This blog is about the intersection between evolutionary biology and food. But also about practical applications, sustainable agriculture, and general tasty things. I originally started eating this way to heal from chronic health problems and...it worked!
Melissa McEwen
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04/04/2011 - 07:50
I understand that people what to have convenient paleo meal options and that people want to provide them. But I'd like to ask people promoting paleo out there to please remain from stamping products with modern industrial neolithic poisons as "paleo"
See Paleo Brands Almond Crusted Cod with Spicy Vegetables and Cauliflower Leek Puree
Cauliflower Leek Puree (cauliflower, leeks, mayonnaise (soybean oil, egg yolks, whole egg, water, distilled vinegar, contains less than 2% of salt, sugar, lemon concentrate, calcium disodium edta added to protect flavor, natural flavors), spices, black pepper, xanthan gum) Almond Crusted Cod, (rockfish, blanched almonds, spices, cracked black pepper)l Spicy Vegetables, (onion, green bell peppers, tomato, olive/granola oil, jalapeno peppers, red bell peppers, fresh garlic, cilantro, salt substitute, [potassium chloride, contains less than 1% of cream tartar, silicon dioxide, natural flavor], paprika, garlic powder, celery seed, black pepper ) l CONTAINS EGGS, NUTS AND FISH.
I don't care if this is a fallback meal. There is just no excuse to produce things that are "paleo" with these kind of ingredients. In fact, why aren't they using absolutely the best ingredients? Either way, I can walk into the local supermarket and get TV Dinners that are more paleo than this. On two occasions when I was traveling I've bought Garden Lite Souffles, which aren't perfect (they are made just with egg whites, yuck), but don't contain anything paleo folks know is truly bad for you. And they aren't pretending to be paleo either.
As for whether or not it's possible to produce a truly good commercial product, Wilderness Family Naturals produces a commercially viable mayo without soybean or canola oil.
Furthermore, shouldn't we hold ourselves to some higher standards? Where is the cod from? Is is fished sustainably? Because some rockfish is harvested through trawling, which is the most destructive way to fish. Maybe some of us paleo folks lean rightward, but I absolutely don't want to buy things that would preclude my children from enjoying seafood in the future.
Can we produce packaged frozen products that meet such higher standards? I say YES. A remarkable number of infrastructural projects are showing that frozen and other packaged foods can be made with local ingredients from small farms. Farm to Table Co-Packers in the Hudson Valley is such a project. When I don't have time to cook or chop vegetables, their products are a fallback I can feel good about.
I hate to say it, but there is absolutely no packaged paleo product out there I can endorse. They either contain absurd ingredients like sugar or soybean oil. Or they have so little supplier transparancy that I'm not sure what's in it. Some products say "grass fed beef." From where? They won't tell you. Maybe from Brazil, where the rainforest has been cut down? Or confined cows fed hay? Who knows. They won't tell you. Contrast that with the WAPF folks- at their Wise Traditions conference they showcased products made with truly good ingredients, with transparency, and with integrity.
To be honest, the more research I've done into paleo products, the less I want to be associated with paleo at all.
04/02/2011 - 14:25
Each weekend I give myself free rein to eat gluten-free desserts. I don't find that eating sugar upsets my stomach at all, which makes sense because most sugar is digested in the small intestine before it gets into the fermentation chambers of the lower intestine. But really, having some treats once in awhile makes it way easier for me to comply with this diet on a day to day basis. Never having bread again doesn't seem so bad in a world of delicious ice cream.
My rules for treats are
- Never buy in large quantities
- Never keep large quantities at home
- Only eat expensive treats, cultivate good taste
Number 3 really limits things. I'm too much of a snob to eat most of the ice cream at the grocery store and have to trek to expensive restaurants to get a fix. 1 and 2 prevent overeating.
Either way, every day I like to have good tea, which is an excellent calorie-free indulgence. This week I am enjoying my order from Davidstea, a Canadian company. Someone asked me this week if I receive $$ or free food from the companies I review and the answer is pretty much no. There are a few restaurant's that reward me for being a regular customer by giving me free apps, but that doesn't have much to do with my blogging. When I do receive things for free, I will note it, but overall I am too disorganized to ask for samples and whatnot. Unfortunately, most "paleo" packaged products also aren't very good. Lots of nut flours that I can't digest well. Honestly, if it's between a but of ground nuts stuck together with agave nectar and real delicious ice cream, guess what I'm going to pick?
Back to Davidstea, I ordered a bunch and my favorites are:
I've been drinking lots of tea since I quit coffee and I look for teas that are high quality, have a strong flavor, and work well without cream/sweetener since I don't always want to use or have access to these things. These teas are great and I'll definitely buy them again. I love how the leave unfurl and you can see that they are whole leaves and not the dust you find in tea bags.
I also got my Foodzie tasting box today (it was a deal on Homerun.com) and was excited because only one item was truly off the menu, which was the Blue Cheese Fig Shortbreads (ack, my fav flavor combo). A non-gluten sensitive person in my life will receive those :)
I really liked to the kale pumpkin seed crackers, which would be a great way to serve rilettes or something. I often miss crackers because some meaty things like rilettes really don't shine without them. A lot of gluten free crackers are too heavy with nuts, made with gut-irritating whole flax seed, or have vegetable oil in them. These were perfect.
Also quite nice for an occasional paleo-friendly treat were Cocomels, caramels made with coconut milk, which tasted very good and not too coconutty.
Tonight I'm hoping to have some yuzu-buttermilk sorbet at one of my new favorite restaurants, Salt & Fat. And those will be my weekend treats!
03/28/2011 - 20:48
What purpose in these deeds
Oh fox confessor, please
Who married me to these orphaned blues
"It's not for you to know, but for you to weep and wonder
When the death of your civilization precedes you,"- Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood
I've been reading Tyler Cowan's The Great Stagnation, which is what he calls the period we are in. I believe it. Maybe it's just the fact I graduated college in this period, but it does feel like stagnation is a very palpable part of my life. I sometimes imagine I am part of a new sort of people- the nouveau poor. We make much less money than our parents did at our ages and don't have many career advancement opportunities. We aren't impoverished, but some of us linger below the federal poverty line, as I did for the year or so after I graduated.
But we grew up in the middle or upper middle class and went to college, so we don't fit the "poor" stereotypes. We are used to a certain standard of living and maintain it somewhat, even if it means scrimping by to do it or approaching it in a novel way. We live in pretty nice areas, but share our tiny apartments with an inordinate amount of roommates. We eat good food, but save money on it through buying clubs, community gardens, and DIY processing. We shop in thrift stores and scavenge furniture from the trash. Time consuming things like canning or backyard chickens don't have a high opportunity cost for us because there isn't much work to go around. Most of us are "creatives," but almost all of us have college degrees that aren't easily convertible to work skills such as those in English or History. A lot of us pay the bills in unrelated fields as baristas or waiters.
If we can afford to have families, many of us chose to spend more time with the children realizing it doesn't make sense to work 40 hours of a job that has nothing to do with what you like so you can give 80% of your income to paying someone else to raise your children and quite a bit of the rest to a government that seems like a dying dinosaur. In fact, there is a general return to homemaking and a greater value placed on quality of life. More time is spent on things like cooking and gardening. The paradox is while we might make less money than our parents did, we might be much healthier since many of us have more time for good food, family, and exercise. The idea that housekeeping might be banal has fallen in the face of the fact that most of us will never posses the fulfilling careers our college counselors promised.
Other nouveau poors might be more stressed because they still have dreams about their creative career and are trying to balance it with bartending. But most of us have given up on that sort of thing. It's not that there is no innovation or ambition, we're just learning we shouldn't base our lives on our careers.
The downsides are real of course. There is a worry that men aren't "manning up", but in reality many men and women seem stuck in adolescence because they cannot afford to start households. Another problem is that some people spend an exorbitant amount of money on education that may not have much of a payoff, such as graduate school in British Literature or expensive private colleges. As a result, many of us have large amounts of debt and no hope of ever paying it off.*
*I've been lucky in this respect since I went to a state school
03/20/2011 - 18:42
Mark Sisson posted a link to a sad essay called IBS Is Why I'm Still Single. Every day I'm able to eat and live normally, I am so grateful. You see, most of my life I had painful stomach problems. When I was four I remember crying in the bathroom. I remember at sleep away camp being too embarrassed to use the communal bathrooms and sneaking out in the middle of the night to the isolated outhouse. It wasn't until I was 15 or so that I was diagnosed with IBS. When I was a freshman in college it became so disruptive to my life that I was finally given Librax. At that point I was also on quite a bit of asthma medication. Then I started having serious heartburn. I went on proton pump inhibitors. At my low point I was on Allergra, Advair, Singulair, Albuterol, Librax, Nexium (Prilosec stopped working at some point), and continuously on and off antibiotics for various ailments ranging from yeast to sinus infections. I was miserable. I missed most of my classes.
The single part of that essay hit home because I remember my first Valentine's day with my first boyfriend. We had a delicious meal, but soon after I was bent double with incredible pain and spent most of the night in the bathroom. I didn't think I'd be able to do anything.
I honestly thought that my condition was caused by eating fat, tomatoes, and peppers. The handouts my doctor gave me insinuated as much. I really didn't like all the side effects of the medications I was on, but when I complained to one of my doctors he said I'd on them for the rest of my life. I tried all kinds of high-fiber low-fat veg*n diets to no avail.
I didn't want to live like this. But all the sudden my condition took a turn for the worst. I felt like my whole body was falling apart. One day I collapsed in the hallway of the dorm. I was diagnosed at the hospital with chronic salmonella. That's not something a 19 year old should have. Afterwards I had trouble with constant burping.
I vowed to do more research and found a small study on GERD and low carbohydrate diets. I also discovered Evolutionary Nutrition on Art De Vany's site through the blog Marginal Revolution. I learned about the Specific Carbohydrate Diet and wondered if my symptoms were caused by bacterial overgrowth. My first attempts to get off my medicines didn't work. I tried to eat low-carb in the dining hall, but I guess the foods had too much crap on them. Luckily, I took summer school and lived dining-hall free in graduate student housing, though my "kitchen" had only a microwave. Looking back, my diet wasn't all that great. I didn't know that much about cooking and nothing about meat. The first meat I bought was some sausage, which I tried to cook in the microwave only to get a massive bowl of exploding grease. Gross. I had to eat out a lot, but stayed mostly paleo and very low carb. I tried lots of remedies like probiotics and drinking apple cider vinegar after each meal. I started drinking kombucha. I read everything I could get my hands on about traditional nutrition. It seemed clear my illness was a modern disease.
I had a goal in mind: as a freshman I had tried spicy food for the first time and learned to love it, but I had thought it was causing all my problems. When it was clear that this was a secondary problem to the inflammation and dysbiosis, I decided to make eating it without pain a goal. I didn't reach that goal until six months into the regimen, but I've been eating delicious curries without incident ever since.
I've also been able to travel extensively without incident, something I thought I'd never do.
Unfortunately I still had some residual IBS issues. I realized a year ago that I was going to have to let go of beer and gluten-containing cheat meals. The IBS has been gone ever since, but I really do miss some of those foods.
So basically the principals I went on were that bacteria was at the root of most of my problems. Being born by C-section, a low-nutrient diet, and constant antibiotic use had put my gut ecology into an imbalanced state. Probably some of my medications made it worse, like Prilosec/Nexium, which is known to allow bacterial overgrowth. My principles were to first starve out the bad bacteria, which was inspired a bit by Hyperlipid, and then gradually try to balance the gut through gentle traditional probiotic and nutrient-rich foods. I suspect I had both hypochlorhydria and small-bacterial overgrowth, which was why I was so excited by the paper I just blogged about.
I'm still quite fiber-intolerant. I can't really do brown rice, quinoa, or many other fiber-rich grains. But I am able to eat a fair amount of carbs, which I'm happy with. As an aside, even some in the alternative health community are very wrong about IBS. Giving up simple sugar will do nothing, as they are digested in the small intestine, which is a point made by the SCD diet. It's the complex sugars that cause the problems in the lower intestine.
As for romance, duh it's easier when you aren't a miserable gas-filled bloated cramped up woman who alternates between diarrhea and constipation (with hemorrhoids) every two days...
So when people say paleo or traditional foods are trivial, I'm just happy I can live a relatively normal life thanks to them. So I thank these things for my good health
- High fat
- Low carb
- Probiotics
- Acidic foods like pickles, kombucha, and apple cider vinegar that helped make up for my low stomach acid
- Traditional foods
- Grass-fed meat
- Gluten-free
03/16/2011 - 22:09
Have you taken the paleo community survey? If not, you should take it since some folks worked pretty hard to put it together and will probably post some interesting data in the future.
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The purpose of this survey is to collect information about paleo diet community members, including demographic information, medical conditions, dietary preferences, and physical activity.
The resulting data will be invaluable in terms of understanding the nature of the paleo movement. It will be provided to other bloggers and researchers with the goal of providing a clearer picture of how the paleo diet has affected the lives of its adherents.
Survey respondents will remain anonymous, your name or other identifying information will not be collected. The survey itself is relatively short and should only take a couple of minutes to complete.
Several incentives for completion of the survey have been provided, and will be explained further at the end of the survey. These include a coupon code for Paleo Treats products and the opportunity to win one of several giveaway Amazon.com gift cards.
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So go take it here.
I leave you with the best of paleo discoteca
Yelle - Safari Disco Club from SIX media marketing on Vimeo.
Lykke Li - I Follow Rivers (Director: Tarik Saleh) from Lykke Li on Vimeo.
03/07/2011 - 22:27
True or false:
- A food isn't paleo if it contains food toxins like saponins
- A food isn't paleo unless it can be eaten raw
Unfortunately, a lot of people out there would answer "true" to these questions. This makes me sad. Every plant food and many animal foods contain potentially toxic substances, but as Paracelsus said "the dose makes the poison." Besides that, there is ample evidence that paleolithic people ate potentially toxic foods like cycads, seeds, and roots. The advent of cooking is debated pretty heavily in anthropology, but everyone agrees it was invented in the paleolithic, though exactly when is heavily disputed. As my professors always said "it's hard to determine much with a sample size in the single digits." Unfortunately, in physical anthropology that's often the amount of samples available.
Beyond that, I strongly recommend listening to the Paleo Solution episode with Matt Lalonde on why this whole "what did paleolithic people eat exactly" discussion is stupid. And Dr. Kurt Harris' post on Orthorexia.
One of my favorite jokes with Chris Masterjohn is "I can't kiss you because you contain lectins" ;) Of course, after saying that, I do kiss him and I could not care less about the lectins he contains, which I also contain.
Avoiding specific lectins might be worth it for those of us battling illness, but only profound ignorance would condemn a food (or a man) because lectins are present. How about trying to figure what's wrong and eliminating foods as needed instead of looking for problems where there are none?
01/09/2011 - 01:02
I was listening to Chris Masterjohn's interview and his meal of raw egg and orange reminded me of this:
Middle of the Way
Galway Kinnell
1
I wake in the night,
An old ache in the shoulder blades.
I lie amazed under the trees
That creak a little in the dark,
The giant trees of the world.
I lie on earth the way
Flames lie in the woodpile,
Or as an imprint, in sperm or egg, of what is to be.
I love the earth, and always
In its darkness I am a stranger.
2
6 A.M. Water frozen again. Melted it and made tea. Ate a raw egg and the last orange. Refreshed by a long sleep. the trail practically indistinguishable under 8" of snow. 9:30 A.M. Snow up to my knees in places. Sweat begins freezing under my shirt when I stop to rest. The woods are filled, anyway, with the windy noise of the first streams. 10:30 A.M. the sun at last. The snow starts to melt off the boughs at once, falling with little ticking sounds. Mist clouds are lying in the valleys. 11:45 A.M. Slow, glittering breakers roll in on the beaches ten miles away, very blue and calm. 12 noon. An inexplicable sense of joy, as if some happy news had been transmitted to me directly, by-passing the brain. 2 P.M. From the top of Gauldy I looked back into Hebo valley. Castle Rock sticks into a cloud. A cool breeze comes up from the valley, it is a fresh, earthly wind and tastes of snow and trees. It is not like those transcendental breezes that make the heart ache. It bring happiness. 2:30 P.M. Lost the trail. A woodpecker watches me wade about through the snow trying to locate it. The sun has gone back of the trees. 3:10 P.M. Still hunting for the trail. Getting cold. From an elevation I have an open view to the SE, a world of timberless, white hills, rolling, weirdly wrinkled. Above them a pale half moon. 3:45 P.M. Going on by map and compass. A minute ago a deer fled touching down every fifteen feet or so. 7:30 P.M. Made camp near the heart of Alder Creek. Trampled a bed into the snow and filled it with boughs. Concocted a little fire in the darkness. Ate pork and beans. A slug or two of whiskey burnt my throat. The night very clear. Very cold. That half moon is up there and a lot of stars have come out among the treetops. The fire has fallen to coals.
3
The coals go out,
The last smoke wavers up
Losing itself in the stars.
This is my first night to lie
In the uncreating dark.
In the human heart
There sleeps a green worm
That has spun the heart about itself,
And that shall dream itself black wings
One day to break free into the black sky.
I leave my eyes open,
I lie here and forget our life,
All I see is that we float out
Into the emptiness, among the great stars,
On this little vessel without lights.
I know that I love the day,
The sun on the mountain, the Pacific
Shiny and accomplishing itself in breakers,
But I know I live half alive in the world,
Half my life belongs to the wild darkness.
01/06/2011 - 18:43
Tis the season of sanity in the paleorealfoodblogosphere?
First we have the brilliant Chris Masterjohn taking down a gluten is evil OMG study that's been widely cited by bloggers including me. Admittedly I didn't read it because back then I wasn't in school. Chris did and it turns out it's not a high quality or conclusive study. Oops.
Maybe gluten is teh evil, but that study doesn't prove it.
It just goes to show that we have to be just as critical of studies that support our viewpoints as we are of studies that don't.
I've posted many times before how I am infuriated by people who call Eskimos/Inuit or Kitvans "paleolithic cultures."
I've written about how many such cultures consist of former farmers (agricultural regression) and some are mislabeled hunter-gatherers when really they are horticulturalists! And also that some forest hunter-gatherers have had long symbiotic relationships with farmers and anthropologists aren't even sure if humans can survive in such forest environments without such relationships*. Prof Gumby at PaNu emphasizes the further point that many of them are in marginal environments.
I'll add a further point that even more have been decimated or otherwise affected by pathogens introduced by outsiders. Anthropologist Thomas Headland, who lived for many years with a tribe called the Agta and raised his children among them, put it poignantly:
There were less-rosy sides to the way our children grew up, too, of course. They suffered from the local diseases, especially malaria (all five of us), and two of our children had primary complex tuberculosis. (TB is the number one killer of Agta adults.) And they may still suffer some psychological trauma over the deaths of many Agta with whom they were close: the majority of their childhood playmates are today dead. (Agta life expectancy at birth averages only 21.5 years.)
Survival International is a charity that helps advocate for tribal cultures. Reading the stories on this site makes it clear that most of these tribes are in highly marginal situations politically, physically, environmentally, and socially.
We do not object to calling these people hunter-gatherers, as long as it is made clear that they are modern-day hunter-gatherers, people who have evolved right along with the rest of us into the 20th century.
Yes, we can learn some things from them, but hopefully these hypotheses will be tested by real science. As I said before "Choosing plant foods because of their history without taking biochemistry into account is dogma, not science." Some paleo authors make this mistake, assuming that we should base our fat content of our diet on some very limited surveys of modern game or ancient bones. That's why I always recommend the books of Gary Taubes to newbies. Even if our ancestors ate low fat, that doesn't mean high-fat is bad or that low-fat is good. Hopefully Taubes' newest easier shorter book Why We Get Fat will bring sanity about fat to more and more people.
Unfortunately, some paleo folks are too arrogant to accept modern science. They are stuck in anthropology, which I love, but that's just part of the picture.
As a bonus, Denise Minger has a good post up on stupid vegetarian studies.
01/01/2011 - 21:01
Wohoo, happy New Year! I know this one is going to be a good year. If you want to hang with me and John Durant, come to our paleo beginners workshop this week.
Some of you have said that you miss my strange videos. I know I haven't posted many lately, so here are some of my favs to celebrate the new year.
12/25/2010 - 23:09
The past couple of posts I've gotten some comments implying I'm misandrist, which any man that actually knows me will confirm is untrue, but furthermore, would a misandrist own a cookbook called A Thousand Ways To Please A Husband With Bettina's Best Recipes?
Unfortunately, I can't link to this cookbook because it's very old. It's from 1917, but actually old cookbooks are a pretty cheap collectible. You can get some nice ones for less than $20 and they make great gifts. I suspect it's because many of them really show their age. American cooking has changed a lot and dare I say that it's better now? Yes, we eat a lot of junk these days, but it's possible to get cookbooks that have healthy AND flavorful recipes. Reading this cookbook, I get the feeling that if anything in it is healthy, it's an accident. As much as I love old things, I feel very lucky that we can evaluate them scientifically. **edit: someone just informed me that this book is available free on Google Books**
This cookbook was from a very strange era. It melds retro gender roles with a more modern emphasis on convenience, thrift, and simplicity. Back when I first got this cookbook, when I was a teenager, I never made anything from it because it had "exotic" ingredients like lard and tallow. Now I don't use it much because everything is bland and has white flour and sugar in it. It reminds me that while our health wasn't so bad back then compared to now, it was probably in the decline. There are wise traditions, but there are unwise traditions as well. I get the feeling that bread-crusted lamb chops are an unwise tradition. It's entirely possible to make unhealthy foods from scratch.
Though let's be honest, anyone who came home to these meals would probably be pretty happy. Each chapter has a trite little story as an intro that makes me very grateful that I am not as boring as Bettina, though her husband Bob is pretty lame too. Then there is a selection of recipes for each occasion. For example "A Sunday Dinner" has roast beef, brown potatoes, browned gravy, baked squash, and Devil's food cake with vanilla icing. Don't worry, it's not entirely woman's work. One progressive chapter is "Bob Makes Peanut Fudge." Don't worry, while Bob is making his manly candy, Bettina is at work on liver and bacon, fruit gems, creamed turnips, and apple sauce. In another chapter titled "Bob makes pop-overs"...Bob makes pop-overs, though really Bettina is making them when Bob comes into the kitchen and says "Let me help you with them, Bettina; this is one place where you can use my strong right arm."
Flour is added to EVERYTHING. The food actually reminds me a bit of what was served at the Baptist church potlucks my family went to when I was a child. The only thing missing is the Jello.
For Valentine's Day there is broiled steak, macaroni with tomatoes and green peppers, baked potatoes, bread, butter, and cornstarch fruit pudding. Probably the most hilarious menu is for Washington's Birthday
"Good bran bread," said Bob, reaching for another piece.
"I like that recipe," said Bettina, "and it is so easy to make."
"What have you been doing all day?" Bob asked, "Cooking?"
"No, indeed. Charlotte was here this afternoon and we made plans for the tea we are going to give at her house on Washington's birthday. Oh, Bob we have some of the best ideas for it! Our refreshments are to be served from the dining-room table, you know, and our central decoration is to be a three-cornered black hat filled with artificial red cherries...blah blah blah blah"
So what's on the final menu? Corned beef au gratin, baked tomatoes, apple sauce, cream pie, and GLUTEN BREAD. Yes, not just bread, but GLUTEN BREAD. Planning parties all day sounds nice though.
A little too much sugar here, which probably accounts for some of the gout men of this era suffered from (if you search Google books for this era you'll find several diabetic and uric-acid free cookbooks), but I've learned some lessons from the book. One of my major mistakes has been making extremely complicated multi-course meals. Bettina makes several simple things. She also often boils or steams things, which I didn't really do much until this year, but they are very simple and gentle cooking methods. Bettina occasionally uses a "fireless cooker," which was a primitive form of crockpot.
While I find Bettina annoying, I don't see her as a mere housewife. These days I'm sure she'd be gainfully employed as a party-planner or something. And while I don't think cooking is a "woman's role" I do personally enjoy cooking for men.
Please your stalkers with a freshly baked cake!
Bake then, even babies helped in the kitchen. Wait... that's not a baby....
Here is a recipe: Head lettuce with Roquefort Cheese Dressing
1 head of lettuce
1/2 t-salt
3 T-oil
1/8 t-pepper
1/4 a cup Roquefort cheese
1 T-vinegar
Cream the cheese, add salt, pepper, and vinegar. Add the oil gradually. Mix well, shake thoroughly. Pour over the lettuce and serve.
I've really become a fan of retro salad dressing recently, particularly Green Goddess, even though that takes me a very long time to make since I make my own mayo.
Edit: Bettina's family recipes seems a lot better and it's also on Google Books for free. These smothered potatoes are calling me...
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