We Are What We Eat

Happy Martin Luther King Day from the Luminous Lakeside Sanctuary. Today I am blogging from bed because I am in the process of recovering from one of the worst cases of food poisoning EVER. While I will spare my readers the gory details of the bug, I will highlight two concepts this bout of food poisoning brought to light: You Are What You Eat and the need to express occasional gratitude for our health, or at least calm bellies.

Last Friday I traveled with my Albanian friend Zana and her husband and two children about one hundred kilometers north of Tirana to Shkoder, to take part in a family celebration. As evening fell over Shkoder, we arrived and were immediately led from the freezing cold front room (why aren't Albanian homes insulated?) into the room heated by the wood stove. Per Albanian custom, we were immediately served stout Turkish coffee and a shot glass of homemade Raki.

Two hours later, I was helping Zana make a salad of Greek yogurt, cucumbers, walnuts, and garlic. Staring into the pure white thickness of the yogurt, I thought about how marvelous it is that so many Albanians have their own cow. Thanks to a singular cow, the average family makes milk, yogurt, butter, and cheese for daily consumption. While most Western cultures devour great quantities of dairy products, as a former vegetarian, Californian, and someone who has always studied nutrition for fun, I only drank soy milk and limited my intake of cheese and yogurt. I have been in Tirana now for two months, and Albanians eat dairy products at every meal. Breakfast usually consists of bread with homemade butter and jam, a fried egg with homemade feta like cheese. Lunch is usually bread, meat, cheese, and some sort of salad of tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, and olives on the side. Dinner is usually more of the same but sometimes its spaghetti or beans instead of meat, but the cheese and bread are always on the plate. Needless to say, I got very, very sick in Shkoder.

Even though I live alone, I am very often eating in the homes of my adopted Albanian families, so naturally, I eat what they eat. Maybe I got sick because my system is not used to such quantities of dairy and meat. Maybe my body is simply adjusting to the different bacterium present in Albanian water, air, and soil or maybe it was the constant swirl of cigarette smoke hanging over everything we ate this week-end like a toxic fog. Why do Albanians still think it's so cool to smoke? In America, after a painful episode of food poisoning, we only eat bread, rice, bananas or potatoes. In Shkoder, Zana's adorable 83 year old aunt Darda, who incidentally resembles an apple doll, begged me to drink milk, eat yogurt, and lemon juice, per their tradition. Talk about cultural differences!

Anyway, since returning from Shkoder on Sunday evening, the fitful storm still brewing in my belly, I heard an inspirational podcast. It was an interview with Jessica Porter on her book, The Hip Chick's Guide to Macrobiotics. Porter refers to whole grains as, humanity's perfect food because they contain fiber and they bind with excess hormones in the body, helping to expel them. They are naturally low glycemic carbohydrates, and contain vast amounts of B vitamins. Whole grains essentially act as the all purpose cleanser for the body; they are live foods working full time inside your body.

This interview inspired me not only to immediately blog about what humans put into their bodies, but reminded the granola California girl in me, to immediately cease and desist the blind consumption of animal products, white sugar, rice, and pasta. Two months ago, before I came here, I was eating Bolivian red quinoa, wild salmon, Swiss chard, and countless apples. I knew it would be a challenge to eat in alliance with my beliefs and my commitment to health in a developmentally challenged country, but here's the thing: hundreds of years ago, early man didn't eat animals. He lived exclusively on whole grains, fruit, legumes, and vegetables. So all I must do now, resisting my natural urge to order my American whole grains from www.wholegrains.com, is find out where to buy the whole grains in Tirana. Albanian fruit and vegetables are beautiful, plentiful, organic, and cheap!

I am the only one who responsible for my health. I will not impose my beliefs and my California culture on my Albanian friends and families; however, I will no longer accept anything they put on my plate or in my glass. Not after this violent episode. I also encourage anyone reading my words with calm bellies to express gratitude for that calm we take for granted daily. Because we have all been where I was this week-end, in a miserable position praying to the porcelain god, as the humorous American euphemism for vomiting goes. So if we truly are what we eat, I choose to no longer be a cow. I want to be a blossoming peach. I want to be nature's toothbrush, the flawless apple. I want to be calcium rich broccoli and spinach. I want to be whichever whole grain I can find here in Albania and hopefully it will be as delicious as my red Bolivian quinoa.