How Bolivian Farmers Made the World Crave Quinoa
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It's listed frequently in gluten-free literature as an alternative to gluten rich wheat products.
All that being said, it tastes fine and isn't overly burdensome to cook. It's a nice change of pace from other staples as part of a well varied diet.
It would be interesting to compare results over time, my son was diagnosed quite awhile ago and it was cheap and easy to go cold turkey WRT grains, whereas I think paradoxically it might be harder today for people recently (self?) diagnosed because there so many "here's a GF sorta-cookie-like object for a mere $6.95" products in stores. Or the GF pancake mix that tastes good even to me, but is about $10/box. Its a lot cheaper, and arguably easier, to eat naturally GF products than artificially GF products, what I'm getting at is its a lot cheaper and easier to make a GF omelet for breakfast than to go thru what you need to do to make (or buy) GF french toast. Its easier and cheaper to make your own taco meat seasoning than to try and buy a packaged envelope that doesn't use wheat flour as a thickener, for example.
(Glycemic indexes are notoriously hard to directly measure; even the numbers you may scare up on the Internet are often only approximations. So I can't prove my statement. All I can say is that when I eat many of those products, I get the same essential reactions to them I do when I eat candy. Which I don't do anymore, either. Of course, in some cases, it simply is sugar... for instance, look at [1] . 18 grams of sugar in 28 grams of cake = 64% sugar! I went to substantiate a claim I wrote here that some of the things were 50% sugar and did more than that. Of course, compare with [2], non-gluten free, 16g sugar in 26g product) for 62% sugar.)
[1]: http://www.generalmills.com/ColorBoxImage.aspx?ImageId={2370...
[2]: http://www.generalmills.com/ColorBoxImage.aspx?ImageId={C84C...
I think if you have to change foods because of a debilitating issue like Celiac, getting rid of whatever is making you feel like you're about to die isn't all that hard and thus you don't really want to terrible substitute. It's the folks who are induced into the fad who don't really feel all that different one way or the other outside of some kind of placebo effect who still desire the foods that "were making them sick".
I think it's a particular kind of disgusting to convince people who are otherwise healthy that eating certain foods is making them sick when it isn't, it's infantilizing them and I think it takes away from the seriousness of the real disease and the people who really suffer from what's a very painful and often socially crippling issue.
One example is alcohol is a food!
Yes $8 GF cupcakes with weird taste and texture are ridiculous but when all the other kids are having tasty $0.50 cupcakes at the birthday party my son wants one anyway, so on rare occasion we buy one of the mostly awful and expensive substitute products.
The other is that X% of the celiacs are asymptomatic. Till they bleed out of an ulcer, or die at a ridiculously high and young rate from stomach cancer. If your allergen blood test measures off the charts, and the gastroenterologist does a biopsy and its all inflamed, even if you claim to "feel fine" it would be dumb to keep eating wheat. With my son it was a little more obvious as wheat products made him explode out both ends, eventually resulting in the two medical tests above. As advice its along the lines of, if you feel OK, then no need to take your blood pressure meds, or if you feel OK then no need to take your psych meds that day, or if you feel OK then no need to finish your course of antibiotics. I wouldn't really go there, even as satire.
Farmers use grains to fatten mammal livestock, about 2/3 the human mammal population in the USA could stand to lose a bit of weight, and wheat is a grain, so cutting grains is a truly great idea for about 2/3 the population regardless of allergy. I'm perfectly fine with gluten but I lost some excess weight anyway when we went mostly GF at home.
Gluten is not an essential nutrient. You'll be perfectly healthy without it. Now I suppose some flake out there could propose a diet where you consume zero vitamin C until you're admitted into a hospital with scurvy... Although that kind of flakiness does exist in other situations, its perfectly safe not to eat gluten containing foods. The only real danger is wasting lots of money on expense artificially GF foods, which I advise against doing other than for social situations, and the danger of losing some weight.
One point where I agree totally with you in fact, but not in outlook, is the infantilizing subject. Infants are going to be infants. Can't be bothered to take chemistry because you'd like someone else to do your thinking for you, thats called being an infant. Can't be bothered to learn anything about nutrition other than directly or indirectly paid advertisements, thats called infantile behavior. Babies are going to be babies, thats just what they do. No point blaming the messenger or the topic, a moron is quite capable of finding another way to do something moronic without anyone's encouragement. So getting nutritional advice from Hollywood stars is just what infants naturally do; after all they learned about vaccines and autism from the same folks. Normal behavior is not a problem. That behavior being normal for lazy/dumb people is the problem.
As someone who has seen the inside of a QA lab at ADM, I think this is a much more likely scenario. The technicians either give good tests that pass the already loosened standards, or they get fired. There was a big problem with Vomitoxin in 2010, due to a lot of wet weather, but that has subsided with this year's drought in the midwest, but many coastal areas which also farm are seeing much more rain this year.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vomitoxin
Combine this uncertainy or "back scratching" quality issues, with typical industrial food practices such as fumigating with phosphene and Sulfuryl fluoride, using more insecticide than recommended and all the fun and exciting stuff coming down the GMO pipe, it's no wonder consumers have lost their appetite for American commodities. They're getting sick from them. All these techniques are tested to have "minimal" impact on the health of consumers, but combine them all, and who knows, certainly not scientists, but people do from first hand experience. How many food recalls have already happened this year? Compare that with other years.. These recalls are not from better testing and transparency because these recalls are for food already in the market and sickening people.
I am mostly a paleo diet type guy but I try lots of foods and its not bad, properly prepared. The primary problem seems to be taste. Its not that much different than rice and is cooked roughly the same way and spiced roughly the same way. It is an excellent protein source for a starving village farmer if its "free" or cheap, but at now $10/pound I'm better off with steak as a protein source in my diet, or fish, or pretty much anything else.
Lets say I pay $4 for a pound of bratwurst. He cannot do more than $4 of environmental damage and still stay in business. Even if brats magically fell from the sky for free, he simply can't do worse than stack up $4 worth of lead and old car tires and set them on fire or whatever other environmental degradation you can imagine.
The good organic farmers market meat costs more than $4/lb but less than $10 so the argument still holds. In fact I'm about to take delivery of a quarter-cow from a local organic farmer, got my high efficiency freezer all defrosted and emptied and ready to fill with delicious organic local grass fed beef.
On the other hand, the guy who I just handed a $10 to for a pound of quinoa can stack of $10 worth of old car tires and set them on fire and dump $10 of antifreeze into the river or WTF. He can afford to "ruin the environment" to the tune of $9.99 and still stay in business, unlike the brat guy above who would go almost instantly out of business if he spent $9 trashing the environment for every $4 incoming.
This is before I even get started on the supply side, where for the sake of argument lets say I have to kill one baby seals per $1 take home pay. That means to earn the $10 for quinoa regardless of how "pure" his quinoa growing operation is, ten baby seals died, whereas to earn the $4 for brats, regardless of how "pure" his pig sty is, a mere four baby seals had to die. I would argue that most people in the real world work at pretty ugly companies, ecologically speaking, so most of the enviro damage comes from earning the money rather than how its spent. Another example is I burn about a gallon of gas per day that I drive to work, so even if I do the ultimate green thing and finance planting a rainforest or something, I've still ecologically destroyed a gallon of gas before I even crack open my wallet.
There are some interesting petroleum arguments also, in that a pound of "meat" from the organic farmer five miles away at the farmers market burned a heck of a lot less diesel / bunker fuel than a pound of quinoa from another hemisphere. Although a small timer grew and sold a little native quinoa at the market which I bought, reality is that the vast majority of it is imported from another hemisphere at substantial cost.
I can buy locally grown organic beef, pork, and chicken. Most people can't buy locally grown quinoa. Some people can, and American's are literally starving them out of the local quinoa market, which is too bad.
Don't get me wrong, I am a hard core environmentalist at heart for example I think people who dump industrial waste into rivers I hike by should be capital punished by being forced to drink what they dumped till they croak, its only fair since the poor bastards living downstream are already literally drinking it... But feel good irrational non-analyzed environmentalism does more bad for the earth than good, and it turns out the reality is that everyone's better off if I eat a quarter pound steak rather than a quarter pound of quinoa, under existing conditions.
$4 for a piece of wood from a forest where the company harvesting the wood does not replant any trees. They ravage the forest, leaving the land barren and unusable, before moving on to the next forest.
$6 for the same sized piece of wood from a forest where the company harvesting the wood replants trees, thereby increasing costs. They sustainably manage the same area of forest and the land remains fertile.
According to your logic, the $6 wood is 50% more environmentally damaging? Clearly we should all buy the $4 clearcut, ravaged forest wood because that manufacturer has less money to damage the environment with?
You later disprove this assumption yourself when describing how local goods can have fewer negative externalities than those imported from across the globe.
In comparison, an externality would be using my wifes prius to pick up a quarter cow from the butcher shop instead of a SUV. The price of the cow is constant but total environmental damage depends how its shipped. There are enough organic farms in my area that its assumed you'll pick up locally so there's a fixed price and you handle your own shipping aka drive out to the farm and back. My wife is arranging a quarter cow and I'm told its about 50 miles round trip, which is only about a half hour away. I can see how this business model wouldn't work for people living in Las Vegas or another desert.
That money goes somewhere. If I give someone 2.5 times as much money, they Could theoretically do 2.5 times as much "bad stuff". There seems to be a lot of hostility toward that obvious logical idea, no idea why. Think about it... local oil change place down by the river... if 200 people each give them $20 they can dump two barrels of used motor oil in the river. Now if only 100 people give them $20, how do you propose they'll dump the same two barrels of used motor oil in the river, if they only have one barrel anyway?
If I hire a repairman to repair my rain gutters, he can only afford to keep his old truck running. If I pay 3 times as much so he installs new gutters, he now has enough dough for a downpayment on a new truck, so he buys a new truck. It seems blindingly obvious which transaction results in more environmental damage... more money meant new gutters instead of fixing them, and a new truck. Less money means neither.
You can fool the finances for awhile, but not forever. $10 of something greenwashed is inherently going to cause more total damage than something the opposite of greenwashed but only $4, especially if they're basically the same thing sold by the same type of people.
According to your argument, buying organic food is worse for the environment than buying non-organic food because it costs more. Likewise, buying hydroelectric power would be worse for the environment (have more negative externalities) than buying coal power if it cost more. Do you dispute the logic of this extension of your argument?
I recently bought a cheap little commuter car for about $15K. I could have bought a much fancier car for $30K but why waste the money to show off my wealth to people on the interstate whom I don't care about? Besides I'm pretty well off but I can find plenty of fun things to spend $15K on and a fancier car doesn't quite make the top 100 or so.
Can you make a reasonable argument, that given the same manufacturer and roughly the same workers that the $30K car wouldn't by definition cause about twice the environmental damage as its constructed as the $15K car? I think thats an epic engineering fail.
Now lets say I bought a 4WD all terrain $40K pork-mobile commuter instead of a green (paint) $100K quinoa-SUV... I'm sure the planet would be trashed about 2.5 times worse by the SUV than my glorified golf cart. Now then lets step back into the world of farmers and their products...
That doesn't make sense at all. There is not a 1 to 1 relationship, or even a linear relationship, between price and environmental damage.
All your arguments seem like you're trying to equate low-cost in dollars with low environmental damage. This is not the case, in food or in cars. In fact in many cases the exact opposite is true.
The problem is that there are a ton of externalities. Farmers aren't paying the cost for the ecosystems they destroy or the waterways they pollute or the monocultures they develop or the greenhouse gases they emit. They can trivially do more than $4 in environmental damage for your $4 purchase.
Think about it this way... human nature MIGHT be more dramatically different between vegetarian and meat eater than it is between two farmers, one who sells asparagus and one who sells beef. Even more confusingly there are small time farmers who sell both plants and meats yet have about the same political outlook as they slop the hogs or spray the fields. Your ascribing a large difference in customers, which probably does exist, to somehow apply to a relative monoculture of suppliers, where I don't think a major difference exists. I'm not buying it.
As a PR tool, yes for vegetarians its popular to publicize animal abuse and rivers of blood from slaughterhouses and such. That valuable PR tool WRT vegetarianism doesn't necessarily mean anything WRT environmentalism. The farmer spraying god knows what on his fields which you eat from is hardly the paragon of virtue just because you don't see any animal blood.
Furthermore you're assuming I work at a greener company than most farmers. Possibly true to as many as half the people. Obviously, $10 of income causes 2.5 times more environmental damage than $4 of income.
Finally the cold hard truth is for most people, food enviro damage doesn't matter compared to their giant SUV or obese mcmansion. Or obesity in general. I'm a mid size dude, in the tiniest highest conventional MPG car I could get, living in a small old house... I can eat ten steaks a day and not cause as much enviro damage via my lifestyle as one fat SUV driver who only eats (enormous quantities of) kale. Most people are like that, and their house, thermostat, car, and job swamp any food purchase effects by a large enough factor to ignore. Food works as a "guilt sells" PR tactic, its very Puritan, and its traditional to make americans guilty about their diet to control them. But I'm not buying it. I don't think the numbers fit reality.
If I have a hillside that isn't being used for anything else, than fair enough, I could throw a couple of sheep/goats on it and later reap the rewards.
I'm not sure how many of these romantic pastures continue to exist though. I live in a green fertile valley, where sheep farming is rife. The sheep get additional feed on top of their grazing. I'd prefer acres of trees or some other arable crop instead. Sadly most of us won't ever get access to the land to do so.
Less than 1% of the population owns 70% of the land, running Britain a close second to Brazil for the title of the country with the most unequal land distribution on Earth. - http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/17/high-ho...
Also, is it possible that grain farming is worse for the planet in some circumstances and better in others? I am sure that a small rice paddy is much better for the environment than a barn full of chickens in cages too small for them to stand up.
Grain and legume farming kills massive numbers of amphibians, birds, and rodents, with huge knock on ecological consequences. When you slaughter a pastured cow or sheep it's one life. During their lives the hooved animals serve a vital role in grassland ecology. The 1930s American dustbowl desertification happened in substantial part because of the preceding elimination of bison and steer.
> a barn full of chickens in cages
If chickens are caged in barns they're eating mostly grain. Historically normal chickens ran around outside and ate mostly bugs, in season.
Europeans decimated the Americas for their corn fed fatty marbled cattle. The rainforests are being cleared for soy, as with most arable crops a high percentage are grown as animal feeds. So there isn't any escape. Eating a cow has collateral damage too.
Take a fraction of those arable crops, don't bother meat farming and move over to better farming methods that are more in tune with nature. It's a balancing act.
If you haven't any ethical qualms about meat eating then you can still farm those fringe places pastorally - reindeer, goats, kangaroos etc.
I still think there's better use for that land than raising cattle on it. I can't help but think that good meat is reserved for the luxury of a few, that includes well raised organic meats. It's only the wealthy people that I know that can afford such.
Are you claiming cowboys are herding cattle in the streets of Manhattan? Or "everyone" wants to move to a cattle ranch in the middle of nowhere in Texas but they just don't know it yet? You could work your argument either direction but I don't think either will work very well. Farmers and ranchers like money just like anyone else. If they could subdivide their land to city slickers at SFO/SV square footage prices I think they would...
After a while I told my girlfriend I'm just going to make rice because quinoa is just silly, so she decided to make it herself. She's not a very experienced cook, but she tries, and as she tried rinsing it half of the stuff went down the sync, she yelled out in frustration... But she continues to cook and eat it to this day for it's 'amazing health benefits'.
http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?dbid=142&tname=foodspice
"Perhaps the most striking health benefit provided by quinoa is its overall nutrient richness. When the nutrient composition of this food is analyzed in depth, the results are unusual and striking."
I think a properly made dal is pretty tough to beat for nutrition and price. The catch is you really have to soak the beans for 24 hours before cooking very well at high temp. Otherwise you get dosed with lectins and phytic acid.
I'm a bit of a cooking enthusiast, so maybe it seems easier to prepare to me than many might find. The Bob's red mill quinoa has been washed so you don't have to, but use a fine strainer and it just takes an extra minute or two to wash if you are using a brand that requires it. Certainly no longer than varieties of rice that require washing to get the starch off...
It is comparable to white rice in preparation time and comparable to brown rice in flavor and nutrition. As someone raised on lots of rice at the dinner table, I think it puts rice to shame.
No, it is not truly a simple substitute to a sophisticated foody, there are positives and negatives, of course.
And it is pricier. Let's not kid ourselves. Most of us to actually cook at home are saving so much money relative to typical American eaters, that the price point is completely irrelevant. If you not eating 20 home cooked meals a week, do not talk me about price. (Yes, I do eat 20 home cooked meals some weeks.)
Some people seem very impressed with themselves for dismissing quinoa as trendy. But I know food well enough to decide for myself, and quinoa is a very attractive addition to my pantry.
Maybe a worse analogy is its like getting a live chicken, vs a shrink wrap boneless skinless tray at the supermarket, vs getting mcnuggets at the drive thru, its all marketed as "chicken" but it matters a lot what kind you buy.
There's probably a startup lesson in here. Life would be a lot more consistent if the quinoa guys never sold processed, for example. It might be less convenient but at least it would be consistent, and inconsistency means confused unhappy users. Consistently PITA sells better than inconsistently PITA.
It's probably a hardy crop if it's a relative of spinach. I'm in the UK, and I'd like to see more of it grown here.
I don't mind it as an addition to salads or other uses but again there's nothing really drawing me to it over the alternatives.
Objectively, accidentally, she's correct that its pretty high in protein and is also a complete protein. As a change of pace for vegans from beans and rice, its arguably better for you than beans and rice. Aside from all the subjective stuff, you're probably better off eating a nice steak and salad nutritionally, but its not bad.
Depends on your definition of salad. For some people it's a couple of slices of tomato and cucumber with iceberg lettuce doused in ranch dressing (maybe with some shreds of red cabbage in there).
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/quinoa-boom-offers-hard-less...
Of course, the challenges continue. Today, rising demand for quinoa has led its price to skyrocket in poorer Bolivian communities, which still depend on the crop as a protein source, making it unaffordable for some families.
Probably a more serious problem (than eating quinoa) would be the difficulty of finding fresh water to clean and boil the quinoa under such circumstances.
Quinoa as a sole food source embodies a strong argument for cannibalism (perhaps the Incas agreed).