polluted, but it's also important not to be so paranoid about it that you're avoiding real food. Think about it this way: food is sunlight, minerals, and chemicals packaged in such a way that our bodies can absorb and integrate into our cells to help us stay healthy. That's it. Stop worrying about how much red meat you're eating or how much shellfish, or how many naturally nitrate-laden leafy greens. Just eat real food.

Not So Simple

I hear a lot of paleo people saying that it's really quite simple to eat paleo, you just eat what's natural. I want to agree, and I've found it pretty intuitive to decide that meat, fat from animals, and vegetables are the things we were evolved to primarily eat, it's really not that simple for others, especially when they're getting over fat-phobia and the inability to cook.

Most people in America, even paleos, are only just barely starting to learn what real food is and learning how to cook it at the same time. It's huge. I know plenty of devoted and disciplined paleo people (who are eating this way out of medical necessity) who approach every meal like a battle, because they're only now learning how to cook, how to shop, how to budget, how to taste, how to plan meals, and how each food makes them feel. To do it all at once is not simple.

I had the benefit of always being in love with food and cooking, so when I started eliminating grains, sugars, and legumes, I already knew how to cook meat and veggies. I already knew how different fats behaved when heated. I already knew how to season, how to pare flavors, how to cook well, what it meant to sear a piece of meat and what cuts needed to be braised or roasted. In a way, paleo was just a welcome culinary challenge for me. How do you thicken a sauce without a roux? How do you render lard? How do you make something tasty besides noodles to soak up your bolognese? How do you make a dessert without any sweeteners, artificial or otherwise?

When you're learning it all at once - the nutrition, the techniques, the tastes, and also how the food makes you feel - it can be totally overwhelming. I think this is a huge reason why people give up and just go back to pasta and sandwiches. Knowing how to cook was crucial to my being able to adhere to paleo. It has never been a big deal to me. I never worried about what snacks were ok, what packaged foods were good and which weren't, what new foods I had to get used to. I never had to suddenly confront the fact that I had to prepare pretty much every meal for myself from scratch because I was already doing that. I cook the way I've always cooked, I just don't make a pot of rice or pasta anymore, and I cook a greater quantity of veggies and meat.

The last few months I was eating pasta and bread, I was making and baking my own - I knew I was about to give it all up, so I figured I should learn the traditions and techniques behind them so I could appreciate them, and understand more about what I was changing in my habits. I even brewed my own beer. I'm a freak who has the luxury of time, space, and motivation. Most people don't have this luxury. Most people I hear who decide to eat paleo are married, have children and full-time jobs, hectic schedules that pretty much ensure they eat food they didn't prepare themselves at least once a day. They come to paleo as a last resort to address chronic and urgent health problems. I came to this out of a love of food and a desire to not become diabetic like my dad. I had no pressing health concerns I was trying to address, I wasn't overweight, and I'm not a gym rat who just wants to be ripped. I just wanted to eat the best food possible, and be as healthy as possible.

Even plastic and arsenic come from the earth. That's why the food industry is able to apply "natural" to so many things. Heroin is natural. Some common mushrooms will kill you if you eat them. You really cannot understate the minefield we face when it comes to the food most commonly available to us in the modern world, and you can't overlook the implications of several generations of people who have slowly lost the ability to cook and taste, and who have been raised to believe processed food is as right as rain and enticingly cheap to boot.

Food

Sorry for the lack of posts. Here's a lamb breast I made with Sichuan peppercorns. It's plated with a salad of radicchio, orange, and a touch of sesame oil and lime juice.

Glutenous Maximus

So, I won't go into the science of why gluten is bad for people especially those who are sensitive to it, but let me just reiterate that gluten can cause some serious health problems in people. This isn't just some new age, hippie, mumbo jumbo. This is medical fact, and even doctors will tell you so, even if they haven't yet understood that gluten-free diets can be beneficial for many people, even those who don't have celiac or allergies to it.

That said, I'd now like to address those of you who are seriously considering going gluten free: gluten contamination is very serious and real. Removing gluten from your diet is not a matter of discipline or being finicky. You can't order a bowl of chicken noodle soup and just pick out the noodles. You can't order a pizza and just scrape off the cheese. This isn't about you getting fat or not, this isn't a matter of discipline, denial, or moderation. If you have gluten sensitivity, you theoretically can't even have one molecule of gluten. You have to view gluten as a poison, which it is. Once a food (or a knife, or a plate) touches gluten, it is contaminated. This is important to understand in the restaurant setting, where there is a lot of cross-contamination, and it's important to understand when someone serves you a gluten-containing item. You must tell the person that you have a serious allergy to gluten, because that's what it is. Just as people with nut allergies can't have things that have even touched nuts (no other way to phrase that sentence, sorry), people with gluten allergies can't have anything that has touched gluten, and there's no such thing as "just a little bit" of gluten.

It's difficult, I know. Any change in lifestyle is difficult. But this is a matter of life and death. I hate to put it so dramatically, but the lust I see in people's eyes when they think about bread or cupcakes, and the excuses people make to indulge in those things even as they have medical proof that they can't have them, just makes me want to smack them. Unlike most "diets" and conventional nutritional advice, this is not a vanity thing. My advice has nothing to do with making people thinner or more attractive or fit into their swimsuits better. It's about helping people not get sick and die a slow death. It's about not developing painful and crippling autoimmune diseases.




I watched my dad eat himself half to death. Every time I tried to prevent him from eating something that even his doctors told him he wasn't supposed to eat, he just said, "Just a little bit." When pressed he would say, "What is life if I can't enjoy it?" But the problem is, these foods were killing him slowly, and we were left having to take care of him. I would have accepted his logic if he were eating honey-flavored arsenic, or if he were sky-diving. As it was, we were left watching him deteriorate and depend more and more on our help. Yes, enjoy life, but you can enjoy life without bread. You can enjoy life without pasta. Hell, they make really good gluten free versions of those things, but more importantly, there are so many other amazing foods out there that you can eat, the vast majority of which you haven't even tried yet! Eliminating gluten isn't about limiting your life, it's like a little obstacle to make you explore even more and love even more food than you previously imagined. Life is also about being there for the people you love and not forcing them to take care of you prematurely. Is having crippling arthritis or Crohn's disease for the last two or three decades of your life worth eating that cupcake? You want to sacrifice your health in order to enjoy Barilla pasta or Annie's mac n' cheese that you bought at the Giant?

Exasperation

Sometimes I just feel like giving up. It's exhausting trying to defend the way I eat and explain myself to people who are completely ignorant of food. A lot of people come to me with earnest questions, but it seems some things that I am saying, such as that animal fat is good for you and industrial seed oils like canola and soy are bad for you, are blowing people's minds. It's not their fault - our media, our government, and the food companies have all brainwashed us into thinking that our ancestors were idiots and the only thing that will save us is yet another industrial product or a homegrown tomato. In any case, it's not the point that ancient civilizations were founded on grain and that many cultures eat a lot of grain. That doesn't make grain good for us, and it doesn't mean that people aren't getting sick. As it has been said before, paleo is a science-informed framework by which modern man can make healthy food choices - it is not a historical re-enactment.

Anyway, so I haven't posted here in a long long time. I've been cooking. I've been cooking for the whole damn world, it seems like. Cooking for most people is a chore or an occasional hobby. For me, it's just a part of every moment of every day. That's the way it was for our ancestors, our grandmothers, even some of our mothers. I'm not idealizing traditions that kept women enslaved, but I'm saying that you can't get around the fact that good food takes constant attention, time, and commitment. Making it a team effort makes it easier, but right now, the people who would be on my team still need to be taught so much, even things as simple as how to cut up an onion quickly and efficiently.

I have the luxury of working from home, so I can devote most of my time to food. And although I love cooking, sometimes I just wish someone else could be the one boiling bones for broth or searing a fillet of wild salmon, or braising the chicken thighs. I wish someone else would, like me, get up and go straight to the kitchen to make breakfast. This is the unfortunate side of eating well - you must pay a lot of attention, even most of your attention, to the food you eat. It's possible to make delicious meals in not very much time, but in order to continuously eat well, you have to continuously have something going on in the kitchen.

Self-reliance through swimming-pool re-purposing

...Really!

http://gardenpool.org/

Chickens, container gardens, tilapia ponds, complete with mulching of waste, water reclamation, and bio-filtration.

Photos and a short video tour--more detail on the specifics of the interlocking biosystems would be nice, but achieving self-sufficiency for a family of 4 from the produce of a retro-fitted swimming pool is impressive, indeed.

Tribe of One

I'm pretty sick of cooking meals for myself. Today I made an amazing breakfast of ground pork seasoned with garlic, ginger, white pepper, and gluten-free tamari, sauteed with shitake mushrooms and yellow squash. I dribbled a few drops of sesame oil on it after I plated it. And then I ate it. Alone. As delicious as it was, there was something missing.

Even in an artist warehouse in a wonderful city where I've found the closest thing to a community I've experienced outside of college, I find myself alone 90% of the time. If we're trying to investigate and even emulate the best parts of hunter-gatherer lifestyle, we have to rethink the ways in which we organize and prioritize our social life. It just doesn't feel natural to have to make plans to see your friends. Ideally, you and your friends find each other through the course of a day organically, because you have the same places you like to go within a relatively small land area, and you gather together to share food because it's more efficient to pool all the fruits of your hunting and gathering than to keep what you have to yourself. I left New York specifically because I was tired of having to "schedule" my friends in.

Of course, I realize people have jobs that force them to arrange their days a certain way. We are still ultimately slaves to clocks and gas tanks and bills and paperwork. This is the modern world, and paleo is only an attempt to remind ourselves who we are on a biological level. We can't actually go back to the paleolithic savanna, but I do think there is room to relearn how to be social according to our evolution.

Check out Evolutionary Psychiatry, a blog specifically about what I'm talking about.

In the meantime, I'm hoping to find people to share food with on a daily basis. Our potlucks are great, but I want that every day. I feel most at peace when I'm breaking bread, er, meat with people. I hope that people who work office jobs can still find a way to make each meal a social event. I think this is a vital component to our overall health that many of us in this lonely modern world are missing.

Happy Little Boozer

On bus up to New York. I feel like shit. I've been pretty off for the past couple of weeks, and I can't figure out why. I hate to admit it's probably the drinking. I love the sauce, what can I say. I love wine and whiskey, and I like to drink it every day. It's genetic. My whole family is like this. We drink regularly, but we don't like getting smashed — it's more of a physiological craving than an emotional crutch. I also love coffee. I've always said that coffee is the one drug I don't think I could ever give up. But I think I've established some sort of metabolic yo-yo thing with the booze/coffee routine. I don't get hungover anymore since I stopped eating/drinking gluten, but I'm definitely not feeling optimal right now. I think I may have adrenal fatigue from my hectic on/off schedule, from all the coffee, and from the low-carb thing I was doing. I think the euphoria of my first few paleo months is wearing off. I'm still committed to ancestral eating because I know my problem isn't that I'm not eating enough bread or hummus. I know I'm getting enough nutrients, but I haven't really fine-tuned anything. I guess before I start trying to micromanage my macronutrient intake, I should probably just try cutting the booze for real. I did it for a week when I first started paleo with no problem, and I also did it when I cooked on the boat recently. I guess it's the aimlessness of a sedentary life. As fun as my life is in general, I get a little bored at night sometimes, and my reflex is to hit the packaged goods store for a half-pint of Evan. I think a small amount of alcohol is healthy, but I easily go through a bottle of wine by myself without even noticing. That can't be good.

Nothing is Set in Stone Age

I am trying to make every single meal I eat for the rest of my life the healthiest meal possible. However, I'm basing what I think is healthy on information that is constantly evolving and changing. Right now, I know this: I will never eat refined sugar, I will never eat processed foods, and I will never eat junk food. Of course, my definition of "processed" includes store-bought bread and pasta, and a lot of other common foods most people consider wholesome, such as pasteurized dairy. If anything, the paleo thing is just an excellent guideline for how to compose most meals - it's flexible and includes most of the foods I love anyway. But as strict as I am adhering to these guidelines, I by no means think that I have it down perfectly, and I by no means think my way is the definitive right way.

I am learning how to listen to my body and change my food to suit what it needs. I seem to not have a problem with corn, but beans really fuck my shit up, even sprouted and soaked beans. I don't have a marked reaction to gluten, but I know that if I reincorporate it into my regular diet, I will have brain fog, fatigue, and bad hangovers. I will also have more pudge. I've recently tried reducing my carb intake, but that seems to not be helpful. I feel tired, and while my brain and attention span seem fine, I just feel lethargic. Eating fruit doesn't help that much, even high-glucose fruit like pineapple and mango. I was blaming it on the heat, which may be a factor, but I didn't feel quite as good as when I was eating sweet potatoes and yams at most meals. I think I need starches that break down slower in the body. Even Girl Gone Primal, who has been doing the zero carb thing, is starting to re-evaluate what she's doing. I'm going to start eating a little white potato and see how that makes me feel. I do love potatoes.

Anyway, I love food, I will always love wine and butter, and when I'm in Italy I will eat the fuck out of some pasta. I don't want to scare people off from good food. I'm just trying to be conscious of how every food impacts my body. This is a constantly evolving process, and I'm always learning. I hope everyone else is doing the same.

Losing My Religion

No, I'm not stuffing myself with pizza. In fact, it's pretty clear to me now that I will be paleo for the rest of my life. I see and feel very profoundly the benefits of my current diet, and I truly enjoy what I eat. I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything, and really, I'm exploring new foods that I had barely even considered until now. That said, I am very cautious of having this become a religion. Raw foodists, vegans, and paleo people alike all feel the need to proselytize when they first fully switch over to their way of living. However, what has drawn me to paleo in the first place is the overall lack of ideology. Everything I originally read aimed to be rooted primarily in the latest science rather than some philosophical, ethical debate. There is a weird, disconcerting crossover between primal living and libertarian/Objectivist thought, but I would say that's a small sub-sect of paleo.

Overall, paleo is a pretty diverse and flexible clan - some avoid white potatoes, some don't, some avoid olive oil, some don't, and there is a constant re-tinkering and re-evaluating based on science and anthropology. I do not believe how I eat is morally or ideologically superior to the way anyone else eats. In fact, I think on the most part, veganism is 100% an intellectual choice whereas paleo, at least for me, is 100% a physiological, biological choice.

I try to eat locally and I try to eat well-raised grass-fed animals because I think that's the best way to get the best quality and most dense sources of nutrients possible. I don't deceive myself into thinking I'm saving the world. I don't deceive myself that all those animals march happily into the family-run abattoir and offer up their throats to be cut in return for the farmers' kindness. But I also don't have a moral objection to killing for food. I'm saving myself, pure and simple, and I'm making choices according to my biology. This is not to say that I don't want our food system to be as ethical as possible, I just don't think that denying our biology in favor of subjective ethics is ultimately sustainable. As I progress and learn more, I'm continuing to tinker with my diet to make sure that I stay healthy for as long as possible, and eating meat is a huge part of that process. I am not seeking moral purity. I'm not trying to tell other people how to live. However, if you have questions for me, I can relay information as I come across it.

The indisputable facts for me are that humans are evolved to be omnivores, grains and legumes are relatively new to the human diet evolutionarily speaking, and that sugar and gluten are bad for us. I believe that processed foods, including industrial seed oils such as canola and corn, are unhealthy, especially in the amounts that we consume them. I think there is a lot of wisdom in our ancient traditions, and I try to learn from them. There's really nothing revolutionary or radical about my approach to food. I'm just trying to be healthy, and I would like to help the people I love be healthy.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

BEFORE


AFTER

Ok, I hope this isn't TMI for you folks, but I wanted to show you a before and after of my body since I started eating paleo. The first picture was from around the time I moved to Baltimore. I already wasn't eating grains every day and I was avoiding sugar, but I was drinking beer and eating beans. I was still feeling a lot of brain fog at the time, and I often felt hungover for entire days even after only drinking just a couple of beers.

Recently, I've noticed some weird physiological changes. On tour, I had no choice but to wear the same pair of socks for a few days at a time, yet my feet never got stinky. They started smelling strongly of the rubber my shoes are made of, but not that yeasty smell. I used to be pretty prone to athletes foot, particularly if I didn't change my socks every day. I went all of tour with about 5 pairs of socks, and I never had a problem. Another thing I noticed just today is that I am sweating much less than I usually do despite the heat, even after I've run a couple blocks to catch a bus. My heart rate also doesn't increase too much with a short sprint. It used to be that any sudden movement would make my heart pound.

The heat in Baltimore has gotten me feeling pretty fatigued, but not in the same way I used to feel every day, which is to say no concentration and a desperate desire to dip my brain in bleach because it felt like there was a greasy film covering it. The old fatigue also made me feel like I didn't want to lift a finger, but right now my tiredness just makes me want to take things slightly slower. I feel pretty alert, even when I'm exhausted, and all of tour I felt more energetic than I ever have. I think it's heat and dehydration that is getting to me right now.

Anyway, I'm not sharing this out of a sense of vanity. I've just been experimenting with my body for the past couple of years, and I think these changes are pretty interesting. I think it's noteworthy that I've been able to change my body composition with no concerted effort to establish an exercise routine - I lost fat (keep in mind that I have significantly increased the amount of fat I eat), and while I haven't really gained any muscle, I think I'm somewhat stronger. I wound up lifting a lot of heavy stuff on tour, but that was out of obligation more than anything else, and I only lifted one or two heavy things a day. I did notice that it was remarkably easier to lift my bandmate's keyboard than it was two years ago.

Paleo Breakfast

Paleo breakfast. Three-egg omelet with spring onions (eggs were from the egg guy at the Waverly farmers market and the spring onions were from the downtown market), apple salad, and sweet potato, served with mustard/cider vinegar dressing, chipotle salsa, and salsa verde with avocado. I used ghee to cook the omelet, and I melted extra butter and a touch of ghee into the sweet potatoes. I didn't put any cheese in the omelet. For those of you still getting acne or gaining weight, or generally still feeling a bit bloated and gross, please try eliminating dairy from your diet for a while. Ghee is ok because the milk solids have been removed, it's just pure fat, which is good for you. It's the casein and the lactose in milk that are particularly growth-inducing. Chill on that shit. The irony of that ashtray in the picture is not lost on me.

Also, another note, when doing scrambled eggs or omelets, scramble the eggs in a bowl before you cook them - really whisk them to get them to froth up a little. Once you pour it into a hot pan, turn the heat down and stir very gently once every 30 seconds or so just to get them to cook evenly. Don't scramble in the pan. You need to be gentle with eggs when you cook them, otherwise they stick to the pan or become mealy and gross.

Lamb Stew

I made lamb stew.

Ingredients:
Chunks of bone-in lamb (the bone is important if you don't have stock on hand because that's where the flavor comes from)
Onions
Carrots
Bay leaf
Water
Tomato (optional)
Garlic
Salt
Pepper
Cumin
Lemon zest

I rubbed the chunks of meat with salt, pepper, and cumin. I then heated some ghee (I'm trying to use more saturated fats to cook, and ghee has a very high smoking point and tastes awesome) and browned the meat in it. The important thing here is to use a heavy pan (I used a cast-iron pot) and use pretty high heat. You want to get a nice sear on it, which should be a rusty copper color. Too many people are afraid to use high heat, so they wind up with grey, unappetizing meat. Ok, so once the meat was seared, I added chopped up onions, bay leaf, a little more salt, and gave it a stir. When the onions were transluscent, I added carrots and a tomato. I let that cook down a little, then I added a few cloves of garlic, a little lemon zest, and enough water to just barely cover everything. I covered the pot, and put the whole thing in the oven (sort of like with my Fuck You Texas Chili, except covered this time). I intended to leave it in there for at least 2 hours, but when I checked on it after a little over an hour and a half, it was already done. I then chopped up some parsley I got at the farmers market and threw it in. I ate the stew with roasted sweet potatoes, sauteed zucchini, and sauteed turnip greens. Again, I used ghee for everything. There was no vegetable oil at all in this dish.

Fuck You Texas Chili

Tonight, I got bored and went up to Waverly to wander around. Of course I had to stop at Punjab. I got a pound of ground beef. I can't afford grass-fed most of the time, and at least Punjab is halal and they grind the meat for you in front of you, so you can be reasonably sure there's minimal weird crap in it. Also, the fatty acid profile of ruminants is less adversely affected by grain feeding than poultry is, plus the beef at Punjab is very lean, so the fatty acid thing is pretty much a non-issue.

I went home and made chili. I decided I needed to put veggies in it, which is very un-Texan, which is why this is my Fuck You Texas Chili. Chili purists forbid the use of all veggies except garlic and onions (the red color should come from the chili and spices, not tomato). Beans are verboten as well, and the proper thickening agent is corn meal. Since I'm doing a paleo chili, I didn't even intend to use beans or cornmeal, but I definitely felt the need to eat some vegetable matter. Even though they're not seasonal, I used zucchini because that's what they had at Punjab, and they go rather well in chili.

Ingredients:

Ground beef
Onion
Bay leaves
As many cloves of garlic as you can handle
Chili powder
Cumin
Chopped tomatoes (fuck you Texas! Also, anyone allergic to nightshades can omit these.)
Lemon zest/some juice
Salt
Pepper
Cinnamon
Nutmeg
Zucchini
Stock (beef, chicken, veggie, whatever)

Ok, so I didn't list these in the ingredients because most of you probably won't have these on hand, but I used rendered duck fat (you can use bacon fat or light olive oil) and duck stock despite my previous warning about fatty acid profiles of poultry. Duck is delicious, and the fatty acid ratio is better than that of chicken, so whatever. I first heated the duck fat in a dutch oven, then I threw the spices in to let them "open" to use Indian terminology to mean that they become fragrant. I browned the meat in the spice/oil mixture, letting all the exuding liquid evaporate. Then I threw in the chopped onions and tomatoes, stirred it, let the veggies exude their liquid, then I squeezed some lemon juice into it and zested the peel into it as well, threw in a couple bay leaves, a dash of cinnamon and nuteg, a couple cloves of garlic, and enough stock to cover the rest of the stuff by about half an inch. I then put the whole pot, uncovered, into a 350-degree oven for about an hour. Then I chopped up some zucchini and threw them in the pot, and let the whole thing cook for another 20 minutes or so. And that's my Fuck You Texas Chili.

Eating Solo

One thing I've been thinking about a lot during the course of doing the paleo thing is how culture can reflect something evolutionary. Sharing food seems so natural to me that I have to believe it's built in somehow to our genetic code. Indeed bonobos, who we often look to for insight into human behavior, have very complex systems of gathering, hunting, and sharing food. This is why I feel the modern habit of each person getting his or her own plate of food, restaurant style, is not only wasteful and inefficient, it also flies in the face of our intense need to connect to each other via the meals that we prepare and eat together. For the same reason, I also abhor convenience food and food designed to eat on the go. I much prefer cooking and eating family style.

Recent changes in my daily routine have resulted in me cooking mainly for myself most days. This is very awkward for me. Beyond affecting my cooking times and quantities, by the nature in which fresh produce is sold, it's hard for me to use everything fast enough. I also really hate putting so much effort into cooking when no one else is around to appreciate it. I do indeed enjoy cooking, and it's a meditative process for me, but it's just a little less rewarding when I can't share the fruits of my labor with people I care about.

I think sharing food helps us prepare healthier food. We feel free to buy produce and meat and good ingredients when we feel that we are doing so to take care of the people we love. When we're solitary in our eating and cooking habits, it's too easy to slip into convenience foods. Sandwiches, ramen, and microwave dinners are for lonely eating. Real food is to be eaten and shared with your tribe. What I mean is that I miss you guys on nights when I'm eating alone.

I Scream!

It's warm and sunny out, which means the ice cream and icey stands are opening! But alas, if you are sticking with the paleo diet you will have a hard time finding an icey treat to eat out there that's not packed with tons of sugar.

Look no further.

Make your own one-ingredient ice cream at home. It's literally BANANAS. Apparently this is a recipe that is very popular with the vegans but I'm just now discovering it. I found it here. All you need to do is freeze chopped up bananas for a couple of hours. Then put them in a blender or food processor until you've made a creamy consistency. You can add whatever you like (peanut butter, vanilla, honey, cocoa powder, etc.) I put a spoon full of almond butter, vanilla extract, and walnuts in mine and it was so delicious. The picture above (not mine) is the result of re-freezing the blended frozen bananas and then taking a scooper to it to make it look even more like ice cream. This is something that you should enjoy fast because if you let it melt it will just become gooey bananas, which is delicious but no longer ice creamy.

Apparently this process also works with fruits like mamey and mango. I bet it would also work with avocado too. The key is the fat content in these fruits that make it that creamy consistency. To make it local, maybe you could use paw paw from the forest!

Try this. You will like it.

Browned-Butter Sour-Cherry Almond Torte

This is the recipe for the sour-cherry almond torte,
now paleo-friendly!

Start with:

1 stick unsalted butter
vanilla extract
6 egg whites
1/2 tspn salt
cardamom (to taste)
cinnamon (to taste)
nutmeg (to taste)
1/2 cup tapioca flour
1/2 cup molasses
1/2 cup shredded unsweetened coconut
1 cup almond flour
1/3 cup sliced almonds
3 1/2 cups pitted sour cherries
arrowroot powder
1 pint heavy whipping cream

Preheat oven to 375 F.

Butter and flour/coconut a 8-10" cake pan
Mix the salt, spices, flours, and coconut together.
Melt the butter in a sauce pan, and cook it until it begins to brown (not burn).
Remove it from the heat, allow it to cool, and then add ~ 1 taplespoon of vanilla extract to the butter.
Beat the egg whites to the stiff peak stage (egg beater FTW).
Gently fold in the dry ingredient mixture, then the molasses, then the melted butter.
Transfer batter to the prepared cake pan. Cover the top of torte with sliced almonds.
Bake torte at 375 F for 45 minutes, or until fork comes out clean. Remove pan from oven and cool on rack for 15 minutes. De-pan the torte (carefully!) onto a rack and allow it to continue cooling for an additional 20-40 minutes before serving.

Prepare the sour cherry topping by heating the sour cherries with their juices in a sauce pan. Arrowroot powder may be added to thicken the juices, if desired. Cinnamon / cardamom / nutmeg may also be added if desired. Once the cherries are cooked, remove from heat and add vanilla extract to taste.

Prepare the whipped cream topping by adding cardamom / nutmeg / cinnamon and vanilla extract to taste to 1 pint of heavy cream. Beat the cream to the stiff peak stage (egg beater, yet again), and refrigerate until ready to serve.

Enjoy!