JULY 26, 2012 10:11PM

CARBS ARE UNNATCHURL! Foodie Tuesday on Thursday.

Rate: 11 Flag

 

 

 

It was always clear that sugar and fat are unnatural – at least as we have them today, i.e., in limitless quantities.

In primeval times, god knows what we ate – bugs, nuts, roots, fruit. Pure sugar was only in the occasional treasure-trove of honey. Otherwise we had to make do with what we got out of fruit, which was often underripe and not all that sweet. Fat? From nuts, I guess, and gathering, cracking and chewing away wasn't like our handy bottles of oil and blocks of butter. Meat was hard come by – whatever we could get from pit-traps and crude weapons, and it was hardly marbled, since it came from active game, not feedlot animals.

But (in case you hadn't yet deduced, I'm currently doin' the Atkins) that hadn't occurred to me about starch.

Recently I commented somewhere, maybe on Facebook, about gluten-intolerance how eating grass-seed was not really natural. Figuring out how to do so constituted one of the early unnatural (i.e., all too human) technologies that allowed us to expand our numbers and take over the world.

I like to imagine our ancestors, chewing disconsolately on a bushel of leaves, perhaps a salad of sorts festooned with a few high-protein grubs, staring out at a herd of grazing cows. Those behemoths grow to their immensity by eating grass, for chrissake. Also all those leaping gazelles and the like. Mope, mope. We couldn't eat grass, or much of it. Only one stomach instead of four, for starters.

Some antedeluvian genius got the idea of gathering up grass-seed, not much more promising than grass itself. Crushing it, getting rid of a fair amount of the cellulose protecting the bit o' starch. Enough of it and you can make a pita. (Works best if you've already mastered fire.)

Okay, there is a theory that people did the beer trip first – moldering heaps of ripe grass, maybe after a rain, and the magic of fermentation. Can't eat the damn stuff and get strong like bull, at least suck down the bubbling juice and forget one's hunger for a while.

But let's not get off on a tangent. However it happened, in various parts of the world we figured out how to get a staple food from the unlikely source of teeny seeds – grain, or rice, or corn. Voila – practically pure starch. Ready energy. Bread (noodles, tortillas, bowl o' rice) – the foundation of civilizations.

But really, the innards of grass-seed is not a natural food for us. (And so, as I suggested in my comment referred to above, a proportion of the population with gluten-intolerance shouldn't come as a surprise.)

Anyway, getting back to my point, if any: With sugar and fat being rare in the wild, we don't have any shut-off point; rather, our bodies want as much of it as we can lay our hands on and stuff into our mouths. Thus, after getting the basic starch thing down, we have worked on making sweet and fat infinitely available. Too damn smart for our own good. Waddling towards extinction.

I used to like sugar. These days I can, and mostly do, bypass its temptations with scarcely a quiver. Fat I can take or leave alone.

Ah, but starch. Living w.o. starch. No bread, or noodles, or tortillas, or bagels, or muffins, or buns and rolls – today I had a croissant. I'd been thinking about Paris (and what fun it would be to have a meet-up there with Alysa when Joan goes, as she says she WILL, someday), and about the croissants they casually toss off there, and how somehow, even this nice flaky one (starch AND fat, yum) just doesn't measure up. Is it the butter? The water? The Parisian air? The skill of centuries?

But I bypassed the bread. The walnut and cranberry (lightly poked it, oh so nice and spongy, with crisp surface), the flaxseed, the oatmeal, the whole-wheat, the multi-grain, the baguettes ... ah, I remember that day on the French Riviera, late fall, so no crowds, a cafe on the beach, wonderful seafood, but the BREAD ... my friend and I, each trying to maintain our figures (or keep them from going further to pot) tried to have just a bit, but, bit by bit, we demolished the bowl. It was one of the most wonderful things I've ever eaten. Again, nobody can make a baguette like French. DAMN them.

Anyway, thing is, we humans are supposed to be lean and hungry, trekking across the savannah looking for grubs, or competing with the hyenas for leftover lion-kill. And, like, walking and running all day. None of this sitting in front of the computer eating lovely bread with butter. Or even bread w.o. butter, dammit.

Or, like tonight, just thinking about it.

Nothing momentarily stems the eternal hunger like a hit of starch.

A clue to its unnaturalness: As with sweets and fats, it slips down easily, no wasted energy in chewing (well, except with those baguettes), and there's no shut-off. Who can eat salad endlessly, or even meat (in the forms in which we gorge these days, it rates as unnatural), and even fruit – an apple, okay another apple, not not apples all night like we can eat starch (and sugar, and fat, or some unholy combination of all three – the French do pastry pretty good too).

I remember periods when I did fasts. All senses heightened. Especially smell – especially re food. And energized, as reserves kicked in so I could go trekking across the savannah. Even the hollow feeling in the gut felt good.

But, of course, the fast finished, and I was back to ensuring that other way of feeling good: virtually no trekking, no hollow feeling.

The low/no carb diet is a kind of fast, a kind of reverting back to the natural way of being. If you can call eating barbecue chicken and some perverted kind of (them damn French again) rotted butterfat natural.

Like, who wants natural? Hair down to our ankles and an interesting collection of parasites, tigers and wolves and bears on our scent, bedding down in a hollow log or something. WE'RE HUMAN! FOR US, IT'S NATURAL TO BE UNNATURAL.

As soon as I drop 15 or 20, I'm headed for the nearest bakery.  I may even walk.

   Breads

 

(This has been a post for Lammas, the feast of the new grain.)

 

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"We're human. It's natural for us to be unnatural."
So very true.I love the beer theory of agriculture and it has the ring of truth to me. Like you I am a carb addict. Rice and potatoes are my major failings.
The Atkins thing didn't work for me. Portion control and exercise did. R
Gerald Andersen
July 26, 2012 10:54 PM
I don't like bread, but I LOVE French baguettes. I also love potatoes. Not a good combination.
emma peel 2
July 26, 2012 11:35 PM
I could live on croissants. Can't wait to taste them in Paris! ~r
Joan H.
July 26, 2012 11:43 PM
This was a wonderful post. Thank you Thank you for making it all make sense. I want to eat right and I want to be ok about what I eat.
Small amounts of anything. Sugar and Flour and Butter in an endless stream thru my body for years really didn't hurt me that much but I can't seem to stop it. Maybe just let it dwindle down to a small trickle. Green beans. I ate them today and felt good. If it feels good do it again, if it doesn't don't.
zanelle
July 26, 2012 11:49 PM
Ger - I purely hate people who can get anywhere with portion control and exercise...with age, a "portion" must not exceed a tablespoon, and exercise causes pain.

Emma - ah, potatoes. Gift of the Andes. (The people there serve 'em boiled, with guinea pig.)

Joan - You'll dream of them forever after...
Myriad
July 26, 2012 11:50 PM
Zanelle - I thought of you when I was writing this because you've talked about your sugar thing. Green beans are wonderful - but dunno if they're that great day after day in endless amounts. Raiding the fridge late at night for another nosh of green beans... ???
Myriad
July 26, 2012 11:54 PM
Myriad! I've been eating low-carb lately and I feel so much better. I used to eat that way years ago and I forgot how good I felt when I did. It seems like the older I get the more starch and refined garbage bothers my gut. Also makes me feel tired and sluggish. The craving for that stuff goes away pretty quickly, I've found.
Margaret Feike
July 27, 2012 12:42 AM
The Paleo Diet is a good framework for a lot of people who easily gain weight. Other than grain sensitivity, many people just store fat very easily, and that comes from eating sugars and starches. Great for survival when your a hungry farmer, not so great when you are not doing much. Even this morning, I read that observations of current hunter gatherer tribes point out that we eat far more calories than they do, and they are busy moving around all day long. On the other hand, some concentrated energy is great for storage, and a sugary social high. Have the croissant (if you can), and then go hunt/gather the rest of the day. :) I put on an easy ten pounds this spring, because I let croissants, cheese and crackers back into my life. I had to break up with them again.
Oryoki Bowl
July 27, 2012 01:01 AM
without grain I am one crabby bitch...
course...
hyblaean- Julie
July 27, 2012 01:18 AM
Hi Margaret. When I got up this morning, as with a few previous mornings, I felt lighter. Almost floating. My crunchy knee said thanks. Belly not down from yesterday, but weirdly I felt like I had less back! And a constant non-sated feeling is actually kinda good.

Oryoki - I just had breakfast of rye bread (the original kind, a bunch of rye seeds scrunched together into a dense mass) with cheese. Dense enough with just a touch of carb to be satisfying. Yesterday's croissant was while I was in the city. Now I'm back home, where there are no real croissants (tho some doughy imitations) for miles and miles.

Julie - Yeah, well there's that. Only cats and dogs to scream at here, tho.

BIG TEST TOMORROW - Driving somewhere and on the way is a store that sells homemade baked goods produced by some local lady in her kitchen ... and she makes THE WORLD'S BEST BROWNIES. Will I stop? Will I buy? Will I bring the package, unravaged, to my destination? If I do, will my host be appreciative, or groan in despair as he digs in...
Myriad
July 27, 2012 08:29 AM
Were salt new, it'd be a controlled substance.

Rated.
Jonathan Wolfman
July 27, 2012 09:47 AM
Jonathan - right! Salt is another thing that was scarce but necessary, so we're programmed for intake with no shut-off....and, again, we have worked diligently to make infinite quantities of it available for our infinite appetite!
Myriad
July 27, 2012 10:18 AM
A lot of great stuff isn't natural, like air conditioning and toilets, but life wouldn't be as good without them (I know from experience, not having air conditioning). I say, go for the golden croissant ! And I also say, I hope that you come back to Paris some day!
Alysa Salzberg
July 30, 2012 08:56 AM
"We're human. It's natural to be unnatural." This should win some sort of epigram award. Almost everything about our lives is artificial. It's what we do: create things that didn't exist before in nature.

I can identify with so much here. I've been eating a variation of Atkins or Zone for years (but with almost daily spinach salads), and I always keep a few Atkins protein shakes (vanilla) in the fridge and sweeten (artificially) my coffee with them in place of creamer. It's protein coffee, and very low carb. I don't miss the grass seeds, except for rice, which I have occasionally.

By the way, I happen to have written recently about the paleolithic insect menu at an imaginary Cafe Insecta, based on last week's Scientific American article, but I'm not going in that direction myself.

Bon Appetit!
Daniel Rigney
August 02, 2012 02:27 AM
I love Pita too. Unfortunately they come in all sizes...and I just want the standard size...Does anyone know where I can get a Pita Meter?
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Algis Kemezys
August 02, 2012 10:43 PM