I was making eggs for breakfast the other day. I don't just have eggs. There is toast and tea, but I was not referring to that, I was referring to the eggs. When I have eggs, the eggs are typically the last thing that I add to the breakfast. There is something to be said about the flavour of eggs, but I don't care about that. Eggs are nutritious too, but I like more than eggs in my breakfast. I look in the refrigerator and look around it for a while and then I start pulling things out then I put the frying pan on the stove and heat it up.
First goes in the lube, margarine, butter or olive oil. Next goes what I find in the fridge. If there was nothing much it is mushrooms and cheese and maybe some spinach. If I am lucky and there are leftovers like chilli, bean salad or just any salad, they go in first. Then I add the mushrooms, cheese and the spinach. Lastly I add the eggs, usually two. Then I turn the heat off and let the heat of the other stuff cook the eggs. I have to let the other stuff heat up, so they are nice and hot. When the eggs are cooking I can drop a slice or two of bread in the toaster and spread some peanut butter on top before the eggs are cooked. Sometimes it is almond butter or a reject from my friend like pumpkinseed butter. Then I take the hot water that I had in the kettle and I pour it over the tea and it is breakfast time. Lately this has been getting blasé, but when I make it for friends, they think I am imaginative. It is healthy after all.
When you look at what was in that meal you will see more food stuffs than the typical person in the planet eats in a day and some in a year. Let me count: eggs, cheese, red onions, white onions, vinegar, lemon juice, kidney beans, pinto beans, black beans, chickpeas, avocado, olive oil, butter, mushrooms, spinach, peanut butter and bread (which contains: wheat flour, rye flower, the flour or seeds of ten other grains, yeast, salt and sugar). I don't typically have juice with my breakfast, but I have been known to add a few grapes or an apple. I counted thirty-two different food stuffs before I got to the tea. That is just breakfast. Depending what you eat for lunch and dinner, you could eat a total of fifty different foods and that is not counting junk food like Doritos and other stuff. I am a vegetarian, but if I were an omnivore then there would be meats and mixed meats and slurry meats (like hotdogs and chicken nuggets that are made of many different parts).
What was my point? I was just making you aware what a first world person eats and how it proves that I am wealthy, even if I am technically living under the poverty line or near to it for most of my life, in my country. There are countries where people will eat maybe fifty different food items over the course of the whole year and usually many less. There are places that less than twenty-five different things over a year and mostly just a few like rice.
When I eat Doritos, I am eating probalblly close to fifteen food items and chemicals and all of them break down and are absorbed by my body and provide resourses for my to grow. Most people think that if it is a chemical it is bad, but the truth is they are usually neutral to the body and they almost all break down and get used. Aspartame is one that gets worked over by the body like that. They body is quite efficient. Fiber and othe indigestables breakdown and pass out and through much faster but clean your body out and the lower intestines. It is kind of crappy (pun).
I suspect the poor majority of the world eats similarly to my pre industrial ancestors. With a few exceptions and modifications. I learned about the diet of these Ancien Regime peoples years ago in school. They farmed. Their fields and tended their flocks for years eating the flocks and the harvest from the fields. They had one set of feilds and they had learned that they needed to rotate their crops and allow the feilds to recover. They could not add fertilizer except the natural kind. They did not have pesticides and they could not or irragate reliably; they were dependent on good weather to have good crops. They planted their fields with rye, wheat, barley, oats and whatever grain they had availible, not in seperate fields, but all in the same field. The weather would determine which crop did the best in the field and in any case, you cannot survive on one grain alone. When the harvest came, all the grains were harvested at once and the grains were ground together and since storage technology was poor, they were typically baked into bread right away and stored to dry out in the attic for a years time, until the next harvest. The typical breakfast, lunch and dinner was basically the same. Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridige in the pot nine days old, as the rhyme goes was not an exaggeration. That was the way of things. Pease porridge, gruel, soup and a portion of dried harvest bread dunked in to soften it and make it digestible.
Today's poor are poorer than the people in the past, the wonders of mono culture and pesticides and a market economy mean that farmers plant one crop and sell most of it to make money to buy other food. But they typically mostly eat just that crop, unless there is something cheaper to buy than the crop they are growing. The staple foods are the majority of what they eat though. Rice, potatoes or something else. Not like us in the wealthy West.
Why is diversity even important? One might ask that, food is food. Every plant has different levels of different nutrients, some have nutrients that others do not have. Eating a less diverse diet increases the chances that you will miss one or more of these nutrients and it could affect your health a lot. Vegetarians know that most plants have incomplete protiens and that more than one plant should be in every meal to get a complete protien. There are only a few plants that have all the protiens that we need to live and grow. Eating more diversely ensures a good diet. Rice for instance does not have a complete protien. Potatoes do, but only if you eat the skins and then there is not much protien in the skin, there is not much skin. Both are mostly carbohydrates and very little protien anyways.
What about the quality of the food? Quality food tastes better, but that is it. A lot of people think Organic food is better for you. If taste is important for you, then organic is the way to go. If you are looking for a healthy diet on a small budget, don't go organic. If you have the time and the space, grow your own food, but it is expensive, both in time and start up. When you plant a garden, if you do it from seeds, it can take a while for the plants to get to maturity, if you buy them bigger from the garden center, your have plants that may already be producing food without the long wait, but you have to pay more. Either way you have to pick the crop that you want to get the most bang for your buck. It does taste better, but the tasteless food in the supermarket is just as nutritious and there is more diversity there than you can get in your garden.
Of my diet, I fear that the diversity of it is unsustainable. Diversity means that it must come from far away and often very far away. Diversity means that there is hundreds of kilometers if not thousands, for the food to travel. It means that there is a foot print associated with it and it also necessarily means human blood shed or poverty as well. Is that a price that we people in the West think about when we eat our food? One day we will have to. One solution is for superfoods to be created, foods that have lots of nutrients in them that can be grown in very small spaces. Like a potatoe that has more protien than carbohydrates or a grain that is a complete protien or several foods that are complete protiens that we can add to our industrial mash to create a sustainable populous with good health and little disease. It is coming. The Earth needs it, well the humans on it need it.
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