Traditional cultures were far more focused on nourishing their children than we are today.
The knowledge of nutrition and skill at producing healthy food paid off in the form of incredible health and vitality.
A dentist named Weston Price traveled the world in the 1930s to discover many of these secrets.
Culinary traditions represent a time capsule of nutritional wisdom.
Traditional foods are much more diverse and nutrient intense than foods most Americans typically eat.
Egyptologist Mark Lehner walks across what appears to be the smooth surface of a backyard patio until we see that it’s actually a giant precision-cut stone in the middle of an abandoned desert quarry. At 137 feet long, it would have been the largest obelisk ever made had it not cracked before being raised from its stone cradle. The obelisk had lain ignored for nearly four thousand years, until archeologists considered just how difficult making it—and then moving it—would be. Over the past few decades, a series of similar discoveries have revealed that ancient civilizations around the world were in possession of technological abilities that far exceed our own. But piecing such history back together again will be challenging. As an article in Ancient American theorizing on the possibility that the Incas had found a way to sculpt solid rock using concentrated sunlight explains, the best technology of these cultures was highly prized. “These stonemasons weren’t giving away any secrets, or writing them down. Judging by the Freemasons, architects and builders who, some say, trace their lineage back to mystery schools of ancient Egypt, they were a secretive lot.”52
There is, however, another kind of ancient technology that has had far greater impact on all our lives. The remnants of these great achievements are not waiting to be unearthed. They are walking among us, visible in the form of the high school heartthrob who is also the football star, the eighty-year-old grandmother who also runs marathons, and the celebrities on the covers of Vogue, Outside, and People Magazine. As you are about to see, nutrition as a tool for optimizing human form and function, and for protecting the integrity of family lineage, was every bit as evolved, refined, and perfected as the tools of mathematics and engineering.
Very much like the jealously guarded trade secrets of ancient stonemasons and civil engineers, the most powerful nutritional secrets, too, were kept close to the chest.53 If there were as many scientists researching the rituals performed in ancient kitchens as there are researching examples of ancient civil engineering, knowing how to use nutrition to create our own “great works,” sculpted in bone and flesh, would be common knowledge. And if women wrote more of our history books, schoolchildren might learn something with more practical application than lists of battles won by various kings. They might learn something along the lines of what a dentist named Weston Price discovered when he traveled the world nearly a century ago, in search of the lost secrets to health.
In the early twentieth century, Westerners were tantalized by the possibility that superhuman races lived just beyond the boundaries of the map. One of the most talked about groups of people were the Hunza, a sometimes-nomadic band of goat and yak herders living in the mountains of what are now Afghanistan and Pakistan. British explorers to these parts claimed to have encountered a rarified land where cancer did not exist, where nobody needed glasses, and where it was commonplace to live beyond a hundred. If these accounts were true, then such people would present Western medicine with a mystery. What was their secret? Pure air? Mineral-rich glacial water? Caloric restriction? True or not, enterprising businessmen soon discovered that the word Himalayan was bona fide magic—at least when it was printed on the tonic water bottles they were selling. Amid this circus of conjecture, capitalism, and hucksterism, one extraordinary dentist from Cleveland, Ohio, was determined to inject some much-needed science. This man of introspection and quiet charm invested his own money in an amazing series of journeys, attempting to either verify or impeach these rumors. If people possessing extraordinary fitness were found, he planned to systematically analyze what made them so different from the patients at his dental practice in Ohio.
Price was not exactly the kind of man you’d expect to see rounding mountain trails on a mule. But there he was, a bespectacled, slightly pudgy man of average build pushing sixty. A reserved, meticulous man, his data collection was equally detailed and methodical. His passion for truth was driven by adversity, having lost a son to a dental infection. He became, in his words, distressed by “certain tragic expressions of our modern degeneration, including tooth decay, general physical degeneration, and facial and dental-arch deformities.”54 Price couldn’t countenance the idea that human beings should be the only species so riddled with obvious physical defects—like teeth growing every which way inside a person’s mouth. After years of studying the source of orthodontic problems in active clinical practice as well as in his lab (animal research was a common practice among the early twentieth-century medical practitioners), he recognized that nutritional deficits could lead to the same kinds of facial deformities in animals that he was seeing in his patients. Contrary to what was believed by many to be true at the time, Price’s lab evidence helped convince him that crooked teeth didn’t come from “mixing of races,” being “of low breeding,” bad luck, or the devil. Nutrition science offered a better explanation.
Price’s preliminary work in the lab had helped to convince him that human disease arose from the “absence of some essential factors from our modern program.” 55 Using the now-dated language of his time, he reasoned that the clearest path to understanding those missing factors would be “to locate immune groups which were found readily as isolated remnants of primitive racial stocks in different parts of the world”—hence the need to travel—and to analyze what they were eating.56 His plan was simple: count cavities. Count them in mouths of people living all over the globe. Whichever group has the fewest cavities, and the straightest teeth, wins. No fillings or orthodontics allowed. Price was betting that healthy dentition could be used as a proxy for a person’s overall health—an assumption that proved correct—and so the number of cavities could be used as an objective, inverse measure of health across people of any racial and cultural background. It was an elegant and efficient plan.
The expeditions involved lugging several 8 x 10 cameras, glass plates, and a full complement of surgical dental equipment. Fortunately, Price had help from a seasoned explorer often featured in National Geographic, his nephew Willard DeMille Price, who no doubt greatly enhanced the elder man’s ability to return with equipment intact. The resulting tome, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, lays out the products of Price’s exhaustive research along with his conclusions. Price was right. Not only were there entire groups of people who enjoyed perfect, cavity-free teeth and spectacular overall health, their finely tuned physiology owed itself to the fact that their traditions enabled them to produce foods with spectacular growth-promoting capacity. Of course, from their perspective, there was nothing extraordinary about their fantastic health. To them, it was only natural.
Price went into his data collection looking for beautiful sets of teeth. But after staring into his subjects’ mouths, Price stepped back to notice that something undeniable was staring back at him: robust health and undeniable physical beauty. The perfectly aligned teeth he’d been looking for belonged—with rare, if any, exception—to beautiful people. Beautiful faces with beautiful cheekbones, eyes, noses, lips, and everything else—the total package, the physical representation of physiologic harmony.
In each of the eleven countries Price visited, people who had stayed in their villages and continued their native dietary traditions were consistently free of cavities and dental arch deformities. Price couldn’t help but notice they also were just plain healthy. So healthy that on his first outing, to Lotchental, a Swiss mountain village isolated by a palisade of towering mountains, he was as awestruck by the townspeople as by the scenery, writing, “As one stands in profound admiration before the stalwart physical development and high moral character of these sturdy mountaineers, he is impressed by the superior types of manhood, womanhood, and childhood that Nature has been able to produce from a suitable diet and a suitable environment.”57 He repeats this theme again and again, as he travels the world. It seems as if Price felt that the beauty and vitality of a given landscape could be conducted into the bodies of those who populated that landscape through the foods they drew from it.
From the beginning of humanity’s historic record, one can find numerous references to the idea that physical beauty and health are related. And although social taboo currently proscribes explicitly discussing that relationship, to many it remains patently obvious. True, you may remember your high school football star as less than handsome, riddled with acne, wearing thick glasses and braces, and dependent on pills and an inhaler. But usually our high school heroes receive recognition, admiration, and jealousy as a result of good looks and superior athletic skill. This admiration emerges partly from the fact that we instinctively recognize obvious physical endowments like exceptional stamina and coordination as a byproduct of the ultimate gift—good genes. The genius of Price’s work is that he dared to scientifically examine the connection between outwardly visible signs of health and nutrition using the same systematic approach we bring to bear when studying any other biological phenomenon.
FRESH, LOCAL, AND UNPROCESSED
This milk is rich in nutrients bioconcentrated by the goat, which is free to graze on the choicest shoots growing over vast plains of mineral-rich soil. Many small farmers in the United States still raise their animals on pasture, offering the customer a healthy alternative to milk produced by grain-fed animals.
The preference for beauty (in our own and other’s faces) emerges as a result of the instinctive pattern recognition process that I will describe in detail in Chapter 4. For now, it is crucial to understand that what we consider to be beautiful also serves a survival function. As unfair as it seems, less attractive people have more health problems.58 All congenital syndromes that distort facial architecture are associated with impairments in physiologic functions like breathing, talking, hearing, walking, and so on. There are hundreds of such syndromes codified so far, recognized on sight by trained pediatricians and resulting in disabilities ranging from poor vision (as in Marfan’s Dandy Walker, Cohen and Stickler syndromes—just to name a few) to sinus inflammation and susceptibility to infection (Fragile X, Cornelia De Lange) to hearing loss (chromosomal deletions at 22q11.2, Coffin Lowry) to chewing and swallowing difficulties (Rhett, CHARGE, arthrogryposis).59 Price recognized that growth anomalies too subtle to warrant characterization as a congenital syndrome are, nevertheless, also associated with functional problems. For example, underdeveloped mandibles don’t just look unattractive, they also don’t hold teeth very well, which makes it hard to chew and increases the risk of cavities.60, 61 To our animal minds, these physical traits represent potential liabilities, a weakness in the tribe bordering on contagion. This reaction is deeply ingrained, and it may be why even health professionals are reluctant to investigate the root causes of visible physical anomalies. But Price felt differently. He rejected the age-old notion that the blessings of health and beauty are reserved for those few with the purest souls—the biological equivalent of divine right. His thinking was truly outside the box and even today his research findings are ahead of their time.
If you’d like to get a taste of the kind of vitality Price discovered, what people looked like, and how they lived, do a quick Internet search for indigenous tribes. Start with the San, Maasai, Himba, Kombai, Wodaabe, or Mongolian nomad. Or watch any TV show about tribal life. When you look at the people’s faces, notice how particularly well-formed their features are. That is because their diets still connect them to a healthy living environment whose beauty, in a very real sense, expresses itself through their bodies.
One of the first documentary films ever made is called Grass: A Nation’s Battle For Life, filmed in 1925 by Meriam C. Cooper (who later made King Kong). Cooper documents the lifestyle of the Baktiari tribe in the Zardeh Kuh Mountains of what is now Iran. It tracks one leg of the 200-plus-mile journey the tribe made twice a year in the seasonal search of fresh pasture for their goats and pigs. Up and down the rocky mountainsides, old men, pregnant women, and little children herd their stubborn, hungry animals, the leaders breaking through waist-deep snows in bare feet. Five thousand people travel with all their belongings across the 200 high-altitude miles in a little over a month. In distance alone, they covered the equivalent of twenty marathons a year. How did they do it? Genetic wealth. Our twentieth-century Western perspective calls on us to label their lifestyle as subsistence living, since they lacked the accoutrements associated with prosperity. But they didn’t carry their gold in leather satchels. Their treasure was safely hidden inside the vaults of their genetic material, and it endowed every member of the tribe with chiseled features, strong joints, healthy immune systems, and the stamina to achieve athletic feats that few of us would dare attempt. And remember, they did this every season.
Native Thai (left), Danish barmaid (middle), Ethiopian woman (right). Notice their well-formed features, indicative of ideal geometric facial construction. Whether a people draw nutrition from the family farm, the sea, or the savannah, real food acts as a kind of conduit through which the beauty of the environment can be communicated into our bodies and expressed as human form.
Contrary to what Westerners tend to assume, indigenous people of the past were not merely scraping by, skinny and starving, desperate to eat whatever scraps they could find. Their lives did revolve primarily around finding food, but they were experts at it, far more capable than we are of making nutrient-rich foods part of daily life. By fortifying the soil, they grew more nutrient-rich plants. By feeding their animals the products of healthy soil, they cultivated healthier, more nutrient-rich animals. And since different nutrients are stored in different parts of the animal, by consuming every edible part of their livestock and the animals they hunted, they enjoyed the full complex of nutritional diversity. They used their own version of biotechnology to create the most nutrient-dense foods possible, foods that functioned to design every sinew and fiber of their bodies.
At eleven locations around the world, Price secured samples of indigenous communities’ staple foods for lab analysis. His nutritional survey rivals that of our best nationally sponsored programs in having tested for all four fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, and K) and six minerals (calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, copper, and iodine). Here’s what he found:
It is of interest that the diets of the primitive groups … have all provided a nutrition containing at least four times these minimum [mineral] requirements; whereas the displacing nutrition of commerce, consisting largely of white-flour products, sugar, polished rice, jams [nutritionally equivalent to fruit juice], canned goods, and vegetable fats, have invariably failed to provide even the minimum requirements. In other words, the foods of the native Eskimos contained 5.4 times as much calcium as the displacing foods of the white man, 5 times as much phosphorus, 1.5 times as much iron, 7.9 times as much magnesium, 1.5 times as much copper, 8.8 times as much iodine, and at least a tenfold increase in fat-soluble activators [Price’s term for vitamins].62
He continues, listing the findings for each of the other groups he studied. There was a clear pattern: the native diets had ten or more times the fat-soluble vitamins and one-and-a-half to fifty times more minerals than the diets of people in the United States.63 It is obvious that diets of people living in what doctors at the time would have called “backward” conditions were richer than those living in the technologically “advanced” United States by an order of magnitude. Price’s work pulled back the curtain behind which the true glory of humankind’s potential now lies obscured. His anecdotes revealed what life could be like across the range of physiologic capacity, from mental balance (“One marvels at their gentleness, refinement, and sweetness of character”) to freedom from cancer, a doctor for thirty-six years in Northern Canada who had “never seen a case of malignant disease,” and only rarely treated acute surgical problems of the “gallbladder, kidney, stomach, and appendix.” And across the age spectrum, from infancy (“We never heard an Eskimo child crying except when hungry, or frightened by the presence of strangers”), to weaning (“Children of Eskimos have no difficulties with the cutting of their teeth”) to almost ridiculously easy outdoor birthing where women “would take a shawl and either alone or accompanied by one member of the family retire to the bush and give birth to the baby and return with it to the cabin,” to early motherhood, “characterized by an abundance of breastfood which almost always develops normally and is maintained without difficulty for a year,” on into midlife (“We neither saw nor heard of a case [of arthritis]”) and vitality into older age (“a woman of sixty-two years who carried an enormous load of rye on her back at an altitude of five thousand feet”).64 Though his laboratory was dismantled over fifty years ago, I consider Price’s data a more accurate indication of how much nutrition we need than the recommended daily allowance (RDA).
What makes his sixty-plus-year-old data superior to state-of-the-art nutrition science today? Chiefly, the fact that today’s state-of-the-art nutrition science leaves much to be desired. While Price’s data may be old, he identified the healthiest people he could and then systematically analyzed the nutrient content of their staple foods. But if you ever look into how today’s RDAs are set, you’ll find a hodgepodge of differing opinions, unstandardized techniques, and poorly thought-out studies. For instance, the RDA of vitamin B6 for infants younger than one year old was set at 0.1 milligram per day based on the average B6 content in the breast milk of only nineteen women. Six of these women did not even themselves consume the RDA of vitamin B6 for their age group, and their breast milk contained only one tenth of the B6 of the women with healthier diets.65 So you might wonder, then, if a third of the women on which we base our national recommended daily allowances were, by our own definition, undernourished, shouldn’t they have been excluded from the study? The fact that they were not suggests to me that the researchers in charge of this study were not interested in what a baby might need to be healthy, but merely in calculating the averages and getting their jobs done. This is just one example of the poor quality research that defines state-of-the-art, modern nutrition science. (It also determines what gets put into infant formula—and what gets left out.)
If you believe Price’s data, which I do, then clearly our bodies appear to be accustomed to a far richer stream of nutrients than we manage to sip, chew, swallow, or scarf down in our daily diets. Our need for nutrients is, apparently, quite extraordinary. But what is more extraordinary is the totality to which indigenous cultures, and presumably also our ancestors, involved themselves in the production of these foods. In contrast to our general attitude of nourishment as a necessary evil demanding expediency, traditional life seemed to revolve around collecting and concentrating nutrition. To this end, no methodology—and no recipe—was too bizarre.
I will include here a few examples from Price’s book to demonstrate how fully people immersed themselves in the production of food, and a few of the wonderful ingenuities that streamlined this undertaking. In the Scottish Isles, people built their houses using, chiefly, the grass that grew abundantly on the moors. The roofs were loosely woven and chimneyless so that the smoke from their cooking fires would pass directly through the thatch. When the roof was removed and rebuilt in the spring after having been infused with mineral-rich ash all winter, the smoke thatch made fantastic fertilizer for their plant crops, chiefly oats. Their oats, in turn, were superior sources of minerals and were incorporated into many dishes. One of the most important was a fish dish made from baked cod’s head (rich in essential fatty acids) that had been stuffed with oatmeal (rich in minerals) and chopped cod livers (rich in vitamins).
On the other side of the world, in Melanesia, the original arrivals to the islands had brought with them a member of the pig family bred for its self-sufficiency at finding forage in the muddy and mountainous landscape. They’d released their hogs into the wild so they could colonize the forests. Soon, the hogs’ numbers had grown to the point that one could be hunted down just about anywhere. Every part of the quarry—from snout to tail—would be cooked or smoked or otherwise prepared and eaten. Another Melanesian favorite was the coconut crab, so called because of its ability to sever coconuts from trees with monster claws. To catch the well-armed crabs as they came down from the trees, natives would quickly girdle the tree with grass about fifteen feet from the ground. Upon reaching the grass girdle, the crab—convinced it had reached terra firma—would release its grip, and fall. Stunned, the crab could then be easily gathered. It would be tempting to eat them on the spot. Nevertheless, the crabs were first confined in pens for several days and allowed to gorge on all the coconut they wanted—generally enough to burst their shells. According to Price, “They are then very delicious eating.”66
Around the world again to Eastern Africa, Price found Maasai life revolved around producing healthy cattle, used primarily for their milk and their blood and only occasionally for their flesh. Maasai men spent nearly a decade learning to tend their animals. This education included everything from identifying the best grazing grounds based on rainfall patterns, to selective breeding, to regularly drawing blood from the jugular vein using a bow and arrow with surgical precision. As the Maasai ate neither fruit nor grain, this milk, either fresh or curdled (and bacteria-enriched), was their dietary staple. Recent studies have shown that Maasai cow milk contains five times the brain-building phospholipids of American milk.67 In the dry season, when milk yields are low, the Maasai fortify the milk with blood to make another staple drink.
As focused as people once were on the production of healthy food, the chief crop—and the ultimate prize—was the next generation of healthy children. Traditional cultures made a science of it. As we’ll see in Chapter 5, step one was planning ahead. Around the world, traditions reflected extensive use of special foods to boost a woman’s nutrition before conception, during gestation, for nursing, and for rebuilding before the next pregnancy. Some cultures thought it prudent to fortify the groom’s diet in preparation for his wedding ceremony.68 The shreds of surviving information suggest such knowledge was quite sophisticated. Blackfoot Nation women utilized the still-unknown nutrient systems found in the lining of the large intestine of buffalo (and later, cow) to “make the baby have a nice round head.”69 To ensure easy delivery, many cultures reinforced preconception and pregnancy diets with fish eggs and organ meats—loaded with fat-soluble vitamins, B12, and omega-3—as well as special grains carefully cultivated to be high in important minerals.70 The Maasai allowed couples to marry only after spending several months consuming milk from the wet season when the grass was especially lush and the milk much denser in nutrients.71 In Fiji, islanders would hike miles down to the sea to acquire a certain species of lobster crab that “tribal custom demonstrated [to be] particularly efficient for producing a highly perfect infant.”72 Elsewhere, fortifying foods didn’t just facilitate pregnancy; they made the difference between the baby making it to term or not. The soil of certain areas around the Nile Delta is notoriously low in iodine, the lack of which can lead to maternal goiter and infant malformation. Local tribes knew that burning water hyacinth (rich in iodine) produced ashes capable of preventing these complications.73
These ingrained traditions existed throughout the world and, until recently, dictated the ebb and flow of daily life. This kind of dedication, study, and wise use of natural resources is what was required to amass and protect the genetic wealth that enabled people to survive in a very different, and harsher, wild, wild world. Of course, these days most of us spend our time fighting traffic, not wild boar. But the same nutritional input that toughened and fortified the physiologies of these indigenous peoples can still be accessed today for the attainment of extraordinary health. Were the medical community to bring the same enthusiasm to the engineering and maintenance of healthy bodies as archaeologists bring to their study of ancient architectural wonders, they would soon call for a radical revision of what we understand to be a healthy human diet. The construction of a beautiful, sound building is not a matter of chance, but of planning, good materials, and reference to the collected body of relevant science. Winning the genetic lottery depends upon those very same prerequisites.
Today, at every stage in the process of producing food, we do things differently than our sturdy, self-sufficient ancestors did, wasting opportunities to provide ourselves with essential nutrients at every turn. We fail to fortify and protect the substrate on which the life and health of everything depends: the soil. We raise animals in unspeakably inhumane and unhealthy conditions, fill their tissues with toxins, and color the meat to make it appear more appetizing. Being raised on open pasture is no guarantee that an animal’s body, and ultimate sacrifice, will be put to full use; typically, only the muscle is consumed. Much of the nutrients, bioconcentrated over the animal’s life, are thrown to waste. Grains—even those grown on relatively healthy soil—are too often processed in ways specifically damaging to the most essential, and delicate, nutrients. Once in the kitchen, the consumer takes one last swing at whatever nutrition has survived, through overcooking and the use of cheap, toxic oils. Finally, since we’ve not been told that certain vitamins and minerals are more bioavailable when combined with acids or fats (see Chapter 7), many of them pass right through us.
People often say we’re living longer than ever. But is that really true? According to an article called “Length of Life in the Ancient World,” published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine in January 1994, from circa 100 B.C. until 1990, we have managed to tack an additional six years onto the life span. This modest increase is easily attributable not to better nutrition or even better health, but to emergency room care, artificial life support, life-sustaining pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and other technology, not to mention the many leaps in accident prevention. Presuming that it’s sensible to gauge health by longevity of lifespan as opposed to longevity of function, the numbers still tell a surprising story. Even though the average life span has increased slightly, according to the United States Census, in the past 200 years the percentage of people living a really long time may actually have gone down:
Percentage of Americans aged 100 in 1830: 0.020
Percentage of Americans aged 100 in 1990: 0.015
Percentage of people living today expected to live to 100: 0.001
Given that we drop the ball at every stage in the process of bringing food to the table, it’s not surprising that recent studies show, far from exceeding the RDA as we should be, few of us even meet it. For vitamin A, only 46.7 percent of healthy females meet the RDA,74 and levels are low in 87 percent of children with asthma.75 For vitamin D, 55 percent of obese children, 76 percent of minority children, and 36 percent of otherwise healthy, young adults are deficient.76 For vitamin E, 58 percent of toddlers between one and two years old,77 91 percent of preschoolers,78 and 72.3 percent of healthy females do not consume enough. Zero percent of breastfed infants were found to have achieved the minimum recommended intake of vitamin K.79 For the B vitamins, only 54.7 percent consumed adequate B2 (riboflavin)80 for folate, only 2.2 percent of women between the ages of 18 and 35 and 5.2 percent of women aged 36–50 achieved the recommended intake; and for calcium, fewer than 22 percent of African-American adolescent girls consumed the RDA.81 There are more studies, but you get the idea. Not one study shows 100 percent adequacy of any single nutrient, not to mention adequacy of all measurable nutrients, which would be a better goal. Presumably the vast majority of Americans are deficient in multiple nutrients.
Many of my patients suffer from symptoms that could be attributable to poor nutrition. Problems as common as dry skin, easy bruising, frequent runny noses, yeast infections, and crampy digestive systems are all exacerbated by, if not due entirely to, inadequate nutrition. Unfortunately, testing for vitamin adequacy is not easy. We haven’t even defined what “normal” levels are for many nutrients, including essential fatty acids and vitamin K. For those that have been so defined, the normal range may extend all the way down to zero. That’s right: you may have none of an essential nutrient in your bloodstream, yet still be considered to have consumed an adequate amount. So why bother testing? And since many vitamins are stored in the liver and other tissues, even if blood levels are adequate, overall body stores may be low. As far as I can tell, the best way to assure nutrient adequacy is not with testing, but with adequate nutrient consumption—itself no simple matter.
Aside from building a time machine and transporting back to the halcyon years of nutritional bounty, in the face of so many barriers to good nutrition, what is an ordinary person to do? Is it remotely possible, in this day and age, to get the nutrients you need without breaking your bank?
Absolutely. You can grow a garden, shop for fruits and vegetables by smell (as opposed to appearance), and buy animal products from farms that raise them humanely—on pasture and outside in the sun. In the coming chapters, I’ll go into more detail about special ways to make your food as nutritious as possible. But I can tell you right now, you’ll get the most bang for your buck, and the fastest return on investment, if you learn to enjoy something that many kids in many countries aside from this one will fight each other for—the organ meats.
These were the original vitamin supplements, and they comprise key components of almost all truly traditional heritage dishes. They are the missing ingredients whose disappearance from our dinner tables explains many of our health problems, and whose replenishment would go a long way toward improving those dismal nutrition statistics. But like most middle-class Americans, for most of my life I assumed such odd tidbits and wiggly things were best fed to my cats and dogs. I might have thought differently had I been raised some place where traditions of self-sufficiency are still alive and kicking. Some place where children can learn cherished recipes from their parents. Some place where there’s plenty of land and open water per capita, where the weather invites people to spend time outdoors with their extended families. Some place like Hawaii.
The south side of Kauai is known all over the Hawaiian archipelago as Filipino territory; in our old neighborhood about one in three households spoke Illokano. My husband, Luke, a devout meat-eater whose favorite meal is a blood-rare steak, considered himself a serious carnivore until he met these guys. People who catch wild boar with hunting dogs and kill the tusked beasts with knives (not guns, mind you) experience a fuller meaning of the word. There, the majority of households, young and old, could make short work of a large carcass or a sturdy goat leg. When I first moved to Hawaii, given that I am an unworldly American, the culture struck me as slightly terrifying.
Then the inevitable happened: we were invited to a neighborhood buffet for a crash course in local, “any kine” Filipino cuisine. I’d heard about these parties and I knew what kind of stuff awaited us on the rough-hewn picnic table out on the patio behind the sliding glass doors. At the potluck, kids gathered inside to watch and to laugh at the molikini Ha’ Oles (newly immigrated white folk) trying to cope. Thankfully, a sweet eight-year-old girl took pity on us. Graciously highlighting key ingredients, Kiani guided us through the mystery casseroles, greasy open plates, and bowls of soupy chunks.
First up, morcon, a meat, egg, and cheese wrap sliced into neat cross-sections, beautifully setting bright yellow yolk against deep maroon liver. Next, one of those suspiciously chunky soups: tan-colored paksiw na pata, pork knuckles and pork meat braised in a mixture of soy sauce, sugar, and vinegar, and flavored with dried lily buds. I couldn’t get past the knuckles. More soupy chunks, this time in green and tan, of balon-balonan, chicken gizzards softened in vinegar and mixed with water spinach. Beside that, a duo of honeycomb tripe and vegetable stews—goto and callos. I felt as if I’d wandered into a Klingon delicatessen. But then I noticed, at the far corner of the table, a single lonely looking bowl of sweet potato soup. This I could manage.
Luke was a more enthusiastic guest. The weirder the dish’s ingredients, the more he slopped onto his compartmented cardboard plate. This was enormously entertaining to our younger hosts, every scoop generating louder giggling until the adults’ attention was drawn to Luke’s selections. By the time the table tour was over, he had piled on an unbelievable ten dishes that were now slowly melding into one. Onlookers volunteered approval with a round of claps and cheers.
While Luke transformed the contents of his overflowing plate into a small pile of bones, I began to develop the suspicion that I had been living in a cloistered world. The feeling followed me home, and resurfaced each time I hiked past the goat herds that dot the rolling green hills of Lawai.
I’d worked in Thailand and trekked in Nepal. I’d eaten at hundreds of ethnic restaurants, and in the homes of friends from all over the world. But the potluck meal had really been outside my normal experience of eating. There were things on that table I didn’t know you could eat, let alone would want to. At the age of thirty-three, I had learned there’s more to meat than meat. While I’d been in my kitchen sprinkling chicken extract powder over rehydrated ramen noodles, just down the road, my Filipino neighbors were stuffing hoofed feet into a boiling cauldron. I wasn’t so much horrified as I was envious.
Shortly after this initiation buffet, I fell sick from the infection in my knee and I learned that I’d developed the problem due in large part to nutrient deficiencies. Had I been raised, like my same-aged cohorts in Hawaii, on such wild gastronomic safaris rather than the standard middle-class fare of boneless, skinless white meat, margarine, and frozen vegetables, my life would most certainly have been different.
But there’s another piece to this story: I would also very likely look different. The long, slim waist, graceful limbs, perfect vision—and other traits my grandmothers possessed—could have been mine. This may seem like an extraordinary claim. But if you believe what Price discovered, that bad diet can so affect a child’s growth that it can manifest in crooked teeth, malocclusions, and jaw anomalies, then it is no great leap to infer that what affects the growth of the bones of the face can affect the growth of all the bones of the skull and of every bone in your body—your entire anatomy.
We all agree it’s nice to have straight teeth. But for us to understand how diet affects all the proportions of your anatomy someone has to ask a more fundamental question: How exactly is the human body supposed to be proportioned? What proportions allow for athleticism, ease of movement, and even things like a birth canal wide enough to accommodate the passage of a child?
In the next chapter we’ll see that we already have the answer. Because we all recognize this proportionality instinctively and long ago gave it a name. We call it beauty.
RECIPE FROM FRENCH COOKING FOR EVERY HOME, BY FRANCOIS TANTY, CHEF CUISINE FOR EMPEROR NAPOLEON III
Usually when we buy fish these days it’s already filleted and sani-wrapped. But how much closer to the source of your food would you be, and how much more like a top chef would you feel, if you knew how to clean and prepare a beautiful, whole fresh salmon all by yourself?