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.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper



My current read, 5 pgs today waiting inline at the post office and a few more tonight listening to my kids' shaolin kung fu teacher exhort them to live a life of love, is called "Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper A Sweet Sour Memoir of Eating in China" by Fuchsia Dunlop. I am loving this book. Click here to check her out. It chronicles Fuchsia's developing relationship with the gnarliest components of Sichuanese food. This is something that the most ardent Paleo proponents often ignore. I don't know if they neglect the topic through ignorance or eyes squeezed tightly shut to avoid contemplating eating gristle, tendons, guts, feet, eyes and brains. Please don't think I am braver than I am. I am as grossed out by this stuff as you probably are, although I can eat raw meat without difficulty these days. But, the reality of the Paleolithic peoples and more recent hunter-gatherers is that they ate just like the Sichuanese people that Fuchsia describes in her book. These gruesome tidbits are also, of course, purveyors of nutrients that we undersupply ourselves with on a regular basis. Check out this excerpt from her book on pg. 145 "The artistry of the finest Chinese cooking, with it's subtle command of colour, aroma, taste and mouthfeel, still leaves me speechless with admiration. Those fugues on a single theme-imagine, if you will, an entire banquet based on on duck: wings, webbed feet, liver, gizzards, intestines, tongues, hearts, heads, skin and flesh, each part cooked according to its particular character! That combination of intellectual thrill with raw, sexy, sensual pleasure! Those smooth and bouncy and silky and chewy and crunchy and tender textures! Those games with hot and cold! Apply yourself to the study of Chinese gastronomic culture, and most particularly, to the understanding of texture, and whole worlds open up." The photo is a page in Ms Dunlop's scrapbook from her website.
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