Happy Sweet

Those are some delicious happy feet, arent they? Courtesy of a Facebook friend who shall remain nameless.

God is leaving the building

The firing squad is being mobilized for something I said to a friend recently, so I feel the need to argue it logically, from beginning to end. We were talking about Middle Eastern society, and I said that "religion is the basest unifier of people", and I qualified my statement with special regard to Islam that I consider to be a horrible religion, both brutish and binding, with dark truths that prey on people's hearts. Upon arriving home, I could feel the whiplash of my statement pulsing through my family, observant Jews who are very unified through their faith, and crashing their hearts. And it dawns upon me, there is still something intrinsically true to my statement; above and beyond the beauty and joy their congregations feed them, religion is a private relationship between oneself and the world. It is a meditative relationship which hinges upon a harmonious flow between oneself, and all of creation. That being said, there are social celebrations centered upon this relationship which are worthy of congregation, study to be done that works best in groups, but the heart of the matter, the point of my statement, is that there is so much more for human beings to come together around than religion, within their respective ethnicities and cultural identities. As a Jew, I find so much more to come together around within Judaism than seasonal holidays, however much I do enjoy the company of friends and family, however routine the ceremony may be, year after year. Yes, the ceremony and literature IS fundamental and valuable, but there is so much more. To put it simply; CULTURE, and it needn't be codified, but can be individually structured, just like faith ideally should be, from the vast assemblage of cultural foods, language arts, fashions, and all the other vast cultural arts, which some religious people shun due to their prohibitive lifestyles and mores.
Is religion base? Only when it is destructive, otherwise it can be an illuminating blessing for those who follow, and very noble, but my statement reverberates in my heart that it is still not the best basis for social interaction, for union amongst people. It is but one fruit of the great tree that is CULTURE, and I for one, want to see a full, and bountiful tree, lush with the beauty of my ancestors, which I seek to perpetuate. And to take the argument one step further, trees. Cultural springs from which we all may benefit and grow. One of the great benefits of being an American; take advantage people.
Finally, religion becomes base when it is abused. My mother says, everything in moderation, and this applies to religion as well. Besides for the great assumptions we make about the creator's intentions for us and this world, in religious observance, these practices may make robots of people, who, in extremity, adopt a mob attitude, and that is not a noble thing at all. God does not need arbitrarily disciplined armies; I can say in all certainty, that God just wants us to be a good and happy. Let's have a party over that. I'll make some really delicious, healthy food. Come. And let God watch. I bet he likes to watch us LIVE LIFE.

Spring in New Jersey

Our beautiful red tree, the graceful queen of our front yard, has blossomed her dazzling array of leaves. I can not begin to describe the feeling one gets when her grace blesses us with her bounty each spring, but I can try to show you. Ignite!
I grew up climbing this pretty tree, so it was only appropriate to take some pics from inside, cradled in her branches.
A little scene of graceful foliage above my branch.

Her canopy, with the sun and a nearby friend saying hello.
And look at this! When you jump down the ground is always a revelation, and look at what I noticed this time. We have tons of sprouts growing about her trunk. She's a momma!

Leaving the Pleasure Dome.....

.....and entering a whole new world of senses, tastes, and culinary delights, that are real!
As promised, it is time to delve into the next chapter of Forks over Knives, and tackle another important issue the film opens up for us, food as addiction. I am very familiar with this problem, I think we all are to some extent (be they good or bad dependencies), with gluten, specifically via pasta. When I eat a nice plate of pasta (always loaded with veggies, btw), I am good for hours, because the gluten is an incredibly thick, dense, and generally hearty protein found in all varieties of wheat and barley, and some other cereal grains (but those glutens, like those found in corn, are altogether different). This process of satiation from nutrient dense foods is one of the red flags for poor eating habits that people have with the standard American diet that is heavy (no pun intended) in processed foods like bread, pasta (gluten), meats, oils and dairy. We are filling up on these foods, mostly processed carbs, instead of eating a variety of vegetables which are less attractive, and frankly, less accessible. Meat and dairy are great examples of nutrient dense foods that we are over-eating because we like them so much, in fact, our brains are idiotically drawn to them, the video explains, precisely because they are dense and rich, and will fill us up. Cheese is the best example I can think of. How much do we all love cheese? Because it is rich, nutrient dense, and texturally heavenly. But is it really feeding us the protein, fats and minerals it boasts? The brain in our stomach seems to think so. Worse yet, is how poorly we are consuming and denaturing what was once a luxury food. When we eat animal flesh, that which is now an agro-industrial commodity devoid of its original, pastoral integrity, many of us, all over the world, actually, are cooking it up and burning the bio-availability right out of it, and even making this sustenance carcinogenic (browning your meat is caramelizing it, creating cancer causing compounds from the sugars). To put it simply, in principle, when meat, or anything, is OVERCOOKED, it becomes hydrophobic, which means it becomes such a tight, contractive mass that it actually repels water; how well do you think the nutrients from such a product are absorbed into our cells and body tissue? Furthermore, when you cook anything, you cook its digestive enzymes out of it when your cooking heat exceeds 118 (that is barely hot enough to melt butter), thereby making it that much harder for our body to digest it in general. The body likes raw animal protein, that which has digestive enzymes intact, but if you cant stomach it, be sure you are not burning your meat. Braising, boiling, poaching, and what my teacher, Chef Celine, called swateeing (saute-ig with water), are ways to ensure your food does not burn. Finally, there is "well done" food. Food that has the vitality literally cooked right out of it. This is most readily observable in starches that are prized when they are "golden". Dr. Oz explains this process on his website:
"Certain natural sugars and certain natural protein building blocks become fused together to form acrylamide when temperatures top 250°F.The substance...acrylamide...It’s an industrial chemical known to increase infertility and neurological problems at high doses...And, the browner the toast or cereal or potato, the more acrylamide it likely contains"(http://www.doctoroz.com/videos/toxic-toast-411-acrylamide)
It is recently being discovered that these acrylamides are actually carcinogenic, so why do we like these compounds,the dark products of fire roasted foods? Can our instinctual wiring for food be so senseless, and even self-destructive? The documentary explains that it is not our nature, but our nurture that is damning us. The standard American diet has predisposed us to foods that pop! How does a plate of steamed broccoli stand a chance? That plate of broccoli, eaten with some healthy starches, fats, and some animal protein, like a rice pilaf with beans, and a poached egg, is a great meal that will fill up your stomach, and trigger your stomach's sensors for a full, adequately dense meal. The video explains that 500 calories of vegetable foods fills up the stomach quite nicely, and tells your brain you have had enough. Rice and beans, a meal that provides complete protein, is quite filling! And you can load that with all kinds of vegetables in the bean stew, in the rice, and served alongside both (various salsas, chutneys, guacamole, pickled vegetables, raw onions, scallions, radishes, etc.). On the other hand, 500 calories of nutrient dense food is a snack; it barely fills up half the stomach, and while that may temporarily sate us, and literally triggers happy hormones in our brains, it does not give us the nutrients, fiber, and real meal feeling that we need to feel that we have had enough. So we eat more, and more poor calories is the recipe for disease this film warns us about.
We are all of us in the American pleasure dome, and until that cycle is broken, we are doomed to repeat poor eating habits that fill us up without giving us what we really need.

PS. One more IMPORTANT point: when our body eats too much protein or sugar (from an excess of carbs) it goes into an acid shock, known as metabolic acidosis, and our cells and tissues begin to suffer, sometimes irreversibly. It is what happens when our bloods pH goes below a certain level, and becomes acidic. Leafy greens, low sugar citrus, such as grapefruits and lemons, and other ALKALIZING foods balance the acids in our bodies. Look 'em up, and enjoy, to your health!
PPS. Look it! I got this for my kids someday. Those crusts are burned, and kids are right for not wanting to eat them! Dont encourage them!

Everyman's soup

I went to work last night to use their kitchen which lays sad and fallow during the week. I have been fighting with my mother, and I didn't want to occupy her space, so I asked James, our kitchen manager, if I could come over, and make some brownies, pretty please. He gave me a very unexpected "sure, of course", which is a welcome change in my world. But that is not why I am writing you, dear reader, I am writing you to share my last minute bravura, a great soup that I made last night which was also unexpected, and very delicious. It is the last bit of my mother's matzah ball soup with some chickpeas I added (I hadn't had any all weekend, and when I saw the tupperware full of matzah balls, a few carrots, and only a few ounces of chicken stock, I knew I could make something of it). So I stopped at the market to pick up some cilantro, always an excellent addition to most any soup, and got some shrimps and enoki mushrooms at the last minute. First thing I did when I got to the restaurant, was to peel the exoskeletons off the shrimp to make a quick stock which would simmer for a good 40 minutes. I put the meat aside in a hotel pan filled with ice, and set off to make my brownies. When they were in the oven, I prepped the rest of my soup, cleaned the cilantro, shrimps, and mushrooms, and cooked it all together (actually, I rough chopped the cilantro and placed it into the serving bowl, and when the soup was ready I poured it over it, to preserve the fresh taste of the herb) in the two stock mixture. What a delight! I tossed some red pepper flakes, and of course some salt, into the final product, and I really enjoyed this masterpiece, a pan-Asian delight if you will, that I hope to make again.


Look Ma, I really am the devil! But I prefer to think that shrimp and matzah ball can coexist. I dont expect her to agree.

A close up of all the varietal goodness.

Forks Over Knives

As part of my educational entertainment phase, I just finished watching Forks Over Knives, a super jam packed wake up call for people who are addicted to the standard American diet of processed foods and animal proteins. I should say alarmist, but not without cause. The way millions of Americans eat in this country is atrocious, and a real problem that this documetary is tackling head on, illustrating the consequences of the standard American diet.

What is the standard American diet? It is "My Pyramid", it is cheese burgers and fries with a milkshake, it is canned vegetables and TV dinners, it is candy bars and soda, it is sliced bread and lunch meats, processed sugars and grains. In 100 years, from the 20th to the 21st century, Americans have almost doubled, and sometimes tripled the consumption of these foods. In the early 1900's Americans were eating 120 lbs of meats, 40 lbs of processed sugar, and 294 lbs of dairy annually. In 2000, Americans are now eating, 222 lbs of meat, 147 lbs of all processed sweeteners, 605 lbs of dairy annually. And these figures most accurately reflect children's breakfast and lunches at school, where these industries reign due to government subsidies of dairy and the like. What the movie advocates as an alternative is a plant based diet, with whole grains and legumes as the major protein source, and minimal animal protein. What is minimal? I really don't know. I had two organic eggs with my breakfast of potatoes and a bowl of fresh cilantro, which I think is pretty healthy, but maybe I am wrong. Each egg is 50 grams, and two eggs would be 100 grams, just under 4 ounces. According to the film, that is a lot for one meal! And they are right, but how do we put their theories into action (maybe just one egg in the future, like my mom does)? They criticize the standard American diet which is about 10 ounces of meats a day (eggs is included in that category I suppose). So, considering what I ate this morning, can I have any more meat today? Probably not, but who knows! Much less confusing, I think is dairy, as almost 2 pounds of dairy a day is definitely over the limit, and I will tell you why. On top of all the industrial concerns over dairy, the growth hormones present, the poor lipid profile due to a mostly grain diet, and the anti-biotics administered to keep inflammation down in this undignified animal, all mammal dairy has a protein called casein, which up to now I only understood to be one of the toughest proteins to digest, especially after pasteurization when its digestive enzyme is destroyed by heat (casein found in goat and sheep dairy is not as tough, and easier to digest, as are their fats, which are shorter chain fatty acids, which carry a host of additional health benefits). Turns out, it is much worse than I thought. Casein should never be eaten with fruits, vegetables, chocolate, tea, even coffee, because of the way it blocks the anti-oxidants called polyphenols from doing their job of healing the body. It binds to polyphenols, and renders them helpless to pass through our system, a prisoner of casein's chemical bond. Casein is a bitter rogue, and I for one, am frightened by him now. One would do better to eat dairy products without casein (cream based dairy, that which is entirely milkfat) in combination, or to eat dairy products containing casein by themselves, in moderation. So that solo cup of milk at night once in a while might not be such a bad idea after all (considering that it is whole milk, grass fed, hormone free, and preferably non-homogenized). There is the larger concern that casein is causing cancer. That is something I know very little about, but theoretically, it is possible that cancer cells can be fed from the casein which our body can not digest without its proper digestive enzyme, which would only be found in raw dairy, pre-pasteurization. Cancer cells love all animal protein, perhaps especially that wich they have free reign over. But with raw dairy, our body would digest the protein instead of simply passing it through our system, and then we would be fighting with the cancer cells for the food. I'm still not sure how raw dairy paired with foods rich in anti-oxidant polyphenols would affect polyphenol absorption, but it would be logical to assume that if it has its digestive enzyme, the casein molecule wont be looking roguishly for anything else to link up with; it will already have its match, and catalyze from there into digestible food for our cells.
The main, and most preventable, consequence of the standard American diet is heart disease, specifically athersoclerosis, the clogging of our veins and arteries. Dr. Esselstyn (one of the pioneering doctors), says that heart disease is a "toothless paper tiger", which as the film explains, arose in the 60's as a direct result of all the newfangled processed foods of the 50's, and widespread meat consumption. Essentially, as I understand it, plaque is building up in our veins cells, the endothelial cells, compromising their health due to an excess of low density lipids from too much (poor quality) animal foods. Then there is the carb and sugar contribution (which are also stored as fats when eaten in excess, and create more plaque in our veins and arteries). Along with these deleterious fats, sugars provide ample food for bacteria to wreak havoc on our veins, the result of which is the lining of our arteries first being built-up with plaque, then inflamed to the point of bursting, causing blood blockage which is when the heart breaks down due to incapacitation. I actually got to see a bypass surgery in the video, when they take a vein from your leg, and connect it to your heart, to "bypass" a blocked artery. Fucking wondrous. Want to know what's even more wondrous? The graphic they made of the endothelial cells health being reversed and restored back to youthful beauty with a reform in diet to plant foods and whole grains. You truly are what you eat, and it is so important that the healing power of plants play an active role in the life of your body.
There is much more I would like to write about, but I would like to keep the work topical, and dare I say, digestable. My next blog post will be about food as drugs, and how Americans are truly and literally addicted to the plethora of delicious garbage we adorably call food.

Gasland

I recently watched the documentary Gasland about the dangers of hydraulic fracturing, fracking, in the US for natural gas. I had seen some clips about the film from "The Daily Show", so I was expecting to see some tapwater set a flame with nothing more than a lighter beneath the running faucet, but I was horrified by the human, animal, and general environmental toll this practice is wreaking on our fair country. Most interesting is the loss of taste and smell in some of the victims. It can be expected that people are dying from cancers, animals are suffocating instantaneously, and streams are bubbling with natural gas like the US has been transformed into Willy Wonka's natural gasland. Two women featured in the documentary looked woefully into the camera as they described how food to them was now only texture. This is of course, an absurdist lament, atop the migraines and real sickness the natural gas is causing, but in the absurd, we are given an insight into the landscape of this very real menace big business has recently thrust upon us. And this is no propaganda damning big business arbitrarily; in 2005, as the movie describes, Dick Cheney passed an energy bill, The Energy Policy Act of 2005, which exempts the oil and natural gas industries from 30 years of environmental regulations, under the guise of an effort to move away from greenhouse gases (natural gas is a much cleaner source of energy than oil and coal). But it was all for Halliburton, because by easing these restrictions, big companies such as Encana, Williams, Cabot Oil & Gas, and others were now able to use the new Halliburton technologies to undergo "the largest and most extensive domestic gas drilling in history". These technologies are currently being undergone in 34 states. The product of which is most likely powering my computer right now.
The film begins in media res, in the middle of this hullaballo, with our auteur, Josh Fox, the documentarian, receiving a letter from some big company, proposing a lease of his 20 acres of land in Milanville, NY, for fracking along the Marcellus Shale, a large swath of mineral sediment, which houses what he calls "an Iraq of natural gas". These shale basins all over the US are our great sources of natural gas, which, sadly, we have decided to rape in a half-assed haste which I do not fully comprehend. The rape is as such: a host of chemicals are pumped 8000 feet underground into the sediment to cause a mini-earthquake with several tons of water, to create wells, which release the natural gas into great reactors. These chemicals are a great mix of toxins and carcinogens the likes of which we should be running from, not producing and pumping into mother earth. Then, when the gas is reaped, it is full of all of the toxins, which they simply burn off, and emit freely into the air. If this isn't the dirtiest desecration of our beautiful America, I dont know what is. Fox's concern is for where he lives, here, on the East coast, along the Marcellus Formation/shale, which is housed in the Appalachian mountains, and is no small part. If we lose this area to fracking, the devestation will be so wide-spread, there is no way to compute it simply. In a nutshell, say goodbye to our clean drinking water, the water NY prides itself on, which also serves parts of NJ and Pennsylvania. Even the most sophisticated filtration systems dont stand a chance against the corrosive chemicals that eat the filters of the systems. You can slowly say goodbye to the grassfed dairy and livestock of the catskills, as the air and water will slowly kill the vibrant pride of that small beacon of light in this dark, American foodscape. Oh, and say goodbye to hiking and camping, as the streams will be bubbling with natural gas, and the rocks may be hissing a wealth of that good stuff! But who cares, right? This is all hippie shit.