Canthook

Cookbooks have changed a lot over the years.

The recipe for "Next Best Thing To Robert Redford" was published in the 1970s and for a while, it appeared in every community organization cookbook published. I haven't seen it in a cookbook in about 20 years, possibly because Robert Redford is now about as sexy as an orange that's been forgotten at the back of the refrigerator. It's dark brown now, misshapen and wrinkley, and although there's no visible fur, you're scared that it will appear at any moment.

It seems a shame. Robert Redford says he was born in 1937 (although his publicist used to say 1936), and yet he looks far more used up than Paul Newman, born in 1925. It's not necessarily Newman that's the outlier; Joanne Woodward, born in 1930, looks pretty good, too.

So what will you look like when you're, uh, well, 83 years old, just like Paul Newman? I'm hoping to not look like a little plot of grass, six feet long, with a hunk of granite at one end. I've been struggling with "health foods" and so on for more than four decades, and it's finally all coming together in a few rules, but most important is the Rule Of 1900.

A lot of things happened around 1900. John Lambert built America's first gas-powered automobile in Ohio City, Ohio, in 1891. The Wright Brothers introduced heavier-than-air flight in 1903. Einstein published three scientific papers that changed the world. Krispo, now known as Crisco, was invented in 1910. Corn syrup was invented in 1882 (although high-fructose corn syrup was invented in 1967). Although it was known in the 1740s that citrus prevented scurvy, the first vitamins were discovered, starting in 1905. Commercial production of citrus juices began in 1920.

And if you look at the details, modern foods seem to be no blessing. Hydrogenating vegetable oil always produces trans fats, which are even worse than cigarettes in causing cancer and heart disease. A horse that gets into the corn crib is likely to founder and die unless someone steps in and rescues him, and much of the increase of obesity in society parallels the use of high fructose corn syrup in foods - and especially beverages. Study after study is showing that vitamin supplements don't help nearly as much as eating foods that contain the vitamins - and some studies suggest vitamin supplements actually do more harm than good. Fruit juice is still the darling of young mothers, but nutritionists are starting to look at fruit juices with horror.

The problem seems to be that we've stopped eating real food.

The Law of 1900 grabs 1900 as an arbitrary year, and consequently, it's a little fuzzy around the edges. Basically, it says "Don't eat anything that didn't exist as a food before 1900."

There are some exceptions that I draw. Soy-based foods, such as soy sauce, have been eaten in the orient for centuries before soy was introduced to the US in the 1930s. There are indications that people with oriental genes may cope well with soy. I would advise occidentals, however, to avoid soy foods, and even soy oil. I base this harsh advisory from having worked for Central Soya, engaged in research. Some companies are evil, and that doesn't describe Central Soya at all; they are trying to produce the best products they know how. Increasingly, though, the evidence is weighing against soy.

People have been drinking milk for millenia, but they've only been drinking pasteurized and homogenized milk since the mid-20th century. The real thing, raw milk, passes the 1900 test. If it's been pasteurized, though, it lacks enzymes that allow it to be digested easily, and if it's been homogenized, it's far more likely to cause plaque in your veins.

On the other hand, frozen foods also date from the mid-20th century, and they seem to be healthful. Frozen vegetables don't have the salt of canned vegetables, and eating veggies that have been frozen within hours of picking may be better for you than eating veggies that have spent days in hot trucks and cold warehouses, working their way to you. A strict Law of 1900 would demand that you should get veggies from your own garden, but that doesn't work well in northern states in mid-winter.

Over the years, I've tried various brands of vitamins, and various dosages. As far as I can tell, the only difference they made was that I got considerably slimmer - in the wallet. I did notice a difference when I started taking liquid minerals. There was less fatigue and fewer charley-horses - but when I switched to raw milk from the pasteurized, homogenized kind, I got the same benefit without the $35/pint cost for liquid minerals.

The legal definition of organic food talks about what it's not. The people who coined the phrase and made it popular talked about what it is - and there's a big difference about what they were talking about.

I'm not sure why anyone ever thought that it was a good idea to spray poison on our food, feed, and fiber. It seems counterintuitive. The legal definition of organic says the grower hasn't done anything so incredibly stupid as this.

Originally, though, organic food was food grown in soil with a high organic content. Plants don't ask a lot of us. They mostly need carbon (which comes from carbon dioxide in the air), oxygen (which comes from carbon dioxide in the air) and water (which comes from rain), plus energy from sunlight. Fertilizer is NOT plant food - it's plant "vitamins", and it doesn't take much fertilizer to have healthy plants.

In Ploughman's Folly, Edward Faulkner points out that corn farmers dump nitrogen on corn in the spring, and the stalk and leaves grow tremendously fast, but when the hot days of summer arrive, the corn hasn't enough moisture, and the crop is highly stressed. I grew up on a farm in Northwest Ohio, not far from Faulkner's farm. The local farmers were highly critical of Faulkner's book, and they claimed he was a terrible farmer - but when I read his book, decades later, I decided he was right about that one. What's more, in the 1980s, younger farmers started to embrace Faulkner's point of view, and were experimenting with no-till farming and low-till farming, some with considerable success.

It's difficult, though, to switch to "real" organic farming. While the cost of production is lower, and the yields are equivalent, organic farming requires about five years to get going, because you need to establish the bacterial colonies in the soil that make organic farming pay off. Farming isn't a high-profit industry. Farmers can't afford to have five years of losses while they transition from traditional farming to organic farming.

You and I don't have the same problems with our home gardens. We already supplement our gardens' output with food from farmer's markets, from supermarkets, and by eating in restaurants. Consequently, many gardeners - and especially those that have the lush gardens their neighbors look at enviously - are practicing true organic growing, by using composting and supplemental additions of manure or peat moss.

A few decades ago, I drove down the road to buy some eggs. Marie was in her garden, weeding. "I'll have to gather eggs," Marie apologized. She headed off to the chicken coop, and I took her hoe, cutting out the few weeds in the row. When she came back with the eggs, I commented on the texture of the soil.

"Yeah, but we've only lived here for about ten years. It's coming, but it's not where it needs to be." Dave and Marie were Old Order Amish, so they had lots of manure going into their garden and for their fields. I suspect my jaw dropped. A quarter of a mile west, the soil was as hard as walnuts, unlike the silky soft loam that Marie was working in. My tomatoes were struggling; hers were standing tall and proud, bearing a load of fruit that should have had hers bent over, but they were such sturdy plants that they didn't.

The following year, we moved into town. My first wife, Em was terribly fatigued from the lupus that would eventually kill her - but our family's health insurance came from her job. She didn't want to quit - so I wanted to shorten her 30 minute commute to work to 5-10 minutes, to lighten her load.

The soil in our back yard was heavy, clayey. I found an ad in Peddler's Post offering free manure for the hauling. It wasn't easy hauling; the manure was a decade old, and had been trampled down hard. I hauled two pickup loads to our garden, and found my supply of manure shut off, for I'd loosened it up enough that others wanted it. Rats.

But I tilled the manure into our new postage-stamp garden, using one of those back-breaking tillers; I couldn't afford a Troy-Bilt, and the Mantis tiller hadn't been developed. I heaped up the soil into raised beds, without putting boards up to keep the soil in the beds; when you have a family member with a terminal illness, even a few planks are costly.

I planted the garden adapting Square Foot Gardening's concept of intensive gardening, and I bought a couple of oscillating sprinklers. The water bill shocked me - it jumped to TEN TIMES our winter water costs - but we harvested five or ten times as much food from that little garden that we previously had gotten from a garden 8 times as large.

What's more, because we planted stuff so close together, and there was so much less walking involved, the small garden took far less work to maintain than the previous big garden.

It would be nice to cut out country's health care costs. It would be even nicer to cut the amount of ill health in this country. It's easy to see that Pringles and Twinkies are junk foods - but it's equally important to recognize that organic apple juice, and name brand margarine, and those vegetarian soy burgers that the PeTA crowd loves, are even worse for us, too.

There's a story about the guy who goes to the doctor with an ailment, and the doctor tells him the best thing would be to cut out drinking, cut out smoking, cut out long nights with loose women - and the guy says, "Look, Doc. I don't deserve the best. What's second-best?"

Our bodies are miraculous mechanisms, and if they get enough of the nutrients they need, they can cope with a certain amount of crap as well. There's no need to be fanatical about it. But we need to start somewhere, and the Law of 1900 is a good place to start.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
gardening - health foods - Joanne Woodward - Law of 1900 - mantis tiller - obesity - Old Order Amish - organic - Paul Newman - People Eating Tasty Animals - raw milk - Robert Redford - vitamins