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.

Saturday, January 2, 2010

The Primal Creations of my beautiful friends, the Heinos



















In my mind what makes a true dessert is when my Sister Mama, beautiful Steph Z-H, makes it for my son on his eleventh birthday. Desserts nourish the heart and soul because they are special and sweet. When Steph makes you a dessert, her passion and love is in every spoonful. First of all, like everything made by Steph, it will look pretty, so it nourishes the senses. It might be, like this one, made from berries that she herself foraged from some muddy, mosquito-y, stand of berry bushes. On top it will have raw cream, from the Owens Farm, where Steph does chores. Potentially, this raw cream will be sweetened with maple syrup that Steph and her family boiled in the spring when the sap was running. Steph is an ancestral culinary tradition Goddess.

Steph is also an artist and recently has tapped into one of our most Primal raw materials for her work. All that Big Game hunting and early domestication of animals didn't just feed us, it clothed us. I love my artificial-fiber-CrossFitting-gear as much as the next grrrl, but when I dressed my babies, when I care for my sick children, when I need to remind myself that I am of, and from, this earth, I turn to wool. In fact, my least favorite thing about living in southern AZ, might be the lack of wool clothing required. I miss my mittens, scarves and sweaters! Check out Steph's wool creations at her family's website, where you can find her husband, JD, doing the other most Primal of activities, building with stone. The picture is my son Ezra standing in front of one of JD' s walls.

http://www.meadowbrookstoneworks.com/www.meadowbrookstoneworks.com/Family_Fibers.html

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