Kosmic Kitchen

I just read a great blog on the evolutionary roots and merits of playing with our food. As a chef with macro-hippy-back-t0-the-earth roots it feels like pre-thought instinct, from a million or more years ago, to mess with our food in some way, making raw materials more palatable and easier to digest. I imagine that right from the beginning the necessity of processing our food became entwined with ritual and meaning. Millions of years later our American food habits are steeped in cultural meaning, superstition, and ritual and are so much a part of how we identify ourselves. If we could trace our connection with food - fast or otherwise - back to the beginning, and find those roots alive in our own psyche - I think we would have a whole different consciousness in relationship eating.

If you want the best, most common sense, easy to follow, time tested wisdom on eating well to stay healthy, then read Michael Pollan’s Food Rules, an eater’s manual, and follow it! It only takes 30 minutes or less and you’ll spend at least a third of that time having a good chuckle.

Pollan has presented this comprehensive array of traditional and current knowledge on not only what to eat but how to eat. It’s so accessible, getting straight to the heart of the matter while doing an end run around all the confusion and conflicting research and advice we are constantly being bombarded by. This is truly a manual written out of love and care for us eaters with the intention that we fully succeed in our quest to eat well.

You can go here for more reviews and to see Pollan’s other books - more food for thought

Frito-Lay has just announced a change in 50% of its snack food line to all natural ingredients by the end of 2011 - go here to read the full story.

This is welcome news and a big step in the right direction. Removing artificial ingredients and MSG is one of the best things Frito-Lay can do for the consumer. As a whole foods chef and health counselor, I am interested in any and all steps the food industry makes in providing healthful foods for consumers. There are a couple of glitches in this good news though: the word “natural” is associated with “healthy” and that is not necessarily the case, For example: sugar and vegetable oils (safflower, sunflower, canola) may be considered “natural” ingredients/foods, but the prevalence of these ingredients in almost all processed foods is also contributing to an epidemic of diabetes and heart disease in America.

If the general public ate snack foods occasionally and in small quantities this might not be an issue. But, the way the bottom line works now, snack food companies make money by keeping their ingredient costs down, using unhealthy or less healthful options, and by marketing and designing products so that they are extremely appealing and will be eaten in large quantities. The conflict between what is in the interest of the consumers health and the industries bottom line has to be rectified in order for everyone to profit in the long run.

Change has to occur at many levels - no one wants to put an end to snacking or making money! But, until the food industry includes promoting the health and vitality of the nation as part of its mission, it is promoting supposedly healthy products and unhealthy eating habits, all the while making money at the expense of consumers health.

We need to develop strategies that create a win-win situation for everyone involved - educating consumers to take responsibility for their health and producing products that will truly support a healthy lifestyle.

So like I said, this is a good and important step, and let’s not pat ourselves on the back but keep moving, fast. A lot of peoples lives, and livelihoods, are on the line.

Food. If you want to know something about me then all you have to do is think about food. All my life I have been fascinated with food and this fascination has led me down all kinds of paths, and opened up all kinds of practical, philosophical, ethical and spiritual questions. It started with curiosity when I was little. In my family it was a sign of strength to have a good appetite so I wanted to try everything. My Dad would bring back animals that he had hunted for us to eat, a dear or a rabbit or a duck, and sometimes I would watch the deer being dressed out, or peer into the pails of innards……..when we were at the dinner table I would ask my mom - what’s this? And she might say, that’s the heart of the deer honey, or, that’s a kidney, or, that’s the part that went over the fence last….. none of this bothered me - it was all amazing….to be pondered and wondered at…… that deer’s heart was becoming me and I understood that somehow…. now I can see I was being fed that wonder as well as the flesh of those animals.

But that curiosity I mentioned can also be cruel - I remember pulling the legs off spiders, amazed that all the parts would keep moving even after they were separated from each other…..and I discovered that my baby brother would eat dirt if I fed it to him, and he probably would have eaten worms too if my Mom hadn’t caught me before I got them into his mouth.

Luckily for my brother, a shift occurred when I was six or seven, it was the experience of empathy. From then on I couldn’t stand seeing living things suffering needlessly, whether out of ignorance or cruelty. I started to think about life and death, suffering and happiness. In my kid brain I tried to make sense of life. I never spoke about this to anyone but I had these experiences of the interconnectedness of all things… and I came up with something called the Jello Theory. I had decided that the reason it was so hard to grasp the experience of Oneness with my mind was because visually there was so much space around everything, but if I filled that space up with jello, I, and anyone else, could see how everything was connected to everything else and how even the waving of a hand would create ripples that would reach the other side of the world.

When I was 15 I became a vegetarian - perplexing my hunter-gatherer family. But I couldn’t rationalize eating meat any more. Then two things happened that would change my life - my Mom became ill with MS, and my little sister died of liver cancer. I started to question what a healthy diet was. I experimented with giving up sugar, going vegan etc….sometimes convincing my friends to go along with me, all the while living what was a “normal” teenage life at the time - drinking, trying drugs and eating junk food. There was this one moment when my best friend and I had just eaten a half package of Oreos and suddenly realized that they were not vegetarian - they had lard in them! We were not prepared for moral challenge of that moment! I had some awareness and sensitivity, and lots of ideas and ideals, but they weren’t amounting to good health or higher consciousness!

At the age 21 I discovered Macrobiotics and found out that MS could be cured with a macrobiotic diet - I talked my Mom into coming to Boston with me so she could be cured while I studied at the Kushi Institute. I was in heaven, my Mom was not. It was my first explicit recognition that food and consciousness are intimately connected. No matter how “good” the food was for her, my mom was not ready to give up her life and her identity, to adopt a macrobiotic lifestyle. Even though she had made big improvements in her health by eating macrobiotically, the food wasn’t enough, something deeper was missing. She went back to her old way of life. A couple of years later she came out of remission and ended up in a nursing home at 48 years of age….. just a few years younger than I am now. This was a huge blow to me - I started to wonder - what makes us change and grow? How does our experience of consciousness help or hinder our ability to change, and, does changing in practical ways, like changing our diet, help us to change consciousness?

The thing that ultimately helped me understand these questions and and took them way beyond anything I could have imagined, was meeting my spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen in 1990. As a teacher of Evolutionary Enlightenment Cohen has a profound interest in absolutely anything and everything to do with consciousness and it’s evolution. I have been a student of Cohen’s for 20 years now, but between 1996 and 2010 I was the also head chef at EnlightenNext’s international headquarters right here in the Berkshires. During this time I had the opportunity to cook for Andrew and a large group of people that are interested in evolving consciousness more than anything else. It was the perfect petri dish for finding the best fuel for a life of daily meditation and high intensity collective spiritual inquiry. It would be impossible to fully convey the learning process in these few lines but being in that spiritual cauldron led me to a deeper understanding of how we change, what truly nourishes us and how we nourish the life process we are all united in. It has also given me the confidence to start my business, Kosmic Kitchen, with the intention of catalyzing a change not only in the ways we eat and think about food, but in the way we understand our responsibility in this world as conscious human beings.

I started out on a food journey and found out it was a spiritual journey. The next 50 year leg has just begun.

Two articles this past week caught my eye. One was in The New York Times and another is Dr. Mark Hyman’s blog, whose work I deeply respect. Both the discuss the need for our core values to change in order to make the right choices in regards to our health. In the Times article the values are those expressed by corporate and government policies, medical and educational institutions, and the social mores that influence our behavior. In short the very culture we live in. The Times article argues that because the food industry, grocery stores, farming practices, and government policies don’t support a healthy way off eating and living our attempts to make personal changes will be undermined. True enough - through lack of education, means and access a huge swath of the American public has been denied the freedom to make healthy choices. And without a system of support, making and maintaining new and healthy lifestyle choices may be almost impossible for some people. What can we do to change our culture?

Hyman’s blog is making the point that there are real costs to making choices that make and keep us sick. Each of us waking up to this fact is key to making different choices based on different values.

When we make choices based on new and higher values it has a ripple effect - things begin to shift on many different levels. As individuals, doctors, schools, government agencies, corporations, etc., recognize the real costs of ignoring our current epidemic of ill health, and the simple lifestyle choices that could avert it, there will be an incentive to change. How this change comes about is up to each of us - but by embracing different values and acting on them we do have the power to change our current culture!

Just saw this great article in The New York Times – An Apple a Day, Doctor’s Orders.

Exposing children and adults to fresh seasonal produce, in this case by doctors prescribing fresh fruits and vegetables and backing it up by giving out coupons for them, is one of the best ways to fire up an appetite for healthy foods and acquire the taste buds to appreciate them. The next obstacles, once people start to appreciate fresh foods and want to eat well, are cost and availability. But I do see that as the general population demands more affordable fresh produce the food system will find ways to accommodate them. That is one thing it is designed to do – respond to consumer demand! It is not going to change all at once, but as we start doing the right things for our health, we will start to feel better, we will be empowered, and we will do less of the things that are not good for us. This does have an impact that ripples out from each of us.

Teaching people to love and to make really good food makes me as happy as making and eating a fantastic meal myself. SO I had my first cooking class in my tiny kitchen showing 7 curious students various dehydrating techniques, a kind of low temp cooking that preserves the nutrients and enzymes of fresh foods. It was a blast – the highlight of the 3 hour course was when I revealed the secret of my chia seed crackers, which are inspired by the paintings of Jackson Pollock. Layer upon layer of swirly spiraled veggies in a base of gray chia glop, with striking spears of chives, dotted with the fresh herbs, they come out like mini paper murals that you can cut into squares and eat. Digestible art – you eat them first with your eyes, then with your fingers, then with your ears as you tear off a bite and finally you get to taste them – each step a surprise to the senses.

My goal is to get people to look at a vegetable, think of 10 different ways they could prepare it, and be empowered to cre-ate. J

Here are some pictures of the cracker making process, pictures compliments of Judith Lerner, food writer for the Berkshire Eagle:

spreading the chia seed glop

building the layers of vegetables and herbs

loading the dehydrator for the final stage

finished chia cracker - ready to be cut into pieces