The Ancestral Table: Traditional Recipes for a Paleo Lifestyle (2 page)

So what is the optimal balance of foods, the proportions that supply optimal nutrition?

We represent the optimal proportions in our PHD food plate in the shape of a yin-yang apple:

The body of the apple represents the components of a meal; the yin-yang symbol represents a balance of plant and animal foods. The leaves and stem represent pleasure foods that should be eaten in moderation. In the shadow of the apple are foods to avoid—cereal grains, sugar, beans and peanuts, and vegetable seed oils.

A DAY’S MEALS SHOULD INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING:

• About a pound of “safe starches”—starchy plants that are low in toxins after cooking, such as white rice and potatoes
  
• About a pound, or a bit less, of meat, fish, and eggs—the complementary animal foods to the starches
  
• A diversity of fruits and vegetables, adding up to several pounds a day or so, to complement the starches and provide healthful fiber and nutrition
  
• Flavorful sauces composed of healthy fats, such as butter, beef fat, olive oil, avocado, coconut oil, and macadamia nut butter; acids, such as vinegar, citric acid from lemons or other citrus fruits, and lactic acid from fermented vegetables; and umami flavors, such as those found in fermented foods
  

It is good to combine all four of these types of foods in every meal. Doing so not only adds complexity and flavor, but also renders the food more digestible and helps the body metabolize the meal properly.

One last step to healthful eating is to make certain highly nourishing foods a regular part of your diet. We call them
supplemental foods
because they supply key nutrients that are hard to obtain from other sources and should be eaten regularly, like supplements.

Our supplemental foods, so crucial for good health, include egg yolks (you can eat the whites, too, but the yolks have the crucial nutrients); collagen-rich soups and stews made from simmering bones, joints, and tendons; liver and other organ meats; diverse vegetables; shellfish and oily seafood; fermented foods such as kimchi, yogurt, and aged cheese; and, believe it or not, dark chocolate.

My wife and I began eating “gourmet ancestral cuisine” because of our health problems. For Russ, too, poor health was the inspiration for a delicious diet. Russ had a stroke at age 24—a shocking event for a seemingly healthy man—and then discovered he had a life-threatening autoimmune disease, Takayasu’s arteritis. Russ’s health problems receded after he adopted an ancestral diet, as they did for my wife and me.

Experiences like Russ’s and ours are terrific motivation for cooking great meals. We know we need this delicious food!

But for a healthy person, it’s tempting to take an easier path. And that’s what most people do: they eat whatever is readily available, no matter how poor the quality.

That tendency to chow down on whatever food is closest at hand—even if it is as malnourishing as cookies and soda—frustrates diet experts to no end. So powerful is the impulse to minimize time and effort in food acquisition that people eat more or less the same diet all over the world. In nearly every country, two-thirds or more of calories come from the staple agricultural crops that the PHD mostly forbids: cereal grains, beans, sugar, and vegetable seed oils.

As more and more food consumption has shifted to industrially produced foods made from the cheapest, least nourishing, and most toxic ingredients, it’s no surprise that health is becoming impaired. Rates of obesity, diabetes, and autoimmune diseases are rising, and there is reason to believe that life expectancy itself may soon peak and then start to decline.

The temptation to eat what is readily available instead of what is healthful, to buy food prepared in a factory rather than cook for oneself and one’s family—this is a temptation that should be resisted. The effects of industrial food are insidious and hard to notice at first, but over decades they build up, damage health, and shorten life spans.

In
The Ancestral Table,
Russ has assembled the information you need to set yourself and your family on a different path. He integrates the delicious recipe ideas of traditional cuisines, refined over centuries, with the healthful ingredients of our ancestors. Follow the path of gourmet ancestral cuisine. Learn the pleasures of cooking—let the odors of a gourmet meal simmering on the stove pervade your home. It will bring you joy today and good health tomorrow.

And when, as a centenarian, you look back on a lifetime of delicious home-cooked food, don’t forget to remind your great-grandchildren that good health comes from an ancestral table!

—PAUL JAMINET, P
H
D

My journey toward creating this book has been an interesting one, so let me walk you through it.

Life as a Kid

I spent my childhood in a turn-of-the-century farmhouse in Port Orchard, Washington, with three brothers and a baby sister. My appreciation for food started early; my nickname as a toddler was “the vacuum cleaner,” for obvious reasons. I remember most of my childhood being led stomach-first: foraging for wild berries and fruits in our small orchard, swiping tubs of cake frosting from the pantry, and having a battle of wills with my mom over the merits of onions in cooking (she had two arguments—“I cut them up small so you won’t notice them” or “I cut them up big so you can pick them out easily”). When I was a teenager, we moved to a small town nestled in the foothills of Mount Rainier—Yelm, Washington—where I lived until I graduated from high school.

My Culinary Journey Begins

My first job was at a fast-food burger chain, but I soon branched out and tried my hand as a chef at a local pizza parlor and a couple full-service restaurants. Until I was able to pay for my own meals, I ate home-cooked meals almost exclusively. My palate quickly expanded as I started to try new foods. I discovered other cuisines and started developing confidence in my own talents as a chef.

At age 20, I needed to make a decision: continue working as a chef and slowly crawl through college, or try a whole new path. So I joined the United States Navy and was promptly shipped off to basic training. I signed on as a Russian translator and spent a couple years learning the language before moving to my first duty station near Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island of O’ahu. During my seven years in Hawaii, I spent most of my time traveling and deploying onboard Navy warships, providing language support at sea.

I could go on and on about my many adventures traveling the Pacific and picking up another language—Indonesian—along the way. But some of the most relevant facts regarding my time in Hawaii are these: I had a unique opportunity to travel the world, experience new cultures, and try new cuisines. I also met my wife, Janey, and had a few health-related hiccups.

A Curious Decline in Health

In 2005, at age 24, I had a stroke. Up until this point I had been a model of health: I exercised regularly, lived an active lifestyle, and tried my best to eat a diet aligned with the food pyramid. And then I woke up one morning and the left side of my body wasn’t working properly. The doctors who treated me determined that the stroke was the result of a lesion (most likely a blood clot) on the right side of my pons, a part of the brain stem. This explained the loss of fine motor function on my left side, but no one could figure out what had actually caused the stroke. It took me a few months of therapy, but my young brain quickly recovered, and I relearned how to walk, write, and hold a fork.

A year later, I found myself having a hard time catching my breath while exercising. I had difficulty jogging, let alone running, and despite intense effort to get back into shape, I just couldn’t pull together the energy to do it. Eventually I couldn’t even walk without getting winded, and I decided to see a doctor. I spent the next month living in hospitals, undergoing every test I’d seen on TV’s
House.
The doctors finally settled on the idea that my pulmonary arteries were experiencing some sort of blockage, which they later figured out was caused by inflammation.

I was diagnosed with Takayasu’s arteritis, a rare autoimmune disease that causes inflammation and narrowing of arteries. My case was especially strange because Takayasu’s arteritis occurs predominantly in women of Asian heritage (strikes one and two) and only rarely in the pulmonary arteries (strike three). As with most autoimmune diseases, the cause of Takayasu’s arteritis is not known.