I've recently had gluten-free popcorn, gluten-free corn meal, gluten-free oatmeal and – who'd have ever dreamed such a thing possible – guaranteed gluten-free eggs, milk and cheeses.
And I'll be quite honest, I never once noticed that these products had the gluten removed.
How'd they do that?
When so many people believe that all we need to do to be healthy and happy is to look for shrink-wrapped packages stamped with a gluten-free label, you have to start taking this business seriously. Surely, the same people who package your white bread, your Twinkies, and your tasteless winter tomatoes wouldn't try to deceive you with a label promoting gluten-free what-not?
No doubt all of this gluten-freeness is going to be a boon to the less than 1 percent of the population who suffer from celiac disease, a painful inability to digest the gluten protein found only in wheat, rye and barley.
Many have apparently decided that the best way to show support for those who suffer from celiac disease is to avoid all gluten-containing products themselves. We should all be just as sympathetic to the .2 percent of the population allergic to eggs, the 1.2 percent of the population with allergies to bananas, the 1.4 percent of the population that has peanut allergies, the 2.3 percent of the population that has shellfish allergies, or the 60 percent of the population who can't fully digest milk.
In that spirit of solidarity, I can honestly report that my garden is now 100 percent gluten free.
How did I do it?
Mostly by ignoring the latest Hollywood and New Jersey food fads, by trying my best to avoid any shrink-wrapped food product plastered with claims that it will make my life better, and (not least) by planting and harvesting vegetables that are good to eat.
As others have pointed out, "good to eat" isn't a self-evident concept in a bipolar world that flips repeatedly from hysterical food paranoia to processed food gluttony.
So I'll need to clarify.
I don't eat vegetables because they're good for me. I eat foods that make me feel good, from the moment I bite into them until hours and days afterward. I like foods that taste good and smell good and make me want to get up and enjoy life. If they don't do that, I don't enjoy them.
And because they make me feel good, I'd guess they're good for me. After several hundred millions of years of eating plants, I'd guess our animal bodies have come to enjoy certain plants for a good reason.
But shouldn't I be metering out my diet based on vitamins and specialized nutrients and calories and carbohydrates and glycine indices and antioxidants and all that other nonsense?
No. Because no matter what the Wizard of Oz tells you on the telly, we still have no scientific certainty how any of these things actually work, individually or together, in our bodies. We're not even sure we're measuring the right things.
So even the best science makes good guesses about what's good for us.
If the science isn't certain, who do we turn to for dietary advice? Your best guide may be your senses. Based on my sense of taste and smell, I have good reason to believe that this body evolved to take full advantage of the highly complex chemical components of plants, in which I detect odors and flavors far more subtle and varied than I do even in meats, sweets and highly processed foods.
That's no surprise. Our bodies evolved to take advantage of the world around us, just as that world evolved to deal with us. Some plants evolved to benefit from the fact that we ate them, and some plants evolved to keep us from ever wanting them. Our ancestor's bodies evolved to detoxify the plants that they could detoxify, and to react strongly against the ones they couldn't.
Our very sensitive noses and our taste buds evolved in large measure to sniff out these differences. That's why most of us can readily distinguish the chemicals in rosemary from the chemicals in blueberries, even though they're only a few molecules apart. And if we haven't inundated our senses with highly processed chemicals (concentrated sugars, artificial flavors and refined fats) deliberately designed to overwhelm them, I'm fairly certain our sense of taste and smell is a better guide to good eating than the best current scientific testing.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating the faddish "paleo" diets that purport to have us eat the meats that cavemen ate. The trouble, of course, is that the common "paleo" view of what cavemen ate seems to be based on a careful study of the Flintstones. Better science has pretty well demonstrated that early humans evolved with a highly varied diet of plants, supplemented with lean, stringy meats and even moderately processed grains when they were available.
Having occasionally tried to live off the food I could shoot with a gun, I would have to imagine that spear-throwing humans, in an age before refrigeration, must have eaten a lot of meatless meals rich in vegetables. They must have been delighted, as I was, when rich-tasting grains like whole wheat, corn or oatmeal became available to fill the empty spots on the plate.
And I have a sneaking suspicion, backed up by some science, that the vegetables I grow in my garden are a little more like the plants humans first evolved with. Based on the complexities of their flavors and their odors, their crispness and moistness, I'd be willing to bet they're far richer than most grocery store vegetables in the chemicals and fibers that our bodies crave.
So maybe I'm advocating a different kind of caveman diet, a diet based on what our senses and bodies crave.
It's not a perfect system. Sometimes our bodies don't react to things that aren't good for us until it's too late. Sometimes, we develop irrational aversions to things that would probably do us good. Being a thinking animal, I try to weigh these exceptions reasonably.
But mostly, I just turn to my garden. Gardens teach you the delights of eating seasonally varied diets, as our ancestors did, and they reawaken your taste buds to the complexity of odors and flavors, so you're more likely to enjoy a variety of foods and you're more likely to crave the kind of foods that our bodies evolved to take advantage of.
I figure my body knows what it's doing when it craves a stack of grilled eggplants, tomatoes, basil and goat cheese, slapped between two not-too-thick pieces of gluten-rich ciabatti bread. If I were one of the .75 percent of the population that had celiac disease, I'd sure enough lose the bread, and I bet I'd feel just as good.
And in any case, I'd trust my own nose and garden over some corporate crook who figured out how to get rich slapping meaningless labels on packages in the grocery.Also read here:buy bridesmaid dresses online uk
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