Please take some time and read the full article here, it is really long and actually has two parts! I have extracted my favorite sections and it is still very long. I have left out some of the very interesting examples of traditional societies foods, as well as the history and description of how vegetable oils are hydrogenated and the history of the McGovern Committee. I do recommend you read the full article:

Secrets of the Edible Oil Industry by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig

While turn-of-the-century mortality statistics are unreliable, they consistently indicate that heart disease caused no more than 10 per cent of all deaths – considerably less than infectious diseases such as pneumonia and tuberculosis. By 1950, coronary heart disease (CHD) was the leading source of mortality in the United States, causing more than 30 per cent of all deaths.

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Given the rising plethora of food outbreaks courtesy of our industrial food system, this article will give us some history and a clear example of how large-scale agriculture is destroying every corner of our world.

The following events are taken from Vandana Shiva’s book Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, which was written in 2000. As she states, the Indian small scale edible oil industry is not what it once was.

The story of how the soybean displaced mustard in India within a few months of open imports is a story being repeated with different foods, crops, and cultures across the world, as subsidized exports from industrialized countries are dumped on agricultural societies, destroying livelihoods, biodiversity, and cultural diversity of food. The expansion of global markets is taking place by extinguishing local economies and cultures.

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After reading this recent horrific news about what the biotech industry is plotting for our supposed ‘health’ by manipulating vegetable oils even further, we realized we need more info about oil and fat and the economic battles that are being and have been fought over this most basic and vital nutrient for humankind on this website.

Many years ago–way back in 2000–I was the Sous chef at a Renaissance International Hotel, we were hosting some kind of very important conference for UNICEF for a week or so. During this conference I had to pander to the dietary demands of the most nasty, easily irritated and just generally grumpy old man I have ever met (and I have met some grumpy ones I guarantee it). He was on a low-cholesterol diet and I had to cook everything for him on a no-stick pan with absolutely no fat of any kind. At that time I had not yet heard of Weston A. Price or Sally Fallon, but I was pretty sure that his grumpiness was a direct result of his no-fat diet.

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I recently came across the organization NextCourse in my travels on the web. As they say, San Francisco is indeed at the forefront of improvement and ever since Alice Waters started the Edible Schoolyards project in 1995, I have been very excited with what is going on down there. Next Course includes a project for teaching women in prisons and half-way houses basic skills in identifying good food, helping them shop at local farmers markets, as well as training them in the variety of ways to prepare foods.

I was born in Berkeley so I confess to getting a bit of patriotic-type pride going when I think about Alice Waters. She is my original chef hero and if it hadn’t been for her ideals and the things she has created to help and improve the situation of the people around her, first locally and then onto the National and International scale, I would have had a lot less faith in humanity and our ability to get past this stupid economy and world we have greedily created to the happy existence for everybody that many of us are currently creating, (or at least thinking about creating).

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As you can tell from the poll on our homepage (please take a second to vote if you haven’t already , I am a bit of a fan of street vendors, illegal or otherwise since legal and illegal can vary quite a bit depending on what country you are in. I would love to sell some food in the park, so I listen and my eyes glimmer with bright green envy when I hear people tell their tales. I have made a deal with a vibrant lass from New Zealand here in Vancouver to start up a underground restaurant, so we will keep you all posted on that, but in the meantime I would like to share this experience a friend had in Portland with her curbside cuisine

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Newsgrab from the Irish Times:

Cardiac Expert says Sugar More Dangerous than Smoking.

Read the full article here.

Following are a few favorite excerpts from the article:

Sugar is a “drug” that is more dangerous to health than smoking and elevated cholesterol combined, a leading cardiovascular expert has told an international conference in Galway.

Centenarians who are free of cardiovascular disease usually had low sugar and low insulin levels, Sherif Sultan of Galway University Hospital’s Western Vascular Institute said yesterday.

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I recently had a request for information about beans. I think actually it was more a request about how to cook dried beans than these sorts of facts! For details on soaking beans check out this recipe for refried beans. In the meantime let your mind be titillated with these bizarre bits about beans.

Legume family: Fabaceae (or Leguminosae). The third largest family among the flowering plants (after the orchid and daisy families), and second most important to the human diet, after the grasses.

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I’m reposting this since Spring is the perfect time to get out and do some asparagus foraging! Originally written for Healthy Options magazine November 2009.

Considering that the movement towards sustainable living is picking up speed, no discussion of asparagus would be complete without mentioning Euell Gibbons and his original back to the Earth foraging book Stalking The Wild Asparagus (1962). Euell Gibbons learned how to forage from his mother and was able to support his family with those skills during the dust bowl era of the 1930s. When I first read his book it inspired me to take a course in identifying wild herbs at Wellpark College and soon I was walking the streets of Auckland, my eyes intently focused on the ground, trying to figure out what these plants were that I had never noticed before. One of the first ones that I put a name to was Shephard’s Purse, which has such unique heart-shaped leaves it is an easy one to pick out—suddenly I was seeing it everywhere. Since that day, my list of plants I can confidently identify has slowly but steadily grown. I enjoy this sort of collecting, the collecting of plant names, it is free, doesn’t take up space and organizes the jumble of images and information rumbling through my senses to my brain.

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As most of you know, Canada’s tar sands are creating insane environmental destruction. I just read this article about a coalition of Indigenous Nations that have come together and issued a declaration barring the proposed Enbridge Northern gateway pipeline that would transport crude oil from Alberta 1,179 km through many delicate ecosystems and across more than 1,000 rivers and streams.

Read the whole article here. Read the Coastal First Nations Declaration here. Add your voice to stop the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline here.

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Many people have been asking me how the GAPS Diet has been working out for us, and I am finally getting a chance to post about it. We started this diet because we have had serious re-occurring health problems ever since living in a moldy apartment in New Zealand. Our problems seemed to just get worse instead of better. I seemed to have developed leaky gut syndrome and was getting intolerant of more and more foods. We had been on no-carb diets, and various other health regimes which worked for a while but were unsustainable for long periods.

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