New Orleans Food Cooperative

The New Orleans Food Cooperative is looking for founding members to help them open a cooperative grocery store on St. Claude Avenue, in  the old Universal Furniture building at the corner of St. Roch.

A $100 investment makes you a founding member, eligible for discounts when the store opens (anticipated in 2009).  Low- income residents can become members for as little as $25.

For more information, visit their website:

http://nolafoodcoop.org/the-store/

Too many grasshoppers–vegetarian riposte 1.1

I love the way Geoff Lawton puts it here:  if your garden has a plague of grasshoppers (or slugs), what you have is not an excess of grasshoppers (or slugs).  In fact, you will have just the right amount for the food that you are growing. 

What you have is a deficiency of grasshopper-eating birds.  Add the right amount of ducks, chickens, or turkeys to your garden system, and you will diminish the food you are losing to pests and generate one kilo of chicken for every three kilos of grasshoppers.  I suppose you could have just eaten the three kilos of grasshoppers to begin with, but by adding the birds you also generate fertilizer for your garden, you get a more effective grasshopper collection system than your fingers, you save a lot of time, and you probably enjoy eggs for breakfast more than grasshoppers.

Eventually your chickens will stop producing eggs.  At this point you could let them die a “natural” death (unless a cat or dog brings them to a faster form of natural death), and you could bury them reverently in the ground where insects, worms and microorganisms will eat them.  Worms, insects and microorgansisms can eat many things, including chickens that have already gone through your digestive system and given you better strength and health in the process.

Is it immoral for the slugs and grasshoppers to eat the plants you have taken pains to grown?  For the birds to eat the slugs and grasshoppers?  For the dogs and cats to eat the birds?  For the insects, worms, and microorgansisms to eat all of us once we are dead?

The ethics of nature is efficiency — nothing is wasted.

Why I am not a vegetarian, Part 1: ethics and the environment

 This is a post that I’ve been meaning to write since I started this blog, but it’s such a huge topic I’ve never felt that I had the time to dive into it and pick through the many facets of the issue. 

 

This story from the Times-Picayune reminded me of my intention to post on the subject:

Carnivore governor unswayed by PETA by Ed Anderson

Saturday, August 02, 2008

http://www.nola.com/timespic/stories/index.ssf?/base/news-6/1217655115295650.xml&coll=1

 

So I’ll try to approach it one small bit at a time with a series of posts dealing with ethical, environmental, and health issues as they pertain to diet.

 

I respect the intention behind adopting a vegetarian diet.  I was a vegetarian for a time in my childhood, when my father adopted a vegetarian diet in the late 1970s.  As a teen, I adhered to the then-popular no-red-meat diet (worried about cholesterol), and I ate a fried chicken sandwich at Burger King nearly every day for lunch (ack!).  I returned to a vegetarian diet again for awhile in my early 20s.  Here is an earlier post detailing the evolution of my dietary philosophy.

 

Vegetarianism in its various forms is the world’s most high-profile “alternative” or “health food” diet.  Adopting a vegetarian diet is a sign that someone is able to step outside of conventional behavior, think critically and make a conscientious choice to achieve better health and live their lives according to ethical principles.  If the tone of these posts occasionally seem harsh, it is not meant as disrespect to adherents of vegetarianism, but it is in order to make my point understood without clouding it with too much delicacy.  It is not my intention to be judgemental, only to explain my perspective and my choices.

 

I’m going to start with the most basic element of the ethical argument made on behalf of vegetarianism:  that killing is wrong, and if we can live without killing animals, we should.

 

How far does one have to take the argument that killing is wrong?  I think that this argument is sometimes tainted with sentimentalism.  It would seem that it is only wrong to kill something furry and cute, something that resembles us or that we are accustomed to seeing on a regular basis.  Most vegetarians have no problem with raising a plant (say, a carrot), then killing it for food. 

 

Some adherents of the Jain religion will only eat fruit that has fallen from the tree because they do not want to injure the plant by plucking the fruit from its branch.  In a way, I’m glad those folks exist as laboratories at the extreme edge of ethical inquiry.  It is possible that in the grand scheme of things they serve as karmic counterbalances to bloody dictators.

 

Some Jains will also walk with a broom in front of them, sweeping away any insects in their path so that they don’t kill anything unintentionally.  Perhaps if they could, they would direct their immune systems to refrain from killing any pathogens that managed to infiltrate their bodies.  The germ-hosts would soon die, and their bodies would become food for scavengers, insects, and a multitude of micro-organisms.  Is this the ultimate act of compassion?  I’m not ridiculing anyone’s religion, I’m merely taking the argument against killing to its logical extreme.

 

I can’t agree that killing is wrong.  I think that that is a very naive view of the cycle of life and death.  At every level, life is a never-ending process of creation and destruction.  From the chemical level, the cellular level, from micro-organisms to tissues to ecosystems to galaxies, things are torn apart so that new things can be created and established systems can be sustained.  No one entity lives forever, but all are linked in the give-and-take cycle of life, death, and rebirth.  Author Charles Eisenstein has a far more nuanced discussion of these themes here.

 

When I was a member of a collective organic farm, we would tend to the rows of cabbage, broccoli, and greens to pick out the caterpillars who were eating our crops, and crush them in our fingers.  We also used BT, an organically-derived insecticide, when the caterpillars really got out of control.  I don’t know if these caterpillars are toxic, but if they aren’t, I do think it would be more ethical to eat them (or, more appealingly, feed them to chickens and eat the eggs) than to crush them and throw them on the ground or to poison them with BT.  In any case, these caterpillars were eating the food we worked so hard to grow.  If we didn’t kill some of them (and we wouldn’t, indeed couldn’t, kill ALL of them), there wouldn’t be enough food left for us.

 

That was an organic farm. Conventional agriculture kills insects, birds, rodents and other pests on a massive scale through chemical poisons.  These chemicals run off into the environment and poison many unintended victims.

 

If insects aren’t cute or anthropomorphic enough for their lives to have significance, let’s use the example of bunny rabbits.  If you’ve worked for months to prepare a plot and grow vegetables, and a family of rabbits threatens to eat the fruits of your labor, are you averse to killing them to save your crops?  Even if you are, I guarantee the farmer, organic or not, who grows the veggies you buy in the store or eat at a restaurant, is not going to let the bank foreclose on him out of sentimental feelings for cute, furry creatures.

 

Now let’s look at the issue of unnecessary killing from a more global perspective.

 

Killer Vegetarians

Someone who is a vegetarian and does not eat sustainably-grown plant foods (not the same as “organic”) is complicit in death and destruction on a massive scale.  Conventionally grown crops, particularly soybeans, corn, and sugar, represent the greatest threat to all life on Earth today.

 

Monocultures, Famine, GMOs

The first issue to face up to is the many problems of monoculture (growing only one crop across a large area of land).  Natural ecosystems derive stability through complex, multilayered interactions among diverse elements.  In conventional agriculture, massive energy inputs (petroleum and chemicals as well as labor) are necessary to hold nature at bay and grow only one crop over a large area of land.  Because they are inherently imbalanced systems, monocultures scream out for plagues of pests and disease, which means they require heavy doses of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides to maintain an unnatural stability.  A farm or garden that appears “ordered” to the limited human way of seeing, with straight rows of single crops, is in reality a heavily enforced disorder.  The seeming chaos of the forest, wetland, or jungle is, in fact, a complex and self-correcting, balanced system.

 

Monoculture devastates biodiversity.  Across the globe, human beings used to sustain themselves on millions of species of plants, each with a unique niche specific to the ecosystem of the region.  With commercially-driven modern agriculture, mass-production thrives on simplicity.  Industrial food producers would love to be able to make all food out of corn, soybeans, and sugar.  Agribusiness would like to hold the patents on the genetically modified strains of these crops to guarantee their profit stream.  Chemical and petroleum companies benefit when these GM crops are engineered to be immune to their herbicides.  So a handful of patented organisms spread across the globe and displace the complex matrix of indigenous species that used to form the web of life for each bioregion.  Not only does human health suffer as a diversity of local food crops with a rich array of phytonutrients is replaced with a small number of highly processed plant foods, but the stability of the environment is gone when the web of life is replaced by energy-intensive monoculture.  Food security is compromised, and the world becomes very vulnerable to famine when everyone depends on the same narrow range of foods.

 

Genetically modified crops pose a particular threat to biodiversity because they can cross-pollinate with natural species with potentially devastating (and due to the nature of complex systems, entirely unpredictable) results.  For example, plants may become toxic or mutagenic to important pollinators or other complementary species within their web of interaction.

 

Petroleum Wars 

What about organics?  Organic agriculture is a step in the right direction.  You don’t have as many petroleum (fertilizer) and chemical inputs for growing the crops, but you still probably have heavy farm equipment and long-distance shipping and trucking.  In fact, most organic crops are shipped further to reach your dinner table than conventional varieties.

 

Petroleum is ancient solar energy converted into plant matter then condensed for hundreds of thousands of years under intense heat and pressure, making it the most available, powerful and efficient form of energy yet discovered.  The problem is, there is a limited supply of it, and we’ve gotten the easy stuff out of the ground already and burned it up by building suburbs, getting back and forth between the house, work, and the shopping center, and by dumping it on farm land.  We burn far more calories of petroleum than we derive by eating the food we grow and ship with it.  We need to be using the petroleum that’s left to prepare ourselves for the day, coming soon, when we’ve used up all the stuff that’s worth pumping.  But that’s a subject for another blog.

 

Much blood has been spilled for oil.  A large share of the dysfunction and political repression throughout the Middle East, Africa and Asia is due to greed and the desire to control the flow of oil.  When you buy crops that have been grown and transported by burning petroleum (nearly all of us do), then you are complicit in the murder and oppression of human beings, as well as the destruction of animal, plant, and microbial life through the environmental damage caused by oil drilling and consumption.

 

Erosion, The Dead Zone, Global Warming

Even with organic agriculture, you still have the problem of monocultures and erosion.  In fact, erosion can be worse with large-scale organic farming than with conventional “no-till” methods.  Erosion is possibly the biggest environmental problem in the world, though you never hear about it.  Soil is not the same thing as “dirt,” it is a complex assortment of living things, like a coral reef.  If you don’t believe in killing unnecessarily in order to live, you should be very concerned about soil erosion.

 

Erosion is not a new problem brought on by industrial agriculture.  For as long as there has been agriculture, there has been erosion.  The Middle East, particularly Iraq, used to be known as the “Fertile Crescent.”  This was Eden: rich, verdant forests before human beings turned to agriculture.  Cutting trees for timber and using slash and burn farming techniques, the life of the soil was exploited to feed cities and build empires.  Without forests and the complex web of organisms (mostly unseen) that constitute them, the soil died.  The most barren deserts of the world were man-made by “Great Empires” in the Middle East, Africa, and the New World, thousands of years ago.

 

Today in America’s bread basket, massive erosion is occurring due to monocultures.  The heavily chemically-treated soil washes through the Mississippi watersheds and gets dumped into the Gulf of Mexico, where every summer the high levels of nitrogen ignite an algal bloom, starving an immense area of the Gulf of oxygen and killing ocean life of all kinds. 

 

Sugar is probably the worst crop of all when it comes to erosion.  Don’t believe that your tofu ice cream is free from the taint of wasteful killing.

 

In the coming posts, I will develop the themes that the ethics of nature is efficiency:  nothing is wasted.  The ultimate cruelty and injustice is waste.  It is possible, and I would argue, it is necessary to eat meat to fulfill Nature’s ethical requirement for efficiency.

Estrogenic Pollution and Diet

An emerging environmental and health concern is the presence of endocrine disruptors in our environment and food.  A combination of synthetic chemicals that mimic estrogen and natural substances, primarily from soy foods and from hormones added to livestock, may be contributing to obesity, diabetes, infertility and cancer.

 

I first heard about estrogenic pollution when I took a permaculture design course with Geoff Lawton in 2000.  As I recall, he talked about boys in Denmark who had developed breasts due to pharmaceutical estrogen in drinking water.  Women on birth control expel excess levels of the chemicals through urine, and the hormones persist through the ecosystem, uneffected by water treatment methods and show up again in drinking water.  There has been plenty of evidence that endocrine disruption is a growing problem, from rising infertility, sexual disfunction, the feminization of boys and early onset of puberty in girls.

 

Xenoestrogens are synthetic chemicals, generally from plastics, herbicides, pesticides, sunscreen, lotions and food additives that mimic estrogen in our bodies.  Along with pharmacological estrogens (from birth control pills, for example), xenoestrogens pose a threat not only to human health, but to entire ecosystems, particularly the amphibians and fish who are immersed in polluted water and have little resistance to chemical penetration.  Estrogenic pollution is the suspected culprit in deformities, infertility, and even spontaneous sex change in frogs and fish.

 

To avoid xenoestrogens from flimsy plastic water bottles, I drink water out of a glass container, or occasionally use a metal water bottle to carry in the car.  Food-grade plastics (such as the five gallon bottles for carrying spring water) are more stable release their molecules less easily.

 

Phytoestrogens are natural chemicals in plants that act as estrogen in the body.  Soy is very high in phytoestrogens, and soy is prevalent in the processed foods that make up much of the modern American diet.  Hops used in brewing beer are also estrogenic, giving rise to the “beer belly” of persisitent visceral fat, which secretes its own estrogen, signalling your body to continue storing fat.

 

According to elite fitness trainer Mike Mahler, “There are good estrogens and bad estrogens and of the three common estrogens that are measured, estriol is the most benefical one and responsible for much of estrogen’s beneficial properties and when given as hormone replacement has the least side effects. Estradiol and estrone are more harmful estrogens, especially for men, and having levels of estradiol and estrone that are too high can result in water retention, low sex drive, muscle loss, weak bones, increased bodyfat, and depression.”

 

So some estrogen is important for the health of both men and women, but when our environment and food supply are overly tilted toward estrogen, we need to focus on boosting our anti-estrogenic hormones.  To over-simplify a bit, that means boosting testosterone in men and progesterone in women.

 

Cruciferous vegetables, like broccoli and cauliflower, are potent anti-estrogenic foods.  Strength training and high-intensity interval training are good ways to boost healthful hormones like testosterone, progesterone, and HGH.  To optimize hormones, your workouts should be relatively short and intense.  Post-workout, you should feel revitalized, not wiped out.

 

Ori Hofmeklar is a former Israeli commando, artist, and fitness writer who has developed a line of supplements to counteract the effects of endocrine disruption.  His book The Anti-Estrogenic Diet outlines a diet program that may help you shed persistent visceral fat if that is a problem for you.  You can find his products at Defense Nutrition here.

Go Soak Your Nuts

I’ve heard many times over the years that nuts and seeds are an excellent source of protein and healthy oils, good for the brain, the nerves, and youth-preserving hormone levels. 

However, I’ve always encountered several obstacles to making them a major part of my diet.  For one, I was never wild about the taste, particularly the over-salted packaged varieties.  Two, many fresh nuts are difficult to crack and extract the meat from–one of those foods that seem to burn more calories to prepare and eat than you derive from digesting them.  Which brings me to the most significant obstacle:  digestion.  Eating nuts and seeds often left me feeling bloated and uncomfortable.

When I talk about nuts here, I’m talking primarily about almonds, walnuts, cashews, and pecans.  By seeds I mean mostly pumpkin, flax, sunflower and sesame seeds.  Peanuts are something else altogether, a kind of legume, like a bean.  Peanuts can be very allergenic.  Even if you’re not aware of a peanut allergy, they can increase inflammation and worsen other allergies.  Personally, I avoid them completely.

Helen and I have recently been exposed to a way to prepare nuts and seeds that I find delicious, nourishing, and easy on the digestion.  It’s going to sound a little crazy, but here it is:  soaking them in water overnight, then draining and dehydrating them (in a food dehydrator).  In the case of cashews, I slow-roast them instead of dehydrating.  The idea with the dehydration is to keep them raw, but cashews have to be steamed to open the shell, so they’re not really raw anyway.  It all sounds like a big waste of time, right?

Soaking and draining the nuts breaks down chemical compounds called phytates, or phytic acids.  Phytic acid is found within the hulls of nuts, seeds, and grains.  Cooking nuts and seeds reduces the phytic acid, but soaking is better and sprouting is best of all.

Phytic acid is a strong chelator of important minerals and vitamins such as calcium, magnesium, iron, and zinc, and niacin.  It’s a kind of preservative that keeps these minerals from being released until the seed is ready to germinate.  During germination, an enzyme called phytase is released, which breaks down the phytic acid, releasing the nutrients stored in the seed to fuel growth.

I suspect that the phytic acid in unsoaked nuts and seeds is what led to my digestive difficulties in the past.  I also find that the flavor of nuts and seeds is improved by soaking and dehydrating or roasting.

It’s a bit of a project, but you can do a huge load at once.  If you’re not going to eat them all within a week or two, I might refrigerate them in the New Orleans summer.  If you’re willing to put the work in, you’ll have a perfect snack to munch on throughout the day.  Supplement with a tablespoon or two of fish oil every day and that will keep you young and strong like a bear!

Artificial Sweeteners Screw with Your Metabolism

I’ve long been leary of artificial sweeteners.  Past studies have shown a correlation between artificial sweeteners and weight gain, but until now no one really knew why a substance with zero calories should make you fat.

 A new study published in Behavioral Neuroscience suggests that artificial sweeteners throw off your body’s metabolic response to sweet tastes.  The hypothesis is as follows:  Your body’s default response to sweetness is to gear up the metabolism to burn off the excess calories you’re taking in.  By consuming artificial sweeteners, you are essentially “crying wolf” and your body stops responding to sweet tastes with the geared-up energy burn.

 Whether the hypothesis is true or not, I stand by my position: stick to real, natural foods and avoid processed and artificial junk.

2008 Spring Festival in Austin, TX

This year’s Spring Festival, hosted as always by my teacher, Master Joe Schaefer, 6^th degree black belt in Austin, TX, was possibly the most exciting and smooth-running martial arts event I’ve ever attended. Six New Orleans students, ranging in experience from white to black belt, made the trip out with me to take part in the weekend’s events.

On Friday night, J.T. Palacio, who was one of my first New Orleans students when I moved here in 2001, tested for his second degree black belt at Master Don Duncan’s Round Rock, TX school, about 20min North of Austin.  The testing committee consisted of Grandmaster Sin Kwang The’, Master Joe Schaefer, and Master Don Duncan.

J.T. is only the third New Orleans student to achieve the rank of 2^nd black.  To give you some context on the magnitude of this accomplishment, the difference in training between a first and second degree black belt is approximately the same as the difference between a white belt and a first degree black belt.  J.T.’s test went very well.  He was one of the few people testing whose strikes were so hard I could hear his gi snapping from all the way across Master Duncan’s massive 8,000 sq ft gym.  Master Schaefer later approached me at the tournament and commended J.T. on his excellent test.  We celebrated the accomplishment Friday night with a feast at Austin’s most authentic Chinese restaurant.

On Saturday, the New Orleans contingent met for a picnic brunch before heading to the gymnasium at Anderson High School in Northwest Austin where the tournament was held.  Aaron Williams (white belt), Lazaro Gutierrez, Dan Leard and Brandon Bergeron (green belts), Alison Broach (brown belt), and J.T. Palacio (2^nd degree black belt) not only rose to the challenge of performing kata and sparring in front of an auditorium full of strangers from across the region, but they all performed exceptionally well.  The forms all looked solid, with low stances, power, snap, and focus.  They all performed admirably in sparring, with Aaron, Brandon and Alison taking home medals in their divisions.  Brandon also placed high in the forms division.

      

After a quick dinner break for pho, we returned for the evening demonstrations, offering a particularly inspiring range of martial artists of all ages and skill levels.  Some of the highlights included kids doing tricks with jump ropes, families doing forms together, the always-impressive Round Rock school’s demo team combining martial arts and acrobatics, and black belts demonstrating forms from advanced systems such as Hua Mountain Fist, Drunken Fist, Shaolin Monkey, Pa Kua Chang, and Hsing-Ie.  My personal favorites were watching Master Schaefer demonstrate the hua ching (internal force explosion) techniques from Snake Pa Kua, Gary Hart, 2^nd black demonstrating the power and grace of hsing-ie staff, and Sifu Sean O’Brian from San Marcos, TX holding iron chair posture (keeping his body completely straight while suspended off the ground only by his head and feet) while Master Schaefer used a sledgehammer to break 5 concrete blocks stacked on his belly (no spacers between the blocks!).  I wish I could post pictures of the demos, but I was so enthralled the whole time I forgot to take any.  I’ll see if I can locate a few from other sources.

On Sunday, we met for dim sum before parting ways, with some returning to New Orleans and J.T., Alison, Lazaro, and I staying to take Grandmaster Sin’s seminar on the 2^nd Road of Golden Leopard.  The Golden Leopard form uses quick combinations of pressure point strikes.  It’s a very fun and interesting form, and Grandmaster Sin explained the locations of the different points and the reasons they were used in particular combinations.  After learning the form, Grandmaster Sin treated us to a half hour lecture on advice for greater health, longevity, and vitality.  To summarize:  do your kung fu, eat healthy food, drink lukewarm water instead of iced water, drink green tea or bitter tea (ku ding cha), and, if your kidneys are weak (lower back pain, low energy), eat “winter worm-summer grass,” a mummified caterpillar from Tibet that has been colonized by the fungus Cordyceps sinensis.

 

Unfortunately, we had to head back to New Orleans before the black belt banquet Sunday night. On the up side, I don’t think they ate any caterpillar fungus at the banquet (a small bowlful of the stuff runs about $500); as for us, we stopped en route at a Mexican seafood restaurant on the outskirts of Houston where we ate fajitas and were serenaded by small band that wandered in from the street (by the looks of them, right off the set of a Fellini movie). Like I said, probably the best Spring Festival ever!

Broth for Happy Tummies and Healthy Joints

Every Sunday Helen and I head to the West Bank for our weekly pho fix at Tan Dinh, one of my favorite restaurants in New Orleans.  We’ll typically follow it up with a grocery run at the Hong Kong Market on Behrman highway.

If you’ve never had pho, the Vietnamese beef noodle soup, I really recommend you give it a try.  It is a rich, flavorful (high in umami) beef broth infused with Asian herbs and served with rice noodles, brisket, flank, beef tendon, and meatballs.  Less adventurous eaters can cutomize the meat order, but keep in mind that tendon is wonderful for your joints and digestion (see below). Fresh mung bean sprouts, basil (sometimes cilantro), and sliced jalepenos come on the side for you to add just before eating.

Traditionally prepared bone broth is one of the greatest, and least recognized health foods (along with fermented foods like kimchee, sauerkraut, etc. which I’ll cover in a later post).  By simmering the bone, marrow, and connective tissues overnight, all the amino acids and minerals that make up our bones and joints are released and made available for digestion and assimilation.  As an added bonus, the gelatin that thickens the broth is an excellent digestive aid, taking stress away from your digestive system and aiding in the assimilation of nutrients.  No wonder chicken soup has long been a folk remedy for most ailments!

What is Umami?

Sweet, sour, salty, bitter . . . umami?  Though little known in our culture, there is a fifth taste detectable by receptors in our tongues.  The Chinese call it xiānwèi.  English equivalents might be “savory,” “rich,” or “hearty.”  The officially recognized term, coined by Dr. Kikunae Ikeda of Tokyo Imperial University around 1908 is “umami.”

Umami flavor is caused by glutamic acid, an amino acid.  Dr. Ikeda isolated glutamic acid from the seaweed kombu, popular in Japanese cuisine for thickening and flavoring broth.  MSG is a popular food additive that imparts umami flavor, making foods taste richer and more delicious.  Glutamic acid occurs naturally in meats, fish, tomatoes, and dairy products.  Parmesan cheese really packs an umami punch, as does Vietnamese fish sauce.

Umami tastes stimulate neurotransmitters, including feel-good seratonin, and generate a satiety response.  So not only does umami make for a pleasurable meal, but it helps to create a feeling of satisfaction, signalling that you can stop eating.

Onion News: Ninja Parade Slips Through Town Unnoticed Once Again

Ninja Parade Slips Through Town Unnoticed Once Again