IN THIS AFFLUENT wedge of the planet, food is not the problem. Here in the West we are surrounded by (literally) mountains of food. Food is everywhere—in supermarkets, restaurants, corner shops, theaters, shopping centers, fast-food outlets, even garages. The problem, however, is what to eat of the food that abounds, how to discriminate so that our food supports and nourishes us as often as possible, makes us smack our lips and yell “Wow! That was delicious.” The irony is that the more food there is in our Western world, the more food-related illnesses appear, everything from allergies to obesity to cancer.
Our journey into what to eat began in the spring of 2000. Chupi was lying on the sofa and I was listening to an afternoon radio program on different alternative medicine practices: homoeopathy, aromatherapy, etc. It was a very simple series, with a short introduction by the host, followed by an interview with the chosen practitioner. This week’s turn was nutrition. To be honest, nutrition had never been a subject of passionate interest to me, but within minutes of listening to Patricia Quinn’s clear-as-a-bell voice, I was riveted.
At the time, Chupi (then sixteen), Luke (then thirteen), and I were in health-hell. Chupi was just barely coping with daily living. Everyone we consulted gave us a different outcome, a different remedy, a different diagnosis. Chupi recoiled from them all, and I, being the mom, was borderline insane with anxiety.
Now here was Patricia Ouinn, a clear small voice in the babbling wilderness. She talked about the process of illness: fatigue that doesn’t respond to rest; growing irritability; symptoms; and finally illness. Her “doctors” were sunlight and fresh air, pure water and good food, proper exercise and sufficient rest. Neither illness nor health is random or inexplicable: they occur because of what has happened to us (or what we have done to ourselves). We can (and should) be actively involved in our own healing, following very simple guidelines, starting with rigorously sorting out our nutrition. As Darina Allen once famously remarked, none of us would dream of putting unreliable fuel into our precious cars, yet we routinely put the most unreliable fuel into our bodies. We really are what we eat.
When Patricia saw Chupi for the first time, she diagnosed, along with other problems, an extremely severe Candida albicans infestation. Candida albicans, a yeast common to our digestive systems, usually becomes a problem—sometimes a life-threatening one—when a combination of factors trigger an explosion/overgrowth. The most common trigger is overuse of antibiotics (these wipe out the friendly bacteria in the gut and the ever opportunistic Candida takes hold), and then too much sugar, yeast, and refined, processed wheat in the diet, along with prolonged stress. Candida keeps its hold and gets ever stronger as a weakened immune/digestive system is unable to reassert control by normal methods.
The only cure is to go off all sugar and yeast and any foods that have any traces of yeast or mold. No cookies, no cake, no store-bought pizzas, no fast foods, no alcohol, no vinegar, no store-bought condiments are allowed. As Patricia explained, the only way to control Candida is to stop feeding it. (There is no conventional cure for Candida, in fact conventional medicine’s overuse of antibiotics is centrally implicated in the huge rise of Candida in the West. Candida sufferers are forced to take a natural path to healing.) Our task was twofold: to get Chupi off all Candida-feeding foods, and to build her health back up by putting her on a good, clean, healthy diet.
The first few weeks of the diet were pandemonium. Chupi was permanently starving. Luke and I were permanently cooking. No yeast and no sugar meant no supermarket-bought food and no processed or precooked food, since virtually all such food is bulked up with wheat, yeast, sugars, and additives such as monosodium glutamate (MSG). For those of you who pride yourselves on living clean, just think MSG, the most common flavor-enhancing substance around, is apparently the second most addictive substance on the planet, crack cocaine being the first.
Gradually, as Chupi’s system got stronger and Luke and I got better in the kitchen, our diet (and stamina) improved. We found friends who ordered whole foods and would put in an extra order for us. The same friends told us of a local organic farm where you can buy boxes of organic, seasonal vegetables every week. A health food shop opened locally. We discovered the Temple Bar Organic Food Market in Dublin and went there every Saturday without fail.
One of the biggest problems we encountered was finding recipes that didn’t involve soaking obscure beans for 100 years, cooking them for 500 years, then covering the resultant goo with concentrated apple juice. Chupi and Luke were teenagers, they needed nutritious and tasty food—obscure beans just weren’t going to do the trick. We had to stick to the diet, and if we were going to succeed, we had to make it delicious. This cookbook was born, like many good ideas, points out Patricia, at the kitchen table. Chupi was armed with notebook and pen, with Luke and I calling out—turmeric, one teaspoon! Two cloves garlic, crushed! One can organic tomatoes!—as we assembled an evening’s concoction.
This is an incredibly exciting time to be interested in food. With many serious diseases, with serious consequences for us humans now endemic in animal and bird populations (salmonella and avian flu in factory-farmed chickens, and mad cow disease in cattle), and cancer rates rising at terrifying rates throughout the Western world, more and more people are beginning to question the policies pursued by the giant food corporations since the middle of the last century. As Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition at New York University, points out in her book Food Politics (University of California Press), America has been able to feed its entire population twice over for many years now; so the problem for giant food corporations is not how to produce more food but how to get people to eat more of the food that is produced, and how to add value to existing foods. Essentially, in America, behemoths worth billions and billions of dollars, such as Philip Morris, Coca-Cola, and Procter and Gamble, savagely compete in an already saturated market desperately trying to get people to eat more food, that has had more done to it. I’m talking about chemically grown foods with so much added fat, salt, sugar, MSG, and additives, they barely should be classified as foods at all.
As Nestle writes in her conclusion, “We select diets in a marketing environment in which billions of dollars are spent to convince us that nutrition advice is so confusing, and eating healthfully so impossibly difficult, that there is no point in bothering to eat less of one or another food product....” Scary stuff, eh?
Chemicals of course are one of the scariest problems of all in food production. If chemicals and pesticides kill weevils, greenfly, and all those other creepy crawlies that make life difficult for the food producer, then surely they’re going to harm us too?
The food may look great on the supermarket shelves, but those glossy bright-red apple skins have been produced by chemicals, not by nature. The buildup of toxins in our bloodstream, kidneys, and livers will inexorably produce illness. In the globalization of food production and marketing, real food has never been so compromised—genetically engineered, drenched in pesticides, stored for far too long. More and more health practitioners see the overproduction of yeast and mold in our systems—as a result of our sugar- and yeast-dependent diet—as the simmering cauldron from which a raft of modern-day illnesses, from thrush to chronic fatigue syndrome, MS, asthma, and cancer, develop. Cooking real, organic, natural, additive-free food has never been more important—for everyone in the family. We believe that eating Green (our name for eating organic), is no longer a lifestyle choice but an absolute necessity.
But, an end to doom and gloom! Here are our recipes for good—and lasting, we hope—health. Where possible, the ingredients are organic; they are also sugar-free, MSG-free, wheat-free (we use spelt flour in all the recipes), yeast-and mold-free, and of course GE-free. They are for anyone suffering from Candida or food intolerances, but they’re also—we hope you’ll agree—delicious, and really good for everyone in the family, from baby to Granny.
This is our story, the story of the What to Eat When You Can’t Eat Anything cookbook. Our hope is that all of you, whether suffering from health problems or not, will enjoy every single recipe in our book. As you get more and more into the story of cooking and food, you’ll find food time becomes “real time” where all of the household, family or friends, are involved. Meals will become what they truly should be: wonderful thanksgiving feasts, scrumptious and bursting with health, offering all the fruits of Mother Nature.
Enjoy!
—Rosita Sweetman