SRP
Cathlete
I'm reading "The Good Life" by Helen and Scott Nearing. This book documents the couple's homesteading experiences in detail. They moved from New York City to rural New Hampshire back in the 1930s and homesteaded for 60 years. This book was first written in 1954, so you can see how old it is.
Anyhow, they have a chapter on the food they ate - almost all of it grown by them - as well as their opinions on a healthy diet. It's really quite interesting. I hope you don't mind a long post.... The rest of this will be quoted directly from the book - Chapter 5: Eating for Health.
"Good food should be grown on whole soil, be eaten whole, unprocessed and garden fresh. Even the best products of the best soils lose more or less of their nutritive value if they are processed. Any modification at all is likely to reduce the nutritive value of whole food."
"The foods we chose to live on were those that had the simplest, closest and most natural relationship to the soil. Jared Eliot (an author cited in the book) called them 'the clean productions of the earth.' All foods, animal as well as vegetable, come from the land, but raw fruits, nuts and vegetables are the simplest, come most directly and in the closest connection... We might call them primary foods."
"Dairy products are foods at second or third-hand, reaching humans through the bodies of animals which feed on the produce of the soil. ... Milk is a highly concentrated infant food, especially designed to stimulate rapid growth in the early stages of development... Food intended by nature for one is not necessarily a desirable food for the other. Adults of any breed should have been weaned and past the milk stage of feeding."
"Humans eat another type of food which is the furthest removed from the soil - the cooked carcasses of beasts, birds and fish. The human practice of eating the dead bodies of fellow creatures has gone on for so long that it is regarded generally as normal. ... Before the blood culture (how they describe eating meat), which began with the domestication of animals, there was a tree culture based on a diet of fruit, nuts, seeds, shoots and roots."
Okay - I'll stop typing now. That's only a few brief excerpts from the chapter. I found it interesting that the concept of clean eating (note that they do use that term) goes so far back. Of course, their views differ from some of those here. Still, it was a very interesting chapter to read!
Anyhow, they have a chapter on the food they ate - almost all of it grown by them - as well as their opinions on a healthy diet. It's really quite interesting. I hope you don't mind a long post.... The rest of this will be quoted directly from the book - Chapter 5: Eating for Health.
"Good food should be grown on whole soil, be eaten whole, unprocessed and garden fresh. Even the best products of the best soils lose more or less of their nutritive value if they are processed. Any modification at all is likely to reduce the nutritive value of whole food."
"The foods we chose to live on were those that had the simplest, closest and most natural relationship to the soil. Jared Eliot (an author cited in the book) called them 'the clean productions of the earth.' All foods, animal as well as vegetable, come from the land, but raw fruits, nuts and vegetables are the simplest, come most directly and in the closest connection... We might call them primary foods."
"Dairy products are foods at second or third-hand, reaching humans through the bodies of animals which feed on the produce of the soil. ... Milk is a highly concentrated infant food, especially designed to stimulate rapid growth in the early stages of development... Food intended by nature for one is not necessarily a desirable food for the other. Adults of any breed should have been weaned and past the milk stage of feeding."
"Humans eat another type of food which is the furthest removed from the soil - the cooked carcasses of beasts, birds and fish. The human practice of eating the dead bodies of fellow creatures has gone on for so long that it is regarded generally as normal. ... Before the blood culture (how they describe eating meat), which began with the domestication of animals, there was a tree culture based on a diet of fruit, nuts, seeds, shoots and roots."
Okay - I'll stop typing now. That's only a few brief excerpts from the chapter. I found it interesting that the concept of clean eating (note that they do use that term) goes so far back. Of course, their views differ from some of those here. Still, it was a very interesting chapter to read!
