Foodwise E-Book

Wendy E. Cook

• Herausgeber: Clairview Books
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Wendy Cook's fascination with nutrition began during her war-time childhood. In the midst of deprivation and food-rationing, the rich abundance of her mother's organic garden made a profound impression. In her twenties, married to Peter Cook, she discovered the artistic and magical effects that food could have in creating a convivial atmosphere. During this period she cooked for many well-known names, including John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Dudley Moore, Peter Ustinov and Alan Bennett. But it was only later, through her daughter falling ill, that she came to study and understand deeper aspects of nutrition, and in particular the effects of different foods on human health and consciousness. In Foodwise Wendy Cook presents a remarkable cornucopia of challenging ideas, advice and commentary, informed by the seminal work of the scientist Rudolf Steiner. She begins the volume with biographical glimpses relating to her experience of food and how it has influenced her life. She then presents an extraordinary perspective on the journey of human evolution, relating it to changes in consciousness and the consumption of different foods. In the following section she considers the importance of agricultural methods, the nature of the human being, the significance of grasses and grains, the mystery of human digestion, and the question of vegetarianism. In the next section she analyses the 'building blocks' of nutrition, looking in some detail at the nutritional (or otherwise) qualities of many foodstuffs, including carbohydrates, minerals, fats and oils, milk and dairy products, herbs and spices, salt and sweeteners, stimulants, legumes, the nightshade family, bread, water, and dietary supplements. She ends with practical tips on cooking, planning menus, children's food, sharing meals, and some mouth-watering recipes. Foodwise presents a treasure of wisdom and experience for anybody with a concern for the content of the food they eat or a desire to discover more about the physical, soul and spiritual aspects of nutrition.

Leseprobe

WENDY COOK is a writer and speaker on nutritional issues. The first wife of satirist Peter Cook, she gained a reputation as a hostess in the 1960s and 70s. Born in 1940, she studied art at Cambridge where she met Peter Cook. Later they lived in London and New York during which time Wendy developed cooking and entertaining as her creative motif. When their daughter Daisy developed asthma and conventional medicine had little effect, Wendy began a journey of discovery of complementary treatments and alternative ideas. She studied macrobiotics as well as Rudolf Steiner’s approach to nutrition and agriculture (‘biodynamics’). Having discovered how life-changing nutrition can be, she devoted herself to cooking and teaching in clinics, communities and schools. More recently she was resident at Schumacher College while simultaneously studying for a degree in Waldorf Education at Plymouth University.

FOODWISE

UNDERSTANDING WHAT WE EAT AND HOW IT AFFECTS US

THE STORY OF HUMAN NUTRITION

WENDY E. COOK

Clairview Books in association with Temple Lodge Publishing Hillside House, The Square, Forest Row RH18 5ES

www.clairviewbooks.com

www.templelodge.com

Originally published by Clairview 2003 Reprinted 2003, 2004 This edition published by Clairview Books in association with Temple Lodge Publishing, 2009

© Wendy E. Cook 2003

Wendy E. Cook asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 905570 58 4

Cover by Andrew Morgan Design Front cover photo by Daisy Cook. Back cover family photo by Daniel Allan Photo of Wendy Cook by Ros Meyers Typeset by DP Photosetting, Aylesbury, Bucks.

Dedicated to my daughters Lucy and Daisy

CONTENTS

Illustrations and Credits

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction

PART ONE

1 The History of Nutrition A study of the evolution of food and human consciousness

2 Agricultural Methods

3 The Fourfold Human Being

4 Grasses and Grains. The origins and mythology of the cereals

PART TWO

5 What Happens in Nutrition?

6 The Question of Vegetarianism

PART THREE

7 The Threefold Plant

8 Carbohydrates and Sweeteners

9 Bread and Bread Making

10 The Nightshade Family

11 Legumes

12 Milk and Dairy Products

13 Fats and Oils

14 Salt

15 Minerals and the Question of Dietary Supplements

16 Herbs and Spices

17 Stimulants: Coffee, Tea and Chocolate

18 Water

PART FOUR

19 Cooking and Menu-planning

20 Conclusions

Notes

Select Bibliography

ILLUSTRATIONS AND CREDITS

Selby’s son with cabbage, frontispiece: photo by Selby McCreery

Cross-sections of courgette and apple: photos by Selby McCreery

Vortex ring: from T. Schwenk’s Sensitive Chaos, reproduced by permission of Rudolf Steiner Press

The Cook family: reproduced by permission of The Daily Mirror

Early herdsmen: Louvre, Paris

Afghan farmer with grain: reproduced by permission of Christian Aid

Egyptian mask: reproduced by permission of the British Museum

Nike: Acropolis Museum, Athens

Flowing water: from T. Schwenk’s Sensitive Chaos, reproduced by permission of Rudolf Steiner Press

Young Roman: Palazzo Torlonia, Rome

Old Roman citizen: Palazzo Torlonia, Rome

Medieval monastery: drawing by John Platt

‘Self-portrait’ by Louise Courtnell: National Portrait Gallery. Reproduced by permission of Louise Courtnell

Cow: photo by Selby McCreery

Biodynamic preparations: photo by Selby McCreery

Biodynamic compost heap: photo by Selby McCreery

Monoculture in the USA: photo by John Page

Lily of the valley: reproduced from T. Schwenk’s Sensitive Chaos, by permission of Rudolf Steiner Press

Bread wheat: drawing by John Platt

Rice and rice grain: drawings by John Platt

Maize: drawing by John Platt

Common and foxtail millet: drawing by John Platt

Demeter/Persephone: Scala, Antella

Two and six rowed barley: drawing by John Platt

Oats: drawing by John Platt

Rye: drawing by John Platt

Correspondences in nature: magnified human pineal reproduced by permission of Dr Jenny Luke and Professor L.J.A. Didio; cauliflower and calcium carbonate crystal photos by Selby McCreery

Derek with baskets of biodynamic produce: photo by Selby McCreery

Experiments on the sensitive crystallization process: photos reproduced by permission of Dr U. Balzer-Graf

Beetroot, leek and chard: photos by Selby McCreery

Apple and briar rose: photos by Selby McCreery

French farmer preparing bread oven: photo by Jacquie Sarsby

Rising dough: photo by Jacquie Sarsby

Grains: drawing by John Platt

Electron-micrograph pictures of potato and wheat starch: photos reproduced by permission of Mary Parker, Institute of Food Research, Norwich

Tomato plant: photo by Selby McCreery

French bean plant: photo by Selby McCreery

Breast feeding: reproduced by permission of Daena Rose

Jersey cows: photo by Selby McCreery

Olive tree and branch: drawing by John Platt

Lime and silica: drawings from Ernst Haeckel’s book Kunstformen. Supplied by June Woodger

Garlic: photo by Selby McCreery

Vegetable chopping: drawing by John Platt

Basket of Hubbard squash: photo by Selby McCreery

Family meal in Janet’s kitchen; photo by Daniel Allan

Paris in a Brussels sprouts patch: photo by Selby McCreery

Lettuces: photo by Selby McCreery

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Maarten Ekama was involved in an earlier version of this project and has continued to give me support and material. Louise Freisenbruch turned my copious notes into something I could present as a project to a publisher – a deed of love and patience. Dorothy Fagan gave help with editing in the early stages. Tim Dyas and Janet Allan lent their beautiful homes as setting for front and back covers. Christine Rawstorne baked the special loaves as part of the meal shown on the back cover. My daughter Daisy took the picture on the front in Majorca, and Eva Zsiray, a professional baker, personified the principle of Hestiatoria.

Daniel Allan took the pictures of the family meal. Selby McCreery took most of the other photographs and entered into the illustrating of five-pointed stars within an apple and slices of courgette with verve and enthusiasm. Jackie Sarsby provided pictures of her lovely French farmer baking his weekly supply of bread. John Platt was a delight to work with as he provided weekly harvests of drawings of grains, herbs, olive trees and monastic eco-systems.

Richard Smith, Richard Thornton-Smith, Alan Brockman and Michael Duveen, all experienced in biodynamic agriculture, have supplied me with material and checked my agricultural writings for which I am very grateful. Margaret Jonas of the Rudolf Steiner Library has been most helpful in advising me and supplying me with appropriate anthroposophical books and publications. Dr Ralph Twentyman, Dr Marthe Kiley-Worthington and Gunnel Minett have kindly given me permission to quote from their books. Dr Jenny Luke and Professor L.J. A. Didio gave permission to use images of the human pineal gland. Mary Parker of the Institute of Food Research, Norwich, was extremely patient in working with my requests for electron-microscope pictures of cereal and potato starches. Annie Wingfield and June Woodger helped with research. Dr James Welch of Elm Farm Research Centre kindly gave information on cereal content.

Louise Courtnell gave kind permission to use her ‘Self-portrait’, which won the National Portrait Gallery BP prize in 1991. Thanks also for help from the Biodynamic Agricultural Association, Elm Farm Research Centre, the Soil Association and the Food Policy Department of Thames University.

I would not have been able to finish this manuscript without the dedicated editorial help of Susan Hannis who achieved surgical miracles in ‘snipping and tucking’ my unwieldy sentences and format. She was able to help me bring clarity into some of the more difficult concepts I have been struggling with in the book. I shall miss our Friday morning meetings which kept me focused and gave me the courage to go on with the rather ambitious spread of subject matter. Many thanks also to Eileen Lloyd for her fine copy-editing. Finally, gratitude to my publisher, Sevak Gulbekian, who saw the potential in my earlier manuscript, and has put lots of energy into achieving the final product.

Any errors left in the text I take responsibility for.

I have had a great deal of freely given time and energy, for which I am overwhelmed and full of gratitude.

‘One who understands nutrition correctly understands the beginning of healing.’

Rudolf Steiner

PREFACE

I have a strong memory of a May lecture given by John Davy (a former science correspondent to The Observer and later vice-principal of Emerson College1) in the mid-seventies. His talk followed an earlier presentation by Uri Geller and amongst other things he said something like this: ‘It is all very well for us to be impressed by somebody who can bend spoons and stop watches and it is indeed unusual, but how many of us are aware of the daily miracles that surround us? Like the human capacity for uprightness (in defiance of gravity), and that the plant strives upwards towards the sun.’ This gave me food for thought. I began acknowledging these daily miracles and looking and listening more closely to what confronts me in life and how I interact with it, for the universe is pure revelation.

The Western way has been involved in the exploration of physical matter, a path that could lead us back to the world of spiritual dimensions, but the connections have to be rediscovered and relationships recognized. Each phenomenon reveals something important. When we understand its essential nature and see it not as an isolated entity, we may start to recognize the role that it is playing in the world. Whether it be plant, star, animal, rock or human being, when we discover its activity (for all are constantly moving and changing), we will be changed too.

Forms display an exquisite underlying intelligence, as seen in the elegance of the snowflake, the mystery of the human eye, or the five-pointed star within the apple. What are these forms saying to us? We shall explore this question. Can we look at stellar movements, impressions of sea on sand, soup in a pot, listen to a piece of music and see them all as varied expressions of the one cosmic ordering force?

Rudolf Steiner was one of the people able to perceive such relationships, but at the same time he was a scientist who wished to present a participative epistemology, leading to practical application in many spheres of life. He was not seeking for the supernatural and the sensational. His earlier translation of Goethe’s scientific works, introducing the ‘Ur- plant’ or ‘plant archetype’, laid the foundations for a more artistic and inclusive approach to natural science. Steiner made many references to nutrition; he gave it a great deal of importance, both for its interface with agriculture and from the therapeutic/medical perspective. But these lectures tend to be scattered amongst educational, agricultural and medical publications, making it quite hard to see a full picture. Dr Rudolf Hauschka and Dr Gerhard Schmidt have, however, developed these ideas and their books have been of great value to me.

Some of the forms we find in nature: cross-section of courgette (top left), apple (top right), and a vortex ring rising upwards through water (bottom)

The human being’s relation to food gives an indication of his relationship to the earth in general, and though we may hear a great deal about the effects of nutritional habits on health we seldom hear about their effects on our consciousness. I feel this to be an important consideration and in the first part of the book I have endeavoured to look at (albeit only in a thumbnail sketch) the human journey in its quest for food and some accompanying changes of consciousness. The journey sees the human ‘descent’ into earthly and material concerns from a previously more ‘dreamy’, but spiritually secure, relationship to other kingdoms. Today many people wonder whether the earth, her plants and creatures will survive the onslaught of Promethean man. Only a new kind of understanding of our own place in this complex world of interactions will bring about the necessary reordering of priorities. And this has to be a real paradigm-shift; you cannot put new wine into old bottles. We cannot go forward with insight if we have no real understanding of the past. In a very future-oriented culture, history is history and peoples of bygone ages are often considered primitive. But were they?

Next we try to orient ourselves to the current agricultural situation, and ask ‘How can we heal man’s relationship with the earth?’ We take a look at what biodynamic agriculture offers in the way of healing for the earth, and then we focus on the constitution of the human being. How do the ‘subtle bodies’ experienced by the ancient Greeks and physicians such as Paracelsus fit with current concepts of the human constitution? Or do they? We ask, ‘What have been the basics of human nutrition for millennia – since the early days of the inhabitants of Çatal Hüyük?’ The next chapter presents the cereal grains, each with their biography and some of their mythology.

In Part Two we investigate the mystery of human digestion, where accepted theories have been based on the principles of conservation of matter, test-tube chemistry and the laws of thermodynamics, the prevailing paradigm in many people’s minds and practice. Rudolf Steiner has presented us with something quite other. He describes the nutritional processes in the human being as a kind of ‘anti-physics’ and ‘anti-chemistry’ – difficult concepts, but I think worthy of real consideration.

Do we think of ideas, beautiful landscapes, music as being actual nourishment; that our breathing and absorption of sunlight are all connected to our nutritive process? We take a look at their effects on the human organism. Then follows a piece examining the various issues around vegetarianism, such as what happens to domestic animals if we stop eating them.

In Part Three we look at building blocks of nutrition. Some foods are necessities, others have the role of stimulation, some are questionably not foods at all, some provoke allergies. How can we understand these things more deeply and clearly?

Finally, in Part Four, we look at some of the practical and aesthetic aspects of cooking, planning menus, the shared meal, and children’s food.

INTRODUCTION

Why would I want to write such a book? The story begins with my own childhood. I was born at the beginning of the Second World War and I spent my early years growing up in the agricultural area of Bedfordshire. Food was rationed and remained so till the early fifties. My childhood apprehensions imagined a lifetime of ration-book management, juggling those little coupons that represented tiny amounts of protein, sweets or clothing. I learnt from my father how to eke out the sweetie ration – by cutting razor-thin slices of Mars bars and jelly babies he was able to make large expanses, like colourful gardens on a plate. My mother and I would go gleaning in the pea-fields, going over the mounds of stalks looking for the peas that had been missed by the pea-pickers. This was an exciting treasure hunt. Horses were still a common sight ploughing the fields, patient, strong animals; hayricks were often still built by hand. Most of my friends were the sons and daughters of farmers, so I spent a lot of time in mud and hay, communed with the elemental beings and learnt to know the signs of seasonal passings. My mother was a born gardener despite a childhood in the sooty streets of Manchester. Without even a window box to remind one of nature, she was the kind of person who could stick a seemingly dead-looking piece of stick into the ground and it would take root. We had about an acre of garden which seemed vast to a child, with all sorts of nooks and crannies, barns with owls and such a variety of fruit trees, vegetables and flowers. There were plums, apples, gooseberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants and a magnificent pear tree whose luscious fruits, wrapped up individually and a stored in an old chest of drawers, lasted us most of the winter. A freshly dug root of new potatoes with mint and at least three other vegetables was a satisfying meal. They were all compost-grown. Out on our bicycles as a family, if we came across horse droppings my father would ceremoniously scoop them up, put them in a container specially kept for the purpose and onto the compost they went, with grass cuttings, old woollies, tree prunings and vegetable peelings. I marvelled at how all these things rotted, changed their form and smell completely and could be reused as ‘black gold’ on the garden. To this day I make compost wherever I am, and am fascinated by the whole process of decay and metamorphosis.

The women ran a great deal of the agriculture during the war and all of those left at home, kids included, got involved on some level. We were exhorted to ‘dig for Britain’. Parks and flower-beds were given over to vegetable growing; most people knew how to grow them. It was a matter of survival, and neighbours exchanged surpluses. Real hunger is unforgettable. My mother was also a good cook of the plain north country variety. She was keen for me to learn to share this activity and allowed me to experiment on occasions. I became fascinated by choosing, mixing and watching the miraculous transformation of the various ingredients.

My parents, whose own possibility of university education had been removed by the war, like many others, insisted that getting an education was the only way out of the arduous grind of work on the land or simply being obliged to do work that was incompatible with your nature. My father was a civil servant, previously a city dweller, and longed to be free of the smell of rotting cabbage fields and to be in some more intellectually stimulating environment. My sister and I, scholarship winners to the local grammar school, were pressed to fulfil our parents’ unfulfilled ambitions. So I witnessed the trend of young people moving off the land, disdaining this work, and often severing themselves from centuries of accumulated experiences of farm and countryside management. Fertilizers were more and more used (nitrates were a by-product of the manufacture of bombs) and farming was becoming more and more mechanized, meaning fewer people were needed in agriculture.

At my grammar school I took a good spread of arts, crafts and sciences. One of my most useful courses was domestic science where we each had our own kitchens. We invited staff members to lunch. Besides the cooking and menu-planning, we learnt about flower-arranging, how to serve guests and about how to develop good conversation around the meal-table. We were taught how to market, what to look for in qualities of freshness (something that I was already quite well schooled in), how to budget, how to clean a room properly and how to iron. The boys also joined us for this, so it was not just gender based. It was good fun and was to stand me, and others, in good stead for the rest of my life.

I went to study art at Cambridge and found it intoxicating to be in such an exciting international community. My wellies were ditched and I joined in enthusiastically with the emerging exploration of new ideas, new fashions, new freedoms and the breaking of old taboos. Cooking became more and more interesting to me and though I was living on a minute budget I managed to make exotic menus for very little money. The often poorly-fed undergraduates were enthusiastic guinea-pigs for my culinary experiments.

It was at Cambridge that I met my husband-to-be, the satirist Peter Cook, who was definitely intent on breaking taboos and could bewitch an audience without effort. I lived in a former pub, ‘The Prince of Wales’, owned by two philosophy graduates, which became a real salon – a place where good food, extraordinary witty, humorous and serious conversation flourished. Humour can be devastating, as when the jesters in Shakespeare’s plays bring most incisive insights. While you laugh you create a space for new possibilities. So it was a kind of alchemy that developed around our dining table.

Later, living in London, this creative outreach continued. Like many people in the sixties I became a devotee of Elizabeth David, and dinner guests spent time in the aftermath of a evening chez Cooks picking out the rosemary branches from their teeth. We discovered herbs in a big way. Some of the people who shared our table were Peter Ustinov, John and Cynthia Lennon, Paul McCartney, Jane Asher, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller, Terry Downes (middleweight boxing champion), Joan Collins, Malcolm Muggeridge, Bernard Levin, Alan Bates and David Frost. The delight was to be able to select an interesting potion of contrasting folk who might not otherwise bump into each other and to create an appropriately magical meal to enhance a sense of well-being and stimulate conversation and new ideas.

Peter Cook and partner Nick Luard ran a satirical political nightclub called ‘The Establishment’ where politicians, actors, artists, jazz musicians and journalists mingled. It was the early sixties! It was the place to be! This heady and intoxicating life changed substantially when I became a mother. We had two beautiful daughters, Lucy and then Daisy. Daisy developed eczema and then severe asthma. Peter had suffered from asthma as a child and I had been bronchitic, adding to this hereditary burden. I did not breastfeed Daisy, as I had been convinced by others of the convenience of bottle-feeding. If only I had known then what I know now; alas we are not taught anything about parenting and child-care or the really important things in life. Anybody suffering from asthma or parenting an asthmatic child will know the acute anxiety that surrounds this condition and how complicated the picture can be. In those days in a severe attack adrenalin injections were given by the doctor, with violent side-effects. Daisy often needed to be taken off to hospital to be in an oxygen tent and she was given steroids which made her tremble. Her little chest was becoming the typical barrel-shape of the asthmatic. Then there was physiotherapy. I had to be very vigilant and tried to orchestrate playtime with friends as over a certain decibel pitch of excitement I knew she would start heaving. Asthmatics cannot breathe out when having an attack. I was anxious and frustrated, but despite having access to the best medical advice the condition persevered and became quite central to all our lives.

The Cook family, left to right: Lucy, Peter and Wendy with newborn Daisy

I knew that there had to be another way of healing this condition. Looking for this other way became my path, to retrieve some of my own inherent wisdom as a mother, to remember some of the home cures that my mother used to administer and to discover new ways of regarding illness and how best to treat it in its own unique context. This journey took me away from the exciting life of theatre, television and financial luxury; few people can deal well with that amount of glamour and success when in their twenties. It had been an extraordinary experience but it was not an atmosphere that I felt conducive to child-rearing.

Daisy and a young friend, now seven years old, had become determined to become vegetarians. They had seen lovely frisky lambs and calves and chickens happy in nature, but seen dead animals in butchers and made the connection with what was on their plates. They didn’t want any of that, and this wasn’t a three-day fad either. Although I had always provided lots of vegetables and salads at that time, my repertoire for vegetarian dishes was confined to cheese omelettes or cheese soufflés. Vegetarianism after wartime rationing was linked to poverty and considered cranky, which was I suppose why the most famous vegetarian restaurant in London in the sixties was named ‘Cranks’. (In 1889 the 18-year-old Mahatma Gandhi, then a law student in London and vowed to vegetarianism, had walked the streets of the city for many hours seeking a vegetarian eating house before he found one in Farringdon Street.) Now these young folk were bringing a new kind of sensitivity.

I had been told about a community in the North of Scotland where vegetarianism was the underpinning for their spiritual and physical life together. There were stories of how they grew vast cabbages and had converse with the nature beings. I decided to go and explore Findhorn with Daisy and Lucy. Daisy flourished in the clean air, and the wonderful fresh and vital vegetarian fare made us all feel very healthy. I met environmental activist and writer Paul Hawken whilst there. He told me how he had cured his asthma by following a macrobiotic diet and put me in touch with Aveline Kushi with whom I subsequently studied for four years. I learnt a meditative approach to the preparation of food, about the seven grains and the importance of the acid/alkaline balance in a meal.

I also met an interesting family where the six children were highly individual, confident and creative. My children quickly struck up friendships. I learned that these children were at Michael Hall, a Rudolf Steiner school in Sussex. It was at this school that Lucy and Daisy were to spend the rest of their education, where therapeutic activities were subtly inherent in the whole way of teaching.

While the girls went to school I went to Emerson College, a Steiner centre for adult training in education, sculpture, biodynamic farming music and painting. There was also a course in catering and nutrition, and after a foundation year I was drawn to the kitchen. The food supply was mainly sourced from the kitchen garden and the farm. We had local biodynamic milk and yoghourt, cheese and eggs. I introduced tamari miso and some seaweed, which wasn’t perhaps appreciated at the time (the mid-seventies), being so foreign to our Western palate, but it was a place of experiment. Now, over 25 years later, these are familiar ingredients in Emerson’s kitchen as many of the students are Asian – Japanese, Korean and Chinese.

I studied nutrition from Rudolf Steiner’s perspective with Dr Gerhard Schmidt, a visiting medical lecturer, and did as much as I could to learn to understand the principles of biodynamic agriculture, a lofty subject that can appear strange to the modern mind, involving as it does a study of planetary movements in relation to the growth and harvesting of plants. The best educational elements were the products themselves, even superior to those of my mother. So I have spent a lot of my life proselytizing about biodynamic food. I practised Goethean observation exercises with Hugh Ratcliffe and Dr Margaret Colquhoun and gradually began to view life, education agriculture, nutrition, the human being’s relationship to nature, and indeed to the cosmos, from an increasingly enlarged perspective – but one I realized I already knew deep down, intuitively.

Through a balanced programme of philosophical-spiritual study, craft work and work in the gardens and kitchen, ideas became practice and new experiences on a physical level led to new perceptions on the level of ideation. Altogether it was a splendidly creative time and I made many interesting friends. Later I taught vegetarian cookery at Michael Hall school, and worked in clinics and with medical initiatives trying to understand more and more deeply the concepts that Rudolf Steiner was pointing to in the field of nutrition, leading of course into many other areas because all are related. I wanted to bring these concepts into line with my own experiences and developed so many questions which the answers given by current nutritional science fail to satisfy on anything more than a superficial level. I was particularly interested in the questions of quality, the more subtle effects of the kind of heat used in cooking, and the whole community-building aspect of sharing work and food.

Together with some other interested people we bought a 60-acre traditional mountain farm in north Majorca as an experiment. The setting and life-forces on this piece of land were powerful. It had been abandoned for 40 years and nature had run her course. There were terraces that had been devoted to cereal growing and threshing, terraces of olive trees, a lime-kiln and the foundations of a charcoal-burner’s dwelling. There were acres of forest, providing shade, wood for charcoal and, lower down, terraces for fruit orchards and vegetable growing. Natural-rise bread baked regularly in a stone wood-fired oven was delicious and sustaining; water came from a deep spring whose emergence from the great mountain had inspired the Moors to fashion a beautiful ‘temple’ to house it. We cooked over wood fires and had only one solar panel to bring a little electric light into the house. We had milking goats, a sheep, ducks and chickens and a large donkey (somera) to plough with.

Many people came to help us and experience this paring away of technology and convenience luxuries. The food, sun-drenched and full of flavour and aroma, was unforgettable. We were properly hungry because we had laboured and sweated. The seasons were clearly marked by their contingent products, of such wonderful diversity. How many millennia had it taken of painstaking plant-breeding to produce such a variety?

Although this experiment was not very long-lived, for various reasons it left a deep impression upon me and many of our visitors. It intensified my respect for the farming fraternity – there is so much to learn about agriculture to do it well. It had been an almost biblical type of existence in its simplicity, and this is how much of our world stills lives.

However, it is possible to get on a plane to the USA and witness a vastly different scenario, one where great machines programmed by computer distribute fertilizers and pesticides in a vast landscape, a monoculture of wheat. There are no people, no weeds, no trees, no birds and no insects. And I imagine the great and sad voice of God, of a designing intelligence, saying, ‘What have you done with the garden with which I entrusted you?’

And yet more questions pour forth. How come there is so much malnutrition in the world when there are grain and butter mountains, wine lakes, vegetables ploughed back into the soil, and where food policies are creating a new kind of slavery? Bio-technology professes as its motive the solving of world hunger but in fact seeks to monopolize and exploit seed culture and destroy the wonderful genetic diversity created over millennia by small farmers. Meanwhile, millions of Westerners suffer from diet-related illnesses and there is a serious crisis of meaning in our society, ‘soul starvation’, manifesting often as depression. Young children suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder and hyperactivity. Why are children ‘yo-yo-ing’ in their addiction to salt and sugar (sweets and crisps)? Why are so many children taking drugs, incidences of violence and vandalism increasing? I’m sure that we all have our own theories to why all this is happening, but how can we change these tendencies?

Steiner had some interesting insights which provoke a quite different way of seeing our world. He spoke of the evolution of food habits as giving a clue to unfolding human consciousness. He spoke about different epochs in nutrition, the current one emphasizing the mineral. It is a fairly new phenomenon that many Western people are taking mineral supplements, now a hugely lucrative industry. How can we put this strange development into context?

Do we ever ask ourselves how come we have products on our plates, many of which are mildly poisonous, consciousness-altering, addictive and deleterious to health? (Animals on the whole tend not to injure themselves by consuming inappropriate foods, if left to wisely forage.) Often these are plant-based products that have vastly changed agricultural societies, economically and socially, as they strive to provide cash crops like coffee to the detriment of their own indigenous food-growing capacity. What did Steiner mean by saying that we build ourselves primarily from the (formative) forces that have gone into growing the plants? Was it that a different chemistry and physics was at work within the human being? How could it be that extensive eating of potatoes and legumes (particularly soya and peanuts) could create an increasing tendency towards materialism? How could it be that vegetarian nutrition could support spiritual work better than a meat-eating diet, but that not everybody actually could manage to be a vegetarian even if they wanted to?

If everybody became vegetarian what would the fate of the domestic animals be? (The cow is central to the fertility of the soil in biodynamics, as well as giving valuable dairy products.) Why are there now so many people apparently not able to tolerate milk and wheat products, staples of mankind for millennia? During nine thousand years of agriculture it used to be the honoured job of the high priest to cut the first furrow, so how come that nowadays many disdain work on the land, indeed any form of manual work? In the USA there are more people in the gaols than working on the land!

Why are we so alienated from nature? Could our nutrition be exacerbating this tendency? The family mealtime is disappearing, where adults and young people learn to take care of each other, where the rudiments of conversation are cultivated, where the gifts of the earth are savoured, where we learn hospitality and gratitude.

These and many other questions have furnished my quest. As soon as one question is seemingly answered another springs in its place. I am not a doctor; my life has been spent gardening and feeding people. I’ve always tried to learn as much as I could about my profession, observing the phenomena. I love to share my insights and I love to teach. Cooks and gardeners are on the whole notoriously badly paid and unless they are television personalities the kudos is not great either. However, eating is probably one of the last things that any of us will willingly give up. I hope to throw some light on the importance of this great craft, art, science. All good cooks know something about alchemy, and in alchemy we learn about the deeper aspects of substances and their interactions – and the greater cosmic influences.

I believe we are here to be good materialists and that means understanding substance. When we think of a teaspoon of honey as representing approximately 2000 hours of work on the part of the bee, rather than only the sum of its constituents, we start to perceive it on an energetic level. Appreciating this may elicit quite a different response from that of the reductionist science we have been almost exclusively taught. I think we have to bring these aspects together, and in this book I have tried to do so. All I hope is that you can develop the attitude that one of my wise teachers, Dr L. Mees, recommends: ‘When you meet a new and unfamiliar idea, don’t say “No”, just say “Oh!”’ Just live with an idea and, if it has truth, it will like a plant germinate, root and transform other ideas.

PART ONE

1

THE HISTORY OF NUTRITION

A study of the evolution of food and human consciousness

Studying the rise and fall of civilizations can show us the story of mankind’s development. From a simple childlike condition, where life went on within a timeless mythological consciousness, gradually knowledge of an earthly and practical kind increased, sometimes at the expense of wisdom. Skills developed and were often forgotten again. But the aspect that shows a continuous upward incline is the development – hand-in-hand with awakening to the physical world – of an awakening to self-awareness. We do not stop to consider how very long and intricate this development has been; it goes back over many millennia. We take for granted the degree of self-awareness we are familiar with and the outlooks that accompany it. Some consequences of our own outlook, however, are very clear – in particular the strong urge and increasing ability to control living processes.

In order to understand ourselves now, we need to appreciate where we have come from. Without that how can we orient ourselves usefully towards our future? So it is time we really tried to understand something of our human evolution in a new and different way. To look with ‘new eyes’ we might start by trying to appreciate what it was like to look through the eyes of the ancients. Rudolf Steiner gives interesting pictures of our earliest beginnings:

... as the human family developed, its original unity with the cosmos began to be veiled in darkness. The process involved working through three states of consciousness, which led them from spiritual heights into the depths of the earth... It was from these depths that the individual has the possibility to find the original forces for the unfolding of freedom. Thus the human soul went through phases that could be described as ‘sleeping’, ‘dreaming’ and beginning to ‘awake’.1

The gradual awakening process has been accompanied, as we shall try to show, by different phases of nutrition. The variety of foods and methods of preparation have also evolved and the communication arising out of growing, cooking, preserving and trading food is one of the main stories of humanity. This chapter will highlight defining moments in the story of food, dealing primarily with the Caucasian peoples. Journeying thus we may come to see more clearly where we are today and that the historical process is neither haphazard nor arbitrary.

Our beginnings

Our journey begins in the allegorical Garden of Eden – the ultimate expression of the ‘radiant energy of Creation’, familiar in world mythology. Everything there was provided, but for those original occupants there had to be something more. Adam and Eve (representatives of humanity) wished to eat of the Tree of Knowledge; they wished to know what the gods knew; they wished to ‘know’ each other. And so it was that in eating the forbidden fruit before they were prepared for that knowledge, they were cast out naked from this beneficent garden into a world where they had to become familiar with the earth and its laws and its constraints. They were now to find their own food and to cope with pain and death, the woman to experience the pain of childbirth and the man to develop courage and strength, and to learn through physical labouring. Mankind was to become free by going into and beyond the physical, developing individuality and self-governance, but also remembering his divine origins.

The hunter-gatherers

The earliest peoples were hunter-gatherers led by shamanic priests who, according to Steiner, possessed a kind of clairvoyance, but on a low, dreamlike level. Their cave paintings, which represent the most striking and accomplished work of Palaeolithic art, are images often of animals incised or painted on the surface of the rock. An example is the powerful portrayal of the Wounded Bison from the caves at Altamira, northern Spain, so eloquently expressing the power and dignity of the creature as it gives up its life. These cave paintings are believed to be part of hunting rituals for the men of the period known as the Old Stone Age (or Magdalenian period, estimated at 18,000 years ago). By making a picture of the animal they were able to visualize the particular beast they would meet in the forthcoming hunt, and thus magically gained power over the animal’s soul. The ritual helped to draw man and animal together. Animals were experienced as part of their own soul; the bull expressed elements of their own metabolism and their physical strength, whereas the deer expressed something of sun-related sensitivity. While men were engaged in hunting, the women of the tribe were responsible for the gathering of an enormous variety of wild plants – knotgrass, clubrush, berries, rhizomes of the canna lily, roots of asphodel, fungi, acorns, wild grain and snails. They may have acquired over many generations a real and diverse knowledge of the edible resources available and deliberately left tubers and seeds behind, eventually creating little patches with digging sticks for the food plants to grow.

Even today there can be found fields of wild grain (spelt) growing as thickly as cultivated grain. In the 1960s, archaeologist J.R. Harlan experimented with a flint-bladed sickle to see what a prehistoric family in Turkey might have been able to harvest. In one hour he managed to gather enough wild wheat to produce more than two pounds (1 kilo) of clean grain. What is more, this grain proved to be much more nutritious than the modern, cultivated variety.2 It was discovered that lightly roasting wild grains would make threshing – dividing the seed from the chaff – easier. The roasting was accomplished in pits lined and covered with heated stones.

During this Cro-Magnon period the human being developed most basic skills, practical and artistic. The caves with their amazing depictions became silted up; some were discovered 11,000 years later, in 1895, in southern France by children playing.

Eventually, reliable and abundant supplies of foods and the ability to build their own homes must have been significant factors in the development of settled agrarian communities. However, the arrival of farming was certainly not sudden, nor was it simple.

After the melting of the glaciers, the Great Flood

The story of a devastating flood that almost destroyed all life in the world occurs in the legends and belief systems of all the peoples of Mesopotamia and the eastern Mediterranean, from the Sumerians to the Hebrews who wrote down the experiences of Noah. Let us try to imagine ourselves in those times.

Tribal life was strictly ruled by priests, who as initiates had direct insight into the divine ordering of the world. In the migrations which followed the melting of the ice these shamanic priests played an important role in guiding their people to new lands. Then, and for some time to come, ‘the human community looked up to the starry heavens and the knowledge that man still had of the stars showed him unmistakably that their forces lived within him and that he belonged essentially to the cosmos.’3 One of the important leaders of the time was Noah, who guided his people towards central Asia. He was known to the Indians as Manu and in the Persian epic of Gilgamesh as Utnapishtim, and the image of his ark is also found in many other cosmologies. Noah was also known as the father of the ‘Seven Holy Rishis’, the wise teachers of the ancient Indians. The nations issuing from the descendants of Noah were called Aryans, which means ‘Light-bearing’. Amongst these were the ancient Indian peoples and the Persians. According to Steiner, the Indians developed first and turned their steps towards the south-east, to the river basin of the Indus known as Septa Sindhave.

The age of milk and honey (during the Age of Cancer, 8426-6266 BC)

The tribes of the Indian Aryan stream still lived a nomadic life with their cattle, whose milk was their principal food. This milk was instrumental in building bodily substance or kapha, one of the basics of Ayurvedic medicine,4 and the basis for their soul/astral body (see Chapter 3); they began to be more connected to the earth and less ‘dreamy’. They also continued to gather wild food and did not eat their animals; eating meat was forbidden and the cows were revered as sacred. This is the age best described as the ‘age of milk and honey’. Even today the phrase evokes images of abundance and carefree ease. However, in trying to penetrate the quality of these times we should not think of this richness solely as an outer condition, some kind of prehistoric pacific paradise, but rather as a condition of real peace and inner harmony. The human being of these times felt at one both with nature and the gods, receiving their gifts with a feeling of serenity and security. It was a state of being that can perhaps best be compared with that of a young child whose parents surround it with protection and guidance, keeping at a distance for these few precious years all the influences and difficulties destined to come later in life.

The gift of milk from cows and honey from wild bees, as two particular foods, were more than a symbol of humanity’s living relationship with the gods. The Milky Way is not so named simply because it is brighter than other regions in the night sky, but because humanity perceived the region as a source of ‘cosmic milk’ or prana which gave nourishment to the whole hierarchy of gods and spiritual beings who have their home in the starry cosmos. In a similar way, any bright group of stars is called a ‘galaxy’, derived from the Greek word for milk (gala).

Early herdsmen, bas relief (Mesopotamia)

These early peoples relied on the Rishis for their connection with the high spiritual world in which divine beings, the devas, were beheld. It was still possible to make use of the old inherited gift of clairvoyance (through the use of the pituitary and pineal glands, according to Rudolf Steiner), and they were helped to perceive these elemental worlds by means of an inner schooling. The outer or sensorial world was regarded as maya, or illusion. They knew that all natural phenomena were the work of the devas, but that these beings could only be reached in an inner way; all was threaded together in a web of karma.

In the space of thousands of years the Hindus developed this path further and further. It came to expression in the Vedanta, in the systems of yoga, in the Bhagavadgita and in other works, and later was in a certain sense crystallized in the teachings and the revelations of Buddha. So the people were not primarily involved with the sensory earth-world but with the invisible higher spheres; it also meant that they did not come to grips with the possibilities of the earth-world, including the development of agriculture.

Much later the Hindus developed a system of categories of foods, which came from a deep insight into the different qualities of foods and their effects on the human being. The first was Sattvic, providing strength from within and recommended for those doing spiritual work – the Brahmins, the scholar-priest caste. Sattvic foods are considered to be pure foods which keep the mind-body-spirit balanced, clear, harmonious and strong. They include fruits, grains, vegetables, seeds, certain herbs, milk, yoghourt and honey, giving an approximate alkaline:acid balance of 70:30.

Foods from the Rajasic category are indicated for kings, warriors and traders. They include many more stimulating foods: fresh meats, wine, spices, garlic, sweetmeats and eggs. This combination encourages competitive, aggressive and sensual behaviour. Acid:alkaline ratio 50:50.

The Tamasic category includes stale, decayed, decomposed, overcooked or reheated foods. These are foods that have no spark of life left in them, and form the larger part of the diets of the lowest castes. (The acidic pole tends to dominate.)

The categories come from the Ayurvedic system and though it may seem over-simplified to us these days, it shows profound knowledge of both people and food substances.

The ancient Persians (during the Age of Gemini, 6266-4106 BC)

We now turn to the next important Aryan tribe, the Persians, who settled in areas of southern Turkestan and who later extended towards the highlands of Iran, Persia and Medea. At an early stage they developed an outer perception and the kind of thinking that connects with observation. They were still conscious of the existence of a spiritual world active behind the normally visible world, and they still possessed great power over the forces of nature, which were subsequently to withdraw from the control of humanity. Their teachers were the initiates who were the guardians of the oracles and had command of inner forces, particularly of fire and the other elements. Their leader was Zarathustra (considered by some to indicate a certain initiatory level, not an individual, so there was more than one Zarathustra, causing confusion amongst historians rather like the ubiquitous King Arthur).

Zarathustra brought the prophecy of the great ‘Sun Spirit of Light’ known as Ahura Mazda, creator of heaven and earth and source of light and dark. The conspicuous monotheism of Zarathustra’s teaching had an inbuilt dualism: the Wise Lord (God) has an opponent, Ahriman, who embodies the principle of darkness. However, both mankind and spiritual beings are free to choose whom they want to follow. Thus the world is divided into two hostile blocks, whose members represent two warring factions. On the side of the Wise Lord are the settled herdsmen or farmers caring for their cattle and living in a definite social order. On the other side are the followers of the Lie (Druj), who are thieving nomads, enemies of orderly agriculture and animal husbandry. So Zarathustra encouraged his people to be the first agriculturists.

Here I would like to retell part of a Persian legend, where Yima is guided by Ahura Mazda to become the first tiller of the land.

Now Ahura Mazda gave Yima a gold sword and a gold decorated whip for the purpose of cultivating the soil, and he consecrated him first king of the kingdom of Iran. The earth was filled with men and cattle, dogs and birds and blazing red fires, but soon it became too small to contain all. When the afternoon came, Yima went up to the stars; he touched the earth with his gold sword and pierced it and spoke: ‘Enlarge, O holy earth, augment and split open, O yielder of cattle and men.’ In this way he made the earth larger than it was by a third, so that all its inhabitants could walk upon it with pleasure.

After many years, Ahura Mazda called Yima to make it known that humanity, now become wicked and materialistic, would be overtaken by severe winters during which huge masses of snow were to come down from the highest mountains. This and the floods, which would inundate the lands after the snows had melted, would cause a third part of men and cattle to perish. For the protection of his people, Yima was charged to prepare a ‘var’, that is a fenced place or a kind of stronghold, ‘a day’s journey long and wide’. There he was to take men and cattle, dogs and birds and the blazing red fires. On arrival he was first to drain off the water, put up boundary posts, then houses made from posts, clay walls, matting and fences were to be built. There was to be neither suppression nor baseness, neither dullness nor violence, neither poverty nor defeat, no dwarves, no cripples, no long teeth, no giants, nor any characteristic of the evil spirits.

‘Thou blessed Yima, child of the sun, expand the earth, split it apart like wise men, expand the earth by tilling it...’

From this ancient legend we learn how the Persians, through Zarathustra, now took in hand the cultivation of the soil. The ‘gold sword’ forms the archetype of the plough, received from the Sun God himself. Through the use of the plough they became amongst the earliest growers of corn, and indeed many of the food plants we use today originated from that time. The Zend Avesta, or Holy Book of the Persians, can be regarded as the first agricultural handbook.

Excavations in 19605 led by Russian archaeologists in Turkmenistan (the country of origin of the Iranians) uncovered one of the oldest known agricultural settlements, consisting of small rectangular, one-roomed houses, loosely grouped together with small courtyards in which it seems that cattle were kept. These settlements lay on arable land, so that each farmer had immediate access to his own field from the home. Impressions of wheat and barley grains were found in the walls together with agricultural tools with bone handles.

Other legends go on to tell us how Yima, seduced by Ahriman, left the way of God and fell to lying. He also induced the people to eat meat, which had not been the practice of these people, to whom milk was the most revered of drinks. Indeed, a sacred drink was made from milk mixed with the juice of a certain plant. This drink was called soma by the Indians and haoma or hom by the Persians. It was first put through a fermentation process and sacrificed to the gods by means of the ‘blazing fires’, then it was drunk during the ritual – it induced a kind of holy enthusiasm.6 This cult, and its various rites, was later extended and ordered by the priestly class of the Magi. At its centre the eternal flame in the Temple of Fire was constantly tended by priestly service and the haoma sacrifice.

The early Persians were surrounded by nomadic tribes who had little understanding of private property and would take the cattle of the settled farmers. We can see how, by erecting fences to keep in the cattle and creating boundaries between the ‘wild’ and the cultivated, tensions were created between those who still led a nomadic, almost childlike life and those who wanted to cultivate and develop their land and culture. For it was out of these settled agricultural communities that the great civilizations arose.

So the change-over from hunting to husbandry was accompanied by profound changes in the human’s perception, not only of himself, but of his relationship with his world, where he became custodian of a piece of land. The story of Cain and Abel is an archetypal image of these two streams – the nomads and the new farming fraternity. (We should not attempt to rigidify the story within the flow of time. Real myths and legends have their being ‘out of time’ and are therefore true for all time.) Cain is described as an agriculturist and as such was able to develop a kind of independence. He was beginning to understand the laws of nature and gain some control over them. He was able to store grain – a tremendous advantage. Abel was a shepherd who moved about with his flocks, gathering food and using animals’ milk. Cain ‘slew’ Abel, actually meaning that the new way of life, anchored as it was in the soil, provided a surplus that could enable other activities to develop, superseding the nomadic way of life in many places.

Early settlements