The Diary of a Newfegan Madman, Day One

Since I have started this blog back a few years ago now, I have gone through many changes with my eating habits. I initially meant this blog to be a food diary, but due to foreseen circumstances, given my poor time management and general organization skills, I just wasn't able to keep up. But I have been overcome with vigor (perhaps my new change in diet?), and it's high time that I went back to my original idea, which is to write a food diary of sorts. So without further adieu...

First of all, my food diary is going to consist of a certain format for simplification purposes. I am just going to simply write down what I have eaten at what time, and then commentary will follow, with or without links. Each post will be updated in real time throughout the day, since I have nothing better to do.

Newfegan refers to the fact that I am an honorary Newfoundlander and vegan (though I do break the rules here because I am not an extremist about it. I am vegan enough to call myself a vegan.) Hence the term Newfegan. To any Newfoundlanders who are offended by the derogatory term "Newfie," it is at this time I hope to clarify that the two terms are not related, and thus should not be considered offensive to any Newfoundlander who might be reading this.

Day One

Update: 9:06 P.M.

Here's the last update, just as I threatened. So now I'm eating dessert, a pineapple coconut cup (See Vegan Diner.) Instead of gelatin, which is ground up horse hooves and such, we use agar agar which essentially does the same thing as gelatin, but it's from the sea!

That's it, what a day. Seems like all I did was type and eat! Hopefully, this diary will give you an idea of how to eat once you have insanely decided to stop eating everything you've eaten your whole life. I really must be mad...

Peach out.

Update: 8:06 P.M.

Whoo, boy, I'm full. I had me some Sweet Brown rice w/ mung beans (Terry Walters' Clean Food) and Saag Aloo (Chloe's Kitchen), an Indian dish with baby kale and baby spinach, with potatoes. I had two helpings, and washed it all down with some coconut milk, to take my vitamins. My naturopath recommends I take some supplements, so there you go. His name is Mark Kibyuk. Tell him Veggontherock sent you.

There's pineapple coconut pudding for dessert, but I am full at present. I usually don't eat dessert until about an hour after dinner, so expect an update then. Are you supposed to eat before bed? Nope, but I often do, and it doesn't seem to affect me. Some people really can't sleep if they eat before bed, and all the pundits say you shouldn't eat before bed, but one of my jobs is to break the mold, so there you go! I'm going to go wash the dishes...

Update: 6:08 P.M.

Another hour until dinner. I was hungry again, so I had an organic apple (always organic as they're one of the dirty dozen), with almond butter. My 5 yr. old had the same.

I am now drinking some bizarre concoction I made: some coconut milk, chia seeds, and raw cacao powder. Normally you wait 20 minutes for the chia seeds to absorb the liquid and become a pudding, but I am just swallowing as is. The things I do for health!

Actually, I am ramping up my intake of chia seeds ever since I found out how many amazing properties they have. They're a complete food! So I am going to eat them with just about everything, about 2-4 tablespoons/day. I am being intense and not adding any sweeteners!

I am going to go grind some sesame seeds now so we can have some gomashio, a macrobiotic condiment that I absolutely love love.

Update: 4:27 P.M.

Hungry. Snack. Eat a snack with Brown and Black. Eating more cashews...

Update: 3:26 P.M.

Holy Schmoly, I am still a bit hungry. What a surprise, considering I'm not eating any damn food, no gluten, dairy, meat, eggs, cheese, toast, cereal. Argh! Okay, I just downed a glass of So Delicious coconut milk, with the last of our chia seeds. That should do the trick. We used to buy Silk but ever since they didn't sign that anti-GMO bill/prop, we are a bit pissed at them, so So Delicous it is!

Chia seeds. I found some brown ones in the brand we were using, so we're not going to get that brand anymore, the organic ones at Costco. There aren't supposed to be any brown ones, because those are actually weeds or something. So it's an inferior product. Granted, it was the bottom of the can, but I don't like getting stuff at Costco if I can avoid it.

Update: 3:07 P.M.

Yep, I am still hungry. I peeled another carrot and I am eating more hummus. This should work. Normally, I would have eaten the hummus on bread, but I cut out gluten, so...carrots. I also have Mary's brand gluten-free crackers, but I eat these in very limited portions.

Update: 2:42 P.M.

My god, it's Daylight Savings! Arrgh, a whole hour gone. What's happened to the day???

So I have just made my youngest her lunch. She loves my go-to food, the hummus. We were buying hummus from Costco, but I was concerned when I learned that their hummus used canola oil. Yuck. You don't need canola oil in your hummus! And it's probably GMO to boot, because I emailed the hummus company about their using GMO canola oil, and they never responded. To me, that's an admission of guilt, so I don't buy it anymore. If you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself!

So here's her lunch.

Don't ask me what this is, I have no idea, but I do know those are carrots and olives, and a blob of white bean hummus for the head. The hummus jellyfish olive monster is coming to get you!

I was still hungry after the soup, so I just munched on olives, carrots and hummus myself. If I am still hungry, I will eat some more cashews to take any edge off.


Update: 1:55 P.M.

I am starving! I am eating some roasted unsalted cashews right now as I wait for my soup to heat up. I am trying to not microwave as much, so I am actually heating up last night's minestrone in a pan.

Yeah, there's some brown rice pasta in there, but not much. It's got kale, broccolette (kale meets broccoli), kidney beans, frozen green beans, peas, carrots, etc. Green beans and carrots, upward and downward growing vegetables support liver energy, which is the organ that is on the same frequency as the Spring! I told you I was a madman...

I seem to have unbalanced liver energy which apparently comes out in the eyes, so I am trying to eat more foods that address the liver.

I am going to sprinkle some hemp and chia seeds on top for good Omega 3 fats and protein. And I am eating cashews, which also has good fats and protein. Very important when you don't eat animals.

I just recently learned that another huge cause of inflammation can be an improper ratio of Omega 6 fats to Omega 3 fats. And I didn't know this, but Omega 3 fats are anti-inflammatory! So when I heard this, I have begun to ramp up these fats in my diet, while simultaneously reducing the Omega 6's.

Update: 1:30 P.M.

I am done stretching, and I had to stop because I'm freaking starving! I haven't the faintest clue what I am going to eat since I have cut out gluten, sugar, refined flour grains (though I had pancakes as a treat), eggs, dairy, meat, peanuts...Jesus Christ!

I am thinking about what's in the fridge. I had made a white bean hummus which is absolutely scrumptious, and hummus is one of my go-to foods. This recipe can be found in Kris Carr's Crazy Sexy Kitchen. Her other book is amazing, and perhaps in the summer I am going to try her detox program. I don't dare do this in the winter, what with all the fresh produce lacking in the stores and gardens.

I am also thinking about making a blueberry hemp smoothie. I've been craving one for some reason.

Update: 12:34 P.M.

Since you can't be healthy by just eating, you also have to exercise. I have been doing the Miranda Esmond White's Classical Stretch program for two weeks now, and I'm already noticing benefits. And so now I am going to stretch. It's on PBS and if you have a PVR, you can just record it!

Update: 12:10 P.M.

The chia seeds seem to be working. I am not hungry anymore, and all I did was have some chia seeds in some water. Amazing...

Update: 11:16 A.M.

Gluten-free banana and chocolate chip pancakes with maple syrup
Glass of water with chia seeds

We have just had breakfast. Wife made gluten-free chocolate-chip and banana pancakes with brown rice flour. They were still fluffy! When you add the maple syrup, that's a heavy dose of sugar, but there was no white refined sugar--we don't use that anymore. She got the recipe from the macrobiotic-leaning cookbook Blissful Bites.

How ironic, that I'm trying to be healthy and then I go and eat these! Flour of any kind is probably not good for us, but what the hey, we usually have some form of pancakes on Sunday mornings. Tradishuuuuuuuuun, Tradition!

Chia Seeds

Since I am now obsessed with the power of chia seeds, I have taken 1/2 tablespoon of chia seeds and added them to a glass of water. I am still hungry after eating five pancakes. Chia seeds are supposed to make you feel much fuller for longer because they are loaded with...everything! Protein, fiber, omega 3's, they are a complete food! They're great for weight loss, apparently, not that I need to lose any. At about 6 feet tall, I weigh anywhere between 145-150 lbs. Skinny!

People say it's because I don't eat meat that I'm so skinny. So I guess all the ice cream and cookies and meat and cheese and butter that I constantly ate my whole life was making me skinny, too. I have been skinny my whole life. Only now has my metabolism started to slow way down. Now I don't look as anorexic as I used to, just a healthy kind of skinny, lean machine.

My youngest, she ate a bowl of almond yogurt with chia and hemp seeds and frozen blueberries. This is her favorite. Then she had some pancakes later. We're trying to take her off gluten, too.

9:36 A.M.

One cup of lemon water.

I am going to start my day how I always do, with a nice hot steaming mug of lemon water.

I drink lemon water every single morning because I am trying to cut coffee completely out of my diet. I find when I drink this, my desire for coffee disappears completely. I can't say the same for my wife, who still likes her morning coffee, even after she drinks the lemon water.

Lemon water is alkalinizing so is optimal to drink in order to counterbalance the acidity that many of us have in our blood. I usually squeeze half a lemon and half a lime, since lemons tend to be on the expensive side. Ginger is good to add because it has anti-inflammatory properties.

Inflammation

Inflammation seems to be the word of the year. It seems like 1 in 3 of us are suffering from it. Is this a coincidence? Nope. Which foods cause inflammation? Well, since the answer is pretty much everything, it's easier to write a list of what doesn't cause inflammation.

List of foods that aren't really known to cause inflammation:

• fruits, except citrus
• vegetables, except nightshades (potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants)
• nuts and seeds (not peanuts--they're not nuts!)
• lean meats (I'm not sure about this one, but I haven't read anything to the contrary)

Note: Meat is an issue because when you fry it, you get all those carcinogens, and these then cause inflammation, and cured and processed meats are linked to tons of problems, so there are very few meats that don't cause inflammation/problems. I am just going to stay away from them entirely.

That's about it. So it's no wonder we have inflammation everywhere, especially with GMO foods and alien-lifeform foods that we put into our bodies on a daily basis. I also suffer from inflammation, and I have been doing my own experimenting and researching to deal with it. I have been suffering from it since 2006.

Apparently, dairy and gluten are the two largest offenders for inflammation (according to Mark Hyman, anyway).

When I got the chronic pain in my tendons, I was eating a very SAD vegetarian diet, but I ate meat whenever we went out to eat, and I would even eat a lot of the PC brand frozen Indian dishes, so I wasn't really a vegetarian at all. And then I got the chronic pain. So I ventured to change many things in my lifestyle, and I still suffer from the pain. I am 38 years old. Nothing I have done has really done anything, except maybe time. Time has probably done the most good, but unfortunately time has a way of crawling by when you don't want it to. And so I have to accept what is happening, since I cannot control time, but I can control what I eat.

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." This was our mantra we had when I had unconsciously engaged in a pyramid multi-marketing scheme in New York back in '98. Thank God I had the wisdom to get the hell out of there and live my own life, rather than telling people how they should live theirs.

My uncle has had incredible success with Mark Hyman's Blood Sugar Solution, and told my mom about it. My mom told me about it, so I just got the book from the library, and since I have read the book, I have been inspired to make some major changes: cutting out gluten and sugar.

My naturopath has told me that I am sensitive to gluten, corn, and soy. Great. What the hell do I eat then? I haven't cut out corn or soy, but I am cutting out gluten to see how I feel. It's been three weeks now, and I can say I feel better, my irritated eyes don't seem to be so irritated--but the main consequence of cutting gluten is that you now have to eat more of something else to compensate for the loss in calories. And once you cut out gluten, you can then identify if any other foods are causing any problems. Since you're not eating gluten, you know it's not gluten that becomes the offender.

I used to eat a lot of organic corn chips, but I noticed my eyes got pretty irritated, so I'm thinking it could be corn. We had tacos over the weekend, and again my eyes got red and itchy, so is it corn? Who knows...we'll see what happens when I reintroduce gluten back in and see how I feel.

Eat B(right),

Veggie Daddy

Monsanto Is Not For Our Best Interests

Here's some food for thought:

Every time we buy a GMO food at the store, we are actually supporting the companies that are creating these genetically mutated monsters, we are giving them our tacit approval, whether we want to admit it or not.  "Some 93% of soybeans and 86% of corn crops come from such seeds."

If you look at this article, you will see that Monsanto believes "it needs its patents in order to protect its business interests...[which] is vital to preserving the motivation for developing new agricultural products."

However, as good as their intentions might appear, I would like to put it out there that Mother Nature does not need to be improved upon. We don't need any new agricultural products. Give us the opposite. WE WANT MOTHER NATURE BACK.

As Andrew Kimbrell simply points out in the indispensable documentary Genetic Roulette, there isn't one single advantage to having genetically modified crops for the consumer. NOT ONE.

As Monsanto simply states in the article above, there is only one reason they have patented crops: to make a buck. If you take the time to watch Genetic Roulette, you'll see they're doing much more than that. And it should scare the hell out of you.

Here's the doc. Watch it as soon as you can, share it with as many people as you can, and please shop consciously.



Use this non-GMO shopping guide.

Here's how to shop for non-GMO's in Canada.

Look for the non-GMO project.

Remember the main GMO products are:

1. Soy
2. Corn (flour, masa, meal, starch, sugar, syrup, oil)
3. Cottonseed Oil
4. Canola oil
5. Sugar Beets (sugar).
6. Any animal product (meat, dairy, eggs) that is fed GM corn and soy (all factory farmed).
5. Any processed food that contains GM corn and soy (the majority).

Eat B(right),

VeggieDaddy

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