KILAUEA — What happens to food between the time it is harvested to the moment it ends up at a grocery store wrapped in colorful plastic or flashy cardboard boxes? Are the eggs purchased at a national food chain of
KILAUEA — What happens to food between the time it is harvested to the moment it ends up at a grocery store wrapped in colorful plastic or flashy cardboard boxes?
Are the eggs purchased at a national food chain of the same quality as those picked up at a local farmer’s market?
These were just some of the questions answered by Dr. Catherine and Luke Shanahan during their “Rich Cell, Poor Cell: How Peasant Foods Can Save Your Life” talk last week in Kilauea.
The stars of the show were not the Shanahans, however; they were Bill and Ollie, two brain cells.
Bill was a hypothetical unhealthy businessman who led a fast-paced life, with hardly any time for family or sleep, eating food only according to the latest trends. Ollie was a farmer, who lived and worked with the land and animals, enjoying time with his family and eating freshly grown food.
“Connecting your body to a healthy environment (like Ollie’s) is becoming a little harder to do … which is why we’re here,” Catherine Shanahan said.
Most of the foods bought at grocery stores have already been completely wiped out of whatever chemical information the earth originally gave them, Luke Shanahan said.
“Just being in storage changes their nature and balance of vitamins,” Catherine Shanahan said with regards to fruits and vegetables that are shipped over to the island, some already two weeks old by the time they reach stores.
Food obtained from local farms is always a better alternative, they both said, including meat and dairy products.
Eggs sold at national grocery stores are not coming from chickens running around outside, living a natural life and soaking up the sun’s vitamin D which is then transferred to the yolk, Catherine Shanahan said. They are feeding on processed grains given to them to small cages.
Many farm animals, including cows and chickens, are not even able to turn around in their cages, Catherine Shanahan added and said that California recently passed Proposition 2 which would prohibit the confinement of certain farm animals in a manner that does not allow them to turn around freely, lie down, stand up, and fully extend their limbs. The proposition, however, does not become operative until 2015.
“If you’re a vegetarian, we hope that there’s a meeting ground where everyone has to agree on this: No more torture food, no more torturing animals,” Luke Shanahan said, adding that properly raised animals are a kinder and more natural approach to nutrition.
Even farm-raised salmon do not have the same quality of nutrients as those caught in the wild, he said. “They color farm-raised salmon so that it looks like it came from somewhere other than outer space. It would be otherwise be gray.”
Farm-raised salmon also does not have the Omega-3 fatty acids that people tout as being a healthy part of an everyday diet, but have cancer causing Omega-6 fatty acids (found in many processed snack foods) instead, and “plenty of it,” Luke Shanahan said.
“One is related to nature, one says ‘to heck with nature’,” he added.
Projects Supervisor for Malama Kaua‘i, Andrea Brower, who helped organize last week’s event, said “it’s not about one diet/nutrition fad or another — all of which try to scientize the process of eating — it’s about knowing where your food is coming from.”
“As Luke said, ‘a carrot is not a carrot,’” Brower wrote in an e-mail Friday. “A carrot produced in depleted soils, stored in plastic for weeks, and shipped half way around the world, is going to give your body something really different to digest than a carrot grown in Kaua‘i sunshine and picked fresh by your neighbor farmer. Healing and sustaining our bodies and the ‘aina is part of the same process.”
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• Coco Zickos, business writer, can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 251) or czickos@kauaipubco.com
