DAY SIXTEEN, ALKALINE YEAR:Defining pH

DAY SIXTEEN ALKALINE  YEAR

DEFINING pH

October 11, 2009 Meaning “power of Hydrogen,” pH means “potential for hydrogen,” and indicates the numbers of hydrogen atoms in a fluid.  The more hydrogen ions are present, the more acidic the fluid.  There is near-universal agreement that a pH reading of human blood needs to be between 7.365 and 7.45 for a body to be healthy.  Below that is dangerously acidic, above is the potential threat of being too alkalinic.  Is it possible that other disease states might occur if that pH goes above 7.45?  Could be, but very unlikely, given our SAMs and preferred snacks. 

Browsing CNN Online this morning, I saw what has become standard swine flu advice for what is coming to be called the “fall flu season,” as though it were a fashion show. Here’s the CNN advice, displayed after a story about a young woman who had “come down” with flu.  In defining pH and how it relates to you, I’ll try to show why the admonitions are nearly useless:

           

Most effective way to fight flu, including H1N1 virus, is to get vaccinated

Eat lean protein, fat-free dairy products and good fats to boost immune system

      Moderate, regular exercise and adequate rest are necessary to keep healthy

In the first place, vaccination is a highly questionable treatment for flu and, contrary to opinions expressed in mainstream media and by the Centers for Disease Control, may actually increase the risk of flu. Most vaccines, because of the way they are prepared, are acidic.  [Articles of Health, posted on Articlesofhealth.blogspot.com by Robert O. Young, D.Sc., PhD, NMD, Oct. 1, 2009, concerning the 347-man crew of a U.S. Navy ship, vaccinated with H1N1 Swine Flu Vaccine shortly after putting to sea, of whom 333 became so ill that other ships needed to provide aid. The Navy’s response was to classify the information, which came to Dr. Young from whistle-blowers and wives of the afflicted men.]  Second, better than lean protein or fat-free dairy products would be fruits and vegetables and lots of water. As “acidosis is at the heart of many negative health conditions” according to medical textbooks [Susan E. Brown, PhD, CCN, and Larry Trivieri: The Acid Alkaline Food Guide, NY: Square One Publishers, 2006], changing the alkaline balance of what we eat may well be a better way to treat such states than vaccines, which can vary in quality from batch to batch. Third, moderate regular exercise is the last thing anybody would want do if they are sick, a statement so obvious that it shouldn’t need a footnote.

Reading over the last paragraph, I think it was very sensible of the Navy to classify the information, probably on the grounds that it could give aid and comfort to an enemy.  It was interesting that the official Navy response, posted as a comment on Dr. Young’s Articles of Health, did not confirm or deny that the incident had occurred.  The comment focused solely on reassuring everybody that the Navy’s ability to defend its country was not compromised by any such incident as officially had not occurred.

As Susan Brown points out in her above reference, which serves me as a staple guide to acid-alkaline balance of my food choices, health and disease begin in the cells, which need nutrients and oxygen from the bloodstream and also to release wastes.  She writes:  “As it turns out, both of these interactions can optimally take place only when the body is in a slightly alkaline state, which allows for an easy flow of oxygen and nutrients into the cell walls and an equally easy disposal of cellular wastes.”

Another major contributor to these optimal interactions is water.  There’s a tsunami of literature on the subject.  My only experience with this is through several popular writings, so I’ll skip it for the time being except to say that I do use a water filter and try to drink water that’s fairly alkaline, adding baking soda to it occasionally if, as in the days before This Alkaline Year, I’d drunk too much coffee or wine.  Not so incidentally, I’ve not had a headache since the second day of this blog, when caffeine presumably was leaving my systsem.  No tiredness, either; walked the dog for her usual 2.7-3-miles this AM.

DAY 15 ALKALINE YEAR THE REDWOOD PLANTERS

DAY 15, 

THE REDWOOD PLANTERS

October 11, 2009 "Don't sweat the small things" is good advice!  Today being Sunday, at church I had the choice during communion of crossing my hands on my chest for a blessing when the “cup of salvation” was passed, or dipping the wafer in the wine and eating it.  Starch with sugar, tsk, tsk?  Or part of a ritual that I believe brings me closer to God and all creation?

I chose the latter, and believe it was a good choice.  In my opinion it would, however,  have been a bad choice if I had felt compelled either to do it or not to do it.    Wine, of course, is highly acidic, which is why I’m not using it during this alkaline year.  However, according to homeopathic principle, a minute amount  of what will kill you will cure you. 

Likewise, after church, Jack and I went to our favorite restaurant, Enzo’s, which serves incredibly-healthy buckwheat crepes filled with a variety of ingredients.   There is some small part of an egg in each crepe; I nonetheless had one, filled with fresh baby spinach and dried tomatoes.  I asked the chef to hold the mozzarella cheese that goes with this dish, thus observing the dairy part of my preferences for this year.   Instead of coffee, I had a mug of hot water.    Each bite and each sip refreshed me.

This afternoon, Sam is coming to help me plant the new redwood planter boxes that Damien, our house guest, made.    These boxes have a story that needs telling. 

Thirty-one  years ago Joe Long, our former San Juan County Extension Agent, planted a grove of coastal redwood trees on this Pacific Northwest island.  Usually they don’t grow this far north.  However, surrounded by tall firs, the grove withstood violent storms in 1991 and 1992, to grow so tall themselves that by  2008 they needed thinning.  Bill Griswold, who had bought Joe’s old farm by then, culled them.  He couldn’t use all the logs, and offered some of them to me because I wanted to make three 5’x10’x3’ boxes to grow vegetables and--what else?--more lavender.

I found some help to move the trees, cut in five and ten-foot lengths, each around seven inches in diameter.  This spring, another helper stripped the bark off them, fuzzy red bark after it was shredded, used to mulch my young photinia hedge.  Now I had a huge dilemma, which turned into an impasse:  How to build these boxes so they would last?  One builder friend felt that the logs would need to be drilled and bolted in many places because, when filled with drainage gravel and earth, the pressure from inside would be huge and result in seepage.  Money was a problem, even though I could invest much of the summer proceeds from lavender sales in the project.

When Damien arrived, he spent several days figuring out what to do.  He decided, and I agreed, that we could use gardener’s cloth—the sort you put over the ground to inhibit weed growth—to line log boxes so the earth wouldn’t seep out.  He also realized that instead of drilling holes in each log to pound in bolts (five logs piled on top of each other to achieve the three feet of height so I could sit on them and weed), he could pound in long spikes, some horizontal, some vertical, to hold the logs in place.

A couple of weeks ago he finished the project!  The three boxes now sit in my fenced garden, which also includes apple trees.   Today is the initial planting day; I have lots of lavender from cuttings that have been immersed in perlite for a few weeks and (mostly) kept damp so they would germinate.  Sam is coming to help and also to pull a few weeds, and Hazel, for whom he worked this morning, is bringing him over and staying for a while to see the boxes.  Also, I hope she will give me some advice about what else to plant, if we have room.

Not sweating the small things gives me more mental and emotional room for growth, whether it be lavender or heart!

LATER:  Hazel explained more about cuttings today and as a result I have 18 new babies to take to Arizona this winter.  I threw out most of the  cuttings I’d made because, as she explained it, they were too big; the roots had to spend all their time supporting what was above ground and didn’t have time to spread out underground.   She told me the she consistently got best results from dunking wet cuttings into Perlite, placing them into  small plastic pots until the new roots came out the bottoms, then placing them either into larger pots or into the ground.  AND  she advised taking the cuttings from the growth edge of my healthiest existing lavenders, only about three inches, just under one of the little grey-green sprouts.

After following her advice, I now have the 18 little cuttings, with which I’ll experiment this winter to see if they grow faster in the warmish climate, albeit with cold nights, of southern Arizona.   I can spray them every day, as I do here when it doesn’t rain frequently. While doing this, I ate a big Cox's orange pippin apple, moderately to mildly alkaline, right off the tree.  Yummy!

Hazel also gave me, for one of the new planter boxes, a Silveredge, silver-grey lavandula which now is planted and mulched for the winter.  Also today, I finished putting a cup of bone meal on all the lavender plants, which enjoy an alkaline soil better than most other plants such as rhodies and azaleas.  Maybe that’s why lavender and I have a natural affinity!

Topic for tomorrow:  What is pH and how does it relate to you and me?

DAY 14, ALKALINE YEAR DENTAL POSSIBILITIES

DAY FOURTEEN ALKALINE YEAR

Dental Possibilities

October 10, 2009   One of the  downers of aging—teeth deterioration—may be addressed by eating alkaline.  This is part of what I hope this year’s experiment in eating will bring.   And the best way to address it is by seeing what happens during your dental checks while you are eating fruits, vegetables, grains, almonds, seeds, and not eating or drinking coffee, alcohol, sugar, starches, dairy or meats, or processed foods.

Today, due to having chipped a 20-year-old veneer on a front tooth last week, I underwent dental exam, evaluation, and cleaning.  Both the dentist, Steven, and his assistant, Adrienne, are exceptionally  thorough and open to new ideas.   She and I started talking about my decision to  eat alkaline for a year and its potential effect on my teeth and gums and bones.

Is it possible that dental plaque may be caused by our acidic diet?  Good old SAM rearing  his acidic head again?  Adrienne took extensive photos of my present plaque, which was two years in origin (since the previous cleaning), and  she’ll do comparison photos in May.  That, of course, will not produce scientific results, because a lot less plaque would build up in six months than in two years.  But if there’s significantly less, it might say something about the interplay between SAM and plaque loss.  And, of course, if she does another six-month follow-up next November, and there’s less than half as much plaque buildup, we would be getting to something worth examining further.

Today I need to roast a turkey, not in my own kitchen, thank heavens; I don’t enjoy the smell, although Thanksgiving turkey skin used to be one of my favorites.   Somebody gave the Food Bank a large frozen turkey, with potential freezer burn so that presenting it roasted wouldn’t be attractive.  We can cut off the small burned bits.  So  other volunteers and I will roast and cut it up to make  a big turkey soup in our  Emmanuel Church kitchen, which is a Health Department-approved commercial one.  Then we’ll cart it over to the Food Bank, which is presently held in the Community Church and has a smaller kitchen (although a larger congregation).

For that holiday, I’ll still cook a small turkey as most of our friends are omnivores.  Have you ever considered the fact that Thanksgiving dinner traditionally is one of the more balanced meals in our American cuisine?  Think of all the potential side dishes; yams, green salads, all kinds of green, yellow and red vegetables.  True, I’ll avoid the meat, as well as the pumpkin pie with whipped cream, and let a friend do the honors there.  But it should be a fine gustatory experience as well as bringing the joys of being with friends and family.

Tonight we’re having dinner with my longest-time friend and her husband.  She taught home economics, and I know the questions will arise about the old-fashioned USDA food groups, and how I plan to get enough calcium.   The latter is the easiest:  there is, contrary to myth, plenty of calcium in fruits, vegetables, seeds, and grains, if that is your staple diet.  Just to be sure, I take a good calcium supplement.  As to the food groups, all I can say is that this is a new way of eating and that the USDA has been wrong before!


PS: One of my friend's first comments, when I came in with my grapefruit and pre-cooked vegetable-grain gemische, was "My cousin Ailene died of an alkaline imbalance. You'd better be careful!"  I explained to her that underlying most disease states is certainly an acid-alkaline imbalance, but an acidic one that relates to our acidic standard diet.  Then we talked more rationally about what it means to eat alkaline.

DAY 13, DAY THIRTEEN ALKALINE YEAR USING EFT

DAY THIRTEEN                 ALKALINE YEAR

USING EFT TO BANISH  STRESS

 Today held a lot of stress for me:  an insurance appraiser was coming at 8 AM and the house was a mess!  For  my lavender business (orcaslavender.com), I’d cut, five days ago, enough stalks to fill  a lot of “sniff bags,” sachets that people sniff to ward off stress.  Instead of hanging them in the garage for several weeks to dry, I’d opted to  leave them out in the sun for a couple of days, then separate buds from stalks by hand, letting them dry in a huge stainless-steel pot.   Although I’d been able to spend six hours on the project, about a sixth of the cuttings still rested on a white sheet on the dining room table.

Unable to sleep, I got up at 4:15 AM and cleaned the kitchen, set Rachel Rhoomba, our trusty robot vacuum cleaner, to work on the living room,  and by 5 AM was fully awake and able to clean up the lavender project.  Work, for me, is one way of managing stress; I didn’t want to eat anything at that hour.  The soothing scent of the lavender helped, too.  By 7 AM, I woke up my husband and our house guest.  Both of them like to fix their own breakfasts, so I made mine:  previously-cooked emmer  stewed with raisins for 10 minutes in rice milk.  

Aiming not to bore you with routine details, I’ll say only that I got into a nagging mode about—what else?—the garbage run to the island dump being, in my opinion, long overdue.  Both men pitched in to load the car and my guilt set in; I probably didn’t need to be as bitchy with them as I was.  After lunch I took the dog on a long walk around the nearby lake, which had a calming effect  until . . . a friend unloaded a lot of yucky problems onto me.  The friend is ambivalent about choosing a therapist and  would in my opinion benefit from working out the “stuff.”  After a lot of listening and a few suggestions, I interrupted the  extended monologue to explain that, while I have psychological training, I am not, at present, a therapist, and suggested that it would be a good idea to save the juicy stuff for someone acting as a professional.  I wasn’t that nice about it.

Again, guilt!  How to break into the stress-guilt syndrome so it didn’t lead to the freezer, where I know there’s ice cream?  Well,  almonds are one substitute.  Teeth-gritting abstinence is another, but I’ve never been good at that.  Better still, is EFT.  That stands for Emotional Freedom Technique.   Its founder, Gary Craig, has a motto: Try it on Everything. 

EFT, also called “tapping,” is one of the new “energy therapies”.   Its enormous appeal for me lies in the fact that  it helps me get unstuck from negative emotions such as anger and guilt.  Such upsets, which once I felt helpless at combating, are less frequent than they were a few years ago.  More important, for my purpose of enjoying a peaceful alkaline year, is that I can use EFT to change moods that used to lead to eating junk foods.

It’s also called “tapping” because it involves tapping on what eastern medicine--and thousands of western physicians--call the  basic meridian points.    To begin, identify an issue.  For me today the ice cream wasn’t as intense an issue as my angers, so I chose them.  On a scale of one to 10, the issue was a 10.  Then,  tapping six or seven times on the side of my hand just below the little finger, I said: “Even though I’ve been angry twice today, and feel guilty about that, I deeply and completely forgive, love and accept myself.”   Said and did that three times.

Then I tapped on the eight meridian points  with my index and third fingers, with each point receiving seven or eight taps and the initial statement: “this anger issue.”    As it often does, other related subjects popped up and I kept tapping until I felt my energy shift.  The eight points are: inside of eyebrow (EP), outside of eyebrow (OEP), under the eye (UEP), under the nose (UN), under the mouth (UM), Collarbone point (CP, just under the collarbone), under the arm (UA, about four-six inches under your armpit), and under the breast or, for men, the chest nipple (NP).

I stopped to assess my feelings about the anger, which had gone from a ten to a six but also now included feelings of helplessness about ever managing it any better.  This is common; an issue will be taken care of at one level and another pops up.  So I started the second round with tapping near the crown of my head (HP) and saying: “I could choose peace instead of this.”  That’s a wonderful old Course in Miracles  phrase that often gets me to pondering the peaceful alternatives.  Then I tapped alternately on “peace” and “helplessness.”  By the end of this second round of tapping, I was out of the clutches of anger, guilt and helplessness. Anger, guilt and inability to do anything about them were all a zero.   I know because I then did something else (writing this blog) happily!  What a relief!

You can download the free EFT manual  at Emofree.com, or purchase some of the DVDs that show Gary Craig and others helping people with a wide range of problems from overeating to fear of public speaking, some of them  with childhood backgrounds that include abuse of many kinds.   He also has co-authored, with David Feinstein and Donna Eden, the book, The Promise of Energy Psychology.

Will I never get mad at my husband or other people again?  To that I can only reply, HITHSIC, which means "How in the hell should I know?"  I do know that I can replace stress, anger and other negatives with more positive emotions, and that I'm grateful for this means of moving ahead in life.

Day Thirteen is still alkaline after all these days.  Feels good!

DAY TWELVE ALKALINE YEAR

GABY'S CHOICES

October 8, 2009  My daughter-in-law emailed me this photo today and Gaby,  the object of our mutual adoration,  appears to be  pondering, perhaps, whether to continue with the strawberries or take on the cheese.  My response to Gaby, aged 11 months:

Dearest Gaby: You have such a variety of moods!  I love this philosophical photo with the food choices on the tray in front of you!

Your mother is so wise to feed you this way!  Gets you used to making your own choices.  I remember all those hours of shoveling food down your father and uncle, and it could have been so much simpler!  You'll figure out how to use  a spoon when you're good and ready!

Miss you a lot too, Gaby!  Love you, and your parents!  Please thank them from me for sendng the pictures; they're going right on the refrigerator door!   XXXXXX  Gammy

Day ELEVEN ALKALINE YEAR: THE GOOD GOURMET

DAY ELEVEN  ALKALINE YEAR

THE GOOD GOURMET

OCTOBER 7, 2009    I react to  the news that Gourmet Magazine is folding with mixed feelings.  Certainly it has hosted some of the best food writing ever, and some of the most romantic.  M.F.K. Fisher’s The Pale Yellow Glove comes to mind, with its stirring opening: “Once at least in the life of every human, whether he be brute or trembling daffodil, come a moment of complete gastronomic satisfaction.”  Do alkaline eaters ever feel like this?  Right now, I think not, but I’m willing to be corrected.

On the other hand, the good Gourmet  may well have been responsible for God knows how many lives plagued by gout, atherosclerosis, diabetes, cancer, and premature deaths of spouses and friends.  All of these may stem from our acidic diet.  The magazine set the standards, and photographed them beautifully. 

Although editorial comment on its demise tended to blame it on the economy, I think it’s more likely to correlate with changing food tastes.  On the one hand, Americans are gorging on industrially-produced junk foods.  On the other, some excellence is emerging in healthier foods.  Today’s Los Angeles Times, for instance, has a mouth-watering vegan recipe for carmelized onions, using no sugar, with a long cooking time that demands much attention from the cook.   I don’t know if that will produce the “complete gastronomic satisfaction” of which Ms. Fisher wrote, but I look forward to trying it.  R.I.P., Gourmet.

Jack and I lunched with friends at the same restaurant where I’d had my last omnivore meal eleven days ago.  I enjoyed chatting with them about local matters while slowly eating a house salad, having asserted myself to ask for olive oil and a slice of lemon rather than the Roquefort dressing.  Haven’t had a headache since the day after starting this. My energy is good and I’m sleeping very well.  So far, soo-o good!

DAY TEN ALKALINE YEAR

FORBIDDEN FRUIT?

Meat is at best a wasteful use of arable land.  Paul Roberts states in The End of Food  that it takes eight pounds of grain to make one pound of meat. In addition, the way that industrial beef is raised, as Michael Pollan shows in The Omnivore's Dilemma,  opens the way for pathogens to screw up the food chain.  Same goes for pork.  Swine flu warn't named that for nuthin'.  In addition, Roberts points out, as other parts of the world acquire our expensive taste for meats, the costs in terms of land, and even more important, water supply to grow the feed, will force economic crises.   Meanwhile, sub-Saharan Africa cannot feed itself.  Are we stuck in an evil morality play?

With the above paragraph, an image came to mind of Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden, shaking their fists at God, and yelling: "So why did you put that poopendecker tree there in the first place if you didn't want us to eat it?"

In the story of the sixth day of Creation, if my Harper Collins study Bible (NRSV) is correct, God gave humans dominion over fish, birds, cattle, and all wild animals.  He didn't say, "Eat them."  Cattle could have been used to pull plows and to till the land. Be that as it may, when He next created us, He said:  "See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food."  Odd that he didn't think to mention in advance that he was going to make a tree from which fruit couldn't be eaten.  No mention of animals for food.   Next sentence deals with the beasties and in it God is quoted as saying he'd given them every green plant for food.

Why do people get so up-tight over giving up meat?  Maybe it's like Adam and Eve shaking their fist at God.  We could see peace instead of this.  The enjoyable solution would be to give up meats, replant a lot of the genetically-altered corn with vegetable and grain crops, and use the extra arable land to help feed people who are really in need.

Today, Day Ten, was Food Bank day; my main job is picking up the day-old pizza at one store that freezes and saves it for us, and also picking up miscellaneous contributions that visitors deposit in a big red box at the Senior Center. Then I helped to bag dog & cat food and a few other things.  It's "community" in the best sense of the word!  The clients often come in to volunteer, along with a lot of caring others, some of whom also cook lunch for both clients and workers. I'm going to miss it when Jack and I go to Arizona this winter, and hope to volunteer at the one in Nogales.

The most serious challenge to my alkaline visions came when, after tending to the above jobs, I walked into the social hall where the lunch is served, smelled coffee, and saw a table full of pizza, breads, candies and cookies.  The desire was momentary,  YAY!

Later, I met with Sue at her house to help plan the November art show at the Senior Center.  She suggested we call it "Honoring our Ancestors," and it is to include photos, writings, and artifacts before 1940.  We need to stress in the publicity that the ancestors don't necessarily need to be from Orcas, as so few people are and we want everybody's ancestors to show up.    Sue had a good raspberry herbal tea, and we went out to pick two apples from her three-year-old yellow Delicious tree, which is flourishing.

DAY NINE ALKALINE YEAR

FERRY RIDES, FRIENDS, AND FOOD

October 5, 2009 From my earliest rides on the ferries that connect our islands with the mainland, food and food smells played an important part. The smell of popcorn, like Proust's madeleines, takes me right back to a protected time when, if my mother could afford it and was feeling generous, I could spend the hour-and-a-quarter ride nibbling the fragrant corn and looking for whales (Orca whales are actually part of the dolphin family), or spinning wildly around the old Klickatat's brass poles in the main salon, popcorn flying every which way. Fortunately, ferry food has gone the way of that boat and its floor-to-ceiling brass poles, and the food is not as interesting as it once was. More challenging now, from my need to eat alkaline this year, are friends and social life.

Have you ever thought about how much your closest friendships are related to food? Again, going back in personal time, my best friend in the school here and I now can laugh at a teen-age incident in which we made fudge laced with ExLax and fed it to all the boys. We narrowly escaped being expelled. What saved us was that among the fudge's most avid consumers were members of the high-school basketball team. They barely could practice that night. The next evening, they won their big game against a team from a nearby island. Taking totally undue credit for their win, we joked that we'd purged them. (My friend later became a teacher and reported that she had equally disgusting students sometimes.)

More devastating incidents occurred the next two years at private school (transferring there was unrelated to the ExLax incident) when another friend and I found a way to raid that institution's candy cupboard; we reveled in gobbling Look bars, four or five apiece at one sitting. I gained 10 pounds during senior year, up to a lifetime high of 135 pounds. And how many courtships, not to mention affairs, are based on alcoholic beverages? Won't touch that one, at least not today! The friend from boarding school wound up seriously overweight all her life, with many surgeries including one to staple her stomach. She died at 70, perhaps from a combination of medications and alcohol. I was lucky to meet different people and to read different books.

Now, I belong to a group whose stated purposes are friendship and philanthropy, and today we go to a neighboring island for lunch and discussion. We all bring our own sandwiches and the hostesses provide coffee, tea, and snacks. For me, sandwiches are out because of no starch. Ditto with most snacks. Today I'll take along an apple, radishes, and the usual almonds. That should do it. More than that, I can practice extending my friendship skills, bettering the art of listening and responding and story telling.

Will report back on successes and, God forbid, lapses. No serious ones so far, unless you count a slightly acidic tomato!

LATER

Happy meeting, in a home filled with our hostess' favorite quilts, including one she'd made from her late husband's shirts, which included messages of love and caring from all her family and friends. We were a gabby but not gossipy group riding back and forth on the Orcas-Friday Harbor ferry, and we laughed a lot. I of course told them about the blog; several people were very encouraging and a couple were funny. ("What? No wine? No way!!") Humor is always good unless I take it as personal rejection. At lunch I did snack on a small bunch of fresh grapes, mildly or moderately alkaline depending on which experts you like, didn't even get time to touch the radishes, but the avocado was good, and now, back home in the late PM, the apple tastes delicious even though it's a Gravenstein.

Inevitably, the question came up today: Are you doing this to lose weight? No; this AM my scales'' digital display said 113.8 pounds. Likely that would be 119 pounds after dinner tonight. I'm comfortable with my weight range: anywhere between 110 and 120 pounds, where it will likely fluctuate over this year. However, I'd certainly like to rearrange some of it! . Walking doesn't do much for my belly or arms but perhaps I'll add other activity this winter. I know what to do and what I'd like to do (rowing) but I'm not committed to it yet and that's okay. My reasons, as stated in an earlier blog, are simply to avoid headaches, rashes, tiredness and--a big one for me--feeling out of control.

Tomorrow's activities include volunteering at the Food Bank, where we've been fortunate all summer to have dozens of donations from farmers large and small. The only food challenges there will lie in the fact that the church where it's held serves lunches to both clients and volunteers, with excellent coffee and tasty cookies. Maybe they'll have a salad!

DAY EIGHT ALKALINE YEAR

BUCKWHEAT AND OLD LAVENDER

October 4, 2009 Buckwheat groats, available in most places that sell bulk foods, are alkaline, surprisingly easy to prepare--20 minutes to boil, no soaking needed--and add protein, taste and texture to any mixture--okay, gemischt--of green, yellow, and red vegetables. That and sauteeing onions in a little sesame oil, provided a good start for the church breakfast today. Hindsight is always perfect; I should have made twice as much.

The ingredients were:

2 cups buckwheat groats (bring to a boil in salted water, then simmer for 20 minutes, covered for part of that time, stirring now & then to make sure nothing sticks. Reserve the groats while you make the rest.

1 big onion, chopped, sauteed in your biggest frying pan with 3 T olive oil and a good grating of pepper, for about 20 minutes, adding a little vegetable broth if it looks dry before turning translucent

8 medium tomatoes--these are low acidic but okay because everything surrounding them is alkaline; these came from a friend's garden and he not only has great soil but knows how to cultivate it. Add to the translucent onion 4 medium crookneck squash, sliced, and a couple of cups of vegetable broth, either what you've made yourself from previous cookings or a good organic commercial brand such as Pacific.

Sea salt, to taste

Turmeric, at least 3 teaspoons, more for a large crowd. (Some 70 souls showed up on this gorgeous fall day, which was Blessing of the Animals out on the lawn after breakfast. Our priest, who is also a retired bishop, wore his full regalia including mitre, the tall pointed hat with peaks front and back. Liturgically artistic!)

Another grating of pepper

Simmer the ingredients 5 minutes, then chop and add a bunch of kale (I discard the tougher stems for mulch, but they can be used too.) and a bunch of collard greens.

Over medium heat, stir in the buckwheat groats and keep pushing the greens under the rest of the melange until the greens are wilted.

This was a side dish and should have fed about 50 people, with stradas and French toast as main dishes. The congregants went after the French toast "like beagles diving in a dumpster," said one observer. There were many complements to the strada makers and four or five people said they liked the gemischt. Vegetables for breakfast? Why not?

Bishop Craig blessed the animals, like their owners a noisy lot!

After cleanup I headed to a nearby restaurant where the owner, Heinz, had said I could trim his lavender. I'm good at it, and this year also did it for both the Community Church and Emmanuel. In return for trimming it, I take the buds to use in sachets. I did five plants before realizing I'd had neither breakfast or lunch, and that a nap would also feel good. So I came home and ate, in quick succession, half a grapefruit, a whole avocado, and am snacking on almonds as I write. & gulping water too.

The trick of trimming lavender, by the way, is to preserve several whitish grey-green out-croppings that you'll see at the bottom of the stem. These are its leading edge for growth next year. Also, you want the plant to look like an inverted U shape when you're done.

The whole back end of my car is full of cut lavender now, and I feel tired but proud of today's accomplishments.

DAY SEVEN ALKALINE YEAR

COOKING WITHOUT RECIPES

October 3, 2009 Beautiful sunny day, made the more fun by going to our Farmers' Market this morning to buy for 40-50 people who'll be at tomorrow's church breakfast. I purchased a mix of collard and mustard greens, kale, and crookneck squash. Other folks are bringing stradas and I may even break down and make French toast as long as I don't have to eat it. Good way to use up the bread supply and also the syrup that has rested for a while in the refrigerator door. Is it hypocritical to cook differently for others than what you prefer for yourself. Probably. It seems like a minor hypocrisy that I can live with!

Earlier today, I'd sent my list of alkaline foods to a friend, who emailed back: "Now that I have the food list, I'll need to find the book to know how to cook them." My reply was something to the effect that standard cooking methods are fine: some mixture of sauteing (scallions, leeks come to mind), boiling (beets, crookneck squash, zucchini), baking (yams, squash), broiling (sometimes tomatoes, big onions), steaming (kale, other greens). I've discarded recipes as happily as I once discarded girdles, although I still enjoy the photographs, in most cookbooks, not of girdles.

For spices, I adore turmeric on nearly anything, also freshly-grated pepper, sea salt, and sometimes garam masala as well as all the conventional ones. Shelly Young's cookbook introduced me to Spice Hunter products and I've not found one I didn't like. It's like flowers in a garden, which all seem to go together no matter what colors they are.

Took a garlic-walnut bread to the lunch, given by a gracious woman I've always admired, for an old friend who's recovering from a stroke. The house, with high, vaulted ceilings and treasures from its owners' many active professional years and travels, overlooks the seven-mile reach that nearly divides our island.

While our hostess was putting the finishing touches on lunch, I went into her kitchen, both to offer help and also to case the joint and see what I could eat. She'd put iceberg lettuce on plates, which she would then fill with what looked like a delicious tuna-apple salad. As meats & other flesh are off my dance card this year, I explained that I'm eating alkaline and asked if I could fill my plate with additional lettuce. She'd sauteed slivered almonds in butter, which I sprinkled over the lettuce. Not perfect (because of the butter), but who's perfect? She also made a fabulous soup with pureed squash and carrots. I helped to top the other guests' portions with sour cream and chopped herbs, and on mine I put the herbs.

Our hostess was kind enough to say she appreciated it when guests were assertive enough to voice their food preferences. What she disliked, she told me, was when company left lots of food on their plates. I cleaned mine because it was what I wanted. The other guests enjoyed the bread; I didn't need to. Dessert was meringues and molasses cookies, which I blissfully ignored while enjoying and, I hope, contributing to the lively conversations.

Tonight, while Jack is watching football, I'll make the big breakfast for Sunday. This could strain my stated liking to cook without recipes. Will let you know tomorrow.

DAY SIX ALKALINE YEAR

GEMISCHE INTO GEMISCHT

October 2, 2009 Breakfasted royally on emmer cereal, cooked yesterday and refrigerated, with raisins added today. Emmer is puffy when cooked, and luscious with raisins. Also had a banana and half a grapefruit. Most people in their 70s are on one drug or another with which they're not supposed to eat grapefruit. My husband's doctor allegedly said that drug has the same effect as grapefruit and that he should cut down on the drug if he eats grapefruit. This is total hearsay in my part and should not be admitted as evidence! The fact remains that grapefruit is tasty, nutritious, and that because I've not been diagnosed with anything for which I should take the drug, I can take full advantage of food I like.

Deep sleep last night and feeling wonderful today! Only meeting is an island consortium that considers how to get more arts enrichment into the schools. I represent the Orcas Lions on that. The only social occasion is Friday Night at the Lower, our good pub where Jack consistently meets his son John & his wife Patty, for end-of-week conviviality. Jack drinks Pepsi-Cola and I prefer a glass of Pinot Gris or Pinot Grigio. However, as that is off my list, I'd better avoid temptation for tonight. I could go and take my trusty water bottle, but usually eating is part of the scene. Their meals are fish & chips (once adored) or chicken wings, and although they include a good cole slaw, I''m not certain enough of my ability to stay alkaline, to allow myself to enjoy the scene. Maybe someday they will include pH 9.5 water on the menu and make money doing it!

Tomorrow is a luncheon for a close friend, and I'll take a salad just in case. Avocado, chopped peppers, tomato & lettuce dressed with lemon juice, olive oil and freshly-grated pepper. Not unusual, but comfortable.

On Sunday, I'm in charge of the monthly breakfast at our Emmanuel Episcopal Church, an 1880s building looking down the seven-mile reach of East Sound. The village of Eastsound took its name from the Sound but the Post Office back in the 1940s said it had to be one word for the village and so it has remained. I've recruited friends to bring casseroles of their choice, and my choice is--you guessed it--a huge vegetable gemische. Will go to the Farmers' Market tomorrow to get some of the vegetables, and my friend Jan (whose babysitter I was as a teenager, now a more experienced grandmother than myself) gave me a big bag of Orcas-grown tomatoes. By the way, I tried to look up that g-word on Babel.com but they don't translate Yiddish apparently. Likewise drew a blank on etymology.com. Will keep trying.

LATER --Found Yiddish-English translation online--aha!--I was spelling it wrong! The word is gemischt, which means "mixed." That sounds as good as any for those veggie-grain combinations. Took the remaining serving from night-before-last gemischt to the arts consortium at noon; it tasted very good. During the meeting they kept passing a platter of cookies around and I had no trouble in abstaining.

Ran into my hair-cutting pal, Lili, in the market; she had a free half-hour so she came out home & renewed my haircut. She had straight hair most of her life and in her middle years it turned curly! I wish, I wish!

DAY FIVE (Oct. 1, after publishing previous posts) ALKALINE YEAR

MORNING PRAYERS TODAY, especially for the peoples of Samoa and Indonesia, that we all may "care more and better, " as Peter expressed his personal wish at dinner last night, and also that I may be able to give of my substance to assist them. I need to finish the first-of-the-month bills today and will know after that what might be available to help. Heard from June on our church's prayer chain that her daughter has good news about the absence of a feared condition.

Had soaked emmer grains overnight, and now it's upstairs simmering for two hours, to be used in another "gemische" tonight with chopped kale, tomatoes, and whatever I pick up when going downtown for the mail later today. Any extra will be used for cereal tomorrow morning.

LATER: Tonight's gathering is a going-away party at a pavilion in a nearby park for Cliff and Cleo, who are leaving for another island. Thank God, it's a potluck. Best thing about potlucks is that you can bring healthy stuff of your own making. Tonight's, I'll guarantee, will include sausage, hot dogs, eggy side dishes, brownies with chocolate frosting, frosted cupcakes. Yuck! I' m sure some people would say the same about what I'll be taking to feed six:

Cooked emmer, about one small handful per person

1 medium yam, baked and sliced (I zapped it in the microwave for 5 minutes), then sauteed in a little sesame oil with a chopped leek

a cup or so of fresh green beans and a sliced crookneck squash, cooked (boiled or steamed) for about two minutes

1 tomato, chopped

Mix all these together in a large frying pan with some vegetable broth in the bottom (maybe a cup), then add about two cups of chopped chard and kale. Add another cup or two of vegetable broth, Stir everything together over medium heat, add a teaspoon or two of turmeric, possibly some garam masala, salt and freshly-ground pepper to taste. Let these simmer for a few minutes until most of the broth has coated the ingredients, watching so that nothing sticks or burns, then turn into a pre-heated casserole dish and take to your destination, whether it be family dinner table or, as tonight, a picnic in a park.

We also signed up to bring firewood, of which we have a lot and which, I realize, some people would rather eat than the above gemische. Too bad about them! They're grist for the drug companies.

How This Happened

DAY ONE, SEPT. 27, 2009, 5:24 AM

AT AGE 74, after an adventurous life that has been--and I hope will continue to be--most enjoyable, but which has not always included eating and drinking wisely, I have decided to spend the next year forsaking my omnivorous nature in favor of eating alkaline. This decision has been long in the making, dating back to the 1970s when I developed a "health calendar" written with advice of the dietitians at Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston and published by the then-Holt, Rinehart & Winston. We called it Eat & Run. Over its ten-year life under my compilations, I became passionately interested in anything to do with food. Well, to be truthful, I've always been excited by anything to do with food, but not until then did the excitement extend to food's potential role in human health.

After that decade, I became bored with the whole subject because there didn't seem to be anything new, certainly not in terms of encompassing theory. I earned a master's degree in psychology, later another master's in public health with graduate certification in gerontology, and worked for another twenty years in these fields, until I retired two years ago to my small lavender farm. However the subject of food and its effects on human health continued to intrigue me. In the 1980s I first read Herman Aihara's Acid & Alkaline, but it was not until the early 2000s that I found Robert and Shelly Young's book, The pH Miracle, then a book by a contemporary of Louis Pasteur, Professor Antoine Bechamp, who is so seminal to what has become acid-alkaline theory that I'll do more than one day's writing on HIM. I don't want to get overly technical this early in the game, but that will come into it, I promise.

Back to the question of why a 74-year-old woman would choose to eat alkaline at all, let alone to employ the discipline for a whole year, I can only say: It's Julia Child's fault.

Last night, after a wonderful dinner (crab cakes with aioli, an excellent Oregon pinot gris, and chocolate mousse pie, all while watching the first half of a hard-fought football game with my husband), we went to see Nora Ephron's movie, Julie & Julia. I laughed and cried at Meryl Streep's portrayal of Mme. Child, noting the poignant undertones of her inability to conceive a child which, distressing as it must have been, led to her becoming a beloved Tante Julia to the American people. The movie brought back scenes of my own culinary history, such as the time I attempted the complex sauce of filet de sole Marguerie at 10 PM with a household of wine-filled, hungry guests. Ah, the foods I've enjoyed in this and other countries! Julie, of course, is the young woman who decides to cook all the dishes from Julia's book Mastering the Art of French Cooking, over a one-year period and to write a blog about her experiences.

Why not try the same thing with what I've come to know as healthy cuisine? There are, of course, important differences between Julie, Julia and myself. I will be 75 by the time this experience is over. Julie and Julia were younger, bolstered by their passions and by loving husbands and friends. At my time of life, even if one is still lucky enough to have a mate, one faces crises such as the illnesses and deaths of friends, former lovers, husband and ex-husband. My dear Jack faces heart surgery tomorrow, for clogged up conditions that he cheerfully admits are brought on by decades of over-eating the Standard American Meals (hf. SAM). My ex-husband suffers from depression and Parkinson's for which in his passion for definitive scientific answers, he would completely exclude his favorite salami, pastrami and other preservative, acid-inducing foods as causative factors.

For many years now, I've become increasingly convinced that my own aches and pains were--are--due to what I ate and drank. Experiences such as eating alkaline for three weeks have reinforced this conviction: headaches disappeared, rashes likewise. Take coffee, for instance. Both drinking it and quitting it brought on headaches. I've been conditioned to drink it as a beloved social custom. When I was eight years old, I used to get up early to make coffee and cinnamon toast for my parents and their guests, serving it to them in their bedrooms on a tray with cloth napkins. My mother, in turn, would bring the same to me and my small pals when they slept over, putting lots of cream in our mugs along with Kona's best.

Eating alkaline eliminates the on-off syndrome with coffee because you don't drink it in the first place. Same with sugars, starches, and such fungi as mushrooms. If anybody's interested, I can provide a list of foods that are alkaline or alkaline-inducing in the human body, together with references. I've never given myself the chance to test it for more than a few weeks at a time because this would mean many changes in social activities such as church coffee hours, restaurant eating, traveling, plus all these ghosts of past "happy" meals pointing at me and shouting, "You can't possibly DO this!" My only countering answer is that every time I've done it, my energy improves, weight goes down, headaches disappear.

Like Julia, I'm inspired to do this because I think it would improve the nutrition of the American people. I'm only one person but it's got to start somewhere. Statistics show that a great amount of our Gross National Product is spent to control obesity, Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and even certain kinds of cancer for which links to our SAM are becoming well-documented. Our national health debates often ignore a most important aspect: individual responsibility. Even back in my Eat & Run days, I knew that. So this blog will explore what it means to eat alkaline in an acid-happy society, how to meet the kinds of SAM-inducers that normally happen in daily life. I'm giving a birthday party for a friend next week at a Mexican restaurant; how will I handle my own eating under those circumstances? Or will I? I think so.

Surely this is enough for one blog! Tune in tomorrow for a more complete explanation of what eating alkaline means. HINT: it's mostly vegetarian, but much more than that.