Reflections On Food, Paleo, and The Revolution
Post #3 of my 12th Anniversary Blogging Marathon, post #4,260 of my dozen years of daily blogging.
We used to laugh uproariously and poke fun at the articles and authors tagging Paleo as a fad.
“Well, it’s a 2 million year old fad, then.” HaHaHa.
There were right; they are right. It is. I’m not sure it started out that way. I certainly wasn’t trying to make it so, but rather, was participating in what seemed to me like a food revolution based on a really sound foundation…human evolution. And it was powerful. Myself and many others lost much weight. We achieved improved health markers from whatever baseline.
Sometime back I stopped putting my posts into categories or tagging them, and I collapsed all my categories into “No Particular Category.” I have a queer visceral distaste for SEO bullshit and all that stuff. I just want to write and hit publish. Google treats me pretty damn nice in spite of my SEO incompetence.
I don’t recall the exact number, but it was something like 300 or more posts of my cooking in my Food Porn category. Haphazardly, I published some few dozens to Pinterest along the way.
While I’m pretty satisfied with what I did—and most most dishes were my own creations—it just lost its appeal over time. I began to sense several problems, not unlike the massive upsurge in marketing and all manner of foodie blogs with tantalizing recipes. Well, for one, I think the community lost something when it went from seeing food I and others were cooking in their own kitchens, to stuff being done in pro kitchens and photographed in pro conditions.
For another, it begins to create silly standards for what paleo food is. And yea, I fed into that, because I published my best stuff and I went to lengths I’d not have gone to otherwise because I knew I’d be publishing it. It went from slightly less than genuine to completely staged and fake everywhere.
I don’t begrudge anyone capitalizing on any of this, I understand the value of luring those who might not otherwise be interested, and as I age, I’m trying to force myself to be more inclusive. So, it’s just a humble voice of some measure of sorrow speaking to you.
Maybe paleo changed, maybe I changed, but most probably, we both changed and it was in opposite directions. There’s just almost nothing about it I can find really exciting, anymore. It seems to continue to advance ideas that have been superseded in terms of new science and plain old experience by lots of folks out there, including myself. There are decent exceptions, Mark Sisson being one of them. He may not evolve as fast as I or others might like, but compared to Shiite Cordainism—where it was written in The paleo Diet in 2001 A.D., and scripture never changes—it’s a world of difference. So, there’s that.
I chose to focus on food preparations and their pictures to address the wider ideas I’m talking about here because it’s fundamental to the whole thing. We have to eat, almost daily, usually multiple times. And that’s where it became tedious. Continuing to pump out elaborate dishes so I can blog about them and convince people that they can go paleo because “look how awesome this is and you lose weight and get healthier.””
And that’s fine, but it doesn’t need to be that hard. Somewhere, there should be a paleo 1.0 Forever book. Maybe [easyazon_link identifier=”B006X7PBNA” locale=”US” tag=”fretheani-20″]mine comes close[/easyazon_link].
What I want to do and see others do is blog about really simple food. How’s that for inclusiveness? How about soup? There’s tons of stuff and I’ll touch on some ideas in other posts during this blogging marathon.
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Free The Animal is an eclectic writing project about everything since November 2003. 23 years, 5,500 posts, 5 million words.
It's a paid membership blog. Most posts are free and public, but only paid members can comment. What determines whether it's free or paid is when I publish. Monday through Friday, free and public. Saturday and Sunday, for paid members. That's it. Membership info here.
Paleo Blogs, and blogs in general have started losing appeal to me. They good ones start charging and set up paywalls, or get so commercialized you can’t stand them. Bloggers used to be all about the comments, some still are. But most now seem to be all about the “hits” caring less about developing a rapport with readers.
I guess what really turned me off of blogs was the new website “Chaturbate.” Here you have men and women and trannys all competing for viewers. It’s free to watch, but if you want to make a “request” (ie. put the dildo up your butt!) you have to pay a “token.”
It’s mesmerizing to watch, and after a few days of just “being a gray,” you develop a rapport with these people. Kind of like people who read blogs but don’t comment.
CB’ers (as they are called) are like bloggers. They need thousands of veiwers in the hopes that a few will pay with a “token” (comment). Then, they have to do more and more degrading acts to get the viewers and their tokens. Some will try to shock for viewers, others go with their amazing girl-next-door looks, and get 10,000 viewers and 100,000 tokens without trying.
Others get you all hot and horny, and then put up a pay-wall, requiring a payment to see a “hidden show”.
An ugly tranny, who is really just a cross-dressing weird old guy, will degrade himself for free for an hour or more begging for tips. Eventually, with 200 viewers and 3 or 4 tips, they get mad and stop the show.
Go check it out. It’s free, unless you want to tip. A token costs 5 cents, and a token or two will allow you the honor of requesting a personalized act, in your honor. 50 tokens, and you are a God. For $2.50, you can be the guy who caused a most-likely human-trafficked filapina to get splooged on her face.
Anyway. Go check it out, and then tell me us bloggers are not just CB’ing for tokens.
Here’s a good blog about it, anyway.
medium.com/matter/are-you-internet-sexual-1f855e113df#.onrhafphp
“Go check it out. It’s free,”
To each his own but I think I’ll pass. Besides, I have four dogs and their daily butt and genital sniffing and licking scene pretty much has me well covered.
Thanks anyway.
In terms of it being free, well, when there’s some things you can’t un-see, how free is that really?
I’m grateful that was “there” at what, in hindsight, seems like the right time, a sweet spot before it became “a movement.” Late 2010, early 2011. Reading Richard, Kurt Harris, Paul Jaminet et al in real time. It all made such sense.
I’m also grateful to have been there for the intelligent evolution of it by those who kept enough distance to see its flaws and its holes, and those who knew it would eventually turn into a marketing scam and wanted nothing to do with that.
Keep an open but critical mind and there is still a lot of valuable and interesting material out there. That’s why I’m still reading FTA and Richard’s rants five years on.
“That’s why I’m still reading FTA and Richard’s rants five years on.”
By which I mean Richard has always maintained that openness and critical mindset, and thus been an important resource. Didn’t mean for that quoted line to sound like self-praise.
No worries Daniel. Thanks much, man. People like you get it.
Favorite dishes:
Ground beef + bag of frozen veggies.
Ground beef + can San Mariano tomatoes.
Eggs
Baked potatoes.
Cottage cheese
Greek yogurt
Fruit.
For a post tomorrow, I’m photo documenting a simple meal.
This is a late post, and I’m sure you don’t give a flip, but Jimmy Moore recently did a podcast with Amelia Luker from nourishbalancethrive.com and she claims raw potato starch causes dysbiosis in the gut. Didn’t know if you or anyone on here had seen this.
It apparently also causes one to be unable to get their own hair out of their eyes for a photo.
Jimmy isn’t even worth clicking into, anymore—at least for me—and I don’t give a runny shit about his attempts to forestall his eventual demise by having RN’s bla bla on his show.
I have thousands of comments here that attest otherwise.
He’s such a fucking liar.
That guest was just awful. I didn’t finish the podcast.