Yesterday I had a conversation with the "expert" hired by Paula's bakery to create saleable products. I commented that my daughters would not touch real food but eat only "natural", "organic", "bio", "wild" etc. 0% yoghourts, unpolished red rice, free-walking grass-fed chickens, brown breads made from exotic cereals and so on. Bread is practically free in Israel (that's why Palestinians are so fat), but no Kever Benjamin female would buy any. We spend about ten dollars for a piece of brown baked breadlike thing (pic). The expert explained that standard bread has no relation to the bread we ate in our youth, it is some kind of undigestable even toxic industrial product.
A cardiologist says the same thing, with more detail:
...now have many thousands of wheat strains that are different in important ways from original emmer, einkorn, and Triticum aestivum wheat. Interestingly, it has been suggested that einkorn wheat fails to provoke the same immune response characteristic of celiac disease provoked by modern wheat gluten, suggesting a different amino acid structure in gluten proteins. Another difference: Emmer wheat is up to 40% protein, compared to around 12% protein for modern wheat.
In other words, the wheat of earlier agricultural humans, including the wheat of Biblical times, is NOT the wheat of 2010. Modern wheat is quite a different thing with differing numbers of chromosomes, different genes due to human manipulation, varying gluten protein composition, perhaps other differences.
Somewhere in the shuffle and genetic sleight-of-hand that has occurred over the last 30 years, wheat changed. What might have been the "staff of life" has now become the cause of an incredible array of diseases of "wheat" intolerance.
At least now I know why I have to keep buying all that exotic expensive breads.
Yesterday I had a conversation with the "expert" hired by Paula's bakery to create saleable products. I commented that my daughters would not touch real food but eat only "natural", "organic", "bio", "wild" etc. 0% yoghourts, unpolished red rice, free-walking grass-fed chickens, brown breads made from exotic cereals and so on. Bread is practically free in Israel (that's why Palestinians are so fat), but no Kever Benjamin female would buy any. We spend about ten dollars for a piece of brown baked breadlike thing (pic). The expert explained that standard bread has no relation to the bread we ate in our youth, it is some kind of undigestable even toxic industrial product. A cardiologist says the same thing, with more detail:
16 comments:
Sorry I don't buy into this nonsense- your body digests "modern wheat" exactly the same way as it digests regular old wheat - to your body all food is fats, proteins and carbohydrates, it doesn't care what variety. Now allergies are to specific proteins so it is possible that some people may be allergic to one type of wheat and not to another (at least until they become sensitized to the other) but for most people it makes not the slightest bit of difference. White flour (the "bad" kind) is just whole wheat with the less digestible bran and the quick to spoil germ (both of which have undesirable taste characteristics) removed, and in the context of a balanced diet is no less healthy than whole grain bread - the differences in nutrition between the two are minor.
K
Regarding fat poor people (which we have in the US too), what is going on is this - at one time poor people couldn't afford to eat a lot, but with modern food abundance at low prices and government subsidies for the poor, and the fact that few people still do manual labor that burns lots of calories, they have all the food that they want. Now rich women (in recent decades - at one time rich women were expected to be pleasingly plump) model themselves after the sterile boylike Wallis Simpson, who said you can never be too rich or too thin (the latter is obviously false) and so they starve themselves with great discipline. This is suicidal in the long run (sometimes for the woman herself, other times because it renders her incapable of childbearing - at a certain level of starvation the reproductive system shuts down) But poor women are not interested in emulating royalty nor in imposing on themselves impossible regimens. Some recent studies show that extreme thinness adds little to lifespan - some of the most long lived, robust old people are not at all thin. So who are the crazy ones - the rich or the poor?
K
I think we are all crazy - the rich and the poor. That's why we need to follow the rules of kashrut - not because they make sense - they dont - but because crazier crazes are awaiting in the alley. I mean, the endless debates and consultation with the rav this and rav another are stupid, but the debates my family is having about the relative merits of this "grass-fed" chicken vs the "natural" eggs and so on are sick. Sick sick sick and I am so sorry I did not educate my daughters in our religion. If once I feel I have more money than we could use, I shall make a donation to the Pest yeshive.
1. Have your daughters move out and pay for their own stupidity. Once they see the bills that result from their idiotic dieting crazes they will stop...or end up sleeping in their cars.
2. I remember reading a book that counseled that if you have a *large* number of food allergies you should be tested for diabetes. Diabetes in its early stages can manifest itself in ways that don't seem immediately obvious.
3. I don't think that was the reason Kosher dietary laws were instituted, but it is a nice side-effect.
Your remarks about the crazier crazies resonates (though I'm not sure - my cousin having "lost" his son to the Lubavitch, I'm not sure who the craziest crazies really are). What all this mishegos means though is that humans have a natural impulse for sorting and ritual, which usually includes self imposed dietary restrictions. If we can't debate whether the egg that is laid on the Sabbath is "kosher" then we can still debate whether the egg is "free range" which requires the same degree of pilpul. (BTW, "free range" eggs are a joke - legally the definition is met if chickens have "access" to the outdoors. This means a little hatch at one end of the coop. Most chickens prefer to remain indoors where they are safe and food and water are present so few venture out the little door. )
These kind of restrictions are present in almost all cultures that are beyond the subsistence level. Living on the savannah, being able to sort the "good" foods from the "bad" must have had major survival value. Humans are very good at pattern recognition - so good that we see patterns even when they aren't there (constellations in the sky, the Elders of Zion ruling the world, etc.).
K
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The Internet makes it easier for people to educate themselves about food quality, pressuring industrial food producers to improve their products. The "organic" and "natural" food fads will eventually improve all foods, while mass production methods keep food cheap. As for animal rights concerns, eventually meat, fish and poultry will be cloned.
I am of three minds on this issue. On the one hand, I can't believe that God really cares whether some guy in a hat grills people producing my food about whether pork has ever come in contact with their tools of the trade or whatever. On the other, the stupid hippies who believe that cows are people too and jerk off to their own sense of superiority are much worse. On the third hand, the idea of eating, for instance, grain-fed beef from cows packed into shitfilled pens and pumped full of steroids and antibiotics worries me, not just from the aspect of substances accumulating up the food chain, i.e., in my body, but also from the humane aspect. Cows aren't people or even dogs, but inhumanity to dumb animals is still repulsive to me. With that said, I just picked up a quarter of a grassfed cow from a farmer out in the boonies, which wound up costing me about the same as the equivalent quantity of meat from the supermarket. The remaining cattle seemed to be having an okay time hanging out in the pasture, for cows. Let's see if there's a difference in taste.
Just don't expect grassfed beef to behave the same as cornfed. Basically you have to cook it less or more, depending on cut - the tender grilling cuts have to be cooked rare. No well done steaks. The less tender cuts have to be cooked low and slow for a long time and with added moisture or fat. In both cases, go easy on the heat. If you treat the meat properly in accordance with its nature (which is different than corn fed beef) and don't expect it to do things that it can't do, you will enjoy it. If you light a fire hot enough to melt steel and grill the meat to death 2 inches from the coals, you'll have shoe leather.
K
K,
I usually throw meat in a rice cooker in a ziplock bag for about twelve hours, then sear it.
Get yourself a PID controller and you'll be all set. That's a great method for grass fed beef.
K
Can you recommend a functional yet affordable model?
See this website:
http://www.auberins.com/
They sell complete plug and play units but I would recommend piecing together your own for some savings if you are at all handy with basic wiring and $ is tight. You need 3 main pieces - the controller itself (around $35 - you want one with "SSR output"), the solid state relay (around $15) and the thermocouple (you can cheat and use a cheap one for $4 - a liquid tight one is around $20). Never splice a thermocouple - the leads must go directly to the PID. The SSR needs a heat sink - if you use an aluminum project box it can double as your heatsink. Then you'll need a plug, a receptacle , a few lengths of wire to interconnect the pieces, etc. If you are really cheap you can look on ebay and find the same pieces for a few $ less, usually mailed from China, but I've dealt with the Auber people and they are helpful within the limits of their Engrish (they are Chinese) and are in the US.
When it is all assembled, power to the receptacle constantly switches on and off, as frequently as 1x/second, based on whether the thermocouple is reading above or below the set temp. You can save a lot of heat stress on the SSR if you start w. water near the set temp (just plug the rice cooker into the wall until you are ballpark). The rice cooker must be the "mechanical" kind with a switch that pops up - the electronic kind will reset itself every time power is interrupted.
K
Sorry, no time.
Thank you.
Boris
You're welcome. If you go this route, let us know if you have any questions or need help fitting the pieces together. It's really not rocket science if you have a basic understanding of AC power wiring. No special electronics knowledge, ability to solder, etc. is needed.
Again, if you are not comfortable working w. line voltage electricity or don't have time to be messing around stuffing things into a project box, they sell a pre-made idiot proof solution for not a huge premium, but you don't strike me as an idiot so I'm guessing you'd rather roll your own.
K
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