J.D. Moyer

science fiction author, beatmaker, against fascism

A Meta-analysis of Kooky Diets, Part I

By

On February 15

In Health/Body-hacking

In the 1930’s a dentist named Weston Price traveled around the world studying indigenous populations and their traditional diets.  He was interested in why some populations remained free of tooth decay (despite the lack of availability of toothbrushes and toothpaste).  Traveling far and wide, hitting every continent, he studied Swiss mountain people, Scots of the Outer Hebrides, Eskimos, South Pacific Islanders, Australian Aborigines, Native Americans, the Watusi of Rwanda, and dozens more groups.  After many years of field work he concluded that modern illnesses and degenerative diseases (everything from caries to cancer, heart disease, asthma, allergies, and even tuberculosis) were due to the poor quality of the modern Western diet (one based on refined sugars, refined flours, canned and processed foods, etc.).  He published his research in this book (a public domain version is available here).

Picture from Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price, with original caption: FIG. 7. Above: typical rugged Gaelic children, Isle of Harris, living on oats and sea food. Note the breadth of the faces and nostrils. Below: typical modernized Gaelics, Isle of Bardsey. Note narrowed faces and nostrils.

The most interesting thing, to me, is the wide variety of indigenous diets that Price discovered could support robust health and freedom from most degenerative diseases.  Eskimos ate a great deal of seal meat and blubber, but no fresh fruits or vegetables.  People living in an isolated valley in Switzerland subsisted mostly on whole-rye bread and raw, whole-milk dairy from pastured cows.  Scots on the Isle of Lewis ate primarily seafood and unsweetened oat-cakes.  Inland Australian Aborigines dined on kangaroo meat, ducks, wallabies, lizards, insects, berries, and wild bird eggs.  These diets could not have been more varied, but everyone was in excellent health (and had excellent teeth).

Dr. Weston Price concluded, and modern food philosophers like Michael Pollan would agree, that a healthful human diet can consist of a wide number of combinations of various plants and animals, so long as the food is whole, fresh, and relatively unprocessed.

So, that settles it, right?

These days the question of what we eat is anything but simple.  In the United States, there are no surviving traditional regional diets — immigrants come from hundreds of different dietary traditions and Native American diets have been degraded by modern foods like flour, sugar, processed meats, and alcohol (with some efforts to reverse this trend). Health-conscious modern society is in search of its ideal diet, a kind of nutritional holy grail.  We all want to be lean, strong, and energetic (with excellent teeth).  Unfortunately, the foods that are most readily available are of poor quality: fast-food burgers and fries, homogenized pasteurized low-fat milk from corn-fed cows, soft drinks and candy, and lots of bread and noodles made primarily from refined flour.  In response to these poor choices, we collectively invent alternatives — artificial dietary restrictions created to maintain our health (or, in some cases, to circumvent our scruples).  Lacto-ovo-vegetarianism, raw-food veganism, the Zone Diet, Atkins, the low-fat diet, etc.

I’m not going to write about any of these; they’ve all been covered fairly exhaustively.  What interests me are slightly more extreme diets, especially when accompanied by an founder (often an evangelist of sorts), and sometimes a popular movement replete with its own strangely consistent non-food related beliefs. (Why are most adherents of the Paleolithic Diet climate-change skeptics?  What’s up with that?  And are there any Republican vegans?)

Over the course of several blog entries, I’m going to do a Weston Price style survey of a number of unusual diets.  The practitioners don’t find the diets unusual of course — but most other people probably would.

DAVID H. MURDOCK’S FISH-VEGETARIAN WITH LOTS OF RAW JUICE DIET

I recently heard a radio interview with business mogul David Murdock, the 86-year-old multi-billionaire who owns Dole Food Company and the entire Hawaiian island of Lana’i.  Murdock founded the Dole Nutrition Institute, a kind of research-slash-PR company that works tirelessly to extol the health benefits of pineapples, bananas, packaged salads, and other Dole products.  Questions of research neutrality aside, Murdock does seem to have a genuine interest in spreading the word regarding the healthfulness of a plant-based diet.  After his first wife died of cancer in 1988, he changed his own diet, eliminating meat, dairy products, refined sugar, and refined grains.

David H. Murdock receiving his H.S. diploma

Murdock is an unapologetic fan of personal discipline, and espouses the typical conservative view that a person’s misfortunes can in almost all cases be traced to personal weakness, laziness, or ignorance.  This belief informs his style of nutritional evangelism, which can be summarized as “Eat fruits and vegetables, dumb-ass, so you can be healthy like me!”  Over the course of the interview, the British interviewer tossed mostly softballs at Murdock, but did press him on the possibility that some people might value “living the good life” over the promise of optimum health and longevity.  Murdock’s response was to recount a story about a meat-eating, cocktail-imbibing friend — the friend’s wife called Murdock in a panic, her husband had collapsed — what to do?  “Call 911,” said Murdock, “he’s probably had a heart attack from all the bad food and saturated fat he’s been eating!”  Never one to miss an opportunity for a lecture, apparently.

I found this video clip where Oprah interviews Murdock, goes shopping with him at Costco, and samples his baby-shit green health shake comprised of raw spinach, celery, grapes, tomatoes, carrots, kiwi, mango, red bell pepper, and a few other raw fruits and veggies (he drinks this concoction three or four times a day).  Breakfast is unsweetened oatmeal with fresh fruit.  Lunch is an egg-white omelet with vegetables.  Dinner is fresh fish and vegetables.

ANALYSIS: Murdock seems as fit and healthy as he says he is.  This means very little in itself; there are plenty of Scotch-swilling, chain-smoking 86-year-olds who are just as spunky.  However both modern nutritional science and traditional human diets back up Murdock’s approach on most counts.  His diet is incredibly high in vitamins, mineral, and phytonutrients, his meals have a low glycemic load, he gets plenty of protein and fiber, and his diet includes no processed or refined foods of any kind.

Murdock also restricts saturated fat to zero.  Nutritional science is split on this subject.  The latest research seems to point to the Omega-6/Omega-3 fatty acid balance as being more important than total saturated fat intake.  A number of studies have failed to find any positive correlation between saturated fat intake and heart disease.  Still — Murdock’s avoidance of red meat is overcautious at worst — human beings don’t need to eat a side of beef every week to stay healthy.

From the looks of the foods Murdock is tossing into his cart at Costco in the Oprah clip, it appears that he doesn’t give a fart about organic food, or sustainably-grown food (circle of jumbo prawns grown in chemically fertilized dirt pits — check!).  He also disapproves of supplements and medications of all kinds, considering them absolutely unnecessary for people who are eating correctly.

  • Driving philosophy:  live for as long as possible, as vitally as possible, by eating lots of Dole fruits and vegetables
  • Staple foods: fresh fruits and vegetables, fresh-water fish, egg whites, nuts, oatmeal
  • Not allowed: meat, poultry, dairy products, bread/noodles, most grains, refined sugar
  • Supplements: none
  • Importance of organic foods: unknown, but apparently not very high
  • Health advantages: high in food-based antioxidants, high in soluble fiber, low glycemic load
  • Possible health risks this diet overlooks or does not address: pesticides, some saturated fat intake may be healthful
  • Ecological impact: low (no meat or dairy, very little grain)
  • Cost: moderate (no meat, organic foods not required, no supplement costs, fresh fish is expensive, lots of produce)

Summary: Murdock is the type who’s “in it to win it.” Life is a contest, and Murdock is going to be the last one standing (and the richest too — with the most land).  Choking down four slimy green vegetable shakes a day is a small price to pay for that kind of glory.  May he live to be a thousand.

VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON’S ALL-MEAT DIET

Vilhjalmur Stefansson was an Artic explorer and anthropologist who extensively studied and lived with the Inuit Eskimo people for approximately eleven years.  During his first year he gradually adopted and came to enjoy the traditional Inuit diet of raw frozen fish and unsalted boiled fish.  At other times, engaged in Arctic exploration, he and his men would subsist for weeks on nothing but seal meat, caribou, and the occasional polar bear.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson, chillin' on the steps

Stefansson’s first-person account of getting used to this diet, in this 1935 article in Harper’s Monthly, is fascinating.  At first he refuses to partake of the boiled fish (steelhead trout, referred to as “salmon trout” in the article), and has his specially baked.  As a fish-hater, he only nibbles at it, and desperately misses salt.  Over time, he tries and enjoys both the boiled and semi-thawed raw fish, which the Inuit eat like a cob of corn, tossing the bones and frozen entrails to the dogs.  Eventually he comes to enjoy such delicacies as fermented whale oil and spoiled fish in advanced stages of decay.  “I tried the rotten fish one day, and if memory serves, liked it better than my first taste of Camembert.”

Stefansson considers his own health to be excellent during these long periods abstaining from the vegetable kingdom, and even notes an occasion where his “all-meat” diet (which includes fish, organ meats, and generous quantities of animal fat) cures cases of scurvy in his fellow explorers.

Upon returning to New York City, Stefansson encounters many skeptics in the medical and dietetic communities; nobody believes that a diet devoid of vegetable matter can support human health (at least in the “white man” — the Eskimos are widely believed to have special constitutions or mutations that allow them to thrive on this diet).  Stefansson disagrees; the crews of his exploring ships hail from all regions of the world, and men of European, African, and South Pacific descent have all thrived on the all-meat diet (after a period of considerable complaining).  Stefansson volunteers to take part in a rigorously controlled scientific experiment at Bellevue hospital, where he and a colleague (a Danish former crewman by the name of Karsten Anderson) will eat nothing but meat for an entire year, and will be under medical supervision or surveillance 24 hours a day (no cheating allowed).

Both men thrive on the diet, becoming considerably leaner despite consuming most of their calories from animal fat.  This is not a white-meat chicken diet; typical fare includes brains fried in bacon drippings, juicy lamb chops, and fat sirloin steaks.  Stefansson notes that he is free of headaches (which otherwise plague him when he is on a “mixed” diet), has no digestive problems, and has improved strength and endurance.  Both men generally feels strong, happy, and optimistic during both summer and winter months.  The only problem occurs when, as an experiment within an experiment, the researchers at Bellevue deprive Stefansson of fatty meats and feed him only lean meat, an experience he has also undergone during his expeditions when, at times, the only available meat was half-starved caribou.  In his own words: “The symptoms brought on at Bellevue by an incomplete meat diet (lean without fat) were exactly the same as in the Arctic, except that they came on faster – diarrhea and a feeling of general baffling discomfort.” When Stefansson adds fat back into his diet, his good health returns (and remains for the duration of the study).

The results of the study, when published, are met with much skepticism, as is evident in the tone of this 1930 article in Time magazine (aside: reading an article from 1930 online is vaguely surreal).

ANALYSIS: The biggest risk from eating a so-called “all meat” diet is eating too much meat and not enough fat.  Too much protein, more than about 25% of calories, does seem to be associated with kidney inflammation and digestive problem.  The Bellevue experiment concluded that about 80% of Stefansson and Anderson’s calories came from fat — it should really be called the “mostly grease” diet.

A secondary risk is scurvy, especially if meats are overcooked, and fresh organ meats are not included in the diet.  Stefansson does note, in Part 3 of the same article, that eating fresh meat as you go provides superior protection against scurvy during polar voyages than do canisters of stale lime juice.  Apparently there’s plenty of vitamin C in a fresh penguin to stave off scurvy, provided you eat the whole thing.

Provided the diet is sufficiently varied and fresh, the “all meat” diet seems to support vigorous physical activity, a lean body, high immunity, freedom from dental caries, freedom from diabetes and heart disease, and no problems with osteoporosis despite being low in calcium.

  • Driving philosophy:  ideal and most efficient diet for supporting health during Arctic explorations
  • Staple foods: frozen fish, seal, caribou, polar bear
  • Not allowed: fruits, vegetables, grains, beans, dairy products, nuts, seeds, sugar
  • Supplements: none
  • Importance of organic foods: 100% wild meats, no agricultural foods = no pesticides
  • Health advantages: zero glycemic load, high in essential fats, overeating unlikely with no carbs
  • Possible health risks this diet overlooks or does not address: scurvy, parasites from raw meat or fish
  • Ecological impact: high, especially if animals are conventionally raised (on the other hand, no land lost to agriculture)
  • Cost: high, unless you hunt it yourself

Summary: Stefansson concludes, at the very end of Part 3, that eating meat as a primary food probably does not prolong life, but rather contributes to a more vigorous life, in effect speeding up all metabolic process, including aging.

Stefansson himself ate a diet heavy in meat for most of his life, and lived to be 83.  He maintained his health and fitness throughout his entire life.


NEXT POST IN THIS SERIES: THE ALL-CANDY DIET, THE PALEOLITHIC DIET

iHaters

By

On February 6

In Culture Rants/Shares

I’m a member of a growing group — those people that judge people who use their iPhones and similar mobile devices at social occasions.  Recently I confessed to a group of friends that I was a part of this group, and suggested we needed a name.  Someone (I forget who — please identify yourself in the comments), threw out the term iHaters.  I think it’s going to stick.

Oooo ... sorry about that.

iHaters, like myself, project a holier-than-thou attitude if you deign to check your email, or friends’ Facebook statuses, while you’re at my house eating my cheese and drinking my whisky.  We’re an annoying group, sadly shaking our heads (the expression is meant to convey a combination of disgust and pity) while you suckle from your digital teat, your zombified face aglow from the little screen.  We’re part of the same general group who has insisted, over the ages, that television rots your brain, that sugar rots your teeth, and that marijuana rots your memory.  We’re probably right, too, but that’s not the point.  The point is, we’re better than you.

As an iHater with a modicum of self-awareness, I decided to question my own belief that going to party to read your email, or taking a call to have a conversation when you’re already engaged in a conversation, is bad.  Maybe I’m right, but maybe I’m just that old Gen-X geezer shouting “Get off my lawn,” refusing to give up my fax machine, and insisting that people should pay for music they download from the internets.

I’m old enough to have witnessed no small number of cultural trends that I’m resistant to.  Some are stupid (pants so baggy they impede normal movement) and some, in my view, are cool (young men wearing hats).  Sometimes I get on board, sometimes not.  At first I thought Twitter was idiotic, now I tweet and like it.  My point is that I don’t hate everything new, at least not forever.  But the whole walking-around-while-staring-at-your-phone thing … I just don’t get it.

Internet in your brain, now that I’d be down with, especially if it came with an artificial intelligence augmentation that allowed you to operate multiple threads of awareness and processing in a fully parallel mode.  Like Data on Star Trek — you’re having a conversation with him and he’s also modeling warp drive modification simulations and researching Klingon opera singers.  But his brain is so fast, with fully parallel streams, that you don’t notice.  He’s right there with you.  Most people can’t do that, at least not very well.

STATUS UPDATES

I’ve heard the argument that texting with friends or posting status updates is an inclusive activity, a digital glue that keeps the social circle together.  Poor Lars, he’s at home in bed with a cracked fibula, but at least he can see what a fabulous time we’re having.

Ouch -- that's gotta hurt.

That’s what status updates are really for — they’re a digital “Hey, look at me!”  I’m traveling in Europe.  I’m eating pie in a pie shop.  Digitally posting something (especially with pictures) gives it weight and clear boundaries, an act of framing.  Sometimes this elevates the banal (drinking a cup of coffee), other times in trivializes the important (telling — perhaps unintentionally — the most minor of acquaintances that you just got engaged, or broke up).

Status updates are fun to read if you need a two-minute break.  Oh look, so-and-so is in Bali — it looks warm and mosquitoey there.  Hey look, you-know-who finally got a job — good for them.  It’s mildly entertaining and it helps us feel in the know.  It only becomes a problem when the posting and checking of updates becomes an involuntary compulsion … that’s when you get the iZombies at a party.

Oh wait, you say you weren’t even on Facebook?  You were just checking work email?  Whatever man.

CARS

Maybe phones, these days, are kind of like cars were in the Fifties.  It was new for everyone to have a car, and cars gave people (especially teenagers) a new kind of personal freedom.  For the first time, you could drive wherever you wanted to drive.  Cars were a new kind of personal space.  Your car defined your personality.  You could do stuff in your car, like eat, or watch movies, or have sex.  Why leave your car, ever?

Over the years people have become less enamored with cars.  Americans still love their cars, but drive-in movies, drive-in burger joints, giant back seats conducive to comfortable sex — those things have gone by the wayside.  For most people, a car is just a way to get around.  The car you drive (or not driving a car) can still be used to indicate your social status or political/ecological views, but the car is no longer the all-consuming center of modern life.  The phone is.

Back when cars were special.

When I was growing up, a phone was something that attached to a wall with a cord, that you used to call people.  These days, phones can still be used to call people (though not as easily or effectively), but they are also expected to function as entertainment centers, encyclopedias of all knowledge, dating support service providers, compasses, levels, GPS devices, scanners, cameras, video cameras, typewriters, faxes, computers, and personal security devices (I made the last one up, but there’s gotta be an app for that).  No wonder people are interfacing with their devices all the time, they do everything.  But will it last?

As an iHater, I hope the phone goes the way of the car, and we collectively start obsessing about something else, like flight shoes, or universal translator chips, or DNA remodeling.  If phone-obsessiveness faded, at some point staring at your phone while at a social event might become equivalent to taking out an iron and starting to iron a pile of shirts.  Dude, why are you ironing at this party?

I’ll leave you with two of my favorite phone-related clips.

David Lynch on iPhone

Flight of the Conchords – Camera budget

The Tyranny of Stuff

By

On February 1

In Culture Rants/Shares

VINYL IS DEAD, LONG LIVE VINYL

Last week, Spesh, Silencefiction, and I drove to the dump and dropped off approximately 1100 pounds of vinyl records.  This amount consisted not of our personal collections, but of Loöq Records back catalog material from 1998 to 2002 (the years we were pressing our own vinyl and selling directly to distributors and stores).

Losers on the digital battlefield

Spesh posted a picture of the sad, large pile of records on Facebook, and received a range of reactions.  Some people were concerned that we didn’t recycle the material (in fact, SF Recology, aka the San Francisco dump, is a zero-waste facility, and hosts artists-in-residence — experts in creative reuse).  Others were horrified that we were throwing out valuable music.  Others seemed a little sad, but accepted it as a sign of the changing times.  DJ’s play CD’s, or laptops, these days, and buy (or beg/borrow/steal) all their music online.  Only the hardcore holdouts, and diehards in Berlin, still play vinyl.  Vinyl is making a comeback among indie rockers and the like, but in the realm of dance music its essentially dead (except, as noted above, in Germany).

Back in the day (before digital distribution like iTunes and Beatport) it was hard to estimate how much vinyl to press.  You could base your pressing quantity on pre-orders from distributors, but then get stuck with no inventory if the record took off (and thus miss the boat with a slow repress time).  You could take an optimistic stance and press a lot of records (often the same price as a lower pressing quantity — most of the costs are in setup) but then get stuck with a large pile of 50lb-boxes of worthless plastic disks.  Once in awhile we would press the perfect amount, but usually we’d overshoot on the initial pressing or repressing.  This was generally my fault — I hated being out of stock of anything (this was all before digital distribution or high-quality mp3’s — when you were out of stock that meant there was NO WAY TO GET THE MUSIC).

Orders from distributors used to come in for a few weeks after a release — sometimes for a few months (or even up to a year, if a record really took off).  Everything left after that initial run became back-stock, or back-catalog.  For a while Loöq Records was able to move its vinyl back-stock steadily.  Drive to a record store, leave as many records as they would take on consignment.  Drive back in a month or two and collect money with about a 50% success rate (usually the records had sold, but half the time the paperwork was lost or the guy who could pay you wasn’t working that day).  Surprisingly, we moved a lot of vinyl that way … hundreds if not thousands of 12″ singles.  DJ’s liked and bought our records, when they could find them.

Then all the record stores went out of business.

We held onto our precious back-catalog vinyl for years (over ten years, in fact).  But over time, the boxes on the shelf started to loom over us oppressively.  They just weren’t moving.  DJ’s were buying (and we were now selling) all of our music on Beatport, Juno, iTunes, eMusic, and other digital outlets.

When the time came to move out of our old office on Brannan, it was time to let the old vinyl go.  We’ve kept some, of course, for the archives, or to satisfy the odd request from Germany, or in case the original artist requests a few additional copies.  But the bulk of it went to the dump.  Here’s a clip of me hurling a Jondi & Spesh 12″ (Sky City, I think it is), against the wall, shuriken style.  Enjoy.

LIMITS TO DIGITIZATION, THE RETURN OF PERMANENT POSSESSIONS, CORE QUESTIONS OF SUSTAINABILITY

I think that people, in general, are better off with music commerce being digitized.  Music is now universally available for the price of an internet connection, and quality is simply a matter of bandwidth (I pay an extra buck to download the WAV format on Beatport, and I wish I could on iTunes).  Books, and certainly newspapers, seem to be on a similar trajectory.  Within a few years (or decades, at the most) physical information formats will exist only for diehards, fetishists, and the eccentric elite.

Music, print, photographs, film, and software products can all be distributed and utilized in a digital format.  What about everything else?  Are there any general trends worth noting regarding the development of products in general?

I would argue that one significant trend is temporal appropriateness.  Most products last either too long (plastic bags) or not long enough (laptop computers).  Ideally, I’d like my plastic bags to harmlessly biodegrade after a few weeks, and my laptop to be an indestructible, perpetually useful item that can be passed down through the generations, like a silver pocket watch or a samurai sword (instead, I buy a new one every few years, either because the keyboard gives out, the screen goes black, or the damn thing is just too slow).

Side-effect of civilization.

If we keep making disposable, non-biodegradable stuff, then we’re going to drown in a heap of our own garbage.  Annie Leonard discusses the ins and outs of this cycle in some detail in The Story of Stuff (my friend Ariane turned me on to Annie Leonard’s work).  I buy industrially produced products — I’m part of the problem.  I’m not sure how NOT to be.  If there was a laptop out there that would last a hundred years, I would buy it (if I could afford it).  My friend Thor Muller‘s thesis is that we’re currently entering a long recession, and that one positive effect of long-term lowered consumer demand will be that product quality will actually improve; things will once again be made to last.  I, for one, would love to buy a laptop that doesn’t break after three or four years, even if I DO always type like I’m angry (I’m not, I swear, I just like definitive keystrokes).

Even if we — human beings — drastically reduce our ecological footprints, carbon gas emissions, and toxin-spewing industries, we may still run into the problem that there are just too damn many of us.  Seven billion and counting?  Even if we manage world peace, sustainable ocean management, zero-emission vehicles, giant solar farms, vast areas of protected old-growth forests, high-rise greenhouses, intensive soil-enriching polyculture, and a 99% non-renewable resource recycling rate, we may still run out of food, space, energy, and raw materials.

Is this likely?  Probably not.  Humans are fairly clever — we’ll find a way to muddle through and survive.  The rate of population increase is already decreasing due to factors like higher literacy rates, availability of birth control, and the fact that it’s frikking expensive to raise a modern child.  What worries me more is how we’ll deal with the eventual, inevitable decrease in human population.  It’s not likely to be pretty — our entire global economic system is based on perpetual growth, and how can you sustain perpetual growth when you aren’t adding new people to the system?

The character Daniel Aoki thinks, writes, and acts on these questions in my first (and as yet unpublished) novel, A Falling Forward Motion.  One possible escape route for humanity he hypothesizes (escape from the closed system of living on a single planet with limited resources) is for humanity to evolve “into the box.”  Virtual people — not simulations but discrete instances of human consciousness — living in full resolution virtual worlds.  The Matrix, more or less, but without the secrecy.  A next step for humans after a full lifetime of corporeal living.  I think that after a century or two on this planet in the same body (even if I manage to rejuvenate and maintain a perpetual 25-year-oldness, Aubrey de Grey style), I’d probably be ready to change it up a bit.  Presented with the option, I would totally upload into a digital reality where I could switch bodies, fly at will, teleport, and perform any other tricks that the programming allowed.  As long as I could still experience myself as a human being, why not?

THE TYRANNY OF STUFF

Right now I have renter’s envy.  I’m engaged in several kill-me-slowly projects.  I mean home-improvement projects.  Things not in their place, cans of paint lying around, half-assembled IKEA furniture waiting for a missing wall-mount screw … it’s death by a thousand cuts.  OK, I exaggerate.  I have a sensitive psyche.  But I don’t understand how people manage things like getting their kitchen remodeled.

One element of our home improvement efforts consisted of the recent destruction of half our storage space (in order to make room for an additional home office).  Getting rid of old stuff in storage requires a great deal of mental energy (why am I keeping this?  will I ever use it?  will I ever be featured on Hoarders?).  But it’s  ultimately rewarding when you take the leap; give something away, sell it, recycle it, or chuck it.  Straight up chucking it is underrated in this eco-conscious day and age.  It can be satisfying to send certain objects straight to the landfill (once again, I’m part of the problem).  The ex-roommate’s furniture that you never liked but somehow ended up with.  Electronic toys that make awful noises that someone gave your toddler (and your toddler left out in the rain).  You know the kind of stuff I mean.

Unless we’re vigilant, we accumulate stuff throughout our lives, kind of like the way our DNA accumulates cumulative damage from minor replication errors.  This crap weight us down; it oppresses us.  Buying a bigger house, renting storage space — these things might temporarily mask the symptoms of having too many things but they don’t solve anything.

THE PRACTICE

This method won’t do anything for the landfills, but it might lift a layer of detritus from your abode (like a face lift, or chemical peel, for your house).  The idea, introduced to me by my friend Stephanie Morgan, is to get rid of 10 things a day for 10 days.  Easy enough to do — for the first pass you can probably wander around your place almost selecting objects at random — but after a few days there is a noticeable decluttering effect.

What else?  Next holiday season, why not conspire with your loved ones to engage in a Buy Nothing Christmas?  Or pool your resources and make a charitable donation to Heifer International, Doctors Without Borders, charity:water, or another organization involved in good works?

My next big purchase … I’m still considering it.  I’d been thinking about picking up a PS3 (ever since my XBox got 3ROD’ed — my DIY repair only lasted a couple months).  But you know, that’s just another piece of crap that’s going to break or be obsolete in a few years.  I should buy something that can stay in the family for generations; a permanent possession.  Something like this.

Eating Animals, Getting Eaten by Animals

By

On January 27

In Health/Body-hacking

I’ve often thought about the ethical implications of eating animals.  I can’t say I’ve struggled with the issue, because whenever I’m presented with a roasted chicken or a sizzling plate of bacon, ethics are the furthest thing from my mind.

Would I kill an animal myself, in order to eat it?  Certainly I would, though I’d prefer not to.  I’m all for division of labor in this case — so thank you cattlemen and butchers.  On the other hand, if left to my own devices in the forest, I’d probably try to sharpen a stick and spear myself a deer to accompany my foraged chanterelles, roasted grubs, and wild greens.  As for my chance of success at this imagined endeavor — admittedly slim.  But it wouldn’t be zero; I spent a good deal of my free time in junior high developing my spear-throwing skills (not to mention nunchucks and throwing stars).  An ancillary skill I developed, related to these activities, was the installation of new windows.

Foraging ... perhaps easier than hunting.

Both sides have some good arguments.  No animal wants to be eaten, and many animals show every sign of being conscious creatures with emotions.  If you follow this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, then it makes no more sense to kill and eat animals than it does to kill and eat each other (and not just because of the prion issues).

Ethically concerned meat-eaters, on the other hand, might argue that many animals have become much more successful, on a species level, exactly because they are so yummy.  Chickens, pigs, and cows excel in this regard (there are more chickens roaming the earth than people).  For this group, the question is not so much if we eat animals or not, but how we treat them while they’re alive.

Unfortunately, most animals raised for food in the United States (and most other countries) are treated poorly.  This sort of animal abuse is well-documented, as on this site.  If you find this kind of treatment of conscious, living creatures to be abhorrent, then you’re probably 1) a vegetarian or 2) a buyer of ethically raised meat whenever possible.  Niman Ranch claims to raise their animals humanely, Glaum Egg Ranch doesn’t cage their hens, and hundreds of other producers provide (or claim to provide) their animals with environments that include open pasture, normal socialization with their own kind, and other animal perks that make animal eaters like me feel less guilty.  Pretty much all the meat, eggs, and dairy products that I buy falls into this category, but there are definitely some items in the unknown category (like salami).

And when I go to a dinner party, I never quiz the host.  I suppose there must some sort of cognitive dissonance going on here.  I do care about animal welfare, but even more so, I don’t want to be an obnoxious guest.  And when the steaming roast comes out of the oven, I’m not even thinking about the life or last moments of that unfortunate beast.  My baser instincts take over — I just wanna eat it.

Care to discuss Omega-3 fatty acids with this guy?

Does this make me a hypocrite?  Probably.  I do sometimes feel guilty about eating meat (especially when I’m not hungry).  I would have no problem with animals eating me when I’m dead, but surprisingly few animals would want to (vultures, mountain lions, great white sharks, tigers, and hyenas would all happily consume my flesh, but none of the animals I like to eat [sheep, cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, ducks, fish, oysters, mussels, octopus, squid, and snails] would have any interest in reciprocating, thus disrupting the potential symmetry).

What about vat-grown pork?  This will soon be a viable option.  If there’s only pig meat — no pig brain, and therefore no pig consciousness — there can’t really be anything ethically wrong with this approach, can there?  Unless you’re Jewish and kosher, I suppose, or Muslim, or hung up on vague nonsense concept like “natural.”  In any case, it sounds like the meat turns out a bit soggy, and lacking in muscle tone.  I think I’ll stick with Niman Ranch, and tolerate the occasional twinge in my conscience.

What About Health?

The healthfulness of eating or not eating animals, and what kind of animals, and what the animals themselves eat, is a hugely debated, highly divisive topic.  At social events, bringing up the topic of what a person should or shouldn’t eat has become a taboo equivalent to bringing up politics or religion.  It’s just not done in polite company.  Of course I do it all the time (all three) and usually end up regretting it.  These topics are simply too personal, too hot to handle.

When one person suggests to another person that they might be better off by changing their diet in some way, what usually happens is kind of an emotional head-on collision.  The person giving the advice is thinking “I care about you,” and “I want you to be healthy.”  The person receiving the advice is thinking “Do you think I’m so much of an idiot that I don’t know what foods are good for me?” and “You’re a totally obnoxious busybody.”

That dynamic aside, most of us are at least somewhat interested in the health effects of food.  Since there are financial interests backing every single food out there, there are no shortage of industry shills and scientists-for-hire presenting evidence that that you should consume their particular food item in large quantities.  Dark chocolate is good for your heart, as is red wine.  Milk is good for your bones.  Meat can prevent anemia.  Broccoli can prevent cancer.  But much of the information out there is contradictory.  There are advocates for all-meat diets and all-vegetable diets.  You can even get contradictory advice from the same person.  During the time that I was a vegetarian (approximately three years, during high school, which I am now convinced stunted my growth — my evidence for this is my 5’8″ height vs. my 5’11” arm span) I was an evangelical vegetarian, so much so that at my 20 year high school reunion some of my old friends still seemed to be carrying some resentment against my overzealous lectures, those that had occurred two decades previous.  These days I believe in the health benefits of a modified paleolithic diet, but I’m a much more cautious advocate.  I’ve learned that people don’t like to be lectured, and also that the content of my own advice can change over time (radically, in this case).

Eating whole foods and avoiding processed foods (like high-fructose corn syrup) probably has more impact on a person’s health than whether they do or don’t eat meat.  Genetics also has something to do with it — my ancestors co-evolved with cattle and thus I’m capable of producing lactase (which breaks down lactose) as an adult, while some of my friends won’t come near a glass of milk without a package of Lactaid.  So what about meat — is it bad for you or not?  It’s possible that eating large amounts of red meat (even from grass-fed, humanely raised animals) may raise the risk of some chronic diseases.  But if you look at the actual evidence that MEAT = BAD, it’s quite weak.  A lot of diet/health research studies are based on self-reported eating habits, which is about as accurate as  self-reported incomes on all those subprime loan applications.  The evidence that saturated fat is bad for you is even weaker (the latest evidence shows that small dense LDL’s — those that are produced from eating carbohydrates — are much more dangerous than the big fluffy LDL’s that are made from saturated fat).

Michael Pollan, in his book In Defense of Food, warns against “nutritionism,” a dogmatic belief in the value of individual nutrients, or itemized components of food rather than the food itself.  He points out, quite correctly, that conventional wisdom about food changes over time, so we should be cautious about food fads.  (He would probably call the paleolithic diet a fad as well, but at least it’s a fad backed by several millions years of hominid evolution.)

Bottom line?  I’m going to keep voting with my dollars, buying animal products only from suppliers that treat their animals humanely.  I may also continue to feel a twinge of regret when I see a cute pot-bellied pig at the zoo, after having eaten bacon for breakfast (or, if I haven’t eaten breakfast, maybe I’ll feel a twinge of hunger).

And if I’m hiking in the Oakland hills and a mountain lion eats me, well, fair is fair.

You look good ... to eat.

The Joys of Throwing Out Long-term Plans and Lowering Quotas

By

On January 22

In Creative Work/Career, Fiction Writing, Life Purpose & Goals, Metaprogramming, Writing

This year, instead of making New Year’s resolutions or making a list of goals for the year (something I’d done since 2006, with mixed success), I decided to take on one big goal for Q1, and leave the rest of 2010 unplanned.

My planning/goal-setting horizon has been getting shorter and shorter over the years.  I remember having grand life-arc type plans in college, and even as a child.  Once I entered the working world and decided I that I basically liked what I was doing (having my own music business and doing freelance database consulting), the “future-vision” shrunk to two or three years, and finally to one year.

Why shorten my planning horizon to a mere 3 months?

A big part of it has to do with reading Tim Ferriss’s blog and, more recently, reading his book The Four Hour Workweek.  Ferriss makes the point that long-term plans often function as dream deferrals.  Why start something now if it’s on the agenda for 2015?  The problem is, it’s too easy to defer those large, difficult, potentially life-changing actions indefinitely, perhaps so long that we die before we try.  This is true even if the deferred plan of action is a central part of our identity.  I’ve been thinking of myself as novelist since approximately age six, but it took me another thirty-four years to actually write my first novel.  Talk about procrastination.  Anything you’ve been putting off for thirty-four years?

Already a novelist in his own mind.

There’s a natural tension between identity and intention; some parts of our identity evolve out of performing the related actions (if you play soccer enough, you might start to feel like a soccer player), while in other areas the identity and intention come into being first (a high-school student decides to become a doctor and starts planning their academic path).  The distinction has less to do with the profession than it does with the character of the agent.  You could just as easily decide at a young age to become a professional soccer player, or, in your adult life, fall into practicing medicine (perhaps a weak example — of course you can’t just start practicing medicine without a medical degree — but many people do learn a great deal about human physiology as a hobby and end up giving informal health advice to their friends and family).

It’s the intention-related parts of our identity that are vulnerable to deferral, as opposed to the professions that sneak up on us.  For myself, writing is in the former category; computer programming and music production are in the latter.  Who knows why.  What about you?

EASIER SAID THAN DONE

I decided to take on one big, potentially life-changing goal in Q1 of 2010, and that was to write a first draft of my second novel.  It’s a big enough goal to get me excited and motivated, and simple enough to keep in my head every day without constant review (if you have fifteen goals for the year, it’s hard to remember them all — not to mention that by August half of them are irrelevant).

At the same time, I threw out any preconceptions about what the latter three-quarters of 2010 might look like.  Maybe Kia and I and our daughter will spend a few months working remotely from somewhere on the Mediterranean coast (I recently ran the numbers, this option could potentially be less expensive than our current lifestyle, especially if we can get in on some of that free European pre-school — you parents of young children living in the Bay Area know what I’m talking about).  Or, depending on the availability of Spesh or Mark Musselman, maybe there will be a new Jondi & Spesh or Momu album in the works.  In any case it’s exhilarating not knowing.

So — back to my grand plan.  I came up with what I thought was a fail-safe strategy to bang out novel #2.  I whipped out (or rather, clicked on) my digital calculator and figured out approximately how many words I would need to type every day in order to have a more-or-less novel length manuscript on my hard drive by March 31st.  I gave myself weekends off, as we don’t generally have childcare on the weekends (you try writing a novel while a two-year-old is clambering onto your lap demanding to look at pictures of choo-choo trains on your computer) and also planned on taking several “creative sabbatical” weeks where all I would do was write.

1150 words per day, on the regular working days.  That’s what the calculator said.  Okay, no problem.  My work was cut out for me.  Here’s what the first few writing days in January looked like, in terms of actual output:

Day 1: 297 words
Day 2: 402 words
Day 3: 351 words

Ouch.

I wasn’t spending eight hours each day in front of the laptop — nor was this ever the plan.  I still needed to eat, after all, and running Loöq Records takes some time.  I was hoping to hit my quota after two or three hours of focused work, first thing in the morning.

I liked the material I was coming up with, but at this rate it would take me all year to get a draft.  I kept thinking of Stephen King’s observation that after three months, “the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave radio during a period of severe sunspot activity.” Nope, don’t want that to happen.

It was my favorite goofy-hat-wearing vloggers, Tim Ferriss (again) and Kevin Rose, that came to the rescue, with this video post.  It’s long and (as the title warns) random, but somewhere towards the end Tim makes a reference to a story of how IBM achieved the highest sales by setting the lowest quotas.  The idea was to boost productivity by removing pressure, and in IBM’s case it worked.  Tim Ferriss is currently applying the low quota idea to his own writing project, with the goal of writing “two crappy pages a day.”

That sounded good to me.  I needed less pressure.  The 1150 word quota was looming over me every morning like a flying Nazgûl.  I reduced my quota to 750 words a day.  The next two days my word counts were as follows:

Day 1: 1147 words
Day 2: 1120 words

Go figure.  This was just two days ago, so we’ll see if the trend continues, but at the moment I’m feeling the lower quota.  I think the point of a quota is to get one’s ass in gear, and to have a minimum standard of productivity.  Quality is more important than quantity, but you can’t get to quality unless you produce something. Ideally, you get started and catch a wave, you achieve flow … then you hit your goal before you know it.  But for me having a quota is useful; it’s a guardian against sloth and inertia.

Did Rodin have a sculpting quota?

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