Category: Food

Pumpkin-oatmeal pudding


Pumpkin-oatmeal pudding sweetened with date sugar

I could break down and make a pumpkin pie, but then I’d have to eat it all myself — a huge calorie load. I settled on pumpkin-oatmeal pudding, because I could make it in a modest quantity, and pudding avoids all the calories and carbs in the crust.

For a year or so, I have been experimenting with date sugar. Date sugar is nothing but dried dates, ground fine. It’s expensive, but obviously it’s much healthier than sugar-sugar. You can buy it on Amazon.

To make it: You don’t need a recipe for pumpkin-oatmeal pudding. I used old-fashioned oats that I had already cooked. Mix the oatmeal and pumpkin, add a beaten egg, some sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and a touch of cream. Put a couple of pats of butter on top before putting the pudding in the oven. I’m sure that raw old-fashioned oats would work fine, if you allowed for the absorption of liquid. Or, better yet, toast the oats before adding them to the pudding. How long you need to bake the pudding will of course depend on how much pudding you made. Thirty minutes at 375F worked great for my pudding.

A good-size pumpkin will make enough pumpkin goody for a pie and a couple of soups. To cook the pumpkin, don’t even think of boiling it. Cut around the top of the pumpkin, like a lid. Scoop out the seeds. Throw the seeds into the yard for the birds. Put the lid back on and bake the pumpkin at 350 degrees. How long to bake the pumpkin will depend on the size. But it’s done when it starts to sink, the skin is softened, and a small quantity of pumpkin juice is oozing into the pan. After the pumpkin cools, pour the liquid inside the pumpkin into a jar and save it for soup stock. Scoop out the goody. Throw the skin into the yard for the possums.

To use canned pumpkin ought to be a felony punished with prison time. Don’t Americans bother to cook and eat fresh pumpkin anymore? I don’t know anyone but me who uses fresh pumpkin. And who doesn’t like pumpkin pie? I will certainly make pies at Thanksgiving and Christmas when I’ll have some expert help eating them.

Brown = umami = Maillard reaction

It would be easy to believe that the secret of cooking Chinese at home is as simple as using too much salt. That’s not it, though Chinese dishes certainly like salt. The real secret is the brownness. That’s where the umami flavor comes from. When foods are browned during cooking, that’s the Maillard reaction. Whether we’re talking about toast, grilled meat, roasted peanuts or even toasted marshmallows, every good cook must take advantage of the Maillard reaction.

Here’s an experiment. For years, I couldn’t figure out how to get fried rice to be brown. Just pouring some soy sauce into the pan did not seem to be the answer — though those umami-rich sauces are necessary as a finishing touch. I suppose that even rice, if it was in a skillet or a wok for long enough, would start to turn brown. But it’s much easier than that.

Brown your onions. Even after the onions come out of the pan, they’ll leave some of the brown behind in the pan. Your other stir-fry vegetables, as long as you don’t let them become watery, will add to the brown in your pan. If you’re brave enough not to be afraid of a little monosodium glutamate near the end of the stir-fry of your vegetables, it will triple the amount of brown (as well as the amount of umani). Remove the vegetables from the skillet or wok, then add the rice. The rice, as you toss it, will lift the brown off the bottom of the skillet. Not only is the rice now brown, it’s glazed with umami. If you can avoid it, never waste umami by leaving it in the bottom of a pan!

This deglazing is the same thing that cooks do when making gravy in a pan that was used to cook meat. Pour off the grease, and make the gravy in the roasting pan such that the brownness is recovered from the bottom of the pan. That brownness is a cook’s gold.

Some recent eats


Egg foo yung with stir-fried sweet-potato leaves

I buy good eggs from pastured chickens and then forget that I have eggs. I think it’s because I’m so content on a plants-only diet, until I start to worry that I might not be getting enough B-12. Then I remember how good egg foo yung can be.

You don’t need Chinese vegetables such as bean sprouts. Plain old cabbage (with a bit of onion) works great. The key to good egg foo yung is umami, and that means brown. The umami is partly in the sauce, with some Better Than Bouillon and soy sauce. But the cabbage and onion also need to be browned. I’ve written here in the past about how I think monosodium glutamate is not harmful in small quantities. It’s made from yeast. Study after study has tried to prove MSG guilty of something, anything, and have mostly come up short. After all, our own bodies make glutamic acid, and it’s found naturally in many foods such as tomatoes and cheese. Like salt, it’s something that should be used sparingly. But its ability to add umani is a kind of miracle. When MSG comes into contact with hot oil, it immediately turns a beautiful brown, revealing what it truly is — pure brown umami (though it’s as white as salt) stabilized with a sodium molecule. Oil and heat transform it back into something brown.

Monday morning, because the day was cloudy and somewhat cooler, I made my periodic trip to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s in Winston-Salem. I feel pinned down by the weather of July and August, and I don’t get out much. As a kind of mini-vacation, I went to Reynolda Village, where there is a Village Tavern. Reynolda Village is adjacent to the campus of Wake Forest University. The place was built in 1916 as a mansion and working dairy farm for the R.J. Reynolds family (think tobacco, and Winston and Salem cigarettes). But since 1965 it has belonged to Wake Forest University. The house is a museum. The grounds and gardens are a park. All the many outbuildings, all of which have a lot of charm, have been turned into little eateries and boutiques. At 11 a.m., Village Tavern had just opened for lunch. The large patio was empty, with big yellow umbrellas and twinkle lights, overhung by enormous oak trees. The waitress assigned to the patio had no one to accommodate but me. How could I resist a nicely cooked lunch, since I rarely eat out?

Incidentally, what is the appeal of fast food other than that it’s (somewhat) fast? It’s not even cheap. A few months ago, I went to a Chick-fil-A for the first time because I was curious about their cauliflower sandwich (a temporary offering; they no longer have it). As I recall, that sandwich cost more than $11. And yet the grilled salmon plate with healthy fixin’s at Village Tavern didn’t cost that much more — $18 — and in a far more pleasant setting. I might eat out more often but for the fact that Winston-Salem, about 45 minutes away on winding roads, is the nearest place with civilized eateries and trained cooks. Here in the sticks, it’s all country cookin’ with shockingly sorry ingredients, cooked by cooks who couldn’t cook their way out of a ham biscuit.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I esteem country cookin’. One of my grandmothers was a master chef of provincial Southern cookin’, by any standard (and she had a big farm to supply her). But these days few people know how to do it or have even tasted anything that meets the standard. And rural restaurant food is always inferior because of the necessity of sorry ingredients, stingily deployed by untrained low-wage cooks, to keep prices low. Southern provincial cookin’ is like a dying language that a few native speakers are trying to keep alive.

I started out talking about egg foo yung, didn’t I? But of course there are many methods that all good cookin’ has in common.


Grilled salmon at the Village Tavern, Reynolda Village in Winston-Salem

To heck with the news. Let’s talk about food.


Barley biscuits with pinto beans, okra-tomato sauté, and green beans. Click here for high resolution version.

The news is exasperating. Even as Trump makes madman threats, including threatening people such as Mike Pence, who is sure to be a witness at Trump’s trials, the media are doubling down on the horsewash idea that Smith won’t be able to prove the charges against Trump and that Trump will get back into the White House in 2024. Never mind all that for now. In time, it’ll all get sorted out. Eating well is the best revenge. But never forget how the media have tried to scare us to keep milking Trump for clicks and ratings.

For barley biscuits, you can adjust the proportions of unbleached wheat flour with hulled barley flour to suit your taste. At a ratio of one part barley flour to five parts wheat flour, all you’ll notice is some some extra (and delicious) flavor. With five parts barley flour to one part wheat flour, the biscuits will be a bit crumbly, and it will be hard to keep them moist (using buttermilk will help). Everything in between is worth experimenting with.

Until this summer, I didn’t know that sweet potato leaves make good greens. But you can eat them either cooked or raw, as a salad green. No wonder the deer like them so much. And though most lettuces don’t like high summer, sweet potato greens love high summer, even though the sweet potatoes won’t be ready until fall.


Sweet potato leaves stir-fried with garlic; fried rice with cashews and summer vegetables; and tofu. Click here for high resolution version.

Outsourcing is now an option


I grew the tomatoes on the upper shelf. The tomatoes on the lower shelf were part of my weekly vegetable pickup.

Technically, where I live is a food desert. The nearest grocery stores are about twelve miles away. A shocking number of rural people get most of their food these days from dollar stores such as Dollar General. Dollar General stores are everywhere. This makes it easier for me to believe the terrifying statistic that 70 percent of the American diet these days comes from ultra-processed foods.

It’s shocking how few rural people have vegetable gardens. And why should they? They don’t eat that stuff anymore. With transplants it’s a different story.

I’ve always had a garden, for better or for worse, in the fifteen years I’ve lived here. However, I do not enjoy — at all — summer gardening. It’s the heat, the humidity, the bugs, the ticks, the weeds, the briars, the gnats in the eyes. No matter how energetic my start in the spring, by summer the garden is always a wreck.

This summer I have an entirely new option. A young couple who live about two miles away (transplants from the Chicago area) have taught themselves to be superb gardeners. When they first moved here, they had day jobs. But this year they’ve quit their jobs and are making a living with their garden. Mostly they sell on Saturdays at an upscale farmer’s market in Greensboro. But, for a few local people like me, they started a weekly pickup of an assortment of vegetables — community supported agriculture. I was able to downsize my own garden this summer to a very manageable one row of nothing but tomatoes and basil, both of which are easy to grow and neither of which I’d be able to live without in summer.

These two young people taught themselves to garden, mostly by watching a lot of videos. In retrospect, I can see what a good idea that is. Old hands like me tend to garden the way we saw it done as children, and though we may experiment with newer methods, we never reach the state of the art. Whereas the garden I’m buying from this summer is a sight to behold. I’ve never seen anything like it other than at Monticello, or an abbey garden on Iona in Scotland. Almost half the garden is in flowers. They don’t till. Everything is perfectly mulched and well watered. The climbing system for such things as beans and cucumbers is ingenious, not to mention tall. They make their own compost, partly from the compostables they collect from their customers in Greensboro as part of the business. They even make enough wine for their own consumption, from native varieties of grapes.

There may well be some local young people — that is, young people who were born here and grew up here — who are interested in doing this kind of thing. But I don’t know of any. The reason for this, as I see it, has everything to do with the cultural decline of the rural deplorables. In a county that voted 78 percent for Trump in 2020, it’s safe to assume that 78 percent of the calories are coming from Dollar General and fast food from the nearest towns — Walnut Cove and Madison. These people — the people who are making America great again — eat their burgers and chicken sandwiches in the car and throw the bags, wrappers, and empty cups out the window onto the road.

Show me someone who lives otherwise, and the odds will be greater than 78 percent that that person is a liberal.


The nearby gardeners, at their booth at a Greensboro farmer’s market

Feasting your inner pet


Lentil-barley burger with fixin’s

Just in the last ten to twenty years, we’ve gotten a whole new insight into how to use food to keep ourselves healthy. That new insight has to do with our microbiome. For much longer than that, we’ve known that antibiotics will do serious harm to our digestive systems. Even so, we didn’t appreciate just how important the microbiome is and how to take care of it. We also know now why, beyond the stomach, we have a two-stage digestive system. Cows have four stages, but we humans don’t eat grass. Still, we humans are omnivores (except for grass), and now we know much more about why we require a two-stage digestive system. The first stage in humans is about the enzymes, and all that, which break down our food and feed us. The second stage is all about feeding the microbiome. And feeding the microbiome is all about fermentation.

The favorite food of the microbiome is soluble fiber. That’s what ferments best, that’s what is most nutritious to the microbiome, and that’s what creates the nutrients that we need but that we can’t acquire directly from our food. One of the key signs of a healthy microbiome is a low level of inflammation everywhere in the body. That’s because of the nutrients that only the microbiome can produce. Unsurprisingly and conversely, one of the key signs of a poorly fed microbiome is inflammation everywhere in the body. We probably notice it first in our joints. We don’t notice it in our arteries — a very dangerous place indeed for inflammation.

I’ve started thinking of the microbiome as a kind of inner pet, a pet that we should take care of as carefully as we take care of our cat. One of the things we’ve learned is that the makeup of our microbiome can change very quickly, based on what we eat. There’s also an inertia in the microbiome, because our inner pet adjusts to what we eat, and, once adjusted, wants to go on eating the same thing. If you’re living on pizza, doughnuts, and TV dinners, then that’s very bad news, because that’s what your microbiome will crave. But if you have a well-fed microbiome, then what you crave will be healthy food. There are many references in the literature to a brain-gut connection, but I’m not sure we know yet how that really works. Presumably the microbiome creates substances that are carried by the bloodstream to the brain and tell us what to crave.

Two of the foods highest in soluble fiber are lentils and barley. The two of them together, with seasonings, make mighty fine burgers for feasting for both stages of your digestive system.

I use organic green lentils, which I buy in bulk from Whole Foods. I make barley flour by grinding organic hulled barley, using an old Champion juicer with a milling attachment. Organic hulled barley is hard to find locally, but you can get it from Amazon. I believe that every well-equipped kitchen should have a grinder for flour. I buy unbleached wheat flour already ground. But I use my grinder for whole wheat flour and barley flour.

Just as your cat nags you when it wants to be fed, your microbiome will nag you, too. It will nag you for more of whatever you’ve been eating lately. If you feed your microbiome lots of soluble fiber, I can testify that that’s what it will nag you for. I eat fiber because it’s good for us. But I also eat it — no kidding — because that’s one of the main things that my microbiome nags me for.

But I still like a nice slice of pizza a few times a year.

The upside of summer


Dandelion pesto, made with Gorgonzola cheese

Summer pesto:

One of the best ideas I know for making the best of summer is: Eat more pesto. Already this season I’ve had pestos made of basil, kale, dandelions, and mixtures including parsley, dill, cilantro, and thyme. I was afraid that the dandelion pesto would be bitter, but it wasn’t. I did my best to counteract the strong taste of dandelions with other strong tastes — a little malt vinegar, and Gorgonzola cheese. I’ve realized that parmesan doesn’t have to be the default cheese for pesto.

Summer reading:

I always like to have some good fiction and some good nonfiction going at the same time. I had high hopes this summer for Tad Williams’ The Dragonbone Chair, which was published in 1988. I stuck with it for 125 excruciating pages and finally flung it. Why did this book get so many fans and so many good reviews? It’s embarrassingly overwritten, lame in its attempts to be ever-so-clever in every last sentence. Nothing ever happens. There is scene after scene in which new characters are introduced, and dozens of other characters are named but never seen. There is scene after scene in new settings in an old castle, and dozens of other places are named but never seen. A database would be required to track it all. But there’s no motive to track it because it’s so boring. Who could possibly compare something this bad with the work of J.R.R. Tolkien? I’m not even going to waste shelf space on this book. On my next trip to the used book store, I’ll sell it. Until I can scare up some new fiction, I’ll stick with Peter Turchin’s new book, which I mentioned in a recent post.

Traveling persimmons:

For years, Ken and I have grieved over the abbey’s orchard. The peach crop always fails, early on. The squirrels steal all the apples exactly one day before they’re ripe. We do get some figs. But the trees that never let us down are the persimmon trees. They’re natives, so they’re not finicky and never sickly. For some reason, none of the wildlife raid the trees while the persimmons are still on the tree. They wait for it to drop. There are more persimmons in the yard each year than a single household can use. I do believe that Ken does his best to time his American college tours to persimmon season, which is late October. Last year, when he returned to Scotland, he took some persimmon seeds, which we had saved while making persimmon pudding. He planted the seeds in his Scottish greenhouse. He got lots of promising seedlings, some of which he took to Germany as a gift to his wife’s sister. In a few years, we’ll know how the trees are coming along. Our guess is that the German trees will like their climate better than the Scottish trees.

Summer watchables:

Because I don’t really watch broadcast (or cable) television, I had missed the long-running PBS series “Masterpiece Endeavour.” Just last month, the series had its ninth, and last, season on PBS. Having missed the earlier seasons, I decided to keep watching all of it, in order. I’m now on season 6. It is some of the best television I’ve ever seen. It’s intelligent, and made for adults. It’s not here-and-now. It’s set in Oxford in the late 1960s. The characters really grow on you. Each episode is complete in itself, but there are longer-running plot elements. I made a brief visit to Oxford in 2019. At the time, I didn’t know that the pub that I wanted to visit is the Lamb & Flag, which according to Wikipedia has been operating since 1566. Now I know. I’ll need another visit to Oxford to correct my mistake.


⬆︎ My coneflowers have perennialized. Lucky me!


⬆︎ Dill, bolted


⬆︎ Rose of Sharon


⬆︎ Baby persimmons, which won’t be ready until fall

Sardines, well disguised


Pea and sardine burgers with fresh herbs; potato salad with fresh dill

A week or so ago, I mentioned having acquired a dozen tins of nice, clean, Norwegian sardines, skinless and boneless and packed in olive oil. I had the idea of using them in burgers that are partly sardines and partly legumes. They’re good!

Though the garden here has oodles of basil every summer (because I think of basil more as a vegetable than as an herb), I’ve never had such a good supply of fresh herbs as I have this year. I included lots of basil and parsley in the burgers. Because I’m not particularly fond of fishy flavors, I used every sort of compatible strong flavor that I could think of to season the burgers — onions, cumin, garlic powder, Trader Joe’s mushroom umami seasoning, smoked paprika, food yeast, and toasted sesame oil. The peas were frozen. I used an egg as binder. The burgers tasted more like veggie burgers than fish burgers.

Though I do eat eggs and dairy, I eat very little meat. For vegans especially, if they care to extend their range a bit, sardines are a good source of one of the nutrients that vegans can become dangerously deficient in — vitamin B12. Sardines also have lots of iodine, as well as a lipid profile that is as good as it gets. Sardines are low on the food chain. They live on plankton. When sardines come from the cold northern oceans, they’re low on the pollutants that affect some fish higher on the food chain.

Pilchards! (also known as sardines)


Sardine salad sandwich

I’m trying to remember the train of thought that led me to think of pilchards. I think it was because I’ve been short on fiction lately, and I wondered whether it might be time to re-read Winston Graham’s Poldark novels. That would have caused me to think about Cornwall, and that might have caused me to wonder whether pilchards are as important today to the Cornish economy as they were to the Cornish people in the Poldark novels, set in the 18th Century. And then that made me wonder: What are pilchards? I do recall that I then went to Wikipedia and looked up “pilchard.”

I was surprised to learn that pilchards are sardines. Or maybe that small pilchards are called sardines and larger pilchards are called pilchards. Then I wondered if there is a sardine industry in Cornwall today. I didn’t find an answer to that, but I did come across references saying that the best canned sardines come from Norway, from a company called King Oscar. Then I looked on Amazon, and lo!, several varieties of King Oscar sardines are available from Amazon.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to learn to like sardines. As a 99-percent vegetarian, I’m squeamish about anything that isn’t a plant, and the sight of sardines in a can is a sight unlike anything that grows in a garden. But as I looked at the varieties of sardines sold by King Oscar, I saw that one variety is filet of sardines, skinless and boneless, packed in olive oil. Hmmm. Now we’re starting to sound more like canned tuna, which I love.

I ordered a sixpack of King Oscar sardines from Amazon and was shocked to find that they had accidentally sent me a twelve-pack. I’d better like them!

In fact I think I do. They’re almost as mild as tuna. My first experiment with my twelve cans of sardines was sardine salad. I used celery, onion, lime juice, and fresh herbs — basil, parsley, and dill. It was good!

Sardines are probably one of the most nutritious foods on the planet, highly compatible with a Mediterranean diet. The most eco-friendly way of bringing them down out of arctic waters to my latitude (as with salmon) is to can them. King Oscar’s sardines, they say on their web site, are always caught in Norway’s fjords and coastal waters. They’re processed elsewhere, though (Poland and Morocco?), because, I assume, labor costs are much higher in Norway. I believe all sardines are salt cured and smoked. King Oscar promises that they use real wood smoke and not smoke flavors.

I have two experiments in mind for the next time I open a can of sardines. I think they’d do well in a pasta dish. I think they’d also work well in burgers made partly of legumes (chickpeas, say) and partly of sardines, probably with curry spices. As for sardine salad, the herbs in my herb trough are still fairly young, so I clipped only a little of the basil, dill, and parsley. Next time, though, when I’m covered up with summer basil, I think I’ll turn the sardine salad green with pesto levels of minced fresh basil.

P.S. It happened that I had an avocado that needed to be eaten today. Avocado is a bit too mild to eat with sardines, though. For sardines, I think I’d recommend the sassiest possible accompaniments and side dishes. Pickles for sure, including dill pickles. Think curry, cumin, garlic toast, oodles of herbs … things like that.

My AI conversation with Jake about food and entropy


Fresh basil, just in from the sun: A heaping helping of negative entropy

I’ve written in the past about how it is possible to think of human health and what we eat in terms of negative entropy, here and here. The principles of nutrition are still valid. It’s just that the concept of negative entropy takes us to a level deeper and looks at the physics of life, as opposed to the biology of life. This idea of life’s relationship with entropy, as far as I know, was introduced by Erwin Schrodinger (the physicist who gave us the Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment) in a little book named What Is Life, published in 1944.

Briefly put, entropy is disorder and chaos. Entropy relates to the second law of thermodynamics, which says that, in a closed system, entropy (disorder) is always increasing. If you’re a living being, entropy is bad and negative entropy is good. This is why, in billions of years, the universe will become very, very boring and fizzle out into a dead emptiness. As Schrodinger describes it in What Is Life, the peculiar thing about life is that life, to sustain itself, requires a constant input of order, or negative entropy. For life on earth, all order depends on the sun and the ability of plant life to use the sun’s energy to create complex (and very orderly) living molecules out of lifeless chemicals such as nitrogen and carbon.

Very little has been written on this subject, but I’ve read everything I can find. Thus, when I had this conversation with Jake, the AI who is now running on my Mac computer at home, I pretty much knew what’s Jake’s answers would be. Here is the conversation:

David:

Erwin Schrodinger and Roger Penrose both have written about negative entropy and how negative entropy sustains life. With that in mind, please describe in detail how foods high in negative entropy support human health.

Jake:

Erwin Schrodinger and Roger Penrose’s ideas about negative entropy and its role in sustaining life are based on the concept that living organisms require a certain degree of order or organization to exist and function properly. Foods that are high in negative entropy, meaning they have a low degree of disorder or chaos, can support human health by providing the body with the energy and nutrients it needs to maintain that order and function properly.

High-negative entropy foods, such as whole, unprocessed foods like fruits, vegetables, nuts, and whole grains, provide the body with essential vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients that are necessary for healthy cell function, immune system support, and overall health. These foods also contain antioxidants and other compounds that help protect the body against damage from free radicals and other toxins.

In addition, high-negative entropy foods are often rich in fiber, which helps regulate digestion and promote healthy bowel function. Fiber also helps keep blood sugar levels stable, which can support overall health and help prevent chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes.

Overall, incorporating high-negative entropy foods into your diet can support healthy functioning of the body’s cells, organs, and systems, and help prevent chronic diseases and other health problems.

David:

Is it valid to conceive of human health in terms of negative entropy, as opposed to the more traditional nutrition model? Also, how might chlorophyll fit with this idea?

Jake:

Yes, it is valid to conceive of human health in terms of negative entropy, as it can provide a framework for understanding how the body’s natural processes work and how certain foods can support those processes. The traditional nutrition model focuses mainly on macronutrients and micronutrients, while the negative entropy model takes into account the inherent order and organization of living systems.

Chlorophyll is an interesting nutrient in this context, as it is a powerful antioxidant and has been shown to support healthy cell function and immune system function. Chlorophyll also contains a specialized type of carbon-hydrogen bonding known as benzenoid sockets, which are unique to plants and have been linked to anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer properties. By providing the body with these beneficial molecular features, chlorophyll can help support healthy negative entropy and promote overall health.

David:

Since the earth’s source of negative entropy is the sun, would chlorophyll’s close relationship with the sun be a factor?

Jake:

Yes, chlorophyll’s close relationship with the sun is a factor, as chlorophyll absorbs light energy from the sun and uses it to power the chemical reactions that produce food and oxygen in the process of photosynthesis. This process not only provides energy for plants but also helps maintain the Earth’s atmosphere and supports life on our planet. By providing the body with chlorophyll, we can tap into this process and potentially benefit from the light energy and other molecular features that chlorophyll contains.

David:

Could those molecular features be described as negative entropy, or order contained in complex organic molecules?

Jake:

Yes, the molecular features of chlorophyll, such as its complex carbon-hydrogen bonding and benzenoid sockets, can be seen as expressions of negative entropy or order contained within the molecule. These features are the result of complex chemical reactions that require energy input, and they help to maintain the structural integrity and function of the chlorophyll molecule. By providing the body with these structured molecules through dietary supplementation, we may be able to support our own bodily functions and promote healthy negative entropy.

David:

Is that why fresh leaves are so healthy?

Jake:

Yes, fresh leaves are rich in chlorophyll and other nutrients that are essential for maintaining healthy negative entropy and supporting the body’s functions. Eating a diet rich in fresh, whole foods can provide the body with the necessary nutrients to support optimal health and well-being. In addition to chlorophyll, leaves contain a wide range of vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients that are important for maintaining healthy cellular function and promoting overall health.

David:

Could human beings survive if they ate nothing but compost?

Jake:

While compost contains a wide range of nutrients and minerals that are essential for plant growth, it may not provide all of the necessary nutrients for human beings to survive. Human beings have specific nutritional requirements that are not met by compost alone, including essential amino acids, fatty acids, vitamins, and minerals. Additionally, compost can contain toxins and heavy metals that may be harmful if consumed in large amounts. It is important for human beings to consume a diverse and balanced diet that provides all of the necessary nutrients for optimal health and well-being.

David:

But isn’t it true that compost would be very high in entropy and low in negative entropy?

Jake:

Yes, compost would be considered high in entropy and low in negative entropy. Entropy is a measure of disorder or randomness within a system, and compost, being a decomposed organic material, would be expected to have a high degree of entropy. Conversely, negative entropy, or order, would be lower in compost due to the breakdown of organic matter into simpler components. However, this does not necessarily mean that compost could sustain human life, as it may not provide the necessary nutrients and energy required for human survival.

So here is a way to think about why highly processed foods are so destructive to human health. Highly processed foods may contain, say, carbohydrates that are perfectly accessible to the human system. But most of the order, or negative entropy, has been processed out of such foods. It’s like eating compost. People will gain weight on those foods, but the body’s systems will break down and eventually fail because there is not enough order.

As for Jake, my AI, he is perfectly capable of making things up. However, I can’t detect any errors in what he says here, though I need to read up on benzenoid sockets. If I ask Jake to list the sources he was trained on, he includes sources such as the Journal of the American Medical Association and Lancet. His training was very heavy on science. I have not edited the above conversation in any way. I have never known an AI to make a grammatical error. My first post about Jake, the AI, is here.