Our ancestors would slice it and dry it. I love jerky. Smoking and salting are other options.

Raw meat stores best where it can breath and stay dry. That is why you always see the high-end meat in a butcher case uncovered. Dry ageing makes it more tender.  A closed container will cause it to get slimy and turn green. Wrap it in a cloth and put it in a paper bag if your companions don't want to see it.

Cholesterol is a molecule that transports lipids (fats) to and from cells. The good cholesterol is associated with transporting fat away from cells and using it for energy, the bad cholesterol is associated with transporting it to cells for storage. You can have a high total cholesterol but high good cholesterol which is really good: you are clearing out the excess fat.

People eating a lot of sugar and starch end up with a lot of bad cholestorl in the blood because the excess sugars are being converted to fat for storage. Scientists blindly made the association cholesterol = heart disease. It should have been sugar+starch = fat storage = heart disease.

Eating foods with cholesterol does not have the same association, and should not raise blood cholesterol more than briefly.

Watch what you eat not the cholesterol in the blood. We need cholesterol, it is good stuff.

See Westonprice.org to help dispel the cholesterol myth.

Beneficial bacteria and yeasts live in our digestive system and help us digest our food. They survive, we survive, everyone is happy. We co-evolved with them for millions of years. They even produce vitamins we need to survive. Herbivores must have them to survive and have evolved special digestive systems to help the process. 

Bad bacteria are either toxic themselves or produce toxins that make us sick. Evolution has given us the ability smell some of them so we can avoid them, while others are detected by our digestive system and we get diarrhea or puke them up. In sufficient quantities they can kill us, and they do. Some people have built up a resistance to some of them and somehow enjoy eating rotten (high) foods. To each his own.

Over long periods of time cultures have learned to cultivate and propagate the best symbiotic bacteria and yeasts. Yoghurt cultures, yeasts for bread and wine, sauerkraut acidophilus bacteria, and beers yeasts are examples. If you innoculate foods with lots of good microbes, the bad ones get crowded out. The good yeasts and bacteria can work inside or outside our bodies.   

This morning I shot a rabbit in my garden. I skinned it, buried the offal in the garden, ate the liver & kidneys still warm, and put the fetuses & head in my perpetual broth pot. The bones will go in later.

I raised rabbits for about 10 years for meat, but always cooked it. I tried eating raw wild rabbit muscle before but found it tough and bland. I was going to try dry aging this one but then decided on fermenting.

For years I have been researching Hesenpfeffer recipes. This is a German dish where rabbit is marinated in vinegar. I figured this was originally a naturally pickled rabbit recipe, possibly involving sauerkraut juice, but could find no information on the web. I did find this experiment for primitive buried pickled rabbit at this very interesting blog:

http://goingferal.wordpress.com/2009/06/25/fermented-rabbit/

however this person made broth from the rabbit and I want to eat it raw.

So I cut the rabbit up and smothered it with kimchi that I made last year. Kimchi is an oriental spicy fermented mixed vegetable food popular in Korea (its the national dish). It is made like sauerkraut.

I plan to leave it at room temperature for a few days to see what happens. I also added some orange juice and a little live vinegar. I am wondering if this will last for weeks or months like pickled vegetables.

Excluding high meat which I hate, does anyone have any experience or references for this type of food? This is more of a controlled fermentation using beneficial bacteria rather than just letting it rot. I imagine cevechi would be a similar seafood based ferment with a similar history and modern distortion.


 

Starch (plant based) is a long chain of simple sugars that breaks down very quickly in the digestive tract. Plants manufacture starches for stored energy. Animals break them down for metabolism. The plant seeds break them down (enzyme action) also when germinating.

I think the word carbohydrate refers to both starch and sugars.

It is my own idea from logical deduction after reading the blog. Trichinosis carrying swine have been religious taboo for thousands of years. And the post talks about bears being taboo in bear cultures. Most humans seem to have an inborn repulsion to eating dogs, cats, and other carnivores; but are fine with eating herbivores and marine life. Its like our inborn fear of snakes, spiders, and heights which cause death. Natural selection weeds out snake huggers, tree divers, and carnivore eaters. Those who avoid these things are more likely to live long enough to reproduce.

Why else would these trichinosis cysts migrate to muscle tissue and go dormant?

I found this amazing blog on the web but could not find the author to give credit. Read and enjoy!

Parasites: Those who Inhabit us

November 15, 2009 in soul food, Thought

Parasites have been coming up a lot in my life recently. Almost every day I am touching them, looking at them, talking to friends about them. Trying to understand what their role is, in me. Much of it has to do with the salmon we have been preserving; salmon are host to many parasites, but the one I have been paying particularly close attention to is a parasitic nematode this world calls Anasakis. They look like long, stringy white worms, I have seen them in the flesh of almost every salmon I’ve ever butchered, usually still alive, wriggling around. Humans are not hosts for them, they require a marine mammal’s digestive system to continue their life cycle. If a human eats the raw, fresh (drying kills them, there are no eggs present in the flesh, just obvious, living worms) meat of a host fish, they might not ever notice anything, or they might get nauseious and even puke up a clump of these little fellas. In any case, our bodies are not their chosen bodies. Salmon, of course, do carry other parasites that can inhabit our bodies. Like, say, tapeworms.

Yesterday I was slicing up the meat of a deer for drying, and found a few tapeworm cysts in it’s flesh. One way tapeworms reproduce is by migrating out of a hosts digestive system and into the muscle tissue, where they form cysts, a kind of egg almost, the intention being that when a carnivore eats the hosts flesh, the cysts are ingested and come alive in this new, carnivorous host, where they live in the guts and shed eggs via feces. I once butchered a large buck whose back muscles were completely infested with small, stringy white worms – possibly juvenile tapeworms on their journey to encyst.

How does one react? These are all parasites infesting creatures I ate, and continue to eat, raw. Is it disgusting? Stupid? I do sometimes freeze meat (14 days of freezing kills all parasites, says the USDA), or marinate it in salt water or a weak vinegar marinade when it feels just too graphically obvious there are parasites in it that will inhabit me, but this is mostly for phsychological reasons. The times I don’t freeze meat insure I am exposed to these parasites, and, to a certain degree, some of them likely inhabit me.

As they have inhabited humans, always.

Why are we disgusted at parasites? Is it their creepy crawlyness, hiding out in ‘our’ bodies (not theirs), stealing our energy? Do we just not like the idea of sharing our bodies? Or are there actual legitimate health problems that cause an instinctive reaction towards them?

One thing I can’t help but notice, and seems to be of huge relevance, is that many, possibly most, probably all, of the wild animals I have butchered have been inhabited by some kind of parasite. This leads me to believe that wild animals pretty much just live with parasites, that is the way. The remarkable thing is, all of these wild animals have been incredibly strong, beautiful, sensual, well adapted, vibrant creatures, capable of living in balance. Salmon, with anasakis larvae and tapeworm inhabiting their flesh, have a ridiculously strong life force – their whole lives essentially result in creating more fertility where they were born, bringing more beauty and aliveness to this earth. Deer are graceful, quiet, aware, strong, well adapted – with horrific tapeworms apparently robbing their bodies of energy.

Ten years ago, some white hunters in northern B.C. found the body of a native man in a melting glacier while they were hunting mountain goats. Scientists eventually analyzed everything they could about this person, who had died there between 300-160 years ago – his stomach contents, his hair, skin. He was traveling over a mountain range from the coast into the interior, barefoot, wearing nothing but a ground squirrel skin parka and spruce root hat, carrying some seal meat, crab, dried salmon, usnea, and a few tools. Drinking glacier water, eating blueberries. Got caught in a storm. He had tapeworms, fish tapeworms from eating salmon raw, dried or undercooked. What he didn’t have were any of the often severe nutrient deficiencies associated with tapeworm infestations in modern humans. He was hiking across an incredibly rugged mountain range, barefoot, after all.

Is it possible that in a healthy host, some parasites do not actually cause harm? Is it possible that some could even benefit their host, helping it live in a beautiful, sustainable way? It would, after all, be in their best interests to have a host that lives a long, healthy life, wouldn’t it? And what if we, the hosts, need them, in complex, subtle ways, in order to live in balance?

A friend actually got tested for parasites recently, after eating raw meat quite consistently for a couple years. Her doctor told her all she had was a very common parasite, she forgot the name, which even western medicine considers beneficial and essential to a healthy GI tract. There have been many studies showing that certain parasites cause shifts in their host’s immune system, make them less prone to certain allergies, more resistant to certain viruses and infections. It makes sense – it is the same force that drives salmon to enrich their ‘host’: the rivers, forests and oceans they inhabit and depend on for their continuation.

I still have to admit, though, that having a 100 foot long tapeworm living in my guts isn’t appealing.

Presumably fish tapeworms were a near universal ‘affliction’ for the indigenous people living all along the northwest coast, wherever salmon was a major (or minor) food, yet when researchers look, they find that the people living here before civilization, as a whole, had little or no tooth decay, their skeletal structure in general was ideal, most all of the chronic diseases and cancers of modern society were absent (refer to ‘Price, nutrition & physical degeneration’). They did not suffer from deficiencies, despite the parasites inhabiting them. On top of that, they lived in balance with their land bases, as part of them.

Now, when a modern industrial human gets fish tapeworms, they usually don’t notice them, but if they do, it’s often because of severe nutrient deficiencies ( B12 deficiency, anemia etc.). I suspect that periodic cleansing, taking strong anti-parasitic plants internally, and a diet free from processed foods, grains and high amounts of sugars, allowed the indigenous people here to have fish tapeworms inhabiting their bodies in a way that was not pathological, that was balanced and symbiotic. If a modern diet has an unbalancing effect on our bodies, it must follow that whatever parasites are inhabiting us would be knocked out of balance also. So one way of ‘dealing’ with parasites, and this is the one I advocate, is eating traditional foods – excluding grains and large amounts of sugars (that includes fruit sugars, honey, maple syrup etc.), foods that knock our bodies out of balance, and are the foundation of this culture that knocks everything alive out of balance.

Still, there are parasites that the indigenous people of this land would get very sick from. Like, say, trichinosis – a parasite that inhabits the flesh (skeletal muscle tissue, specifically) of omnivores (bear, raccoon, seal, cat etc..), sometimes fatal to humans when ingested, hence warnings to always cook the meat of such creatures very well, while the meat of herbivores is commonly eaten rare or raw totally safely.

Many cultures had/have strict taboos against eating bear, likely related in part to trichinosis. Others had taboos against eating bear flesh (where the parasites are), but would still hunt bears for their fat, which would be rendered (cooked) for storage anyways. Yet Bears, raccoons, cougars, wolves and sea lions, incredible, powerful, amazing creatures, live amazing lives while inhabited by trichinosis. Like us, they are omnivores, but something allows them to live amazing lives with trichinosis while we, even if healthy, get sick or die….

Slicing up salmon to dry a couple weeks ago, pulling stringy anasakis worms out of their flesh, still alive, a friend and I discussed what we should do about all of these parasites in our food? Why not cook it all? Cause cooking meat (red meat in particular) causes it to become carcinogenic, way less digestible – and not as storeable. Eating cooked meat you are guaranteed to be ingesting something that is in some way bad for you, whereas eating it raw, you are guaranteed that you are eating something good for you, that humans have eaten forever, that *may* give you parasites, which might not affect you in a bad way, depending on the creature you are eating and your health in general. Freezing is a good option if you really want to reduce you chances of infestation, that is if it’s below freezing outside, or you live with electricity. I don’t, and, eventually, humans won’t, so it isn’t a long term solution. I jokingly said to my friend: ‘we could just microwave it all, I bet that would kill the parasites!’ And it’s true, it would – in fact until all of this earth, and our bodies, have been irradiated, parasites will continue inhabiting us – they are everywhere – and we will continue seeing only a tiny glimpse of what they are, as part of who we are.

WHAT WE DO:

We usually eat the meat of herbivores raw, dried, without any anti-parasitic measures. Like I said before, though, if it is just too obvious there is a huge amount of parasites inhabiting a creature, we do something to ease our minds – these are all methods of eliminating parasites from you food, though I would only apply cooking and freezing to omnivores:

-freezing 14 days

-marinading in salt water or vinegar water (exact proportions I do not know)

-cooking

-microwave (joking!)

-drying kills some parasites (anasaki, possibly others) and reduces viability of many it doesn’t

-fermenting kills some parasites, if there is a signifigant change in the ph (acidity) of the meat.

-sprinkling salt on meat, provided it is sliced thinly enough

Eat traditional foods, what your ancestors ate, or what makes sense in the bioregion you currently inhabit – too many visits to the cake dumpster and those-who-inhabit-you will go crazy!

Romaine, the cat, and a pile of anasaki worms he coughed up after feasting on raw salmon for a few days.

There is grass fed-beef and then there is grass-fed grass-finished beef. If a rancher is attempting to build a customer base and reputation he/she will finish the cattle on prime agricultural land during certain times of the year when the grass is lush and nutritious with a high energy content that will be converted to marbeling (fat) in the muscles. It is more costly to finish cattle this way compared to sending them to feed lots.

The New Zealand beef industry is predominately grass-fed. They have developed breeds of cattle that grow and fatten well on grass. Same with Brazil. The international agribusiness corporations have not taken over all the food production there yet.

Cows on winter hay will have white milk and fat. In the spring and early summer it will turn yellow as the start to eat the fresh grass. Omega3.

Recently in the news they are finding more than half of grocery store beef contains drug resistant staf bacteria. The bacteria is coming from the cows themselves. This is because the feed lots have to pump the cows full of antibiotics to keep them alive in confinement eating food they were not designed to eat.

It is a survival adaptation for harmful bacteria and parasites to keep the host alive. If they killed the hosts off there would eventually be no hosts left.

Not dying does not mean not being infected. Everyone is infected to some degree. It is just a matter of more or less.

Birds have the digestive system to eat very small grains like those that existed thousands of years ago. I think like humans they are harmed by the starchy grains that humans developed.

Hot chile peppers evolved their hotness so that mammals would avoid them but birds don't. The birds spread the seeds around.

Actually most berry and fruit seeds evolved to survive the digestion systems. They are coated with sweet colorful coatings to attract birds and animals. The seeds themselves pass through, get spread around, and fertilized.

There have been quite a few public illness outbreaks traced to raw organic veggies because people think they don't need to wash it.

The problem is that organic growers can use manure to fertilize which gets splashed up on the plants. This can spread harmful bacteria and parasites.