Slow Food Clive Lawler

abulous complex protein contained within them. For cause in any dietary/health problems, always look towards the cooks, the corporations and the prevailing food culture. Yes, wheat is a wonderful food plant, loaded with complex beneficial nutrients. And whilst the rampant vilification of wheat and other grains, along with the wacky assassination of the splendid protein gluten are errors of misinformation and misfortune, it is nevertheless a comprehensible scenario; an instinctive human response to the omnipresent, accelerated, acid-forming, debilitating food processes of our current, post-1950’s culture. Of the current pandemic of newly-bred ‘intolerances’ on the planet, it is true that nutrients like gluten, lactose and others, as well as anti-nutrients such as phytates, salicylates, oxalates and others do indeed cause allergic reactions, but the solution is not, as is fashionable nowadays, to discard the foods that host these elements!! Hey! We can eat all foods! They just have to be done right. That’s all. That’s what this book is about. The remedies lie in those appropriate, ancient, alkalizing, traditional preparations and techniques, all of which guarantee the neutralization of the bulk of anti-nutrient factors, plus the enzymatic conversion of gluten and other complex nutrients to digestible, nourishing forms. Eliminating countless foods from our diets is not a cure! It’s a bore. It is a confusing folly of complexity and difficulty, fuelling the victim mode, and which ultimately supplies no answers, encouraging only suspicion, and then denial, of access to nature’s broad bounty. We can eat virtually every food with gusto! When we do them right. Allergenic reactions come, clearly, as a body-wise rebuttal to the improper, new-fangled, high-speed, convenient, toxin-retaining, modern approach to food, which fails to both recognize and hence deal with biological intruders, nor understands traditional food methods that enhance pre-digestion. Gluten and lactose intolerances are brand new, post-1950’s diseases, raging unbridled since the ignorant, economy-driven quickening of wheat and other grain food processes, and the pasteurization, the bastardisation, of milk and many other processed foods. The raw materials of all grown foods, preferably organic of course, are no problem. The core of this story is about how this modern diverse allergenic anomaly has come about, and how to very simply deal with it - in our kitchens. That’s my job here. Given just a tad more t-i-m-e, add careful sloooow tending, as we reinvent traditional culinary practices that stimulate the innate enzyme activity in all foods, adolescent glutens and other splendid complex nutrients transform, breaking down to become easily digestible, alkalising, allergen-free and maximally nutritious, whilst unwanted, toxic, naturally-occurring anti-nutrients are substantially, satisfactorily neutralized. When food preparation is rushed, as is the case with 99% of all modern food, and in particular with breads and protein-rich dried bean/pulse/nut/seed foods, those same unconverted nutrients, uncut anti-nutrients, plus the resultant acidity dog and ail the human body, and for huge swathes of people, seriously. Access to live enzymes that facilitate pre-digestion and alkalinity, is essential for body harmony. But this has become unconventional, inconvenient, in a pasteurized, germ-paranoid world where bacteria and their compadres, the enzymes, are treated as outlaws, as the enemy – thereby sprayed, heated, chlorinated or nuked to death. It’s true that a small percentage of people do have genuine allergies, such as coeliacs, but the things typically blamed for the current plague of food allergies is based upon false and perilous premises. We are simply allergic, and addicted, to the rampant rush of modern life and to the wasted haste of crucial and elementary food processes – in both the public and domestic domains.