Interesting story, but glosses over lots of the details of how they got acceptance in US and Europe. Did they teach the gringos how to cook it?
Is it ultimately a technology triumph? As without the debittering (dehusking?) technology the crops would have been unsellable.
Traditional cooking method takes lots of time and rinse water to remove the bitter coating. If as a tribal villager you've been cooking your porridge for decades you get pretty good at it, but it tastes pretty awful as a gringo if you screw it up and its all bitter. So yeah, pretty much unsellable in the USA without the debitter machine treatment. I have purchased and tried small amounts of locally produced quinoa at farmers market and to say the preparation is an unholy PITA of rinsing and soaking would be an understatement.
I am mostly a paleo diet type guy but I try lots of foods and its not bad, properly prepared. The primary problem seems to be taste. Its not that much different than rice and is cooked roughly the same way and spiced roughly the same way. It is an excellent protein source for a starving village farmer if its "free" or cheap, but at now $10/pound I'm better off with steak as a protein source in my diet, or fish, or pretty much anything else.
Hilarious to read people writing that they'd be better off with steak as a protein source, it might be better for you - but not the planet. We'd be better of as a species by eating the grains directly and bypassing the animals. Silly food subsidies (at least in the UK), subsidise meat and dairy over grain and veg. For example it's cheaper to buy sausages than it is to buy aubergines. Pretty senseless!
Grain farming is less sustainable than pastured animal raising. You're welcome to a discussion about supportable human populations, but the idea that grain and legume farming is more ecologically sustainable is flat out wrong.
Cost of industrial non-organic grain production, herbicides, insecticides and the whole lot vs hey cow, here's some natural prairie, now go eat it, which doesn't cost as much environmentally.
This cows on natural prairies idea is pretty much bullshit. Unless you are talking about some maasai tribes that bleed out their cattle for protein shakes. Cattle farming is huge agricultural business. And for most people their meat is farmed (with additional inputs).
Europeans decimated the Americas for their corn fed fatty marbled cattle. The rainforests are being cleared for soy, as with most arable crops a high percentage are grown as animal feeds. So there isn't any escape. Eating a cow has collateral damage too.
Take a fraction of those arable crops, don't bother meat farming and move over to better farming methods that are more in tune with nature. It's a balancing act.
If you haven't any ethical qualms about meat eating then you can still farm those fringe places pastorally - reindeer, goats, kangaroos etc.
I have a freezer full of pastured beef & game venison and that's pretty much all I eat in terms of protein. I have piles of grass fed butter in my fridge. What's bullshit about that?
I think though you're an exception. What a luxury. It sounds like you've weighed up the environmental pros and cons for your locale, which is more than most do.
I still think there's better use for that land than raising cattle on it. I can't help but think that good meat is reserved for the luxury of a few, that includes well raised organic meats. It's only the wealthy people that I know that can afford such.
The cost argument is bunk. I spend much less than most people on food. The average westerner blows thousands of dollars on expensive processed food and garbage restaurant meals. There is nothing but consumer preference preventing most people in western countries from eating like I do.
"I still think there's better use for that land than raising cattle on it."
Are you claiming cowboys are herding cattle in the streets of Manhattan? Or "everyone" wants to move to a cattle ranch in the middle of nowhere in Texas but they just don't know it yet? You could work your argument either direction but I don't think either will work very well. Farmers and ranchers like money just like anyone else. If they could subdivide their land to city slickers at SFO/SV square footage prices I think they would...
Good point. But we should be thinking about supporting the masses.
If I have a hillside that isn't being used for anything else, than fair enough, I could throw a couple of sheep/goats on it and later reap the rewards.
I'm not sure how many of these romantic pastures continue to exist though. I live in a green fertile valley, where sheep farming is rife. The sheep get additional feed on top of their grazing. I'd prefer acres of trees or some other arable crop instead. Sadly most of us won't ever get access to the land to do so.
I can see that, though then you run into all manner of ethical questions of eating animals as well. What we eat is a pretty complex social, environmental, and moral problem.
Also, is it possible that grain farming is worse for the planet in some circumstances and better in others? I am sure that a small rice paddy is much better for the environment than a barn full of chickens in cages too small for them to stand up.
Grain and legume farming kills massive numbers of amphibians, birds, and rodents, with huge knock on ecological consequences. When you slaughter a pastured cow or sheep it's one life. During their lives the hooved animals serve a vital role in grassland ecology. The 1930s American dustbowl desertification happened in substantial part because of the preceding elimination of bison and steer.
> a barn full of chickens in cages
If chickens are caged in barns they're eating mostly grain. Historically normal chickens ran around outside and ate mostly bugs, in season.
Don't forget fish kills from fertilizer runoff. Depending on what part of the country you live in. Locally runoff fish kills means vegetarians are in the running with fish eaters in terms of total dead fish per year.
Couldn't disagree more strongly for economic reasons.
Lets say I pay $4 for a pound of bratwurst. He cannot do more than $4 of environmental damage and still stay in business. Even if brats magically fell from the sky for free, he simply can't do worse than stack up $4 worth of lead and old car tires and set them on fire or whatever other environmental degradation you can imagine.
The good organic farmers market meat costs more than $4/lb but less than $10 so the argument still holds. In fact I'm about to take delivery of a quarter-cow from a local organic farmer, got my high efficiency freezer all defrosted and emptied and ready to fill with delicious organic local grass fed beef.
On the other hand, the guy who I just handed a $10 to for a pound of quinoa can stack of $10 worth of old car tires and set them on fire and dump $10 of antifreeze into the river or WTF. He can afford to "ruin the environment" to the tune of $9.99 and still stay in business, unlike the brat guy above who would go almost instantly out of business if he spent $9 trashing the environment for every $4 incoming.
This is before I even get started on the supply side, where for the sake of argument lets say I have to kill one baby seals per $1 take home pay. That means to earn the $10 for quinoa regardless of how "pure" his quinoa growing operation is, ten baby seals died, whereas to earn the $4 for brats, regardless of how "pure" his pig sty is, a mere four baby seals had to die. I would argue that most people in the real world work at pretty ugly companies, ecologically speaking, so most of the enviro damage comes from earning the money rather than how its spent. Another example is I burn about a gallon of gas per day that I drive to work, so even if I do the ultimate green thing and finance planting a rainforest or something, I've still ecologically destroyed a gallon of gas before I even crack open my wallet.
There are some interesting petroleum arguments also, in that a pound of "meat" from the organic farmer five miles away at the farmers market burned a heck of a lot less diesel / bunker fuel than a pound of quinoa from another hemisphere. Although a small timer grew and sold a little native quinoa at the market which I bought, reality is that the vast majority of it is imported from another hemisphere at substantial cost.
I can buy locally grown organic beef, pork, and chicken. Most people can't buy locally grown quinoa. Some people can, and American's are literally starving them out of the local quinoa market, which is too bad.
Don't get me wrong, I am a hard core environmentalist at heart for example I think people who dump industrial waste into rivers I hike by should be capital punished by being forced to drink what they dumped till they croak, its only fair since the poor bastards living downstream are already literally drinking it... But feel good irrational non-analyzed environmentalism does more bad for the earth than good, and it turns out the reality is that everyone's better off if I eat a quarter pound steak rather than a quarter pound of quinoa, under existing conditions.
Is this a satire on something? I can't tell if this is a big joke or if you actually believe this "cannot do more than $X of environmental damage" absurdity.
You'd have to expand on whats absurd about it. If food is a hot button for you, lets take it to a new area. How bout cars?
I recently bought a cheap little commuter car for about $15K. I could have bought a much fancier car for $30K but why waste the money to show off my wealth to people on the interstate whom I don't care about? Besides I'm pretty well off but I can find plenty of fun things to spend $15K on and a fancier car doesn't quite make the top 100 or so.
Can you make a reasonable argument, that given the same manufacturer and roughly the same workers that the $30K car wouldn't by definition cause about twice the environmental damage as its constructed as the $15K car? I think thats an epic engineering fail.
Now lets say I bought a 4WD all terrain $40K pork-mobile commuter instead of a green (paint) $100K quinoa-SUV... I'm sure the planet would be trashed about 2.5 times worse by the SUV than my glorified golf cart. Now then lets step back into the world of farmers and their products...
Your reasoning relies entirely on the ability to quantify environmental damage, but it's not clear how you would quantify this. To me it appears completely arbitrary how you decide "this damage is 2.5x worse than the other damage"
So your argument is you can't compare levels of environmental damage. OK then by that argument there is no way to compare the environmental damage of $4 worth of bratwurst vs $10 worth of quinoa. So I may as well eat what tastes better and is healthier and eat the brat.
>Can you make a reasonable argument, that given the same manufacturer and roughly the same workers that the $30K car wouldn't by definition cause about twice the environmental damage as its constructed as the $15K car?
That doesn't make sense at all. There is not a 1 to 1 relationship, or even a linear relationship, between price and environmental damage.
All your arguments seem like you're trying to equate low-cost in dollars with low environmental damage. This is not the case, in food or in cars. In fact in many cases the exact opposite is true.
If environmental damage actually cost money in that way, a lot of problems would be solved.
The problem is that there are a ton of externalities. Farmers aren't paying the cost for the ecosystems they destroy or the waterways they pollute or the monocultures they develop or the greenhouse gases they emit. They can trivially do more than $4 in environmental damage for your $4 purchase.
So... you're seriously trying to argue with me that giving people in the same line of business, with identical morality, outlook, and financial motivation $10 will magically result in less environmental damage than giving them $4, merely because they sell their $10 product with a little more greenwashing PR?
Think about it this way... human nature MIGHT be more dramatically different between vegetarian and meat eater than it is between two farmers, one who sells asparagus and one who sells beef. Even more confusingly there are small time farmers who sell both plants and meats yet have about the same political outlook as they slop the hogs or spray the fields. Your ascribing a large difference in customers, which probably does exist, to somehow apply to a relative monoculture of suppliers, where I don't think a major difference exists. I'm not buying it.
As a PR tool, yes for vegetarians its popular to publicize animal abuse and rivers of blood from slaughterhouses and such. That valuable PR tool WRT vegetarianism doesn't necessarily mean anything WRT environmentalism. The farmer spraying god knows what on his fields which you eat from is hardly the paragon of virtue just because you don't see any animal blood.
Furthermore you're assuming I work at a greener company than most farmers. Possibly true to as many as half the people. Obviously, $10 of income causes 2.5 times more environmental damage than $4 of income.
Finally the cold hard truth is for most people, food enviro damage doesn't matter compared to their giant SUV or obese mcmansion. Or obesity in general. I'm a mid size dude, in the tiniest highest conventional MPG car I could get, living in a small old house... I can eat ten steaks a day and not cause as much enviro damage via my lifestyle as one fat SUV driver who only eats (enormous quantities of) kale. Most people are like that, and their house, thermostat, car, and job swamp any food purchase effects by a large enough factor to ignore. Food works as a "guilt sells" PR tactic, its very Puritan, and its traditional to make americans guilty about their diet to control them. But I'm not buying it. I don't think the numbers fit reality.
I am seriously arguing with you that $4 of one product can result in more environmental damage than $10 of a completely different product. Not that it does, but merely that it can, depending on exactly how they are produced and what the products are. Your simplistic "$4 cost means <=$4 in environmental damage" is just plain wrong.
Your "bratwurst vs quinoa" argument makes the assumption that negative externalities per dollar is constant, therefore negative externalities can be measured by dollars spent.
You later disprove this assumption yourself when describing how local goods can have fewer negative externalities than those imported from across the globe.
Transport cost isn't an externality because neither were will-call or transported by myself (other than the last mile to my house). The transport cost was baked into the retail price in both examples. I suspect it was substantially higher for the quinoa; its still baked into the retail cost of both.
In comparison, an externality would be using my wifes prius to pick up a quarter cow from the butcher shop instead of a SUV. The price of the cow is constant but total environmental damage depends how its shipped. There are enough organic farms in my area that its assumed you'll pick up locally so there's a fixed price and you handle your own shipping aka drive out to the farm and back. My wife is arranging a quarter cow and I'm told its about 50 miles round trip, which is only about a half hour away. I can see how this business model wouldn't work for people living in Las Vegas or another desert.
That money goes somewhere. If I give someone 2.5 times as much money, they Could theoretically do 2.5 times as much "bad stuff". There seems to be a lot of hostility toward that obvious logical idea, no idea why. Think about it... local oil change place down by the river... if 200 people each give them $20 they can dump two barrels of used motor oil in the river. Now if only 100 people give them $20, how do you propose they'll dump the same two barrels of used motor oil in the river, if they only have one barrel anyway?
If I hire a repairman to repair my rain gutters, he can only afford to keep his old truck running. If I pay 3 times as much so he installs new gutters, he now has enough dough for a downpayment on a new truck, so he buys a new truck. It seems blindingly obvious which transaction results in more environmental damage... more money meant new gutters instead of fixing them, and a new truck. Less money means neither.
You can fool the finances for awhile, but not forever. $10 of something greenwashed is inherently going to cause more total damage than something the opposite of greenwashed but only $4, especially if they're basically the same thing sold by the same type of people.
A negative externality is the cost borne by parties unrelated to the transaction. In this debate, that party is the environment. I'm confused by your usage of the term.
According to your argument, buying organic food is worse for the environment than buying non-organic food because it costs more. Likewise, buying hydroelectric power would be worse for the environment (have more negative externalities) than buying coal power if it cost more. Do you dispute the logic of this extension of your argument?
Here's a trivial example disproving your entire argument:
$4 for a piece of wood from a forest where the company harvesting the wood does not replant any trees. They ravage the forest, leaving the land barren and unusable, before moving on to the next forest.
$6 for the same sized piece of wood from a forest where the company harvesting the wood replants trees, thereby increasing costs. They sustainably manage the same area of forest and the land remains fertile.
According to your logic, the $6 wood is 50% more environmentally damaging? Clearly we should all buy the $4 clearcut, ravaged forest wood because that manufacturer has less money to damage the environment with?
You can probably blame the gluten-free madness for some of it. Most of the people I know who are big fans became fans at around the same time they suddenly "developed" gluten problems coincidentally at around the same time a couple years ago when the fad started taking off.
It's listed frequently in gluten-free literature as an alternative to gluten rich wheat products.
All that being said, it tastes fine and isn't overly burdensome to cook. It's a nice change of pace from other staples as part of a well varied diet.
I understand that there's an unseemly faddish element to the gluten free thing, but I think it's unfair to say that your acquaintances suddenly "developed" gluten problems. More likely, they just hadn't been announcing their chronic bowel problems to you all along and suddenly found that their symptoms improved when they tried out this new diet they'd heard of.
My son has medically diagnosed gluten sensitivity or whatever Celiac is officially called, and he loves the recent fad because there's tons of junk food he can buy at the store, at least as long as the fad lasts. He was diagnosed many years ago and back then, there were not many artificial GF products out there to buy...
It would be interesting to compare results over time, my son was diagnosed quite awhile ago and it was cheap and easy to go cold turkey WRT grains, whereas I think paradoxically it might be harder today for people recently (self?) diagnosed because there so many "here's a GF sorta-cookie-like object for a mere $6.95" products in stores. Or the GF pancake mix that tastes good even to me, but is about $10/box. Its a lot cheaper, and arguably easier, to eat naturally GF products than artificially GF products, what I'm getting at is its a lot cheaper and easier to make a GF omelet for breakfast than to go thru what you need to do to make (or buy) GF french toast. Its easier and cheaper to make your own taco meat seasoning than to try and buy a packaged envelope that doesn't use wheat flour as a thickener, for example.
I have the Real Deal of Celiac too, and my advice to anyone else is really to just drop the wheat entirely. A lot of those Gluten-Free substitutes seem to have sky-high glycemic indexes, which is really not good.
(Glycemic indexes are notoriously hard to directly measure; even the numbers you may scare up on the Internet are often only approximations. So I can't prove my statement. All I can say is that when I eat many of those products, I get the same essential reactions to them I do when I eat candy. Which I don't do anymore, either. Of course, in some cases, it simply is sugar... for instance, look at [1] . 18 grams of sugar in 28 grams of cake = 64% sugar! I went to substantiate a claim I wrote here that some of the things were 50% sugar and did more than that. Of course, compare with [2], non-gluten free, 16g sugar in 26g product) for 62% sugar.)
One of the enduring problems with various specialized diets is the desire to make substitutes for the food that was left behind. Nobody really wants to give up a food if they don't have to and we end up with all kinds of terrible substitutes when folks should probably just make the entire paradigm shift into whatever their new food style is.
I think if you have to change foods because of a debilitating issue like Celiac, getting rid of whatever is making you feel like you're about to die isn't all that hard and thus you don't really want to terrible substitute. It's the folks who are induced into the fad who don't really feel all that different one way or the other outside of some kind of placebo effect who still desire the foods that "were making them sick".
I think it's a particular kind of disgusting to convince people who are otherwise healthy that eating certain foods is making them sick when it isn't, it's infantilizing them and I think it takes away from the seriousness of the real disease and the people who really suffer from what's a very painful and often socially crippling issue.
Yes $8 GF cupcakes with weird taste and texture are ridiculous but when all the other kids are having tasty $0.50 cupcakes at the birthday party my son wants one anyway, so on rare occasion we buy one of the mostly awful and expensive substitute products.
The other is that X% of the celiacs are asymptomatic. Till they bleed out of an ulcer, or die at a ridiculously high and young rate from stomach cancer. If your allergen blood test measures off the charts, and the gastroenterologist does a biopsy and its all inflamed, even if you claim to "feel fine" it would be dumb to keep eating wheat. With my son it was a little more obvious as wheat products made him explode out both ends, eventually resulting in the two medical tests above. As advice its along the lines of, if you feel OK, then no need to take your blood pressure meds, or if you feel OK then no need to take your psych meds that day, or if you feel OK then no need to finish your course of antibiotics. I wouldn't really go there, even as satire.
Farmers use grains to fatten mammal livestock, about 2/3 the human mammal population in the USA could stand to lose a bit of weight, and wheat is a grain, so cutting grains is a truly great idea for about 2/3 the population regardless of allergy. I'm perfectly fine with gluten but I lost some excess weight anyway when we went mostly GF at home.
Gluten is not an essential nutrient. You'll be perfectly healthy without it. Now I suppose some flake out there could propose a diet where you consume zero vitamin C until you're admitted into a hospital with scurvy... Although that kind of flakiness does exist in other situations, its perfectly safe not to eat gluten containing foods. The only real danger is wasting lots of money on expense artificially GF foods, which I advise against doing other than for social situations, and the danger of losing some weight.
One point where I agree totally with you in fact, but not in outlook, is the infantilizing subject. Infants are going to be infants. Can't be bothered to take chemistry because you'd like someone else to do your thinking for you, thats called being an infant. Can't be bothered to learn anything about nutrition other than directly or indirectly paid advertisements, thats called infantile behavior. Babies are going to be babies, thats just what they do. No point blaming the messenger or the topic, a moron is quite capable of finding another way to do something moronic without anyone's encouragement. So getting nutritional advice from Hollywood stars is just what infants naturally do; after all they learned about vaccines and autism from the same folks. Normal behavior is not a problem. That behavior being normal for lazy/dumb people is the problem.
There has been a lot of issues with storing commodities such as grains in massive piles in open air (for futures trading) and fungal blooms. I wonder how much "gluten sensitivity" is actually vomitoxin* sensitivity, from a food industry that has had most regulational oversight removed.
As someone who has seen the inside of a QA lab at ADM, I think this is a much more likely scenario. The technicians either give good tests that pass the already loosened standards, or they get fired. There was a big problem with Vomitoxin in 2010, due to a lot of wet weather, but that has subsided with this year's drought in the midwest, but many coastal areas which also farm are seeing much more rain this year.
Combine this uncertainy or "back scratching" quality issues, with typical industrial food practices such as fumigating with phosphene and Sulfuryl fluoride, using more insecticide than recommended and all the fun and exciting stuff coming down the GMO pipe, it's no wonder consumers have lost their appetite for American commodities. They're getting sick from them. All these techniques are tested to have "minimal" impact on the health of consumers, but combine them all, and who knows, certainly not scientists, but people do from first hand experience. How many food recalls have already happened this year? Compare that with other years.. These recalls are not from better testing and transparency because these recalls are for food already in the market and sickening people.
Of course, the challenges continue. Today, rising demand for quinoa has led its price to skyrocket in poorer Bolivian communities, which still depend on the crop as a protein source, making it unaffordable for some families.
It does mention: "Of course, the challenges continue. Today, rising demand for quinoa has led its price to skyrocket in poorer Bolivian communities, which still depend on the crop as a protein source, making it unaffordable for some families."
I won't ever understand some trendy foods. This stuff costs 10 times a much as rice and is a bit more annoying to prepare. Then you have to adapt your recipes and such.
After a while I told my girlfriend I'm just going to make rice because quinoa is just silly, so she decided to make it herself. She's not a very experienced cook, but she tries, and as she tried rinsing it half of the stuff went down the sync, she yelled out in frustration... But she continues to cook and eat it to this day for it's 'amazing health benefits'.
I lol'ed at 'sync'.
My girlfriend also introduced it for the amazing health benefits, she decided to taste it before mixing it in the salad... it tastes of nothing and has the texture of (what I imagine) kitty litter.
I must say when mixed in the salad it was not bad, but CousCous would have been an excellent alternative...
Couscous is really just white pasta, a refined carb. So I see it as an energy provider rather than something nutritional. Whereas quinoa is a wholefood. There's currently a shortage and hence it's rocketed in price. It used to be cheaper to buy for me than rice. I'm a fan. It does have a subtle nutty/smokey taste. Red quinoa is even nicer. Both nice with roasted veg, garlic and tomatoes. And as another has said a pleasant change from rice and potatoes.
It's probably a hardy crop if it's a relative of spinach. I'm in the UK, and I'd like to see more of it grown here.
Depends on the local conditions. E.g. according to Wikipedia, "In eastern North America, it is susceptible to a leaf miner that may reduce crop success; this leaf miner also affects the common weed and close relative Chenopodium album, but C. album is much more resistant." That said, it seems pretty hardy as, "Quinoa's optimal growing conditions are in cool climates with temperatures that range from 25°F/−3°C during the night, to near 95°F/35°C during the day."
All very accurate subjectively, and most food fads are purely subjective, scientific method need not apply.
Objectively, accidentally, she's correct that its pretty high in protein and is also a complete protein. As a change of pace for vegans from beans and rice, its arguably better for you than beans and rice. Aside from all the subjective stuff, you're probably better off eating a nice steak and salad nutritionally, but its not bad.
> probably better off eating a nice [...] salad nutritionally
Depends on your definition of salad. For some people it's a couple of slices of tomato and cucumber with iceberg lettuce doused in ranch dressing (maybe with some shreds of red cabbage in there).
Don't eat it like rice, then you'll just be disappointed. Quinoa is a different food and (I say this as a quinoa-lover) just tastes boring if you eat it the way you'd eat rice.
Of course the easy thing to do is mix with vegetables and broth, and it's fine for that-but the nutritional advantages don't really do it for me, especially to offset the cost and weirdness factor.
I don't mind it as an addition to salads or other uses but again there's nothing really drawing me to it over the alternatives.
"Perhaps the most striking health benefit provided by quinoa is its overall nutrient richness. When the nutrient composition of this food is analyzed in depth, the results are unusual and striking."
Lentils and peas seem to do better on the little graphs on the site.
I think a properly made dal is pretty tough to beat for nutrition and price. The catch is you really have to soak the beans for 24 hours before cooking very well at high temp. Otherwise you get dosed with lectins and phytic acid.
Caramelize some onions in a pot. Toss in a diced pepper and cook to soften. Add quinoa and toast a couple of minutes. Add double the volume of liquid to the amount of quinoa. I use either chicken or vegetable stock but water works in a pinch. Simmer 15 minutes. Eat.
I'm a bit of a cooking enthusiast, so maybe it seems easier to prepare to me than many might find. The Bob's red mill quinoa has been washed so you don't have to, but use a fine strainer and it just takes an extra minute or two to wash if you are using a brand that requires it. Certainly no longer than varieties of rice that require washing to get the starch off...
Annoying to prepare? It uses roughly the same proportion water as rice and it cooks in half the time (compared to brown rice which takes the longest to prepare). What's the problem otherwise?
It is comparable to white rice in preparation time and comparable to brown rice in flavor and nutrition. As someone raised on lots of rice at the dinner table, I think it puts rice to shame.
No, it is not truly a simple substitute to a sophisticated foody, there are positives and negatives, of course.
And it is pricier. Let's not kid ourselves. Most of us to actually cook at home are saving so much money relative to typical American eaters, that the price point is completely irrelevant. If you not eating 20 home cooked meals a week, do not talk me about price. (Yes, I do eat 20 home cooked meals some weeks.)
Some people seem very impressed with themselves for dismissing quinoa as trendy. But I know food well enough to decide for myself, and quinoa is a very attractive addition to my pantry.
I'll assume you know about oats and there's unprocessed, slow cook, quick cook, instant... The problem with quinoa is its all marketed as quinoa although by analogy, you can buy completely unprocessed which takes forever, somewhat processed which still needs some rinsing, and super processed safe to use in prepared box mixes. You have to read the fine print. If you make the mistake of treating raw unprocessed from a farmers market as if it were perfectly dehulled ready to use box mix grade, it'll taste so awful and bitter that you'll spit it out, and probably swear off the product.
Maybe a worse analogy is its like getting a live chicken, vs a shrink wrap boneless skinless tray at the supermarket, vs getting mcnuggets at the drive thru, its all marketed as "chicken" but it matters a lot what kind you buy.
There's probably a startup lesson in here. Life would be a lot more consistent if the quinoa guys never sold processed, for example. It might be less convenient but at least it would be consistent, and inconsistency means confused unhappy users. Consistently PITA sells better than inconsistently PITA.
It is a laughably bad grain food source. Due to overzealousness in my youth, I have a giant jar of quinoa as a last-ditch food source in case of thermonuclear war, worldwide famine or biological catastrophe. Once I've eaten all fresh and canned goods and MREs, I'll still have a gallon of quinoa held in reserve.
Probably a more serious problem (than eating quinoa) would be the difficulty of finding fresh water to clean and boil the quinoa under such circumstances.
Quinoa as a sole food source embodies a strong argument for cannibalism (perhaps the Incas agreed).
I think I first discovered quinoa in a cooking program 10 or so years ago. Some of the comments here seem to assume people consume it just because it's trendy in some way.
For what it's worth, I like it simply because I like the taste, its slight crunch, and just as something different occasionally.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadI am mostly a paleo diet type guy but I try lots of foods and its not bad, properly prepared. The primary problem seems to be taste. Its not that much different than rice and is cooked roughly the same way and spiced roughly the same way. It is an excellent protein source for a starving village farmer if its "free" or cheap, but at now $10/pound I'm better off with steak as a protein source in my diet, or fish, or pretty much anything else.
Europeans decimated the Americas for their corn fed fatty marbled cattle. The rainforests are being cleared for soy, as with most arable crops a high percentage are grown as animal feeds. So there isn't any escape. Eating a cow has collateral damage too.
Take a fraction of those arable crops, don't bother meat farming and move over to better farming methods that are more in tune with nature. It's a balancing act.
If you haven't any ethical qualms about meat eating then you can still farm those fringe places pastorally - reindeer, goats, kangaroos etc.
I still think there's better use for that land than raising cattle on it. I can't help but think that good meat is reserved for the luxury of a few, that includes well raised organic meats. It's only the wealthy people that I know that can afford such.
Are you claiming cowboys are herding cattle in the streets of Manhattan? Or "everyone" wants to move to a cattle ranch in the middle of nowhere in Texas but they just don't know it yet? You could work your argument either direction but I don't think either will work very well. Farmers and ranchers like money just like anyone else. If they could subdivide their land to city slickers at SFO/SV square footage prices I think they would...
If I have a hillside that isn't being used for anything else, than fair enough, I could throw a couple of sheep/goats on it and later reap the rewards.
I'm not sure how many of these romantic pastures continue to exist though. I live in a green fertile valley, where sheep farming is rife. The sheep get additional feed on top of their grazing. I'd prefer acres of trees or some other arable crop instead. Sadly most of us won't ever get access to the land to do so.
Less than 1% of the population owns 70% of the land, running Britain a close second to Brazil for the title of the country with the most unequal land distribution on Earth. - http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/17/high-ho...
Also, is it possible that grain farming is worse for the planet in some circumstances and better in others? I am sure that a small rice paddy is much better for the environment than a barn full of chickens in cages too small for them to stand up.
Grain and legume farming kills massive numbers of amphibians, birds, and rodents, with huge knock on ecological consequences. When you slaughter a pastured cow or sheep it's one life. During their lives the hooved animals serve a vital role in grassland ecology. The 1930s American dustbowl desertification happened in substantial part because of the preceding elimination of bison and steer.
> a barn full of chickens in cages
If chickens are caged in barns they're eating mostly grain. Historically normal chickens ran around outside and ate mostly bugs, in season.
Lets say I pay $4 for a pound of bratwurst. He cannot do more than $4 of environmental damage and still stay in business. Even if brats magically fell from the sky for free, he simply can't do worse than stack up $4 worth of lead and old car tires and set them on fire or whatever other environmental degradation you can imagine.
The good organic farmers market meat costs more than $4/lb but less than $10 so the argument still holds. In fact I'm about to take delivery of a quarter-cow from a local organic farmer, got my high efficiency freezer all defrosted and emptied and ready to fill with delicious organic local grass fed beef.
On the other hand, the guy who I just handed a $10 to for a pound of quinoa can stack of $10 worth of old car tires and set them on fire and dump $10 of antifreeze into the river or WTF. He can afford to "ruin the environment" to the tune of $9.99 and still stay in business, unlike the brat guy above who would go almost instantly out of business if he spent $9 trashing the environment for every $4 incoming.
This is before I even get started on the supply side, where for the sake of argument lets say I have to kill one baby seals per $1 take home pay. That means to earn the $10 for quinoa regardless of how "pure" his quinoa growing operation is, ten baby seals died, whereas to earn the $4 for brats, regardless of how "pure" his pig sty is, a mere four baby seals had to die. I would argue that most people in the real world work at pretty ugly companies, ecologically speaking, so most of the enviro damage comes from earning the money rather than how its spent. Another example is I burn about a gallon of gas per day that I drive to work, so even if I do the ultimate green thing and finance planting a rainforest or something, I've still ecologically destroyed a gallon of gas before I even crack open my wallet.
There are some interesting petroleum arguments also, in that a pound of "meat" from the organic farmer five miles away at the farmers market burned a heck of a lot less diesel / bunker fuel than a pound of quinoa from another hemisphere. Although a small timer grew and sold a little native quinoa at the market which I bought, reality is that the vast majority of it is imported from another hemisphere at substantial cost.
I can buy locally grown organic beef, pork, and chicken. Most people can't buy locally grown quinoa. Some people can, and American's are literally starving them out of the local quinoa market, which is too bad.
Don't get me wrong, I am a hard core environmentalist at heart for example I think people who dump industrial waste into rivers I hike by should be capital punished by being forced to drink what they dumped till they croak, its only fair since the poor bastards living downstream are already literally drinking it... But feel good irrational non-analyzed environmentalism does more bad for the earth than good, and it turns out the reality is that everyone's better off if I eat a quarter pound steak rather than a quarter pound of quinoa, under existing conditions.
I recently bought a cheap little commuter car for about $15K. I could have bought a much fancier car for $30K but why waste the money to show off my wealth to people on the interstate whom I don't care about? Besides I'm pretty well off but I can find plenty of fun things to spend $15K on and a fancier car doesn't quite make the top 100 or so.
Can you make a reasonable argument, that given the same manufacturer and roughly the same workers that the $30K car wouldn't by definition cause about twice the environmental damage as its constructed as the $15K car? I think thats an epic engineering fail.
Now lets say I bought a 4WD all terrain $40K pork-mobile commuter instead of a green (paint) $100K quinoa-SUV... I'm sure the planet would be trashed about 2.5 times worse by the SUV than my glorified golf cart. Now then lets step back into the world of farmers and their products...
That doesn't make sense at all. There is not a 1 to 1 relationship, or even a linear relationship, between price and environmental damage.
All your arguments seem like you're trying to equate low-cost in dollars with low environmental damage. This is not the case, in food or in cars. In fact in many cases the exact opposite is true.
The problem is that there are a ton of externalities. Farmers aren't paying the cost for the ecosystems they destroy or the waterways they pollute or the monocultures they develop or the greenhouse gases they emit. They can trivially do more than $4 in environmental damage for your $4 purchase.
Think about it this way... human nature MIGHT be more dramatically different between vegetarian and meat eater than it is between two farmers, one who sells asparagus and one who sells beef. Even more confusingly there are small time farmers who sell both plants and meats yet have about the same political outlook as they slop the hogs or spray the fields. Your ascribing a large difference in customers, which probably does exist, to somehow apply to a relative monoculture of suppliers, where I don't think a major difference exists. I'm not buying it.
As a PR tool, yes for vegetarians its popular to publicize animal abuse and rivers of blood from slaughterhouses and such. That valuable PR tool WRT vegetarianism doesn't necessarily mean anything WRT environmentalism. The farmer spraying god knows what on his fields which you eat from is hardly the paragon of virtue just because you don't see any animal blood.
Furthermore you're assuming I work at a greener company than most farmers. Possibly true to as many as half the people. Obviously, $10 of income causes 2.5 times more environmental damage than $4 of income.
Finally the cold hard truth is for most people, food enviro damage doesn't matter compared to their giant SUV or obese mcmansion. Or obesity in general. I'm a mid size dude, in the tiniest highest conventional MPG car I could get, living in a small old house... I can eat ten steaks a day and not cause as much enviro damage via my lifestyle as one fat SUV driver who only eats (enormous quantities of) kale. Most people are like that, and their house, thermostat, car, and job swamp any food purchase effects by a large enough factor to ignore. Food works as a "guilt sells" PR tactic, its very Puritan, and its traditional to make americans guilty about their diet to control them. But I'm not buying it. I don't think the numbers fit reality.
You later disprove this assumption yourself when describing how local goods can have fewer negative externalities than those imported from across the globe.
In comparison, an externality would be using my wifes prius to pick up a quarter cow from the butcher shop instead of a SUV. The price of the cow is constant but total environmental damage depends how its shipped. There are enough organic farms in my area that its assumed you'll pick up locally so there's a fixed price and you handle your own shipping aka drive out to the farm and back. My wife is arranging a quarter cow and I'm told its about 50 miles round trip, which is only about a half hour away. I can see how this business model wouldn't work for people living in Las Vegas or another desert.
That money goes somewhere. If I give someone 2.5 times as much money, they Could theoretically do 2.5 times as much "bad stuff". There seems to be a lot of hostility toward that obvious logical idea, no idea why. Think about it... local oil change place down by the river... if 200 people each give them $20 they can dump two barrels of used motor oil in the river. Now if only 100 people give them $20, how do you propose they'll dump the same two barrels of used motor oil in the river, if they only have one barrel anyway?
If I hire a repairman to repair my rain gutters, he can only afford to keep his old truck running. If I pay 3 times as much so he installs new gutters, he now has enough dough for a downpayment on a new truck, so he buys a new truck. It seems blindingly obvious which transaction results in more environmental damage... more money meant new gutters instead of fixing them, and a new truck. Less money means neither.
You can fool the finances for awhile, but not forever. $10 of something greenwashed is inherently going to cause more total damage than something the opposite of greenwashed but only $4, especially if they're basically the same thing sold by the same type of people.
According to your argument, buying organic food is worse for the environment than buying non-organic food because it costs more. Likewise, buying hydroelectric power would be worse for the environment (have more negative externalities) than buying coal power if it cost more. Do you dispute the logic of this extension of your argument?
$4 for a piece of wood from a forest where the company harvesting the wood does not replant any trees. They ravage the forest, leaving the land barren and unusable, before moving on to the next forest.
$6 for the same sized piece of wood from a forest where the company harvesting the wood replants trees, thereby increasing costs. They sustainably manage the same area of forest and the land remains fertile.
According to your logic, the $6 wood is 50% more environmentally damaging? Clearly we should all buy the $4 clearcut, ravaged forest wood because that manufacturer has less money to damage the environment with?
It's listed frequently in gluten-free literature as an alternative to gluten rich wheat products.
All that being said, it tastes fine and isn't overly burdensome to cook. It's a nice change of pace from other staples as part of a well varied diet.
It would be interesting to compare results over time, my son was diagnosed quite awhile ago and it was cheap and easy to go cold turkey WRT grains, whereas I think paradoxically it might be harder today for people recently (self?) diagnosed because there so many "here's a GF sorta-cookie-like object for a mere $6.95" products in stores. Or the GF pancake mix that tastes good even to me, but is about $10/box. Its a lot cheaper, and arguably easier, to eat naturally GF products than artificially GF products, what I'm getting at is its a lot cheaper and easier to make a GF omelet for breakfast than to go thru what you need to do to make (or buy) GF french toast. Its easier and cheaper to make your own taco meat seasoning than to try and buy a packaged envelope that doesn't use wheat flour as a thickener, for example.
(Glycemic indexes are notoriously hard to directly measure; even the numbers you may scare up on the Internet are often only approximations. So I can't prove my statement. All I can say is that when I eat many of those products, I get the same essential reactions to them I do when I eat candy. Which I don't do anymore, either. Of course, in some cases, it simply is sugar... for instance, look at [1] . 18 grams of sugar in 28 grams of cake = 64% sugar! I went to substantiate a claim I wrote here that some of the things were 50% sugar and did more than that. Of course, compare with [2], non-gluten free, 16g sugar in 26g product) for 62% sugar.)
[1]: http://www.generalmills.com/ColorBoxImage.aspx?ImageId={2370...
[2]: http://www.generalmills.com/ColorBoxImage.aspx?ImageId={C84C...
I think if you have to change foods because of a debilitating issue like Celiac, getting rid of whatever is making you feel like you're about to die isn't all that hard and thus you don't really want to terrible substitute. It's the folks who are induced into the fad who don't really feel all that different one way or the other outside of some kind of placebo effect who still desire the foods that "were making them sick".
I think it's a particular kind of disgusting to convince people who are otherwise healthy that eating certain foods is making them sick when it isn't, it's infantilizing them and I think it takes away from the seriousness of the real disease and the people who really suffer from what's a very painful and often socially crippling issue.
One example is alcohol is a food!
Yes $8 GF cupcakes with weird taste and texture are ridiculous but when all the other kids are having tasty $0.50 cupcakes at the birthday party my son wants one anyway, so on rare occasion we buy one of the mostly awful and expensive substitute products.
The other is that X% of the celiacs are asymptomatic. Till they bleed out of an ulcer, or die at a ridiculously high and young rate from stomach cancer. If your allergen blood test measures off the charts, and the gastroenterologist does a biopsy and its all inflamed, even if you claim to "feel fine" it would be dumb to keep eating wheat. With my son it was a little more obvious as wheat products made him explode out both ends, eventually resulting in the two medical tests above. As advice its along the lines of, if you feel OK, then no need to take your blood pressure meds, or if you feel OK then no need to take your psych meds that day, or if you feel OK then no need to finish your course of antibiotics. I wouldn't really go there, even as satire.
Farmers use grains to fatten mammal livestock, about 2/3 the human mammal population in the USA could stand to lose a bit of weight, and wheat is a grain, so cutting grains is a truly great idea for about 2/3 the population regardless of allergy. I'm perfectly fine with gluten but I lost some excess weight anyway when we went mostly GF at home.
Gluten is not an essential nutrient. You'll be perfectly healthy without it. Now I suppose some flake out there could propose a diet where you consume zero vitamin C until you're admitted into a hospital with scurvy... Although that kind of flakiness does exist in other situations, its perfectly safe not to eat gluten containing foods. The only real danger is wasting lots of money on expense artificially GF foods, which I advise against doing other than for social situations, and the danger of losing some weight.
One point where I agree totally with you in fact, but not in outlook, is the infantilizing subject. Infants are going to be infants. Can't be bothered to take chemistry because you'd like someone else to do your thinking for you, thats called being an infant. Can't be bothered to learn anything about nutrition other than directly or indirectly paid advertisements, thats called infantile behavior. Babies are going to be babies, thats just what they do. No point blaming the messenger or the topic, a moron is quite capable of finding another way to do something moronic without anyone's encouragement. So getting nutritional advice from Hollywood stars is just what infants naturally do; after all they learned about vaccines and autism from the same folks. Normal behavior is not a problem. That behavior being normal for lazy/dumb people is the problem.
As someone who has seen the inside of a QA lab at ADM, I think this is a much more likely scenario. The technicians either give good tests that pass the already loosened standards, or they get fired. There was a big problem with Vomitoxin in 2010, due to a lot of wet weather, but that has subsided with this year's drought in the midwest, but many coastal areas which also farm are seeing much more rain this year.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vomitoxin
Combine this uncertainy or "back scratching" quality issues, with typical industrial food practices such as fumigating with phosphene and Sulfuryl fluoride, using more insecticide than recommended and all the fun and exciting stuff coming down the GMO pipe, it's no wonder consumers have lost their appetite for American commodities. They're getting sick from them. All these techniques are tested to have "minimal" impact on the health of consumers, but combine them all, and who knows, certainly not scientists, but people do from first hand experience. How many food recalls have already happened this year? Compare that with other years.. These recalls are not from better testing and transparency because these recalls are for food already in the market and sickening people.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/quinoa-boom-offers-hard-less...
Of course, the challenges continue. Today, rising demand for quinoa has led its price to skyrocket in poorer Bolivian communities, which still depend on the crop as a protein source, making it unaffordable for some families.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6028905
After a while I told my girlfriend I'm just going to make rice because quinoa is just silly, so she decided to make it herself. She's not a very experienced cook, but she tries, and as she tried rinsing it half of the stuff went down the sync, she yelled out in frustration... But she continues to cook and eat it to this day for it's 'amazing health benefits'.
It's probably a hardy crop if it's a relative of spinach. I'm in the UK, and I'd like to see more of it grown here.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinoa
Objectively, accidentally, she's correct that its pretty high in protein and is also a complete protein. As a change of pace for vegans from beans and rice, its arguably better for you than beans and rice. Aside from all the subjective stuff, you're probably better off eating a nice steak and salad nutritionally, but its not bad.
Depends on your definition of salad. For some people it's a couple of slices of tomato and cucumber with iceberg lettuce doused in ranch dressing (maybe with some shreds of red cabbage in there).
I don't mind it as an addition to salads or other uses but again there's nothing really drawing me to it over the alternatives.
http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?dbid=142&tname=foodspice
"Perhaps the most striking health benefit provided by quinoa is its overall nutrient richness. When the nutrient composition of this food is analyzed in depth, the results are unusual and striking."
I think a properly made dal is pretty tough to beat for nutrition and price. The catch is you really have to soak the beans for 24 hours before cooking very well at high temp. Otherwise you get dosed with lectins and phytic acid.
I'm a bit of a cooking enthusiast, so maybe it seems easier to prepare to me than many might find. The Bob's red mill quinoa has been washed so you don't have to, but use a fine strainer and it just takes an extra minute or two to wash if you are using a brand that requires it. Certainly no longer than varieties of rice that require washing to get the starch off...
It is comparable to white rice in preparation time and comparable to brown rice in flavor and nutrition. As someone raised on lots of rice at the dinner table, I think it puts rice to shame.
No, it is not truly a simple substitute to a sophisticated foody, there are positives and negatives, of course.
And it is pricier. Let's not kid ourselves. Most of us to actually cook at home are saving so much money relative to typical American eaters, that the price point is completely irrelevant. If you not eating 20 home cooked meals a week, do not talk me about price. (Yes, I do eat 20 home cooked meals some weeks.)
Some people seem very impressed with themselves for dismissing quinoa as trendy. But I know food well enough to decide for myself, and quinoa is a very attractive addition to my pantry.
Maybe a worse analogy is its like getting a live chicken, vs a shrink wrap boneless skinless tray at the supermarket, vs getting mcnuggets at the drive thru, its all marketed as "chicken" but it matters a lot what kind you buy.
There's probably a startup lesson in here. Life would be a lot more consistent if the quinoa guys never sold processed, for example. It might be less convenient but at least it would be consistent, and inconsistency means confused unhappy users. Consistently PITA sells better than inconsistently PITA.
Probably a more serious problem (than eating quinoa) would be the difficulty of finding fresh water to clean and boil the quinoa under such circumstances.
Quinoa as a sole food source embodies a strong argument for cannibalism (perhaps the Incas agreed).
http://www.quinoa.net/127/136.html