GM Rice

Ayurvedic Vegetarian Food Pyramid

Vata : emphasis on sweet, salty, sour and pungent tastes
Kapha : emphasis on bitter, astringent, sour and pungent tastes
Pitta : emphasis on sweet, bitter and astringent tastes

Vata : more dairy, nuts
Kapha : more beans
Pitta : more raw food

Wendell Berry Interview

Wendell Berry - Eating is an Agricultural Act

A Canadian WWOOFer introduced me to Wendell Berry. I cannot wait to read his books.

Every once in a while we find people who become spiritual companions and guides, kindred souls who share similar intuitions and thoughts. These people can dispel the ominious sense of isolation arising from the frustration of not sharing the same views as peers or mainstream culture. Thoreau, Spinoza, Epicurus, Patanjali, Masanobu Fukuoka, Michael Pollan, Michel Onfray are a few in my Pantheon. They will certainly have to make a little room for Wendell Berry very soon.

"His nonfiction serves as an extended conversation about the life he values. According to Berry, the good life includes sustainable agriculture, appropriate technologies, healthy rural communities, connection to place, the pleasures of good food, husbandry, good work, local economics, the miracle of life, fidelity, frugality, reverence, and the interconnectedness of life. The threats Berry finds to this good life include: industrial farming and the industrialization of life, ignorance, hubris, greed, violence against others and against the natural world, the eroding topsoil in the United States, global economics, and environmental destruction. As a prominent defender of agrarian values, Berry's appreciation for traditional farming techniques, such as those of the Amish, grew in the 1970s, due in part to exchanges with Draft Horse Journal publisher Maurice Telleen. Berry has long been friendly to and supportive of Wes Jackson, believing that Jackson's agricultural research at The Land Institute lives out the promise of "solving for pattern" and using "nature as model."

The concept of "Solving for pattern", coined by Berry in his essay of the same title, is the process of finding solutions that solve multiple problems, while minimizing the creation of new problems. The essay was originally published in the Rodale Press periodical The New Farm. Though Mr. Berry's use of the phrase was in direct reference to agriculture, it has since come to enjoy broader use throughout the design community."

The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner.

Eating is an agricultural act.

The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war, but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful.

Reductionism (ultimately, the empirical explanability of everything and a cornerstone of science), has uses that are appropriate, and it also can be used inappropriately. It is appropriately used as a way (one way) of understanding what is empirically known or empirically knowable. When it becomes merely an intellectual "position" confronting what is not empirically known or knowable, then it becomes very quickly absurd, and also grossly desensitizing and false.

We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all— by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians— be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.

We need to confront honestly the issue of scale. Bigness has a charm and a drama that are seductive, especially to politicians and financiers; but bigness promotes greed, indifference, and damage, and often bigness is not necessary. You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don't need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don't need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally.

Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.

What I stand for
is what I stand on.

Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

White Trash

From WHFoods.com

Question: "It's great that you have listed all the healthiest foods we should eat. Can you also share with us the "unhealthiest foods," those that we should avoid?"

"The "unhealthiest" foods tend to be those that least resemble their original natural ingredients and those that have the most added refined and artificial additives. Prime examples are the so-called "white foods"-white sugar, white flour, and white fat, and the gamut of foods in which they are the principal ingredients. It's not that these foods are white in color-many of them are actually not. It's that these foods have had many of their natural components-including their natural colors-processed away. "White foods" is simply the shorthand label that we are using when we refer to these heavily processed, nutrient-depleted foods.

* "White sugar" includes refined sugar cane or sugar beets having virtually all B vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and other essential nutrients removed. Corn syrup is also a "white sugar," made from processed cornstarch and essentially devoid of other nutrients.
* "White flour," analogously, is whole wheat flour minus its nutrient-packed wheat germ and fibrous bran. Nutritionally speaking, white flour is a ghost-like shadow of its original whole grain.
* "White fat" can include rendered animal lard, vegetable oils "hydrogenated" to make them hard at room temperature, and refined fats such as cottonseed oil. Hydrogenation is a chemical process that transforms natural fats into more saturated trans-fatty acids that do not occur naturally and which are strongly associated with cardiovascular disease.

Foods having "whites" as their primary ingredients are frighteningly ubiquitous! Examples include soft drinks, breads, hamburger and hotdog buns, crackers, pasta, pastries and pastry fillings, pies, cakes, frostings, margarine and bread spreads, jellies, sweets and candies, frozen dinners, pizzas, snack foods, doughnuts, candy bars, and cookies-all of which are common snack and convenience foods. Indeed, many of these combine all three whites together-white sugar, flour, and fat! Furthermore, these foods frequently contain artificial colors, artificial flavors, preservatives, texturizing and processing agents, and other additives that further detract from their nutritional stature and your health. These are among the foods that I would consider to be the unhealthiest and the ones that I would avoid."

--

Beyond white foods, one can add potentially very healthy foods ruined by negative production methods such as meat or milk from unhealthy, intensively raised animals. Also, it is good to remember that certain combinations of healthy food can make the end result unwelcome.

Healthy on a Small Planet

Is there a simple way to evaluate the quality of food in terms of health and sustainability?

In the UK, a traffic light food labeling system was introduced in certain supermarkets to indicate whether levels of fat, saturated fat, sugar and salt where safe, moderately high or very high.

While the label is helpful to those aware of their specific health risks - diabetes, cholesterol and high blood pressure - it fails to give the average consumer an indication of how much "quality" a product has.

The obvious pitfall is to disqualify food on the basis of a nutritional configuration. This type of selection belongs to the realm of marketing, the food and pharmacological industries. Buying food intelligently is not to follow the industry's "health” claims. No natural food is inherently unhealthy.

All natural foods are healthy as long as they are balancing to the eater's constitution, that they are eaten at an appropriate time and season, that they are combined properly, that they are made digestible (with cooking or spices for example), that they are eaten in proper quantity. As a consequence, no "natural" organic food, should be considered unhealthy and attributed a red light. Organic butter might receive a red light in the aforementioned labeling system for its saturated fat content, while it is almost universally life-giving to those eating it in the proper conditions.

Below is an alternative labeling system (open to modifications) which indicates definite risk for health, for the environment or for unfair population exploitation.


Green Light

The Bottom Line:
Healthy. Respectful of the environment. Respectful of workers. Efficient in space and energy. Sustainable.

All foods in this group must be:

• Organic*
• Local
• In Season
• Fair for workers along the entire chain of production and distribution.
• 100% Natural. Without any additives or synthetic chemicals.

List:

• Vegetables
• Fruit
• Whole grains and cereal
• Beans
• Nuts and Seeds
• Oils
• Spices and Herbs
• Beverages
• Unrefined sweeteners
• Eggs
• Dairy**
• Sea Vegetables**
• Honey, propolis, royal jelly, pollen**

Have fresh.
Take into account individual needs (pregnant, diabetes...).
Always include in a varied, balanced diet.

*Organic as in replenishes the soil, respects natural cycles, without chemicals, respectful of the welfare and health of animals, 100% natural, not from large monoculture fields.

**Can have a bad ecological impact, but not as much as “yellow light” or “red light” foods.




Yellow Light

The Bottom Line:
Healthy but either:

• Taxing in resources of space or energy.
• Damaging to the environment or species in excess.
• Addictive.
• Excessively stimulating or dulling.
• Unhealthy when not eaten only occasionally.

All foods in this group must be

• Organic*
• Fair for workers along the entire chain of production and distribution.
• 100% Natural. Without any additives or synthetic chemicals.

List:

• Meat
• Fish
• Poultry
• Coffee, guarana, ...
• Alcohol
• Sweets and candy
• Refined flour, cereal and sweeteners
• All “Green light” foods that are not produced and distributed locally

Red Light

The Bottom Line:
Avoid altogether. Unhealthy, damaging to the environment, damaging to workers, encourages an unethical economy.

• Food grown with chemical pesticides and herbicides
• Genetically engineered food
• Animals fed with food that belongs to this red light list or unsuited for their needs
• Animals not raised in proper conditions for welfare and health
• Fish from polluted water or from intensive fish farms.
• Plants from large monoculture fields
• Endangered species of animals or plants
• Food produced, transformed or distributed in a way that does not respect workers
• Food produced, transformed or distributed in a way that prevents the economic emancipation of poorer countries
  
• Food processed with chemical additives
• Processed oil
• Excessively salty, sweet or fat processed food

Diversity

"Alors que près de 7 000 espèces végétales ont été cultivées depuis le début de l'humanité, 15 variétés de plantes et 8 variétés animales seulement fournissent aujourd’hui 90% des ressources alimentaires de la planète. Cette uniformisation pose le problème de la perte des saveurs et de l’appauvrissement culturel, mais également celui de notre dépendance à quelques variétés alimentaires lorsque celles-ci se trouvent menacées par un agent pathogène, un insecte ravageur ou un aléa climatique.

Variez donc autant que possible votre alimentation et vos achats : ce conseil nutritionnel classique est aussi une bonne façon de soutenir la diversité biologique, qui n’a rien à voir la diversité croissante des produits dans les supermarchés, où les produits soi-disants « nouveaux » sont souvent faits avec les mêmes matières premières – du maïs, du blé, du riz et des pommes de terre."

-MesCoursesPourLaPlanete