Market Farming

[road's end farm <organic101 AT linkny.com>]

On Apr 8, 2005, at 8:56 AM, MaggsMD AT aol.com wrote:

> <x-tad-bigger>Sally Fallon writes</x-tad-bigger>
> <x-tad-bigger> </x-tad-bigger>

I have seen a presentation by Sally Fallon and was, to put it mildly, not impressed. What actual data was involved had clearly been bent around to fit a preconceived hypotheses. (For one example: there were a lot of pictures that claimed to support the hypothesis that the recommended diet caused better health, higher intelligence, and broader faces; while a different diet caused poor health, low intelligence, and narrower faces. The people whose pictures were supposed to illustrate the better diet had all been posed showing off their good teeth by producing broad grins. The people whose pictures were supposed to illustrate the poorer diet had all been posed showing their teeth by dropping the lower jaw so that their mouths gaped wide open. If you look at yourself in the mirror with these two expressions you will see that the grin expression makes your face look wider; it also makes you look bright and cheerful. The dropped-jaw expression makes your face look narrower and unhappy and is associated with an appearance of less intelligence.) No good data were shown to back any of the claims made. 

I do think there's a great deal to be learned from traditional diets. Weston Price, however, did not seem to be trying to learn, but to impose his ideas on what he claimed to see in the places he visited briefly. Some other people at the presentation who did know something about their own cultures' traditional diets were very upset at the presentation.

I have read in more reputable places that some people are allergic to fava beans. I believe some people are also allergic to soy. This doesn't mean that other people shouldn't eat them, though it might be good to make sure your customers know of the allergic potential if the food is unfamiliar to them. I don't know enough about soy nutritional factors to weigh in with any authority on that issue; but I do note that there seem to be a lot of people who think soy is a magic food that will cure almost anything, and also some people who think it's a terrible food nobody should eat. I suspect, based on the fact that a lot of people have been eating a lot of soy, some of them for generations; and the fact that many of these people are healthy but some are not; that neither of these claims is correct.

Diet certainly does affect health. But different people do have differences in what they digest well, and not everybody should be on the same diet.

-- Rivka; Finger Lakes NY, Zone 5 mostly
Fresh-market organic produce, small scale