11 ~ Lessons from Hunza
I’ve now run out of some kitchen staples; still, life is good today - I write this beside a pot of tea that’s steeping in boiled birch sap instead of water. Gone now from my larder are olive oil (but have offers for some to follow up), regular sugar and white flour. For this situation, encouraging lessons come from the mountains of Pakistan.
As for many of us, olive oil is usually a prominent character in my kitchen (and which I use more frequently than sugar or flour). And of course, it’s a staple of a healthy, Mediterranean-style diet. Olive oil rates particularly high in my family: my sister Anne and her son, my nephew Keegan, both live in central Italy, and produce their own oil from their own olives (check out https://www.annesitaly.com/blog/our-olive-oil-green-gold-of-umbria/).
When my sister reads this, that I’ve let my olive oil supply dwindle to zero, she is likely to organize an intervention to put my life-threatening (and quality of life diminishing) nonsense to an end.
But hey, Mediterranean schmediterranean. Not saying it isn’t a healthy diet, just that it’s not the only game in town. In other parts of the world, people have lived very long lives (and probably longer than Italians) without ever tasting olive oil or an Omega-3 laced oily fish.
One such place is Hunza, a region in northern Pakistan in the Karakoram Mountains, the world’s second highest range (home to the peak K2 - “K” as in Karakoram). My buddy Frank Wickert and I had the good fortune to travel through Hunza in 1989. The area’s monumental, jagged peaks, framing green, terraced stream valleys, make for one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen (and apparently true for others, as well - Hunza was the inspirational model for Shangri-la in the 1937 film Lost Horizon). Frank and I traveled for several days (mostly by public bus) along the Karakoram Highway from Pakistan into the western, Muslim region of China - the route of the old Silk Road. It was a fantastic trip, and a particularly memorable part of the journey for me was a few days spent in the Hunza valley, in the village of Karimabad. Karimabad was the last stop before the final run up to and over the border with China, at the Khunjerab Pass. At 15,393 feet (4,693 m), the pass is the highest paved border crossing in the world.
The residents of Hunza were once among the longest-lived people on Earth, and various studies attributed this in large part to their diet (e.g., The Wheel of Health: A study of the Hunza people and the keys to health, by Guy Wrench, 1938). Being such high, mountainous country, wood for making fires is in short supply in Hunza. In response, residents traditionally made fires only in winter - for warmth, and at the same time cooking food, including modest amounts of meat (sheep and goats mainly). In summer, fires were severely restricted (some accounts say prohibited). During these months, the people of Hunza subsisted (and in fact, thrived) on a diet of mostly fruit dried the previous autumn (dried mulberries and apricots in particular), fresh fruit when it was ready, dairy (including various yogurt-like cultures and ferments, and clarified butter or ghee), and fresh vegetables and sprouted whole grain grown in their elaborately terraced fields.
But their traditional diet –and longevity –didn’t wholly survive the coming of the British Raj (Hunza was then part of India). The residents of Hunza report that three things introduced by the British diminished their health and longevity: cooking oil, sugar and white flour. These are precisely the things my larder is now short of, and so I’m not too worried.
[Note: There have been some challenges to the notion of exceptional health and longevity in Hunza – but all are based on observations there after the British left. So, in fact, they support the narrative of a decline in Hunza health.]
For now, I’m Hunza. Instead of olive oil, for fat I'm relying mainly on butter, which I make myself from organic cream milked a few miles away from cows I know. If that kills me, I’ll die a happy man.
The photo above is a view of Hunza I pulled from a travel website. If you’d like to see more, on the 1989 road trip I met a writer, Frank Jossi, who subsequently published an article about his journey, illustrated with my photos; I’ve put a scan of it here.]