The Temple of Omnivory

 

 (this picture of marinated fresh anchovies is a screen shot from a slideshow on Dalí’s website)

My husband and I went to Dalí for dinner last Sunday.  He’d been working late a lot, and the end-of-project crunch was finally over.  And we had a couple of other nice things to celebrate, too.  So we spent the afternoon hiking (walking, really) around Walden Pond and the evening eating and drinking at Dalí.  Dalí is among the places we hold dearest in our hearts.  We got engaged there; we took our officiant and dear friend Liz there for a quiet dinner before the wedding madness started; and we think of it whenever we think of celebrating or treating ourselves.  If you’re in the Boston area, you should check it out.

And, of course, when a friend mentioned that Dalí was the place she most often consumed strange meats, I realized that I could earn some serious omnivory points by going there this month. 

If you’re trying to diversify your diet by consuming meats other than the beef, chicken, pork, and turkey you find in the typical grocery store, if your idea of varying your seafood consumption is trying a different brand of canned tuna, a tapas bar is a great place to try new things without a big commitment.  You can have just a bite or two of rabbit, for example, without committing to preparing and eating the whole thing.  Dalí’s standard menu sports some unusual offerings, including fresh anchovies, octopus, pheasant, duckling, quail, rabbit, and squid; I’ve tried them all at one time or another.  Then there are the sort of medium-strange foods, the things that are mainstream for some people but odd for others, like mussels, scallops, lobster, crab, lamb, prawns, and goat cheese.  For me, one of the great delights of Dalí is its lack of chicken dishes - the tapas menu serves a little plate of chicken in garlic sauce, and that’s it.  (I don’t know about the main courses, never having eaten on there, always preferring to order a lot of tapas instead.)  I have only recently discovered a liking for chicken; for many years, I thought chicken tasted and smelled dead.  While I do like chicken occasionally now, it’s nice to see a restaurant that can get along without it!

If you avoid pork for religious reasons, you should approach a tapas menu with caution - the Spanish love their pork, so it pops up even in dishes where it is not the star.  But there are still many, many choices that are pork-free; in a decent restaurant like Dalí, your server should be able to help you.  (If you avoid pork for health reasons, we need to have a little talk.  Let’s start here, and maybe here as well.)

Be Careful What You Name Your Blog

Where do I get off calling this blog The Migraineur? I haven’t written about migraine in months! What the heck is this blog about, anyway?

I started it as a form of psychotherapy for my migraines. I haven’t had a migraine since something like, I don’t know, June 3, 2007. It’s not that I’m uninterested in the subject of migraine any more, but my interest is less immediate. Inderal has given me back my life. I wish I weren’t taking it any more. I returned to a low-carb diet a couple of months after starting Inderal, so I can’t say with any certainty whether low-carb is helping or whether it would be enough by itself to control migraine. I’m a little too chicken to try dropping the Inderal to find out. And I’m a little too chicken to go to my doctor and tell her I want to taper a drug that to all appearances is working fabulously in order to try drug-free therapy. She’s an allopath; she’ll think I’m nuts.

I am fairly sure that the drug has something to do with the snail’s pace of my weight loss. I am also not looking forward to summer, when the combination of my natural low blood pressure, the heat, and Inderal is going to make me feel like a dishrag. I moved from one house to another in July, and it was torture. I wonder how I got it done. Then again, I was also fat and addicted to carbs in July. Maybe this summer will be different. Maybe if it isn’t, that’s the impetus to persuade the doctor to get me off Inderal.

But I digress. I will spare you the long discussion of how the blog came to be about low-carb. The short discussion is migraine > menstrual period > reproductive endocrinologist > polycystic ovary syndrome > insulin > OMG-I-gotta-stop-messing-around-and-ditch-the-carbs!

And I won’t say this blog has stopped being about low-carb, but I can feel it evolving into more. A blog about food. About respecting food. About eating well. About not swallowing what you’re told. About thinking for yourself. And yes, a blog about why a low-carb diet isn’t gonna kill ya.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who has ever started a blog with a specific topic in mind and then watched it drift … and drift … and drift.   So gee whiz, if I were whisked back in time and could pick a name for my blog, what would I call it that would be sufficiently general? I suppose I could’ve chosen something funky and meaningless, like “bananagoddess” or “tuna_toes.” But I’m thinking that, if I could rename this blog, I’d call it UseYourHead.

Interestingly, though, in spite of my neglect of the topic of migraine, far and away the most viewed post on my blog is Ketogenic Diet for Migraine? And, in fact, if you Google “ketogenic diet migraine,” my blog is the first hit. (I’m famous!) So I know I’m not the only migraineur who wonders whether low-carb is helpful. I’m only sorry that I don’t have a definitive answer to the question.

(In case you’re wondering, the second most viewed entry on this blog is What’s Your Ideal Weight? Why are all my most popular blog entries questions? How Many Teaspoons???? is up there, too, as is Would You Take Diet Advice From This Person?. Anyway, I am sure that most people viewing the ideal weight entry are disappointed, since I do not tell you how to figure out your ideal weight, and in fact I’m throwing the whole concept into question.)

Omnivory: Eat It All!

I’ve had a couple of thought-provoking experiences lately.  First, Huckleberry commented on my original Omnivory Month post that it was probably harder to do this in March.  Second, a friend told me she’d heard February and March referred to as Starvation Season, because in the old days, if you hadn’t (literally) salted away enough food in your smokehouse, if you hadn’t stocked your root cellar adequately, you were gonna be hurting until late spring.

Huckleberry’s comment got me thinking about how we tend to think that variety in our diet is provided by plants - when the snow covers the ground, and plants are scarce, variety is harder to come by.  And I certainly noticed in the first two weeks of Omnivory Month that in our agricultural world, where most of our food is provided by domesticated species, there are lots and lots more domesticated plant species available than domesticated animal species.  But what about wild animals and wild plants?  Apparently the numbers are relatively similar - 250,000+ for plants, about 240,000 for animals.  Of course, I have no idea how many of those are edible to humans.  (All living things are edible to some other living thing, I guess.)  In any case, when I read what Huckleberry wrote, I started to wonder if eating a wider variety of animal species could be a kind of insurance against the lack of variety in winter and early spring.  It’s not foolproof, mind you - some animals hibernate, and ultimately the whole food chain relies on photosynthesis, so food is always going to be somewhat more limited when plants are scarce.  But there are more kinds of food, and just plain more food, available in winter if you eat animals, wild or domesticated, than if you stick to plants.  Sort of Diet for a Small Planet in reverse - when plants are scarce, eating animals is not a bad idea.

To my friend’s comment I replied, “What, people didn’t hunt and fish a hundred years ago?”  Her observation seemed to be truer in a strictly agricultural society than in a society with some hunting or gathering behaviors.  While it’s true that hunter-gatherers still have to deal with the same wintertime scarcity issues I described above, those scarcity issues are counterbalanced by the fact that hunter-gatherers eat many, many more different species than agriculturists do.  I would guess that makes them less vulnerable to shortages of one species.  The most extreme example:  a plague of insects that eat a crop would be a disaster to an agriculturist, who would do everything possible to keep the insects at bay.  But hunter-gatherers would consider the insects themselves to be a tremendous windfall of delicious food.  (I understand cicadas are mighty tasty.)  Closer to home, I’ve certainly eaten snails (this month, actually, which gives me two omnivory points, one for the species and one for wild).  Many people consider snails to be a garden pest.  Omnivory, then, is a pretty clever evolutionary survival mechanism - if something eats your lettuce, there’s no need to despair.  Just eat the thing that ate the lettuce.  The koala is screwed if the eucalyptus equivalent of Dutch elm disease strikes; but it’s hard to imagine what kind of food shortage could wipe out bears or raccoons.  Reduce populations, maybe, but wipe them out completely?

It reminded me a little bit of Socrates, in one of the Platonic dialogues, talking about how writing made us less smart, because we stopped needing to use our memories.  The conventional wisdom is that agriculture was a great benefit to humans because it increased the amount of available food.  But I wonder if that’s really true.  Did agriculture actually make us more helpless by making us dependent on domesticated species to the exclusion of wild foods?

Down 20 Pounds

I found this image at Antique Haven.

Yes, folks, the scale registered 141 this morning.

My scale (which looks nothing like the one pictured above) is pretty flaky.  I bought it for $5 on sale at Target almost a decade ago.  It’s not the most accurate thing in the world.  My husband confirmed my impression that you can change your weight easily depending on whether you put your weight mostly on your heels (less) or balls of the foot (more).

Plus, my bathroom is tiny, which means the scale has to be pushed into a corner for storage and then pulled away from the wall when it’s time to weigh in.  On top of that, our wood-frame house was built around 1856, and the floors bow.  So if you don’t get the scale in the exact same spot each time, your weight is going to vary.

Because of all this, my weight has been flirting with 141 for some time, except when it’s been 142, or 143, or (after a treat of French fries) 145, or back to 142, or … you get the idea.

This morning’s “heel” reading was 140, and the “ball” reading was 141.  I’ll take it.

For All You Vegetarians …

see more crazy cat pics

courtesy of ICanHasCheezburger (as if you didn’t already know)

The General Mills Organic Tomato

Check out this post on Anna’s Against the Grain blog.

After all my years in banking, this kind of thing shouldn’t surprise me.  But with food, it does!  The difference is, when a bank acquires another bank, the acquired bank effectively ceases to exist - when Bank of America bought Fleet, you stopped seeing the Fleet brand.  (Sad for any New Englander interested in history, since it was one of the oldest banking brands.)  So you can’t help but notice that a merger has been effected and money (or, really, stock) has changed hands.

But when General Mills acquires Muir Glen, you still see the Muir Glen brand everywhere.  I guess it has more cachet than suddenly seeing “General Mills Organic Tomatoes.”  But doesn’t it seem sort of deceptive?  I thought I was buying those tomatoes from a certain kind of business, and now it turns out I’m buying them from a completely different kind of business.

Plus, when banks swallow other banks, there is at least some show made of having public hearings.  You can’t fail to notice if your do-gooder community bank gets bought by another to whose practices you object.  But if a producer of organic food is swallowed up by some giant corporation that, in its other lines of business, buys tainted food from China, irradiates its spices, uses milk from cows fed rBST, buys genetically modified corn from Archer Daniels Midland, and makes baby formula out of Roundup-sprayed soybeans - well, unless you have habit of combing through the back pages of the business section, you may never know about it, and even if you know about it, there’s unlikely to be a public hearing, and even if there is a public hearing, the hearing is not exactly shouted from the rooftops the way it is in banking.

The rationale for this in the banking industry is that banks control the money supply, and therefore they control the economy, so we have to be careful what we allow them to do.  I don’t disagree (too much) with this principle, but … isn’t food even more important than money?  What about the people who control the food supply?  Whether you believe in more regulation or less, shouldn’t we at least have the right to know who is producing our food?

Omnivory Month Update

Isn’t it just like me to start an ambitious project and then either fail to follow through on it, or to follow through really slowly?

I haven’t given up on Omnivory Month - if you go here, you can see my tally.  But wow, was it time-consuming looking up all those species names!  Truth be told, participating in Omnivory Month is much more fun than documenting it.

For those of you who don’t want to wade through the whole list, here are some highlights.

Total points earned, as of March 15.  78.

Weirdest plant consumed.  Cardoons.  I’d heard of them, but when I saw them in the store I figured, Hey, it’s Omnivory Month.  They look like spiny celery and taste a bit like artichokes (to which they are related, though not in the same species).  Mostly they are a vehicle for anchovy butter.

Weirdest animal product consumed.  Chicken livers.  They are among the easiest organ meats to get your hands on, but I’d been fearing them because as a child I. Did. Not. Like. Liver.  Well, now I love them, but man, are they rich!  And you must understand that I adore rich foods.  I can sip heavy cream, straight.  I have been known to cut a little slice off a stick of butter and pop it straight into my mouth.  But chicken livers, oh, my!  I couldn’t handle more than two at a time.  (Fortunately, the kitty cats adore them, too.)

The weird animal product thing brings up an interesting point.  At the moment, we have a duck, some ostrich, some bison, and something that claims to be a wild boar tenderloin in the freezer, but I haven’t cooked them.  My husband has been working crazy hours and eating dinner at work, and I just don’t think it’s as much fun to eat something our families would never have dreamed of eating if he’s not here to join me.  Hopefully, we’ll get to these soon.  He informs me that the ostrich will be tomorrow’s dinner.

Domestication.  We humans really have managed to domesticate way more species of plant than of animal.  Maybe it’s because animals have behaviors while plants have habits?  That is to say, no human is going to put up with a species whose behaviors make it obnoxious to be around, which is probably one reason why we haven’t domesticated too many carnivores.  On the other hand, I think I could easily double the number of animal species consumed just by trolling the fish counter - there sure are a lot of different kinds of fish.

Variety.  Very few of the items on my list were new to me - cardoons and chicken livers were the only things I’d never eaten before, and frankly, I’d probably had chicken livers hidden in some gravy or dirty rice somewhere in my carb-eating past.  So in a way it seems like I already get a lot of variety in my diet.  But a closer look reveals that very, very many of the distinct species are herbs, spices, and flavorings, nothing that I consume in quantity.  I’ll work harder on this in the second half of the month.

Weirdest thing I learned.  Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, collards, kohlrabi, and Brussels sprouts all belong to the same species!

Greatest victory.  I did have a bite of bread and some potatoes, and even some soy, but note that corn has not passed my lips!

How about you?  Tried any new foods this month?

Another Food Myth Exploded

Myth:  Meat has no vitamin C.

Before I go any further, let’s apply common sense.  The only two mammals that cannot produce their own vitamin C are humans and guinea pigs.  So if other animals make vitamin C, where does it go?  Does it just go “poof” when they die?  I’m not saying it doesn’t, but I was not under the impression that vitamin C is a particularly volatile compound.  I mean, vitamin C supplements don’t come with labels warning us to keep them refrigerated or out of light.

I’m about to cook up some chicken livers, and out of curiosity I visited the USDA food database to see how they stack up nutritionally.  It turns out 100 g (about 3 1/2 oz.) of cooked chicken liver has 28 mg of vitamin C.

The same amount of cooked lamb kidney has 12 mg.  Sweetbreads (I’m afraid you’ll have to search under “veal thymus” to find these in the USDA database) have 39 mg, over half the recommended daily value.  Even beef tongue has a couple of milligrams.

The old “meat has no vitamin C chestnut” surely means, “the ubiquitous muscle meats that Americans eat to the exclusion of all else have no vitamin C.”

Please note that this data comes from the ultra-mainstream USDA, not from some crazy wacko like me who really believes that Vilhjalmur Stefansson actually lived for a year on nothing but meat and didn’t get scurvy.  (Stefansson was a fascinating guy; check out this reprint of his lengthy 1935 account in Harper’s of his time among the Eskimo.)

Daylight Savings Time

After hearing people bitching and moaning all day about losing one little hour of sleep, I have to wonder:  am I the only person in America who loves early DST?

I was thrilled when we started going on DST earlier and getting off later.  I love that extra hour of light in the afternoon.  Afternoon daylight means spring.  I don’t care if temperatures were in the 20s today; I don’t care if we haven’t hit the equinox yet.  As far as I’m concerned, it’s spring when it’s still light enough to walk across the park after work (something I haven’t done since December).

I wish some year we’d go on DST and never get off.

Personal Choice

There’s been an interesting discussion about corporate marketing vs. personal choice over at Mark’s Daily Apple lately.

 Here’s the original post that started it:

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/fast-food-marketing/

 And here’s a followup post that Mark put up yesterday:

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/fast-food-2/

I think about this subject all the time, so here’s the comment I put up.  Mark moderates comments that have embedded URLs, so it may take a few minutes for this to show up on his site.

—————————

Here’s another really wonderful take on personal choice:

http://breadandmoney.com/thefreeradical/?p=138

I came to the conclusion recently that I cannot rely on the food-industrial complex to supply me with full-fat fermented dairy products, so I am in the process of dropping out of that supply chain entirely.  I bought cultures for buttermilk, yogurt, and kefir from New England Cheesemaking Supply, so I simply won’t be buying the junk that passes for yogurt, kefir, and buttermilk any more.  Next step:  find a farm source of milk.  For now, I’m stuck with grocery store milk, much of which is ultrapasteurized and doesn’t ferment well, but I’m working on changing this.

Fermenting your own is very easy - about 5 minutes of prep, including washing your utensils scrupulously clean before starting, followed by about 12 to 48 hours of waiting.  (New England Cheesemaking Supply says 12 to 24 for buttermilk, but I keep my house kind of cool in the winter.)

Is this an example of how the food manufacturers are not, in fact, supporting personal choice, because they are not giving me what I want?  I am not sure — by American standards, I’m a bit of a food weirdo.  I have been told time and again by grocery store managers that they don’t carry full fat yogurt or kefir because it doesn’t sell.  On the surface, the reason it doesn’t sell has very little to do with the food manufacturers and everything to do with official pronouncements and government policy, which has most of us conditioned to believe that fat is bad and sugar won’t hurt us.  But if you dig just a bit below the surface, you realize that it is Big Agriculture and Big Food who are driving the government policies and funding the research.  (Anyone heard of Fred Stare?)

So what is one person to do in a sea of bad information and bad products?  Oddly, after reading Michael Pollan’s two latest books, I am more hopeful than ever.  It takes a bit of work, but there are more choices than there were 10 or even 5 years ago.  There are more farmers’ markets than ever; more CSAs than ever; and people are starting to get turned on to the concept of sustainable animal husbandry.  Plus there are more well-respected, well-known writers (Pollan, Mark Bittman, Gary Taubes) focussing on what’s wrong with the system, meaning more transparency, more outrage, and more people with the information to make informed choices.  And then there are the bloggers, the vast, not-so-underground network of people with passion and critical thinking skills.  Are there misinformed journalists and bloggers?  Absolutely.  But, especially in Blogland, there are more opportunities than ever to hear differing points of view.  As Anna and some of the other commenters have implied, good information is critical.

So, maybe the question of personal choice is as simple as making buttermilk!