Kefirology

This week, I made my own kefir using a powdered culture that I bought from Whole Foods.

The process is simple, elegant, and magical. I am not overstating matters when I say that, as I watched the milk's rapid alchemy into kefir, I felt the hairs on my arms tingle. Plus, the mixture smelled so clean and acidic that I had to force myself to cap the jar and leave it aside until the time was right.

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The recipe is simple. Add a packet of powder to a gallon of good milk and wait. Make sure the container is glass and that there's some way for the gas to escape. Otherwise, the pressure will cause the vessel to explode in your shitty 2005 Hyundai that hardly works any more.

Wait 24 hours for a thin kefir, 48 for a thick.

Lay 1/2 cup of the kefir aside and top it off with milk. Apparently, the culture will make an additional 5-7 batches this way. I wanted to be clever and started multiple batches from the initial one, including a buttermilk kefir, in honor of the dvd release of True Grit, a movie based on a novel by one of my favorite writers, Charles Portis. The main character enjoys her buttermilk, let me tell you.

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First batch was better than any kefir I've bought from the store - even better than the Amish produced kefir sold at the excellent Siberia Russian market in Nashua.

Some people run into problems because of milk temperature. To the amusement of the guys at Mass BJJ, I left it in my car. Since the week was fairly warm, this kept the milk warm and caused the fermented to occur quickly. It also caused a mild agitation to the mixture. The ideal temperature for fermentation is 86 degrees F.

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I was pleased enough with the results to cook up a batch of fermented yams for a Memorial Day bbq tomorrow. I added sorrel and dill to the cooling yams, then the starter culture, as well as non-iodized salt. I thought of using garlic, but then remembered it has antimicrobial properties which might kill off the culture. I looked this up online and, sure enough, I was right to avoid the garlic. Garlic doesn't discriminate between good and bad microbes.

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I took the photo in my front yard. If you decide to use it, please credit me.

Beware the Ginger Yeti

This is my friend Luis. He has started a bilingual paleo blog. That way he can sully paleo culture for multiple cultures at once. Find it here.

Paleo and Autism

Compelling testimony from Robb Wolf's webpage on how a paleo diet may have played a factor in reversing the symptoms of autism.

Fasting and Feasting

Not sure how credible the source is, but this is an interesting article on how fasting is good for heart health and HGH.

The BBC reports that culture consumption is good for your health, but interestingly notes that, for men, the effects were greater if they consumed, rather than produced, art. Could this be because male artists are fucking insane? I kid, I kid. I would think that a male artist in our world who is at all concerned with the truth of things is going to be a little off, almost by definition. Although I still hold that on some deep level, as Wallace Stevens said, "poetry is a health" and this extends to other creative realms as well.

Pineal Glands, Gut Flora, Green Shit, and a Soundtrack for the Endless Silent Rain

I tore something in my knee, so I've had to lie around all day. I was able to get into work and take care of everything before an early and inconclusive meeting at the doctor's office. On to the orthopedists!

Since my physical activity level is extremely low, I adjusted my diet. All I had to eat today was some celery, a pint of kefir (unfortunately, low-fat, in keeping with yogurt's marketing to neurotic women who've been brainwashed into thinking fat is bad for you), and a big plate of pulled pork, simply spiced. With the near constant rain over the past few weeks, I'm feeling a little bit NDD. But that has also meant I've had a lot of time to catch up on reading. Today I read Ray Carver for pleasure, but I'm also reading through a stack of books on the Pareto principle.

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Today, while at work, I set my computer up to play silent films in the background while I worked, and then I would replay the films and change the music in my ipod to study the effect it had. I mostly watched works by Stan Brakhage - who likely wouldn't approve of my experiment - and Georges Melies - who likely would. The music shifted from Lichens to some Will Oldham instrument music to The Body. Ah, The Body. And then there was Roland Kirk in there, too. It's nice to have a job that let's you experiment with consciousness while you work.

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It was interesting also to perform a Burroughs-esque scramble on the Internet's insistence and to see what happened when I deliberately altered the normal frantic pace by which the digital proceeds.

When I was younger, I found Brakhage tedious, but now, his films often and easily put me in the state of a child watching light play across the water. This sense I miss: I have a vivid memory from my youth of sitting near an anthill and rubbing my eyes and letting them deliberately blur over, entranced by the patterns of movements among the ants. It was an intoxicating experience and profound enough for me to remember it thirty years later. And, for moments today, as I watched his films I felt a minor resurgence of mere and mute wonder at simple and beautiful things.

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I drink the kefir both because it's so tasty and because of the probiotics. I suspect part of why paleo works so well is because it goes beyond our limited notions of humans as discrete selves in isolations and see them as ecosystems. When I experimented with different diets, the one that made me feel the worst was veganism, and the worst aspect of it was that for months I had terrible gas and my shits were green and soupy. This never went away until the day when I shifted course and ate only meat. Within hours, my shits turned back into the hale, hearty and firm manshits that seem to me, on some level, to speak of happy gut flora.

And, as I've gotten more into paleo foods, I find myself, like many people, less hungry during the day and capable of going longer and longer periods without needing to eat. Not only does this not tax my energy levels, but it seems to give me a surplus.

Which is why I started taking melatonin - to see how it might affect sleep.

Melatonin, for me, has a drug-like effect that goes beyond placebo. Apparently, As soon as I take it, I feel a nice warmth spread over my body. I am asleep within minutes, and I sleep restfully.

As I researched melatonin more, I thought of yogic claims that certain postures stimulated the pineal gland and even of old H.P. Lovecraft stories in which occult scientific techniques caused the pineal to "awaken" and the unfortunate seeker to see into other mad and frightening worlds. I also discovered that melatonin, like many other tools used to hack the mind, seems to at least anecdotally have an effect on lessening the effects of dementia. Since I have a personal interest in Alzheimer's disease, I've noted that creatine, high-fat diets, wild caught meat, fermented foods, activities in nature, sociality, and even learning new skills all seem to suggest ways in which the effects of Alzheimers might be lessened. I think by now most of us are comfortable with the notion that the etiology of the disease might be complex: that the cause and effect is not simple, and might never be clear under an outdated paradigm of 19th and 20th century medicine, but functions more like a network, or even an organism itself.

Of course, thinking this way is difficult, even for otherwise intelligent people.

Introducing the Paleo Champion of the World

Hello, five people reading this!

In December, I started following a paleo diet and I lost of lot of weight and I feel better and, well, there's a lot to say about what happened.

And there's a lot to say about the implications of this little dietary theory for general health, memory, disease, and creativity. There's a lot to say about the Internet, and eating pork, and ladybug sex, and fishing, and vibrating dolphins, and Huichol art, and coffee beans, and human co-evolution with dogs, and the pineal gland. From the connection between Alzheimer's disease and peanut allergies and nature deficiency syndrome to why the boring parts of Moby-Dick are the most interesting parts, we have a lot of territory to cover.

And since I'm laid up with an injured knee, there's no reason I shouldn't start on this Paleo Encyclopedia of Everything like, right now.