The classic dilemma rears its head right around 11:30 am. I haven’t eaten breakfast and I’m getting hungry. Noon time is the height of digestive fire and noon time is quickly approaching. I could stop by Whole Foods and get an orange juice but that doesn’t sound like enough. I need to be here, there and somewhere else by 12:30 so I better get something now if I’m going to have any time to actually eat it. So hungry, the thoughts twirl and jump.
What sounds colorful? What sounds delicious? What sounds like it will stave off this feeling akin to death that I call hunger and which plagues me every day around this time? Hungry, hungry, driving around. My morning tea is gone so there isn’t even a distraction at hand. Grass Roots has olives. Those won’t help enough. Verde has chips and guacamole. Salted, dessicated starches dipped in yummy drummy plant fats. They can’t even digest at the same time. Oh the weight of too much knowlege under the pressure of hunger. Whole Foods has options and I need a bathroom anyway, I’ll go there. They do have that quinoa salad with edamama and mango and slivered almonds and all those herbs and that questionable dressing but it’s definitely vegan. Cold, citrus-drenched fluffy, starchy quinoa!
I get the quinoa salad. I drive to the beach. I spread my loving towel next to a convenient stump on the sand and admire the inland sea. I eat all the quinoa and all the toppings that shouldn’t be eaten with quinoa. I chew and delight in the texture. I dig for another spoonful. The side of my arm gets hot. I check the time. Ten more minutes until I have to be everywhere.
I close the lid on the empty container and lick the spoon clean. I place them in my bag, the qunioa salad now gurgling away in my tummy, while I sit a minute longer. Nothing about my enjoyment of the meal has changed the chemical processes now occurring in my digestive tract. The food is not “gone.” It is transforming into its component parts. The mango still breaks down within ten minutes and, blocked by the oils and starches from entering my blood stream, begins to ferment. The vinegar in the dressing is already burning cells and calling on my blood to get a neutralizing agent. The complex proteins in the nuts could take a whole day to be completely broken down. The starches will be worked on for at least the next four to six hours but since they need an alkaline medium and the proteins in the nuts need an acidic medium, they’ll both be inhibited and may not break down at all. I’ve just created hours and hours of complex chemical processes for my body. I’m not even going to sit long enough for my stomach to deal with what I just put in it. But I was so hungry and I did SO enjoy that quinoa salad!
At least there is the enjoyment because left to it’s own devices, without “my” memory of and desire for quinoa salad, my actual body would never choose such a bound up combination of unlike foods.
Driving around and being hungry is never going to be completely avoided (the entire fast-food industry is dependent on this very scenario). The more stress we’re under when we make decisions about food the more likely those decisions will be emotional and not purely physical. Starches have a calming effect because their molecular structure is very similar to painkillers! Starches soothe and sedate. So if you’re in need of soothing when you make a decision about what to eat, you are more likely to choose a complex starch that feels good to eat but in the end takes more energy to break down than made usable to your cells. PLUS, acid ash metabolic waste which has to be sequestered in mucus to prevent it burning your cells and then eliminated through your hopefully functioning kidneys.
Those dang delicious starches.
Here’s what to do: PACK A LUNCH. Pack a lunch for breakfast. Pack a lunch for 3:30. Pack a lunch for dinner. Pack a lunch for 10:00 am if that’s when you get hungry and know you’ll be in the car. Then it goes: “I’m so hungry, what’s around here? Oh wait, I have pomegrantes and a spoon!”
This is the way.
I pack a juice or two, sliced fruit, napkins, water, dried figs, dates. I pack anything I have in the house that is fruit related and not messy. If I have time for a picnic I find a grassy patch and live life to the fullest. If I have to do eighteen errands before pick-up at 3:00 I eat in the car like a slave – but a well-nourished slave at least. A too-stressed hungry slave chooses starch all day or else waits too long and chooses two starches, fruits, veggies, fats and a couple proteins all in the same frenzied meal.
Every weekday morning I pack a lunch for my son. Today he has pomegrantes, grapes, fruit-fig-newton cookie things that I made from dates and raisins and figs and cocoa powder, plus cucumbers with a dressing of olive oil and spices. Why wouldn’t I do the same thing for myself if I knew I’d be out of the house for the next five or six hours?? “Oh I’ll find something while I’m out.” No you won’t! You will get whatever “sounds good” in the moment, not what you know to be good ahead of time.
This is my lesson and I am learning it. Maybe one day I’ll be able to pack myself a quinoa salad and not break out the next day but until that day arrives, pack a lunch I must.
References:
- To learn more about food combinations and digestion, reference The 80/10/10 Diet by Dr. Douglas N. Graham.
- To learn more about starches and their effect on the body, reference The 80/10/10 Diet by Dr. Douglas N. Graham and Mucusless Diet Healing System by Prof. Arnold Ehret.