The View From Here/Up For This Week

Announcement!

First, an announcement. If you are a food-minded reader, please take a look at the new online magazine 'Eighty Percent Raw:' it's going to be packed with interesting articles, recipes, exercise advice and other discussions from a balanced perspective, and I'm going to be writing for it too! I'll be writing an article each month and I also have a blog over there that's just getting started. It has a discussion forum attached too, and I'll try to look in there as I'm able. 

For this week, I'm going to continue with my series on the no-sugar treats and I anticipate that I'll still talk about food and food issues a fair bit here, but since my other blog will be mostly about food, it will give me more space here to talk about everything else as well! (Well, that's the theory - amazing how there's always more to write about and not always the time to write it.) I will post a link here when I blog over there and vice versa. 

I want to talk about food issues and eating-disorder-recovery a bit here this week too, because I haven't much and because right now it feels relevant. There will also definitely be another 'wordstalk' this week, and I also have a post mostly written in the back of my head about making do when you have less-than-ideal equipment.

The View From Here

Starting from this post, I'd like to start each week with a 'view from here' post. (Unfortunately and super-ironically, the day after I finally learned to post pictures here, our camera stopped working! But we'll see if we can remedy that so that there will be more photos.) I remember saying last summer, when we were looking ahead to what it would be like to live here in the winter, that living in a place with this kind of climate is like traveling without going anywhere: the same places look so very different in the different seasons. As the days lengthen apace and the snow and ice inexorably melt and people have their seeds started indoors and there is even some green grass beginning to poke up amid all the brown, snow-bruised leftovers from last time, it feels like we're moving a little faster right now. 

And the view from my writing spot - from our whole cabin, perched as it is 30ft from the bluff - is perhaps incomparable as a vantage point for seeing transformation in action. All that said, I wrote my sister-in-law a couple days ago that we were definitely in 'Break-Up' now, as opposed to winter (a between-season that isn't quite Spring) and that very night it snowed 5 inches up the hill from us, and has been snowing and sleeting at our lower elevation. This morning our heater has quit working so I sit here in down coat, hat, down booties bigger than my head - and am quite happy. [update: Phil fixed the heater! He is so awesome in every way.]

We'll probably have some sunshine today: it just stopped snowing and you can at least see where the sun is through the clouds. These days of sun and cloud remind me of the constant imperative to pay attention to the gradations of light that is one of the most enduringly fascinating aspects of being here.

It's mating season for ravens, eagles, squirrels and it's lively out there! We didn't know that juvenile eagles bred, but we've seen two juveniles who definitely seem to be at least playing at it together. Yesterday they swooped out in wonderful, synchronous unison far out over the ocean, then parted and came back together in amazing symmetry, and twice we saw one flip all the way over! I see ravens do that all the time, but I'd never seen an eagle flip over before and nor had Phil.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, last week Phil and I were hiking the beach one evening and there were two mature eagles mating on the beach, who got interrupted by a flock of maybe 40 crows flying right over them - buzzing them, very deliberately - cawing in full voice! How rude… 

About No-Sugar Treats 3: My 'Magic Ingredient'

Thanks for bearing with me for that soul-baring interlude! I'm ready to share more about making raw energy bars without any sugar ingredients, which means, to recap the last post, without the easeful advantages of the sweetening, binding and preserving effects that dried fruit, honey and other syrups, and the like, provide. I hope you're also on board with me on the 'palate' aspect: if we choose to look at it as opening ourselves up to a spectrum of flavors that get refined out of ken by over-reliance on sweet, rather than as being deprived of the super-sweet, the adventure is even more joyful.

Well, so - back to my metaphors and substitutions philosophy… I am wanting to make a portable, delicious, energy-bar-type snack that holds together well and doesn't spoil too quickly. I love the adventure of infusing flavors… What could I find as a substitute? 

The magic ingredient that I came up with is actually composed of three magic ingredients that are already widely loved: I call it 'chia-sweet' - chia seeds*, white stevia powder and tea or other infused liquid! I realized that if I make a thick chia gel from chia seeds mixed with a stevia sweetened strong herbal tea, or water with stevia and a strong essence, I end up with a sweet ingredient that is also a binder: it's not sticky and waterless like honey or dates, but it's about as close as you can get without sugar! It's also versatile and variable in terms of thickness and flavor combinations. And it can work great as a substitute for sweeteners if you're adapting a regular recipe.

So, it has two of the sweet things' properties out of three going for it: sweetness and binding. What about the third, durability? - since it inevitably adds some water... I'm still working on this, and don't have a definitive answer yet, except to note that the time when I kept the fat content very low, as I mentioned before, it molded fast, so keeping a decent amount of fat in the recipe is essential. A good trick with this 'chia-sweet' ingredient is to include some flax meal, or some chia meal, in the dry ingredients. This will absorb the water further and may help to make it last. But as I said, this is something I'm still working on.

Here are some ratios to play around with: 1/2c chia to 1 1/2c liquid makes a thicker gel than commonly used just for chia smoothies, etc, so I often start from there as a guideline and scale up or down depending on how much volume I'm needing. It should be stir-able but there shouldn't be any 'loose' liquid there. As for the stevia and extracts, a teaspoon of pure white stevia is equivalent to a cup of sugar (or honey, or dates). Since I've often started from regular recipes that do contain dates/agave/honey/etc, I will decide how much sweetening I need and then add stevia accordingly. For example, if a recipe has 1/4c agave in it as the only sweetener, I'd use 1/4 teaspoon stevia. But if it also had dried fruit, I'd either put more, or up the cinnamon and ginger to complexify the sweetness.

Some of the 'flavorings' that I love to use in the liquid are: 

- a strong chai tea

- a strong peppermint tea and/or some peppermint extract

- almond extract 

- rose water with cardamom (my middle-eastern roots asserting themselves - I adore this!)

As an example recipe, the 'bliss ball' recipe I posted last time is also greatly improved by using 'chia-sweet.' This version of the 'bliss balls' really came out as a pretty convincing 'energy bar'-type texture, actually, although it's superfood-heavy, green, and looks good in balls!

1 1/2 c filberts (soaked and dried)

1/2 c brazil nuts (soaked and dried)

1/2 c shredded coconut

1/2 c hemp protein-fiber powder

1 T spirulina 

1 T maca

lemon zest

dried hot pepper

pinch sea salt

cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, ginger, black pepper, turmeric (yes, I'm spice-crazy!)

1/2 c 'chia-sweet' made with a 1:3 chia-liquid ratio, with 1/2t stevia and strong chai tea (chia-chai - tee hee)

1/4 c coconut oil (melted)

extra cinnamon (or what you will) for rolling

Grind the nuts, dried pepper, lemon zest, as fine as your equipment can manage, and mix all the dry ingredients in a bowl. Gradually incorporate the 'chia-sweet' alternately with the coconut oil. I always end up having to do the final mixing with my hands: don't be tempted to add more liquid before you've really incorporated as much as you can so that it holds together, you'll often be surprised at how little 'wet' it takes to get it all blended. Adding the coconut oil alternately with the 'chia-sweet' helps to avoid ending up with too much liquid in there. Roll in balls or shape in bars and coat with cinnamon if desired.

Oh, I love this! It's so good! It is so satiating on all sorts of levels. The maca was a great addition, as I'd suspected it would be. Note that I only added one more tablespoon of coconut oil compared to the last time. Durability-wise, definitely store quantities in the freezer and at least in the fridge.

Additional note: remembering metaphors and substitutes again, these recipes are totally 'templates:' it's easy to vary the nuts and seeds used (and I'll probably write sometime about the different virtues of each), as well as nut pulp from making mylks, superfood powders, protein powders, and spices. Probably not everyone likes as much of a spice explosion as I do :) And I, too, love to highlight individual spices on occasion. That's something else I'd love to talk about sometime - the different magics and properties of individual spices and their synergistic combinations.

So, 'chia-sweet' is my magic ingredient for holding energy bars together. I have also learned a really beneficial technique that seems to make the texture even better, and that will be the subject for the final post on the subject.

*When I started to participate in the raw food world again after my absence, the prevalence of chia was one of the little signs from the cosmos of how I was still connected: they'd been one of my favorite staples for quite some time. It was so sweet to see other people enjoying them in ways similar to myself. Here are some other good discussions of chia. This lovely article by Angela Stokes-Monarch is a comprehensive overview. Joanna just posted some luscious recipes and highlighted the high calcium content that is one of chia's many desirable features. The Pure 2 Raw ladies have pictures of their great creations featuring chia. Yes, chia is wonderful!

On the Other Side of the Glass/Different Perspectives on (your partner's) Detox/'Why do you need your Strength?'

I am going to lay out the different perspectives that Phil and I are experiencing on my current detox. I really hope that when I do this, I will receive help from the universe and also that it will be helpful for others to read.

I sincerely believe that Phil is concerned because he loves me, cares for me and wants the best for me: let that be said before anything else.

Phil sees that I went through a phase of expansiveness and permissiveness, allowed myself all kinds of things, and have now 'cut back' and thereby have reverted to my lifelong trap of austerity and renunciation, getting a reverse kick out of depriving myself and giving stuff up.

I see that I tried all of those everyday foods and felt unsatiated, crazy, in pain, bloated, and that all of those feelings increased that very deprivation tendency. Conversely, going back to raw foods happened 'by accident:' I never set a resolution or intention to do it: in fact, for over a year I hadn't even allowed myself to think  about it because I didn't think it fitted with Phil's lifestyle. Thus, I see it not as a 'cutting back' or a renunciation, but as finally, for once in my life, listening to my body! Not deprivation, but high-grading.

Phil sees that I have lost quite a bit of weight, and that I have days of intense fatigue and exhaustion, as well as a tendency toward anxiety. He knows that I'm a person who almost died of anorexia and still has body image issues. He thinks that I'm starving myself and wasting my muscles and nerves, hence jumpiness, and that I'm not going to be in shape for all the manic summer adventures.

I see that I am cleansing and detoxing, and really allowing myself the space and time to let that happen, really experiencing the concomitant exhaustion. Last week, I allowed my workload to pile up a little too much and got very anxious: I remind myself that deep cleansing really takes a lot of the body's energy and, in order to be strong in the long term, I have to let myself be weak now. However, I do also acknowledge that I've lost more weight than I expected to (without trying to at all), and think that this is hilariously ironic after those months last summer when I was trying to make myself live on fish and cottage cheese and spinach, _starving_ all the time and not seeming to lose weight very fast. At the moment, I feel very satiated for the most part. Phil compared my claim of satiation to the situation of the deer on Kodiak Island, who come down to the shore in the wintertime and fill their bellies with the seaweed, and have full bellies but end up starving to death. I have to disagree on that - even in this weak, cleansing mode, the contrast between my current satiation and the crazy craving feeling I was having before is just magical.

But Phil does have a point, and I need to confess to noticing that my avocado portion sizes have progressively shrunk, as have those of all the other more substantial foods I eat. His observation that I have a tendency to 'do without' if I can is a true one. When I was below 100lbs (which was for most of my 20s and up to age 31), it's true that I couldn't  ever seem to build stamina or muscle, frenetically active though I was and try though I might. I'm getting toward that point again and would prefer not to have to put myself in the position of 'needing to gain weight' because that is so triggering for me psychologically. 

For myself, I have to accept that this may happen before I'm through cleansing, and that it's going to occasion some alarm for my poor husband.

Phil sees that I'm depriving myself of treats, which he thinks everyone should have more of, and also of connection with other people through the shared pleasure.

I see that it's true that I had some fun eating chocolate (I even tried a bite of milk chocolate (bleck) - Phil is a snickers fiend) and drinking alcohol with friends, but look at the yeasty beasty consequences! I have to be glad for Phil that candy gives him so much pleasure and I have to believe that that being the case, trans fats notwithstanding, it won't do him harm (but this is so hard for me). But for me, the pleasure of the chocolate and alcohol was never simple, pure pleasure. I could always either feel negative reactions impending in my body or taste the underlying crappiness of the food. I can't let Phil kiss me when he's been eating peanut M&M's - it just smells so awful to me.

So, once again, he's right: the danger of my feeling cut off and judgmental is enormous. But I don't need to feel cut off because of the choices I make in order to feel my best! The judgment part is mostly based on fear, because I know how sick that stuff makes me feel and don't want it to be killing my loved ones slowly. But ever since I was a little kid and would throw up all day if I ate a breadcrumb, whereas all the other kids could eat plenty of bread without problems, I have had to acknowledge that the same food can act very differently in different bodies. Once again, I have to suspend judgment.

'Why Do You Want Your Strength Back?'

Last fall, as my strength went down and down and down, and I was feeling somewhat depressed and frustrated about it, one day a voice said to me that before I could have my strength back, I would need to achieve clarity about what I wanted it for. I've crashed and burned a few times before in my life after being super-active in someone else's rhythm. I'm not going to be allowed to repeat that cycle again.

This debate with Phil makes that question even more urgent, and also suggests some answers. Do these sound like some good things for which to want my strength back?

I want my strength back so that I can stay in my own integrity.

I want my strength back so that I can be flexible and accepting of others.

I want my strength back so that I have abundant energy to take care of my own needs, including treats, as well as cooking and baking for my family.

I want my strength back so that I can enjoy my relationship with Phil.

I want my strength back so that I can explore the out-of-doors, even in this harsh climate.

I want my strength back so that I can share of myself fully, both in person and through my writing.

I want my strength back so that I can fully relax!

Both of us are very open to advice - words of wisdom will be listened to and appreciated.

On the Other Side of the Glass/Different Perspectives on (your partner's) Detox/My Failed Attempt at Self-Transformation

More posts about the energy bars are coming! But today I feel that I need to write about some more personal stuff, to open my soul and strive for clarity through revelation, hope for good advice from kindred spirits and also hope that my own experiences may be of help to others. It's probably going to take two posts to say what I have to say conveniently.

Many people who change their diets are familiar with the social acceptance issues that this can provoke. The person who changes has their own part in this, in terms of avoiding becoming obsessive or judgmental whilst preserving their integrity. Their loved ones and family members also have the challenge of acceptance and understanding. There are so many differences between Phil's and my choices, constantly requiring our mutual acceptance and understanding: in many ways it seems like we inhabit parallel but different universes! And right now, marvelously accepting and understanding though Phil is, the intense cleansing process I'm going through, together with the prognosis of remaining on a low-glycemic raw diet, are difficult because of this difference in world-view. 

Here's some back-story to explain why I think that the groundwork I laid made this even harder.

'A Vane Blown with All Winds'

I own the mixed blessing of being ridiculously flexible in the ability to see all perspectives, to the point that I don't hold my own ground but allow myself to be, as Shakespeare would say, 'a vane blown with all winds.' Especially if I admire someone, I'm very likely to emulate them.

Well, I admire Phil tremendously! Apart from being extremely loving, funny and intelligent, he is, simply put, superman. He thinks nothing of working hard chainsawing all morning and then going for a 15 mile hike in the afternoon just for relaxation. He's been farther out in the most inhospitable wilds than anyone I know, just roaring along covering decades of miles per day on foot, just because he has so much energy. In the huge blizzard a couple of weeks ago, on one of the worse wind days he ski'd in the morning and climbed down our bluff to hike along the beach to town in the afternoon. I met him in town and had a hard time walking just a few hundred yards, the wind was so strong and icy! Oh, and did I mention, he's 61?!

On top of all this, he eats for fuel (can easily make a plate of meat and potatoes disappear when I've barely taken two bites of my salad, and be ready to run out again, whereas I feel better letting things digest for a while) and especially, for pleasure. If he feels like it, he'll take care of the whole pan of brownies at a sitting, or eat ice cream by the quart although he knows it's bad for him and makes him mucusy. Although he loves plants and herbs and is willing to put anything in his mouth in terms of wildcrafting experiments, his preferred tastes really are sugar and salt. And in terms of fuel, meat and bread are at the center.

When we got together, I had been vegetarian basically my whole life and raw for a half dozen years, and was just experimenting with raw animal products. I was also just beginning to build significant strength, which it's always been hard for me to do, and which I wanted very badly. I had also just been doing my own diabolical 'supersize me' experiment with the 'Primal Diet,' which is another story I could tell if there's interest, and thought I had some weight to lose. 

The Dangers of Being Married to Superman

So, I admired him so much and wanted so much to fit in with his life, and until my body simply wouldn't let me do it anymore, I set it as a rule for myself that I had to do as he did, in terms of physical output. Somehow, I thought that  if he's still (at the time) pushing 60 and going strong, and his diet and attitude worked for him to make such a dynamic phenomenon, I could convert myself to be the same.  So, if we'd been hiking all day and then he wanted to launch the boat from our campsite and row it around a bit, I had to go too, instead of finally relaxing. He never wanted me to be like this, and it was torture to make myself do it That recent blizzard day when I didn't join him brought home to me how glad I am that I removed that rule from myself!

As for adjusting to his food beliefs, he has such a cast-iron constitution and, it should be added, such a successful 'pleasure' approach that, whilst he acknowledges that what we eat does have some effect on our health, he has little patience for 'faddism,' doesn't really believe that there's danger from toxins/pesticide residues, etc, and dislikes the tendency to obsessiveness/judgment/exclusivism that tends to accompany special diets. 

I couldn't possibly eat the way he does (if only because of the gluten) but for the first year or so that we were together, I tried to at least make my diet a subset of his. I quit paying so much attention to rawfood considerations, lost touch with rawfood acquaintances, educated myself about meat and fish, started eating cooked food - and there were some good parts to that. There were enjoyable times: I love to cook! I also tried to allow myself to be a little more pleasure-oriented, and especially, to be able to feed myself pleasurably no matter where we were: I conceived a guilt complex for having had 'special needs' and forbad myself to make my own 'special foods.'

Constant cravings were a totally new thing for me, as well as feelings of deprivation. This was a 'detox' of its own: a lot of repressed cravings and deprivation from the anorexic and then fruitarian days, unacknowledged and now clamoring for attention.

Unfortunately, as my digestion worsened and my frustration continued as the 'supersize me' weight dissipated only slowly, this led to my buying all kinds of 'special' diet bars, etc, instead of making my own, which only helped me to feel worse. Worse here means weaker, increasingly depressed, moods out of control.

I quit all that, as well as dairy (which I'd re-experimented with), which made things much better emotionally, and was eating mostly steamed vegetables and a little meat and fish. But even then, even taking strong digestive enzymes, I had intense stomach pain every time I ate. Now, eating no meat, raw salads, nuts, algae, I'm usually pain free! It is such a relief! 

Back to being deviant...

But it is so painful too, because of its divisiveness and because it puts paid to my eating solely local foods. I really did try to make myself successfully 'locavore' (fish and game, with seasonal plant matter) here in Alaska. 

And I really did try to eat more like everyone else. Those are the two dilemmas. The first, locavorism, is about abundance, which has been a life-long issue for me to work on, while the second is about social acceptance, which I scorned in as a food-choice-based issue for a long time but which actually does count for something. 

I really believe in self-transformation, and that we can perceive this life and universe through any of a myriad prisms of perspective. And I really believed that I could transform myself into engaging with it like Phil does, specifically in the realms of activity output and insouciance about food input. I'm trying not to view this as a failure but rather as a recognition that in this regard, we are on different paths. Trying to turn myself into Phil was not ultimately going to serve me on my path, and therefore probably wasn't even the best thing for our relationship. It's back to the Serenity Prayer and 'the wisdom to know the difference' (between what I can and cannot change).

In the next section, I'll talk about the deeper dangers and concerns over this deviant diet of mine in Phil's and my different paradigms, since that's the troublous thing at the moment. And I'm afraid that my 'feet first' attempt to completely remake myself as described above probably makes my current habits seem even more outlandish and hard to accept.

About No-Sugar Treats: Intermission: The Palate of Available Tastebuds: A Subtler Kind of Sweet

I feel like I need to interrupt this series of posts, very briefly, with a point of information. This stems from an extremely interesting phone conversation with Bethanne and Christian last night in which, amongst other things, we were talking about the development and cultivation of fruits, the flavors of the wild fruits that we find, and the question of sweetness. This also connects to some of the points that Wrangham made about the differences between modern fruits and those available in a Pleistocene scenario.

Since my last post was about the 'palette' of ingredients for making these goodies, I'm prompted to indulge my paronomastic predilections and point out that you also need to develop your 'palate' to enjoy them! We are so conditioned to go for sweet, sweet, sweet. Many people can't really appreciate any flavors besides sweet and salty, (and fatty, because that is also a flavor) except in minuscule doses (and with lots of sweet and/or salt added - think sweet pickles).

Wild/uncultivated fruits and roots are less sweet, and in direct proportion contain more fiber and more tannins, minerals, vitamins and other compounds. As Wrangham pointed out, some of these compounds are toxic/unpalatable/undesirable. But many of them are important nutrients, and Wrangham also concedes that the increase in sweetness and palatability is always at the expense of nutrient density.

Consider this: it takes 2 feet of raw sugar cane to produce a tablespoon of pure, refined, white sugar. If you munch down on raw sugar cane, it's certainly sweet, but the flavor is much more than simple sweetness. The whole cane (which is, of course, a kind of grass) is as rich in minerals as grasses in general are famous for being. Refining all of that down to a tablespoon of sweetness is an essentially reductive process: everything else is lost along the way, not just the tough fiber.

Analogously, when we compare the level of sweetness of a wild or uncultivated fruit to one that has been co-evolving with humankind, the intensification of sweetness in the cultivated variety represents a similar reduction. Sweet at what cost?

I don't want to turn this into a rant and I don't want to get too sidetracked onto fruit discussion either, since I intend - and hereby set that intention - to make a longer post at a later date about different fruit trees and their evolution of sweetness.

But for myself, I feel grateful that between having a sensitive palate and a longstanding interest in and predilection for wild foods, as well as being forced to be adventurous by my body's lifelong intolerance of the standard fare available, I do have appreciation for the more complex spectrum of tastes. It is probably worthwhile to mention this up front, as something of a disclaimer for those who may want to try my no-sugar treats but aren't used to a subtler, more 'dilute' kind of sweetness (the 2ft of cane versus the tablespoon of sugar).

 I should also point out, though, that sensitive palate and adventurous spirit notwithstanding, I have 'mainlined' plenty of straight honey in my time. Fresh honey in new-drawn comb is the most incredibly sweet-tasting food you can come across. It's also far from being an unprocessed food: those bees had to fan-evaporate their gathered nectar from an 80% water solution to the 80% sugar, 20% water that is honey! Until moving from Hawaii with Phil a year ago, my main occupation was beekeeping and honey was one of my staple foods. None for me now, obviously.

So, if Ms Honey-hands the fruit fairy, which is who I used to be, can appreciate these subtler kinds of sweet, I think anyone can! Please stay with me.

About No-Sugar Treats 2: The Palette of Ingredients Available + a Recipe

In my first, conceptual post about making no-sugar treats and energy bars, I said that it is all about abundance - but also economy, in the avoidance of empty calories - and the recognition that I may need to stay off sugar indefinitely but am determined that this shouldn't mean that I can't have dessert. [I've left it to go without saying that I'm not going to use aspartame, splenda, etc but if anyone isn't on board with why not, I can write about that sometime.] 

In figuring out how to make things, it all goes back to my 'metaphors' post: if you know what role an ingredient is playing in a recipe, you can almost always devise a substitute for it. Today, I'm going to talk about the ingredients potentially available for making no-sugar bliss balls and energy bars. In my experimentations so far, I have also identified two crucial techniques, which I'll share in the next post.

This week, I posted my 'birthday pie' recipe, which is super-decadent and rich, and definitely not an 'every day' food. It was also pretty easy to de-sugar because the binding effects of potential sugary ingredients could easily be accomplished by more moisture and fat, and stevia works as a sweetener.

But bliss balls, energy bars and other kinds of snack are a really important 'every day' food if you have any kind of active lifestyle, as we do, and those are the ones I've been playing with the most because it's a bit trickier, because  of the variety of roles that the sweeteners play. 

In general, raw energy bars ('Lara Bar' or 'Organic Food Bar' style) are so easy! At their simplest, they are just nuts or seeds and soft dried fruit processed together. They can also include spices, salt, some nut butter or oil, honey, agave or other syrup, sprouted grains, superfoods, powders - cacao, carob, etc. But the basic nuts'n'dates is what does it. For a 'Lara Bar' type bar, the proportion is about 3 parts dates to one part nuts. These are a wonderful, portable food, and they don't spoil quickly either, so they're good compact camping food.

'Bliss balls' utilize many of the same ingredients but tend to rely more on nut butter or coconut oil and powdered ingredients and a small amount of syrup to hold them together. And raw fudges rely purely on the fat to hold them together - but will melt when it gets warm!

So, for my experimentations, all syrups and dried sweet fruits are out of the picture. (I say 'dried sweet fruits' because I put some dried jalapenos in my last batch of bliss balls and they're technically a fruit…) Which leaves me with everything else - nuts, seeds, spices, superfoods, sprouts, salt, nut butter, oil.

What are the roles these ingredients that I can't use play in the recipe?

1. They sweeten it. Well, duh! But this is actually the easiest thing to fix. Many kinds of nuts are sweet in themselves. Coconut and coconut oil are very sweet. Carob is Phase 1.5 and will be involved soon. So are goji berries, which is something to think about (although they're not really sweet). But stevia is a wonderful thing. Many spices are also sweet: especially cinnamon, cardamom, vanilla. I haven't cared for mesquite, but that's another possibility.

2. They make it durable. The dried sweet fruits, honey, agave, are all non-perishable. This means that you end up with a bar that isn't going to spoil rapidly. This role can be fixed either by using more oil in the no-sugar bar recipe, or by using more moisture and then dehydrating. But in the former case, it can end up being too oily, and one of the most delightful aspects of the typical energy bar is that it doesn't require dehydrating and is so simple to put together.

3. They bind it together. Dried sweet fruits, honey, agave, are all sticky. They hold the bar together without having to make a wet dough, which is also part of the durability piece. There aren't many things that contain no sugar and are sticky: in fact, one of the pleasures of avoiding sugar is this complete absence of stickiness! So, just like in role 2, the addition either of more moisture or of more fat is going to be necessary in adapting the recipe.

Stevia is wonderful, and cinnamon is actually somewhat viscous in water, but neither one of them is going to hold your bar together or stop it from degrading. And personally, I didn't want to end up with glorified sweetened nut butter balls: I wanted more protein in there. I also didn't want crackers. 

At this stage, I am starting to think that a little dehydration may be unavoidable (or else keep them in the freezer). Fat is also essential. My second experimental batch of energy bars, a few weeks ago, which had barely any fat and a lot of hemp protein powder, went moldy after just 6 days, in the fridge! Freaked me out. (It also didn't taste very good, even when it was fresh. (And obviously I didn't taste it after mold set in!)) The lesson from that batch was that slightly more fat really is a good idea. It helps with binding, but I got that batch to bind without it. Turns out it's really important for durability too.

Bliss balls rely on fat for binding and durability and raw fudges and chocolates do even more so. So, both of those are really easy to make no-sugar, because the main role dates/honey/agave/syrups are playing in the recipe is sweetening, rather than binding or making durable. (Please note, I adore the taste of all of these and am not saying that they don't contribute their own special flavor. But, for those who can't have them at all, it is good to know that you can still make the recipe without.)

There is one ingredient-composite and one technique that I have found really helpful in my experimentations, and I'm glad to share both of them. I'll do that in my next post on this topic, but I'll leave you with my most recent bliss ball recipe experiment: (c=cup, T=tablespoon, t=teaspoon)

1 1/2 c filberts (soaked and dried)

1/2 c walnuts (soaked and dried)

1/2c shredded coconut

1/2c hemp protein/fiber powder

3 T flax meal

1 T spirulina 

Generous shake of cinnamon

1 t ginger

1/2 t cardamom

pinch sea salt

1 dried jalapeno

lemon zest

3 T coconut oil

water

extra cinnamon for rolling

Grind the nuts until they're mostly powder, then put in a mixing bowl and add all the dry ingredients. Stir together, and then add the coconut oil and enough water so that it holds together. Add the water a very little bit at a time and stir lots: it's less water than you might think!

When the mixture holds together, roll into balls in your hands, and dust with cinnamon.

Note: next time I make these, I might add a little more coconut oil, as I did in my previous batch: this batch is nice and high-protein but doesn't hold together quite so well. Next time, I'll also add some maca, which is another good binder (plus delicious).

Wordstalks 3: Unetymologizable

I have a thing for hot peppers, surprisingly for someone with as sensitive a digestion as mine. But no, this post isn't going to be about food and digestion! I'm just telling a story. One evening last week while I was fixing dinner and got too hungry, I munched down on a dried jalapeno to hold me over - and soon concluded that it wasn't the best thing to have gone for! I mentioned something about it to Phil and he said, 'Oh, honey, that's about the least copacetic thing you could have eaten, isn't it?'

'Copacetic?' ???

It stopped me in my tracks. I'd never heard that word before! One of the great pleasures of being a word nerd with a background in linguistics and a very intimate knowledge of Latin, Ancient Greek and some others, is that ordinarily, if ever I hear an unfamiliar word, especially technical or botanical, I can etymologize it pretty much instantly and figure out what it means.

'Copacetic.' I tried several different segmentations and parsings. I was stumped. That 'co' on the front and that 'tic' at the end were so teasingly, beguilingly Latinate, so maybe I could make head and tail of it but without a body, head and tail did me little good!

Usually I read dictionaries for pleasure, not to look up a word, but 'copacetic' sent me to the dictionary. And I found myself in good company: no one knows its etymology and it's classified as early-mid 20th century American slang! It means 'in good order,' 'agreeable,' 'ok.' Even the spelling isn't nailed down - it can be spelled 'copasetic' too (although my spellchecker doesn't like that spelling).

Phil gave me some contexts in which he'd heard it. He said that it was mostly in the context of army guys -  'Wanna go down to the burger place in twenty?' 'Yeah, that's copacetic.' 'Do you have time to take care of this mess over here?' 'Yeah, that'd be copacetic.' 

He suggested, and I'd suspected this too on the basis of my dead-end-etymologizing, that someone had made it up to sound like a clever long word and then just used it a lot facetiously.

So, 'copacetic' is now a fairly frequently used word around our household, always with a big smile and tongue in cheek!

And, of course, it's a major fillip for my Philip - he rarely gets to stump me with a word!

Photos, Mark 2

Now I get to laugh at myself! I had so much resistance and anxiety and residual ludditeism, and apart from the horrendously slow internet connection and the fact that each photo took minutes to upload, that last post was ridiculously easy!

I am going to follow up with a few more pics that I wanted to share, and leave that last post unedited for posterity, to laugh at myself. And tomorrow, I promise that I will post another 'wordstalk' and also share some more about my no-sugar energy bar experiments.

I also need to give a shout-out of thanks to our brother-in-law, Larry, another wonderful photographer in the family, who gifted us the camera back at New Year's 2009! Larry - finally we've gotten to it!

Those of you who know about our long-drawn saga toward maybe one day getting running water to the cabin will be amused by this one:

This is the head of our driveway, the end of the cul-de-sac, and we really did tie the 1100-gallon tank down with fishing line and drive it home last summer. (This was in July. Sweet to see green grass on the road.) Doesn't it just look like a giant snail? Even sillier: we were out of water at the time, so you can't see our 6-gallon jugs crammed and jammed in, but we drove our snail into the Safeway parking lot to fill them - and got some strange looks indeed!

Every solstice around full moon there are some enormous tides, and last June we went across the bay in Phil's little boat,

and saw some amazingly altered and challenged life. Here are the starfish hanging out to dry:

high and dry, poor things! And here's one more for perspective - amazing how shallow the water is compared to normal:

The tideline is above the top of the photo!

Well, those times are coming up again soon, or so it feels, with the snow melting, willows budding and sun shining - but we don't put the shovels away yet!

I'll leave you (if I can get them to upload before running out of time) with a couple pictures from last week's blizzard:

This little yearling moose (the smallest folks have seen around here lately) was hanging around our cabin most of the worst day of the blizzard - here, she's trying to eat the mountain ash tree.

Here, she's working on our raspberry canes - look how much more snowcovered she is by later in the day! Talk about tough...

Photos, At Last!!

It's been a very busy week but it's important to me to keep promises. If all goes well, I'll have some photos up in the next few minutes.

I'll start with my lovely Phil! On a camping trip across the bay last summer. Here's another: in his element, on the beach.




Please bear with me with this strange formatting - I'm running out of time and computer battery once again and just getting the hang of this.

A couple photos of my love to begin with, but it turns out that he is really the one who is the excellent photographer. His brother is a professional, and amazing, and told me that Phil could have been too (in addition to all his other talents). But that explains why more of the photos that were in the camera were pictures of me...

Now for some pictures to give a clue about the little one-and-a-bit-room cabin we live in.

This was taken in August, looking east from our cabin. Can you see the double rainbow?

Our cabin's whole south-facing wall is windows from waist-high up. This is due south - the edge of the bluff is 30ft from our windows. This is midwinter sun - look how low in the sky it is!
When the sun is out, our cabin is a solar oven. It can be beyond freezing outside and hot inside!

Here I am at the edge of the bluff outside the cabin, the tide is going out and you can see the beach 400ft below!

Goofy, but Phil caught me sitting up in our sleeping loft - he's below, with his back to all those south-facing windows, in the main room.

And finally - Phil was very displeased with the way the zoom distorted my face, and it is an awful picture of me, but I'm including it because you can see our outhouse in the background through the west window (and appreciate my earlier enema story even more!) Also, the blue canister behind me is the six-gallon jug with spigot that serves as our sink water.

I have more pictures to post but the internet is so slow and Phil is waiting to go home, so that should be enough for this time. Yay, though - finally did it!

As Promised - My Birthday Pie Recipe

Finally, as promised, I get around to posting the recipe for my chocolate-almond birthday pie with no sugar and with yeast-fighters in every layer. As I mentioned originally, the recipe is loosely based on the 'chocolate peanut butter pie' in 'Rainbow Green Live Food Cuisine' - but only loosely: that is a Phase 2 recipe. I was really just using it the concept and as a 'quantities' guide.

Two disclaimers: the small amounts of maca and carob I consider ok under the 'small amounts of something from Phase 1.5 in the context of something larger' rubric. And, I ended up using cashews (which are on the 'off' list) for the whipped cream/cheeze because I simply didn't have anything else that would work. I did soak them in peroxide and culture them with a probiotic, so mold issues are unlikely.

So, then, the base was:
1 cup(soaked/dried) pecans,
1 cup pulp from making milk (could use 2c nuts but I like the lighter texture)
2 tablespoons ground flaxseed
2 tablespoons coconut oil
1 teaspoon maca
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1/4 teaspoon pure stevia
and some nutmeg and cinnamon.
A little water to get to stick, for which I used my yeast-fighting pau d'arco/reishi tea.

All blended together in the food processor.
This was just barely enough for a thin crust for a 9-in plate.
*Yeast fighters: coconut oil, pau d'arco/reishi tea

The almond layer was:
1 cup almond butter
3/4 cup cashew cheese (made the night before by blending soaked cashews, juice of half a lemon, a pinch salt, 1/4t stevia, acidophilus)
1/4 t almond extract
1/4 t pure stevia

Blended with immersion blender - was very hard work for it! Added a little tea.
This made slightly more than enough for the 9-in plate.
*Yeast fighters: acidophilus, pau d'arco/reishi tea.

The chocolate layer was:
1/4 c cacao butter
1/4 c olive oil
1/2 c ground cacao nibs
2 scoops chocolate 'Amazing Grass' superfood powder
1 tablespoon carob
1 tablespoon lecithin
scraped vanilla pod
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup pau d'arco/reishi tea

Blended slowly with immersion blender until all incorporated: added the tea last and gradually. Poured a layer of this over the almond layer. Reserve at least 1/2c for final swirl.
(Man, this was so so so good!)
*Yeast fighters: pau d'arco/reishi tea

The top creme layer was:
Remaining 1 c of cashew cheese (see almond layer)
2 tablespoons coconut oil
2 tablespoons lecithin
2 tablespoons powdered psyllium
2 tablespoons xylitol
scraped vanilla bean
1/4 teaspoon salt
sprinkling ground cloves

All blended with immersion blender.
Pour over the top of the chocolate layer, let sit in fridge or freezer for a while, and then pour 1/2 cup remaining chocolate mixture into center and swirl.
This layer was the least successful layer (it sort of tasted like bananas!) It wasn't quite enough for a really deep swirl.
*Yeast fighters: acidophilus, coconut oil, xylitol.

For me, a small piece of this is incredibly satisfying and delicious. At the party, despite the plethora of other foods, half of it got eaten and everyone liked it!

Sugarless Treats and 'Making Do:' Preliminaries

'Diet' versus 'Cleanse'

As a prelude to my series of posts about no-sugar treats and my quest to develop a raw energy bar with no dried fruit or syrup, I need to talk about the question of ‘diet’ (in the ‘whole lifestyle’ sense that I’ve used it elsewhere here) versus a temporary ‘cleanse.’ In a way, this also connects to the concept of ‘making do:’ what can be pruned out of a diet so that there’s still great nutrition – and pleasure, of course?

We can’t control the future, but we can have clear intentions and directions for our navigation of the morphing of ‘then’ into ‘now.’ I’ve been doing ‘Phase 1’ of ‘Rainbow Greens’ for a month now and my intention is to continue (with small amounts of Phase 1.5 foods, particularly maca) for a couple more months. But then what?

The ‘cleanse’ model says, ‘Great – you did the cleanse, you took the herbs, you got rid of the yeasties, now you can eat whatever you like and you’ll be just fine.’ This is what my husband, bless him, believes and wants for me. He doesn’t want to see me return to the ‘deprivation’ mode in which I spent so much of my life – and this includes the pleasure piece most especially (candy and ice cream are big features in his family).

The ‘diet’ model says, ‘Eating the way you used to eat, you got sick – maybe gradually, but inexorably. You were feeding yeasties instead of yourself. Don’t you feel so much better now? Why would you want to change that?’ Given what I recognize about my body and what it’s been through, this is the model that rings true for me, probably settling in a ‘Phase 1.5-type’ basis.

The Dance

The dance and the trick will be not to allow this to turn into deprivation (as I have done at family gatherings where I haven’t taken care of myself). The emotional tug of feeling deprived is an achesome thing indeed, and it’s one that I repressed so deeply all the years that I was anorexic (and fruitarian for that matter) that I recognize that I needed to real-ize and experience it in the last year. It was always a purely emotional sense, because I've always been able to taste how gross ‘conventional’ sweets are ‘under the surface’ and feeling sick for a whole day after eating ice cream isn’t worth it to me – it wasn’t a physical pleasure I was being deprived of.

And of course, the other trick will be not to end up ‘black and white’ about it. Over and over, this is the dance and the harmony that I seek. I acknowledge that I am connected to all and all to me, but I exercise discrimination about what parts of ‘all’ are filtered through my body.

Key Concepts

Three key concepts for me here, in my exploration of sugarless-treat-creation and intentions about ‘diet.’

1) Be prepared! I make the commitment to take care of myself, to share of my abundance and creativity, to hold a nonjudgmental space for others’ choices, and to make sure there is no need for me to feel deprived.
2) Love, not fear. This does away with the danger of ‘black and white.’ When my system is in balance again, if it feels loving to myself and others to do so, I can partake in small amounts of sweet fruit, or whatever else, in a spirit of love, pleasure and abundance that will ensure that my body takes it the right way. Meanwhile, constantly keep in mind that my choice is ‘highgrading,’ not renunciation.
3) Avoid empty calories. If I can make something sweet and delicious without incurring a whole load of extra calories (especially the deadly sugar-and-fat-calories combination that besets many raw desserts), why would I want to do it differently?

And then I guess that the fourth thing is a willingness to be creative, both in preparing things and in tasting them. This is the true blessing that I have received from all my allergy problems: I’ve noticed that I’m far, far less attached to how something ‘should’ taste than most people are, and far more willing to appreciate unfamiliar flavors.

I choose not to feel sad about all the years I spent learning as much as I could about fruit and fruit trees, and bees and beekeeping. In fact, I’m looking forward to some bee pollen in the next few weeks and am going to try and run some bees up here! I feel gratitude for the continuous exploration.

On 'Catching Fire:' Part 2.3: Implications for Raw-Foodists 3

What we've had up to this point:
Part 1
Part 2.1
Part 2.2

I concluded the previous part of this study by saying that Wrangham's demonstration of the key role of cooking in human evolution is convincing. But I remain a raw-foodist! In fact, I think that some of what he has to say argues in favor of eating at least a very high percentage of raw foods. So, now for the fun part, where we look at how his hypothesis can be true and can still motivate raw food eating. First, though, I'll summarize the 'take-home lessons' for raw-foodists from this book.

'Take-Home Lessons for Raw-Foodists'

It's a Choice and a Joy, not a Dogma
The first and most important lesson, which I already mentioned in the previous post, is to let go of the mythological beliefs about our pristine, Garden of Eden antecedents. That probably is not how we got to where we are now. As I'm going to discuss in more detail in a moment, I think it's far more interesting to look at where we are now and where we're headed than at where we came from. The sweetest part of letting go of the mythological thinking is that it frees us up: instead of saying 'we're supposed to eat this way,' 'this is our natural diet;' we can say that given the amazing options that the thousands of years of food processing, breeding and developing have wrought, these are the foods that we choose to eat in order to be at our best!

This feels quite liberating. It also does away with the inconsistency of proclaiming that we all ought to be eating like bonobos, whilst secretly feeling glad that we have more brains than they do, and are not compelled to spend so very many hours of every day masticating, and meanwhile looking at our seedless grapes, or supersweet carrots, and wondering how much resemblance these really bear to bonobo fare.

Aside from releasing this ideological mind-trap, there are a couple of practical pieces of advice that raw-foodists could glean from the book.

Fiber

The first of these is that from an evolutionary perspective, reduction of fiber in the diet was a key factor in allowing nutrients to be more readily available. Our guts shrank (to around 60% of the size predicted by comparative anatomy with other primates) in response to a reduced need for fiber, and in the absence of all the extra gut tissue doing all that metabolic work, our brains increased in size.

Fiber is a controversial subject among raw-foodists. Juicing advocates extol the benefits of removing fiber so that nutrients can be absorbed for less labor by the guts. Others contend that the fiber is necessary to produce more of a timed-release effect. What is not controversial is that the presence of fiber combined with sugar slows the release of the sugar and mitigates spikes in insulin. So if you wanted to avoid insulin spikes, it wouldn't be a good idea to juice a lot of very sweet fruits (removing their fiber), or to eat a lot of honey by itself.

However, after reading this book, I have stopped feeling the need to eat quite so much fiber (having gone through my own obsession with it as part of my quest for an answer to my own gut issues). If you are eating a plant based, mostly raw diet, you will be eating plenty of fiber (which is, of course, an important nutrient for gut flora). And drinking a nut milk or a vegetable juice can be a wonderful way to receive the nutrients 'directly,' keeping more of your available energy free to fuel your brain or the rest of your body.

Absorption

It would also benefit raw-foodists to assimilate the information given here, that bodies absorb calories more efficiently from cooked foods than from raw foods, so there would be some wisdom to paying attention to optimizing one's absorption.

From Scarcity to Abundance - The Choice to Be Raw: Outgrowing Evolutionary Programming

Wrangham concludes his book by saying that the glut of overly processed, nutrient-poor foods of today are the logical conclusion of the whole evolutionary thrust that began with cooking. From an evolutionary perspective, dismal as these foods are, they 'are the foods we have evolved to want.' p.195.

We can choose to see this as an invitation to open our eyes and look at where we are going, as well as where we came from. From an evolutionary perspective, as Wrangham says, 'life is mostly concerned with energy.' p.81. The sheer fact of absorbing more calories would have trumped any detrimental vitamin loss or toxic by-products in the race to live long enough to reproduce. What a different world from the world that many of us are blessed to live in today! Many of us can choose not to reproduce - think it a moral imperative not to, in fact. Instead of being limited to what happens to be available nearby that could conceivably yield calories, many of us have access to the pick of foods developed to be maximally appealing to us.

Many of the common foods available today provide an excess of calories, instead of what's needed for survival and reproduction, accompanied by a shortage of vital micronutrients and an exacerbation of the negative/toxic by-products of processing, and instead of growing stronger and smarter, the opposite will happen.

It's time to think about micronutrients! It's time to think about what we're here for!

The situation of being overfed and undernourished is now familiar: people are overweight and yet starving at the same time. On the other hand, people who transition to a raw food diet often report a period of initial voracity followed by a progressively increasing satisfaction with less food.

We don't need to be following the 'take in as many calories as possible' program: it is now obsolete. Our short guts and big brains mean that we require high-quality fuel, complete with all the micronutrients, that is readily assimilated, in order to be the best we can be, for as long as possible.

Environmental Toxins

Back in the Pleistocene, Maillard molecules and detrimental carbon compounds from charring may have been the bulk of the toxins our ancestors were exposed to. Once again, the picture has changed. Toxins of all kinds are so all-pervasive nowadays, and are having clearly documented and serious effects on the health of the whole ecosystem, from the individual up. Because we're not in the Pleistocene now, we're not obligated to eat manioc, or taro, (or blowfish!) or other foods that are nutritious cooked but highly toxic raw. We actually have the luxury of being able to choose foods that are edible, palatable, lacking in toxic by-products from preparation, and rich in the micronutrients we need.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a correlation between increase in sweetness (i.e. appeal to the evolutionary drive) and decrease in micronutrient profile in the development of plant foods. However, heirloom varieties are becoming increasingly available. Depletion of soil
and hybridization, as well as the general pervasiveness of toxins in the environment, create a very different nutritional environment from that in which we evolved. All three of these make choosing raw foods seem like a good idea, as they will have the least concentrated load of environmental toxins, an absence of toxic byproducts from heat exposure, and likely the most vitamins and antioxidants available. Raw plant foods will be best of all on all three counts, since toxins are concentrated up the food chain.

Final Words

So, in conclusion, our 'cooked' evolution, our drive to reproduce, and our creative intelligence have brought us to this place of massive abundance of choice, with unfortunate corollaries of excess and toxicity. We can choose to turn away from the evolutionary imperative and use our evolved large brains for more than finding fuel and reproducing. We can choose to turn away from empty calories. We can choose to eat foods that are full of micronutrients and life-protecting antioxidants. We may choose to lightly cook some foods on occasion, especially in calorie-deficit circumstances, knowing that these calories are more readily absorbed (but we can choose to be very careful about what we decide to cook). But we can choose to be raw because we love it, and not out of a feeling of compulsion, fanaticism or dogma.

Coming Up This Week - Photos and more!

Last night I finally made the connection between camera and computer - there, not so hard, was it?!

Turns out that we had many photos from various seasons up here in Alaska, and sometime this week I am going to share a whole bunch of them on here. I have had so much resistance to this, and now we're off and running!

I still intend to make this mainly a word-based blog, partly because I know the frustrations of waiting for pictures to load on a slow connection. It can take forever.

Other promises to be fulfilled this week: right after I post this, I'm going to post the final installment of the discussion of Catching Fire. This week I'm also going to continue the series of posts about 'making do' that I started on Saturday. Two other promises that I'll fulfill: I will post the recipe for my raw birthday pie with no sugar and yeast-fighters in every layer, and I will start my series of posts about my experiments to create no-sugar treats and energy bars. I also feel like it's high, high time for another 'wordstalk!'

It was snowing this morning, but when I hiked down to the library to use the internet, it was 40 degrees, sun glaring off panoramic snow, the roads running with torrents of snow-melt; I frequently had to scrape myself against the very edge of the sidewalk to avoid being drenched by spray from passing vehicles... I'm looking forward to sharing photos of this spectacular place.

Love to all...

'Making Do,' Eating Locally, Accepting Where I Am

The final section of the discussion of 'Catching Fire' is coming soon: the really crucial stuff about what Wrangham's scenario implies for raw-foodists.

But I have to make a digression, to honor a feeling. I've been wanting to write a series of posts about 'making do,' being creative with what you have even if it isn't much or isn't ideal. From some perspectives, 'eating locally' is a part of 'making do,' and living in Alaska, where the ground is frozen seven months of the year in the balmier places even, makes that a challenge!

I've been hearing people elsewhere talking about starting their gardens, and have seen photos of fiddlehead ferns poking up. I ate loads of fiddleheads last year - in June! So we're still a good ten weeks away…)And this morning, as Phil and I hiked on the frozen beach, talking about fishing expeditions, I found myself tearing up with compassion for myself (not self-pity, I hope!) - remembering how very hard I had tried to 'eat locally' for many months last year, to convert my body to get most of its calories from fish and game - and how very much better I feel now that I'm no longer forcing that, but how sad that it cuts down on 'local' subsistence so very much.

Of course, in the three-to-four month growing season we can grow quite a lot of vegetables, and last year we wild-crafted large amounts of berries and greens (nettles, ferns, various shoreline grasses and herbs, as well as kelp and dulse). That's something to look forward to.

And for now, I am doing my best. I sprout lentils, fenugreek, sunflower seeds. I mix dried nettles in with my salads (delicious!). Cilantro pesto from my wonderful cilantro patch last year is in the freezer and getting used. I want to find out if it's possible to grow maca here, spirulina - would be so cool to grow superfoods besides the superfoods that grow wild here.

Since I've been sent this opportunity to make this place home for now, I have to make the best of it and learn all that I can from it. This is one of the last wild places, a place of great beauty. And it has been my husband's chosen homebase for the past 30 years (almost as long as I've been alive!) And even if it is true that eating fish and meat made me sicker, I can derive all sorts of powerful medicine from the plants that grow here. They have to be pretty potent to survive here at all. Considering how horribly spiky it is, in the first of spring, the new growth shoots of devil's club are surprisingly delicious. (Devil's club, by the way, is 'oplopanax horridus,' where the 'panax' part indicates its status as a panacea. More to explore there.)

Like many who live in Alaska, we have no running water at home (imagine the challenges there)! We haul six-gallon jugs from the public spigot at Safeway in town. Well, that spigot has been out of order the past few days (thank goodness I didn't make kombucha - we'd have had no water at all). We are finding another way today, and it has also inspired me to harvest snow from outside and explore that.

So, I temper the twinges of sadness I'm feeling at living in the land of the long winter with determination to do my best, and to learn as many of the lessons offered to me here as I can possibly compass. I continually make my peace with the 'eat all local' ideal, and give thanks for all the ways that I can connect with people elsewhere, and hopefully share some of the powerful plant and animal lessons that I'm learning here. It's certainly a global and iconic instantiation of the whole practice of 'making do,' and I look forward to writing more about that.

On 'Catching Fire:' Part 2.2: Implications for Raw-Foodists 2

Dispelling Raw-Food Mythology (and Clearing the Way to a Better Understanding)


The Rest of The Posts on this:
Part 1
Part 2.1
Part 2.3

Outgrowing the Garden of Eden

Raw-foodists love to tell an idyllic evolutionary story for humans, whereby we evolved in a balmy tropical Garden of Eden, where we didn't need clothing to keep warm, and where rich, sweet, abundant tropical fruits dripped from the trees year-round and sustained us effortlessly. Some leave their previous lives and move to the tropics in pursuit of this. I did, myself, for a time. Wrangham shows, unequivocally, in my view, that this story never happened. I will discuss how he shows this, add a few comments from my personal experience, and look at the implications for raw-foodists.

A side-note on Wrangham's credibility: it is clear to me that he knows what he is talking about. This isn't because he's professor of Anthropology at Harvard, or because his book is so thoroughly researched and well presented, so much as because of his personal engagement with the issues. He has personally spent time in Africa, studying the living conditions of great apes for extended periods of time. He has followed a chimpanzee around and tasted for himself the kinds of foods selected by it. Although nothing is for certain, I wouldn't be writing about this if I didn't believe that what he has to say is worth paying attention to.

Seasonal Fluctuations in Quantity Available

Working up to his conclusion that 'people with an anatomy like ours today could not have flourished on raw food in the Pleistocene epoch,' pp. 49-50, he dispenses with the possibility of year-round bounty, noting that in every habitat, world-wide, seasonal scarcities are the norm and force reliance on lower-density foods such as roots. 'The notion of a permanently superproductive habitat is unrealistic.' p49. This is one to take down and memorize, I'm afraid! It is the first point of key importance to note. And initially, I disagreed with it!

Personal Experience

I thought of Hawaii and my first thought was 'Coconuts! They are available year-round, nutrient dense, powerful food.' But then I had second and third thoughts. Coconuts do produce year round but you can only harvest young nuts every 4 months or so. And if you harvest all the young nuts, you won't have any mature nuts or sprouts, which are much more nutrient-dense, on the ground. In Hawaii there are many wild coconut groves where you can gather as much as you want from the ground: but part of the reason for this abundance was that relatively few people go after them. If they were a sole staple, you would need a lot of coconuts indeed to sustain even a small population.

Besides coconuts, even on the fruit farms in Hawaii there was seasonality. If you planted carefully, and had several different varieties (hailing from different original provenances), you could have avocados year-round most years. Continuous bananas and papayas are also possible, with cultivation and intentionally timed plantings, and even then there are periods of greater and lesser abundance. Durians and macadamias are highly seasonal, as are the calorie-dense annona fruits. Jakfruits and breadfruit produce continuously, and then fallow for a while, so they have no predictable season, just 'go' continuously; mamey sapotes are like this too.

But the most sobering recognition for me when I moved to the fruit farms in Hawaii was that none of these foods was wild, or native to Hawaii: that in fact, the appearance of year-round abundant fruit (with scanty periods with nothing but a few bananas) was due to the careful planting of a large variety of cultivated trees, shrubs, plants, originating from Asia, Africa, South America… And even then there were lean times in terms of variety and quantity of fruit. In a sense, I learned the lesson that Wrangham tells from my own experience there.

Outside of the fruit farms, in the jungle, there were wild (escaped/naturalized) mangos, avocados, guavas, mountain apples, nonis, besides the coconuts. But these are all seasonal and would not sustain very many people for very long (especially with all the competition from rats, pigs and mongoose).

And the Issue of Quality

Personal Experience

In addition to the fact that no habitat would have provided sufficient quantity of nutrient-dense tree-fruits to sustain humans year-round, the quality of the foods also has to be considered. I mentioned above that none of the wonderful tropical fruits mentioned above was a wild food. (It should be noted here that, while seedling durians, mangoes, avocados and jakfruit (to name but a few) can produce some of the most wonderful fruits, the vast majority of these seedlings produce fruit that is either completely inedible or very inferior. Seedlings also take much longer to fruit than grafted or air-layered trees. Some of the sapotes and annonas cannot reproduce from seed at all, although they are full of big seeds!)

From Wrangham

Wrangham mentions in first chapter that wild fruits eaten by chimps at Kibale National Park in Uganda, analyzed in their lab at Harvard, contain about as much sugar as a modern carrot. As a quality source of calories, Wrangham identifies three problems with wild fruits as compared to modern fruits that have been bred to taste delicious to us: Wild fruits are higher in fiber, lower in sugar and contain many toxins, tannins and other anti-nutrients. He lists several foods that chimps will happily chew on for hours on end that are astringent, bitter and otherwise unpalatable to humans.'In my experience of sampling many wild foods eaten by primates, items eaten by chimps eaten in the wild taste better than foods eaten by monkeys. Even so, some of the fruits, seeds and leaves that chimps select taste so foul that I can barely swallow them. The tastes are strong and rich, excellent indicators of the presence of non-nutritional compounds, many of which are likely to be toxic to humans - but presumably much less so to chimpanzees.' p.51. Lower quantities of simple sugars, higher quantities of fiber, and the presence of toxic compounds all reduce the utility of wild fruit as a viable source of calories for humans.

A smaller point here is that Wrangham's link between fire and hairlessness in humans is more convincing than the mythology that says that we wouldn't need hair if only we lived in the tropics. Even in the tropics, humans need protection from the elements! Yes, the temperature is generally more comfortable, but even in the tropics it can get cold at night. The bug situation bears some thinking about also (could tell some bugbear stories there, lol)…

So, if Wrangham is right, and cooking played a crucial role in our evolution into the beings we are today for as long as 2 million years - and his demonstration is very convincing and plausible - where does that leave raw foodists today? That will be the subject of my final post on this.

On 'Catching Fire:' Part 2.1: Implications for Raw-Foodists 1

Links to the rest:
Part 1
Part 2.2
Part 2.3

There are two ways in which Wrangham's book is of special interest to raw-foodists that I am going to examine here. First, and more briefly, I am going to look at his criticisms of raw food diets and offer some responses to them. Second, and much more interesting and important, I am going to discuss some of the implications of the rest of his research for raw foodists and in fact for anyone who is interested in how to make good nutrition choices.

There are things in here that are useful and important for raw-foodists to know, partly because his research puts paid to some of the mythology surrounding raw foods that is often asserted by raw food enthusiasts and discredits the whole movement, and more importantly because, in my opinion, contrary to Wrangham's own conclusions, much of what he has to say argues in favor of raw foods nowadays! I hope you find this as interesting as I do. This book talks about the importance of ease of digestibility. Smaller things are easier to digest. Well, in the same spirit, I'm going to break this Part 2 down into three further subsections: there is simply so much that is interesting that needs to be said, and I suspect that it'll go down better in smaller doses!

Part 2.1 Wrangham's Critique of Raw-Foodists

On the basis of one short-term and one longer-term study of raw food diets, as well as a few anecdotal experiments and 'castaway stories,' Wrangham concludes that humans lack the ability to extract adequate energy solely from raw foods.

The major studies in question are the 'Evo Diet' experiment, where volunteers with dangerously high blood pressure ate a 'chimpanzee diet' for 12 days, improved all their vital statistics but unexpectedly also lost a lot of weight despite eating 'adequate' calories, and the longer-term 'Giessen Study' of German raw-foodists, many of whom had a BMI much lower than average: low enough to cause amenorrhea in around 50% of the female participants. Quoting with approval the conclusion of the study's authors: "a strict raw food diet cannot guarantee an adequate energy supply," and emphasizing the rate of amenorrhea, which he correlates with infertility, he suggests that from an evolutionary perspective, natural selection would have favored humans who ate cooked food and thus had higher fertility rates and better chance of reproduction. He amplifies this point by contrasting the prosperous, relatively sedentary urban lifestyle of these raw-foodists, with year-round access to high-quality fruits and vegetables, with the much more strenuous lifestyle of a Pleistocene hunter-gatherer, and the inevitability for the latter of seasonal shortages, which would have made fertility even less likely. I'll come back to this point, as I think it is important for raw-foodists. In this German study, by the way, some participants were vegan and some were not, and they were from 70% to 100% raw. Interestingly for Wrangham, the low BMI correlated with the higher percentage of raw food consumption: it didn't matter whether the food in question was vegan or not.

Wrangham's main point is to show that cooking food conferred an evolutionary advantage because more calories are available from cooked food than from raw food, universally so. This is one of the most important take-home lessons of the book. However, because this is one of his key points, he somewhat whitewashes raw-foodism, in my opinion (which is understandable, given his focus, but I want to respond anyway)!He frequently mentions later on in the book that humans 'fare poorly on raw diets nowadays,' and other generalizations, which are falsified by his own acknowledgment that the Instinctotherapists with whom he met (and who use none of the blending/processing techniques he cites as essential to making modern raw-food diets work and unavailable prehistorically) were 'lean and healthy.'

I don't want to spend long on contradicting his whitewash because the implications of his study for raw-foodists and eaters in general are much more interesting and important. Probably all of us have met raw-foodists who are thriving, vibrant and full of energy, as well as raw-foodists who are weak and enervated. Multiplying anecdotes isn't all that useful here. (However, I have to wonder what Wrangham would make of Aajonus Vonderplanitz' 'Primal Diet,' which has its practitioners gain excess weight by eating huge amounts of raw animal products as a therapeutic, toxin-mobilizing regimen. I may write here some day about my own excruciating experiment with that diet. Absolutely all raw foods, and (foolish thing for a recovering anorexic to do) I bulked myself up to the biggest I've ever been, by far. And then, living with my husband, I lost the weight eating cooked food. Quite a bizarre exception to Wrangham's rule.) But I digress.

Accepting that his treatment is a whitewash, I want to address just a couple of things. First off, the fact that all the participants of the Evo study lost a significant amount of weight is only slightly suggestive that raw foods induces a caloric deficit. It is not specified that the participants were overweight to begin with, but since all had dangerously high blood pressure, it is likely that many of them were. For that short, 12 day period, a better interpretation would be that the diet evoked a cleansing response in their bodies. It would have been interesting if their 'outputs' had been measured as well: I'm willing to bet that they pooped a lot out!

As for the longer-term Giessen study: first of all, I am not convinced of his equation between amenorrhea and infertility. I am not an expert on this, but I am under the impression that it is possible to ovulate without menstruating. This also brings us into the area of ideology. Wrangham mentions the strength of belief in the diet held by the Germans in the study, and the belief that absence of menstruation correlates with superior health and absence of toxins in the body. He pooh-poohs this, but speaking from personal experience, I can say that it is a very seductive hypothesis. I would suggest that these women may well have allowed themselves to remain very thin to the point of undernourishment because of underlying emotional issues, a fixation with 'purity,' and some distancing from their body. Just because it might be easier to embrace this ideology on a raw food diet, it doesn't mean that it's an inevitable consequence of the diet. (Personal anecdote: I had no periods for the first 4-5 years of being 100% raw, but I had had none for several years earlier either due to being emaciated. I was convinced that this was a good thing, but I had very little sex drive or any other 'juice.' I started menstruating when I built some muscle and went above 100lbs, when I added raw eggs to my raw-plant-based diet and was very physically active. Periods were painless, light and easy, I got a libido, and that was the best I've felt in a long time. (Why oh why did I mess with the Primal Diet and cooked food?…lessons to learn...))

Wrangham concedes that raw-foodists can thrive - 'but only in rich modern environments where they depend on eating exceptionally high-quality foods.' p. 36. The flip side of 'rich modern environments' is foraging in the wild: an area of much fantasy and idealism amongst raw-foodists. His main goal is to show that humans with anatomies like ours could not have survived and evolved eating solely raw foods on the kinds of foods that were available in the Pleistocene. I'll come back to modern raw food diets later, but I believe that his point here is persuasive. In the next section I'll look at this point in more detail and explain why it is important for raw-foodists to understand.

I hope eventually to show how raw-foodists can put aside myths and fantasies about a pristine and fruitful wilderness, and yet find ways to integrate the wilderness into this modern existence.