Re:Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie
by bane on Saturday March 05, 2011 @10:07AM
(#2291564)
No I actually mean it. I've had the good fortune to travel all over the world and it continuously amazes me that no matter where I go that local traditional food, made with local ingredients, is so commonly put together in combinations that are completely nutritious (and tasty).
The skills necessary to survive on the local available food in one place don't entirely translate someplace else. Somebody had to look at a squid for the first time and decide to eat it for example. Or that the rotting month old cabbage would be a good meal.
Traditional foods are often preagrarian foods in some cases. You can find expensive wild foods restaurants in South Korea for example that serve only food you can gather in the mountains, mushrooms, pine nuts, pine needles, ferns, wild onions, etc. These are things that people cobbled together before they had any knowledge at all of nutrition and amazingly, when we look at them today with the modern eye find out that they represent a fantastically complete diet, rich in essential nutrients. In Latin America you can still find plenty of pre-Columbian cuisine with similar characteristics. And I'd wager elsewhere as well.
Put another way, why didn't they just settle on say mushrooms? How come the entire diet for a people isn't just one food? Or a combination of foods that represent a diet lacking in a certain vitamin? Amazingly, wherever you go, the traditional foods tend to make up a complete diet.
It seems a modern curse that we can gorge ourselves on singular foods and grow fat and suffer malnutrition at the same time. Only today can somebody eat hamburgers and pizza 3 times a day for years.
The skills necessary to survive on the local available food in one place don't entirely translate someplace else. Somebody had to look at a squid for the first time and decide to eat it for example. Or that the rotting month old cabbage would be a good meal.
Traditional foods are often preagrarian foods in some cases. You can find expensive wild foods restaurants in South Korea for example that serve only food you can gather in the mountains, mushrooms, pine nuts, pine needles, ferns, wild onions, etc. These are things that people cobbled together before they had any knowledge at all of nutrition and amazingly, when we look at them today with the modern eye find out that they represent a fantastically complete diet, rich in essential nutrients. In Latin America you can still find plenty of pre-Columbian cuisine with similar characteristics. And I'd wager elsewhere as well.
Put another way, why didn't they just settle on say mushrooms? How come the entire diet for a people isn't just one food? Or a combination of foods that represent a diet lacking in a certain vitamin? Amazingly, wherever you go, the traditional foods tend to make up a complete diet.
It seems a modern curse that we can gorge ourselves on singular foods and grow fat and suffer malnutrition at the same time. Only today can somebody eat hamburgers and pizza 3 times a day for years.