We went camping last weekend!
Well, technically we went "Höhling", aka "Boofen", a word which is nicely reminiscent of doof -- German for "not so bright" -- which is how some people find the suggestion of camping in the winter. But the idea is actually rather cozy: you find a dry, half-open cave in the woods and build a crackling fire and set out your winter sleeping bag and cook up a pot of Glühwein with friends.
Not that we were all that successful at points one and two. The cave we'd first had in mind was occupied, so we settled for one that was open at both ends. This made it pretty ass-cold for sleeping out of doors in January -- despite the Smokiest Fire Ever Achieved, which took us half an hour to light using wet wood! -- but the weather was bright and sunny, the hiking was terrific, and the company great.
Mom and I both agreed that there is something magical about the Pfälzer Wald. The Odenwald on the other side of the Rhein River (love the name! "Odin Wood") is very beautiful, and, being less dark and thick and more open and accessible, it is Bert's and my hiking forest of choice. But the Pfälzer Wald is... mysterious. It feels larger, more ancient, more impenetrable, the sprinkling of villages more isolated. I've heard from others, too, that the Pfälzer Wald is a place where you imagine fairy tales originating. Contrary to the pleasantly settled Odenwald, the Pfälzer Wald is sheer wildwood.
Plus I really liked chopping it down. Well, not really, we actually just hacked at dead trees for firewood, but it was really fun. What is so pleasurable about this? About getting a good axe-swinging rhythm going and watching the chips fly, followed by the satisfaction of lugging fuel back to the campsite to warm your boyfriend? If hunting wood is this much of a thrill, imagine how it felt back in the day to come home with meat. Not that I'd enjoy the pressure of having no other choice: a walk to the farmer's market is infinitely less dangerous and more certain of the outcome. But a weekend in the quiet green of things really inspires one to get out of Ludwigshafen more often. And to get some exercise! Our bodies were made to thrive hiking and chopping and schlepping all day long, not sitting in front of a computer blogging!
Sunday, February 01, 2009
More thoughts on food
Speaking of what our bodies were made for: I just finished a super book, The Jungle Effect, by Dr. Daphne Miller (thank you, Amy!). I highly recommend it. It's not only a good read, it also really inspires you to take your health into your own hands and get cooking. The book explores the secrets behind the mystifying good health and longevity of people who eat indigenous foods -- by which the author means fresh, unprocessed, and local -- as opposed to the flabby, increasingly diseased populations of "developed" cultures who eat things out of packages. She points to what should be obvious: if it's fresh and local, your body was made to eat it. If not... well, you get America.
This book really pushed open a door for me that was already somewhat ajar. In the last ten years, I've developed an increasing distrust of the processed foodlike substances that comprise the foundation of our western diets. Think about it -- almost everything in the grocery store has been manipulated to be somehow different from its original form. Even white flour has been treated to remove the wheat germ, and it's only in the last generation that we've realized, hey wait! This seemingly harmless "improvement" actually made the food inferior.
So what about when we add stuff, instead of just subtracting it? I know that long list of unpronounceable ingredients is such common packaging adornment that it's unusual not to see at least a couple chemicals on there. It's normal. Besides, we don't immediately keel over after ingesting a portion of meat treated with sodium nitrate, so it can't be that bad, right? We simply accept that we won't understand everything on the back of the label, the same way we don't understand everything that goes on under the hood of the car. We're just the consumers; they're the nutritionists and chemists, the "experts".
I take issue with a couple of these assumptions. First of all, food is not a car engine. Food is food. Why shouldn't you be able to identify everything in your meal, and ingest it in a form you could recognize? It never needed to be engineered or tinkered with until we humans thought we were so scientifically omniscient that we could "improve" on a complex system that we are only just realizing we don't know a damn thing about.
It's this sheer normalcy of additives that I find the most pernicious -- after all, when every single package of lunchmeat lists "sodium nitrate", it makes us quietly wonder, oh come on, how bad can it really be? Only conspiracy theorists or obsessively orthodox hippies would really get their panties in a bunch about it.
Which brings me to my second point, the assumption that if it were truly toxic, no one would be allowed to sell it.
Not that any potential toxicity is intentional. I don't think the owner of that sausage-processing plant is twisting his mustache and congratulating himself on fooling the gullible mortals. I just think it's absurd -- and patently untrue -- to think we know everything; that the simple approval of some government body automatically makes something safe.
The thing is, potentially harmful chemical additives are such slow poisons that we can't recognize them as bad news in the short time we spend experimenting on them. But when we're living eighty-plus years, that slowness is suddenly relevant. The cancer and heart disease and diabetes and depression develop years later, and any cause-and-effect connections -- like the pretty unmistakable conclusions you'd come to after putting a poisonous mushroom in your mouth -- are not quickly apparent. So we chew the processed cookie-like substance, swallow it, don't immediately die, and think it must be okay.
Today, we all shake our heads in wonder that 1950s doctors endorsed smoking. In the seventies, scientists confidently reported that margarine and other hydrogenated oil -- a product of modern, all-knowing and holy Science! -- was good for you. Why do we think that we're so much wiser, just because we're at the forefront of history? To continue harping on sodium nitrate, it's only now that we're seeing a direct link between ingestion of this substance and colon cancer. Indeed, someone close to Bert & me, who has been a lifelong processed-meat eater, is struggling with this very disease.
So why do we tinker with our food at all? To make it more sellable. To be able to produce higher quantities of it. To make it taste "better" and thus be more competitive with its neighbors on the supermarket shelf. Chemical additives are not necessary. It's one thing if food were unavailable and we traded the evil of artificial substances for the greater evil of starvation. Hell, if UNICEF needs to add extra salt to a rescue package to keep it from spoiling in a blistering hot refugee camp, that's understandable. But we in America are not starving. Instead, we're being chemmed to death.
I am not suggesting that we keep a careful list of "forbidden ingredients" to take with us to the grocery store and minutely dissect every label. In fact, I don't think we should be picky about our chems at all: I think we shouldn't eat them. A good rule of thumb would be, if there's an ingredient on the list whose appearance you can't picture in your head, there's no guarantee that it's food. Or better yet, do as Dr. Miller in The Jungle Effect suggests: instead of trying to navigate the world of processed food, just buy some ingredients and make it yourself.
This does mean a commitment to cooking. But I'd rather spend 30 more minutes in the kitchen every evening than 60 minutes on dialysis three times a week when I'm sixty.
Sure, not everyone gets sick from food chemicals. And not everyone who smokes dies of lung cancer. But I think there's enough evidence out there now to show that smoking is not a good idea. At the best, food additives are nutritionally useless. At the worst, they are possibly -- and in some cases, proveably -- harmful artificial products manufactured by frighteningly fallible humans within the last fifty years. I'll prefer not to take my chances!
The nice thing is that we have a choice these days. I've noticed a difference in the availability of natural products even in the last ten years. You don't have to go all crazy with the organic and pay seven bucks for a pound of spinach; but if you have a choice between cocoa mix that contains "cocoa powder, sugar, and dried milk" and "cocoa powder, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, high fructose corn syrup, whey solids, sodium aluminocilicate, sugar, E538", I think one of those two isn't doing you any favors.
This book really pushed open a door for me that was already somewhat ajar. In the last ten years, I've developed an increasing distrust of the processed foodlike substances that comprise the foundation of our western diets. Think about it -- almost everything in the grocery store has been manipulated to be somehow different from its original form. Even white flour has been treated to remove the wheat germ, and it's only in the last generation that we've realized, hey wait! This seemingly harmless "improvement" actually made the food inferior.
So what about when we add stuff, instead of just subtracting it? I know that long list of unpronounceable ingredients is such common packaging adornment that it's unusual not to see at least a couple chemicals on there. It's normal. Besides, we don't immediately keel over after ingesting a portion of meat treated with sodium nitrate, so it can't be that bad, right? We simply accept that we won't understand everything on the back of the label, the same way we don't understand everything that goes on under the hood of the car. We're just the consumers; they're the nutritionists and chemists, the "experts".
I take issue with a couple of these assumptions. First of all, food is not a car engine. Food is food. Why shouldn't you be able to identify everything in your meal, and ingest it in a form you could recognize? It never needed to be engineered or tinkered with until we humans thought we were so scientifically omniscient that we could "improve" on a complex system that we are only just realizing we don't know a damn thing about.
It's this sheer normalcy of additives that I find the most pernicious -- after all, when every single package of lunchmeat lists "sodium nitrate", it makes us quietly wonder, oh come on, how bad can it really be? Only conspiracy theorists or obsessively orthodox hippies would really get their panties in a bunch about it.
Which brings me to my second point, the assumption that if it were truly toxic, no one would be allowed to sell it.
Not that any potential toxicity is intentional. I don't think the owner of that sausage-processing plant is twisting his mustache and congratulating himself on fooling the gullible mortals. I just think it's absurd -- and patently untrue -- to think we know everything; that the simple approval of some government body automatically makes something safe.
The thing is, potentially harmful chemical additives are such slow poisons that we can't recognize them as bad news in the short time we spend experimenting on them. But when we're living eighty-plus years, that slowness is suddenly relevant. The cancer and heart disease and diabetes and depression develop years later, and any cause-and-effect connections -- like the pretty unmistakable conclusions you'd come to after putting a poisonous mushroom in your mouth -- are not quickly apparent. So we chew the processed cookie-like substance, swallow it, don't immediately die, and think it must be okay.
Today, we all shake our heads in wonder that 1950s doctors endorsed smoking. In the seventies, scientists confidently reported that margarine and other hydrogenated oil -- a product of modern, all-knowing and holy Science! -- was good for you. Why do we think that we're so much wiser, just because we're at the forefront of history? To continue harping on sodium nitrate, it's only now that we're seeing a direct link between ingestion of this substance and colon cancer. Indeed, someone close to Bert & me, who has been a lifelong processed-meat eater, is struggling with this very disease.
So why do we tinker with our food at all? To make it more sellable. To be able to produce higher quantities of it. To make it taste "better" and thus be more competitive with its neighbors on the supermarket shelf. Chemical additives are not necessary. It's one thing if food were unavailable and we traded the evil of artificial substances for the greater evil of starvation. Hell, if UNICEF needs to add extra salt to a rescue package to keep it from spoiling in a blistering hot refugee camp, that's understandable. But we in America are not starving. Instead, we're being chemmed to death.
I am not suggesting that we keep a careful list of "forbidden ingredients" to take with us to the grocery store and minutely dissect every label. In fact, I don't think we should be picky about our chems at all: I think we shouldn't eat them. A good rule of thumb would be, if there's an ingredient on the list whose appearance you can't picture in your head, there's no guarantee that it's food. Or better yet, do as Dr. Miller in The Jungle Effect suggests: instead of trying to navigate the world of processed food, just buy some ingredients and make it yourself.
This does mean a commitment to cooking. But I'd rather spend 30 more minutes in the kitchen every evening than 60 minutes on dialysis three times a week when I'm sixty.
Sure, not everyone gets sick from food chemicals. And not everyone who smokes dies of lung cancer. But I think there's enough evidence out there now to show that smoking is not a good idea. At the best, food additives are nutritionally useless. At the worst, they are possibly -- and in some cases, proveably -- harmful artificial products manufactured by frighteningly fallible humans within the last fifty years. I'll prefer not to take my chances!
The nice thing is that we have a choice these days. I've noticed a difference in the availability of natural products even in the last ten years. You don't have to go all crazy with the organic and pay seven bucks for a pound of spinach; but if you have a choice between cocoa mix that contains "cocoa powder, sugar, and dried milk" and "cocoa powder, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, high fructose corn syrup, whey solids, sodium aluminocilicate, sugar, E538", I think one of those two isn't doing you any favors.
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