I am hardly the first blogger to recommend Michael Pollan’s long article in the New York Times. He’s the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, supposedly one of last year’s best books.
But his article, and I assume his book (that I haven’t yet read), reinforces one of my major motivations for ‘playing’ with the SCA: Critical thinking about modern life.
"Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the
Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the
rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we
are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren’t a healthy diet, the
people who follow it wouldn’t still be around."
Exactly. The modern notion that ‘we know so much more than our predecessors’ is so dangerous, it’s led this country into "a national experiment in mainlining glucose." You know what the results are – look at the girths around you.
I have a lot of fun I want to accomplish in this lifetime, so I’m stacking my decks to make it last as long as possible. I feel blessed to finally find a population of kindred spirits – I don’t want to lose you all to blindness, paralysis, hypertension and the various forms of heart disease in twenty years. So please, please, research how your great-great-great grandmother would have eaten. Avoid the "food-like substances" that come vaccum-sealed in bags inside boxes wrapped in plastic, with thirty ingredients. Find something physical and fun to do.
Pollan also says: "Cook. And if you can, plant a garden." So now I need to find a container to haul chicken manure in.
Eat a traditional ethnic food group, that sounds great in theory but lets look at say a traditional English diet. Lots of boiled food. All the vitamins and minerals are lost to this type of cooking. Lots of fats (lets talk about fish and chips on newspaper shall we?). with a modern spin to these traditional foods, less fried food and food fried in better oils. Less boiling to mush and more cooking till tender to retain the vitamins and minerals. So I understand the idea of a traditional diet, but I think you can add modern ideas to it.
Also with the prevalent spread of sugar and processed sugar, the palate of the modern people is dramatically different from say depression era or middle ages people.
Can we say that middle ages people had less diseases or better health than we do today? Starvation is a great way to keep the pounds off, so is working your 1 acre farm from sunup to sundown hauling things around the farm and keeping the farm animals fed and tended. We live a sedentary life.