Stomach safety

First a reminder to those in colder climate where growing season is over: stock up on as much local garlic as you can. Remember most of that blazing white supermarket stuff not otherwise identified as to point of origin is likely coming from the seriously toxic soils of China and has been dipped in formaldehyde to give it that bright complexion. Eat local.

Another reminder brought to you by Roger Cohen's gluten-free opinion column in the New York Times.  I happen to totally agree with him that all the food fetish is the narcissism of the I'm special competitive consumer culture rampant among those under 45. For one thing, their new fuss over ancient gluten is misplaced and misinformed. Non-celiacs who have a verifiable physical reaction to bread are most likely being poisoned not by good old gluten but either by hyped up industrialized wheat with far more than normal gluten so it can be processed more easily, or more probably by the toxic glysophate, the lead chemical in all that Roundup sprayed on industrially grown wheat two weeks before it is harvest.

I've been in the food business as a caterer but the most frustrating time I ever had in a kitchen was at a Dharma Center where half the meditators insisted on special foods just for them. I watched two young cousins start life malnourished because their mother suddenly wanted to be viciously vegan. Last week I ate with a family that is vegetarian because they don't want to eat meat but they have no problem eating other critters killed for their supper: fish. Really? At least Tibetans who had no choice in their frozen desert highland but to eat meat or starve had the resolve to eat only large animals so that one death saved many people. They refuse to eat fish, shellfish, Cornish hens and anything even remotely one on one.

If you want to eat meat, and some of us need to do that from time to time to keep our gut going, try doing it so, as the Thai people would say, you don't butcher at the table. No huge slabs. Itsy bits of pork sausage for flavor on pasta, an occasional stew packed with vegetables, a little ground lamb stuffed into a large eggplant. You can't easily undo 10,000 years of human digestion. The Dalai Lama tried going, how shall I say? cold turkey, and ended up hospitalized. Cutting back to maybe three days a week will do it. Because so many of us are trying to do that, last year 10 million less animals were slaughtered for our dinner.

And don't obsess over the sea salt. It may not contain the vital nutrient you see in cheap salt that's been iodized. Your thyroid will dumb down. So keep some iodided salt on hand to throw into the pasta water and stews and places where you don't need glamour from salt. 

Oops, I started out to write about colorful eating without pumpkin spice and sidetracked into this sermon.
Hope it helps.