Eat Green, Not Greens

Modern “Food”…could be a little less modern.

Technology can change just about everything in life, but it cannot alter what the human body considers “food.” Everybody agrees that grain is not a cow’s natural food, but through technology we’ve created “food,” things that the cows can ingest, digest, and grow fat on…but just look at the differences between a cow and the meat (food) it produces that grazes on grass and one that ingests “food” devised by humans. Not even close.

Likewise, if you wanted healthy house plants, a healthier endangered species or healthy just about anything else, you wouldn’t re-engineer and come up with a whole new “food” for that species just because it can ingest the substance… you’d feed it what it’s evolved to eat.

Well humans are no different. For thousands of years technology (whether farming and harvesting vegetables and grains that we had never eaten more than a small percentage of until then, or margarine, or even just grain fed beef, as a more recent examples) has been giving new meaning to the word “food,” quite literally. Technology has put us in a position to take anything that we have the ability to digest physically and say ‘here, eat this, because you can…and because you can eat it, it’s now “food.”’ Technology really is the problem; when technology says this computer is better than that computer, or this steel is stronger than that steel, or this surgical procedure is safer than that procedure, there’s something to it; but when technology says “this is ‘food’” simply because some technological invention has allowed us to process and package the substance in a way that we can ingest it….. well I’m sorry but that doesn’t make it human “food!” As is evident by the endless studies of what’s healthy and what’s not, contradicting each other, one study after another…

From a scientific perspective, the word “food” has a pretty narrow description; for most plants it means sun and water; for most organisms it means something very specific. But for us, because of our ability to ingest and digest so many things, combined with our technological abilities, and because of industry, because of marketing, because of population/land constraints, because of modern medicine, we now consider an absurdly wide range of things to be “food” just because we can physically ingest and digest them. My point is that there are endless “diets” around the world and some are closer to that of what the body gets the most out of than others. I think it’s fair to say a Mediterranean diet for examples is closer to what we as humans should be eating than what most Americans eat, and so a rather narrow study like one that looks at the modern, technologically enabled diet of one geographic region, can easily say Diet A is 30% healthier than Diet B. But that doesn’t say much about the evolutionary validity of either diet, let alone what could potentially be healthier than either of the alternatives.

Notice I didn’t argue about what foods I do or don’t consider ‘healthy’ (although you of course already know..). My point is to argue with the whole perspective and modern approach people these days take to determine if something is healthy or not. If people would stop looking at studies that compare geographic-based, “diet”-based analysis, often ignoring zillions of other geographic/lifestyle-based variables, and start looking at the science itself behind what happens in the body when various things are ingested, I think we’d have a much better picture of what we ought to be eating. And it wouldn’t be pita bread, olive oil and yogurt sauce. All of which, unfortunately, are in fact delicious. And that delicious-nous, in modern, spoiled-by-thousands-of-years-of-eating-crap-humans, is exactly the problem…”It’s delicious, therefore it must be ‘food’”

Surf ‘n Turf Meatballs with ‘Fried Rice’

These were a nice discovery…they will be made again. And again.

We started with ground pork, chopped shrimp, an egg, chopped garlic, basil, sea salt and a bit of cayenne pepper.

Got our fingers dirty…

Formed about 15 mini-balls, then set them in a glass pan headed for the oven.

With time to kill, we started on “fried rice.” Why the quotes? We got this cauliflower-based recipe from HealingNaturallyByBee.com. And it’s amazing. All you do is saute shallots in coconut oil and butter. Then drop in a whole, finely grated cauliflower and saute some more. Then, push veggies over to one side and scramble three eggs until cooked and mix back in. Add butter and salt to taste. Voila.

Serve in a mountain of glory.

Eat [grass-fed] Meat!

This is our first post. Eat Well!