Laboratory-produced meat or lab meat—sometimes called “cultured meat” or even “clean meat”–is in the news these days, with gushing articles in the Washington Post, the New York Times and many magazines. The publicity machines are whirring at high speed, and all the chic arguments are on display. “Save the planet bite by bite,” is one of the slogans. If we eat lab meat instead of real meat, we’ll save the land from the desecration by cattle, cut down on water use, protect the air from cow farts containing methane and forestall global warming. Lab meat would be kinder also, because no animals would be killed.
Author: Sally Fallon Morell
Diet For A Large Planet
Recently I participated in the 2018 Long Island Food Conference, the lone meat eater in a lineup of speakers espousing “plant-based” diets. The keynote speaker was Francis Moore Lappé, whom you will recognize as the author of the very influential Diet for a Small Planet, the 1971 book that convinced many to embrace a diet of grains and beans.
Flavored Milks: How Low Can You Go?
Flavored milks are highly sweetened beverages made with powdered skim milk—they are actually the dairy industry’s way of getting rid of all the skim milk left over from the production of butter and cream, mostly for ice cream. Since Americans are huge ice cream eaters (and since Americans are eating more butter these days), there’s an enormous amount of this waste product that the industry needs to get rid of.
What Pasteurization Does To The Vitamins In Milk
“Pasteurization of milk ensures safety for human consumption by reducing the number of viable pathogenic bacteria.” So begins an article published in the Journal of Food Protection, published in 2011.
The 2018 Global Food Forum
Recently I attended the 2018 Global Food Forum, organized by the Wall Street Journal, held in the Intercontinental Hotel in New York, and sponsored by Pratt Industries (maker of recyclable packaging), the South Carolina Department of Agriculture, US Soy and The Australian (news coverage).
Radionics on the Farm: Too Woo-Woo for You?
Farmers have a lot of things to keep them awake at night, and one of the things that made me lose sleep since we started farming in 2011 was chicken predation.
Food in Switzerland
Earlier this year I made a trip to Switzerland to give two talks on raw milk and to visit one of my boys, who lives in Geneva. Of course, the food in Switzerland received my special attention.
MSG and Free Glutamate: Lurking Everywhere
A few weeks ago, on a trip to British Columbia, I ate in a local restaurant. When eating out, I always try to order something simple, without a gravy or sauce, since these sauces are bound to contain MSG. So I ordered a plain crab cake with rice and vegetables—no sauce, no mayo. Boy, did that crab cake taste good! About midnight I knew why. I woke up with a dry mouth, a terrible thirst and a headache. The next day I felt sore all over, like I’d been in a fight. My hands felt like they had arthritis.
Eating Ice Cream By The Pint (Or The Quart, Or The Half Gallon)
An article in the March 10 Wall Street Journal caught my eye: “Eating a Whole Pint Of Ice Cream Is OK Now.”
Building Natural Immunity
Many wise parents have made the decision not to vaccinate their children. They know that vaccines are full of toxins that can cause many serious side effects. It is also becoming apparent that vaccines don’t even work, and worse, can actually spread disease.
Cooking The Whole Fish
My mother and I both loved Paris and several times had the pleasure of being there together—either meeting there or traveling there. However we met up, we never let the opportunity go by without a visit to our favorite restaurant, La Boule D’Or, in the 7th arrondisement.
All Those New Oils
I often get questions about all these new—even new-fangled—oils like grape seed oil, rice bran oil, hemp seed oil and argan oil. Other oils new to the scene include avocado oil and camelina oil. Do they have any health benefits, and should we use them in cooking and food preparation?
Wise Traditions 2017
The 18th annual Wise Traditions conference of the Weston A. Price Foundation is coming up next month, November 10-13 in Minneapolis Minnesota. If you are looking to learn a lot in the company of a community of like-minded individuals, this is the place to be.
Pancake Batter
One of the most versatile and successful recipes from Nourishing Traditions is the pancakes. Freshly ground flour (spelt, emmer or soft winter wheat) soaked overnight with equal parts of yogurt or kefir serves as the base for delicious, light tasting and highly digestible pancakes.
Gizzards, The Gateway Organ Meat
Have you ever wondered how animals without teeth chew up their food, especially hard foods like grains? They actually have an internal grinding apparatus, called the gizzard.
Milk and Water Kefir
Kefir grains are a wonderful way to culture raw milk because they are not temperature sensitive—for yogurt and other cultures, the milk needs to be heated and kept warm for the culture to work.
True Blue Zones: Loma Linda
So far we have looked at four “blue zones,” regions that have lots of long-lived people: Sardinia, Okinawa, Costa Rica and Ikaria. What have we learned so far about the characteristics of these nonagenarians?
Maybe the most important thing is to live in a place that ends with the letter A. Just kidding.
True Blue Zones: Ikaria, Greece
Tourism in the Greek island of Ikaria got a big boost when scientists determined that Ikaria was a blue zone—an area with a large number of long-lived inhabitants
True Blue Zones: Costa Rica
The Nicoya Peninsula is a fertile rectangle of land on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. Since the arrival of the Spaniards, the region has hosted herds of beef and dairy cattle. Many tropical fruits thrive there, including citrus, mango and papaya.
True Blue Zones: Okinawa
In my last blog, we began a discussion of blue zones—regions with a lot of centenarians—as popularized by Dan Buettner in his book The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest. As we saw in his chapter on the Sardinian blue zone, he leaves out considerable information that contradicts his premise, namely that the longevity diet is one that contains a lot of vegetables and only small amounts of meat—that’s lean meat, not “processed meats that are filled with fat.”