Sounds Kind Of Like

 

First, the state of nutritional science in 107 words:

The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

The French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

The Japanese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

The Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

The Germans drink a lot of beer and eat lots of sausages and fats and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

Conclusion: Eat and drink what you like. Speaking English is what kills you.

That's about the sum total, folks. No one really knows nothin', outside of a few hints.

 

Dhoti? Dhow? Dia? Dido? Die? Die Away? Die Out? Diode? Dit? Ditto? Ditty? Do Away With? Do It? Doh? Doha? Doodad? Doodle? Dot? Dote? Dotty? Dowdy? Dud? Dude? Due Date? Due To? Duet? Duty? Dye?

Nope. Diet. Let's talk diet.

A diet is a way of eating to achieve a purpose. All diets exclude. Every general-purpose diet, intended to cover people in general, is a fraud. Let's label that fraud as "fad". There are three broad classes of diets. Two of them are not fads, and they are critical, but those two classes are so narrow and so tiny that they are almost non-existent. We'll start with them.

 

Class One Diet

What works for you. Like the woman who eats only beef, with water, and a bit of salt. Perfect.

I'm happy for her. Whatever she says is fine. I cannot judge what she does, and I also have no interest in even trying to eat this way because I don't want to. I also don't think that it would help me in any way. Probably the opposite.

This diet is exclusionary.

I know that I could not eat cow brains, cow livers, cow kidneys, or cow hearts to get at their essential fatty richness, which is required because lean meat will not sustain life. I wasn't raised on organ meats and could not even force myself to eat them now. I also know that I could not afford to buy enough beef to keep myself alive, and I have no interest in spending hours each week cracking open long bones to get at marrow.

This diet is an interesting data point for me but nothing else, a curiosity. Some people are more oriented toward vegetables and grains, or fish, or meat. Some can't handle milk. Some can. Evolution has worked in different directions in different parts of the world. We have all been tuned differently. We come from separate sub-species. We need to eat differently, accordingly.

My people are flatlanders. They are tough and stupid, hard to kill. They can stand out on the prairie in their underwear, at night, in a blizzard, just to see what it feels like and say things like "Hey! This is the real deal then, not?" And then go back inside to watch more TV. They eat potatoes and meat and butter and milk and cheese and eggs and dumplings and a little cabbage and some borscht now and then, and grow very old and feel utterly fine, while remaining skeptical of those vegetable things lurking in the garden. And they love gluten, passionately.

Maybe not you, but who's asking?

 

Class Two Diet

This one is prescribed by a qualified, knowledgeable, experienced medical professional for exactly one person, based on a diagnosis backed up by verifiable, quantified data, to treat a real medical condition. It is exclusionary.

End of story.

 

Class Three Diet

The fad.

I break this out into "fad", "fantasy", "fetish", and "cult" subclasses, but they are really all the same. They claim to be applicable to one and all — just "Do this, and everything will be perfect." That's the hook. Always with the hook.

These are also exclusionary.

Some exclude sugar, some exclude all fat, or only "bad" fat. Some exclude protein. Some exclude starches. Some leave out fruit, leave out everything but fruit. On and on. All of them promise. Promise big time. Lovely promises, all.

• Cult
• The Jim Jones Kool-Aid diet. Ends all your problems in mere seconds. Drink up.
• Breatharian. Ditto — Death, but slightly slower to arrive.
• Vegan. Guaranteed to kill you as well, but it could take a decade or two, due to deficiencies in vitamins K2 and B12 (B12 is not produced by plants).
  
  
• Fetish
• "Detox" diets, as if the body didn't do this, day and night, forever, on its own, relentlessly.
• "Clean food" diets. (Which apparently prevent everything you eat from turning to shit.)
• "Macrobiotic". Do anything you want, because the food will protect you, because it makes you holy.
  
  
• Fantasy
• Want a butt like Kim Kardashian? Then eat what she does.
• Want a husband like Kim Kardashian? Then eat what she does.
• Prefer Suzanne Somers? Then try Somersizing. Works for me! Ya-sure-you-betcha-right.
  
  
• Fad
• Almost anything, really — too numerous to list them all.
• Mediterranean. (Enjoy sunny, lazy days the yacht, guzzling olive oil).
• Baby Food Diet. (Yeck. You know how hard it is to hire a diaper-changer?)
• Cabbage soup diet. (Like starving in the old country, when we felt blessed to find bugs in our soup.)
• Gluten-free. (As if.)
• Fruitarian. (Recommended by Sir Shitsalot.)
• Grapefruit. (Or his wife.)
• Master Cleanse. (Cf. Sir Shitsalot.)
• Morning banana. (What — apples are out?)
• Paleolithic. (Drag them knuckles, Knut. Grunt and fart like you mean it.)
• And an infinite number of others.

 

Class Act Diet

This isn't a diet. It is inclusive.

The trick is you just eat. Food doesn't really matter that much unless you fuck with it. Like by not eating it, which is what each and every "diet" mandates. Or by obsessing over it. There is a line spouted by some that goes "Don't eliminate, replace." But replacing one food with another is eliminating. Fish isn't beef, isn't chicken, isn't tofu, isn't pork. Each is similar to the others in some ways, but no food is a drop-in substitute for any other. Better to add or maybe alternate than to either eliminate or replace.

Instead of all this crap, go back to step one, but not to eating only beef. Rather, pick a cuisine that appeals to you — Vietnamese, Peruvian, Icelandic — anything. Just pick one. Or what your grandmother ate, if she was born before the 20th century, before food became big business.

What you'll get is good food that has been vetted for centuries, possibly millennia. Guaranteed to make you happy and keep you well, because it tastes good and because it also supplies everything you need to keep going. Because it's what people have voted for, with their mouths, and because they stayed alive and happy and healthy on it.

Cuisines are continuously evolving, but they do so slowly, by adding new items, and seeing a few items gradually fade out. This is good. Because, if nothing happens suddenly, then there is plenty of time to make corrections. And because there are millions of mouths involved, the cuisine gets voted on by all sorts of people with varied lifestyles, body types, and nutritional needs, constantly.

That means that you yourself are guaranteed to be well treated by a cuisine, any cuisine, and if you just eat it you will be OK. That's it, all there is.

But I bet that much more depends on getting lots of sleep, shunning dangerous chemicals like tobacco and other drugs, avoiding contact with communicable diseases, and getting a lot of exercise. This last one is probably the most important. A good goal might be a tithe — exercise for 2½ hours a day, every day. Pant and break a sweat. Repeat tomorrow, forever.

Even a hundred years ago most people were physically active most of the time. Imagine being on your feet for 10 or 12 hours a day, at a job, moving, using your muscles, and then walking home and doing chores. We don't do that now. Maybe we should. Fewer of us might be crazy.

And food would be just something to eat and enjoy.

 

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Comments? Send email to hoofist@nullabigmail.com

See if that helps.

Announcing G-Spot Beer!

I have a confession to make.

I have eaten bread. In the past, of course.

And that bread was made with wheat.

You know about wheat, right? I mean, if you've been reading this blog for any length of time then you know. Oh, yes, you know.

In fact, if you've been reading this blog for any length of time then you know everything. Everything that I've instructed you on so far, anyway. Of course you'll have to keep coming back for more instruction.

No one is perfect (except me of course), so my tutelage will of necessity continue without end. Because I know everything, and you, you should be grateful that you found me.

So now, back to bread. You have heard of it. You know what goes into it. You know that it will kill you because it is pure poison. So why would you eat it? Don't be a fool.

Just because humans have been consuming wheat and wheat by-products for thousands of years is no reason to continue this shameful practice. You may have parents who survived childhood years full of peanut butter and jam sandwiches, platters full of spaghetti, and bowls of chicken noodle soup, but this does not mean that they escaped unscathed.

Nor you.

It may take generations to gradually unwind the trauma that these meals have caused, and to unwind the damage, even in your own life, though you yourself have never been within ten feet of a cinnamon roll. Beware!

But sticky buns are not the only hazard. There is also beer.

Beer is good. You should drink beer whenever you can get it, and you should drink as much as you can hold. These are proven facts from scientific laboratories. However there is one problem. Beer (as it is habitually manufactured by giant multi-national companies) contains gluten.

Beer contains gluten because beer is made from barley. From barley, hops, water, and yeast. That is the full list of ingredients in the most basic and essential beers. Plus that gluten.

So here we are, sitting in paradise, on top of the Andes mountains in South America, without beer. Because beer contains gluten, and gluten is the most deadly poison in the world.

Well, I say let's just start a petition. Someone here should make gluten-free beer for us.

Since I'm retired, and don't feel like working any more, let alone putting my very own ass on the line by plunking down my life's savings to follow through on this idea, let's just get some Ecuadorians to do it for us.

As my good friend Roberts Terry said just yesterday,

I think an Ecuadorian craft brewery could do a nice bit of business in Ecuador with creating a tasty gluten-free beer - as long as it had decent distribution. You'd be the only gluten-free beer here, at least for a while.

In the US, even the monster, Budweiser, has a respectable gluten-free beer called Redbridge. Sure better than no beer at all on beautiful, warm days like we're enjoying.

We could name it after my two cats, Bojangles and Samwise.

This sounds great, all the more so if someone else takes the risk. And does the work.

So why don't some savvy locals go ahead and plunk down half a million or so to start up a no-gluten brewery, and if we feel like it we'll buy a bottle of their beer every now and then?

If we're in the mood.

Until the next food fad comes along.

We've been through fat and sugar already. Gluten came next, but I believe that gluten in fact was only an introduction to a whole new family of toxic and dangerous foods.

Me, I've got my eye on protein — all protein, not just gluten. Isn't it about time to eliminate protein from our diets entirely?

Each person's first responsibility has to be to preserve our precious bodily fluids. Beer does that of course, but only gluten-free beer.

And given enough clean, fresh, pure gluten-free beer, anything is possible. First the beer, then the protein.

Who's with me on this?

What's Pink And Has Whiskers?

Lap it up.

My sister gave me a cat in a can.

I was hoping, when I opened the can, that it would be

• A live cat.
• Not dead.
• Etc.

But of course I knew better. Right on the label, under the Cat-In-A-Can logo, it says Inflatable Feline.

No live cat, even one small enough to fit into a can of that size, even one that small and which would hold its breath while traveling through the U.S. Mail system, would let itself be inflated, either before or after the can part or the getting-mailed part, let alone both. And I wouldn't put my lips to either end of such a cat to try inflating it.

Or any cat, really.

In other words, I was onto that game. I was clued. I was dialed in. I knew it was plastic. And thereby OK. (Clean, non-scratchy, low probability of hissy fits.) And gladly inflated it, and gained a new friend.

But it wasn't the same as Ernie.

At this point in my life I don't remember anything about Ernie except for two fairly important facts.

• The cat's name was Ernie, and
• Ernie was a real cat, and
• Ernie was not made of plastic nor was she inflatable.

Sure, those were three facts, but when you're dealing with facts, more is always better. And the extra typing gave me a few seconds more to recall some of those fond memories of Ernie.

Wasted seconds, I guess, because I still don't remember who in the hell Ernie was, cat-wise, aside from the name. (I threw in the she part because it sounds better, though I don't remember requiring Ernie to stand for a close inspection, nor was I ever inspired to put my lips there and blow, either. You don't do that. I don't.)

So, ultimately, we are left with a residue of things we may say we understand. In this case, they are that real cats are real and not-real cats are inflatable, and as far as I am willing to take this research, I hereby declare that there is a difference, and real cats do their own inflating, after supper, if they do it at all.

The same goes for things that you do put in your mouth. Like horchata. I've had it in tea bags. It's good. It's OK. It's acceptable. It isn't all that bad. Well, if you get "horchata con miel". I like the "miel" part. That's honey. Or something honey-like.

I hear that it can also be a sugar-based syrup, which is fine by me, since horchata tastes good that way, regardless of how it actually got to that particular address.

The straight horchata I had in tea bags was not my favorite, but with honey-like sweetening, it's yummy. But still too much like honey and herbs in a can, waiting to be inflated by the correct amount of applied liveliness, in order to achieve OK-ness, not-all-that-bad-ness, a level of mediocre acceptability with hardly any bitter aftertaste.

And in the other corner, there is live horchata, fresh-brewed — it requires no blowing. It self-inflates and breathes on its own. It's good.

No, I haven't said what horchata is. Here are a few words on that subject from someone who does know:

The herbs and flowers that are part of this drink include some better known herbs such as chamomile, mint, lemon verbena, lemon grass, and lemon balm. Some of the flowers that are included in this tea are rose geranium, small roses, violets, begonias, carnations, fuschias and malva olorosa/malva blanca — which are flowers from the mallow family. The horchata herb mix also includes some lesser known and harder to find herbs which include cola de caballo or horse tail (also known as shave grass), llanten or plantain plant (not to be confused with plantain bananas), borraja or borge, linaza or flax, a red leafed herb called escancel, in English it is known as bloodleaf, this herb gives the drink its red pinkish color. Another plant used in this tea is called ataco or red amaranth, this one also contributes to the color of the drink. There are a few other plants that are used, however these seem only grow in Ecuador and, at least according to my mom, don't have known names in English, in Spanish they are called pimpinela, shullo, and cucharillo.

Mine was tall and cool and pink, like pink lemonade, but not lemonadey. Not like something liberated from a can, or brewed in a tea bag, or retrieved dry by the handful from a box under the sink in the back room before boiling.

And it did not require me to put my lips on it and do anything but suck. So that's what I tried.

Yummy.

I'll have to do it again.

More: Horchata lojana or herbal tea mix