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.