April 7th

  Today is April 7, and the April showers are still decidedly on the solid, white side. I thought about blogging on this extended winter, but decided it was too much of a downer this late in the winter. Instead, I am going to blog about the other hot topic, Food. Many people are going cold turkey off of their “vice” foods, and BadBaker is putting out some very reasonable rants. A year ago I had a major cleanup of my diet when I went off wheat products as part of finding controls for my COPD. This year, I am only doing a cleanup of minor parts of my eating and drinking. I have given up cheap coffee from the machine at work, but maintain my 1 cup of high quality latte in the morning before leaving home. I am attempting to increase my water intake, and have put a large water container on my desk at work, so have no excuses not to drink when It is right in front of me. We have not bought boxed wine now in months, instead reverting to the more primitive style of purchasing wine in glass bottles (the better ones have screw top lids).I am keeping up my chocolate intake, as I think that quality chocolate is healthy (cheap chocolate has a lot of other junk added to keep the price down).

   Mr Repay posted a rant by another baker on gluten, and the evils of self diagnosis. Now as one of those self diagnosed gluten sensitive people, I had to respond. There are a couple of points to bring up, such as “is it gluten?” or something else? I have to agree on that point, it could be gluten, it could be something else in the modern wheat plant, or it could be fallout from the mind control drugs that the CIA adds to jet fuel when forming Chemtrails (the last one is plausible only because of observing the one and only baker I know, as bakers would obviously have a higher exposure to any such mind control drugs). The fact is that “wheat” as currently found on the grocery store shelf is not the wheat that Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris ate as children. In the 1960’s, a primitive form of genetically modifying plants was used on wheat; this was called the “Green Revolution”. The yield from wheat went up ten-fold per acre, and we went from 3 billion persons on earth, many on the edge of starvation, to over 7 billion, again with a large percentage on the edge of starvation. What the defenders of gluten gloss over is that it is not the same plant (for instance it produces twice as much gluten, and prefers huge doses of chemical fertilizers to grow). This is not the plant that man has been cultivating for thousands of years, it is a product of modern laboratories, that has a superficial resemblance to historical wheat. The other item is that gluten sensitivity is not like pregnancy, as in you can be “a little bit” sensitive to wheat, not just insensitive or Celiac. So before you jump on the bandwagon, do what I did, and try going without for a month. If you feel better, maybe a self diagnosis is in order, and you change your eating habits. As far as self diagnosis goes, sometimes you don’t need a PhD and malpractice insurance, just some common sense. I have self diagnosed many things, such as hitting oneself in the head with a hammer is a bad thing, and I no longer engage in that behavior.

  So have a really good cup of coffee, a nice glass of wine, some excellent dark chocolate, and be glad, that despite the solid precipitation, we don’t have earthquakes.    

Dennis Donohue