our children, might prove catastrophic. That is a good instinct, and even though our great-great-great-grandparents may not have known to follow it at the time, that instinct remains alive in every one of their descendants, and it will help get us back to Earth.
snack chips stashed away in their cars. But it’s not just the sensory experience of real food that our bodies crave. Although food scientists have figured out how to recreate intensity of taste, if not the subtle nuances of real food, they cannot duplicate what Mother Nature does best: create foods that are equally rich in flavor and nutrition.
I submit that as our acquaintance with the experiences of real food have been denied us for so long and to such an extreme that the food conglomerates have nudged us, en masse, inch-by-inch, so far from nature that it is as if—with regard to foods produced for shelf life, in depleted soil, in limited space, and marketed as “healthy”—the majority of Americans today have been pushed off the planet and exiled to life in outer space.
Consider this: if we lived confined in some kind of giant penal colony on Mars, what would our diets be like? Would they really be so different from our own modern diets?
Most Martian foods would need to have long shelf lives. Since the shuttle only comes a few times a year, the shipments must be able to last for months. You’ll find most space-foods loaded with shelf-stable ingredients such as sugar, flour, protein isolates and hydrolysates, and vegetable oil. (“Sports” and “nutrition” bars contain almost nothing else.) Though these products have been refined and stripped of living, reactive components, many contain toxic preservatives to make them last even longer, including BHT and BHA (the same chemical compounds, incidentally, used by plastic and tire manufacturers).220 Since vegetable oil is particularly unappealing to micro-organisms (for reasons described in Chapter 8), you will find it incorporated into numerous products and nearly impossible to avoid while living on a Martian diet.
Space food’s not big on flavor. The sterile environment can support the growth of a few assorted veggies, including iceberg lettuce and hydroponically grown tomatoes. The occasional shipments of carrots, bell peppers, broccoli, potatoes, apples, and a few more fruits and vegetables offer the splashes of color that help convince inmates they’re getting real food, in spite of what their taste buds tell them. To make
matters worse, significant nutrient decay occurs during extended transport so that many “fresh” fruits and vegetables actually contain little more nutrition than their canned or frozen counterparts.221, 222 Fruits and vegetables shipped from Earth are picked unripe, and as a result, they contain significantly lower levels of vitamins (less than half in some cases) than any physiologically mature product.223 Research suggests such mass-produced products might taste bland because they provide us little more than water and cellulose, some having just one tenth the vitamins or antioxidants of their organically raised cousins.224
Space is at a premium on this penal colony, so animals grown for human consumption there are denied access to pasture, sunlight, and room to run. There is no ocean, so fish—genetically engineered for prodigious growth—are farm raised on high-calorie pellets. Chickens, fish, cattle, and hogs are reared in dimly lit containers, fed a mash of corn or soy, and their more perishable fleshy parts (organs) and bones are baked into animal feed or discarded.
The manufacturers on Earth know that the well-educated prisoner is willing to spend his commissary allowance on products labeled
“organic.” Producers of these products must slightly reduce chemical inputs during production to comply with the labeling rules. Shipments include a small portion of their volume as organic cereals, milk substitutes, meat and cheese substitutes, and desserts, to help these prisoners feel their foods are significantly superior. Other health-conscious inmates—sensing the inadequacy of their diets—follow the lead of U.S. astronauts and take synthetic vitamins, lots of them, unaware that the vitamins manufactured in factories typically fail to approximate the real thing.
You get the idea. It is no great exaggeration to suggest that as far as our bodies are concerned, most of us might as well be living in outer space. Compared to the Maasai, who still root their genes deep within the same nourishing fruits of the earth as their ancestors did 40,000 years ago, our genes are flailing in empty air. The milk the Maasai enjoy today is much the same as it was thousands of years ago when artists drew pictures of people with their cattle on the walls of caves in the Gilf
Kabir in Northern Africa (see illustration opposite the title page of this book). More to the point, it carries the same information to their cells.
The gray-white substance pumped from our sad cows? Not so much.
Fortunately, you don’t need to join a nomadic tribe in the desert to start eating better. All you need to do is follow the recipes laid out in any truly traditional cookbook. In Chapter 10, I will discuss in detail the foundational elements of the Deep Nutrition philosophy so that you can pick the best recipes from those available in your favorite cookbooks and on the Internet.
But before we get into which foods you should seek out, I would like to talk to you about two ingredients so harmful and so intrinsic to the modern American diet that with the single act of identifying these troublemakers, you put yourself miles ahead of the game.