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Yesterday I wrote about losing interest in e-mail discussion lists, and today I'm on three new ones. I guess I need my communication fix. All three of them concern kefir, but one of them seems less interesting than I'd hoped for. It's about traditional nutrition, and the people who write there are not so interesting to me. Too much whining about conditions I don't wanna know that much about.
One of the lists seems just right for a person like me. They have three or four chatty moderators, and the owner now has other interests. The owner of the third list seems very informed, but capitalistic in an arena where capitalism is not considered so much a virtue. I'll probably just lurk there to pick up information about kefir.
The type of kefir that initially interested me is made from milk, but it turns out that there is another type of kefir made from water. The process for making both types appears to be similar, but according to what I'm reading you can't use the same kefir grains for both. I'm gonna need two kinds of kefir "grains" to cover my bases. It makes me very happy to have another topic to get obsessed about. Here is a link about water kefir:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibicos
The root word, Tibicos, supposedly derives from Mother Teresa's visit to Tibet, where the Tibetan lamas taught her how to make it and she carried it back to India where her work was. I'm a little confused though. I read other stuff and watched a couple of videos that take it back to Mexico where it grew on cactus plants there. Apparently, this is a very ancient medicine with sources all over the world. Why am I always the last to know?
One of the last things I seem to have encountered is the very idea that some ancient civilizations and cultures have the food thing worked out a lot better than my immediate ancestors. One of the reasons I started thinking about this notion came from a comment on some cooking show where the chef stated that Italians use their food recipes for medicine.
Yesterday I was watching a documentary on PBS where the presenter was talking about the early days of New York City where the diet there was basically copied from English foods. Immigrants would arrive there and wanna fall in with their new country's practices, and so they adopted the English diet to feel like they were a part of the existing culture. Not the Italians though. They stuck to the old country's diet, and for very good reasons. The English don't know shit about food. Ugh!
From there I began to think about old cultures and their foods. Three main groups. The culture of ancient Rome where people from all over the known world brought their homeboy stuff there to provide a different food that would appeal to the mix of immigrants coming from all over the Empire. When a human gets a little disposable cash, who among them doesn't look for something more interesting to eat?
The same thing happened in China where Asian people from those successions of Empires brought their best stuff to the Emperor's courts in order to seek favor and make a living. The third place where this happened were the Incas in South America. Their stuff was so different and so unusual to the European diet, like tomatoes and potatoes, that it changed the Roman diet forever, and for the better.
The old Deep South diet I was raised on, except for the cultured milk products and some of the preserved fruits, were actually bad for the good ol' boys that catered to them. In other words, it's been proved that "soul food" will kill you if you depend on it for the sake of tribal identity. I have an idiot friend who brags on his concept of "calculated country cooking" who is literally dying from it for political reasons. No wonder the South lost The War.
If I hadn't acted like an ungrateful fool I would have my own milk kefir grains that I can use to make my own kefir, and experiment with making various light beers from water kefir grains. I can buy all I want right now, but there is something unholy about buying something that should be offered as a gift.
Soon, when enough people find out my needs, they will provide, and I will come to them in their dreams and heal what ails them for their providence. That's the dynamic of gift-giving that is older than God. '-)
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