Comments on: Jungle fever

By: an oeuf

an oeuf — Thu, 29 May 2008 21:00:24 +0000

schmoo… i think i read an article in an old issue of harpers on a very simular situation, there was a picture of a haz-mat looking suit you had to wear to go near the pigs in that facility. by the by, on the question on wanting to find a pig that lives outside i happen to know a bit about, my husband is a butcher in a small town for a family farm that raises a lot of their own all grass fed cattle and buys/slaughters/sells other small family sustainable animal friends. What this means is we never want for the lesser loved parts (ummmm…cheeks and tongue) and i ‘make’ lard once a month, reserving butter for some baking. depending where you live i can give you info on a buying club in seattle from Thundering hooves or a shipping situation through niky usa, who (among other things) sells pork raised in a slightly larger than smaller family farm, but great and sustainable none the less.

By: mamster

mamster — Sun, 25 May 2008 04:56:25 +0000

You've just described the genesis of Who Moved My Cheese?.

By: Katelyn

Katelyn — Sat, 24 May 2008 22:33:53 +0000

Food is definitely linked to depression. For example, when I have not had cheese in four or more days, I can’t get out of bed in the mornings and spend entire days weeping into my pillow.

By: StillBorn

StillBorn — Thu, 22 May 2008 16:21:45 +0000

I think I’m there with you on ‘Real Food’. Actually, I didn’t even finish it. I was reading it, then left the country for a month and came back with a feeling of ‘what’s the point?’.

By: Schmoo

Schmoo — Thu, 22 May 2008 13:49:38 +0000

So, I haven’t read any of these books. I love the mortar and pestle idea. And, I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that, in order to mass produce food, we’ve managed to suck the nutrients right out of it. Disease free, drought resistant, high yield (especially high yield) does not equal good for you.

I can’t remember what channel I was watching (Discovery, National Geographic, one of those) and they were talking about pigs. In order to qualify as “The Other White Meat” they engineered all the fat out (I think through both selective breeding and some sort of geneticized hybridization). Right, so, poor pigs. THEN people realized pig with no fat tasted like poop (and we sorta got off all of the no/low fat meat thing, if you’re gonna eat it, get a good piece of marbled meat). So, now there spending all this time re-introducing the fat into the pigs. Now, aside from a giant pain, a pretty stupid move and all the time it took, these pigs are super duper unstable. Their genes are really weak and their immune systems are weaker. They can’t go outside or they’ll die (can’t fight disease, can’t keep themselves warm, etc). Scary.

Anywho, I now want to meet a small scale pig farmer who will sell me some of his pig (that has lived outside and is already butchered thank you very much, or at least the bothersome organs are gone). And I think that the key is varying your food sources so you’re not eating the same one type of mass-produced corn all the time. I’m planting four types of heirloom tomatoes in my garden.

By: matt wright

matt wright — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:17:34 +0000

Sounds like a great book, and pretty similar to “Real Food” by Nina Planck. The connection between what you eat and your health is unforunately a lesson hardly taugh these days, mainly thanks I am sure to industrial food companies telling us what is “healthy”, rather than using common sense about natural foods.

Rant over :D

By: mamster

mamster — Thu, 15 May 2008 15:22:18 +0000

Daphne, thanks very much for clearing up my misconception. I’m really looking forward to reading the book.

By: Daphne Miller MD

Daphne Miller MD — Thu, 15 May 2008 15:09:31 +0000

Hello Daphne Miller here. The family doc who wrote the Jungle Effect. The book does not deal with prehistoric societies or even preindustrial ones. I wrote it based on my travels of the past 3 years to places around the world that I call “cold spots.” Cold spots are essentially places that still boast relatively low rates of the modern chronic diseases that plague us in the US—like diabetes, heart disease, colon cancer and depression. In each instance, I found sound scientific data that food plays a strong role in their good health and thought that each region would offer some good lessons that we could apply here at home. I headed off on these travels thinking that I already knew an awful lot about nutrition (I did Andrew Weil’s integrative fellowship and a number of other trainings and have counseled patients in my medical practice for over 12 years)but boy was I wrong. Each area handed me some fascinating/surprising new lessons. For example: how could Icelanders pride themselves in being “vegetable haters” and yet have relatively low rates of depression and great longevity? Or how can the Tarahumara of Copper Canyon MX eat such a high carb diet and have such low rates of diabetes? When you’re reading The Jungle Effect you’ll see that I muse about what vital nutrients are at play in these diets but try to not to get too caught up in labeling foods as “good” or “bad”. Rather I look at whole diets (and traditional recipes) that have worked for hundreds to thousands of years.

By: mamster

mamster — Wed, 14 May 2008 18:34:12 +0000

Wendy, you’re on, as long as you call your column “Live from the Mosh Pit-Oven,” or “Ptarmigan, Ptarmigan, Jiggety-Jig.”

By: Wendy

Wendy — Wed, 14 May 2008 17:58:23 +0000

I get all my cooking tips from The Clan of the Cave Bear and its sequels. Cave bear fat is great for cooking ptarmigan in a pit oven. I have it from a reliable source.

On a related subject, perhaps you want me to take over the column while you work to meet your deadline.