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Ultramarathoner Scott Jurek is another high-profile vegan athlete, taking second place in the IAU 24 hour run championship. He ran 166 miles in 24 hours! On an ordinary training day, Jurek must consume between 5,000 and 8,000 calories. This guy makes me think of Forrest Gump. Maybe if Forrest ate plants instead of shrimp, he’d be running in Greece this weekend…
During the 24 hour race, Scott consumed this list of vegan goodies:

23 Clif Shot Gels
8 calcium/magnesium capsules
12 Clif Blocks
1 Succeeed Electrolyte capsule per hour
4 Ginger People ginger chews
3 Guayaki Yerba Mate shots
3 bananas
210 ounces Clif Shot
Electrolyte Drink with chia seed powder
8 small potatoes
40 ounces rice milk/Jarrow Soy Essence protein drink
60 ounces mango juice nectar
30 ounces Spiadry rice powder and water
1 cup miso with ramen noodles

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I volunteer at lunchtime at ice daughter’s school, sneakily and infrequently. Kids will try new foods if others around them are trying them, and then they will bring their new tastes home and add that food to the meals at home. It benefits the entire community to initiate a plant-based eating program at the schools. I bring lunch for ice daughter and myself, with tons of extra for the little angels at her table. Last year the kids sampled stuffed grape leaves, marinated great white beans, fruits of all varieties, and even some veggie sushi when I felt particularly flush financially. Our plant based community is expanding. What are the other kids eating around the world? Not spent hens…

In Japan, a typical lunch includes a bottle of milk, a bowl of rice, a fish dish, pickled salad, soup with veges and tofu, and a piece of fruit. Kids eat their lunches with their teachers, who discourage wastefulness and promote good manners.

In Finland, lunch could be ham and potato casserole or barley porridge. Children always have a vegetarian option. A favorite is coconut milk and beetroot casserole. Spinach pancakes are another hit.

In Spain, schools break down the meals into the total calories, fats, protein and other micronutrients. An evening meal is offered to ensure balanced nutrition.

In Italy, all schools are mandated to have organic offerings on the menu. Menus emphasize the Mediterranean diet, with more fish, seasonal fruits and vegetables, and whole foods. Lunchtime lasts 45 minutes, and table are often decorated with fresh flowers.

In France, lunch costs between 3 and 7 dollars per angel. School lunches include an appetizer, a main course of fish with vegetables and a slice of local artisan cheese, and dessert. Students are required to take a choice from each of the color coded food groups. Anything less than a one hour lunch is considered barbaric.

Schools offering local, sustainable foods are sprouting up all over the US and around the world. It may not be realistic to have an accredited garden-to-lunch program at every school, but is realistic to start weaning schools off unhealthy, fast food meals and start encouraging local, plant-based nutrition. In the meantime, we’re going to pack lunch from home, and I’m going to run my own little nutrition class at ice daughter’s table.

I ask my patients what they are going to do about their out of control diabetes and elevated cholesterol. Specifically, what behavior modification are they going to focus on to acheive a change in their personal health. I love these patients. They are trying so hard, and they are so smart. And they almost always say that they need to exercise more. I think I visibly deflate, because then they immediately follow up with a comment about eating more vegetables, intending to help me keep the faith as I get through the day at the office. I hope they are trying to do that too.

Number one daughter wants a mac daddy refrigerator. She thinks it plebian for me to get my water from the sink and my ice out of the freezer, and then go turn the tv on on the other side of the kitchen. She started gently pressuring me for a refrigerator with ice and water available from the door, claiming this would cut our energy costs since we wouldn’t open the door to get ice. She wants the tv mounted right on the door too. Sounds like a nice fridge, probably with a corresponding nice price tag.

Good parenting is mastering the art of distraction. Number one daughter needed to think about something else. I shared with her the use of earthenware pots for cooling food, and shared my hope that the fridge would break down, so we could eliminate it altogether.  She’s been praying ever since for long appliance life. And until she graduates from medical school, so am I.

The op-ed piece, Math Lessons for Locovores, by Steven Budiansky, published in the NY Times Friday is an intelligently written consideration of the cost of transportation and the value of supporting local agriculture. His math calculations consider only the cost of the gasoline required for transportation, and not the cost of maintaining the roadways and railways. And trucks and trains. The costs of transport of food long distances is subsidized by the governement at many levels, and that contributes to the small farmer not being able to compete. The environmental catastrophe of large monoculture farms, which require more fertilizer and pesticides to maintain the health of the monoculture, is not calculated by the simple addition of the cost of pesticide.

The benefits of local agriculture don’t just include decreasing fuel costs. Contrary to Mr. Budiansky’s opinion, local agriculture maintains green space around the community. Big ag doesn’t grow food more efficiently. With the use of heavy machinery and high doses of pesticides and fertilizer required to maintain a monoculture, combined with the hidden and actual costs of transport, they use far more calories than the small farmer to make the same amount of food. And they aren’t making food. They’re growing corn and soy, mostly for animal feed and processed food products like high fructose corn syrup. Money spent within your community is redistributed six times within the microeconomy of the community, stimulating your local economy much better than a trip to the superstore. Kids are learning farming and animal husbandry, practiced in a way that at least respects the animal as a sentient being. Animal waste isn’t stored in lagoons that contaminate the groundwater and flood the neighboring rivers with every rainshower, it is instead used instead as the fertilizer.

The distraction being practiced by Mr. Budiansky, suggesting that food preparation is the main problem, is right on and completely wrong at the same time. The transportation, chemicals and environmental destruction of coorporate farming are devastating our country, and our waistlines. My community needs my money right here, now more than ever. My kids need safe, fresh food with short, reliable supply lines from a farmer with integrity. Also, as we trend increasingly away from meat and dairy, my need for home refrigeration declines. As I eat more raw food, my oven is used less and less. Water is good without ice, right out of the tap.

Buy local. Eliminate meat and dairy. Eat more raw food. Save your life, your waistline, and a little diesel. The sight of apples ripening on Leelenau Peninsula and in my backyard fill me with hope. Concentraing on local foods means thinking of fruit as a product of an orchard, and winter squash as the fruit of an early winter farm. March past the off season fruits. You have nothing to lose but mealy, juiceless, rock-hard, unripened food.

Photo courtesy Raja Sekhar Malipati

Ice daughter just hates the five second rule. If food hits the floor, it needs to go in the trash. The dogs, the feet, and general level of cleanliness, I’m not sure what exactly bothers her, but there is no allowable period of time that food can remain on the floor and still be ingested. I wonder if she’d feel differently if she understood the contamination the food already has, before it even comes home from the grocery store.

All of our food has allowable contaminants that the government measures and permits, where it is still considered safe even though there are trace amounts of other materials in it. Canned tuna’s allowable contaminant, for example, is rat hair. The government regulatory agencies have determined an allowable amount of rat hair that can be present in canned tuna and still have it considered safe. Slaughterhouses are naturally places where contamination with some feces from the GI tract of the animal would be possible, and is minimized in other countries by slowing down the rate of slaughter, giving the workers on the line enough time to do their jobs without nicking the animal’s intestine and causing contamination. But here in the US, the lines have to move quickly to keep the costs of the product low. The government has decided to deal with contamination by irradiating the meat after processing, which at least brings the bacterial counts to a reasonable level. Even after zapping it, ½ of the chicken sold is grocery stores has live campylobacter in the package. Campylobacter is responsible for 80% of the 76 million cases of food-borne illness in the US annually.

The growth hormone Posilac, a Monsanto product, comes with the warning that it may cause a number of side effects, including swelling and infected udders. These infections transmit pus to the milk. Factory dairy farms will sometimes mix the milk from infected udders with normal milk, so the offensive flavor and color is diluted. You can’t just give a milk cow a rest to heal the udder, because the profit margin is too narrow to feed her without getting a fair share of milk out of her. US regulations allow milk to contain more pus cell concentrations than any other country in the world – almost twice the international standard of allowable pus. The pus concentration is even higher in fattty milk products, like ice cream and cheese. I think you can taste the pus in ice cream if you let it sit on your tongue long enough.

Rat hair, feces and pus. In this context, it may be reasonable to consider embracing the five second rule. How could could a few seconds on the floor hurt anything?

The fast food world is focused on creating more items that are astonishingly inexpensive but increasingly larger in size. This summer, there is serious foot-long mania, initially inspired by Subway. Move over, whole wheat roll. Welcome the foot-long cheeseburger, with three burgers with three slices of cheese on a white bun, sliced in half and wrapped in sandwich paper. The sandwich is being tested at 50 Carl’s Jr. restaurants in Claifornia and 50 Hardee’s units in Indiana. This is the chain that brought you the Monster Breakfast Sandwich, with 47 grams of fat. It’s only $4, but $4.50 with lettuce and tomato. Look for Subway to increase the options of $5 footlongs this summer, including a steak and cheese omelet at breakfast. Sonic has lengthened its’ foot-long hot dog by 1 1/2 inches and added toppings of meaty chili and melted cheese.