Reading cookbooks. Sheez.

Nourishing Traditions:
The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition
and the Diet Dictocrats

by Sally Fallon, with Mary G Enig. Ph.D.

I had high hopes for this book but they rapidly diminished.  She's got a lot of good ideas and some of them are backed up by facts. Some of them.

Her take on fats and oils is right in line with current research, and her description of how most vegetable oils are extracted from seeds brings back the nightmare that I got after reading how canola oil is made.  Refined carbs are evil in anyone's book.  But then she moves on to protein.  How can ANYONE who is serious about nutrition writing trot out that hackneyed old cliche about it being "essential" to consume complete proteins in every meal?  We've gotten past that fantasy, all right? Even the author of Diet For a Small Planet refuted her own thesis--years ago.

So, basing her argument on an obsolete theory, and tradition, Ms. Fallon concludes that good old animal protein is essential for optimal health.  Having just read the Richard Dawkins letter that illustrates the danger of basing beliefs on faith, tradition, or authority, I shouldn't have picked up the book at all.  She takes traditional methods of cooking, treats them as the ultimate authority on correct nutrition, and cherry picks her evidence to support it.

Ignoring the basic fallacy of her approach, I suspect she has some good ideas here.  Especially in the area of "sprouted grains" and sourdough methods of making bread.  It's true, mankind doesn't have the intestinal fauna to digest whole grains, nor do we have enough stomachs.  (I prefer to take my wheat in the form of beer, which over time, creates its own stomach.)  It would be really interesting to see some good, solid research in the area of nutritional benefits of slow soaking of whole grains.

But you won't find that here.  All you'll find is a bunch of recipes with a more-or-less random commentary running down the sides of the pages.  None of the commentary is footnoted or backed by references.  You might as well be reading Ye Olde Farmers' Almanac.

One last beef: in the introduction she stresses the differences in nutritional benefits between meat and eggs that are raised free-range vs. those mass-produced in a factory on corn based feed with a generous helping of antibiotics.  But after that, it's seldom mentioned.  I'd have put it in every recipe.