First blog for the new website!
Righto – I’m gonna set out exactly what Eat Your Environment is seeing as it’s pretty integral to all my adventures and experiments. Background first – I’ve been a chef for well over 30 years now, from cruise ships in the Caribbean and China to hotels in New Zealand to restaurants in New York. As well as quite a few stints in London and Suffolk including running my own pubs. And I’ve worked front house as well as back. 10 or 15 years or so ago and after experiencing many forms of Environmental Health systems across the world it slowly dawned on me how completely nuts it is to have this whole massive framework that controls how the food we consume is regulated. The fridge is the be all and end all of the system. Everything has to be within temperature, labelled with a Use By date at which point it has to be binned. Despite the actual food being perfectly safe to eat most of the time. I did a quick Google and discovered that only as recently as 1963 (the same decade I was born) only 6% of UK households had a bloody fridge – the US considerably more but domestic fridges have still only been around for maximum 100 years so far. So how did it become so ubiquitous? And how on earth did we as a species survive without one for the duration of our evolution? Which, for the sake of argument I’ll put from an arbitrary 500,00 years ago. Even though technically we’ve been evolving since the first single celled organism happened.
If you pick this point as your start it sets off a complex chain reaction that creates many more questions than it can answer. So what did we eat? How did we preserve and store food?
The answer seems simple – we would’ve eaten what was in our immediate environment – probably within a 10km radius of where we were living. We would have been fairly nomadic as well so we moving through territories yielding different foods – nuts, berries and animals. Organised farming didn’t happen until only about 12,000 years ago and even then it was by no means a sudden change – different societies had dabbled with it on and off for thousands of years, some giving up and going back to a hunter gatherer lifestyle. But eventually enough of a movement happened for it to snowball and now it’s taken over the world.
This is something I’ll dive into another time but basically as soon as you settle down and domesticate crops you’re tied to a geographical area. Manpower is key and farming requires it in spades. Which is handy as birth rates skyrocket when you’re domesticated – hunter gatherers wouldn’t have another child for several years – breast feeding acting as a natural contraceptive and constantly on the move means that you’re limited to how many kids you can have, plus infant mortality seems to be way higher with this lifestyle. As soon as you have crops you have something other people want to steal, increased manpower again tends to discourage raids. So it sets off a chain reaction of one potato, two potato and before you know it you’ve got an Industrial Revolution, leading to Capitalism which creates a virtually unstoppable behemoth hungry for constant growth to satisfy ever greedier market demands – often in the form of shareholders who want ever bigger returns. Yup, Greed. And so we find ourselves in a situation where food needs to have a longer shelf life, which makes for easier transportation and less waste which equals bigger profits. So pump those animals full of growth hormones, chuck antibiotics at them. While we’re at it fertilise the crap out of the crops, muck about with the genetics. It’s all for a bigger gap between the cost and the selling price. And people’s health is rarely considered, tests to see what all these chemicals to do people are only made public if they can be interpreted to show that they aren’t that bad. Corporations don’t have a proud history of looking out for the consumer.
Ultra-Captalism became a thing post WWII and we now have a handful of corporations controlling most of what we consume – everything from the manufacture, marketing, packaging, transport, testing is under one roof. And despite all the marketing spin these products are there for only one thing – profit. They’re not there to make you healthy or to feel good – they’re loaded with low nutrients, sugar, salt and chemicals designed to make you want more and more. And because they’re low nutrient your body wants to eat more because it knows it’s not getting sufficient goodness. Anyhow, I’m getting ahead of myself and a bit ranty. So what was the next step? For me it is blindingly obvious that the Global Food System is built on sand. Or money. We were managing perfectly well for 500,000 years – virtually zero cancers, heart disease, diabetes or any other ailments. Yes, I know it wasn’t all Utopian – getting out of infancy was a challenge back then but if you made it that far, your chances of a long and healthy life were a hell of a lot more likely than today. But what does that Global Food System look like? We now have an extra 7 billion or so people than we did way back which is going to put different pressures on the traditional model. In my mind it all came back to what we’ve evolved with, humans take SO long to adapt to the slightest environmental changes we stand no chance at all of evolving rapidly enough to deal with this totally new diet we’ve created – which is why we’re seeing a worldwide epidemic of obesity, as well as all the before mentioned diseases. And don’t think that we can create a pill to magic us out of this mess. Big Pharma have a vested interest in us being sick so they can sell us the cure. But it isn’t a cure, these drugs alleviate symptoms. For a massive price. Is it worth living an extra 30 years if they’re spent in pain, on a cocktail of expensive drugs or if you’re only able to have a fraction of the quality of life you should be living?
So I decided to try living as we used to – to immerse myself into an ancestral indigenous people’s diet and to measure the Before and After results. If I could successfully do this it would create a really solid base from which to figure out a better way to live. And so it was in Greenland in 2022 when I looked at kayaking from the south to the north, the qajaq having been invented by the Inuit thousands of years back and what they traditionally would’ve used to hunt from.Initially it was just to see if I could do it. Then, I thought, why don’t I see if I can do it by eating only what the Inuit would’ve eaten. I was starting to look into Eat Your Environment then and it totally made sense to me – immerse yourself in your environment. By eating hyper-locally then surely your gut microbiome is going to be in optimum health for surviving in that environment. Everything should be in tune. As opposed to bringing in 3 months ration packs worth of freeze dried crap. And then I got a bunch of microbiologists involved and had blood tests just before I headed out and then again when I finished to see what happened. I’ll go into in more detail in another post but suffice to say it worked way better than I imagined. Every health marker was improved, some dramatically. I then had the opportunity to come out to East Greenland this year – a 2 month stint cooking at a remote hotel owned by the legendary Italian explorer Robert Peroni. Of which I’m currently halfway through as I write this. And this time round I’ve supersized the Before and After tests. I realised that the kayak ones were slightly half-arsed and any interest, let alone feedback from the professionals wasn’t happening. So this time round I have a really comprehensive set of tests and results. And I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens. To date I’ve lost 10kg (in 30 days), am feeling great and sleeping really well.
So what next…? Firstly I’m gonna complete the kayak trip in the north – when I got to Upernavik in July 2023 the sea ice was unseasonably solid and unnavigable. So July & August I’ll be kayaking to Qaaanaaq (about 800km). Then I will be traveling to another 5 regions across the planet, each one a pivotal anthropological moment in our species evolution< - as they discovered new continents, new foods, new bacteria and new environments. I will be immersing myself in the indigenous diet - getting as close to what we would've eaten several thousand years ago to see what effect it has on me. It'll be interesting to see how my genetics affect how I fare. And the diets will range from virtually keto - as is the case here in Greenland to virtually vegan in other places. I'd bloody love you to come along for the ride.
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