Macrobiotic Musings: Reintroducing...Sea Vegetables!

A Spoonful of Sugar Help the Sea Vegetables Go Down

When I am hungry and want to get my feast on, sea vegeatables are absolutely the last thing I want to pop in my mouth to say hello to my stomach. I have never liked seaweed and don't know if I ever will. But as Mary Poppins likes to say, a spoonful of sugar will help the medicine go down--in this case, the medicine is sea vegetables. I am of course big into macrobiotics right now, and I was crestfallen to learn that I should be eating more seaweed and other vegetable denizens of the sea. But before we go running for the hills in terror as we usually want to do with things or people we don't understand, let's learn more about it. Seaweed has incredible properties, and it will do all of us a lot of good to take a second glance and learn more about seaweed and other sea vegetables (a core food in the macrobiotic diet.) Who knows, maybe we can even learn to appreciate these watery wonders like Pee-wee Herman learns to appreciate snakes (spoiler: he never does.)

The following information is from The Macrobiotic Way by Michio Kushi.

Sea Vegetables, a Brief History

(life.bio.sunysb.edu)

Sea vegetables (extracts of marine algae) are in just about every processed food we know of as they are used as stabilizers and thickeners, such as carrageenan, algin, or agar--all extracts from sea veggies. But we shouldn't eat them as additives. As with all food, we should eat straight from the source because that's where the truest, most dynamic energy comes from. As I have repeatedly said, this is why we must eat food that is alive as opposed to dead and processed. We are what we eat, and we shouldn't be eating dead food. Dead food is dead energy. Processed food isn't even dead. It's...alien. And aliens don't taste good. But I digress...

Sea vegetables may sound alien, but they are in fact one of the most commonly eaten foods around the world--just not here in the West. People all over the world have eaten sea vegetables for centuries. They were, and still are, as common as bread and butter, depending on geography. Who ate them, eats them? The Chinese, Irish, British, Icelanders, Canadians, Japanese (duh), Native Americans, Inuits, Hawaiians, Koreans, Russians, and even South Africans. The list goes on.

Dulse was sold by street vendors in Boston. In the maritime provinces (go Newfoundland!--when my wife went kayaking with Stan Cook over there by Tors Cove, ol' Stan there just reached into the water and ate some seaweed!) and Scotland, a dulse snack was (still is?) served in pubs. The Russians made a fermented beverage called sea cabbage. The coastal Irish have used Irish moss and other sea veggies in their recipes for centuries. The Japanese grade their sea veggies like the USDA does with their antibiotic-pumped, disease-infested and sickly factory-farmed meat (usually given a Grade A since they're paid by the industry, many regulators are actually from the industry, to stamp this approval. I give it all a triple grade F, which stands for Factory Farmed Feces, since really the whole system is fueled by shit anyways. Read Animal Factory by David Kirby to see what I mean.)

"Digression!"

"No it's not, this is all relevant! Shut up!"

"Sorry."

"That's okay, just let me kvetch if I want."

"Sure, it's your blog."

"Thank you."

Sea Veggies, Getting To Know You, Getting to Like You


Though they may sound as appealing as Green Eggs and Ham, Sea Veggies are massively good for us. Let's check the stats:

Kelp: 150x more iodine, 8x more magnesium than garden vegetables

Dulse: 30x richer in potassium than bananas, 200x the potency of beetroot for iron content

Nori: this is the stuff sushi is usually bundled in, has loads more vitamin A than carrots and has 2x the protein of some meats (not sure which, but our bodies don't really harness the full power of meat proteins because we are not carnivores, hence why we should get our proteins from plant foods and not animal foods.)

Hijiki: 14x more calcium than whole milk

Kombu: loads of phosphorus

Finally, sea veggies contain Vitamins A, B1, C, E and B12, very important for vegans and vegetarians (even meat-eaters don't get enough, actually.)

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the power of sea veggies, not a surprise since the source of all life began in the sea. In fact, this is why everyone's always telling us to eat fish because it is rich in Omega 3's. Well the only reason they're so rich in Omega 3's is because they are eating marine algae--so, if you're feeling brave, go ahead and dive right in and explore the world of sea vegetables. Don't know where to begin? My mom just told me of a very interesting blog called Seaweed Snacks. Though they're not all vegetarian, many of the recipes look very delicious. You'll also want to check out any macrobiotic website and cookbook like The Macrobiotic Way or Alicia Silverstone's The Kind Diet. Macrobiotics Canada is a great place to order anything you can't get in your area.

Update: I just discovered that you can get a variety of sea veggies at Fat Nanny's over there on Duckworth Street so go get some!

Eat B(right) and deep,
Veggie Daddy

Macrobiotic Musings: Try the Squid Ink Blotter

Here's a macrobiotic juice I made this morning (inspired by The Juicing Bible) from carrots (see The Dirty Carrot), apples, and to give them this beautiful crimson color, beets! I also juiced the beet greens to give this leviathan even more depth. I call it the Squid Ink Blotter. Macrobiotically, these foods would be more on the yang side before juicing since carrots, beets and apples are hard, dense, compact, but once you juice them, you've pretty much squeezed the yang out of them. A bad joke, I know, but it's true! Fruit and vegetable juice is more yin as it is free and floaty, in liquid form, able to fill into any container regardless the shape. Before being juiced, good luck fitting a carrot or a beet into a shot glass.We bought all of the fruits and veggies at the Fagan's Farms truck at Churchill Square, and this is what makes this incredible drink macrobiotic: all of the ingredients are grown here locally, with little to no chemicals or pesticides.

This is one of the key criteria in the standard macrobiotic diet (SMD), that the majority of the food we eat should naturally grow in our climate and region. Our bodies don't do well when we eat too much food that ain't from around here. And there's a lot of that! For us here on the rock right now, that means lots of root vegetables, hard tree fruits, pumpkins, squash, etc. Basically, any of the fruits and veggies you see at the truck. But think twice before you grab for those potatoes!

Potatoes are unfortunately from the Nightshade Family, and though it'd be downright impossible to avoid them entirely, you might want to reconsider how much of these you're eating, especially if you're eating them in the form of french fries. Some people are sensitive to the alkaloids in nightshades which can cause arthritis and joint problems, and the SMD generally warns against them. Though I'm not going to stop eating them altogether, I do plan on being more careful from now on. I do actually suffer from some kind of tendonitis that isn't tendonitis (they're calling it overuse-syndrome, whatever that means)--but it's the main reason I started on the road to better health. And in order to do this, I first had to really change my perspective about food. I had to truly make the connection that the food we eat directly affects our health in a major way. Many people have actually reversed disease once they began to eat macrobiotically. I can easily see why.

Macrobiotics is not just a diet, but a lifestyle that allows you to live and eat in harmony with your local surroundings. It is hard for us to do this when we import most of our food across various oceans, boxed and packaged with God-knows-what additives and preservatives to do just that--add and preserve. When you eat foods that are local and close to the earth, there is no factory middle-man. Just true honest, good food that we were designed to eat. Nothing more, nothing less. It's the perfect balance, good for the planet, and good for us.

Love fish? In the SMD, eating fish is the only animal food that is considered AFE (acceptable for eating.) All other animal foods are extremely yang and can get you out of whack pretty fast. I imagine Newfoundlanders will be happy with such news. Just be careful you're food isn't so white all the time as has been my experience once I eat outside of St. John's.

Eat B(right),
Veggie Daddy

The Dirty Carrot

As I was cutting up veggies for juicing this morning, I tried to wash the dirt off all of the carrots, but this one was a very dirty carrot.

Macrobiotic Musings: Eating Dinner for Breakfast

Very recently I have converted myself into a macrobiotic eater, and since it seems to be so under the radar (which happens to be perfect for me as just about everything I like is generally under the radar) I thought I'd write a little macrobiotic diary, my adventures of going macrobiotic.

I started this blog in my frustration of there being no tempeh in stores here in St. John's, and since that time, my eating habits have vastly changed. Eating my wife's vegan cooking was a big change, as I've mentioned throughout this blog, then I went through a massive raw fruitarian phase which all but destroyed me. Finally, inevitably, my horrible experience with eating too much raw, tropical fruit from Costco led to my discovery of vegan macrobiotics via Terry Walters and Alicia Silverstone. And this change was quite the whammy on my food-borne curiosity. So much so that I now eat dinner for breakfast, aka leftovers from the night before, something I never thought I'd ever do in my lifetime.

Eating leftovers for breakfast, am I nuts? Yes, it sounded crazy to me, too, but now that I think about it, eating dinner for breakfast isn't that strange at all. We do it all the time, eating bacon, eggs, omelettes, sausage, breakfast burritos, Egg McMuffins (the last time I had a an Egg McMuffin I was in the shitter for an hour--back in 1996.) But if you're a vegan, you have to scratch all that. You're limited to the non-healthy items on the breakfast menu: pancakes, waffles, toast, muffins, cereal, pastry, bagels with fake cream cheese or even worse, processed soy sausage links or bacon strips with scrambled egg replacer (never had it, never will.) You're going down a bad road if you keep that up. Which is exactly what I was doing, I was eating from the unhealthy side of the vegan breakfast palette. But I needed to do the opposite: my breakfast needed to be as healthy as my other meals, not just comprised of a bunch of baked goods made from refined white and whole wheat flour that'll give me diabetes when I'm fifty. No thanks, I'll pass.

All of the these vegan-friendly breakfast items, pancakes, waffles, toast, muffins, conventional cereals, pastries, bagels--these should all be considered sometimes foods. More importantly, processed, refined white flour should also be considered a sometimes food, as everyone clearly can tell from the headlines is becoming increasingly bad news on the body. If you do use white flour in your baking, try to at least balance it out by halving the white flour amount and using whole wheat pastry flour for the rest in your recipes. So, yes, flour is pretty much a bad guy. No, it won't kill you, but it won't do you any favors either, and is more than likely to trip you up if you're eating lots of white flour and white sugar together in the perfect harmony known as the baked good. Don't want to give up bread? Then eat sprouted bread, it's much better for you.

What, now I can't eat baked goods? Then what the hell can vegans and vegetarians eat for breakfast? Ay, there's the rub. Fortunately, macrobiotics has the answer: you eat leftovers from the night before. Or you can go one better: just look at your pantry and throw a macrobiotic-friendly meal together. It doesn't matter if it looks like a typical breakfast or not. If you're going for hot cereal, it will. Anything else would probably look foreign--ironically stated because macrobiotics is all about eating in harmony with the climate and region you live in. Here's how the process works: you simply begin to think macrobiotically when you plan your meals, morning, noon, and night. Actually, when you start to eat macrobiotically, you begin to see how much sense it makes, and this is where the magic really happens: you feel it deep down, in the marrow of your bones, that you know what you're doing is the best thing you can possibly do. It feels just so damn good. Then you become a happy macrobiotic convert like us and the rest of the macrobiotic community.

No, it's not a religion, it's a philosophy/lifestyle, which just so happens to be based on Taoism--yin and yang. Our food is loaded with both, which is why it's so important to eat meals that balance both of the two energies. Eat too much yang food and you're yanged out. Eat too much yin food and you're...yinned-out. And with the mass populace eating loads of factory farmed meat (extreme yang) and coupling it with factory-made sweets (extreme yin), it's no wonder we're all bipolar, mood-swinging, disease-ridden, pill-popping, processed-food-a-holics. Chow down on some bacon, eggs, home-fries and pancakes with maple syrup and a cup o' joe or a glass of milk and you've yinned and yanged the hell out of your body right there. That's a hell of way to start a morning, and yet millions probably do this daily. But their day has just begun. Once you top it off with an animal-based lunch and dinner with a nice sweet dessert, and let's not forget all the snacks in between, and you're really out of whack, yinning and yanging all over the place, with no balanced center in sight, all of which is to be repeated the very next day, for years. Yikes! Doctor, I feel like shit, help me!

I made this the other night and so had it for breakfast this morning. I carmelized some leeks, carrots, and parsnips in olive oil, threw some fresh corn in there, and sauteed the whole thing in brown rice (soaked in water for at least three hours). I dabbed it with my wife's home-made cranberry relish from Thanksgiving, and voila, a perfectly-balanced macrobiotic breakfast. Everything in this meal is grown here locally, save for the brown rice and olive oil. It is the eating-vegetables-for-breakfast-thing that I am just getting used to, and loving it.

Eat B(right),
Veggie Daddy

To learn more, I highly recommend The Everything Guide to Macrobiotics and/or The Macrobiotic Way.

The F-Word Today's Health and Diet Gurus Can't Say

(Purple Passion Stew from Macrobiotic Community Cookbook)

Take a stroll down to the nutrition/diet section of your local bookstore, and you'll quickly deduce that no one seems to agree on what is good for us or what is healthy for us or what we should eat. The main division seems to lie in whether or not we should eat animal products, in other words, dairy, eggs, and red and white meat (and let's not forget fish, which J. S. Foer points out in Eating Animals is also farmed, even if it's wild.) Some self-professed health gurus think we should drink milk, eat eggs and eat meat, and others say we shouldn't eat them at all or have very little, about 10% of our daily intake.

It should be no mystery where I stand on this issue, but I cannot imagine any doctor or any nutritionist out there who could look you in the eye and say that eating today's commercially-sold, factory-farmed animal food would be good for you. I could understand if they were referring to local, wild game and insects like today's hunter-gatherers eat that you'll see on Beyond Survival, or past tribes and civilizations of yore, but not today's government-sanctioned and subsidized factory-farmed meat or dairy where antibiotics and all sorts of disease runs rampant, causing death and viral outbreaks such as H1N1 or Listeria. Honestly, who could possibly tell you that eating sick animals is healthy? (Oh, just cook it and it'll be fine! goes the typical and utterly ignorant response.) And yet, this is exactly what all these diet and health-related books are telling you to do or not do: eat lean meat and drink milk, the former for protein and essential fatty acids, and the latter, for calcium, all of which careful vegans can get in ample quantities.

What all of these books and knowledgeable authors are leaving out is that factory-farmed meat and dairy is absolutely NOT GOOD FOR YOU and they know it, but they simply CANNOT SAY IT. They'd be fired if they did, and they know that, too.


This all vastly depends on which lobbyists are paying their checks as we all know, or should know, since many of these doctor/scientists are paid off to slant the data in the food industry's favor. The China Study, though I agree it seems to be biased, is a great look into how these academic "experts" are paid by or invested in the modern food industry. Yes, the standby rule, follow the money, applies here greatly. Just see who pays their checks.

So this seems to be where all nutritionists part company, whether you should eat meat, fish, and drink dairy or not. But if they just wrote "Make sure you eat plenty of factory farmed meat, fish and dairy," it'd be a whole different ball game--one that none of these health experts are willing to play. They cannot go there, even if they want to. Factory farmed food is their triple F-word. It is simply unspeakable, it is the line they are not willing to cross. And for a second, let's imagine if they were to write this. Who would buy it? Who would believe anyone who told you to eat factory farmed meat and dairy? That's right. Nary a soul. We'd all see their bullshit for what it is. Which is exactly how we need to start viewing this entire health food and diet industry: it's all smoke and mirrors, and piles of factory-farmed pig cow and chicken shit--which just happens to keep them all so happily employed. It's also what seems to be in our food. But that's okay, just cook the shit out of it, and it should be fine.

Eat B(right),
Veggie Daddy

Courico Tacos with Grilled Pineapple Salsa

Awhile ago we made this vegan version of Courico Tacos, which is a Portuguese version of chorizo sausage. The recipe suggests using soy curls, but we used seitan instead. Seitan is made from vital wheat gluten which is comprised of the pure protein of wheat. No, this isn't good to eat if you have gluten allergies, though I suspect this gluten allergy thing has become a bit out of hand. Many of us are having allergy issues because of all the REFINED grains we are eating, not necessarily whole grains, which is now becoming the norm in processed foods, the irony of all ironies!

It is really easy to grill pineapple. Cut it in strips, lightly brush with oil, and grill on both sides like so:

As you can see here, we use a cast-iron grill pan with the grooves. You can see it grills nicely, eh?

We got this recipe from the phenomenal Vegan Brunch by Isa Chandra Moskowitz, a brilliant self-taught vegan chef.

Corn, Soy, Sugar: The Holiest of Trinities

Macrobiotics, Trend or Tradition?

Well, we have just eaten our first homemade macrobiotic dish: Purple Passion Stew from The Macrobiotic Community Cookbook which my wife found in the bargain bin at a bookstore. This book is like a compilation/greatest hits of all the best-known macrobiotic chefs in the field, a veritable who's who smorgasbord of philosophical cooking gurus, such as Jessica Porter, author of The Hip Chick's Guide to Macrobiotics: A Philosophy for achieving a Radiant Mind and a Fabulous Body, and Christina Pirello. CP was diagnosed with leukemia at age twenty-six, began eating whole foods and cured herself of her disease. She has been championing macrobiotics and whole foods ever since. I asked my mom if she knew what macrobiotics were. Apparently it's been around for years. So why I am I just hearing about it now??? Clean Food and The Kind Diet are culprits.

What? You can reverse disease by changing what you eat? You don't say! Yes, from the little research I have done, this is clearly very possible to do. There are tons of stories out there of people who have either witnessed it for themselves or have seen it happen to others. The champions of this perspective first and foremost are the PCRM, please get to know them and their books. We must dispel the myth right now: foods are and can be medicine, drugs are made in a lab, and most of the food we eat today is made in a lab. So our food is not food, but I guess we can go so far as to say they, too, are drugs, mutant-foods. Are we really so high and mighty that we think we can improve on God's design? Well, yes, regardless of the inevitably nasty consequences staring at me from the myopic surface of the eight-ball, we most certainly are. Survey says? WE'RE SCREWED.

FRANKENFOODS

Mary Shelley taught us of the dire consequences that can happen when we tamper with nature's original intentions, and my god are we tampering: GMO's, monocultures, Monsanto's roundup-ready privately patented seeds, antibiotic-ridden vittles and victuals, FRANKEN-foods, the destruction of our bees (no bees no food!), toxic waste run-off into our formerly-pristine rivers and oceans, Superman-speed topsoil erosion (it can take centuries for depleted topsoil to grow plants again, native vegetation wipe-out thus topsoil wipe-out, corn and soy in 99% of our food so that our hair is now comprised of corn when tested in a lab, the conversion of euthanized cats and dogs into livestock feed which we then blithely eat at our favorite restaurant or in our deli-meat sandwich, the list goes on. Yes it's ugly now, but how ugly does it have to get before we go, "Oh shit, what are we doing?" History tells us, not long. Relatively-speaking, that is.

Are Peace and Suffering Inseparable?

Though our entire existence on this planet may be some massive aberration, perhaps some experiment created by the One where we've been somehow designed to worship some mystical being that is greater than us be it God or The Buddha, what is clear is that we are destroying/taking for granted our precious (semi-precious?) resources. We're stomping them into the ground so they can never grow for at least several more generations, literally. We're asking for severe punishment on a scale never before seen, meaning, on a global scale where we're all in cahoots with each other. In short, we are asking the grand master of creation to wipe us out. Scratch that, we are wiping ourselves out, cutting out the middle-man. We seem to want to. Look around you and ask if this isn't true. Look at the sheer waste. Look at the plastic. Look at your plate. Look at the drought in Texas, the flood in New England. Vermont, says CNN, has been wiped off the map. Are we so naive as to think it's not our doing??? We're staring at the problem daily, in real life and on T.V. Or is it a problem at all?

Ever since my own disease set in since the fall of 2008, I, too, have been on a journey of self-discovery. Under the moniker Circuit Tree, a little folktronica side project, I made an RPM album about my suffering and how lost I was, such as in "Happy Little Song" or "Lost My Way." Those who suffer the most are the most likely to lean to the spiritual as they have, free marketly-speaking, a greater incentive to find truth in their pain--so Eckhart Tolle says, but I have found this to be true in my own experience. Those who suffer the most have the greatest potential to find peace in their suffering. If you're not suffering, then why would you be looking for peace? Where is your motivation? So one of the tricks of the self-help gurus, my favorite being Byron Katie, the strategy to deal with suffering is this: get into alignment with your suffering and your problems. Once you've done that, like the Earth's topsoil we are all rendering inert, so too will your problems disappear. See how easy it is? Ha ha ha!

Yes, this book changed my life, and I read it at The MoMaVie Centre over at Quidi Vidi Lake. I was going there to cure my disease. One message: stop complaining! (Wait, am I complaining now? The food industry sucks. Ha ha ha!)

Biting the Hand That Feeds

Suffering or not, I'm motivated to stop eating crap, plain and simple. I also seem to be motivated in showing others, not just that they're eating crap, but the crap that they are eating is a one-way ticket to the next food apocalypse. It's not so much a question of "if" as a question of "when." But it will happen: the rule says we are insane when we repeat the same actions expecting different results. Well here's a no-brainer: we're insane. Deeply insane. We're off our rockers. Somehow, someway, collective humanity seems to think (or not care?) that we can eat all this meat, grow all this grain so we can eat our meat, and enjoy an endless supply of fresh oil and water with which to grow all this grain and feed all our livestock, thus feeding ourselves in the process.

But as the authors of Empires of Food daringly posit, thousands of years ago, moving to agriculture and farming in which we maddeningly started to grow and eat plants that couldn't fend for themselves (grain, fruits, and vegetables) was one of the most fateful (read: stupid--but how could we know???) decisions mankind had ever made: we locked civilization to the land we inevitably, unknowingly, destroyed. In fact, all the great civilizations of the past unknowingly destroyed themselves in this very same way. And now we, too, are biting, in this case absolutely devastating, the hand that feeds us.

Put simply: we have waged war on the food we grow, the land on which we grow the food, and the animals that eat the food that we grow on the land that we are destroying, a big lose-lose, a disastrous Bermuda Triangle from which we could never return, not in our lifetimes. That is insane. Sorry Stephen Covey, but we're not listening, even if you are a best-selling author. We are engaging in some massive, Jolly-Green-Giant-sized bad habits. The irony, of course, is that history has taught us to avoid all these moves, but as we are veering our gas-guzzling cars we love so much off the proverbial cliff, rather than ease on the brake, we are not just stepping on the gas individually but as an entire global populace! It's A Comedy of Errors of the greatest proportions! Sorry Mary Shelley but though your incredible book may be mandated reading in schools all over the world, it's falling on some seriously-deaf, illiterate ears. We just can't seem to learn your lesson of Adam Spurned. The modern food industry and all who eat of it, i.e. the global majority--we're all insane. But that's not a problem, of course. It's just who we are, who we have been as a people. We've done it for thousands of years, so why would we change now? When we start to die off in mass numbers with disease, starvation, and hunger on a scale we have never seen but just read about (the bubonic plague), we'll deal with it. The survivors will get smart, sure. But it will be too late. It will be centuries before we can recover. The fortune cookie says so.  Once you've opened the plastic wrapper to see what's inside, that is.

Looking for Organic in All the Wrong Places


Walmart wanted to sell organic foodstuffs, but due to low demand, they had to scrap the let's-make-our-food-healthier-for-everyone campaign. The people voted and Walmart acted. Thou shall not buy organic at Walmart. (Walmart currently ranks as the #1 largest grocery chain in America.) The poor and the low middle-class like to shop at Walmart, statistically. And this demographic cannot afford organic food. So why in God's name would Walmart sell it? Well they don't. Not too many grocery stores do (at affordable prices, that is.) So where do we get it?

If you want organic at a decent price, you're going to have to cut the middle-man. Yes, I'm talking about your favorite grocery store. Grocery stores are glorified medieval merchants who want to give us a bargain and will cut their prices to do so. They cut prices to the bottom and we become bottom feeders. We are feeding at the bottom. And from the bottom pours out shit.

"Shit adds up at the bottom." -- Maynard Keenan, Tool. "If I let you, you would make me destroy myself..." Hmm, sound familiar? Thanks Rollins, you hit the nail on the head. 

Georges Bataille has some great essays on this, too. Please please read The Solar Anus, you'll laugh your sun-ified ass off. I had to read this one in the most amazing course I ever took, The Theory of Desire, taught by the best prof ever, Richard Corum at UCSB.

PCRM says to eat at the bottom of the food chain, but in this respect they don't mean to eat shit like us modern-day processed-food consuming bottom feeders, they mean eat food that grows close to the ground, close to our Earth. Just as we depend on today's middle-men, the grocery stores, we also depend on eating animals who get all their energy from eating plants. So again, let's cut the middle-man, in this case, middle-animals, and just eat the plants ourselves, rather than eating the animals who eat the plants. Let's just eat the plants! It is plants that give us energy, another no-brainer, and yet there's all this debate about vegans and vegetarians and how they aren't getting enough nutrients. It's hogwash. This is what it means to eat from the bottom of the food chain. I'm not even an environmentalist and I can see the logic of why we should do this. More than 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to create cropland to grow grain to feed farmed animals. And this is the exact manner in which the great civilizations unknowingly destroyed themselves. Here's how it worked/works:


1. Clear cut the land of forests in order to grow food
2. Wipe out native vegetation which destroys the soil.
3. Topsoil erodes, washes downhill, massive flooding occurs, a new topsoil takes centuries to reform.
4. With no forests to attract moisture, clouds do not visit, massive drought occurs.
5. Land becomes inert (read: DEAD.)
6. People starve.
7. Disease and hunger kills off (input name of great civilization here.)
8. Wait for forests to grow again (takes 100's of years)
9. Repeat steps 1-8 for as long as necessary or until planet and/or human species is destroyed.


Texas has a drought now. The midwest had a big Dust Bowl thing happening. Rainforests are getting axed down to raise cattle. The East Coast just had a big flooding problem. The Middle East is mostly sand and desert. Soon South America will be desert, too. Fertile Crescent? Not fertile anymore, is it? Haven't even mentioned oil. We're stepping on the gas, yay! Let's drive off that cliff! Anyone with me? No? Look at your plate. 


Corn, Soy, and Sugar, behold the awesome, the sublime, the Holiest of all Trinities. Not to mention the destruction of our people and our planet. Amen. Or Om, take your pick. It is what it is. Until it isn't.


Eat B(right),
Veggie Daddy

Why Have We Declared War on Farm Animals?

I've finished reading Alicia Silverstone's The Kind Diet, and let me tell you, this girl is anything but clueless. She has this incredible way of summarizing every single reason why going vegan is the best thing for you to do and for the planet (and I don't even believe in global warming, but I do believe factory farmed food is doing lots of harm to it and our animals.) Unless you have the heart to slaughter your own cow, I don't think you should be eating one. And yet the U.S. slaughters more than 90,000 cows a day. 90,000 divided by 24 hours equals by the time you have finished that hamburger and washed it down with a coke, 3,750 cows were mercilessly murdered to appease our ceaseless, misdirected hunger.  By the time you take a few bites of hamburger in one minute, about 63 cows get hanged. As Jonathan Safran Foer says in Eating Animals, that's war. We have declared war on all cows, pigs, chickens, and fish everywhere.



They have no defense, no say, and for some reason cats and dogs are spared. Why don't we eat our dogs?  Foer and Silverstone challenge. (Actually, euthanized dogs and cats get converted into livestock feed. Didn't know that, did you? Those cats and dogs are being eaten by cows, so we are pretty much eating euthanized cats and dogs if you want to be technical about it.) So please, if you don't think you could kill the animals you eat yourself, then you probably shouldn't have any business eating them. Oh, but they're so healthy for you, our government proclaims. You gotta have meat and drink milk to be strong. That's hogwash, though, and it only takes a little digging to find out the truth. The establishment uses fear-mongering to make us worry about how much protein we're getting. We're all so obsessed about where our protein is going to come from. If you don't eat meat or dairy, then how can you get your protein? Well, as Silverstone brilliantly points out, the official term for the clinical disease of protein deficiency is called kwashiorkor. Never heard of it? That's because it's obviously not a danger. As The China Study clearly points out, what is a danger is the exact opposite: having too much protein in the system is what can kill us and does kill us daily. While my dad was visiting us here, he perused the book and was convinced. He was worried about having too-low of a cholesterol, but after reading The China Study he saw there was no reason to worry and that eating eggs and dairy was also a lose-lose proposition.



Forks Over Knives just came out in theaters and covers all of this as well. The evidence about the dangers of eating animal protein is irrefutable. Even if animal protein was good for you, declaring war on these animals is our modern-day, post-war tragedy. Don't think for one minute that an animal before slaughter does not feel any fear. And that very fear stays right there in the meat. Cortisol levels get jacked up just before slaughter, and then we eat them. It's scary meat. We are eating fear. There are much better things we can eat, many more kind foods out there. Please take the time to learn about them so you can make the right choice at the dinner table.

Eat B(right),
Veggie Daddy

Newfoundlanders and Their Love of White Food

The past two weeks I have been away from the house because we had our floors refinished and had to bug-off for a bit. So off we drove to a cabin out there in Riverhead, Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, about an hour's drive from here in St. John's. And as I have said in an earlier post, the summer here on the Avalon has been simply dreadful, hence the irony of wanting to eat warm foods in July. August hasn't been much better. And out there on the Avalon over at Harbour Grace, the weather did not serve us well either. So we went museum hunting since these activities would be indoors. We would have preferred walking on more trails, but we did manage to squeeze in the incredible Skerwink Trail in Port Rexton outside of Trinity, and the Burnt Head trail in Cupids, which was awesome (or awe-inspiring as I finally learned the actual definition on Q's contest of misused words. Peruse won the prize, and I can see why. I had no idea we've bastardized the meaning so much. Clearly, none of us have ever bothered to peruse the definition of peruse.)

Needless to say, while we visited all these museums, drove around in the rain, what have you, we got rather hungry. And it shouldn't surprise anyone when I say these various restaurants that seem to be dotted around every which where in little towns with cute, child-friendly names like Heart's Content and Dildo do not serve vegan and hardly any vegetarian fare, if at all. My wife, who I can safely say is a die-hard vegan extremist, managed to eat completely vegan during the whole trip, but I didn't seem to be able to do it, and don't think I would have enjoyed myself much if I had tried. I am certainly not going to beat myself up for eating cheese and butter despite my deep feelings about avoiding such foods. This very topic became very heated on the facebook group nl vegans. When in Rome, or the Avalon Peninsula...

As I have said earlier, I am not an extremist about it, but eating vegan is a lifestyle choice at home, not necessarily on the road, which really depends on the circumstances. I am not ready to whip myself on the back and suffer silently (see Da Vinci Code) as I eat iceberg lettuce and toast because that's the only thing on the menu I will eat. I know if I was travelling in California or Washington, D. C., or England, it'd be loads easier to go veg. But that is not the case here, especially when you venture even twenty minutes out of St. John's. To boldly go where most Newfoundlanders have gone before...Actually, I've heard stories about how there are many Newfoundlanders out there who have never gone more than a few miles from their home in their entire lives. Based on my own past as a nomad having moved over 20 times, I can't imagine.

(wildhorsespubandeatery.com)

Here's a pic of what I mostly ate on my sojourn on the outskirts of St. John's. Yep, this is a Newfoundland favorite a.k.a. fish and chips. You take your cod and deep fat fry it and in case you haven't had your fill of fried foods, you get a bonus in the form of deep fat fried potatoes a.k.a. "chips." (Don't worry, I'm not dissing this dish, but I certainly wouldn't want to eat it daily.) There's also cod au gratin and pan-fried cod if you're feeling fancy. Because of various socio-political and health reasons, I choose not to eat factory farmed food, but where does cod fit on this spectrum of foods-to-avoid? The modern fishing industry is pretty damned awful, and if you're not from here you wouldn't know there's a cod moratorium because of over-fishing, which have apparently/arguably depleted the codfish-stocks here. The history (it's hammered into your brain at every single museum) tells us that fishermen seemed to think the supply of cod here would be endless. Either that or they knew it was a finite supply and decided to take as much as they could as long as it was humanly possible. They'd deal with a sans-cod sea later. Sure enough, we still have bottom-feeders left, not to mention the fact that we're dripping in oil. Without these, I'm not sure St. John's would be booming the way it is, but that's another post.

Please take a look at this picture again:

Notice anything striking? Is it on the tip of your tongue but you just can't grasp it? The word I'm looking for here is "monochromatic." Of one color. Eating this dish completely violates Veggie Daddy Rule #3: Eat a Variety of Foods. There's also a cookbook you can get, Color Me Vegan (we don't have it yet) that enforces this entire point. Whereas Clean Food organizes recipes by season to guarantee you're eating more locally, this one organizes recipes by color!

This guarantees you're eating the rainbow, across the spectrum of available nutrients. This is what you want to do when you eat, and the darker and brighter your food is, the bigger the blast of health. So keeping this point in mind, look again at the fish and chips. Umm, Newfoundland, we have a problem. We're missing some serious color in our foods. I'm not talking about the ones you can buy at Dominion or Sobey's, but at restaurants outside of St. John's. The restaurants out there don't seem to be aware that food is supposed to be colorful and bright. "Oh my god, it's so vivid." That's what we want to say about our food, but not to the point that our Quaker Oatmeal turns blue because of those oh-so-yummy dinosaur eggs the company feels will make kids eat their oatmeal if it glows blue. If my oatmeal turned blue, I'd throw it in the trash. I certainly wouldn't let my kids eat it, you can be sure of that.

At these restaurants, the food was so white. The cod was white, the bread was white, the potatoes were white, the lettuce and tomatoes were pretty much white. Their idea of a salad is iceberg lettuce with bland pink/white tomatoes and some chopped green pepper with shredded cheddar cheese. Sorry, but this is not a salad. Iceberg lettuce is not going to cut it. Why can't they serve whole wheat bread? Not in demand? (The salad I was impressed with was a Greek salad that my father got at Skippers in Bonavista. It was actually green.) But for the most part, once you get outside of St. John's, it's pretty grim out there. Again, history tells us Newfoundlanders had little choice, but this isn't history. This is today, and St. John's is slowly getting up to speed. We already have one all-vegetarian restaurant and a couple of health-food stores. You can get a seven-course vegan tasting menu at Raymond's (if you can afford it.) And it's high time the rest of us here on the rock got up to speed with the times, even if tourists are looking for the traditional jigg's dinner. But to eat this way as a lifestyle? .These restaurant owners don't seem to be aware that tourists might have other expectations. But then if they changed their menus too much, then would-be travellers who are looking for that authentic Newfoundland experience (whatever that means) wouldn't get a true taste of the rock. We certainly can't have that. 

Veggie Daddy Rule #5: Know Thy Food Source

"The stuff we throw away is what we're paying for...the packaging, printing, manufacturing, warehousing, refrigeration, and distribution. After all this has been paid off, there's not much money left for the actual ingredients in the food. This is why most processed, packaged, and prepared foods are full of chemical flavors, colors, and empty calories created to make actual food ingredients go further. Another reason for enjoying more whole, fresh, raw foods straight from the source." -- Ani Phyo, author of Ani's Raw Food Essentials.

Got this from Chapters for ten bucks. Good deal, I must say.

Veggie Daddy Rule #5: Know Thy Food Source

Veggie Daddy Fun Fact: Thomas F. Pawlick from The End of Food says the Canadian potato has lost 100% of its Vitamin A. This doesn't just apply to potatoes, but all of our fruits and vegetables, grains, and even our sodium-solution-pumped meat has lost massive amounts of nutrients over many years. Synthetic fertilizers are a big part of the blame, the food industry as a whole, but we, too, are a big part of the blame. We choose to buy inferior food. My guess is that this could turn around if we started to pay more attention to where our food comes from: who's growing it, who's making it, who's selling it, and who's buying it. And don't forget the most important question of all: What is in it? Take the Slate quiz and see how well you do. Our food has become so alien to us, we need the food companies to come up with a fancy brand name in order to tell us what it is we're eating. If the Slate quiz makes anything clear, it's that the food we are eating is not food at all. So, again, if it's not food, what in God's name is it?

That fruit you're buying that was shipped from God knows where isn't getting soft because the fruit is being harvested when it is barely ripe. Then the fruit gets subjected to bouts of toxic polyethelene gas as if in a modern-day Auschwitz re-enactment in order to "ripen" the fruit in the "ripening" rooms on the trucks as they get shipped thousands of miles to our favorite grocery store. The fruit looks amazing, and then we take it home with us and bite into that juicy tomato, which isn't juicy at all, it just looked juicy, and it has no flavor at all, it just looked like it did. What is happening to the food? It's being gassed to death in trucks. Do you think this gas might affect our health? I'll let you figure that one out.

Synthetic fertilizers only focus on three nutrients (the classic NPK formula) when we actually need seventeen essential nutrients to grow our food. Monsanto is trying to sue farmers for trying to steal their seeds as the genetically modified crops inadvertently contaminate organic, non GM crops. "The major biotech companies currently own 50 percent of the world’s commercial seeds, and we certainly don’t want to get into a situation where a few chemical companies own all our commercial seeds," says Andrew Kimbrell, founder and exec. director of the Center for Food Safety. Seeds aren't very profitable until you find some way to patent them. Now they can make you bank. Now you can "smile as you kill" as you join the others at "the top of the hill." 

Yet we must stay low to the ground and eat low on the food chain, foods close to the earth, as local and organic as possible. I just learned that genetically modified food is still considered organic. This is a joke. And the joke's on us. Thomas, a guy I know from down at Harbourside told me to Google "Cow Human Hybrid" and "Spider Goat". When I get the time, I will, but from what he told me last night, we are in serious trouble. And at the rate we are currently going, we are letting these people control our entire food supply. When will we TAKE THE POWER BACK? Only time will tell.  

Eat B(right),

Veggie Daddy

And don't forget Veggie Daddy Rule #4!

Eating the Sun: The Power of Eating Warm Foods

(howstuffworks.com)

Ceres, goddess of agriculture, corn, the carrier of the cornucopia, mourns the loss of her daughter Proserpina six months out of the year, ever since Pluto made her a captive and companion for him in the underworld. However, every six months, Proserpina returns and Ceres opens her arms to welcome her back from the darkness. While Proserpina enjoys her stay with her mother, the sun comes out and everything begins to grow—this is the time to plant those seeds, pick grapes off the vine of Bacchus, drink wine, fornicate, marry and be merry. But we all know the growing season ends. As Pluto takes Ceres’s daughter back to his underworld kingdom once again, Ceres once again mourns the loss of her daughter, the sun departs and the world becomes cold, the ground becomes hard with frost. Nothing grows, the trees shed their leaves to survive the harsh winter to come. All the animals hibernate in caves and holes and subdivisions until Proserpina returns once again. And so it goes.

(reversespins.com)

Oh Proserpina, where are you? Here on the rock of Newfoundland, it’s been a cold summer. Ceres doesn’t seem ready to open her arms to welcome Proserpina back from her prolonged stay in Pluto's underworld. Pluto may no longer be a planet, but we still associate Pluto with being cold. (Funny then that Hell is supposed to be hot.) In other words, the sun hasn’t come out. Or if it has, it seems to be teasing us, playing hide and seek. Perhaps Ceres has lost hope this year. Perhaps Proserpina was too drunk and hungover from partying with Pluto’s minions and was knocked unconscious while playing pin the tail on Cerberus. Perhaps Ceres and Proserpina are not on speaking terms with each other—having a row, as they say. Whatever the reason may be, the sun isn’t out, thus we are not warm. And when we are not warm our bodies contract too much and we retreat back into ourselves and away from the world. So we have a few options. We can do the corn dance (which I and my past lives seemed to have forgotten) or we can bundle up. We can harness the power of warmth. We can think warm thoughts. We can eat warm foods.

Heat and warmth is a strange thing to be talking about in the summer. (We’re heading toward August now.) Usually in the summer, we talk about how to cool down, not warm up. I was at Second Cup the other day and saw their ad for their new summer drinks, you know, to cool down. But there was a dire warning attached to the sign: FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY. Tim Horton’s has their iced lemonade chillers or whatever they’re called. Though it looks on the outset like just another marketing ploy to spur demand in a short amount of time and boost sales, it’s actually a reminder to us that Proserpina is only here for a limited time. And the marketing boys over at Tim Horton’s and Second Cup may have miscalculated the demand for their new gimmick. Newfoundlanders probably aren’t buying too many of those cold drinks. And if they are, they shouldn’t be.

So what’s going on? We have the heat on, our thick comforters are back on the beds, the thermostat is on, we’re inside cuddled under a blanket trying to get WARM. It is not just that the sun is gone. It is actually cold. It can still be hot without any sun. But this summer, if that’s what you want to call it, the weather seems to be contracting us, when it should be expanding us. Our instinct in the summer, usually, is to drink iced tea and eat salads, pasta salads, potato salads, deli sandwiches, but in order to expand, we must do the opposite. Now we have to think soup, casseroles, chili, hot cereal, cobblers and crisps, pies. Comfort food. That’s why it’s called comfort food. And if you’re eating non-comfort food in this cold weather, then you may be extremely uncomfortable and wondering why. You’re just following your instincts, so who can blame you? Our instincts are telling us one thing, but our bodies are telling us another: “Hey you! I’m cold! Warm me up!”

Being from Southern California, where it’s pretty even-steven all year round at a nice, comfortable 70 degrees Fahrenheit/20 Celsius, I never understood the concept of eating seasonally; my wife partner, being from Toronto mostly, did. And she cooks accordingly. See, we didn’t have falling leaves where I grew up, or snow-capped driveways. Christmas was just another sunny day, no difference from the Fourth of July. You could eat fruit all year long. So my wife partner raised her eyebrows at me when I would request “summer foods” in the winter. She thought I was strange, and I thought she was strange for planning her recipes according to the seasons. Now I see the error of my ways. Boy do I ever!

Rudolf Steiner was big on warmth, he always emphasized it. Warmth is the beginning of everything, the source of all life. The first thing we do to a newborn baby is swaddle them up. If your children aren’t growing in a healthy way, it might be because they are too cold. Think about it. Without warmth and heat, without the sun, nothing would grow. We often underestimate the power of the sun’s energy, we take it for granted. This summer, if it isn’t going to come out, then we must summon it within ourselves. Food, real food, is stored energy. We eat the food so we can get the energy. This is why we eat more grains in the winter and more fruits and vegetables in the summer. If you eat lifeless food, however, then it stands to reason you will have a lifeless energy about you. Processed food, processed meats, processed veggie burgers, processed anything—it has very little energy, despite what the marketing boys over at headquarters will tell you. The new McDonald’s Happy Meals may serve apples, but you can bet those apples are heavily processed. Ever see an apple left out too long? It oxidizes and turns brown. I don’t even know if the McDonald's apples can even be called apples. God knows what they’re doing to them. I know their oatmeal isn't oatmeal.

Terry Walters, not just a cooking genius, but also a nutritionist, has one of the best cookbooks out there called Clean Food. Rather than eating Mr. Clean in our foods, she stresses that the foods we eat should be clean, non-processed, foods.

What makes the book so special is that the recipes are organized by season. So for any of you locavores out there, this is a special plus. If you eat locally, then you can be sure you are eating seasonally, across the entire food spectrum. This is one of those if-you-are-stranded-on-a-desert-island-and-could-only-take-one-cookbook-with-you kinds of books. It’s simply incredible.

 

Clean Start is amazing, too. All the recipes are gluten-free. Gluten seems to be the new enemy, people increasingly getting diagnosed (incorrectly?) with Celiac disease. Just another example of how unhappy our beloved Ceres has become as our relationship to Mother Earth has become increasingly twisted and strained. How can we cheer her up? 

Eat, drink, and be warm. Even if it is summer.

Eat B(right),

Veggie Daddy

I would like to thank my good friend Lesley for inspiring this post.