Bad Idea Fridays: Bonobo Diet

I was raised by former hippies, so when I have a bad idea, I don't stifle it like a normal person. I do science to it, and C comes home to find a terrible mess and a wife with a slightly perplexed expression. How do you know that it's a bad idea until you try it? Common sense is just an excuse for laziness.

But since I'm getting older and wiser, I will recognize that some of these ideas are likely to be... unwise. Then, I will do them anyways. I will write a post about them. Who doesn't read blogs for the schadenfreude?

Onward.

In recent years, there's been a rash of dietary nostalgia. Michael Pollan- who I am somewhat ambivalent about, despite naming my blog after one of his ideas- says you shouldn't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't eat. My family already had that policy, but that's because she possibly poisoned her first husband. Before that, there was the What Would Jesus Eat diet- basically a Mediterranean thing, looting the moldering WWJD corpse for one more dollar. And now, now there's the Caveman diet. It's based on a very 1960s version of Paleolithic life, interestingly enough. I would have expected more quail and rabbit and partially mature eggs- possibly the odd lizard- and an absurd emphasis on radical shifts in food based on the season. They seem to eat a lot of ground beef. But the principle- that your body evolved eating certain things, so possibly you should eat like that now- that seems interesting.

But come on, the stuff they're referring to is 100,000 years old, tops. You might grab a couple of extra enzymes to break down gluten and lactose, but you still have the intestines- and general biochemistry- of a chimp. Thus, the bonobo diet.

My goal- to spend one day eating a reasonable approximation of a chimp- or bonobo's- natural diet. This is probably a bad idea.

First things first- I am bad at finding termites. Even when I'm getting paid to look under rocks, I don't find many. And I'm pretty sure that I'm not willing to eat them without someone telling me that they are cuisine. Dried shrimp though- they're in the same... Phylum. I don't think I can do any better on short notice. I will also not hunt bush babies. Dialium is closely related to Phaseolus- so, I'll eat some dry turtle beans. (Don't worry about my teeth- the preferred method is to let them sit in the cheek until they disintegrate.) Ficus is easy- I bought some figs. I'll bet that will be the tastiest part of this experiment. Chimps apparently extract moisture from a whole range of herbs in families I don't know- but there's a fleshy Brassicaceae in there, and an honest to goodness wild parsley. No drinking water. As for the other fruits that are the backbone of the chimpanzee diet- Lost Crops of Africa calls Pancovia laurentii "so delicious in its native state that there was no reason to domesticate it." All the other fruits are apparently not eaten by humans. I've found some polite treatises on not buying these rain forest woods- but that's all. Double figs, then.

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I didn't make it past lunch.

I started off well enough. I ate a couple of figs, (it's kinda past the best part of fig season) a couple of dried shrimp (Not bad, and made me popular with the cats. Odoriferous though.) I finished with a couple of kale stems (very chewy) and a large handful of parsley (good for shrimp breath). Apparently chimps hold a wad of vegetation in one cheek, masticate it slowly, and suck out the resulting moisture. This is as disgusting as it sounds. I tried it at work- after one minute, I realized that I couldn't continue to do this once my coworkers arrived- green drool is not professional. After three, I spat out my cud and made myself some tea. My jaw muscles ached.

Fine, yes, chimps have significantly larger and stronger jaw muscles. I knew that. And the huge cheeks are apparent from pictures. I didn't know there was a reason. All my reading about primates covers how they are just like us. Freaking deceptive evolutionary biologists.

So I figured I'd try sucking on two or three beans with my tiny cheeks. Let me tell you- raw beans taste gross. And there's a point where you can crunch them with your teeth or swallow them whole- my saliva enzymes never get them soft enough to chew safely. Or not after 45 minutes.

I ate some more figs. They're kinda tasteless in November. Also they make my tongue swell. I don't know if that's a me thing. Eventually- in a point familiar to anyone who's ever been on a "Eat all the X you like and lose weight"- I was desperately hungry and completely unwilling to eat a fig.

I went home for lunch. I ate a couple of dried shrimp. Then the cat explained- through interpretive dance- that he could eat those shrimp, and I could eat something else. So I did. I had a grilled cheese sandwich on wheat bread with a glass of Coke. Haha, evolutionary biology.

This diet was definitely a bad idea. I may have the intestines of a chimp, but I have a puny human jaw and weak human teeth and itty-bitty human cheeks. Also, I grew up in a world with ample calories. Eating no calorie dense foods makes me very very cross. I can't think of one good aspect of this idea.

Oh, apparently I now have the perfect cat treat.

Planthead's Chocolate Pudding

This is not exactly as tasty as non-vegan pudding. It is vastly better for you, and it is really easy to make. It helps if you don't try to paste pudding flavor onto it- think of it as a delightful dessert that superficially resembles pudding. And it's good, it's good, I swear.

Take 1/2 container silken tofu (7 oz.). Puree in a food processor with 1/4-1/3 cup cocoa and 2-4 tablespoons honey, maple syrup, agave nectar, or, you know, sugar. Add a dash of vanilla extract or rum or orange liqueur. (I'm just guessing about those measurements- add stuff until it tastes good. It's a very forgiving recipe.)

For added richness, melt some chocolate in the microwave (in 15-30 second bursts), temper by stirring in a little pureed tofu, and then add the whole thing back to the food processor and blitz.

Roasted things.

It's just after the election- regardless of your political alignment, you're almost certainly unhappy. What you need is my mother's "I will take a sick day and spend all daylight hours reading political blogs also here is some dinner go do your homework." roast vegetables.

Take one head cauliflower and two pounds sweet potatoes. Cut the sweet potatoes into wedges. Put in a plastic bag. Add salt and ample olive oil, shake like it's a non-voter from Wisconsin's 7th district. Put on a cookie sheet in a 400 degree oven and roast for twenty minutes.

Cut the cauliflower into slices. Put into a plastic bag, add salt and what appears to be half the bottle of olive oil, shake like your favorite governor ever is back in office and you're pretty sure it's a dream. Put the cauliflower on a cookie sheet. When the timer for the sweet potatoes goes off, add the cauliflower to the oven. Bake both vegetables for an additional 25 minutes, then gesture vaguely towards the oven whenever someone asks you a non-election related question.

Kale/Quinoa Tabouli

This post title reads like a parody of vegan cooking.

Rinse 1 cup white quinoa three times. Simmer in two or three cups of water until tender and the seed embryos pop out.

Chiffonade the heck out of two cups of (destemmed) dinosaur kale, one cup of Italian parsley, and 1/2 cup mint leaves.

Drain and cool the quinoa. Mix the chopped greens and the quinoa with two cloves diced garlic, the juice of two lemons, a healthy dash of salt, and 1/4 cup olive oil.

Why Aren't You Eating More Kale?

Kale is pretty awesome.

Take one bunch kale and strip the leaf off of the stems. Tear or chop it into bite sized pieces. Taste a couple- is this something you would eat without further cooking? If so, go ahead and eat it raw. Otherwise, blanch the kale in boiling water- let it cook for three minutes, and then start testing it for edibility. When the kale is sufficiently done, drain it.

Crush 2 cloves garlic. Juice two lemons. Add 1/ cup olive oil and 1/8-1/4 tsp Braggs. Beat together and pour over kale. Eat hot or cold. Hey, leafy greens! Now you will live forever.

Apparently kale is tastiest if you serve it with glutamines. If you're not ready to commit to a bottle of vegan glutamine source, try using a couple of tablespoons of grated Parmasan.

The 800 Calorie Problem.

I'm skeptical about diets. (This is a rarely used definition of "skeptical" meaning "violently opposed to".) Part of it is my total lack of impulse control- when I get hungry, I am going to eat something. I will eat all of the things in my lunchbox, and then if I am still hungry, I will eat other things: Entire fennel plants. Acorns. Wayward deer. Unwary coworkers.

I assume other people buy a candy bar or something.

Thus, my lunchbox always contains at least 800 calories and 10 grams of fiber. (And ample 'pocket jerky'- edible but non palatable items.) My challenge this summer was all vegan lunches- it's a little hard to find things that are sufficiently energy dense. I've relied heavily on potato salads.

Potato Salad with Mint and Lemongrass
Boil 1 pound of potatoes until fork tender. (Potato texture is not important in this recipe, except that it be delightful. Thus, this is a good slush recipe for those strangely textured potatoes in your life.) Cut into large chunks. Add three stems thin sliced lemongrass and 1/4 cup chopped mint. Dress with 1/4 cup rice vinegar, 1/4 cup olive oil, and 1 tsp sugar. Salt to taste.

Boiled green peanuts.

I bought a butt-ton of green peanuts. At the farmer's market. Attempts at roasting them gave results that were not high on the edibility scale. I wanted to make a chile/ground peanut sauce and put it over potatoes, but that was temporarily vetoed by C. Boiled peanuts are so good that I might never try any other peanut recipes.

Put three tbs salt and three cups of water into a pot. Heat to a boil. Add up to two cups of green peanuts. (Why you'd want two cups, I don't know. They might make you ill if you eat them all yourself. Not that I know anyone who'd do that.) Boil for ten minutes. Remove. Dust with salt. Eat.

After I made two cups worth, I tried it again with half a cup. Still tasty. And I tried it with shelled raw peanuts. Still tasty. It's hard to mess this up.

These are pretty much the perfect snack on a lazy, rainy day. Try them with a pot of green tea and some trashy fiction/video games. Or a big stack of thank you notes. (All water marks with salt riming on my thank you notes are from tears of gratitude.)