@Paul – With a limited number of categories, I had little choice. I suppose I could make a new category in the spirit of modern lifestyle design and call it unHealth 😀

Mmmm bacon!

….Wrong link – same movie, but this explains (quickly) what I’m getting at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8WA5wcaHp4&feature=player_embedded

Beans and rice aren’t really “processed” (white rice is, but, for the most part, that isn’t as bad as a Hungryman meal or something). And Flour, switch to whole wheat or something. All that is really happening in the “processing” is that massive amounts are being processed. You could get your own mill-machine and process it yourself, which is neat. But time consuming (unless you are “retired”).

In essence, a pasta machine, mill-er, and some chickens (for eggs) can sustain even better along with tomato’s and other veggie crops. Too bad apartments don’t let you keep chickens.

Oscar Meyer makes a very good turkey bacon for the non-pork people. Best fried, not microwaved.

I only want to use the chicken’s for eggs. The only meat that seems alright to eat is fish – but we could talk for ages about how our Ocean’s are being destroyed worse than anything else by overfishing and pollution…and poorly maintained oil rigs…

If anyone has read “Emergency”, the example about the goat makes it hard to keep an animal only to eat it in my opinion. The extended steps of where my steak or ham or bacon comes from is an ignorance I am willing to live with as long as I eat it

I’m going to agree to disagree with the beans and rice, as it goes way back in my family history.

I don’t feel my diet is superior at all – I love meat! In this instance, ignorance is “bliss” of sorts. I guess if I did try living in a farm, I would eventually get used to it.

Meat, fruits and veggies sounds like Atkins. I tried Aktins and it does make you feel better and lose weight because all those carbs are cut out completely.

I can post trailers also that prove my case

@ Zen – Gary Taubes, who wrote “Good Calories Bad Calories” responded to the China study in his book – a summary of this response can be found here:

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/cardiovascular-disease/gary-taubes-responds/

“The Asian question first. I do address this in the book and I address it again in the afterward of the paperback. There are several variables we have to consider with any diet/health interaction. Not just the fat content and carb content, but the refinement of the carbs, the fructose content (in HFCS and sucrose primarily) and how long they’ve had to adapt to the refined carbs and sugars in the diet. In the case of Japan, for instance, the bulk of the population consumed brown rice rather than white until only recently, say the last 50 years. White rice is labor intensive and if you’re poor, you’re eating the unrefined rice, at least until machine refining became widely available. The more important issue, though, is the fructose. China, Japan, Korea, until very recently consumed exceedingly little sugar (sucrose). In the 1960s, when Keys was doing the Seven Countries Study and blaming the absence of heart disease in the Japanese on low-fat diets, their sugar consumption, on average, was around 40 pounds a year, or what the Americans and British were eating a century earlier. In the China Study, which is often evoked as refutation of the carb/insulin hypothesis, the Chinese ate virtually no sugar. In fact, sugar consumption wasn’t even measured in the study because it was so low. The full report of the study runs to 800 pages and there are only a couple of mentions of sugar. If I remember correctly (I don’t have my files with me at the moment) it was a few pounds per year. The point is that when researchers look at traditional populations eating their traditional diets — whether in rural China, Japan, the Kitava study in the South Pacific, Africa, etc — and find relatively low levels of heart disease, obesity and diabetes compared to urban/westernized societies, they’re inevitably looking at populations that eat relatively little or no refined carbs and sugar compared to populations that eat a lot. Some of these traditional populations ate high-fat diets (the Inuit, plains Indians, pastoralists like the Masai, the Tokelauans); some ate relatively low-fat diets (agriculturalists like the Hunza, the Japanese, etc.), but the common denominator was the relative absence of sugar and/or refined carbs. So the simplest possible hypothesis to explain the health of these populations is that they don’t eat these particularly poor quality carbohydrates, not that they did or did not eat high fat diets. Now the fact that some of these populations do have relatively high carb diets suggests that it’s the sugar that is the fundamental problem. Ultimately we can only guess at causes using this kind of observational evidence. To know anything with certainty we’d need the kind of randomized controlled trials I yearn for in the epilogue of GCBC.”

I can’t believe you even suggested replacing the bacon! 🙂

Jacob, I love the concept behind ERE, the blog and the community here.

But your recipes are *terrible*! Only a scientist could manage to make cooking sound so joyless 😉

I absolutely want to put the principles of ERE into practice (I’m already saving lots, tying up money in inflation-proof bonds for eventual investment and cutting back), but there will always be some wiggle room when it comes to food.

I do sympathise – there’s really only so much you can offer in terms of ‘recipes’ for ERE cooking. For those of us who try to remain creative, cooking with cheap cuts of reduced meat and fish and whatever veg/fruit are loss leaders for the week, cooking is constantly inventive, fun (and challenging).

I’d like to hear more from you on life, the universe and everything…. bar food! For example, I know you don’t run one of those blogs with constantly changing financial goals and values (as you’ve already achieved your goals to a large extent), but it would be genuinely interesting to hear your take on current events a bit more.

That’s right Jacob, but taking the fun out of it 🙂

For that reason (and for mathematical efficiency), I shall start a campaign to ensure that food globally is labelled purely by cost, with no other description. For example, I shall no longer have bean burgers with wholemeal rolls and a tomato salad – it’ll be a ‘£0.70 dinner’. I can see where this will get confusing already….

Sounds lovely. Stop worrying about the impending heart attack. Saturated fat is most likely not a direct link. Enjoy life anyway, you will be dead relatively soon no matter how fit you keep… at least most of your life was not spent slaving 🙂

source for wheat berries is War Eagle Mill in Arkansas… the best ever