I’m very proud of myself: I spent the evening chopping, pounding, and mashing cabbage mixed with salt and whey into glass jars so that they can rot for a few days and turn into that super-nutritious wonder-food known as sauerkraut.
Not only that, but the whey I used I made myself just a few days before that, along with some delicious cream cheese (now all eaten). Ohh, and I’m getting déjà vu as I write this, always a good sign.
Yes! 2010 is the year of the Healthy Chaos Heathen! I have several goals for this year, but one is to make good on my Substitute Living rant from last year. I have this vision of Heathenry as being a movement which incorporates traditional food, organic farming, and a rejection of industrialised agriculture with all its iniquities, environmental destruction, capitalist greed, and shocking malnourishment.
But you know what they say: be the change you want to see. So there I was, bits of juice-flecked cabbage flying up around my mallet, as I joyously got to work.
I feel more and more strongly all the time that Heathenry really needs to get its sleeves up and get serious about nutrition. If we abandon the miserably conveyor belt diets that cause heart disease, cancer, and diabetes then we’ll be well on the way to demonstrating why faith in old ways is a winner: we’ll be the healthiest, happiest – and maybe even most attractive – fringe group of weirdos around!
I made a lot of sauerkraut and I spent about an hour working away, doing the simple, repetitive, hypnotic tasks that were involved. There is a real magic in preparing one’s food from the ground up, especially when fermentation – which unlocks incredible nutritive powers in food – is involved. I wandered into various gentle trance states, connecting deeply with my simple sense of lived, embodied being.
Next week when I get a chance I’m going to hit a local farmers’ market (not literally) and see what lovely organic treats I can lay my hands on; and soon I’m going to be creating all kinds of delicious, nutritious foods. It is easy to dream up the notion that its too hard or I haven’t got the time or whatever, but I suspect that the better we eat, the more energy we have, and the more energy we have, the less convincing these excuses will seem.
So here are some proposals for what Heathenry applied to food would look like:
A rejection of refined flour and refined sugar, surely the two biggest enemies of good health that there are;
A rejection of the (now debunked scientifically anyway) crazy idea that fats are bad and that food made from synthetic chemicals such as margarine is better than the natural foods that humanity has been thriving on for millennia;
A celebration of localised food production, the idea that you get to meet the person who makes the ingredients for your meal, that food buying is more than just the anonymous and mechanised task of collecting plastic-wrapped, sorry looking morsels from the sickly-lit supermarket shelf;
A celebration of slow food, taking time to treat one’s body right. As I say, I suspect that the more time one expends on such worthy endeavours, the more time one ultimately gets back in good spirits and energy;
A recovery ultimately of the social essence of cooking and eating, rather than miring ourselves in TV dinners and fast food gorging.
I’m dead serious, Heathenry has to be about our bellies first and foremost. I don’t care what else you believe, say, or do. If you aren’t serious about reconnecting to traditional, genuinely nutritious food, then I strongly question whether you are actually serious about Heathenry.
Hey, we don’t all have to be perfect, or build our personal gustatory Rome in a day! Just taking small, methodical steps is enough. Having the courage to question and experiment.
Of course, this process isn’t necessarily easy, mostly because of our brains. Even after I read the research showing that the “fat is bad” hypothesis pretty much never had any sound empirical basis (except for those deadly synthetic trans fats that you get in the margarine that was supposed to “save” us from butter), well, I still struggled to free myself from the spell. It has been beaten into us all so thoroughly, this vile propaganda.
But folks, eating a lot of fat doesn’t mean overeating. A diet can be low in calories and high in nutrients, and part of that is all those lovely fat-soluble nutrients like Vitamin A, and Vitamin D, and all that. I read somewhere that body fat is so essential that when we starve our body will break down brain tissue to survive on rather than touch certain types of fat stores.
One of the bad things about fridges (apart from the greenhouse gases) is that we stopped doing all the food fermentation tricks we used to use all the time to preserve food, not realising that those tricks serve to make the food easier to digest and more nutrient-dense. But now, in this best of both worlds scenario, I can leap headlong into my fermentation and use my fridge to make my efforts easier and more efficient. No one said you have to do this whole food renaissance thing the hard way, just the right way.
Anyway, these are issues that need more than my rapid-fire, scattergun opinions in order to be compelling. I strongly, strongly recommend that everyone who reads this buy copies of In Defense of Food
Anyway, I have some beans on slow simmer I need to check, and some big tall jars of sauerkraut-to-be to marvel at (all it takes is time to ferment, how brilliant is that?). Have a joyous and maybe even inventively healthy new year, and – go on! Take the Elhaz Ablaze Traditional Food Challenge! Sure beats dressing up in ye olde clothes or giving yourself stupid, grandiose Old Norse titles!
A Happy & Healthy New Year to you! I absolutely agree with you, Heimlich, because being a Heathen is a way of life and this includes eating. At the moment I decided to stop eating fast food (which is a really bad habit) once and for all. I think we all too easily forget how much power we have over the direction Spaceship Earth is taking, if we just make the right decisions. If we follow your suggestions to meet the person who makes the ingredients for our meals and celebrate localised food production, the mega-corporations that represent capitalist greed, short-sighted aims and alienated performance will ultimately loose their power. And the right people will get the money (and the power).
However, the only thing I’m asking myself is what role the vegetarian diet could play in the traditional food approach. I’m not one myself (though maybe I will be), but after all factory farming and the incredible suffering it causes to animals is absolutely unacceptable. Surely traditional farming isn’t so cruel, but then again there are many well-grounded reasons that argue for a vegetarian diet.
One really weird issue is that my four years old daughter became a vegetarian (and she means it – now she’s five) after she found out that humans kill animals! Pagan sensibility, I guess. However, what do you think about slaughter houses and which role they play in traditional food?
Hi Matt,
Well I’m going to be lazy and just post a couple of links from the Weston A Price Foundation related to meat and vegetarianism. Some serious cud to chew over I feel. Enjoy!
http://www.westonaprice.org/The-Ethics-of-Eating-Meat-A-Radical-View.html
http://www.westonaprice.org/Myths-of-Vegetarianism.html
There’s nowhere in the world where it’s easier to eat natural, organic and local than here in California. When demand leads supply, Capitalism ain’t that bad.
Matt, I gotta agree with Heimlich. It is possible to live on a vegetarian diet, but it’s not really natural or healthy. The following looong article gives some great insight into what can go wrong with that approach.
http://www.beyondveg.com/nicholson-w/hb/hb-interview1a.shtml
How do you talk a four-year-old into eating her meat? Unfortunately I have no idea.
As a child, I really disliked the taste and texture of fish. My parents put a lot of pressure on me to eat it regularly for health reasons (in which they were correct) but only succeded in making me hate fish to the point that the smell alone would make me nauseous.
My best suggestion would be to get her on milk, eggs and vitamin supplements and hope she grows out of it on her own.
Random tip for our readers out there in cyber land.
If you’re having trouble quitting sugar, white flour, caffeine or alcohol, try Glutamine supplements.
Glutamine is an amino acid, one of the building blocks of protein. I have recently found Glutamine supplements to be extremely effective in defeating the physical cravings for carbs, caffeine and alcohol. I’m talking 90% of the way there kind of effective,(at least for me) so that you’ll only need 10% of the willpower you’d normally need to go cold turkey.
Now, Glutamine is normally contained within the proteins of the food you eat. Taking a refined Glutamine supplement is obviously not the most natural thing in the world but, if you’re trying to break one or more of these addictions, taking Glutamine for a week or two can get you over the hump.
Have you heard of Paleo Diet? It’s a diet that excludes sugar, grain, legumes (including peanuts) and dairy altogether. The idea was inferred looking at the sort of diets Paleolithic people-hence the name-as well as remaining hunter/gatherer societies today would eat. Namely meats, nuts, root and leafy vegatable and fruit when available. The idea is that this is the diet we as a species are evolved to eat. Grains and legumes weren’t eaten until the Neolithic era 6,000 years ago when agriculture developed. They would have required too much work before then. ANd as for dairy, try milking a wild buffalo if you want to know why cavemen wouldn’t have eaten it. For over 40,000 years our ancestors lived on the land eating game and fish and foraging for edible plants and mushrooms. Our ancestral culture as we usually think of it existed for a considerable shorter amount of time. Genetically and biologically we are still cavemen.
Back in October, I experimented with this diet and I loved it. I stuck with it for a few months and lost-I’m not kidding you-5 inches off my waist! My tastes changed and I actually started finding conventional food rather bland. I also noticed I feel much more energetic and ambitous on this diet. However I did have arecent lapse, Holidays and all. But I’m getting right back on it. Our bodies are the greatest gift of our ancestors, and it does them tribute to keep ourselves as healthy and vital as possible. It also does our gods tribute to forge our bodies into magnificent avatars for their might. I also follow the Warrior Diet, designed by Ori Hofmekler. Like Paleo, it is infered from the eating patterns of our ancestors, but is more focused on time cycles, rotating between meals and fasts. Of course we don’t need to hunt and forage, but we can use these as guiding principles when choosing our food. Maybe this seemed a bit long, but I just wanted to make my fellow heathens aware of these ideas.
Keep up the good work
Hey M. Krull, thanks for your thoughts!
Clint wrote an Elhaz Ablaze article about adopting the Paleo Diet which you can read here:
http://www.elhazablaze.com/2009/10/eat-like-your-ancestors/.
It is worth noting that the Paleo Diet falls down on a couple of things, firstly it neglects fermented foods, which are hugely nutritious even if they probably haven’t been around in an organised way for as long as meat and vegetables; and also I read somewhere that dairy actually _does_ go back way further than anyone realised…and if you combine fermentation with dairy you get more superb foods that are perfect for the human body…
I love all of these different ideas…they make so much more sense than the self-punishing BS of the old “low fat, synthetic food” craze that is ruining everybody’s health (and the environment often, given the ugly food manufacturing practices involved…)
H
hmmm, I am wondering can someone supply websites or links or something that support this claim I keep hearing about refined flour and sugar? It sounds like the new health fad to me.
The whole “slow food” thing to me is kind of amusing, as I have been slow fooding my whole life. My mom was chef, but she learned cooking from her mom, and myself and all my siblings are pretty capable in the kitchen because of that. I grew up on slow food, with my mom looking for locally grown seasonal food, so the that idea is so “new” or “radical” is rather alien to me.
Hi, this ought to get you started: http://ezinearticles.com/?Why-is-Refined-Sugar—Known-As-White-Sugar—Bad-for-You?&id=119462. And here is an interesting article from the Weston Price Foundation: http://www.westonaprice.org/Replacing-Refined-Sugars-with-Natural-Sugars-One-Step-At-a-Time.html. Just type “why refined sugars are bad for you” into Google and you’ll find yourself overwhelmed with interesting reading. This isn’t just a health fad, it is one of the few actually solid findings that nutritional science has made.
I don’t think the paleo diet realy “falls down” on anything except perhaps the social oddball factor.
On the other hand, I do think it’s perfectly healthy to supplement your paleo staples with real whole grains, dairy products, the aforementioned fermented foods etc. as your individual metabolism allows.
If the paleo diet is mans natural Hunter/Gatherer Diet, then a supplemented paleo diet would be a traditional Farmer/Warrior Diet, something our ancestors have been doing pretty well on for thousands of years.
Most of the stuff developed in the last couple of hundred years is pretty bad for you.
Most of the stuff developed more than a couple of thousand years ago is probably pretty good for you.
Most of the stuff people have been eating for millions of years(or for as long as we’ve been fully human) is ideal.
Thanks Heimlich! I think those are the best examples you could have given me. I did do the google search, and most of the websites that came up I considered dubious, but there was a few more reputable sites that had matching information.
At least in the US, as I am a label reader (and have been for a while) it is rather shocking to think about all the things that have processed sweeteners added to it, now days mostly being processed corn syrup. It also made me look into unrefined sugar, and makes me wonder about how obtain that for use as a sweetener, instead of unrefined.
Hey Christopher,
I’m not sure what you mean by unrefined sugar, but you should look into Blackstrap Molasses and Honey.
These are great links, guys. Thanks! I will go deeper into this…
I read an article that talks about humans having evolved to possess a gene that adapts them to eating red meat: http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/why-we-outlive-our-ape-ancestors-27830.html. Yet the article also shows that evolutionary adaptation may not necessarily correlate with longevity.
I surmise that the perennial debate between meat eaters and vegetarians may have this biological tension in the human genetic make-up as its cause.
Some people who try to become vegetarians end up becoming sick. A notable case is the Dalai Lama. It is always worthwhile to check with a physician regarding individual constitution before making the big decision of becoming a vegetarian. Yet it is also a fact that countless vegetarians are in excellent health: otherwise religious traditions like Buddhism and Jainism would not have survived. The warrior monks of the Shaolin Temple are vegetarians. (Tibetan Buddhism is an exception in that it includes meat in its rituals and diet.)
There are of course vegetarian Olympians!
I myself am not a vegetarian.
According to wikipedia, there are two types of unrefined sugar. Molasses is actually a byproduct of the sugar refining process, and where all the vitamins and minerals of the refined sugar end up. Unrefined sugar only has been dehydradted and depending upon the process of dehydration can form into fine or large crystals. The two types mentioned are turbinado and muscovado. The brand known as Sugar in the Raw is turbinado sugar for example.
There is a drink I have heard of that is hot water, blackstrap molasses and apple cider vinegar. I believe it is called “quaker” and is commonly used as a morning tonic. You could also use honey instead of the molasses.
As always, moderation is the key to health. Personally, the thing that has most impressed me about home-grown home-made food is the flavour. I am sure that the rediscovery of real flavour is as health-giving as the nutrients themselves.