How and When to Be Your Own Doctor - Moser and Solomon (simple ebook reader .txt) 📗

bushel of wheat is selling for a certain price, they mean #2. Bakers compete for higher protein lots and pay far higher prices for more protein.

We prefer our bread about 25% rye, but rye contains no gluten at all. Mix any rye flour into fourteen percent wheat flour and the dough becomes very heavy, won’t rise, and after baking, crumbles. So I kept looking for better grain and finally discovered a knowledgeable lady that sold flour mills and who also was a serious baker herself. She had located a source of quality wheat with an assayed protein content and sold it by the 50 pound sack. When I asked her if her wheat was Organic she said it was either sixteen or seventeen percent protein depending on whether you wanted hard red spring wheat or hard white spring wheat. Organic or conventional? I persisted. No, she said. High protein!

So, I said to myself, since protein content is a function of soil fertility and since my body needs protein, I figured I am better off eating the best quality wheat, pesticide/herbicide residues (if there are any) be damned. Think about it! The difference between seventeen percent and fourteen percent protein is about 25 percent.

That percentage difference is the key threshold of nutritional deficiency that makes teeth fall out. We can’t afford to accept 25%

degradations in our nutritional quality in something that we eat every day and that forms the very basis of our dietary.

Please understand here that I am not saying that high protein wheats can’t be grown organically. They certainly can. The founder of Great Harvest Bakery performs a valuable service locating and securing high-protein lots of organically grown wheats for his outlets. But often as not Organic products are no more nourishing than those grown with chemicals. Until the buyers at Organic whole food wholesalers get better educated about grain, obtaining one’s personal milling stock from them will be a dicey proposition.

Sometimes Organic cereal can be far worse than conventional. To make a cereal Organic is a negative definition; if it hasn’t had chemicals, then its Organic. Grain is one of the few foods that will still produce economic yields of low quality seed on extremely infertile soil or when half-smothered in weeds because herbicides weren’t used for reasons of ideological purity. Vegetables will hardly produce anything under those conditions; carelessly grown fruits and vegetables are inevitably small, misshapen, unmarketable.

But seed cleaning equipment can remove the contamination of weed seeds in cereal grains (at a cost.)

The price the farmer receives for Organic cereal grain is much higher, so it is possible to accept rather low yields or expend more money for cleaning out high levels of weed seeds from the field-run harvest, and still make a good profit. A lousy Organic cereal crop like this might even make a higher profit because the farmer has been spared the expense of fertilization, of rotation, of weed control. I remember once I bought a sack of Organic whole oats that were the smallest, most shriveled, bitterest oats I’ve ever tried to eat. We ended up throwing out that tiny, light (lacking density) seed in favor of using the “conventional” whole oats that were plump, heavy and sweet.

Wheat is not the only cereal that is damaged by industrial milling.

So are oats. Most consumers have never seen whole oats; they look very much like wheat berries. But rolled oats become rancid and stale on the shelf much like wheat flour on the shelf.

Another pitfall about using whole grains is that to be nutritious they must still be fresh enough to sprout vigorously. A seed is a package of food surrounding an embryo. The living embryo is waiting for the right conditions (temperature and moisture) to begin sprouting. Sprouting means the embryo begins eating up stored food and making a plant out of it. All foods are damaged by exposure to oxygen, so to protect the embryo’s food supply, the seed is surrounded by a virtually airtight seed coat that permits only enough oxygen to enter for the embryo’s respiration (yes, seed breaths slowly). Often the embryo is located at the edge of the seed and has its own air intake port. When the seed coat is removed or damaged, the innards are exposed to air and begin deteriorating rapidly. In the case of oats, especially rapidly, because oats are the only grass-based cereal that contains large quantities of oil—five percent oil, more or less. That’s why oats “stick to your ribs.” Rolled oats become stale and lose their flavor (and nutritional content) and perhaps become rancid very rapidly. So we make porridge from whole oat groats that we coarsely grind to grits (steel-cut oats) in an electric seed/spice mill just before cooking.

It is not easy to cook oat grits. They take a lot longer than rolled oats and if not done exactly to the recipe I’m about to give you, will almost inevitably stick to the pot badly and may also froth over and mess the stove. Here’s how to cook them. Coarsely grind (like corn meal) your whole oats until you have one cup of oat grits. Bring exactly four cups of water (no salt) to a very hard boil at your highest heat. You may add a handful of raisins. Light or turn on a second, small-sized burner on the stove and set it as low as possible. Into the fast boiling water, slowly pour the ground oats, stirring continuously. Take about 30 seconds to pour it all or you’ll make clumps. Keep on the high heat until the water again boils vigorously. Suddenly, the mixture will begin rising in the pot and will try to pour all over the stove. This means it is all at boiling temperature again. Quickly move the pot to the low burner; that instantly stops the frothing. Then cover. Let the porridge cook for 30 minutes, stirring once or twice to prevent sticking. Then, keeping it covered, turn off the heat. They can be eaten at this point but I think it is better to let the oats finish soaking on the stove for at least two to four hours. Then reheat in a double boiler, or warm in a microwave.

We usually start a pot of oats at bedtime for the next morning. See why people prefer the convenience of using rolled oats? But once you’ve eaten oats made right, you’ll never prefer the flavor of rolled oats again. And if the human body has any natural method of assaying nutritional content, it is flavor.

Nutritionally, millet is almost the same story as oats. Millet seed is protected by a very hard hull. Cooking unhulled millet is almost impossible. After hours of boiling the small round seeds will still be hard and the hulls remain entirely indigestible. Worse, the half-round hulls (they split eventually) stick in your teeth. But prehulled millet, sitting in the sack for weeks and months, loses a lot of nutrition and tastes very second-rate compared to freshly-hulled millet. It is possible to buy unhulled millet, usually by special order from the health food distributor—if you’ll take a whole sack. Millet can be hulled at home in small batches.

Here’s how we figured out how to do it. There probably are better ways.

Using a cheap steel-burr flour mill, set the burrs just far enough apart that the seed is ground to grits, but not flour. This pops the hulls loose. An old mill with worn-out burrs works great for this job. Then you have to get some hand seed cleaning screens just large enough to pass the grits but not pass the hulls (most of them).

Window screen or other hardware cloths won’t work. Seed cleaning screens come in increments of 1/128 inch; we use a 6/64” round screen. Other batches of millet might work better with a screen one step larger or smaller. It will take you a little ingenuity to find hand-held screens. They’re used by seed companies and farmers to clean small batches of seed for inspection and are usually about one square foot in size with a quality wooden frame. Larger frames made of the same screening material are used in big seed cleaning machines. (The hulls could also be winnowed out by repeatedly pouring the grit/hulls mixture back and forth between two buckets in a gentle breeze.)

After you’ve screened out most of the hulls, the rest will rinse out, floating off as you wash the grain prior to cooking. We never hull more than enough millet for two or three meals and keep the uncooked (unwashed) millet in the freezer in an airtight jar. It is interesting how people will accept poor nutrition and its consequent sickness as the price of convenience.

If you eat much buckwheat you should also figure out how to hull (sometimes called groating) it yourself. Someone should write a thorough book on the home milling of cereals. And perhaps sell the equipment by mail. Probably would be a good little homestead business.

Something else you need to keep in mind about seed. Even though the embryo’s food supply is protected by the seed coat, it still slowly deteriorates, steadily oxidizing and losing nutritional value.

Eventually old seed looses the ability to sprout. The decline in germination ability matches a decline in nutritional quality. Any seed you are going to use for eating should possess the ability to sprout, strongly and rapidly. (After you’ve comparatively sprouted a few grain samples, you’ll know what I mean by this.) Fortunately, cereal grains usually sprout well for quite a few years after harvest if they have been stored cool and dry. Eating dead or near-dead seeds will help move you closer to the same condition yourself.

Finally, one more warning about buying store bread. Salt-free bread tastes “funny” to most people. It bakes fine, salt is not necessary to the leavening process, but no bakery could stay in business without salting their bread. The standard level of salt is two percent by weight. That is quite a lot! Two percent equals one teaspoonful per pound. I’ll have more to say about the evils of salt later on.

I imagine some of my readers are feeling a little overwhelmed by all these warnings and “bewares ofs,” and intricacies. They are used to taking no responsibility for securing their own food supply quality and have come to expect the “system” to protect them. I believe it is not because of lack of government intervention, but because of government intervention itself, our food system is very perverse.

Until our mass consciousness changes, if you wish to make yourself and your family truly healthy, you are going to have to take charge and become quite a discriminating shopper. Unconscious consumers are on a rapid road to the total unconsciousness of death.

And again, let me remind you here that this one small book cannot contain everything you should know. The bibliography at the end of should become your guide to earning your post-graduate education in nutritional health.

Freshness Of Fruits And Vegetables

Most people do not realize the crucial importance of freshness when it comes to produce. In the same way that seeds gradually die, fruits and vegetables go through a similar process as their nutritional content gradually oxidizes or is broken down by the vegetables own enzymes, but vegetables lose nutrition hundreds of times more rapidly than cereals. Produce was recently part of a living plant. It was connected to the vascular system of a plant and with few exceptions, is not intended by nature to remain intact after being cut. A lettuce or a zucchini was entirely alive at the moment of harvest, but from that point, its cells begin to die. Even if it is not yet attacked by bacteria, molds and fungi, its own internal enzymes have begun breaking down its own substances.

Vegetables, especially leafy vegetables, are far more