Eat food.
Not too much.
Mostly plants.
Sounds simple–but it is very hard to do–KSH.
Eat food.
Not too much.
Mostly plants.
Sounds simple–but it is very hard to do–KSH.
Yet another foodie who is going to make a million selling a book on why we should listen to him. He is of course right about the garbage in American processed food, and he is surely right about having a garden of your own. But he isn’t going to sell eating leafy greens to the eskimos, so to speak, and he sure isn’t going to sell it to me, who will not give up lamb chops so we can all eat like women at a health spa.
I slaughter a pig every fall so I know where my pork is coming from and I know its quality. This is not going to replaced by eating kale. And I put lard and butter in my piecrusts because I want a real crust, which is, to follow his rule, what my mother and grandmother and great grandmother did. LM
The fear and dread of you will fall upon all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air, upon every creature that moves along the ground, and upon all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hands. Everything that lives and moves will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.
Genesis 9:2-3 [NIV]
Pork, beef, chicken, and fish…there what’s for dinner! 😉 Every time you see a rainbow, you can remember that God said we can eat meat. I think pizza is OK too, as long as it has some sort of meat topping.
I highly recommend reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals By Michael Pollan. It’s not a book I would normally read, but after having it recommended to me by both a very politically and theologically conservative person and a very liberal political activist friend of mine, I was intrigued. It’s very interesting and informative and the “hero” of the book is a radical libertarian graduate of Bob Jones University – Joel Salatin.
#1, Larry Morse, I think you would find Michael Pollan would not condemn your food choices, because you do slaughter your own food — this is aimed at the rest of us.
It’s perhaps a shame this wisdom is coming out of Berkeley since that will set many people against it – but what he says is quite accurate, including ‘eat mostly plants’. That is the way that our digestive tracts and organs were made to work, and they have not evolved to process the rafts of junk in a modern supermarket in a way that nourishes our bodies! nor are they ever likely to. The liver falls behind in its ability to clear toxins from the body and next the intestines will suffer. Eating fish (where the omega-3 is), leafy greens and other veggies, and copious amounts of ripe fruits, with minor whole-grains is appropriate and if you look at the cuisines suggested as healthy in the article, this is mainly what they consist of, and that is why those cultures evolved them. Some cultures are still introducing health practises in food; Australian hamburgers are usually offered with shredded beet (aka beetroot) along with lettuce and tomato, sensible when the meat (animal fat) can tax the liver’s bile production a bit and beets are a veg that thins bile.
I wouldn’t have a strong opinion about this article had I not within the past month learned that my gallbladder should come out, soon. To stop the attacks I researched diet and modified mine very considerably. It’s unbelievable what a few days with no dairy products, no fatty meats, and little oil but heaps of oatmeal, green veg and fruit will do for mental acuity, energy level, weight, disposition and enjoyment of wholesome food, all at once. You almost become the person you were the last time you felt really well and healthy, and it takes less than a week to notice the change. The next thing is to find ways to make the new foods appealing and varied, easier since you’re not spending money on all the prepared and junk foods so special touches become affordable. That’s my testimonial, and it doesn’t surprise me that this author is selling a lot of books, with the atrocious dietary habits many Westerners have fallen into.
Two points about TACit’s comments
1. How do the indigenous peoples of the Arctic regions manage to live? Not too many fresh fruits in their diet.
2. Almost everyone agrres that a well varied, omnivorous diet is good for you. The problem is that eating lots of fresh fruits and vegetables gets rather expensive. A home garden is a great idea, but it takes a lot of time to tend and even more time to process the produce for freezing and canning. I remember my grandmother spending most of the summer preparing and canning the produce from my grandfather’s garden.
Random comment – what people are advocating today regarding healthy eating and conservation is not very far from how people lived in the U.S. during World War II. Everything was recycled, things like meat and butter were rationed, and people were encouraged to plant their Victory Gardens to provide food for themselves.
Um, well, #5, it is in fact the case that native Americans have extremely high incidences of gallstones, a result of digestive processes not coping well with the diet they eat. Evidently not evolved to cope with the restricted diet? They would, though, presumably eat plenty of fish.
W/r/t your claim that fresh vegetables and fruit are expensive: when one stops spending money on large amounts of meat, lots of dairy products, all the prepared food-like substances and junk that are sold in supermarkets, why, suddenly there is money that can be spent on the plain foods that actually are good for us. One has to leave off eating things that are not good – no use mixing the two.
I agree about the return to practises common in WWII – perhaps the advocates hope to ensure that raising one’s own food doesn’t become a lost art in the US. Many varieties of produce already have been lost but at least the knowledge of how to grow things needn’t be.
#2: I was amused at your citation of Gen. 9:2-3. [url=http://www.vulcanhammer.org/?p=444]At this posting (which is a comment on the issue of vegetarianism and the Bible)[/url] I said that “This verse should be engraved over the entry way of every hunting license issuing location in the Old Confederacy.”
But doesn’t this run afowl of the [url=http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/065njdoe.asp?pg=1] “plants have feelings, too”[/url] crowd?
The home garden, like the pig in the pen, a couple of sheep in the little pasture, a friend who raises Belties, t his is the way to go, and it is rather cheap. Corn (ah, Silver Queen!) comes off the stalk and into the boiling water and on to the plate. Fresh asparagus or Sugar Snap peas. It only takes a small space and a little time to eat REALLY fresh. I might add that there’s nothing better for the diet than a mess of steamed clams and a cuppla lobsters, chix will do fine, and then one can go wild on real melted butter. And some Qing Dao.
Oh, this is killing me even to think of. Where’s my clam fork? LM
And, Larry, Mel Bartholomew proved that this is not a dream or practice limited to the country (well, perhaps except for the pig in the pen) when he developed his [url=http://www.squarefootgardening.com/] Square foot garden[/url] idea.
Re: Larry # 9 – In the interests of the environment, shouldn’t you be using a spork instead of your clam fork? 🙂
OK, now the healthy eating lecture since there’s been a chorus acclaiming some foods folks love to eat. God made us a certain way as human, not some other way, and He made us with digestive systems that require BALANCE to function effectively for the good of the rest of our body. That balance is easily upset by over-eating in some food categories, fats and sugars particularly. What is objectionable about the nutrition options foisted on us by their mass availability to consumers in supermarkets is, they are out-of-balance, and can easily trap us into making our bodies’ condition reflect the imbalance of what we put into our bodies. Fats and sugars are both addictive, which adds to the ease of entrapment.
God did not make us to be cows, and for that reason large amounts of the dairy fat that calves thrive on ultimately harm us. Nor did he make us to be chicks living off egg yolk.
And he did not make us with the digestive equipment of lions or other large carnivores, which thrive on quantities of protein directly from other animals’ bodies.
What did Jesus eat? Fish, for sure, fruits such as grapes and figs, apricots perhaps; olives and derivative oil, wholegrain bread; lamb, maybe once a year! – this would make an interesting Bible study, no doubt already done elsewhere. Pork? nary a chance! And of course, red wine.
The point is, though there is nothing to prohibit people eating dairy, eggs, pork or beef or venison, or refined wheat, corn and sugarcane products – all these foods are greatly over-represented in the typical range of foods available to typical American supermarket or convenience store shoppers. None of them are really bad in very modest amounts, and all are harmful to humans in significant amounts because that upsets the balance that our bodies were equipped to function with. Rather than supposing we are free to eat whatever the heck we like or what comes to us easily, we really need to understand that we are free to choose to eat what will make and keep us healthy – or suffer the consequences and not lay that at anyone else’s feet. That lots of Americans are not making good choices here is evidenced by, for example, the fact that something like 20% of surgeries in the US are gallbladder removals!
Anybody ever tried the Hallelujah Diet? If I remember correctly it says God never intended for us to eat meat. I knew several people in a church I attended who used it and they were always drinking barley grass shakes and eating so many carrots their skin looked yellowish.
Kinda sounds contrary to the New Testament admonishment that what goes in our mouths is not what defiles us.
A clam fork is a device for digging clams. (Am I being numb and missing a jest?) It looks like a spade but its handle is short, about a foot and a half, and at right angles to the teeth. One goes to the clam flats, which are different from the seafood section in the gigantic supermarket, with a clam hod and a clam fork, one looks for clam holes nicely clustered together, one then presses the teeth in as far as they can go and then one pulls backward, rolling the sand over and, with any luck, exposing the clams. Actually this takes some skill and a strong back.
The problem isn’t what we eat so much as the excess of the same. Still, I AM biased. I despise the food fascists who are everywhere, so I go on finding vegans ridiculous and eating standing rib roasts with risole potatoes and Yorkshire pudding. Larry
Larry, I think you might want to actually read Michael Pollan.
He’s not a vegan. He’s talking about not eating industrial food. He is skeptical of the entire nutrition industry. But his simple formula is an implicit critique of the diet industry, the nutrition industry and industrial food. It is not a commentary on meat eating (although it is a commentary on what we feed our cows). Its a commentary on our propensity to eat at buffet and fast-food restaurants rather than grow food ourselves.