Before last week, I wouldn't have made this my birthday dinner, but this is now and all else came before. The menu: meatloaf (yup, the real deal), baked potatoes, asparagus, and just to keep things in keeping with the old me (the one from before last week, not the one that's now the age of a common highway speed limit) - vegan chocolate cake.
What gives? Last week, I listened to two lectures that shook up my view of food, like nothing else has done....ever. The first was given by Sally Fallon who is the director of the Weston A. Price Foundation. Dr. Weston Price was a dentist, who in the 1930s traveled to various places around the world, studying the health and diets of "primitive" people. He then compiled his observations and now people like Sally Fallon have been following up his ideas and amassing research to support it. It turns out that there are certain commonalities surrounding the diets of "primitive" people regardless of where they lived or what foods were available to them. I won't go into them all here, but the one that struck the biggest chord with me (a resounding twang, really) was that they all ate animal protein. Somehow, this did for me something that nothing had ever done for me before - it was the first reason that ever made sense to me that there might, just might be a reason to eat meat after all. Because Dr. Price found that all the "primitive" groups he visited enjoyed great health. Likewise, he found that when he returned to these people after they started eating more modern diets, their health had declined.
The other lecture was on the advantages and dangers of soy - or so it was billed. It was mostly on the dangers of soy. Again, I'm not going to go into detail, but I'd always assumed that the anti-soy stuff I heard had been fueled by the meat and dairy industry. As it turns out, much of the pro-soy stuff I'd heard had been fueled by the soy industry which just goes to show how naive I am!
So, out with the soy milk and tofu and in with meat loaf for my birthday dinner, because, well, I really, really love meat loaf! However...and this is a big however - that meatloaf was made from grass-fed cows who live out in the sunshine the way cows are meant to live. I assume you've heard of the Vitamin D deficiency epidemic in the U.S. and I assume you've heard that we cannot easily get Vitamin D from food. However, according to Fallon, animals raised in sunshine make plenty of Vitamin D and if you eat such animals (or products made from their products - ie, milk), you can get Vitamin D from food. Which got me thinking, that perhaps, just perhaps, this epidemic is being fueled by our factory farming practices and that we're consuming these animals and their products which are deficient themselves. I also learned that the Vitamin D in plant based milk substitutes (soy, nut, and hemp milks) is Vitamin D2, whereas the Vitamin D in animal milk is D3. What's it matter? It seems that D3 helps put calcium in bones, whereas D2 leeches calcium from bone and deposits it in soft tissue.
However, now that I wrote all this, I have to caution you that with any nutritional topic, the research is all over the place, on every side of every issue. It kind of makes your head spin (or, at least it makes my head spin).
So, what's a person to do? How do you decide what to eat? I think you pay good attention to your body. How does your food make you feel? Are you healthy? Are you energetic? How are your moods? I even throw into the mix, do I feel like I'm being a good steward of the earth and it's living creatures by my food choices? And, when you go to your doctor, what clues can you get from your physical exam and lab results?
My head stops spinning when I realize that almost everyone agrees that whole foods, in their natural form are healthiest (and I write this knowing that someone, somewhere has probably written something about how Twinkies are perfectly nutritious).
And then I just loosen up and enjoy a slice of meatloaf, with a baked potato and asparagus. As for the vegan chocolate cake...not so great - but that probably had something to do with my replacing ingredients willy-nilly even though I'd never made the recipe before. It wasn't my best effort but somehow, my family managed to choke it down (without complaint). I'd say it was more of a vegan chocolate crumble...all over the table, but then again, one of the potatoes exploded in the oven. Perhaps it was all just birthday fireworks. Happy birthday to me!
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