3.11.2010

Traditional eating?

With a lot of fad diets steadily replacing actual healthy eating it is easy to get confused, swamped and totally overwhelmed by what is healthy.  Moderation we've always known is healthy.  Variety we've always known is healthy.  But what amounts really are healthy?  If you eat a meal bigger than your fist you are over eating to which I say YEAH, DELICIOUS! I try to make meals that are just as tasty bite 60 as they are in the first taste.  I am an overeater.  I also have a sizable butt.

Okay, so there are so many diets which one can choose from and still be healthy.  The basic ones are omnivore (meat and vegetable and if it's tasty period), vegetarian - no animals in diet* but products of animals may be consumed (*under which a lot of microlabeling gets folks all the more confused so I've separated the main categories), vegan - no animal products, raw food (eats living foods but not cooked meaning nothing that's gone over 150 degrees usually and so dehydrated or smoked meats are in some raw diets), and so all of these diets can yield healthy, happy results as long as additives and MSG (in all its names) are avoided.

So NOW... there are so many diets it is astounding.  With Gluten free to worry about, High protein... Lets just think about how SLOW evolution is. (I'll call it evolution because no matter what you believe God or otherwise it sounds a lot better to call a natural process slow than to blame God for us not changing rapidly with our environment.)  In the most natural state a human would never have the luxury of opportunity we have now.  You wouldn't as a simple woman or man living off the land encounter a deer kill it and then bring it to the firesite to rub it in a rosemary, lemon, garlic marinade to have it sit cooling overnight.  You would IF lucky rub some salt on it and fricassee up that bad boy.  And more likely is you wouldn't encounter a deer to kill and you'd subsist on a handful of berries or some wild leafy edibles.  In our day and age not only can we encounter things from the entire globe without leaving the heartland but we can now for the first time consciously select the vital things we need in our diets and remove them- at a whim.  Just take out something that is crucial to proper brain function,  or muscle growth.  Deem what is needed as bad.  And what is bad as good.  The ways in which a fad becomes harmful is the whole dropping the word moderation... If a diet is severe in that it removes certain foods because they are "bad"  then what does that diet replace for the things you once ate to get its value?  A vegan can be healthy with taking away butter, but should replace it with olive oil not margarine.  (margarine isn't healthy for anyone)  There is a simple way of looking at food.  There is nothing NEW in FOOD.  Its food! Intake for energy.  Take it and change it to lack the properties of food and then it just becomes EDIBLE and not straight poison. You CAN eat erasers off pencils and NOT die, but why would you do that?  Factories can't make the next best thing in food.  Nature makes food.  Man either cultivates it or destroys it.

Traditional eating is a term that is circulating, although I am not certain what that means for a lot of people - even those who eat traditionally. This notion of what it actually means changes with inference.  So where you came from, how you were raised and what you think of food would impart something when you hear "traditional eating."

I take it to mean eating closely with nature as our ancestors did.  I also think that eating together is an important part of eating well.  Eating as a couple, as a family, with friends.  Sharing bounty when it is there.  I take it to mean a really compassionate form of eating as well.  If you eat animals then what they eat is important, how they live is important.  I will wax on later about what a noble and great creature the chicken is. So I take traditional eating to be a lot like the philosophy of slow food

And I don't get paid for saying it!  So cultivate it, or destroy it. Your choice!

1 comment:

  1. I love this post--everything is so true!

    Keep the recipes coming Sara and Jason! =)

    -Lindsey

    ReplyDelete