Wizard Recipes

Price was heading towards an organic vision of food and health, being much ahead of its time. He understood that by eating we are bounding with the earth and its elements, as well as solar energy. “Dinner that I took tonight,” as he was saying in a lecture that he held in 1928, “was part of the sun with a few months ago. The food industry hides and diminishes these links. By stretching the Tropic chain, so that the population from the big cities can be nourished using far away soil, we violate the “laws of nature” at least twice: stealing nutrients from the soil in which plants were grown and then wasting them trough food processing. Unlike the indigenous populations studied by Price, which endeavored to return nutrients back to the local soils on which their entire existence depended, “our modern civilization returns extremely few nutrients compared to the quantities consumed”. Renner shows us how Price came to the conclusion that the food and health problem is actually an organic dysfunction. Destroying links between local soils, local food and local populations, the industrial system, it can not fulfill the biochemical requirements of the body, which, by not having time to adapt, will collapse.

Regardless whether or not you are willing to follow Dr. Price in his long journey, he and all other researchers of western diets from the twentieth century that have returned to the civilized world with the same simple conclusion, devastating and hard to resist: the human animal is adapted and apparently can prosper on the basis of extremely varied diets, but the Western diet, however you define it does not seem to be a part of them.

But the ecological critic of the industrial civilization that was promoted by Weston Price in 1930 hasn’t survived the Second World War.  The niche of this type of writings-in which Sir Howard and Lord Northbourne from England and the American agrarians took part- closed shortly after Price published “Nutrition and Physical degeneration” in 1939. Soon, people had to turn the back to the attacks on “industrial civilization”, on which their salvation depended in time of war. At the end of the war, the industrial civilization strengthens his position, becoming more confident.

The next consolidation was the agriculture industry (that had a benefit from the transformation of the mountains in soil fertilizers and toxic gas in pesticides) shortly the other types of agriculture disappeared. Weston Price and his colleagues who had studied the western diseases had been forgotten by now. No one was willing to look back or to recognize the wisdom of the primitive groups, moreover, they disappeared or were quickly assimilate, even Aborigines were moving to the city.

In terms of the Western diseases, these didn’t disappeared- immediately after the war the rates of heart disease have exploded-but now they remained to the responsibility of modern medicine and to the reductionist science.          The nourishment became a widely language accepted in discussion about nutrition and health. The industrial food chain would be brought up again late in the 60s along with the rise of organic agriculture.

But what about the meat? Unlike plants that we can not take out from our nourishment, we are not allowed to eat meat- with the exception of the vitamin B 12- all the meat nourishes can be achieved from other sources. (The little amount of B 12 that is necessary for our body is not hard to achieve, it is in all the products of animal origin and it’s produced by bacteria. Therefore you can get the B 12 vitamin consuming dirty food, altered or fermented products).

But meat, whose procurement people have made enormous efforts and from which people feed many years, is a nutritious nourishment which contains all the essential amino acids and many vitamins and minerals, and I haven’t found any convincing reason to exclude it from my nutrition. (I do not mean by this that we don’t have good ethical or ecological reasons)

Probably it is not such a good idea to eat large amounts of meat, as we do it now (each American consumes an average of 90 kg of meat per year) especially if that meat comes from an extreme industrialized food chain. According to studies, the more consumed meat- especially red meat- the bigger is the risk of heart disease or cancer. But studies on “flexitarieni” show that, in small quantities- less then a portion per day- meat increases the risk of illness. Probably Thomas Jefferson was right when he recommended meat only for flavor like a” spice for vegetables” than as a main meal. I didn’t know which of the component elements of the meat are supposed to concern us (saturated fat? The type of iron? Carcinogenic substances produced by cooking and conserving?)

It is possible that the problem consist in the fact that by eating a big amount of meat, we cut out the vegetables from our plate.

But excessive consumption of industrial meat exposes us to bigger quantities of saturated fat, fat acids omega-6, human growth hormones and carcinogenic substances than recommended.

Meat illustrates the idea that the health of food product can not be separated from the health of the food chain. This means that the health of the soil, of the plants, of the animals and of the consumers depend on each other.

Once animals could also synthesize some antioxidants, including vitamin C. But the rich plants nourishment of our ancestors content so much vitamin C that we lost in time this ability to produce this composite, maybe because of the natural selection which tends to give any unnecessary element up that is metabolically costly. (Plants are a rich source of antioxidants because they need those for the oxygen management, produced during the photosynthesis)

Of course this was a great evolution for plants, because people have become completely dependent on them for procurement of an essential nutrient and therefore, people did those vitamin C producers lots of favors, spreading there genes and extending there habitat. The antioxidants like vitamin C has an important role in the relationship between humans and plants even this is less noticeable. Our biologically plant dependency is ancient and profound, so it’s not at all surprising that plants are beneficially.

There are many studies which are proving that rich nourishment in fruits and vegetables is reducing the risk of death in case of all occidental diseases. In countries where people consume daily a pound ore more of fruits and vegetables, the rate of cancer is twice smaller then in the United States. We also know that vegetarians are less disposed to all the occidental diseases and therefore they live longer (semi-vegetarians the so called “flexitarians”- are as healthy as vegetarians). We do not know very well why this happens. It is almost sure that the plant antioxidants protect us, but this could be valid for omega-3 fat acids (other essential nutrients which our body can not produce) for fibers and for other elements and synergic relations of plants compositions, unknown jet.

As shown on the studies of whole grain it is very possible that vegetal aliments are more than the amount of composing nutrients. But probably the advantages of plant based nourishment aren’t based only on the content: vegetal products (with the exception of seeds) have the energy density lower then the rest of nourishments. Eating especially veggies you will consume probably less calories (which will protect you from many diseases). Seeds are the exception that shows us why it is important to consume more leaves then seeds; even if unrefined seeds like whole grain and fruits with a hard shell can be very nutritious, they contain more calories, because there biological role is to deposit energy.