pork

Learn how to really use lard and to make delicious and nourishing Asian dashi stocks.

Image from MARTHA STEWART, she is badass

My fridge is full of jars of creepy goo. At least my roommates thing that. But the truth is that those jars hold liquid gold! I love jars, as they are easy to clean fat off of and don't leech plastic byproducts. But I love what's in those jars more:

• Stock! Just save your bones and put them in your crockpot with water on low for 24 hours and you get a brew rich in minerals like calcium and delicious savory flavor. Use it to make soups or just drink it! Don't ever throw away bones, even weird ones like pork and buffalo, make decent stock. The fat that floats to the top is good because it forms a cap that keeps the stock fresh for months. Once you break the fat cap, use within a week. If the stock is relatively new, I use it as a fat to saute vegetables for soup in.
• Pig juice! I make pork belly all the time. I just throw the belly in the crock pot on low overnight with a salt brine. The end result is pork belly, which I brown and eat, and a rich brown liquid. I put it in a jar and the fat floats to the top. The fat can be used to cook anything with, but often I just dump the whole jar in a crock pot with a lean cut of meat like wild boar or pork tenderloin to transform it into something delicious. I used to love lean meat, but since going paleo I realize it is inferior...fortunately pig juice saves it. 
• Pig jelly! I don't have it anymore, but it was a crock full of rilettes from a farmer friend. Rilettes are delicious lard and delicious meat combined into an unholy medley of wonder and happiness. Spread on some lettuce, seaweed, or some less fortunate cut of meat. 
• Some buffalo marrow bones from the farmer's market. Put them in a cooking pan with sides and pop them in the oven..or even the toaster oven until the fat melts. Spread it on anything or eat it plan. 
• Sardines I didn't like. The box said they were delicious, but really they were just fishy. Unfortunately they are healthy and cheap, so I am planning on forcing myself to like them. When people tell me they dislike X healthy food, I often recount how I have gradually forced myself to like various slimy sea creatures because they are so good for me. 

Stefansson also forced himself to like fish, you can read about it in his interesting book online:

Until I was twenty seven I had the belief about myself that I could not eat fish and felt certain that its taste was obnoxious to me. I thought it an interesting peculiarity and assumed that everyone else would think so and there were few things I told about so often as the fact that I was peculiar in that I could not eat fish. I think I might have lost the notion sooner if it had not formed such an excellent topic of conversation 

I hear it all the time: why not just eat a diet like the Okinawans, the healthiest and longest lived people in the world? Traditionally they ate rice, tofu, and almost no meat! Unfortunately after WWII Americans introduced bad foods like pork and now disease rates are increasing.

That's the conventional narrative at least. Honestly, I'm not sure about the Okinawan diet. Most of the people discussing it are Americans with some sort of ax to grind. I would love to hear some Okinawan voices tell us what they actually ate, but those are few and far between. 

Americanized nonsense "Okinawan Diet"

The picture that is painted from the actual studies available is pretty murky, but shows that what is being promoted as an Okinawan diet is cultural misappropriation for profit, with American nutritionists making $$$ passing off what ends up being a Mediterranean diet with rice as the secrets of Okinawan elders. 

The real traditional diet seemed to consist of yams, goat, pork, tofu, seaweed, and seafood harvested from the island. It seems like it was pretty similar to the diet of Kitava. After the devastation of World War II, importation of food increased and oils, sugar, flour, white rice, and other processed foods became staples. The narrative of fat consumption increase only takes statistics starting from World War II, so we really don't have much of an idea of how much fat was in the traditional diet.

We do know the the consumption of traditional foods like raw goat, yams, and seaweed decreased dramatically. Also, that domestic meat production didn't really change much after WWII and much of that increase was probably recovery from devastation of the war.  The increase of meat consumption came mostly from imported animals that were probably factory-farmed...or SPAM, which is now hugely popular there.  

It does seem that their traditional diet was high in carbohydrates from yams, but its nonsense make up an Okinawan Diet plan including foods that are nothing like what pre-WWII Okinawans consumed such as whole grain bread, olive oil,  soy milk, apples, and yogurt. The traditional Okinawan diet doesn't seem to be far from my own paleo diet, except for the soy . Fortunately, the harmful effects of that can be mitigated by fermentation. I occasionally consume some fermented soy since I am an Asian food enthusiast and I adore the taste of miso and ssämjang. Yam are controversial on the paleo diet, but personally I enjoy them without ill effects. I would say my own paleo diet is heavily influenced by Japanese cuisine and benefits from it tremendously. I could never tolerate a diet of just eggs and ground meat...I'm too much of a foodie and an omnivore for that!

Here is a recent paper on the importance of the yam, kombu, and pork offal in Okinawa. Paleo dieters could definitely benefit from the consumption of kombu, which is rich in iodine, and pork offal (feet, ears, blood, intestines), which is delicious and contains many important nutrients. The problem with this paper is that they assume that people threw away pork fat...I don't know of any agrarian culture that exhibits that kind of waste. They say akunuki is removal of fat, but it also seems to mean removal of astringent taste.  

Speaking of Japan, I was just reading this editorial by Swedish scientist Uffe Ravnskov:

 In a study of Japanese migrants in the United States the cultural upbringing was the strongest predictor of coronary heart disease. Those who were brought up in a non-Japanese fashion but preferred the lean Japanese food had a heart attack almost twice as often as those who were brought up in the Japanese way but preferred fatty American food.⁴

I think it's possible that the issue here was that they thought fat wasn't traditional for Japan, but it sheds light on the fact that fat doesn't seem to cause heat disease.