Conscious Choice: Traditional Foods, Unconventional Wisdom

September 2000

Traditional Foods, Unconventional Wisdom

by Julie Brussell

Ah, food. A basic need, a sublime experience. A source of pleasure and a source of pain, a source of worry if we don’t have enough, a source of guilt if we have too much. One thing is certain, though: we all need to eat.

Too often today, we eat on the run, grabbing whatever we find as we cruise through the myriad eateries surrounding us. When we do slow down, we eat to celebrate. "Let’s do lunch." "Let’s meet for coffee." "How about brunch on Sunday?" "We’re having a few friends over for dinner." We eat to forget and we eat to remember. But, mostly, we eat because it’s fun.

Our culture has a love/hate relationship with food. We’re surrounded by our own ambivalence; we can’t get away from it. We’re inundated by advertising for the latest fast food concoctions and then by advertising for the newest diet strategies. Subliminally admonished that only thin people are successful, beautiful, sexy, we consume our French fries with a zero-calorie shake.

The diet gurus and scientists control our food consciousness: this month lowfat is good, no-fat is better, pile on the complex carbohydrates. Next month, high-protein is good, soluble fiber is better. Our heads and stomachs spin as we rush for the low-fat granola bar or frozen custard or bagged burger. Where did this food mania come from?

Have you ever asked yourself, "What am I really hungry for?" Have you even considered that the usual answers — I eat for comfort, for power, for escape — may not be true? Maybe we need to look again at what we consume, as much as why we consume it. And maybe the answer is in our stomachs, not in our heads.

Most of us have happy memories associated with "traditional" meals. We glow a little when we think about that holiday turkey, surrounded by stuffing and mashed potatoes. We smile at the memory of the apple pie on the countertop or the steaming bowl of collards on the table. Some of us get unaccountably excited about eating a hot dog at a summer baseball game. Those reactions aren’t sick, they’re a normal response to memories of childhood, festivities, and holidays.

Traditional eating is a joyous event. The only problem with traditional eating in America is that we don’t think far enough into the past. For food to truly rate as traditional, it should be remembered at a cellular level. Truly traditional foods are foods eaten by our ancestors — foods far removed from our all too-processed, highly refined modern diet. They are foods that our cells remember, even if we don’t.

The foodstuffs that we consume here and now bear as much resemblance to the foods we evolved eating as a plastic statue of a cow does to a snorting woolly mammoth. Literally, too much is missing: too many enzymes, too many beneficial bacteria, too many complex nutrients. Most of today’s highly processed, hybridized, sanitized, homogenized, colorized, pasteurized, chemical-laden, microwaved, and irradiated stuff scarcely deserves the name "food." No wonder our cells are hungry.

According to Sally Fallon of the Weston A. Price Foundation in Washington D.C., and Jo Robinson, author of Why Grassfed is Best! (Vashon Island Press, 2000), we can fix this state of affairs. And the solution is not so grim.

Weston A. Price was a dentist who traveled extensively in the 1930s. During his travels, he studied the physical attributes of indigenous people who never adopted a Western diet heavily dependent on refined grains, sugars, and highly processed vegetable oils. He compared them to others of their village or family who had adopted a Western-style diet. He found among those eating a refined diet significant evidence of degenerative problems such as tooth decay, infectious diseases, and other physical problems. These problems were not evident in those who relied on their native foods and preparation methods.

Sally Fallon reports his findings in her book, Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats (New Trends, 1993). Her conclusions are provocative: the overall health, bone structure, and teeth of those indigenous peoples who avoided pasteurized milk products, refined flours, canned foods, and refined sugars remained excellent. Those who adopted a modern diet succumbed to ill health and tooth decay.

Two significant issues to bear in mind: the animals and seafood consumed by these indigenous cultures or the animals providing their dairy products were not raised in the same industrial agriculture environments in which most domestic animals are raised today.

Most of the meat and milk consumed by our ancestors came from grassfed animals, whose pastures and feed were free from pesticides and other agrichemicals. In her book, Why Grassfed is Best! The Surprising Benefits of Grassfed Meat, Eggs, and Dairy Products, Jo Robinson cites evidence that the more grass a pasture-eating animal’s diet contains, the higher the amounts of CLAs, or conjugated linoleic acids, contained by their meat or milk. These essential fatty acids have been shown to be important for maintaining normal body weight as well as helping to reduce cancer risks. Eggs from chickens raised organically on pasture have also been shown to have increased levels of CLAs. These are the same types of meat, milk, and eggs consumed by our traditional diet-eating ancestors.

In addition, many animal foods as well as indigenous plant foods were consumed after being fermented or cultured. In other words, they were naturally processed by bacterial or fungal action to create foods like yogurt and tempeh. These foods were not then further processed and sanitized to a fare-thee-well.

Understanding the role of fermentation and other "traditional" processing and storage techniques as opposed to modern high-temperature or high-pressure processing such as hydrogenation is as critical to our health as understanding which foods we ate as we evolved. We need to think about both of these issues if we are to come to grips with why our bodies may be crying for enzymes and other nutritive elements missing in our modern diet.

Most of us are probably not anxious to experiment with many of the dishes relished by our ancestors, such as partially rotted fish, even if they are good for us. So, how do we reconnect our bodies and ourselves with traditional foods? We can experiment with adding some lacto-fermented foods to our menus, items such as Korean kim chee or cold-fermented pickles. These foods result from fermentation through the combined action of yeast and bacteria.

"Fermentation," according to Bill Mollison in The Permaculture Book of Ferment and Human Nutrition (Tagari, 1993), "is an excellent way to prolong the life of many foods and to build proteins and vitamins into starchy or low-grade foods." This fermentation action has been well utilized by indigenous people across the world throughout human history to store foods and enhance their nutritional value. Eating cultured dairy products such as yogurt, raw milk cheeses, and kefir, particularly when made from non-homogenized milk, provides us with foods that contain beneficial bacteria and enzymes found in our ancestral diets.

Isn’t all this meat and cheese a problem? What about saturated fats? According to Fallon, studies abound with evidence that saturated fats are not the human killer so often portrayed in medical reports. Her book offers study after study demonstrating that our bodies need some saturated fats to function properly. Some of these studies suggest that the real killers may be artificially hydrogenated fats, such as those found in margarines and solid vegetable shortenings. Brainwashed as we are, this may seem to be too much to believe, but consider the French phenomenon. The diet of most French men contains much more saturated fat than American men but they have significantly less heart disease. If saturated fats were in fact the heart disease culprit, this would make no sense.

Even some conventional medical health reports appear to be experiencing a change in attitude towards butter and other animal fats. Yet many of these fail to mention the connection between a grass-based diet and the animals providing the meat and milk. Even our animals need traditional food.

As usual, it seems that the knee-jerk tendency to label a food good or bad is faulty. The only truly good advice about what we should eat these days may have originated in the 1960s: "Question authority!" Ask questions about where your food comes from and how it was raised. Then ask yourself "Did my body evolve eating this kind of food?" If not, chances are your cells may be hungry for something not found in that deep-fried, flash-frozen, factory-crafted thing in your hand.

So, here’s some permission to loosen up a little: indulge in organic butter on your potatoes! Have grassfed steak once in a while, taking care not to make it a staple and overtax the planet. Treat yourself to a couple of free-range eggs. Just hold the white sugar and avoid refined flour. Your cells will jump for joy.

Recommend this page to a friend

Top Ten pages recommended to friends: