Last week on Gourmet.com there was an interview with the author of a book called The Jungle Effect, which is about the value of traditional diets and how we can accrue some of that value without having to actually live in the jungle. The author, Daphne Miller, wisely pitches her book as a companion volume to Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: he tells you why to eat a traditional diet, she tells you specifically what to eat.
I haven’t read the book and am agnostic on its thesis, but I liked this part a lot:
> At a conference last week I was asked to help people determine what’s a healthy oil and what isn’t, because it’s so confusing. So I sat down and looked at traditional oils, which are oils that have been used for cooking for thousands of years, versus the oils that we’ve had since the Industrial Revolution (essentially for the past 100 years or so, or a little less). The way that you can make the distinction easily is to take a mortar and pestle and see if you can make that oil–if you even have a fighting chance of making that oil. Take a kernel of corn, for example, and stick it in your mortar and pestle and go at it. And you call me when you get that corn oil, okay? Versus take something like a palm fruit or an olive or a piece of coconut or something like that–you’re not going to make gallons of oil [when you grind it yourself], but you’re going to get something greasy.
As I said, I don’t know if the oils she’s talking about are the healthiest (thought if I had to bet, I would bet that they are), but they are definitely *the most delicious.* Especially if you add duck fat, butter, and lard to the list.
Using better cooking fats is one of the easiest ways for a cook to make a better dinner. Olive oil, peanut oil, lard, and butter are four of my best friends in the kitchen. And they can be your friends too!
**NOTE:** I am on a hardcore deadline for the next month and you will probably see little of me, online or in person, between now and June 15.
I’m wondering if I’m the only one who is now picturing you trying to fit a pig into your mortar by pounding on it with a really big pestle. :-)
Go Lard!
-L
Ha!
How traditional do you need to get? Butter was only invented a few thousand years ago (according to http://www.webexhibits.org/butter/ — go internets).
It would be interesting to read about the actual history of what people ate and how they cooked.
Like when was cooking in fat (as opposed to just eating things with fat in them) actually invented in different parts of the world? Does it even make sense to do that if you don’t have metal cooking implements? Would that totally ruin your cedar basket?
Those are excellent points, Laurel. First of all, if you google for “history of metal,” you will learn a lot about guitar heros but not a lot about iron.
The author of Jungle Effect is talking about traditional as in “before the industrial revolution.” I am skeptical of this belief that preindustrial societies are more healthy, overall, than industrial societies–there seems to be something to it, but it’s probably a lot more complicated than “Eskimos don’t get heart disease”–but that’s the hypothesis she’s working off.
I assume you could do some oil-based cooking in stone pots, but it would be hard to do the TV chef saute pan flip technique with a 30-pound granite skillet.
In short, I think all food should be roasted on a spit.
I may have left this comment before, so pardon if I have, but the book ‘Real Food: What to Eat and Why’ by Nina Planck addresses a lot of this.
StillBorn, I reviewed the book and, in short, hated it. It was loaded with bold claims and essentially zero reasons to believe them.
I get all my cooking tips from The Clan of the Cave Bear and its sequels. Cave bear fat is great for cooking ptarmigan in a pit oven. I have it from a reliable source.
On a related subject, perhaps you want me to take over the column while you work to meet your deadline.
Wendy, you’re on, as long as you call your column “Live from the Mosh Pit-Oven,” or “Ptarmigan, Ptarmigan, Jiggety-Jig.”
Hello
Daphne Miller here. The family doc who wrote the Jungle Effect. The book does not deal with prehistoric societies or even preindustrial ones. I wrote it based on my travels of the past 3 years to places around the world that I call “cold spots.” Cold spots are essentially places that still boast relatively low rates of the modern chronic diseases that plague us in the US–like diabetes, heart disease, colon cancer and depression. In each instance, I found sound scientific data that food plays a strong role in their good health and thought that each region would offer some good lessons that we could apply here at home.
I headed off on these travels thinking that I already knew an awful lot about nutrition (I did Andrew Weil’s integrative fellowship and a number of other trainings and have counseled patients in my medical practice for over 12 years)but boy was I wrong. Each area handed me some fascinating/surprising new lessons. For example: how could Icelanders pride themselves in being “vegetable haters” and yet have relatively low rates of depression and great longevity? Or how can the Tarahumara of Copper Canyon MX eat such a high carb diet and have such low rates of diabetes?
When you’re reading The Jungle Effect you’ll see that I muse about what vital nutrients are at play in these diets but try to not to get too caught up in labeling foods as “good” or “bad”. Rather I look at whole diets (and traditional recipes) that have worked for hundreds to thousands of years.
Daphne, thanks very much for clearing up my misconception. I’m really looking forward to reading the book.
Sounds like a great book, and pretty similar to “Real Food” by Nina Planck. The connection between what you eat and your health is unforunately a lesson hardly taugh these days, mainly thanks I am sure to industrial food companies telling us what is “healthy”, rather than using common sense about natural foods.
Rant over :D
So, I haven’t read any of these books. I love the mortar and pestle idea. And, I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that, in order to mass produce food, we’ve managed to suck the nutrients right out of it. Disease free, drought resistant, high yield (especially high yield) does not equal good for you.
I can’t remember what channel I was watching (Discovery, National Geographic, one of those) and they were talking about pigs. In order to qualify as “The Other White Meat” they engineered all the fat out (I think through both selective breeding and some sort of geneticized hybridization). Right, so, poor pigs. THEN people realized pig with no fat tasted like poop (and we sorta got off all of the no/low fat meat thing, if you’re gonna eat it, get a good piece of marbled meat). So, now there spending all this time re-introducing the fat into the pigs. Now, aside from a giant pain, a pretty stupid move and all the time it took, these pigs are super duper unstable. Their genes are really weak and their immune systems are weaker. They can’t go outside or they’ll die (can’t fight disease, can’t keep themselves warm, etc). Scary.
Anywho, I now want to meet a small scale pig farmer who will sell me some of his pig (that has lived outside and is already butchered thank you very much, or at least the bothersome organs are gone). And I think that the key is varying your food sources so you’re not eating the same one type of mass-produced corn all the time. I’m planting four types of heirloom tomatoes in my garden.
I think I’m there with you on ‘Real Food’. Actually, I didn’t even finish it. I was reading it, then left the country for a month and came back with a feeling of ‘what’s the point?’.
Food is definitely linked to depression. For example, when I have not had cheese in four or more days, I can’t get out of bed in the mornings and spend entire days weeping into my pillow.
You’ve just described the genesis of Who Moved My Cheese?.
schmoo…
i think i read an article in an old issue of harpers on a very simular situation, there was a picture of a haz-mat looking suit you had to wear to go near the pigs in that facility. by the by, on the question on wanting to find a pig that lives outside i happen to know a bit about, my husband is a butcher in a small town for a family farm that raises a lot of their own all grass fed cattle and buys/slaughters/sells other small family sustainable animal friends. What this means is we never want for the lesser loved parts (ummmm…cheeks and tongue) and i ‘make’ lard once a month, reserving butter for some baking. depending where you live i can give you info on a buying club in seattle from Thundering hooves or a shipping situation through niky usa, who (among other things) sells pork raised in a slightly larger than smaller family farm, but great and sustainable none the less.