My initial interest in them was mostly about knowing where my food comes from – I know chickens are raised in pretty despicable conditions usually, and organic standards don’t mean too much in terms of giving the chickens a good life.  Even if it cost me more to get eggs from our chickens than it would to buy them from the store, at least I would have more guilt-free eggs.  But a few news stories recently have me more convinced that industrial chicken farming is dangerous, and not just to chickens, and I’m happier and happier with my undertaking with our five hens here at home!

There was a cow incident in a nearby town recently where a couple cows died of undetermined natural causes.  Maybe eating some poisonous plant... and the report I heard on the radio ended by saying one cow was still missing.  I do think it’s sweet that the local AM news sees fit to mention when one little bovine soul goes missing... but the truth is we have a lot more than one cow missing around here.

 

 

The job of raising cattle for dairy or beef is being concentrated into large operations that then truck their products around the region or country.  You don’t need a dairy farm in daily delivery distance from your house anymore - especially with refrigerated trucks.  And yet the horses are still here.

 

Why horses?  Horses aren’t a commodity, they’re a service.  If you want your kid to take riding lessons, or want to board a horse somewhere, you do those things near where you live.  You can’t outsource a horse.  

 

 

Since humans have been eating solids since before there were books about child-rearing... nature ought to provide a pretty good guide to how to do it.  It wouldn’t be good for the species to screw this up.  The biggest hint is that babies develop an interest in picking up food and bringing it to their mouths around 6 months give or take a couple months.  Often their first teeth come in during this interval as well, as another cue to the parent and a driver for the child to want to chew on things as they're teething.  

Now cooking is a recent invention, so the easiest foods a child could start with are foods that are soft in their natural, uncooked state, and appealing to them... this pretty much means ripe fruit!  The child will progress slowly onto other solid foods as there isn't that much you can eat in its raw state without molars.  Seeds, nuts, grains and meats, and most vegetables will be hard to eat until the appearance of molars.  Breastfeeding supplies most of the nutrition until the molars are present, at the earliest.  The iron stores in the baby are also wearing off around this time and they need to start getting iron from dietary intake.  But if you offer them what they are capable of feeding themselves, it should all work out naturally.

Modern caveats ...

-We have an epidemic of food allergy and allergic conditions... so we have to be more careful with food introduction

.-We have a penchant for cooking food and spoonfeeding it, which will affect the child's natural appetite and food preferences - allowing them to completely self-feed raw foods can seem really tedious and prolonged of a process compared to the schedules you read about in books and hear about others trying, but breastmilk is quite adequate for their nutritional needs while they spend a few months learning how to work this food thing.

-We introduce non-breastmilk foods to babies before gut closure.  Usually cow milk formula, sometimes others, sometimes rice solids in thickened formulas.  Some babies are started on "solids" before gut closure, since it happens sometimes between 4-6 months, but we don't know when for any particular baby.

-We tend to clamp a newborn's umbilical cords right after birth, which keeps some of their iron stores from getting to them, and may require introduction of iron-containing foods before the time of molar eruption.

Environmental causes have always been attractive to me, and social justice in general, but my husband’s interest in international development and poverty has gotten me thinking over the past almost 10 years about the intersection of all these issues.  I see developing nations pinning their economic hopes on the strength of their exports - and doing it by monocropping - taking their specialty food they can grow well and exporting it.  To me it seems like a quick fix, and far, far from sustainable.  It leaves communities that used to be self-sustaining utterly dependent on foreign markets.  And now we realize that all this economic math about exporting your strengths and importing your other needs was based on cheap transportation - cheap oil.  Not just that, but massive monocropping agricultural operations depend on petroleum inputs for fertilizer and for agricultural machinery.

Relocalizing agriculture isn’t just something for rich hippies (like me) in the US to dream about - it’s a practical move for communities everywhere - perhaps even more important in the less wealthy regions where they live so close to the edge already.  And if you’ll allow this rich hippie to dream a bit more - local agriculture is local power - people with the means to sustain themselves are not as easily victimized by corporations and corrupt government.  Couple that with a few modern ideas like low-cost laptops, distributed solar power, and microcredit, and you could have some really empowered communities.

They quote research on some raw foodists showing they have lower than average plasma levels of lycopene.  Hey, lycopene’s good for you... every bottle of ketchup says it has lots of it!  Apparently cooking tomatoes helps make it more available, and of course more concentrated.  But do we need it?  It’s an anti-oxidant, and anti-oxidants are lovely... but are the raw foodists getting more of other things that compensate for lower lycopene levels?  Is the average level of lycopene found in the general population actually the most healthful level to have?

Finally, I just don’t understand the evolutionary pressure that would have made cooked tomatoes the preferred way to eat.  But the take away message people are going to get from a quick skim of this article is that raw foodists are lacking in some nutrients and that cooking your food has advantages.  It may be true, but I’d need to see a lot more proof!  I’m eating cooked food still, but I’m eating it for other reasons - convenience, familiarity, comfort - not because I believe it to be more healthful.