81 ~ Mediterranean, schmediterranean?

Brrrrr.  It was -18F (-28C) at the farmhouse this morning - the kind of morning when one’s thoughts might turn to sunny Mediterranean beaches. 

I’ve had the Mediterranean on my mind recently, but for other reasons. Earlier this month (on January 6), The New York Times ran an essay that, once again, extolled the virtues of the Mediterranean diet. It was a useful review, but stumbled a bit by listing some foods not traditionally found or eaten in the Mediterranean – such as salmon, avocadoes, and low-fat yogurt (as one reader posted in response, no Greek would be caught dead eating low-fat yogurt).  Nor did the article mention pasta, a cornerstone of Italian eating, yet not particularly healthy as a regular thing (at least in American-sized portions…).  

In any case, the links between what people around the Mediterranean consume (such as significant amounts of olive oil and fatty ocean fish) and their good health might be more nuanced. Residents of the basin also have access to other healthy things many of the rest of us don’t – such as more sunlight to produce Vitamin D, and proximity to the good energy of the sea.

This isn’t to say the Mediterranean diet isn’t a healthy and good thing; just that it’s probably a bit more complex, and may not be the only game in town. There’s also a bit of a problem here: I live a long way from a swimming sardine or an olive tree. For an inland northerner like me to consistently replicate the diet of someone in Greece or Italy would plant a large and dirty ecological footprint on our already reeling Earth. Perhaps I best look to other examples...

One such possibility is Hunza (which I wrote about in a past post). It’s a remote region in the Karakoram Mountains of northern Pakistan, and home to K2, the world’s second highest mountain (“K” for Karakoram).  Hunza is a damn long way from any ocean, yet at one time the residents of Hunza (aka, Hunzakuts) were among the healthiest, longest-lived people in the world – even though they never saw a drop of olive oil, a lemon or an ocean fish rich in Omega-3s.  Maybe there’s more than one way to beat the reaper.

In the late 1980s I traveled through Hunza, along the route of the old Silk Road, on my way from Pakistan to the western, Muslim region of China. It’s difficult to bring alive in words typed here the beauty of Hunza (at least for a writer of such modest gifts as mine).  Suffice to say, the area’s immense, jagged peaks, reaching from a narrow green valley up to the vault of an impossibly blue sky, made for perhaps the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen (and no surprise, Hunza was the inspirational model for Shangri-la in the 1930s book and film, Lost Horizon).  

Being particularly high montane country, firewood is in short supply in Hunza. In response, the valley’s residents traditionally made fires only in winter - for warmth and for cooking food, including modest amounts of meat (from sheep and goats, mainly).  In summer, to conserve wood, fires were by some accounts forbidden, or at least severely restricted. During these warmer months, Hunzakuts subsisted, and apparently thrived, on fruit dried the previous autumn (mulberries and apricots in particular), almonds, fresh fruit when it came in summer season, dairy (including various yogurt-like cultures and ferments, and clarified butter or ghee), and sprouted whole grains and a few vegetables grown in beautifully terraced fields (an alpine version of raised beds).

Basically, out of necessity for months of the year, a 100% raw, local food diet. I recall loading up In a small village market on golden brown dried mulberries, sold out of large burlap sacks, for the final leg of the bus trip up to the border with China (at the Khunjerab Pass; at nearly 15,400 feet, it’s the world’s highest paved border crossing).

Alas, the traditional Hunzakut diet  – and the area’s legendary longevity – took a hit with the arrival of the British Raj on the Indian subcontinent. Residents report that three things introduced by the British wreaked havoc upon their health: cooking oil, sugar and white flour (it should be noted that some commentators have disputed the notion of exceptional health and longevity in Hunza – but such challenges were based on observations made after the period of British rule; so in fact, they support the narrative of a decline in Hunza health).

These three horsemen of the apocalypse are also among the items that are most challenging for me to procure in my experiment of living from the Driftless land, and so I don’t get too worried. Excessive white flour, sugar, and the wrong sorts of dietary fat hound the health of Americans in general. Although embracing the Mediterranean diet would likely mark an improvement, we should take care to not make Mother Earth even more ill than she is through our own attempts to be healthy.  Probably not a good long game.

To be sure, I’m not a fundamentalist about this. I’ll still gladly accept olive oil shipped to me from Italy by my nephew, and in a restaurant I’ll order some far-away wild salmon from Alaska.  But more and more I look to the likes of Hunza – although also a distant place, in spirit not a lot separates Hunza from my home ground in the Driftless Area (a Hunza with firewood!).

For now, then, I’ll continue to be more Hunzakut than Sicilian. I rely quite a bit on butter (homemade from cream given by cows I know), and I eat more apples (and mulberries!) than oranges, more morels than olives, and more venison and local stream trout than ocean fish.

If such a diet beckons the reaper, well, at least I’ll die a contented, land-connected man.

A reminder and invitation to check out a couple of talks I’ll present at the upcoming PBS Wisconsin Garden and Landscape Expo, at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison:

“Gardening with Spirit”: Friday, February 10 at 12:15 pm and Sunday, February 12 at 12:45 pm.

"Reflections on a Three-Year Hiatus from Grocery Shopping”:  Friday, February 10 at 4:00 pm and Sunday, February 12 at 10:15 am.