Category: Nutrition

Trash Nature, Trash Ourselves

pond

Near my daughter’s apartment in the Midd Cities, Texas, there is a small pond next to a highway. It is the only place to walk in an unconstrained natural landscape, though the pond has the feel of a very damaged place. There are few waterfowl to be found on the water, though I saw a beautiful bluebird (sialia sialis) in a tree the other day. The flora is the sort that propagates in disturbed habitats: a couple of black willows, Roosevelt Weed (bacchais neglecta), common sunflowers, asters, goldenrod, and a field of Silver Nightshade (solanum elaegnifolium), their silvery stems now carrying tiny tomato-like seeds.

Towering over the southeast corner is an immense Lotto/Power Ball billboard (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myths-about-the-lottery/2019/12/27/742b9662-2664-11ea-ad73-2fd294520e97_story.html ) that announces in huge letters the money to be won; the numbers increase daily. Below, the still lovely landscape is polluted by trash, some tossed from cars, some left by the fishermen who use the pond for occasional recreation.

There is no signage anywhere, and as the property appears neither connected to the neighboring apartment complex nor to the golf course across the street, it is fair game for trashing. In this place, at this time in history, to most people this small piece of the Earth-unappropriated, unowned, and unprotected- is unconnected to them, so they feel free to dump on it. (This is a problem for the whole area. Tarrant County is attempting to control it with citizens’ help: https://access.tarrantcounty.com/en/transportation/environmental/illegal-dumping.html)

I have been cleaning up the trash since I began using the walk around the pond for exercise and started using the leaf piles for clandestine composting of my kitchen scraps. It is clear that the majority of garbage is from food and drink containers: soda cans, plastic juice bottles, liquor bottles, styrofoam dishes, plastic silverware, Starbuck cups, plastic bags of every size, most advertising some sort of fast food: chicken wings, fries, burgers, tacos, etc. And while this pollution is degrading the landscape, it has already done the damage to the people who have bought and eaten this cheap and unwholesome food (diabetes and obesity are diet related and increasing in Texas: https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/annual/measure/Obesity/state/TX)!

This is my point: every one of us, every human being is an integral part of the environment in which we are embedded. Our own personal environment is as susceptible as the greater enveloping environment to being exploited and ruined, and by the same forces of greed and ignorance.

A society like the one here in Texas which denies climate change and supports the exploitation of the land is the same one that sees people as being only a means to make money, without taking responsibility for the destruction of people’s health or well being.

Without a connection to the natural world, without an understanding of the laws of Nature, how do we instill in ourselves, our society, and our culture a love and care for the natural world and for our bodies which are just an extension of that world?! To be blind to the interdependence of the land, the air, the water, the insects, the birds, the plants, the microbes, and ourselves is to be blind to the reality of life itself!

Baby’s Food!

Charlotte on bottle — Charlotte enjoying her bottle! Watercolor pencils on paper. copyright J.Hart

Food, as I have mentioned in past posts, is one of our most fraught choices in the present climate. Most of us are eating foods created by the industrial agriculture corporations, with little governmental oversight here in the States and less transparency of what is in these foods. The majority of doctors are clueless (or worse, misinformed) about what constitutes healthy eating as many of them have had almost no training in nutrition! So that leaves us on our own about the best choices to make about what to eat.

For my family, with a newborn in our home, the question of what to eat has become particularly important! My daughter is breast feeding, but she goes back to work shortly and needs to supplement the baby’s diet with formula. I have been eating a mainly organic low carb & high fat diet for the past three months (more on that in a future post) so we have organic produce and pasture raised meat & eggs in the house, but the question of what to get for formula has been more challenging.

We bought a supposedly organic formula as our first choice, and upon checking the ingredients, found that corn syrup was the first (and therefore main) ingredient, so that went back to the store! Next we went for HIIP, a cow’s milk formulation for newborns, which is imported from Europe where the governmental oversight is more rigorous than here in the U.S.

Unfortunately the baby began to fuss and to have reflux, so we switched to a goat’s milk formula, which she tolerated better. However, it was not specifically for newborns, so our pediatrician sent us home from our doctor’s visit with a corporate popular brand which was designed to help reflux in newborns and had, yet again, corn syrup as the main ingredient! She also suggested that if the baby continues to have reflux, we should give her antacid medication ranitidine, so much easier than struggling to find the best nutrition (sic).

Now, just to be clear, I trust this pediatrician to give the baby medicine and her shots. I am not an anti vaxxer. The science has shown that vaccines do not cause autism. However, there seems to be a strong correlation between the increase of autism in children and the increased use of glyphosate (Monsanto’s Roundup) in our food supply, which is why getting an organic formula is so important! https://www.drperlmutter.com/gmo-and-autism/

We are also in the middle of an epidemic of childhood diabetes and obesity, and I can’t help but wonder why a pediatrician would encourage parents to use a formula in which corn syrup is the first ingredient?! Of course, as Dr. Robert Lustig has written and shown, sugar acts as a natural pain killer, so it would make sense to put it in baby formula to help “relax” a fussy baby, wouldn’t it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxyxcTZccsE&t=1637s

Anyway, we came home from the pediatrician’s still without a good idea about what to feed the baby. We needed to find some reliable information so I, of course, went on the internet, which brings me to our basic problem in trying to get accurate information: whom can we trust and what information is unbiased by the profit motive?

You can think of information as a continuum: at one end is the corporate media that supports corporate agriculture, pharmaceuticals, mainstream nutritionists, etc. Any information from this source is going to be hopelessly simplified and distorted. At the other end of the spectrum are the single issue groups using emotion, morality, and shallow correlation to support their ideas about what is healthy (and what is not). Vegans, Seventh Day Adventists, Paleo dieters, etc. would be my examples.

Somewhere in the middle are the folks I find more trustworthy: Functional Medicine doctors (Dr. Atkins, Dr. Hyman, Dr. Perlmutter, et al) and the citizen scientists and journalists who have done the heavy lifting of learning the new theories or resurrecting forgotten useful ones, and reading all the papers on the relevant clinical trials unbiased by corporate money. In this group belongs Ivor Cummings, Gary Taube, and Nina Teicholz.

So with these criteria in mind, I found a resource that inspires confidence. It is Dr. Bridget Young’s https://babyformulaexpert.com/ Dr. Young is a specialist in baby nutrition who gives parents the information and tools to make their own informed decisions. She explains things like what is the difference between whey and casein and why the percentage of each is important; and which are the healthiest added fats and why (good discussion about palm oil). She does make recommendations, but with the caveat that parents should do their own research and check with their own pediatrician before deciding, though Dr. Young provides summaries for harried new parents!

We chose an organic formula after studying her site, and baby seems to be having less reflux (fingers crossed!) drinking it!

The take away, for me, is that if we want to make better choices about our children’s health and especially their food, we will need to understand the science behind eating, and what our options for healthy food are in this difficult time!

Eat meat?

eggs & pitcher copy — ‘Eggs & Pitcher’ Oil on canvas © J.Hart ’16

Our relationship to the foods that we eat is probably the most intimate and immediate choice that we can make to help heal the planet. And the question of whether to eat meat or not can be, in our society, a major moral and ecological decision.

As in everything driven by the late stage hypercapitalism in which we live, corporations work hard to convince us that convenience and price override every other consideration. Nowhere is this clearer than in the foods we buy and eat, especially animal products.

I think of eating meat or not as on a continuum. On the far end is the daily (and sometimes three times a day!) habit in the United States of eating industrially raised meat. This is meat available in fast foods, processed foods, and in large supermarkets for just a couple of dollars a pound. How meat could be sold so cheaply is explained by government subsidies (our tax dollars at work!) and a monstrously large scaled farming system that can mechanically spew out tremendous quantities of inexpensive, imperfectly inspected meat to feed millions of people.

The horror of sentient beings (cows, pigs, and chickens) treated as nothing more than factory material to be imprisoned, tortured, and killed to provide us with their flesh should be a good enough reason to abjure eating corporate food products. But there is another important reason to give up meat and that is the destruction that this method of farming causes to the environment (and by environment I include each person’s individual body).

The methane that the animals, especially cows, expel is a major contributor to global warming. (https://timeforchange.org/are-cows-cause-of-global-warming-meat-methane-CO2)

The feces that the animals(especially pigs) excrete are stored in vast lakes that pollute the local environment and sicken nearby (usually poor) inhabitants. (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/24/pig-farm-agriculture-its-wrong-to-stink-up-other-peoples-lives-fighting-the-manure-lagoons-of-north-carolina)

And finally, the hormones and antibiotics that are given to these poor creatures to ensure the fastest production of eatable meat and eggs and to keep these animals alive while living under truly inhumane conditions are ending up in both our bodies and the water supply. This profligate use of antibiotics will be responsible for creating the antibiotic-resistant superbugs that await us in the near future. (http://time.com/4590391/animals-meat-antibiotics-antibiotic-resistance/)

Are there any other choices besides the complete refusal to eat meat? We can substitute fish and seafood for meat; but as the latest predictions are that fish will be unavailable by 2048 as we are overshooting the ability for fish to reproduce and replenish their species, and the industrially raised fish have the same issues with hormones and antibiotic use as meat!

For me the immediate solution is to eat less meat (once or twice a week only) but buy local raised, humanely farmed, and higher quality meat. Joel Salatin and other organic small scale regenerative farmers, use chickens and cattle to free range across their fields thereby naturally fertilizing their pastures. In Dallas, free range beef, chicken, and eggs are easily available, though more expensive than industrially raised meat and eggs. However, if you cut down the amount of meat and eggs you eat and up the quality, the price becomes manageable. Also, the recent studies suggest that your all-over health will improve with less meat, and therein lies a savings in doctor bills and prescription medicine costs!

A vegetarian diet which still uses eggs, and diary products like butter and cheese, is at the further end of the continuum. As with everything we eat, the closer the fruits and vegetables are grown to where we live (and raised in our backyard is best of all!), and the more organically grown, the better.

At the far end of the no meat argument are the vegans who eschew all meat usually on moral grounds that it is immoral to enslave and eat another sentient. For me, it is a very refined and noble sentiment, but I am not sure that it realistically reflects how Nature operates. Personally I expect one day to provide a very high quality feast to the beetles, maggots, and worms when my body goes in the ground!

Meanwhile, I am making the choice to slowly but consistently move toward eating less meat and treating that pasture-raised sirloin as a once a month luxury!

Grow for Flavor!

It is the beginning of the growing season here in Dallas, Texas. Be still my heart!! I have lived for the past 20 years in a place with a 10 week growing season, so this is pretty amazing! Having found a community garden where I can help with the gardening (more information to come on that in a future post), I have started to research what to plant here in the South (again, very different cultivars than what I am used to); and I found a terrific book at the library that I want to share.

It is James Wong’s Grow for Flavor, published by Firefly Books, 2016. I loved this book so much that I purchased it on Kindle. James Wong is a self-described botanical geek and serious foodie, and the information he supplies in this book is very different from what one usually finds in gardening books, even organic or sustainable ones.

The main focus, as the title tells us, is on flavor. Now, that seems like a given, especially for home gardens, but when James read the U.S. Department of Agriculture 2014 action plan for crop breeding, he found that not once was “flavor” or “taste” mentioned, and surprisingly, that the cultivars promoted for the home gardener are the same as those used in large farms! Happily, as James read through thousands of new studies, he found that there is a shift going on to, not only better flavor, but to better nutrition (and they are connected chemically!) in the new plants being developed.

So, James Wong focusses on flavor and, its partner, nutrition as the goals for your garden, and dismisses advertisers’ hype promoting large sized photogenic fruits (usually bland) and huge yields (unnecessary in a personal garden) to which we have become habituated. Instead, think small but intensely flavored blueberries, cherries, strawberries; carrots of all colors from deepest purple through orange to cream; and salad greens from sweet to fiery including what we mistake for weeds. Wong provides great suggestions of the names of the best cultivars and descriptions of what they taste like as well as super suggestions on how to grow them.

Because the basis of this book is the latest trials, James also gives all sorts of neat tricks (scientifically tested!) for improving the health of the plants. Did you know that you can jump start your tricky-to-germinate seeds like parsley and corn by soaking them overnight in an aspirin and seaweed soak (pg.34)? Or that watering your tomatoes with a 2% solution of salt water twice a year will make your tomatoes taste better (pg.49)? Or that slowly and gently stroking seedlings once they are one inch high makes them stockier and more resilient (p.34)?! And finally, James suggests in his recipes (also included in this book!) that you can cook with tomato leaves (pg.52)?! I have been adding carrot greens to my soups for awhile now, but chefs are starting to add tomato leaves for that leafy smell!

One final note, before I send you out to get this book and I start researching where to get these great cultivars, Grow for Flavor has also a lot of information for us permaculture fans including how to plant trees, best ways to prune, and when to harvest. You can learn more about and from James Wong at http://www.jameswong.co.uk. Happy Gardening!