PHYTOCHEMICALS: Your Word of the Day--or of Your Life

Just watched this PBS pledge video with Joel Fuhrman M.D., who says that the average American's diet contains a mere 10% of fruit and vegetables. What is even more disturbing is that 5% of these fruits and vegetables are actually white potatoes in the form of french fries, mashed potatoes, etc. And this is exactly why so many of us are prone to disease: because we are not consuming a diet rich in micronutrients and phytochemicals.

So it's time to get to know a new formula and commit it to memory:

H = N/C

Health is defined by the amount of nutrients we consume divided by how many calories we eat. So someone can be eating the same amount of calories every day, but one is healthy and the other isn't. It doesn't take long to realize that the healthy person is the one who is eating food with actual nutrients in them vs. the sick person who is not eating any nutrient-dense food or very little of it. This is a simple problem that can be easily corrected. How to do this?

He says to eat foods with an abundance of micronutrients and phytochemicals. Or put simply, eat unrefined plant-based foods, which are whole grains, beans/legumes, fruits, nuts and seeds (not too many nuts if you're trying to lose weight) but most importantly, eat vegetables. As he says, "Salad is the main dish." Every other food should be considered a side to complement your main meal: a big-ass salad, loaded to the brim with fresh fruits and vegetables. 

Why should we do this? Because it is only recently being discovered that these foods actually contain disease-fighting nutrients that are not in animal-based foods, and you certainly aren't going to find them in processed foods. So let's stay in the produce section of the grocery store, shall we? 

Meat, eggs, milk, butter, cheese, refined white flour, and sugar all lack these non-essential disease-fighting, cancer-fighting, diabetes-preventing agents, and yet these are the foods that most of us eat. In fact, we make them 95% of our diet! I say "non-essential" because these nutrients are not necessary for our survival as opposed to the essential amino acids, but these "non-essential" nutrients are essential to fight many if not all of the diseases caused by the SAD diet. That is right: if you are not aware of it, what we eat can kill us. It's high-time we made this connection--thankfully, with all the info on the internet these days, many of us are beginning to see this relationship: 

Good food = HEALTH. Bad food = DISEASE. 

But if the equation is so simple, why do we continue to ignore it, even though millions of us are now dying each year because we don't honor this simple rule? Heart disease, Cancer, and Health care are killing us, and they are all related, but when are we going to start paying attention to the causal relationship?

Emma Mustich's fascinating article on salon.com might help answer this question. It is worth a read.

Eat B(right),

Veggie Daddy

The Kerfuffle of the GMO Food Industry: We are Mostly to Blame

If 2/3 of processed food on the shelves is genetically engineered and most of the grains our livestock eats is also genetically modified as Organic Connections Magazine points out, then it seems our modern-day society is in a bit of a kerfuffle. When I think of the size of the problem, I pretty much just throw up my hands. What is to be done about it?

Apparently, GMO food is far better labelled in Europe than over here, so it's clearly possible to fix or at least improve the situation. And yet, we are in the dark ages when it comes to our food labels. Why is this?

The only answer I can come up with besides the fact that our regulators and politicians are in cahoots with the big food giants is that we are to blame for buying food that is not properly labelled. Put simply, it's our fault. We still shop at the grocery stores and we do not demand of the grocery stores that they start selling food that is properly labelled. We just buy it anyway, even though statistics say the majority of us do not want to eat genetically-engineered food. So what should we do?

Buy organic foods as much as possible, and look for foods that are labelled Non-GMO. Grocery stores know what's up. If they know that the consumers are buying organic non-GMO foods as their fancy little computers tell them every second an item is swiped at the check-out, they will start stocking more of those foods. The reason they are not stocking more non-GMO foods is because we still keep buying them. And so nothing changes.

I'd love to say it's all the fault of the politicians and the food giants and the farmers, but this is a cop-out. As global consumers, we really lack personal responsibility. It's really our own stubborn laziness. As long as we continue buying the GMO food at our local grocery stores, they'll keep selling it. It's the basic law of supply and demand. Demand for product rises, supply of product then rises, as do prices. And from what I see every time we go shopping at Dominion or Sobey's, nothing is going to change anytime soon. It's one hell of a kerfuffle, and one in which the majority of us could clearly care less about or we'd change our ways. And until we do, that sign my wife took a picture of in Oakland last year is just that: a meaningless sign.

It would seem that 99% of us do indeed consent to what is going on. And that is our modern-day comedy of errors of which 99% of us are willing players.

Eat B(right),
Veggie Daddy

Making Pizza? Hold the Cheese, Please.

If you take a quick glance at this picture of your atypical pizza, you might notice something missing. Yep, that's right. It's cheese! Now at first, it might look odd to see a pizza without any cheese on it, and if this seems strange to you, at this point, you're probably in one of two camps. Right now, you're either saying to yourself, "How disgusting!" or "How delicious!" I would have been in the former category about a year ago. I didn't care what you put on the pizza, but my attitude was, "It better have some goddamned cheese on it or I ain't eating it!"

It's probably been about a year or so since I've stopped eating pizza with cheese. The reason is because my wife started to put all these crazy vegetable combinations on the pizzas, and the plain fact of the matter was, a whole bunch of processed pasteurized mozarella cheese melted all over the veggies made it taste like a gooey, disgusting mess. Another thing I learned once I stopped the cheese craze was that once the cheese was gone, something magical happened: I could actually taste the taste of all the veggies, the herbs, the spices. It all tasted so much better. The cheese actually masked the flavor and I would just taste the cheese.

This pizza here is butternut squash, red onion, and kale. Can you see how cheese would just ruin this pizza? These kinds of pizzas, and by that I mean vegan, taste way better without the cheese. Don't take my word for it, try it yourself. And if you've got a bread machine like we do, I'd substitute a half cup of the white flour for whole wheat.

Eat B(right),
Veggie Daddy

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