This is the eighth1 installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season.
The world is a pretty big place, but it seems smaller because we're so connected with faraway places, not only through instant information but also through shipping and transit. You can walk into any grocery store and find fruits and vegetables that don't actually grow anywhere near you, and usually aren't even in Season. This seems like a great thing, at first. You can try new flavors without having to travel across the world to get them. But, I would argue, that isn't the best approach.
For pretty much all of our history on this planet, people have been more or less tied to the land that they grew up in. They were born there, started and had their families there, and died there too. Some adventurous folks set out for parts unknown, but usually didn't make it farther than a few territories over. Most people stayed within the boundaries of their culture and region. That meant that they largely ate the same foods every day of their lives, grown from the land that they lived on or near. Europeans ate grains and root vegetables, desert dwellers had cucumbers and melons, native South Americans had corn and tomatoes. They learned how to grow these crops well, and how to eat them well too. Over time, they developed enzymes and gut bacteria specially designed to digest these foods in the best way.
Now, we throw all sorts of things at our digestive systems, not only from around the world, but modified foods with properties that they were never meant to have. I recently learned about einkorn, an ancient grain that hasn't been hybridized or modified at all in its 12,000 year history. Modern wheat has been bred to have a higher and higher gluten content, to make bread producers happy, while einkorn contains the same amount of gluten it did when it was first harvested in modern Turkey. And now gluten intolerance is rampant among modern people. Is it a problem with the people, or a problem with the food?
Great, we know our modern food system is broken, what to do? A good first step is to start eating the same thing every day, and make it as basic as possible. In our family, we don't plan specific meals for each day, like meatloaf on Monday and tacos on Tuesday2, we form every meal around a grain, usually rice or quinoa (not actually a grain, I know), vegetables like salads or frozen green beans, and protein, usually pork or chicken. Sauces and seasonings are added afterward, but the basic structure is the same. Not only is this very economical compared to pre-packaged meals, it helps with digestion and overall health since our bodies know what we're consistently going to be getting each time we eat. It's getting to the point for me that eating nearly anything from outside the house, even if it's GF/DF/EF, isn't worth it. I've heard this strategy called the Groundhog Day diet, since you eat the same thing every day, but that makes it seem like you're trapped into an endless purgative cycle of some kind. Incorporating seasonally fresh fruits and veggies is important too, so instead I'll call it the Seasonal diet. That's pretty on-brand.
What foods do you find yourself coming to again and again?
The word eighth is so weird, isn’t it? Like it shouldn’t be spelled like that, but it is. It’s also a very excellent number!
Waffles on Wednesday, turkey tetrazzini on Thursday, filleted fish on Friday, salad bar on Saturday, and Southwest chili on Sunday. The Magic Tree House diet!