Stirring the Cauldron

New Moon Newsletters from Jessica Prentice

New Moon of Making Fat

May moondark kitchen notes
from Jessica Prentice

The moon is new! We have just entered the lunar cycle known as the Moon of Making Fat in Lakota (Sioux) culture. The Lakota knew, and we have forgotten, that fat is good. For many millennia throughout human culture, fat was considered precious and sacred -- a thing to be sought after, harvested in whatever ways in whatever places it was found, held in special vessels, prized, eaten with gratitude, and used in religious ceremonies. Nowadays, many Americans actually make a conscious effort to to avoid fat. They purchase 'lowfat' or even 'nonfat' products, and feel very enlightened about doing so. Any indigenous culture on the planet would think we were completely crazy, mixed-up, backwards. And we are.

The notion that fat is bad for us is so pervasive, we don't even question it. We don't ask to see the evidence, we just assume it's all true. We scrimp on butter, avoid buying cream, order our omelet with egg whites only, buy nonfat milk and believe that by thus depriving ourselves, we are being healthy, virtuous, and good. Part of our belief system about fat is the notion that eating fat will make us fat. And becoming overweight is one of our greatest fears. We all know that America is experiencing an epidemic of obesity, and that this disease is linked to our lifestyle. We are terrified of being obese, and work hard to avoid even the suggestion that we might be overweight. But what is overweight? Is there one ideal body type that we should all aspire to?

About 12 years ago I spent a year as the only white student at an African-American college in Mississippi. Coming from a Northern, urban, European-American backround, I was continuously struck by differences between the culture I had grown up in and the culture I was immersed in. One was a much greater acceptance of a wide range of body types. The careful Southern politeness of my fellow students made saying anything derogatory about someone's weight taboo. When people were describing someone who was heavy-set, they would describe that person as "healthy." You would also never call anyone 'skinny,' but would rather say 'tiny.' It wasn't just that people didn't want to be rude, it was also that a much wider range of body types were considered okay, natural, and even sexy. Larger women were often proud of their size, and were looked on as appealing and sexy. This struck me as very different from white culture.

By the time I spent that year in Mississippi, I had already had another eye-opening experience regarding body types: traveling in Europe and looking at Renaissance paintings. I was utterly shocked, at the tender young age of 15, to see women portrayed as irresistible goddesses who were, by modern American standards, overweight. Even the dimples in their skin from generous flesh were considered attractive. I was absolutely blown away. I was spending, at that time, a considerable amount of energy (like so many young, American women) obsessing about my weight and my body. Convinced I was too fat, I swung on the pendulum between dieting and bingeing, with a full dose of guilt and self-recrimination and disgust thrown in. Seeing these women painted so exquisitely, so erotically, in their bountiful largeness, completely rocked my world. I began to consider the possibility of a more inclusive view of feminine beauty, one that encompassed a much greater range of diversity than what I had been brought up seeing.

Years later still, studying about Ayurveda, I studied drawings showing the three different body types of the three Ayurvedic doshas, or types. The Vata dosha was thin, flat-chested, narrow hipped, angular. The Kapha dosha was big-boned, ample-bosomed, wide hipped, fleshy. The Pitta dosha was in between, medium-sized and muscular. The three doshas are not just body types, but energetic elemental types: Vata is air and space, Pitta is fire and water, Kapha is water and earth. Each dosha has its tendencies, excesses, shortcomings, and longings. I am an air-type (Vata) born under an air-sign (Libra), and my head is always in the clouds. I am moony, lunar, idealistic -- always reaching for the moon, always longing for the earth. I have to struggle to pay attention to the physical world around me. I long to feel connected to the plants, animals, and other earthy and earthly things of life, and I work hard to stay grounded. But it is not my natural tendency.

Cultures have doshic tendencies as well. Our American culture is very Pitta, action-oriented, strong, muscular, quick to anger, fiery. The form of feminine beauty we celebrate is in a range from Pitta to Vata, with slenderness being a key aspect. The extremely Vata imagery of the fashion industry tends towards an ethereal, completely unearthly ideal that most Ayurvedic doctors would recognize as either unhealthy or young and unformed. The culture of the Renaissance celebrated the Kapha, the earthy, even maternal seduction of mature womanhood -- what we like to call Rubenesque. It is an ideal of beauty that we rarely see in our modern society. Maybe it is time for it to make a comeback. I saw the word "zaftig" three times in three different places last week. We may be on the cusp of an understanding that it is not only 'okay' or 'acceptable' for women to be big-bodied, but it is sexy.

In the best-selling series of books set in Botswana, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, the heroine, Precious Ramotswe, is proud of being a 'traditionally-built lady' and both critical and dismissive of the Western influence that makes women want to be thin. She doesn't diet or express any desire to be anything but the 'traditionally-built lady' that she is, and experiences unabashed pleasure at her favorite dinner of pumpkin dripping with butter and beef stew with lots of good gravy.

Not that the butter or gravy is what makes Precious Ramotswe 'traditionally built.' She is 'traditionally built' because that is her body type -- she is Kapha. She sees her size as the size she was given, and considers it a blessing. She is also blessed to live in a culture that still embraces her beauty despite the encroachment of Western influence.

The Vata ideal of beauty in this country is truly damaging to women. Even Vata women end up feeling that they are not 'Vata enough.' In fact, the most Vata of us all -- thin, adolescent girls just beginning to develop into women -- starve themselves, binge and purge, and waste endless, countless hours obsessing over their weight and seeking to discipline their appetites. I find it an appalling waste -- of time, of energy, of intelligence.

We make a great mistake in this culture lumping together into one 'problem' the issue of obesity, the fact of body fat, and the presence of fat in the diet. We think that the fat in our diet is the cause of obesity, and consider that any body fat we find on our bodies puts us on the road to obesity. None of these things are true. While a person with a Kapha body type may be at a higher risk of obesity than someone with a Vata body type, it by no means implies that the person is obese. The person might well be 'healthy' (as they said in Mississippi). While a Vata body type might not be at risk of obesity, poor nutrition might still be a problem. And as for the idea that fat in the diet is what causes any of this, I believe that is just patently untrue.

In America, our rates of obesity have gone up steadily in the last 70 years, while our average consumption of fat has gone down steadily in that same period of time. While once we (like all sane people everywhere) ate as much butter, cream, lard, and natural oils as we were able to afford, we now avoid all these things and eat a diet high in sugars, refined carbohydrates, and processed foods. In fact, in many cases the sugars, carbohydrates, and processed foods are actual substitutes for the natural fat content in things.

When you take the fat out of something, you are left with two serious problems in the palatability of the foodstuff: flavor and mouthfeel. As we loved to say in cooking school: "Fat is the messenger of flavor." Once you take out the fat, you take out the flavor, and you have to put something back in to make it taste good. That thing is usually sugar. You also take away the sense of richness and goodness in the mouth. The way you make up for that is through a combination of refined carbohydrates in the form of starches and gums, and also processed, fake and hydrogenated fat-like products that are truly frightening chemical compounds that utterly confound our wise bodies.

Luckily for the companies that manufacture these lowfat foodstuffs, sugars, gums, fillers, and chemical compounds are much cheaper to produce than healthy fats. Healthy fats come from animals that need lots of room and good husbandry in order to stay healthy. They come from the fruit and nuts of trees that require expanses of land, healthy soil and good stewardship. They come from fish that thrive in the wild only if we protect clean and well-managed marine ecosystems. In other words, good fats are still precious, challenging to obtain, and derived from nature in its most expansive, complex, interconnected form: just as they have always been. Fat substitutes can be synthesized in laboratories, patented by companies, produced for pennies and sold at the same price as their full-fat competitors. The nutritionist and author Joan Dye Gussow made this oft-quoted quip: "As for butter verses margarine, I trust cows more than chemists." Me too.

Meanwhile, our rate of obesity has never been higher, and our consumption of refined sugars, carbohydrates, and chemical compounds has also never been higher, but our consumption of traditional fats has never been lower. Let's put our thinking caps on...

I think that one of the saddest parts about a belief that eating fat makes us fat is the lack of reverence for the complexity and mind-boggling intelligence of Creation that it implies. As living beings, part of an infinitely intricate, subtle, and miraculous Creation, our bodies work in ways that are mysterious and fascinating. Plants take sunlight and transform it into leaves, petals, bulbs, fruit, roots, sap, bark, and many more vegetal forms and functions. They do this with light! Ruminant animals like cows take grass (which is virtually indigestible to people), digest it beautifully and naturally, and turn it into muscle, blood, fat, milk, horns, bones, hooves and much more. Chickens take worms and grasses and snails and grains and turn them into flesh and feathers and eggs. Oysters take in plankton and build shells, bodies, and even pearls.

Do we really think that human bodies are the exception to this rule? That instead of doing something magical and mind-boggling they simply take fat in and then stick it on our hips?? No! Will drinking milk make us lactate or eating fertile eggs make us ovulate? No, of course not. We are part of this miraculous earth and our bodies have a genius way beyond our comprehension.

When I was a girl, I was embarrassed by my round face. I wanted to have the high cheek-boned, chiseled, slender face I associated with fashion models. My family would tease me about my 'moonface.' When I lived in Thailand as a young woman, the people that I worked around would complement me on the shape of my face, explaining that a round face is a sign of beauty in their culture: the ideal being a face the shape of the full moon. This struck me as a bit ironic, and made me feel a little better. Years later still, I would read the work of Weston Price, the dentist who travelled around the world in the 1930s studying the teeth and bone structure of isolated, traditional peoples as well as those who had been modernized and colonized. He found a direct correlation between healthy people, healthy dental structure, and broad, wide faces; as well as a direct correlation between ill-health, rotting teeth, and narrow faces. He found that the isolated traditional people were much healthier than the modernized or colonized people. He also found that one common denominator in the diets of all the people with good health, broad faces with plenty of room for teeth, and absence of tooth decay was that they all ate diets rich in traditional fats.

Over time, I have come to be proud of my broad face, and be grateful for the 'nutritional capital' it implies. I have also let go of the silly notion that we should avoid fat because it will make us fat, and begun to understand that our bodies work with a deep intelligence. Somehow, through a series of intricate physiological processes, we take in fat and turn it into strong and healthy bones and teeth. We take in carbohydrates and turn them into fat -- a wise system of stored energy that evolved during the ice age to help us live through times of deprivation.

We will never fully understand all that the human body does, or how it does it. But because we are obsessed with knowing, explaining, and quantifying everything, we cling to understandings of nutritional inputs that are overly simplistic at best, dangerously distorted at worst. Our mechanistic science seeks to understand all of life in terms of distinct parts and unique functions. The body is seen as an engine. You add fuel and water and it runs as long as you keep the parts in working order. But bodies are infinitely more complex and subtle than engines -- the intelligence at work in Creation that made our bodies is something that human intelligence can only glimpse at.

What we can do is love and respect these wise and intelligent bodies, whatever shape, size, or color they come in. Each one is a miracle and an amazing blessing. We have to be careful of our tendency to think we know what's best for us, and to force all of life to fit into the confines of our limited understanding. To live in right relation can be as simple as knowing that we are precious, just as Precious Ramotswe knows that she is: a traditionally built, African woman, on the edge of a desert, loving her culture and her people, enjoying her pumpkin with butter and beef stew with gravy, soaking in the beauty of being alive.

Wishing you all the richness of life during this Moon of Making Fat. Berries are coming into season: they are absolutely delicious with cream.

Updates on upcoming farm tours I'll be doing through my job at CUESA:

The May 31 farm tour "Daughters of Earth" is sold out! We will be going to Bodega Bay Goat Ranch and Green Gulch Farm in Marin. Maybe we'll be able to do this tour focusing on Women in Farming again next year.

On June 13 we'll be going to Highland Hills (a pasture-based cattle ranch) and Eatwell Farm (a small-scale organic farm). I'm calling the tour "The Polycultural Farm" and we'll be looking at the biodiversity of small farms and ranches. We leave from the Ferry Building at 8am, provide lunch, and the cost is only $25. If you're interested in registering, please email christine@cuesa.org.