The Low Down

The human body is a metabolic marvel comprised of dozens of little systems connecting to create one complex system. Food is the fuel, the input, for the systems. Our metabolic machinery evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to function optimally on select fuels. These fuels were the original, Primal foods of the human organism. Over these hundreds of thousands of years our Big Game Hunting, small prey capturing, scavenging, foraging, gathering, opportunistic ancestors accumulated experience and wisdom about nourishing themselves. The learned to preserve and predigest foods to maximize the quality of their metabolic fuel. Eventually they learned to cook foods without destroying the important nourishing properties of the food, and then they learned to heal the human body with food. Only recently in the human evolutionary experience, have we abandoned all these hundreds of thousands of years of accumulated epicurean genius. Now we fuel our marvelous, complex metabolic machinery with crap invented to create profits for agribusiness. We have become dumb eaters. As we regain our eating intelligence it doesn't make sense to move back to the savannah and put out our fires or climb into our cave and pretend there is a glacier next door. It makes sense to fuel our bodies with all the primal human foodstuffs, prepared and preserved with accumulated ancestral wisdom and served up for the undeniable desires of the human taste buds. Primal, paleolithic food choices, handled according to ancient food ways resulting in outrageously good food.
PRIMAL. SMART. DELECTABLE.

Monday, January 11, 2010

A Multi Part Series on Shopping and Food Prep








POST-GATHERING SUNFLOWER SPROUT, CUCUMBER, CELERY SALAD


Part I: "The Gathering"

Five grocery stores in a 48 hour period is unusual even for me, but every now and then I just get absorbed in food and it seems like the best use of my time to scour the City of Tucson looking for the foods that are calling to me. Anyway, since I no longer live on a little mountain in the middle of nowhere, I may as well take advantage of my urban bounty. A different kind of joy. I strayed very very far from local foods this weekend, but I had lots of fun.

I gave my 11 year old son a Raw Food cookbook and told him to pick two recipes out of it for the week. He chose a vinaigrette dressing (no shopping required) and a raw fruit pie made of…cherimoyas. A cherimoya is a delicious little tropical fruit, but a tiny bit on the unusual side. My best guess was that just maybe 17th St. Market would have them, but they didn’t. Without doing my research I’d guess cherimoyas are out of season and do not appear to come canned or frozen. No big deal, we’ll use something else, but while at 17th St. I was inspired by some plaintains and kaffir lime leaves as well as grape leaves and sun-dried, oil-cured olives.

That evening I got out a pile of my favorite cookbooks and searched for vegetable inspiration. In a book that I grew up on (as a cooking feminist that is) called The Perennial Political Palate by The Bloodroot Collective, I found a little salad made of sun-dried tomatoes and roasted red peppers (among other things that aren’t Paleo, but easily fixed). Now I know not all of you want to spend your weekends at grocery stores and reading cookbooks. Bow in deep gratitude if you have someone who takes care of your nourishment so that you are rendered free of food shopping and meal planning. If you don’t have such a Divine creature, male or female, in your life then f***ing dive in! Making excuses like “I don’t have time” or “I’m not a good cook” or “I don’t know how” or “I don’t like to” is bullsh**. That’s like saying you don’t bother brushing your teeth because you don’t know how, or you don’t wipe your bum because you don’t have time or you don’t wash your hair because you don’t like to. Procuring and preparing food is a life requirement. Do it well, live well. Do it like shite, feel and look like shite.

If you are a woman, and the constant servitude of cooking, feeding and cleaning up the mess has worn you down and made you resentful don’t fall into that self-sabotaging gerbil wheel. I have a cadre of powerful women in the generation of my family that precedes me who do not like to cook. I think it is a tightly woven complicated story, but the general plot line is that to constantly serve and nourish the ungrateful is a sh**ty way to spend your years. There are the constraints of time, food budgets and the futile sense of needing to make others happy. Pile on top of all that the fact that if you are one of my relatives you likely wish you were thinner and having to cook makes you deal with food which makes you guilty and angry and miserable and you wish that you could be left alone to read books. Dude. Bad news. Bust out. Throw it off. Do it for yourself and give a harsh smack down to anyone who whines, complains or undermines your work in the kitchen. If you have to get divorced, do it. Just kidding. Actually, that might be my ex-husband’s very best feature. He never complained about my cooking and was always grateful. Stay tuned for Part II when I’ll tell you how I stumbled across the concept that cooking might be pleasurable.

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