And Another Thing

Something else to complain about - super-restrictive diets undertaken not because of specific medical issues, but because you don't appear to have anything else to do with your life. And you don't have a sense of humor, and you like to proselytize. Or so it appears to me, anyway.

Now, you can eat whatever you want, I don't care. If you want to live exclusively on Doritos, or if you want to be a floratarian (I read this in a Connie Willis story, but they may actually exist) go ahead. If you have a medical condition such as food allergies or intolerances or celiac disease, then of course you have to restrict your diet. I can't eat bivalves, because I throw up for hours if I do, but that doesn't mean I don't think you should eat them. Eat what you like, just don't tell me about and for the love of God don't try to bring me around to your way of thinking.

What got me started on this was reading a recipe on a "paleo" diet website. These are the people who believe we should go back to a "hunter-gatherer" diet, because that's how we evolved to eat. So wait, we stopped evolving before we learned to grow crops? I don't know the precise number of thousands of years (or tens of thousands, who knows), since that happened, but my understanding of evolution is that it keeps happening all the time, without our knowing it. Sort of the point, n'est-ce pas? I'm wondering when this line of thinking will "evolve", if you will, to the point of thinking that even coming down from the trees was a bad idea, and we should never have left the oceans in the first place, (thank you, Douglas Adams) so we should just eat fish and plankton.

Also, the paleo people don't eat grains, but no one could have begun to raise grains if there weren't some wild ones around in the first place, right? I suppose if you can find some wild oats or wheat, that would be OK, wouldn't it? And what about wild rice? They eat fruits and vegetables, but those have presumably been farmed. The recipes I see call for things like broccoli and onions, but not wild ones.

Oh well. Here's the non-paleo, non-vegan, totally delicious cake I made for Mom's birthday back in June. It's the Devil's Food Cake Cockaigne recipe with the Chocolate Sour Cream Frosting from the Joy of Cooking, garnished with chocolate chip-stuffed wild black raspberries (I got the idea from Pinterest). Man is it good, and I'm not even a big chocolate cake fan.