My Meals 2/22/2010

Breakfast

Had this one after my usual 17 hour fast.  Today I did my strength training at the end of the fast then ate this:

Broiled yellow fin (about 8 ounces) (marinated in lemon, ginger, and soy sauce)
Stir-fried bok choy, celery, carrots, and red pepper (with olive oil, ginger, and garlic)
Baked kabocha squash with 2 tablespoons of coconut butter
Some raisins and a few tablespoons of almond butter mixed together

I prefer kabocha squashes to all other winter squashes, and even to sweet potatoes, but they generally cost more that sweet potatoes and take a little more time to prepare, and too often I find that the grower did not let it ripen long enough.  They look like this:

 

Photo courtesy of Tainongseeds.com  

Lunch

 

Steak tartare (again, I really like it, and easy to prepare!)

Half an avocado with chipotle salsa

Stir-fried vegetables (same as breakfast)

1 orange

1 apple

Yes, I eat a fair amount of fruit.  Same as equatorial hunter-gatherers.  Yes, the human body can handle fructose in the amounts we get from fruit.  We have specific biochemical pathways for doing it, a legacy of a paleo diet containing significant amounts of fructose.

Evidence contradicts the claim that all wild fruits are "small" and not sweet.   Ward Nicholson at Beyond Vegetarianism describes many of the plant foods eaten by the !Kung, including the wild orange, which averages nearly one pound per fruit:

Wild orange

Description:

10 cm diameter, 438 gm average weight. Lee [1979, p. 482] describes it as follows:

The fruit looks superficially like a large Sunkist orange about 10 cm in diameter. But the rich orange-colored rind is hard and woody, and the pulp inside is quite unlike an orange, consisting of 30 lozenge-shaped pips surrounded by a sticky brown pulp.

The fruits are in season from September-December. However, the common custom is to collect unripe fruits by knocking them down with sticks or snagging them with a probe. The unripe fruits are then buried at a depth of 0.5 meters in the ground, where they remain for approximately one month. Burying the fruit speeds up ripening and protects the fruit from insect attack. The wild oranges are popular with other local tribes, and are a trade commodity. Consumption: The fruit is cut with a knife and the pulp eaten out-of-hand or with a spoon. The fruit is sweet and has a nice fragrance. The seeds are discarded; only the pulp is consumed.
There is another form of the wild orange; it is not buried but roasted. When tree-ripened, it can be eaten in the raw state.
The !Kung understand that unripe wild oranges are unsuitable as food. Lee [1979, p. 482] reports:

The !Kung older people caution the children to never eat either species [of wild orange] unripe, saying that doing so will make them vomit.