It's been so long since I've posted here for so many reasons. Our dance company has been busy. Our daughter is super-busy with school and everything else. (How did that happen?)


I admit, this blog is where I write things that can get me a bit in trouble. I have some strong opinions about food. If you've read this blog at all, you will know why. I have some good reasons.


So here is the first and probably last entry for 2014. I will try to write more in 2015!

I am listening to another program that is promoting veganism as a beneficial diet for everyone and the planet (at one point the speaker egged on a caller/cheerleader with “preach! preach!”) - and I can feel my blood pressure rising....So here it goes. I realize that so many of my friends are vegetarian or vegan, so I apologize for upsetting anyone out there. I love you all and respect your choices. I feel as if I regularly hear the vegan/vegetarian side of this discussion, and I feel as if I get a constant proselytizing media barrage in the Bay Area. I invite you to please take a look at this post. It is not fashionable (although I am happy to say that this argument for an omnivorous diet is becoming more recognized these days) but neither am I.



Food is compassion. It is home. It is where we come from. If we eat what our great-great grandmothers recognized as food, then we are probably doing well. For *most* of us, this is probably not a plant-based diet. Lierre Keith was a veteran of veganism for over 20 years and moved to an omnivorous diet when her health declined to the point at which she simply had to change. She also realized that widespread intensive agriculture is worse for the planet than the raising of pastured animals on a farm that does not rely on monocultures.  Check out her book The Vegetarian Myth for her entire set of arguments. She comes on strong, but knows her stuff. 



It is as much an economic argument as it is a nutritional and ecological one. Our economic system relies on monocultures, even for organic plant crops. Imagine if everyone was vegetarian - a huge amount of the planet’s surface would have to be co-opted into intensive plant crops. It’s not that I don’t think that intensive ranching isn’t bad. There is a huge problem with feedlots and big-box stores - I love that CostCo carries organics, but I worry about their sourcing. (At the same time, there is the expense of that good stuff from the farmers’ markets - it’s hard for us, too!) Keith, who was a proselytizer of veganism for most of her adult life, is now just as preachy for the Weston A. Price Foundation, which makes me slap my head, but that’s her. Meanwhile, she describes the massive clearing of agricultural land for organic plant crops as a form of ecological genocide in which the natural balance of life is enormously disturbed in favor of plant-based monocultures. While California’s big organic ag is maybe not so bad as the acres of Monsanto-tainted corn in the Midwest, it still rips up acres of plant and animal community that is necessary to environmental balance. 



At the same time, Salatin’s Polyface Farm, and others who are increasingly following his lead, raise many different animals as well as multiple crops in a careful dance that results in a thriving farm that uses its waste resources. Its soil stays rich and its ecosystem is self-renewing. 



There are new studies that say that plants may feel pain, which then makes the cruelty-free argument more complex than simply leaving out animal products from our diets. 
http://www.smithsonianchannel.com/sc/web/video/titles/12151/do-plants-respond-to-pain


Preparing food has some very yucky, messy stages. Raw ingredients for an excellent meal remind us that our bodies do require the death of some other organism. We should never take that lightly. At the same time, we can’t simply skip out on the responsibility of feeding our families and ourselves well. Withdrawing is a child’s response to a very large and thoughtful question. Adults need to take that on. Whenever I handle raw meat it is my job to think of how best to honor that animal, whether that is to use as much of it as I can, or to talk to our daughter about where this food came from and about how her grandmother used to cook it, how not to waste the food, to use compost, to live as waste-free as possible. How to not just cook but to eat with family, building many lives from that death, in order to give it respect. 


Then there is the sugar question. Vegetarianism is, by its nature, high in sugars, whether you are eating carrots and kohlrabi in your salads or apple honey cake. The western diet is too high in sugars. Period. Check out Peter Attia’s TED talk. He is a doctor who switched to an extremely high-fat and animal-based diet when he realized that his plant-based eating was actually causing his diabetes. Again, this is very individual and probably refers back to what a person’s ancestors ate. I can say from personal experience, and a family that tends towards insulin intolerance that I can’t live on a diet weighted towards plants. I’m sure that there are plenty of people who can. I haven’t met too many.



This leads to the argument that I do see all the time on the web, which also annoys me to no end because it fuels our cultural obsession with skinny bodies. Yes, a high carbohydrate diet, even if it’s “healthy”, will generate excess fat. Eating meat and whole, saturated fats do not make you fat. People who eat a higher sugar diet and have high triglycerides are at greater risk for heart disease than people with above average overall cholesterol count and low triglycerides. In other words, eating cholesterol does not give you high cholesterol. 



The part of the vegan/vegetarian argument that gets me the most upset, however, is a statement that I hear all the time, even from well-educated, sophisticated people. I also hear and read this constantly in medical research, which is disturbing. This is the assumption that all meat eating is inherently a feedlot-based diet and relies western menu staples, such as “meat and potatoes.” Even worse is the assumption that the hamburgers that come out of my kitchen are, by virtue of their meat content, equivalent to what comes out of a fast food restaurant. That may sound really silly, and it is, but many medical studies (I will insert one here when I can - there are dozens) simply record that a person ate a “hamburger” with no interest in its sourcing as a factor. Believe me, my hamburgers are nothing like the thing you’d get at a drive-through window.



The call to eat more vegetables is probably a good one. We have forgotten how to eat them. We have also forgotten that for many indigenous communities who do have a high plant to meat ratio in their diets, that grain porridge and roasted potatoes were NOT preferable to roasted meat, but was what they ate in lean times or between good hunts. We are not meant to eat meat only all day. We are also not meant to eat plants only all day. Every person, each dietary heritage is somewhat different as far as that balance goes, but it is extremely rare to find a truly vegan community, unless they are following the diet for specific religious reasons. (On the other hand, the Masai’s diet of meat and blood does exist.) Veganism can also be used for detox for a period of time, or, according to Sally Fallon, near the end of life when the human body simply needs less animal-based food.


I invite everyone to please ignore fashion, whether that is to eat vegetarian or to follow the trendyarianism of the moment and please check in with your ancestors to see what's good. (If there are tiny marshmallows in it, then look farther back.) If history has been lost, please read up on where your family came from and find some clues, then maybe surprise your relatives at the holiday table this season!








The Elephant In The Kitchen

It's been three years since I started the GAPS Diet and somewhat longer than that since I became acquainted with the work of Weston A. Price. It was soon after that I began to notice something that very rarely gets mentioned and seems to stick out like a two-ton pachyderm hiding behind the refrigerator door.

Food is one of those things in our lives that is way more than the sum of its parts. The relationships that we have with food, the way we get it or raise it, cook and eat it speak loudly to how we live on the earth, relate to each other, and to what are our most deeply held opinions and values. Our eating habits, rules and taboos make us part of a tribe, or not.

People like me who cook and eat along the lines of Weston A. Price/Nourishing Traditions tend to be on the right of the political/cultural spectrum. Those who are more on the left seem to be more likely to be vegetarians and appear to be in a different reality when it comes to food and nutrition. This isn't always the case, I'm sure, but so far I have, as yet, to be proven wrong. 

There. I've said it. Throw your tomatoes now, if you like. It's true. It's weird. It puts me in company that ordinarily would never share any kind of mental space with me and my ilk and visa versa. Or at least, that's what I thought before I started researching how to improve my family's health through diet. 

It's a lonely road being a political and cultural liberal with this kind of nutritional philosophy. Occasionally I hear other progressives speaking out who have discovered that current science points human beings towards pastured animal-based foods rather than a solely plant-based diet, like Lierre Keith and my original mentor, Julie Matthews. It's a relief when I do hear a voice that speaks of eating compassionately for the environment and for our bodies, that the cycle of life includes death, and a world of intensive agriculture without animal husbandry is a scary one to contemplate. It's rare, though, that I meet a liberal in person who is either on GAPS or following WAP's philosophies. Our family fills our plates with rich stews, fermented condiments and vegetables, raw milk yogurt and cheeses while just about everyone we know is avoids too much fat and feels that they should apologize if they choose to eat chicken instead of soy products. It's not fun to eat alone, even when the food is delicious. I keep hoping to find liberals who are on a similar journey, but so far that's not been the case. 

On the other hand, I've recently come into contact with a cousin that I never knew that I had. Like many folks on that side of my family (most of whom I have never met and am only now learning exist) she is a conservative and a Libertarian. She also packs her freezer with local, grass-fed beef. She cooks locally and from scratch, believes in giving her beautiful and healthy children whole fats and good food, at least as our family would know it. When I post a sharp comment on Facebook about genetically modified organisms or the undeclared toxins in commonly available toiletries she often posts supportively with all my liberal friends. We are careful not to talk politics since we're both pretty opinionated. We've made many a connection through how we feed our families and it's a blessing. 

There aren't too many situations these days in which rightwards- and leftwards-leaning people can connect like this. I am thankful for this one.