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"Romanticizing Antique Food-Handling"
Chef Jem replies to several one-star review of Nourishing Traditions.
Date: 5/19/2012 11:09:31 PM ( 12 y ) ... viewed 3537 times Just posted these at books.google.com about my all time favorite cookbook!
Re: "I am heartily sick of people romanticizing antique food-handling. No, people didn't eat as much processed food, because there wasn't much processed food. However, children were far more likely to die from contaminated or spoiled milk ..."
Chef Jem replies:
The very sad -"Standard American Diet" is a very recent development in light of the whole time-line of our entire dietary heritage. The most outstanding characteristic of modern foods is that they are highly processed. However there is a very long history of foods being processed but not as highly processed as they have been in the last century or so which again is a tiny sliver-slice of time in the whole time line.
Manufacturers of modern-day, highly-processed foods have done things to foods that no other traditional food processing has ever done to foods before. In other words it is not just a matter of "antique food-handling". There is a transformation of foods happening now that did not exist before. These transformed "foods" (along with the addition of a myriad of fake foods) bring challenging difficulties to the human digestive system (that is designed for real foods) and it is these things that truly deserve the "red alert" that Sally Fallon Morell has directly spoken to throughout Nourishing Traditions! The focus in Nourishing Traditions (and in all of Sally's mission) is on the truth about food, not about "romanticizing".
Re: milk - Milk has the same long-standing historical timeline (as all the other real foods) and in light of that there is virtually no danger of death from traditional milk whether "contaminated or spoiled". The cause of the "milk problem" was much less about the milk and more about the environment (due to the greed for a greater gain from grain for making alcohol and the use of that spent grain to feed the cows in confinement dairy operations). At the same time that this "milk problem" was occurring there were healthy real dairy farms where the cows were feeding on their natural life-giving diet on acres of "salad bar" pastures and thus made nutrient-dense food-as-medicine milk being used at the Mayo clinic to support the healing of those children sickened by the sick beverage coming from swill dairies.
In light of the above facts, please provide verifiable references that indicate: "children were far more likely to die from ... spoiled milk" and where the implicated milk that was used was raw, grass fed milk. If you can not show at least one single shred of evidence that can lend some credibility to your statement about milk as it stands now then I think you should retract that statement because it does not distinguish where the overwhelming majority problems come from with "milk". (1)
It should be very well-noted that whenever making a generalized statement about "milk" that we all realize that there are actually two milks. Nourishing Traditions is all about traditional milk (what I think of as the first milk) that has also been called "farm milk", "raw milk", "real milk", "pastured milk", "grass-fed milk", etc. as opposed to the other milk that typically comes from grain-fed animals and consequently needs to be pasteurized because it is similar to the swill milk-product that did indeed kill people back in the 1800's to early 1900's. It is this other "milk" (that has been known to cause sickness and death) that needs to be pasteurized to at least minimize the severity of sickness that otherwise could result if that milk were not pasteurized.
Is is the other "milk" that is always subject to contamination and spoilage (because the inherent immunity that is normally present in healthy milk has been severely compromised by the diet and other factors contributing to poor health of the cows in confinement operations)! Any one can demonstrate this for themselves by putting out identical containers of the two milks and observing what happens to them over time. The pasteurized milk will always rot. The grass-fed raw milk will naturally clabber! Clabber is a traditional milk product that has been enjoyed by our ancestors for a very, very long time!
I am confident that you will not be able to find any references for death by grass-fed clabbered milk. On the other hand, the deaths that have occurred by pasteurized milk are so extensive that you will not be able to fully identify them all. What a contrast! And you made no distinction whatsoever! And that is understandable since all most anyone has known about real traditional foods in America has been what immigrants have brought here for there traditional cultures and that might be passed on to the next generation. I don't imagine that you had the good fortune of growing up in a family having the wisdom that is inherent in traditional foods. I am really sorry about that! It can make it extra hard for people who have been separated from their own ancient traditions [like the ones that are liberally spoken of in Nourishing Traditions (NT)] to readily recognize where this NT message is coming from. If I knew where you lived I could suggest the closest chapter of the Weston A Price Foundation where they may have NT potlucks. Especially given the fact that you actually did not try any of the recipes in the book!
I am sorry that you are so sick of "people romanticizing antique food-handling". Please forgive us (for there are so many of us)! Thank you for posting your comments at Books.Google.com for Nourishing Traditions where I can respond!
In Love and respect
Chef Jem
Long-standing member of The Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF).
One of the first founders of a local WAPF chapter.
Occasional member of the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation
Raw Milk, Real Foods, Food Freedom Blogger:
Raw Milk: The Whole Truth:
http://curezone.com/blogs/f.asp?f=1452
Chef Jem by Chef Jem:
http://curezone.com/blogs/f.asp?f=1785
Posted at: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/146571984
(1) "... the CDC does not have one recorded death from consumption of raw milk since beginning its recording of illness data in 1973. At least 80 deaths have been recorded from pasteurized milk (if the Jalisco pasteurized cheese incident is included). More than 422,000 illnesses are listed under pasteurized milk at the CDC since 1973, but only 1100 are recorded under raw milk.":
http://renourishment.org/2011/11/15/raw-milk-institute-headquarters-rawmi-visit/
I would also add, at least here (to this already posted reply) the following link to a book review by Steve Solomon of "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" By Dr. Weston A. Price:
http://www.soilandhealth.org/02/0203CAT/020305ppnf/PPNF.HTML
Where one can read:
"Weston A. Price did humanity a great and largely-unappreciated service by establishing an easily understandble standard of human health, clearly demonstrated with photographs. A really good picture really is worth many thousands of words and Price offers the reader a narrated slide show of over a hundred photos, many of them of extremely healthy people contrasted with degenerated ones, photos taken all over the world, of people of different races living in climates eating totally different dietaries, accompanied by sensitive, compassionate narration. This coupling of the visual image with narration increases the power of Price's argument by a hundred-fold. Price's book is basically a photographic travelogue, the story of a world-wide search for a standard by which to judge human health. This makes Nutrition and Physical Degeneration the most convincing and powerful awakener of health-consciousness I have ever encountered."
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Reply to another one of the "lone-star" reviewers:
Greetings Michael,
I understand how you can make the assessment that you made. First in regards to "fad diets": Here's a couple facts that may be helpful in seeing where Nourishing Traditions is coming from.
On page XV (which is the very first page of the Preface) the author says (in the third paragraph): "The first modern researcher to take a careful look at the health and eating habits of isolated traditional societies was a dentist, Dr. Weston Price." Dr. Price learned from fourteen groups of people "in which almost every member of the tribe or village enjoyed superb health. ... they produced healthy children with ease, generation after generation."
That description is based on the documented record from Dr. Price's book: "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration". If you were to read this book you would find that the diets and " ... eating habits of (all these) isolated traditional societies" all varied according to the locality and the traditions of each group.
Based on all these very well documented facts, kindly show me where the "fad diet" is in any of these fourteen traditional diets.
Re: "dogmatic preaching" -
Dr. Price said: “I spent several (over 10) years studying the primitive people in various parts of the world, and I have come as a missionary from them
to the people of modern civilization, and I beg of you to learn of their accumulated wisdom. And if you do, you too can have strong healthy bodies without so much disease as we suffer from these days.”
Would you care to make any comments on that?
Dr. Price said he was a missionary.
Most Americans are raised without learning anything of this "accumulated wisdom". The health of the people in America is about the worst on the planet. Yet Dr. Price's work stands as a recorded testimony of truth.
The very last six words that Dr. Price said at the end of his life were: You teach, you teach, you teach"!
In light of all of this (and more) would you be willing to simply consider Nourishing Traditions as at least an attempt to follow in the footsteps of Dr. Price (as "the missionary" that he was)? If so then I think it might be easier for you to accept the fact that this attempt was made by a mother and a chef with a real dedication to teaching the nourishing traditional wisdom that began as Dr. Price's mission about fifty years ago. If so then maybe you can begin to see that Nourishing Traditions is truly more than a cookbook. And if all you want is just another cookbook then there are loads of those available! But if you can see the need for a paradigm shift in our relationship with food then welcome to that shift as it has begun and this book has payed a major role in making the shift!
"Nourishing Traditions is more than a cookbook - it's an education that will lead you to 'cook with pride', as you will know that you are giving your family the proper nourishment for a lifetime of vigorous good health. Now that is the real 'joy of cooking'!
William Campbell Douglass, MD
Author of The Milk Book
Re: "... giving your family the proper nourishment for a lifetime of vigorous good health" - Last night I had the very good pleasure to hear Mark McAfee once again as he made his presentation at the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation (near where I live in the San Diego area) and he reiterated the general replies that Dr. Price had heard all the people say in answer to his question as to why the people had placed so much emphasis on the foods they carefully selected and all the preparations they put into their foods said, essentially, because we want our children to be healthy!
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Here's (most of) the last reply that I made at the review sites that are linked from books.google.com for her one star reviews on Nourishing Traditions:
... the "chapter" titled "Organ Meats" is a grand total of eighteen pages and includes the most common traditional foods such as "Liver and Onions", "Sauteed Chicken Livers" plus about 22 additional recipes of various organ meats that may be new to some people and may be very familiar to others. No one needs to like organ meats to like Nourishing Traditions! (Especially wherever the (SAD) Standard American Diet has prevailed.)
I realize now as I am writing this that the SAD paradigm not only imposed the "foods of commerce" upon the American people it separated he people from the traditional wisdom of the omitted foods, like organ meats. So not only did people become conditioned by the big food industry to rely on their manufactured products these people also lost the traditional connections with the wholeness of food, the wholeness of where real food comes from including the wholeness of the animals and especially the organs! In light of this I can certainly understand someone saying "Yuck" about organ meats! And I'm sorry if you have been conditioned by the (very) SAD paradigm that has largely rejected traditional foods for the profit of big food industry rather than for the health and the wisdom of real people, like you!
"As a convinced vegetarian of some 25 years, I opened Sally Fallon's book to her many meat recipes and immediately closed it again. But then I figured that there must be more to it than that. There is. ... I was surprised at the wealth of information to help me (even as a vegetarian) make better food choices and prepare the ones I have chosen to get the most nourishment from them."
Peter Hinderberger, MD,
Past President Physicians Association for Anthroposophical Medicine
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Plus another reply with a whole different vibe to it here:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/112887532
I feel like I've just earned myself a real meal from all the writing I've just done over the past five and half hours. My copy of nourishing Traditions is opened to the section on Game. That section begins with five recipes on venison. My paternal grandfather included venison in the family's diet! I think I had some as a child. It is a traditional food in Germany. More so then in many other areas. I can look back on all the traditional foods that my German grandmother prepared and "wish" I had learned to make them all just as she made them! Instead I started learning how to make American foods (i.e, pizza) as of age twelve. I really don't expect to find anyone like my German grandmother who was my favorite chef of all time! Everything she made from the most simple scrambled eggs to the hand formed dumplings that always came with real stove- top gravy was beyond comparison! I live in a household where there is a rule to not prepare meat in the kitchen and so it is a challenge for me to even dream of preparing the meat dishes my grandmother prepared, otherwise I would!
I just now reopened my Nourishing Traditions and came to the recipe for Corned Beef in the Raw Meat Appetizer section and that means I can think about having this dish without any concern about "no meat cooking" in the kitchen here! Yippee! Nine pages of Raw Meat Appetizers!
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