Fear and Loathing in the Kitchen

Can organic feed the world?

2008-06-27T18:00:00.002-04:00

Sure it can - if it's done right. Michael Pollan talks about permaculture.

Missing in Action?

2008-06-18T08:37:00.002-04:00

Where have I been?

Well, between working full-time and directing a play in this summer's Fringe Festival here in Toronto, I've been running around like crazy. So, the blog is on hiatus until mid-July.

I'll have tons of catching up to do, both with nutrition news and with my own eating habits. Being busy really can wreak havoc on diet, and I've put on a couple of newly-shed pounds. Working from home, I've been really spoiled as I've always had time to cook. Eating on the go, not to mention eating low carb on the go, has proven more challenging than I realized.

So come mid-July, I'm back in blogger action. Hold on to your Oopsies.

The Oil We Eat

2008-04-29T10:29:00.007-04:00

An essay by Richard Manning, author of Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization, from Harper's Magazine Feb 2004. It's lengthy, but well worth the read. Posted online, with some interesting reader comments, here.

The Oil We Eat (from Harper's)

Following the food chain back to Iraq

The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly.

--Balzac

The journalist's rule says: follow the money. This rule, however, is not really axiomatic but derivative, in that money, as even our vice president will tell you, is really a way of tracking energy. We'll follow the energy.

We learn as children that there is no free lunch, that you don't get something from nothing, that what goes up must come down, and so on. The scientific version of these verities is only slightly more complex. As James Prescott Joule discovered in the nineteenth century, there is only so much energy. You can change it from motion to heat, from heat to light, but there will never be more of it and there will never be less of it. The conservation of energy is not an option, it is a fact. This is the first law of thermodynamics.

Special as we humans are, we get no exemptions from the rules. All animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants. This is the food chain, and pulling it is the unique ability of plants to turn sunlight into stored energy in the form of carbohydrates, the basic fuel of all animals.
Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. There is no alternative to plant energy, just as there is no alternative to oxygen. The results of taking away our plant energy may not be as sudden as cutting off oxygen, but they are as sure.

Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a given year, the total budget for life. They call it the planet's "primary productivity." There have been two efforts to figure out how that productivity is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the other an independent accounting by the biologist Stuart Pimm. Both conclude that we humans, a single species among millions, consume about 40 percent of Earth's primary productivity, 40 percent of all there is. This simple number may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet. We 6 billion have simply stolen the food, the rich among us a lot more than others.

Energy cannot be created or canceled, but it can be concentrated. This is the larger and profoundly explanatory context of a national-security memo George Kennan wrote in 1948 as the head of a State Department planning committee, ostensibly about Asian policy but really about how the United States was to deal with its newfound role as the dominant force on Earth. "We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population," Kennan wrote. "In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction."

"The day is not far off," Kennan concluded, "when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts."

If you follow the energy, eventually you will end up in a field somewhere. Humans engage in a dizzying array of artifice and industry. Nonetheless, more than two thirds of humanity's cut of primary productivity results from agriculture, two thirds of which in turn consists of three plants: rice, wheat, and corn. In the 10,000 years since humans domesticated these grains, their status has remained undiminished, most likely because they are able to store solar energy in uniquely dense, transportable bundles of carbohydrates. They are to the plant world what a barrel of refined oil is to the hydrocarbon world. Indeed, aside from hydrocarbons they are the
most concentrated form of true wealth--sun energy--to be found on the planet.

As Kennan recognized, however, the maintenance of such a concentration of wealth often requires violent action. Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature's offerings. Why humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question, especially because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries.

Farming did not improve most lives. The evidence that best points to the answer, I think, lies in the difference between early agricultural villages and their pre-agricultural counterparts--the presence not just of grain but of granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses significantly larger and more ornate than all the others attached to those granaries. Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since.

Domestication was also a radical change in the distribution of wealth within the plant world. Plants can spend their solar income in several ways. The dominant and prudent strategy is to allocate most of it to building roots, stem, bark--a conservative portfolio of investments that
allows the plant to better gather energy and survive the downturn years. Further, by living in diverse stands (a given chunk of native prairie contains maybe 200 species of plants), these perennials provide services for one another, such as retaining water, protecting one another from wind, and fixing free nitrogen from the air to use as fertilizer. Diversity allows a system to "sponsor its own fertility," to use visionary agronomist Wes Jackson's phrase. This is the plant world's norm.

There is a very narrow group of annuals, however, that grow in patches of a single species and store almost all of their income as seed, a tight bundle of carbohydrates easily exploited by seed eaters such as ourselves. Under normal circumstances, this eggs-in-one-basket strategy is a dumb idea for a plant. But not during catastrophes such as floods, fires, and volcanic eruptions. Such catastrophes strip established plant communities and create opportunities for wind-scattered entrepreneurial seed bearers. It is no accident that no matter where agriculture sprouted on the globe, it always happened near rivers. You might assume, as many have, that this is because the plants needed the water or nutrients. Mostly this is not true. They needed the power of flooding, which scoured landscapes and stripped out competitors. Nor is it an accident, I think, that agriculture arose independently and simultaneously around the globe just as the last ice age ended, a time of enormous upheaval when glacial melt let loose sea-size lakes to create tidal waves of erosion. It was a time of catastrophe.

Corn, rice, and wheat are especially adapted to catastrophe. It is their niche. In the natural scheme of things, a catastrophe would create a blank slate, bare soil, that was good for them. Then, under normal circumstances, succession would quickly close that niche. The annuals
would colonize. Their roots would stabilize the soil, accumulate organic matter, provide cover. Eventually the catastrophic niche would close. Farming is the process of ripping that niche open again and again. It is an annual artificial catastrophe, and it requires the equivalent of three
or four tons of TNT per acre for a modern American farm. Iowa's fields require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year.

Iowa is almost all fields now. Little prairie remains, and if you can find what Iowans call a "postage stamp" remnant of some, it most likely will abut a cornfield. This allows an observation. Walk from the prairie to the field, and you probably will step down about six feet, as if the land had been stolen from beneath you. Settlers' accounts of the prairie conquest mention a sound, a series of pops, like pistol shots, the sound of stout grass roots breaking before a moldboard plow. A robbery was in progress.

When we say the soil is rich, it is not a metaphor. It is as rich in energy as an oil well. A prairie converts that energy to flowers and roots and stems, which in turn pass back into the ground as dead organic matter. The layers of topsoil build up into a rich repository of energy, a bank. A
farm field appropriates that energy, puts it into seeds we can eat. Much of the energy moves from the earth to the rings of fat around our necks and waists. And much of the energy is simply wasted, a trail of dollars billowing from the burglar's satchel.

I've already mentioned that we humans take 40 percent of the globe's primary productivity every year. You might have assumed we and our livestock eat our way through that volume, but this is not the case. Part of that total--almost a third of it--is the potential plant mass lost when forests are cleared for farming or when tropical rain forests are cut for grazing or when plows destroy the deep mat of prairie roots that held the whole business together, triggering erosion. The Dust Bowl was no accident of nature. A functioning grassland prairie produces more biomass each year than does even the most technologically advanced wheat field. The problem is, it's mostly a form of grass and grass roots that humans can't eat. So we replace the prairie with our own preferred grass, wheat. Never mind that we feed most of our grain to livestock, and that livestock is perfectly content to eat native grass. And never mind that there likely were more bison produced naturally on the Great Plains before farming than all of beef farming raises in the same area today. Our ancestors found it preferable to pluck the energy from the ground and when it ran out move on.

Today we do the same, only now when the vault is empty we fill it again with new energy in the form of oil-rich fertilizers. Oil is annual primary productivity stored as hydrocarbons, a trust fund of sorts, built up over many thousands of years. On average, it takes 5.5 gallons of fossil energy to restore a year's worth of lost fertility to an acre of eroded land--in 1997 we burned through more than 400 years' worth of ancient fossilized productivity, most of it from someplace else. Even as the earth beneath Iowa shrinks, it is being globalized.

Six thousand years before sodbusters broke up Iowa, their Caucasian blood ancestors broke up the Hungarian plain, an area just northwest of the Caucasus Mountains. Archaeologists call this tribe the LBK, short for linearbandkeramik, the German word that describes the distinctive pottery remnants that mark their occupation of Europe. Anthropologists call them the wheat-beef people, a name that better connects those ancients along the Danube to my fellow Montanans on the Upper Missouri River. These proto-Europeans had a full set of domesticated plants and animals, but wheat and beef dominated. All the domesticates came from an area along what is now the Iraq-Syria-Turkey border at the edges of the Zagros Mountains. This is the center of domestication for the Western world's main crops and live stock, ground zero of catastrophic agriculture.

Two other types of catastrophic agriculture evolved at roughly the same time, one centered on rice in what is now China and India and one centered on corn and potatoes in Central and South America. Rice, though, is tropical and its expansion depends on water, so it developed only in floodplains, estuaries, and swamps. Corn agriculture was every bit as voracious as wheat; the Aztecs could be as brutal and imperialistic as Romans or Brits, but the corn cultures collapsed with the onslaught of Spanish conquest. Corn itself simply joined the wheat-beef people's coalition. Wheat was the empire builder; its bare botanical facts dictated the motion and violence that we know as imperialism.

The wheat-beef people swept across the western European plains in less than 300 years, a conquest some archaeologists refer to as a "blitzkrieg." A different race of humans, the Cro-Magnons--hunter-gatherers, not farmers--lived on those plains at the time. Their cave art at places such as Lascaux testifies to their sophistication and profound connection to wildlife. They probably did most of their hunting and gathering in uplands and river bottoms, places the wheat farmers didn't need, suggesting the possibility of coexistence. That's not what happened, however. Both genetic and linguistic evidence say that the farmers killed the hunters.
The Basque people are probably the lone remnant descendants of Cro-Magnons, the only trace.

Hunter-gatherer archaeological sites of the period contain spear points that originally belonged to the farmers, and we can guess they weren't trade goods. One group of anthropologists concludes, "The evidence from the western extension of the LBK leaves little room for any other
conclusion but that LBK-Mesolithic interactions were at best chilly and at worst hostile." The world's surviving Blackfeet, Assiniboine Sioux, Inca, and Maori probably have the best idea of the nature of these interactions.

Wheat is temperate and prefers plowed-up grasslands. The globe has a limited stock of temperate grasslands, just as it has a limited stock of all other biomes. On average, about 10 percent of all other biomes remain in something like their native state today. Only 1 percent of temperate grasslands remains undestroyed. Wheat takes what it needs.

The supply of temperate grasslands lies in what are today the United States, Canada, the South American pampas, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Europe, and the Asiatic extension of the European plain into the sub-Siberian steppes. This area largely describes the First World, the developed world. Temperate grasslands make up not only the habitat of wheat and beef but also the globe's islands of Caucasians, of European surnames and languages. In 2000 the countries of the temperate grasslands, the neo-Europes, accounted for about 80 percent of all wheat exports in the world, and about 86 percent of all com. That is to say, the
neo-Europes drive the world's agriculture. The dominance does not stop with grain. These countries, plus the mothership--Europe accounted for three fourths of all agricultural exports of all crops in the world in 1999.

Plato wrote of his country's farmlands:

What now remains of the formerly rich land is like the skeleton of a sick man. ...Formerly, many of the mountains were arable, The plains that were full of rich soil are now marshes. Hills that were once covered with forests and produced abundant pasture now produce only food for bees. Once the land was enriched by yearly rains, which were not lost, as they are now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea. The soil was deep, it absorbed and kept the water in loamy soil, and the water that soaked into the hills fed springs and running streams everywhere. Now the abandoned shrines at spots where formerly there were springs attest that our description of the land is true.

Plato's lament is rooted in wheat agriculture, which depleted his country's soil and subsequently caused the series of declines that pushed centers of civilization to Rome, Turkey, and western Europe. By the fifth century, though, wheat's strategy of depleting and moving on ran up against the Atlantic Ocean. Fenced-in wheat agriculture is like rice agriculture. It balances its equations with famine. In the millennium between 500 and 1500, Britain suffered a major "corrective" famine about every ten years; there were seventy-five in France during the same period. The incidence, however, dropped sharply when colonization brought an influx of new food to Europe.

The new lands had an even greater effect on the colonists themselves. Thomas Jefferson, after enduring a lecture on the rustic nature by his hosts at a dinner party in Paris, pointed out that all of the Americans present were a good head taller than all of the French. Indeed, colonists
in all of the neo-Europes enjoyed greater stature and longevity, as well as a lower infant-mortality rate--all indicators of the better nutrition afforded by the onetime spend down of the accumulated capital of virgin soil.

The precolonial famines of Europe raised the question: What would happen when the planet's supply of arable land ran out? We have a clear answer. In about 1960 expansion hit its limits and the supply of unfarmed, arable lands came to an end. There was nothing left to plow. What happened was grain yields tripled.

The accepted term for this strange turn of events is the green revolution, though it would be more properly labeled the amber revolution, because it applied exclusively to grain--wheat, rice, and corn. Plant breeders tinkered with the architecture of these three grains so that they could be hypercharged with irrigation water and chemical fertilizers, especially nitrogen. This innovation meshed nicely with the increased "efficiency" of the industrialized factory-farm system. With the possible exception of the domestication of wheat, the green revolution is the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet.

For openers, it disrupted long-standing patterns of rural life worldwide, moving a lot of no-longer-needed people off the land and into the world's most severe poverty. The experience in population control in the developing world is by now clear: It is not that people make more people so much as it is that they make more poor people. In the forty-year period beginning about 1960, the world's population doubled, adding virtually the entire increase of 3 billion to the world's poorest classes, the most fecund classes. The way in which the green revolution raised that grain contributed hugely to the population boom, and it is the weight of the population that leaves humanity in its present untenable position.

Discussion of these, the most poor, however, is largely irrelevant to the American situation. We say we have poor people here, but almost no one in this country lives on less than one dollar a day, the global benchmark for poverty. It marks off a class of about 1.3 billion people, the hard core of the larger group of 2 billion chronically malnourished people--that is, one third of humanity. We may forget about them, as most Americans do.

More relevant here are the methods of the green revolution, which added orders of magnitude to the devastation. By mining the iron for tractors, drilling the new oil to fuel them and to make nitrogen fertilizers, and by taking the water that rain and rivers had meant for other lands, farming had extended its boundaries, its dominion, to lands that were not farmable. At the same time, it extended its boundaries across time, tapping fossil energy, stripping past assets.

The common assumption these days is that we muster our weapons to secure oil, not food. There's a little joke in this. Ever since we ran out of arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1. And this understates the problem, because at the same time that there is more oil in our food there
is less oil in our oil. A couple of generations ago we spent a lot less energy drilling, pumping, and distributing than we do now. In the 1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we spent getting it. Today each barrel invested in the process returns only ten, a
calculation that no doubt fails to include the fuel burned by the Hummers and Blackhawks we use to maintain access to the oil in Iraq.

David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has estimated that if all of the world ate the way the United States eats, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years. Pimentel has his detractors. Some have accused him of being off on other calculations by as much as 30 percent. Fine. Make it ten years.

Fertilizer makes a pretty fine bomb right off the shelf, a chemistry lesson Timothy McVeigh taught at Oklahoma City's Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995--not a small matter, in that the green revolution has made nitrogen fertilizers ubiquitous in some of the more violent and
desperate corners of the world. Still, there is more to contemplate in nitrogen's less sensational chemistry.

The chemophobia of modem times excludes fear of the simple elements of chemistry's periodic table. We circulate petitions, hold hearings, launch websites, and buy and sell legislators in regard to polysyllabic organic compounds--polychlorinated biphenyls, polyvinyls, DDT, 2-4d, that sort of thing--not simple carbon or nitrogen. Not that agriculture's use of the more ornate chemistry is benign--an infant born in a rural, wheat-producing county in the United States has about twice the chance of suffering birth defects as one born in a rural place that doesn't produce wheat, an effect researchers blame on chlorophenoxy herbicides. Focusing on pesticide pollution, though, misses the worst of the pollutants. Forget the polysyllabic organics. It is nitrogen-the wellspring of fertility relied upon by every Eden-obsessed backyard gardener and suburban groundskeeper--that we should fear most.

Those who model our planet as an organism do so on the basis that the earth appears to breathe--it thrives by converting a short list of basic elements from one compound into the next, just as our own bodies cycle oxygen into carbon dioxide and plants cycle carbon dioxide into oxygen. In fact, two of the planet's most fundamental humors are oxygen and carbon
dioxide. Another is nitrogen.

Nitrogen can be released from its "fixed" state as a solid in the soil by natural processes that allow it to circulate freely in the atmosphere. This also can be done artificially. Indeed, humans now contribute more nitrogen to the nitrogen cycle than the planet itself does. That is, humans have doubled the amount of nitrogen in play.

This has led to an imbalance. It is easier to create nitrogen fertilizer than it is to apply it evenly to fields. When farmers dump nitrogen on a crop, much is wasted. It runs into the water and soil, where it either reacts chemically with its surroundings to form new compounds or flows off
to fertilize something else, somewhere else.

That chemical reaction, called acidification, is noxious and contributes significantly to acid rain. One of the compounds produced by acidification is nitrous oxide, which aggravates the greenhouse effect. Green growing things normally offset global warming by sucking up carbon dioxide, but nitrogen on farm fields plus methane from decomposing vegetation make every farmed acre, like every acre of Los Angeles freeway, a net contributor to global warming. Fertilization is equally worrisome. Rainfall and irrigation water inevitably washes the nitrogen from fields to creeks and streams, which flows into rivers, which floods into the ocean. This explains why the Mississippi River, which drains the nation's Corn Belt, is an environmental catastrophe. The nitrogen fertilizes artificially large blooms of algae that in growing suck all the oxygen from the water, a condition biologists call anoxia, which means "oxygen-depleted." Here there's no need to calculate long-term effects, because life in such places has no long term: everything dies immediately. The Mississippi River's heavily fertilized effluvia has created a dead
zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey.

America's biggest crop, grain corn, is completely unpalatable. It is raw material for an industry that manufactures food substitutes. Likewise, you can't eat unprocessed wheat. You certainly can't eat hay. You can eat unprocessed soybeans, but mostly we don't. These four crops cover 82 percent of American cropland. Agriculture in this country is not about food; it's about commodities that require the outlay of still more energy to become food.

About two thirds of U.S. grain corn is labeled "processed," meaning it is milled and otherwise refined for food or industrial uses. More than 45 percent of that becomes sugar, especially high-fructose corn sweeteners, the keystone ingredient in three quarters of all processed foods, especially soft drinks, the food of America's poor and working classes. It is not a coincidence that the American pandemic of obesity tracks rather nicely with the fivefold increase in corn-syrup production since Archer Daniels Midland developed a high-fructose version of the stuff in the early seventies. Nor is it a coincidence that the plague selects the poor, who eat the most processed food.

It began with the industrialization of Victorian England. The empire was then flush with sugar from plantations in the colonies. Meantime the cities were flush with factory workers. There was no good way to feed them. And thus was born the afternoon tea break, the tea consisting
primarily of warm water and sugar. If the workers were well off, they could also afford bread with heavily sugared jam--sugar-powered industrialization. There was a 500 percent increase in per capita sugar consumption in Britain between 1860 and 1890, around the time when the
life expectancy of a male factory worker was seventeen years. By the end of the century the average Brit was getting about one sixth of his total nutrition from sugar, exactly the same percentage Americans get today--double what nutritionists recommend.

There is another energy matter to consider here, though. The grinding, milling, wetting, drying, and baking of a breakfast cereal requires about four calories of energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. A two-pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of
gasoline in its making. All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces.

That number does not include the fuel used in transporting the food from the factory to a store near you, or the fuel used by millions of people driving to thousands of super discount stores on the edge of town, where the land is cheap. It appears, however, that the corn cycle is about to come full circle. If a bipartisan coalition of farm-state lawmakers has their way--and it appears they will--we will soon buy gasoline containing twice as much fuel alcohol as it does now. Fuel alcohol already ranks second as a use for processed corn in the United States, just behind corn sweeteners. According to one set of calculations, we spend more calories of fossil-fuel energy making ethanol than we gain from it. The Department of Agriculture says the ratio is closer to a gallon and a quart of ethanol for every gallon of fossil fuel we invest. The USDA calls this a bargain, because gasohol is a "clean fuel." This claim to cleanness is in dispute
at the tailpipe level, and it certainly ignores the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, pesticide pollution, and the haze of global gases gathering over every farm field. Nor does this claim cover clean conscience; some still might be unsettled knowing that our SUVs' demands for fuel compete with the poor's demand for grain.

Green eaters, especially vegetarians, advocate eating low on the food chain, a simple matter of energy flow. Eating a carrot gives the diner all that carrot's energy, but feeding carrots to a chicken, then eating the chicken, reduces the energy by a factor of ten. The chicken wastes some energy, stores some as feathers, bones, and other inedibles, and uses most of it just to live long enough to be eaten. As a rough rule of thumb, that factor of ten applies to each level up the food chain, which is why some fish, such as tuna, can be a horror in all of this. Tuna is a secondary predator, meaning it not only doesn't eat plants but eats other fish that themselves eat other fish, adding a zero to the multiplier each notch up, easily a hundred times, more like a thousand times less efficient than eating a plant.

This is fine as far as it goes, but the vegetarian's case can break down on some details. On the moral issues, vegetarians claim their habits are kinder to animals, though it is difficult to see how wiping out 99 percent of wildlife's habitat, as farming has done in Iowa, is a kindness. In
rural Michigan, for example, the potato farmers have a peculiar tactic for dealing with the predations of whitetail deer. They gut-shoot them with small-bore rifles, in hopes the deer will limp off to the woods and die where they won't stink up the potato fields.

Animal rights aside, vegetarians can lose the edge in the energy argument by eating processed food, with its ten calories of fossil energy for every calorie of food energy produced. The question, then, is: Does eating processed food such as soy burger or soy milk cancel the energy benefits of vegetarianism, which is to say, can I eat my lamb chops in peace? Maybe. If I've done my due diligence, I will have found out that the particular lamb I am eating was both local and grass-fed, two factors that of course greatly reduce the embedded energy in a meal. I know of ranches here in Montana, for instance, where sheep eat native grass under closely
controlled circumstances--no farming, no plows, no corn, no nitrogen. Assets have not been stripped. I can't eat the grass directly. This can go on. There are little niches like this in the system. Each person's individual charge is to find such niches.

Chances are, though, any meat eater will come out on the short end of this argument, especially in the United States. Take the case of beef. Cattle are grazers, so in theory could live like the grass-fed lamb. Some cattle cultures--those of South America and Mexico, for example--have perfected wonderful cuisines based on grass-fed beef. This is not our habit in the United States, and it is simply a matter of habit. Eighty percent of the grain the United States produces goes to livestock. Seventy-eight percent of all of our beef comes from feed lots, where the cattle eat grain, mostly corn and wheat. So do most of our hogs and chickens. The cattle spend their adult lives packed shoulder to shoulder in a space not much bigger than their bodies, up to their knees in shit, being stuffed with grain and a constant stream of antibiotics to prevent the disease this sort of confinement invariably engenders. The manure is rich in nitrogen and once provided a farm's fertilizer. The feedlots, however, are now far removed from farm fields, so it is simply not "efficient" to haul it to cornfields. It is waste. It exhales methane, a global-warming gas. It pollutes streams. It takes thirty-five calories of fossil fuel to make a calorie of beef this way; sixty-eight to make one calorie of pork.

Still, these livestock do something we can't. They convert grain's carbohydrates to high-quality protein. All well and good, except that per capita protein production in the United States is about double what an average adult needs per day. Excess cannot be stored as protein in the
human body but is simply converted to fat. This is the end result of a factory-farm system that appears as a living, continental-scale monument to Rube Goldberg, a black-mass remake of the loaves-and-fishes miracle. Prairie's productivity is lost for grain, grain's productivity is lost in
livestock, livestock's protein is lost to human fat--all federally subsidized for about $15 billion a year, two thirds of which goes directly to only two crops, corn and wheat.

This explains why the energy expert David Pimentel is so worried that the rest of the world will adopt America's methods. He should be, because the rest of the world is. Mexico now feeds 45 percent of its grain to livestock, up from 5 percent in 1960. Egypt went from 3 percent to 31
percent in the same period, and China, with a sixth of the world's population, has gone from 8 percent to 26 percent. All of these places have poor people who could use the grain, but they can't afford it.

I live among elk and have learned to respect them. One moonlit night during the dead of last winter, I looked out my bedroom window to see about twenty of them grazing a plot of grass the size of a living room. Just that small patch among acres of other species of native prairie
grass. Why that species and only that species of grass that night in the worst of winter when the threat to their survival was the greatest? What magic nutrient did this species alone contain? What does a wild animal know that we don't? I think we need this knowledge.

Food is politics. That being the case, I voted twice in 2002. The day after Election Day, in a truly dismal mood, I climbed the mountain behind my house and found a small herd of elk grazing native grasses in the morning sunlight. My respect for these creatures over the years has become great enough that on that morning I did not hesitate but went straight to my job, which was to rack a shell and drop one cow elk, my household's annual protein supply. I voted with my weapon of choice--an act not all that uncommon in this world, largely, I think, as a result of the way we grow food. I can see why it is catching on. Such a vote has a certain satisfying heft and finality about it. My particular bit of violence, though, is more satisfying, I think, than the rest of the globe's ordinary political mayhem. I used a rifle to opt out of an insane system. I killed, but then so did you when you bought that package of burger, even when you bought that package of tofu burger. I killed, then the rest of those elk went on, as did the grasses, the birds, the trees, the coyotes, mountain lions, and bugs, the fundamental productivity of an intact natural system, all of it went on.

Weight of the Evidence: The Solar Powered Plate

2008-04-24T16:09:00.000-04:00

Speaking of vegan diets, Regina Wiltshire has a great post about the fallacies behind the meat eating/global warming connection. Her point? It's not meat eating - it's the industrial farming complex, silly, and that includes the large scale corn, soy and wheat operations.

Of course her post was blitzed by vegans calling her a "killer" and spouting the same old information - information that her post specifically dealt with. Guess no-one bothered to actually read it before they attacked.

I have nothing against vegans. I just get righteously irked when people - any people - respond to something out of pure emotion, and don't provide any factual information. Calling people names isn't very nice either, but apparently low cholesterol levels can lead to aggression and violence, so perhaps, in this case, they couldn't help it. (Note that it's low HDL, the "good" cholesterol, that has this effect - and saturated fat, in conjunction with a low carbohydrate diet, increases HDL. Oh, and lowers triglycerides to boot.)

Weight of the Evidence: The Solar Powered Plate

I Can't Believe It's Vegan!

2008-04-20T11:13:00.006-04:00

A tip o' the hat to the All Animal Life blog for this one.

So you wanna be a vegan, because 1) it's better for the environment 2) it's morally "correct" and 3) it's healthier. But what can you eat? Are you doomed to a life of wheatgrass and alfalfa sprouts?

Heck no! The folks at PETA have compiled a handy list of vegan-friendly products that can be found at your local supermarket. That's right, kids - you can save the world and yourself and still enjoy Cracker Jacks, Cocoa Puffs and KoolAid.

Take a stroll through your local grocery store, check some ingredients, and you'll see what we mean. You may even be surprised to find that a few of your favorite indulgences happen to be vegan! For example, did you know that Pepperidge Farm Turnovers, Murray Butter Cookies, and Cracker Jacks are all vegan? They may not all be "health foods," but they are great for the taste buds! Just remember, one cannot live on Goldenberg Peanut Chews alone.

There is also an abundance of chips, dips, cookies, candies, frozen pies, soups, and other mouth-watering items by mainstream food manufacturers that are also vegan.

I will give PETA the benefit of the doubt here and assume that this list is intended to seduce SAD-eating non-vegans into seeing that a vegan diet can be...fun! You don't have to eat nothing but soy "meat" and kidney beans. You can keep your Pop Tarts! Froot Loops! Tater Tots!

Awesome. If I ever ate any of that shite, I'd sign right up.

Course, I am a tad curious as to how eating any of these foods helps the environment. I mean, can you get 100 Mile Cap'n Crunch? Keebler Fudge Pops that aren't manufactured in a large, pollution-pumping plant? Betty Crocker Hash Browns made using fresh, local ingredients sourced from small, sustainable family farms? And how does eating mass-produced processed food help the soil, air, water? If we all ate like this, pollution etc from factory farming operations would certainly decrease (though we'd still have all that methane from rice paddies to worry about) - but wouldn't we just be replacing one issue with another?

Well, at least we wouldn't be killing any animals. Except during large-scale crop production, of course. And unless you count human beings as animals, in which case they'd be dropping like flies after a few decades.

About 25% of us would suffer metabolic syndrome/insulin resistance, so would step lightly out of the population via diabetes and its associated conditions. Anywhere from 1 in 22 to 1 in 4 of us would be stricken with the more than 150 medical conditions that result from gluten intolerance, and get to spend our lives on medication to treat, among other things: thyroid disease; colitis; Crohn's; arthritis; lupus; gallbladder disease; depression; ataxia; migraines; schitzophrenia; Addison's disease and multiple sclerosis.

If the only criteria for selecting a food item is whether or not it's vegan, then that criteria is sorely misguided. Apparently, it's fine by PETA. My concern is that young people, researching veganism, will read this list and stock up. On it's website, PETA does warn that "you can't be healthy if you eat nothing but junk food" - unfortunately, their version of healthy food still causes trouble for a whole lotta people, even if it's whole grain and organic.

If PETA could admit that people can be and in fact are very healthy on a diet that includes meat (which, if they really read the science from the late 1800's onwards, they would HAVE to concede) and based their position on moral grounds, I'd have no problem with that. Morality is, after all, subjective. If you feel that it's "wrong" to eat animals, then don't eat them (and take your vitamins). But to take the science that suits your beliefs and ignore the rest is, in my opinion, immoral.

If they would read, say, Good Calories Bad Calories, for example, and actually LOOK at the work that has been done (and ignored by the mainstream) for literally centuries, or examine the paleoanthropological evidence regarding human diet, PETA could do some good to both the general public and it's members. They have no problem, for the most part, embracing "alternative", non-mainstream information - and Taubes' book is a huge eye-opener as far as information suppression by the mainstream goes. Instead, they create websites like Atkins Exposed, which recycles the same old myths that those of us who've actually read the literature and the studies (from both sides) know to be false.

And now, they're promoting factory-made, highly packaged and processed, trucked-all-over-the-country-to-get-to-you junk food. Way to go, guys.

School Nutrition Policies - A Step in the Same Direction

2008-04-19T07:56:00.005-04:00

From Yahoo! Health:

School nutrition policy can prevent obesity

By Amy Norton Wed Apr 16, 1:25 PM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Philadelphia schools that cut out soda, revamped snack selections and took other measures to prevent childhood obesity were able to halve the odds of students becoming overweight by sixth grade, a study has found.

Among fourth-graders at five schools that instituted the new nutrition policy, 7.5 percent became overweight over the next 2 years, compared with 15 percent of students at five city schools that did not make the changes, researchers report in the journal Pediatrics.

The findings show that a comprehensive approach to battling childhood obesity in schools can make a significant difference, according to lead researcher Dr. Gary D. Foster of Temple University.

Schools have been at the center of the controversy over what to do about U.S. children's rising rates of overweight and obesity. Critics have pointed to vending machines, sugary "a la carte" items in school cafeterias, and reductions in gym class as part of the problem.

At the same time, schools are considered the ideal place for children to learn healthy eating and exercise habits, and various school-based programs have been developed with that aim. The results have been mixed, however.

For their study, Foster and his colleagues evaluated a program developed by a non-profit community group called the Food Trust. Ten schools enrolled in the study; half were randomly assigned to adopt the nutrition program, while the other half served as a comparison group.

Schools in the program made an array of changes. They replaced soda with water, low-fat milk and 100-percent fruit juice, and rid vending machines and cafeterias of snacks that did not meet certain nutrition criteria. They educated students on how diet and exercise affect their health, and gave them raffle tickets for bikes and other prizes to reward them for choosing healthy snacks.

The schools also got parents involved through meetings and nutrition workshops that encouraged them to give their kids more fruits, vegetables and other healthy foods.

Among the 1,349 students Foster's team followed from fourth to sixth grade. As mentioned, there was about a 50 percent reduction in the incidence (new cases) of overweight at the end of 2 years among the children attending the program schools, while no changes were seen among the children attending the schools without a program.

The prevalence (total number) of overweight children also declined during the study period in the program group. However, no differences in the prevalence of obesity were seen between the program group and the comparison group.

The results, Foster told Reuters Health, underscore the benefits of schools having a comprehensive nutrition program, rather than taking only individual measures -- like removing vending machines, for instance.

He and his colleagues also stress that the urban schools in this study had largely low-income, minority student populations -- children who are at particularly high risk of obesity. Black children appeared to particularly benefit from the nutrition policy.

In the sixth grade, the study found, African-American children in these schools were 41 percent less likely to be overweight than African Americans in the comparison schools.

Despite the success, Foster's team writes, the fact that 7.5 percent of children in the program schools still became overweight shows that even more needs to be done.

They say that obesity-prevention programs should start before fourth grade, and possibly include a broader range of measures -- such as devoting more time to gym class and enlisting the corner stores near schools to offer healthier snack options.

SOURCE: Pediatrics, April 2008.

I applaud any effort to improve the food choices available to kids at school. When I think back to my high school cafeteria days, I feel a gentle wave of nostalgia for brown food: fries and gravy, burgers, perfectly square breaded & deep-fried chicken patties. Oh wait - that's not nostalgia. It's nausea.

Grade school for me was bagged lunches - we didn't have a cafeteria. It always surprises me a little to hear about 8-year-olds lining up with trays to buy their lunch (I'm assuming lunch isn't free). What doesn't surprise me is that the choices available to little kids are about as horrible nutritionally as the choices I had in high school. Cheap, ready-made non-food. Feeding on a mass scale is first and foremost determined by budget, after all, not health.

But these improvement efforts, although a step in the right direction, still fall short because they're based on recommendations that themselves are based on faulty science: fat makes you fat. There's recognition that sugar plays a role - getting rid of sodas and sugary 'a la carte' items is a great idea - but anyone who knows anything about current government nutrition guidelines knows that "snacks that don't meet certain criteria" means anything that contains too much fat, saturated in particular, and not enough fibre. What's ignored is that kids need fat - and calories - in order to grow and develop properly.

Sandy Szwarc, BSN, RN, CCP of Junkfood Science blogged about a 2007 University of Delaware study that went totally unreported in the media. The study, a small clinical trial of ten kids, aged six to ten, set out to determine how much fat prepubescent children burn in order to support normal growth and energy needs. What did they find?

...children’s bodies naturally need more fat to fuel growth processes, such as higher rates of protein synthesis, lipid storage and bone growth, and to meet their energy needs, the researchers said. Females also have higher nutritional needs for fat.
They reported that low-fat diets do not meet the nutritional needs for children and, instead, can interrupt normal growth and development. Sadly, diets recommending restricting fats to 30% of calories have been “translated by some in an overzealous, but well-intentioned, manner to provide as little fat as possible in the diet, leading to inadequate energy intake and compromised growth,” they said. The National Academies’ 2002 recommendations, they noted, are that children 1-3 years old to be allowed as much as 40% fat, and children and teens up to 18 years of age consume up to 35% of their calories as fat (25-35%).

So kids need fat. Again, it's a start. I'd argue, of course, that restricting fat intake, in anyone, to even 40% is unnecessary, but in this nutritional climate that's a hard row to hoe. Never mind that a diet high in fats (and correspondingly low in carbohydrates) has been demonstrated to help epilepsy, stabilize blood sugar and, in some cases eliminate symptoms of diabetes, and reduce heart disease. Saturated fat in particular is vital for cell membrane integrity, the proper absorption of calcium, immune system function, and the proper utilization of essential fatty acids. See this article, by Mary Enig, for more information.

And of course, fat has never actually been proven to cause any of the health conditions it has become synonymous with. What has been demonstrated to have an effect? Carbohydrates - mainly, sugars and starches.

In spite of all this, improved school lunches are going to focus on getting the fat out and on reflecting the ubiquitous pyramid - the one that many of us have grown fat and diabetic on.

____________________________________________________

Want your kid to avoid the cafeteria altogether, but don't have time to pack them a lunch? Never fear! There's always pre-packed lunch options, full of all the things growing kids need.

Like Lunchables! Why not a Ham & Cheese Wrap, with a Squeezable, Low Fat Berry Yogurt Jammer and 100% Fruit Juice Punch? Sounds wholesome enough. And at only 430 calories and 13g fat, it's gosh darn good fer ya. Or a Schneiders Smart Lunch of a Whole Wheat Bagel with Light Cream Cheese, Turkey Pepperettes, and Craisins, for a measly 340 calories and 9g fat. Healthy, right? (note from the marketing team: foods that begin with Capital Letters are perceived as Trustworthy and Nutritious and Positively Reflect The Brand)

Wrong. These lunches have 65g and 49g carbs worth of sugar and starch respectively (if you follow Schneider's suggestion to add, say, a small banana and a box of OJ, you could be looking at 97g) - more than some low-carbers eat in an entire day. These carbs will be converted to glucose within minutes, and swept out of the bloodstream by a whoosh of insulin. Some will be stored in the liver and muscles as glycogen - the excess will be stored as fat. About 90 minutes later, blood sugar will fall to normal levels, but insulin is still busily shuttling glucose to the fat cells. Blood sugar falls below normal, and the kidling feels hungry again - and reaches for another healthy goodie, like apples or Triscuits and low fat cheese, and the whole cycle begins again.

If your kids are eating high levels of carbs all day, week after week, year after year, this cycle is constantly going on. And it doesn't matter if those carbs are coming from french fries and a Coke or a raisin bran muffin and a banana - as far as the body is concerned, glucose is glucose. Continual high levels of insulin then lead to insulin resistance - it takes more and more insulin to get that glucose out of the blood. Suddenly, we've got a chubby kid with a ravenous appetite. Much of what s/he eats is being tucked away as fat, and insulin ensures that fat can't be accessed to use as energy. The body needs nourishment and can't get it, so it signals hunger.

And even if they don't gain weight in childhood, this cycle sets them up for weight gain in adolescence or adulthood, along with an increased risk of diabetes and all the other fun 'diseases of civilization' we've come to both dread and expect. And all the grains and dairy can, in susceptible individuals (and there's more of us than mainstream medicine will believe), lead to GI problems, acid reflux, tooth problems, headaches, acne, allergies and a host of other maladies that we've come to consider normal.

So what to do? Schools can't afford to serve your kids t-bones every day, and you can't send them off to school with Filet Mignon.You can, however, send them off with real food in their Dora lunchbox. Egg or tuna salads, sliced meats and cheese, veggie sticks and full-fat dip - heck, even leftovers from last night's dinner make a good, filling lunch, as do thermoses full of chili, stew or chunky meat and veggie soups and chowders. Oopsie rolls, crackers or muffins made with nut/seed flours and/or butters, hard boiled eggs, mixed nuts, pickles and olives make great snacks (if your kids like pickles and olives - my nephew goes insane for them, and will pick them over fries any day. My niece prefers spicy beef sticks. When we take them to the zoo, they barely even glance at the Harvey's, and if we eat there they don't finish their burgers - they delve into our snacks instead. They rock.)

Schools are a whole other ballgame. I know what they're up against - I have two step-parents who are grade school principals, and my mum teaches nursery kids. All of my parents friends were teachers, so I've been around them socially and heard the crap they have to put up with since I was in Grade 2. The school cafeteria is under budget, and that's going to determine what they serve. But as Jamie Oliver demonstrated in his School Dinners series, healthy options are possible with proper planning.

But who the hell am I to talk? I don't even have kids. On that note, Richard Morris, author and successful loser (of weight, that is), has some wonderful advice for parents here.

So how do you deal with school lunches? What does your child's school provide for them? Any tips on packing healthy lunches?

News from Harvard: Eggs Will Kill You

2008-04-09T09:05:00.005-04:00

From Yahoo News:

Seven or more eggs a week raises risk of death

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Middle-aged men who ate seven or more eggs a week had a higher risk of earlier death, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.

Men with diabetes who ate any eggs at all raised their risk of death during a 20-year period studied, according to the study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

The study adds to an ever-growing body of evidence, much of it contradictory, about how safe eggs are to eat. It did not examine what about the eggs might affect the risk of death. [So this study only discovered a correlation between egg consumption and mortality, and as we all know, correlation does NOT imply causation. Of course that never stops the media from reporting on these "studies" as if they do.]

Men without diabetes could eat up to six eggs a week with no extra risk of death, Dr. Luc Djousse and Dr. J. Michael Gaziano of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School found.

"Whereas egg consumption of up to six eggs a week was not associated with the risk of all-cause mortality, consumption of (seven or more) eggs a week was associated with a 23 percent greater risk of death," they wrote. [That one extra egg was the tipping point, I guess?]

"However, among male physicians with diabetes, any egg consumption is associated with a greater risk of all-cause mortality, and there was suggestive evidence for a greater risk of MI (heart attack) and stroke." [Of course, eggs were the only thing that these diabetic physicians were eating. Right? Because if they'd been eating anything else, we'd have seen other correlations pop up. Right?]

They urged more study in the general population. [I urge a real study, one that controls for other dietary variables and actually looks beyond correlations.]

Eggs are rich in cholesterol, which in high amounts can clog arteries and raise the risk of heart attack and stroke. [Despite the growing mountain of evidence to the contrary.]

One expert on nutrition and heart disease said the study suggests middle-aged men, at least, should watch how many eggs they eat.

"More egg on our faces? It's really hard to say at this point, but it still seems, if you're a middle-aged male physician and enjoy eggs more than once a day, that having some of the egg left on your face may be better than having it go down your gullet," said Dr. Robert Eckel of the University of Colorado and a former president of the American Heart Association. [I suggest that all middle-aged male physicians grow beards, in order to assist in the capture and storage of said eggs whilst they are en route to said gullets.]

"But, remember: eggs are like all other foods -- they are neither 'good' nor 'bad,' and they can be part of an overall heart-healthy diet," Eckel wrote in a commentary. [Remember: there are NO BAD FOODS. Chips, cheezies, and Pop Tarts can be part of an overall heart-healthy diet. Just keep your calories under 600 and never, ever eat more than a 1/4 teaspoon of polyunsaturated fat a month. And make sure you throw away the yolks.]

The Harvard team studied 21,327 men taking part in the much larger Physicians' Health Study, which has been watching doctors since 1981 who have agreed to report regularly on their health and lifestyle habits. [So was this a study of a study?]

Over 20 years, 1,550 of the men had heart attacks, 1,342 had strokes, and more than 5,000 died. [Must have been the eggs, then.]

"Egg consumption was not associated with (heart attack) or stroke," the researchers wrote. [Scratch that - the people who have been actually conducting this study for the last 17 years didn't find any association at all. So why is this news?]

But the men who ate seven eggs a week or more were 23 percent more likely to have died during the 20-year period. [Harvard: "Yeah but, they, like, ate EGGS. And eggs are, like, BAD. And they, like DIED. And like, we're from Harvard, so, like, we know stuff."]

Diabetic men who ate any eggs at all were twice as likely to die in the 20 years. [Harvard: "See?"]

Men who ate the most eggs also were older, fatter, ate more vegetables but less breakfast cereal, and were more likely to drink alcohol, smoke and less likely to exercise -- all factors that can affect the risk of heart attack and death.

(Reporting by Maggie Fox)

Based on the last paragraph, I hereby present alternative headlines for this breaking news story:

Being Old Raises Risk of Death
Fat Diabetic Physicians Die
Vegetables Will Kill You
Want to Outlive Your Colleagues? Eat Breakfast Cereal.
Drinking, Smoking and Lack of Exercise: A Prescription For Death

This is a shining example of why one should NOT base their diet or overall health strategies on what they read in the news. Maggie Fox, don't put this one in your portfolio.

Oopsie Challenge - Recipes!

2008-04-01T18:09:00.005-04:00

Time to catch up on the Oopsie challenge - work and other activities have gotten the best of me lately, but I am now firmly back on track and seeking creative, delicious ways to use these things.

Zedgirl, from ALC, made crepes:

I added a couple of teaspoons of water to loosen the mixture and pressed down firmly on the lid (on sandwich press) after closing it. It started to squeal when I did this (bit like cooking a potato in the microwave without piercing it first) but I just ignored it. They were cooked in under 20 seconds. I also added in a couple of teaspoons of sesame seed meal (in lieu of all almond meal) just because I could - and to see if it made any difference to the taste and texture. Once again I was thrilled with the result:
Pennink, another ALC member, made a delicious looking pizza:

Locarbbarb went for pancakes:

I made Oopsie Roll Pancakes this morning. I figured if you could make waffles out of them, then you could make pancakes, too. They were so good, they tasted like bread pudding!

I added 1/2 scoop of vanilla whey powder to the yolks, plus 1/2 tsp. of vanilla. I used 2 drops Sweetzfree instead of the Splenda. Cooked them just like regular pancakes - used a 1/3 cup for each pancake and got 10. I nuked them for about 1 min. on medium to make sure the insides were fully cooked before serving.

I ate 5 with SF syrup and DH ate 5 (they are so light!) Magnifique!

And misschriss had an idea that I am all over - "dough-not" holes:

The other night I cut the oopsie into cubes, tossed them over heat with butter to coat and then threw them in a ziploc of granular splenda and cinnamon and had "dough-not" holes!!, they were delish!!

I'd better start getting creative here. Hopefully the recipe will hold up as well with mayo as it does with cream cheese - I figure with added flax or nut meals, I can still get a tasty result.

Thanks everyone for your recipes! Keep them coming. There's a world of gluten-free folks out there who need a break from rice bread.

April Carnivore Contest, Homemade Mayo, and Vegetable Oil 411

2008-04-01T10:32:00.008-04:00

Well the March Kitchen Clean Contest at the Bus is over - I managed half the month totally clean, with slip-ups either being artificial sweeteners, dark chocolate or - once or twice - rice.

On to bigger and better!

This contest is the best one yet, in my opinion. According to Dean, pack leader over on the Bus, the April Carnivore Contest serves the following purpose:

...to help people find out what they can and can't give up in their pursuit of a more natural and healthy diet, based on what we evolved on. If you can go all the way with this thing, you're lucky. It's not really about that, though. I mean it can be, if that's your thing. But, it's really more about focusing on something harder, so we'll get our minds off what we're "giving up" in our diet, and instead see what we're "adding to" our natural diet. I can begin to really appreciate how just a cup of coffee can be seen as a treat, and how I don't need to eat ice cream or pie for that mental fix. When I am focused on keeping veggies out of my diet, I'm not thinking about donuts. Haven't thought about those in months. If "slipping up" is eating some almonds or drinking some cream or eating a tomato, then we're doing pretty damn good, now aren't we?!

Agreed! Whether you think that vegetation is harmful, unnecessary or vital, these contests really help keep you focused on adding natural, good whole foods to your diet. Plus - they're fun!

The rules will be following for the month of April are:

All foods should be as natural, fresh, and whole as possible. Animal fat should be kept high, 60-80% of calories, and carbs should be kept as low as possible. The cleaner one eats and the closer they get to an exclusive raw animal diet, the more points they can rack up. The goal is not to be perfect, but to see how close you can get to our ancestor's diet.

Allowed
* any part of any animal (including processed meat)
* eggs
* VLC dairy
* VLC vegetation (includes nuts)
* olive/nut oil
* VLC condiments, seasoning, salt, AS
* VLC beverages

To get any points you MUST eat only what's Allowed and remain under 20g carbs.

If you had something not allowed or went over 20g carbs you are out for the day, you get zero points.

Add up your points each day. You can get up to 5 points per day.

One point for each, for having:
- only allowed items + under 20g carbs
- no alcohol + no AS
- no vegetation + no oil
- no processed meat + no dairy (butter is not counted as dairy)
- some raw animal part / raw egg

So, for instance, if you had no vegetation and no oil during the day, you would get ONE point for abstaining from those items... or if you had no alcohol and no AS, you would get ONE point for not having those things... or if you had no dairy and no processed meat that day, there's another ONE point.

You can get up to FIVE points per day.

For me, I'll be avoiding cheese. I've developed eczema under my nose, and I suspect it's cheese-related. I will include heavy cream for now. Coconut milk falls under vegetation/oil, and will be counted as such.

I am aiming for 100 points total out of a possible 150.

So does no-cheese leave me out of the Oopsie club? Nope! I've made mayo, and will be experimenting with mayo-oopsies throughout the month. Making mayo is so, so easy - just oil and egg, and whatever seasonings you care to add. I followed Ray Audette's recipe in Neanderthin:

1 whole egg
1/2 t dry mustard
1/4 sea salt
1/4t pepper
1 1/2 T lemon juice
1 cup light olive oil (I subbed walnut oil, bc I didn't have any olive, and didn't need the whole cup)

Put everything but the oil in a blender and whizz. Take the plastic stopper out, and slowly drizzle oil in. That's it! Simple and fast. One minute, you've got liquidy, oily crud whirling about; then, all of a sudden, it transforms into thick, white mayo before your very eyes. Now that I've done it, I don't know why I'd ever buy mayo again. Tastes much better than store-bought, and you can control what's in it. Homemade mayo lasts about a week in the fridge - store-bought can sit in there for ages, even though it's made with oils (usually canola or soybean) that are not known for their stability or long shelf life. Something to think about.

Even so, nut oils (like other polyunsaturated oils or PUFAs) are too high in omega 6 linoleic acid compared to omega 3, and are best used sparingly. Too much omega 6 can interfere with the production of important prostaglandins (hormone-like substances that contribute to functions such as the dilation and constriction of blood vessels, control of blood pressure, and modulation of inflammation) and result in blood clots, inflammation, high blood pressure, GI tract irritation, depressed immune function, sterility, cell proliferation (an increase in the number of cells through cell division and growth) and weight gain. When omega 3 linoleic acid is in balance with omega 6, prostaglandin production is balanced as well.

Unfortunately, most commercial vegetable oils are way out of whack. Traditionally, PUFA consumption came from the small amounts in nuts, seeds, green veggies, fish, olive oil and animal fats (nope, animal fat is not 100% saturated), as well as legumes and grains if eaten. The vast majority of fatty acids in the diet were saturated and monounsaturated, and came from animal sources (lard, tallow, then butter etc), tropical oils (coconut, palm) and olive oil. These fats began a slow decline in the early decades of the 1900's (as heart disease started singing "I'm Coming Out" and strutting around in glittery dresses), with the invention of glorious plastic foods like margarine, but we didn't start chugging massive quantities of PUFAs until the 1950's.

By 1950, heart disease had taken the lead role in "Cause Of Death" and was (literally) killing audiences nation-wide. Margarine and vegetable oils had by then practically replaced natural fats like butter and lard. The connection should have been obvious. It was obvious. Instead, we got the lipid hypothesis, kicked off by a study on rabbits eating cholesterol (scroll up to the first paragraph). By the 1990's, consumption of vegetable oils had jumped from less than 2g per day to 30g, per person. Butter had plummeted to about 5g per day, and use of lard and tallow had dropped by two-thirds. We all know what happened to heart disease rates - they kept pace, despite the claims that foods made from soybean, canola, corn and safflower oils, among others, were "heart healthy" and animal fats were suitable only for the four horsemen of the apocalypse, who don't have to worry about clogged arteries, the lucky bastards.

Of course then we learned about the dangers of trans fats, found in partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, and now we can buy trans fat free margarine and other veggie oil containing processed foods. Problem solved? Nope. In addition to the whole prostaglandin issue, studies have shown numerous problems resulting from PUFA consumption. A 1994 study published in The Lancet showed that almost three quarters of the fat in artery clogs is...wait for it...polyunsaturated. For more depth than I can go into here, I highly recommend reading everything Mary Enig has ever written on the subject of fats, starting here and here.

So yes, I intend to make my own mayo but I will focus on keeping animal fats in the lead role. We evolved eating them. We thrived eating them. We wouldn't be here, loving our hearts with Becel margarine, if it weren't for animal fats. Seems pretty simple to me. A high (animal) fat diet has made me feel better than I've ever felt, and these contests at the Bus serve as constant reminders of that. Even knowing what I know, sometimes I need all the reminders I can get!

Oopsie Challenge - Zedgirl's Pancakes and Cleo's Sub Buns

2008-03-19T21:14:00.011-04:00

Zedgirl (the sassy rooster on the left), a creative ALC member, makes gorgeous pancakes using the Oopsie recipe and the Almond Pecan Waffle recipe from Low Carb Cookworx (scroll down to Episode 15 for the original recipe):

For as long as I’ve been low-carbing I’ve been trying to make a bendy wrap that doesn’t require any wheat or soy ingredients. I’ve never had any luck and had given up until now. Oopsies were my inspiration, but I wanted something that was a bit more of a workhorse, so I used the ‘Almond Pecan Waffles’ recipe from the Low Carb Cookworx site (episode 15) as my base recipe but left out the pecans, added some different gums (similar to Thicken/Thin), tweaked it a little in the preparation and used a sandwich toaster/press as the method of cooking.

It’s basically a cream cheese and egg pancake (an Oopsie) with some cream, almond meal, gum and protein powder added. I’m thrilled with the result and this was only my first attempt...

This is how I made them. I won’t post the recipe because I’ve converted everything to grams etc., just use the (Cookworx) link above. Sift dry ingredients together. In a separate bowl, soften cream cheese for a few seconds in the microwave on a very low setting. Using a whisk, gradually mix the whipping cream into the softened cream cheese. Next add the lightly beaten egg a little at a time, beating after each addition. Mixture should be smooth. Combine the wet and dry ingredients. Pour some of the batter onto sandwich toaster; gently close lid and cook for about 1 minute. If making pikelets, leave the lid up and turn after 2 minutes.

Here's the result - looks amazing, either as a pancake or as a wrap/crepe.

Cleo, the queen of the Oopsie, baked Oopsie batter in mini loaf pans and got herself sub buns!

Sounds so simple, but I'd never have thought of it. I'm so used to doing without subs that they don't even register. Now...it's a different story! Meatball subs were always my favorite, and I'll be digging into her recipe sometime this week - if I get to the Farmer's Market for some ground beef, that is.

Both of these recipes would be great for kids, both to eat and to help make. I know several people who struggle with making one low carb or gluten-free meal for themselves, and a "normal" meal for their family. Oopsies make it a whole lot easier to create a new "normal".

Keep 'em coming!

Oopsies - The Challenge!

2008-03-19T13:53:00.007-04:00

The low carb world has been abuzz with "Oopsie Rolls" - blogger Cleochatra's version of Atkins Rev Rolls. Basically, you make them with double the amount of cream cheese, so 6T instead of 3. Cleo made an "oopsie" in her measurements, but the results were delicious - hence "Oopsie Roll". I usually make mine with mayo but, since I've been using dairy again, I thought I'd give the recipe a try. I'm always happy to add more fat to my recipes. Oh please, twist my arm - more luscious, artery-strengthening, ass-slimming fat. Bring it!

The nice thing about her version is that, unlike the originals, they taste good right out of the oven. My first batch got doused with peanut butter while nice and warm - ooh, I've missed peanut butter toast! You know when the peanut butter gets all melty and goopy...yeahhhhh.

For this batch, I decided to try a pizza crust. In my wayward, high carb gluten-y days, one of my faithful lunch standbys was a pita pizza: tomato sauce, garlic, olive oil, green olives and feta, crisped up in the oven. Why not recreate this with Oopsie batter?

For density, I added about 3T or so of ground flax seeds and a 1/4t of xanthan gum, plus a generous shake of onion and garlic powder, parmesan cheese and oregano (I omitted the sweetener). Rather than piling the batter in mounds, I spread it out flat on a baking sheet and baked for about 30 minutes. After it cooled, I picked it up - held together nicely - and stored it in an open ziploc in the fridge until this afternoon's lunch.

I brushed 2 squares of the dough with olive oil and more garlic and oregano, then crisped it up a bit in the oven. Then, I added my toppings and stuck it back in to heat. My whole kitchen smelled like garlic bread - it was wonderful.

Verdict: pretty damn good! The crust was a bit floppy, not stiff like a regular pizza crust, but I could easily hold a slice in my hand and eat it. It was a bit airy, as is the case with rev rolls, but not in a bad way - just different, if you're used to the density of gluten crusts. Overall, I was THRILLED to have an old favorite again.

As I ate (and ate, and ate), I thought about what a shame it is that the gluten-free folk aren't directed to low carb resources. All I ever see on celiac message boards are starchy, high carb recipes. We LCers have so, so many tweaks and twiddles on old favorites like bread, muffins, pasta and rice, and for people with gut damage and/or overweight they'd be a lifesaver. Besides, they're far less expensive to make, since they generally use ingredients that most of us keep on hand, or at least have easy access to.

For my next batch, I am going to whip the egg whites soft, rather than stiff, because I don't need the puffiness of a roll and want a less airy texture. I'm going to add some almond meal as well as the flax meal, to see if that adds even more density. Spreading the batter flat means there are tons of applications - foccacia bread (you could even dip with it!), wraps, pita...hell, just plain old flat, square sandwich bread. Sloppy Joes, here I come!

People on the Active Low Carbers forum have successfully used this recipe in a million ways: french toast, grilled cheese sandwiches, pancakes, desserts (just make the batter sweet rather than savoury). My personal plans for Oopsie batter?

Garlic bread with cheese. Mama, I'm coming home.
Chocolate eclairs, with real whipping cream and 80% choccy melted overtop
Strawberry shortcake, when the berries are in season
Onion buns
Bruschetta
Fish batter - would it work? I'll try it and see. If it does, then I will make onion rings to go with it, and weep with joyous abandon at their goodness.
Every (low carb) pizza I've ever seen or read about, including Pizza Rustica. This will be tricky, since I can't fold the dough over the toppings in the same way, but I have a few ideas up my sleeve.
Meat pie! Oh heavenly mother of christ, meat pie. This'll be at least a two-stager, but if it works I will be mouthgasmic. There's nothing in the world like a real, Quebec-style Tourtiere. If I could eat gluten and/or carbs, I would move to Quebec City and eat nothing but. (Okay - maybe some Maple Syrup Pie for dessert.)

What are your plans for Oopsies? Let me know, so's I can steal 'um. In fact, I'm gonna go it one better - I am hereby issuing an Oopsie Challenge! In honour of Cleo and her delicious error, I challenge all readers (yep, all three) and LCers - hell, even you hardcore carnivores! It's just eggs and cheese, after all - to put on your chef's hats (or cowboy hats, tinfoil hats, etc) and send forth your mad creations. Email me with your recipe and a pic, or submit to the thread I'll start on the ALC forums, and I will post them for all to see and try. They can range anywhere from the simple to the sublime, the pedestrian to the provocative, Chef Boyardee to Iron Chef Mario Batali.

Get cooking!

Update - Kitchen Clean Challenge, My Big Fat Diet, and a Delicious Lunch

2008-03-13T23:21:00.007-04:00

13 days in to March, and I've yet to post the rules for the Kitchen Clean challenge I'm taking part in on the Magic Bus. Bad, bad me. But, better late than never:

Allowed
* any part of any animal (natural clean cuts)
* eggs
* VLC dairy
* VLC vegetables, nuts, seeds
* coconut oil/milk
* olive/nut/seed oils (for condiments)
* seasoning, salt, VLC sauces, stevia
* water, tea, coffee

Disallowed
* no grains, legumes, fruits
* no vegetable oils, mayo, salsa, bbq sauce, etc.
* no processed meats/cheese
* no artificial sweeteners (except stevia)
* no alcohol

This is pretty close to my usual diet, with the exception of artificial sweeteners, mayo and salsa. I like using a mix of erythritol, Splenda and stevia for baking, but I've kept it to stevia only in my occasional coffee.

Thing is, I've only clocked 6 days! After the carnivore challenge, I went a bit carby and had some real junk food - cheezies, and the dreaded Ruffles. And you know...they didn't taste very good. Why do they still hold any appeal for me? No idea. It's like smoking - I know they're gross, taste bad, and are bad for my health, but there's an addiction factor going on. Junk accounted for two days - the rest were due to having a small amount of rice with sushi, or a banana (which, I discovered, made me bloat!)

But the other day, I saw a terrific documentary on the CBC called "My Big, Fat Diet" by Mary Bissell. From the website:

If you visit Alert Bay off the coast of Vancouver Island, you'll find a picturesque fishing village inhabited by two cultures, the Namgis First Nation and their non-native neighbours. Here an epidemic is undermining the health and vitality of community. Like most aboriginal communities across North America, the rates of obesity, metabolic syndrome, and diabetes here are up to five times the national average. No one's life is untouched by this problem, everyone is related to someone who is either at risk, or coping with one of these health issues. Mainstream medical professionals cite sedentary lifestyles and a diet rich in fat as the underlying reason for the growing epidemic.

But after two decades of service in public health and a distinguished career, Métis physician, Dr. Jay Wortman, believes that the western diet which replaced the traditional diet is the primary cause of the epidemic. "Obesity, diabetes and heart disease were unknown in these populations until very recently. No aboriginal language has a word for diabetes."

Wortman's conviction comes from personal experience. Four years ago, he discovered that he had type 2 diabetes. "My immediate instinctive response was to stop eating any food that caused my blood sugar to rise. So I eliminated carbohydrates from my diet. Within four weeks, my blood sugar and blood pressure had normalized and I began to feel much better."

Directed by Mary Bissell, My Big, Fat Diet chronicles how the Namgis First Nation goes cold turkey and gives up sugar and junk food for a year in a diet study sponsored by Health Canada and the University of British Columbia. Through the stories of six people, it documents a medical and cultural experiment that may be the first of its kind in North America.

Around 100 residents took part in Dr. Wortman's study, while others opted out but still ate in a more traditional fashion - natural fats (including golden-yellow oolichan grease, oil from a smelt-like fish and referred to as their "sunshine in the winter"), meat, eggs, veggies and fish. Cauliflower, especially cauli-flied rice, was a huge hit - the lone grocery store on the bay was selling 112 heads a week!

After a year, total weight loss amongst the participants was over 1,200 lbs (544 kilos). The average weight loss after three months was 16.5 lbs (7.5 kilos), and after six months was 24 lbs (11 kilos). Triglyceride levels plummeted by 30%, and markers of diabetes improved within days. One of the six people featured, Art Dick, was able to go off both his diabetes and blood pressure medication.

If you're in Canada, you can catch the doc again on Saturday, March 15th at 10pm ET/PT on CBC Newsworld (and can we give the CBC props here for even airing this doc?). If you're elsewhere, check out YouTube for some clips. I've heard word from the filmmaker that the doc may air in the States at some point - somebody tell Oprah, and fast, so we can get Dr. Oz outta there and Dr. Wortman in! Edited to add this tip from Wifezilla: radio interview with Dr. Wortman here.

Finally, I made a delicious lunch today: crab meat mixed with garlic, onion, a little lemon juice and some locally made green onion cream cheese on Cleochatra's infamous "oopsie" rolls, with some organic mozzarella melted on top. Served with some tomato-cream soup, it kept me going for the rest of the day. Look upon my lunch with awe and wonder:

Chief Bill Cranmer, of the Namgis First Nation, advises other First Nation communities to "listen to the wisdom of our ancestors to achieve weight loss and health improvement." I think that's advice we can all take to heart. Our paleo ancestors ate a diet concentrated on meat and fat, with varying amounts of vegetation depending their geography. If it wasn't for meat and fat, we wouldn't be here to be told that meat and fat are the reasons we're dropping dead of diabetes, cancer and heart disease. Doesn't it make sense that traditional foods, the foods we evolved eating and thrived on, are the best foods for our health? And does it make any sense at all to base a diet on foods that have been altered, skimmed, or invented in a lab? There is a reason behind all of Nature's recipes. When will we grow up and realize that Mama really does know best?

I'll remind myself of this next time I catch myself eyeing a bag of Cheetos.

Nexium - Now For Kids!

2008-02-28T20:37:00.002-05:00

From Yahoo News:

FDA OKs Nexium in children age 1 to 11

2 hours, 9 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - The Food and Drug Administration has approved use of the drug Nexium in children aged 1 to 11 who have acid reflux disease.
FDA said Thursday it approved liquid and delayed-release capsules of Nexium in doses of 10 milligrams or 20 milligrams for these youngsters. It is already approved in doses of 20 milligrams or 40 milligrams for those aged 12 to 17.

Nexium, manufactured by AstraZeneca of Wilmington, Del., is a type of drug known as a proton pump inhibitor, which reduces the amount of acid produced in the stomach and helps heal damage to the esophagus caused by excess acid.

The approval was for short-term use in these children, FDA said. The most common side effects in children were headache, diarrhea, abdominal pain, nausea, gas, constipation, dry mouth and sleepiness, the agency said.

Now this is the kind of thing that really pisses me off. I'm not a conspiracy theorist in the least, but stories like this make me rethink my worldview.

Everyone, and I mean everyone I know of who has suffered from acid reflux has totally recovered when they went on a low carb diet. Why? They tend to remove offending foods, like wheat, from their menu. But god forbid we diddle around with the diet of a one-year-old, and deprive him of Animal Crackers and toast. Better to pump him full of drugs that'll make him crampy, achey and either bunged up or overloading his pull-ups. Maybe they should just start fortifying their soy formula with Nexium. And hell, throw in a statin and some Paxil while you're at it - little bugger's gonna need it sooner or later, right?

FDA: F*cking Dumb Asses.

/rant