Adventures in the Land of Singing Garbage Trucks

by Adam Tervort

  There is a cure for cancer, and it doesn’t involve drugs or chemo. The key to defeating cancer is a healthy immune system. Every one of us has cancer cells in our bodies every day, but most of us never know because our body can defeat those rogue cells through the power of our immune system. The more you do to allow your immune system to function as it should, the better your chance of winning the daily battle against cancer cells and other invaders and mutations inside your body.

  Here are the principles that guide our eating:

  Eat for color. Eat a variety of fruits and vegetables that are red, yellow/orange, purple/blue, white, and green each day. We don’t count servings per se, but if you want to make sure that men get nine servings, women seven servings, and children five servings of some type of fruit or vegetable each day.

  Avoid animal products. I am a vegan, and once I got over the initial transition stages, I have never regretted the decision to stop eating animal products. This is not the only way, however. Meat can be a part of a healthy diet, but will never be the center of that diet. Michael Pollan’s rule is “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” If you want to eat meat eat quality meat, not the cheap stuff, and eat it as a side dish or complement in your meals, not the main dish.

  Eat whole foods. Most packaged foods are not healthy. Foods that make health claims on their packaging are not healthy. If you can’t pronounce each of the ingredients, or there are more than six ingredients in a food, it is probably not healthy. If your grandmother would not immediately recognize what type of food it is then it is not healthy. Choose foods that are as few steps away from nature as possible. One of the greatest things that I have done to help me in this area is to start a small garden in my apartment and eat things grown from it every day.

  Local is better than organic, organic is better than not, anything is better that GMO and cloned. In our family we make a concerted effort to eat organic foods when we can, but I think eating locally is much more important. In the USA, you can look into Community Sponsored Agriculture (CSA) programs to get fresh produce directly from farms during the growing season. Here in Taiwan we have two farmers in our area that we trust and buy from a number of times every week at the local market. They know us, have met our family, and understand the trust we place in them to grow our food in a healthy way. When one of the farmers we used to buy from began selling things that she didn’t grow herself we knew very quickly, and we were able to communicate to her, both in words and by not buying from her, how important it was for our family to get food from someone we trust. Many times organic food is grown far away, the biggest farms are in China. Even if the foods grown there are of high quality, by the time it gets to you it isn’t, which defeats the purpose of eating organically. We make a concerted effort to avoid any foods that are GMO, even though this can be tough. The vast majority of soy grown in the world is GMO, up to 90% in the USA, and finding non-GMO soy takes effort and more money. To me it is worth it.

  Cook at home. This was one of the greatest lessons I learned from Everett Bogue’s book “The Art of Minimalism.” Cooking at home saves you money, gives you much more control of what you eat, and helps a family to create a culture of love by sharing meal times together. If you aren’t much of a cook, you can find great, easy recipes on blogs. Stir fry is one of the best ways to cook because it is fast, takes little cleanup, and can prepare a whole meal with a minimum of tools. We own a few pots and pans, but our flat bottomed wok is used in preparing every meal.

  Resources

  I know that I am not the most eloquent advocate for this type of eating, please check out some of the excellent blog posts, books and movies listed below. They say in a way much better than I ever could, why this type of eating is healthful and important for both ourselves and the planet. If you have any questions for me specifically, as always I welcome you to leave them in the comments, contact me by Twitter, or by email.

  Books

  The RAVE Diet by Mike Anderson ~ This book goes along with the documentary “Eating,” and teaches Anderson’s philosophy of eating. RAVE stands for no Refined foods, no Animal products, no Vegetable oils, and no Exceptions (plus exercise).

  Books by Michael Pollan ~

  Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual

  In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto

  The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

  The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World

  Michael Pollan was the first writer I read who really taught me about the state of the American food system and where the food most people eat comes from. I mentioned his simple rule for eating above: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” Each of the above books are extremely well written, provide great insight into food and our relationship to it, and give good solid advice on how to make positive changes in our relationship to food.

  Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser

  Similar to Pollan’s “In Defense of Food,” Schlosser’s excellent book looks at the food system in America and the rise of the food corporations that control so much of what people eat today.

  MAD COWBOY: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won’t Eat Meat by Howard F. Lyman

  Do you remember when Oprah was sued over mad cow disease? Lyman was the guest on her show that made the comments that got them both sued. (And they won the lawsuit.) Lyman was a fourth generation cattle rancher who changed his life after serious disease struck him. He gives an eloquent appeal in favor of eating naturally both for the benefit of individuals and the planet.

  Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating by Erik Marcus

  This is an excellent introduction to the why and how of a vegan lifestyle. This book changed my life!

  The Luxury of Less by Karol Gajda

  The first section of Karol’s five rings of minimalism is health, and the way of eating Karol proposes is minimalist, super-healthy, and very doable.

  The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman by Timothy Ferriss

  OK, I know this is a strange place to put a fitness book, but this book impressed me so much with its compatability with my kind of lifestyle, and it led me to fall in love with beans. Thanks Tim!

  The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-term Health by Thomas M. Campbell II

  The China Study is a very important work (but it is also a brick, so be prepared to read for a long time!) The research that went into this joint study between researchers from Cornell and Oxford took 20 years, and studies diseases and mortality in rural China where people live with very selective diets and so can be tracked very effectively for the effects of those diets.

  Movies

  Food, Inc. This movie features Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser and other advocates of a safe food system.

  Michael Pollan Authors@Google ~ Can you tell I like Michael Pollan? This is a one hour video on YouTube of Pollan talking about “In Defense of Food.”

  Michael Pollan’s Deep Agriculture talk at the Long Now Foundation ~ All right, I promise this is the last link to anything Michael Pollan, OK? This excellent talk discusses a vision for the future of sustainable agriculture.

  ~~~

  So, that takes care of the eggplant (which is delicious, by the way. I hated it as a kid, but really like it now, especially on pizza. Go figure.) What about the penguins? That would of course be GNU/Linux. I started using Linux around the time that Langston was born because I was tired of buying programs for my laptop running Windows XP. It was slow, getting slower, always cropping up viruses, and in general not a fun system to use. I ran across an article about Ubuntu and decided the worst thing that could happen would be that my computer would blow up in my face. That didn’t happen, and I have been a happy penguin ever since. This whole book was written on a computer running Ubuntu, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

  This articl
e was written for one of my blogs earlier this year.

  “To be able to choose between proprietary software packages is to be able to choose your master. Freedom means not having a master. And in the area of computing, freedom means not using proprietary software.”

  -Richard M. Stallman

  Everyone today is familiar with the concept of copyright. How about copyleft? Copyright is a method of guaranteeing that an idea or product will be protected against copying by others, which gives commercial protection to the copyright holder. Copyleft is just the opposite, ensuring that an idea or product, and anything derived later from that idea or product, will remain free for all. This is the brainchild of freedom activist and software genius Richard Matthew Stallman, one of the pioneers of the free software movement.

  While Bill Gates was working on the first versions of the Microsoft operating systems, Stallman was also working on an operating system call GNU. The idea behind GNU was to make a free operating system that could be used by anyone and modified freely. To assist in the project and to promote the idea of free software, the GNU license was created. This has turned out to have a much greater influence than the GNU project itself. Because of the GNU license, giants of the internet age like Google, Yahoo, EBay, and Wikipedia exist. The software that forms the basis of these companies began as GNU-licensed software, and has revolutionized the internet. Stallman is one of my heroes, an uncompromising revolutionary who would see the future be filled with freedom and transparency. His views may be too radical for some, but the free software movement he began has benefited anyone who uses the internet.

  “Software is like sex: it’s better when it’s free.”

  -Linus Torvalds

  If you are tired of viruses and the blue screen of death, you should check out Linux. The greatest difference I have seen in the way I use computers is that now I’m not afraid of them. I know that if things get really bad I can just reinstall. Instead of being the guy who always has to ask other people for help, now I’m the guy that everyone calls. It’s not because I’m a Windows expert, I use Linux, remember? But I know more about computers now that I use Linux, and that means I know where to find answers as well. I’m no grand poobah, but at least I am never at the mercy of the machine now. That kind of freedom is worth the effort of learning something new like Linux, even if you decide you don’t want to use it on a day by day basis.

  Chapter 16 - Invictus (Unconquerable)

  I took a lot of French when I was a student, I think six years by the time I graduated from high school. I was never very good at learning French because I never worked hard enough to make any progress, but I loved learning about the culture and country, especially in high school. (Holy Subjective Batman, maybe I was able to learn Chinese because there are no verb tenses!) My high school French teacher was Mme. Stevick. She had spent some years in France, maybe doing graduate school there, I can't really remember. She was the first American I met that had spent a number of years overseas by choice. Most of the people I knew who had done stints in other countries did it because of military service or mission service, not because they really wanted to. Mme. Stevick really wanted us to have some exposure to France and the outside world, so she took us on museum tours, bought smelly cheese and expensive bread for us, and in general made us feel like she thought France was a better place than where we lived. This caused resentment in some students, and didn't necessarily make her a popular teacher (even though we all knew she was a good one). One day during my senior year she stopped class and "gave us a talking to." I don't remember the exact things she said, all I remember is the impressions and feelings I have had since. Her point was that even though she loved France and French culture, she was still an American. She had had wonderful experiences in France and France was an important part of her life, but she was not France. She was Mme. Stevick, an individual whose life had been influenced deeply by France but for all of that influence she was still herself.

  During my years in Taiwan I have thought about Mme. Stevick very often, more than most teachers I have had. A big part of that is because I do for my students what she did for us, teach a foreign language, give encouragement, and see them through a lot of language-learning challenges. I read an article in an education magazine where the author remembered his French teacher being willing to "do the can-can in a trash can" as long as students asked for it in French. I don't know if Mme. would have gone that far, but that's how I feel sometimes with my students. (Thank goodness they don’t know French, right?) But I also remember Mme. Stevick because of that talking to she gave us.

  I am not Taiwan, and Taiwan is not me. This book is admittedly very pro-Taiwan and pro-Chinese culture, but I am not just a blind cheerleader for all things from Formosa. Taiwan just happens to be the place where I was when most of the life-changing events in my life took place. I am still an American, though sometimes I feel that the idea of the United States of America is much better than the reality. I love Taiwan for all it has given me, just as I love the US for all it has given me. I write about Taiwan because Taiwan is where I found my freedom.

  Freedom is abstract. So is happiness. What makes me free might not mean anything to you. During my years in Taiwan I have become religiously free, economically free, politically free, intellectually free, and culturally free. Could this have happened to me at home in Missouri? Sure, maybe if things worked out in the right ways. It could have happened in France or Canada or Mexico or Morocco, anywhere really. For me it happened in Taiwan, so Taiwan has special significance for me.

  It might seem funny for me to talk about myself as religiously free, I've told you about some of my experiences and I am still a very active member of the LDS Church. I started off that way and I still am today. Where's the freedom in that? The freedom comes because now I believe because of what I know myself. Any kid can feel a strong connection to a religion because of their parents, and that is important because it is a stepping stone to learning important things that all people should know, ethical conduct, charity, recognition of others as unique and valuable individuals. I'm not a Mormon today because of what I learned as a child, not because of my parents, not because of my teachers. Those influences were both good and not so good, but they would never been powerful enough to hold me until today. Religion isn't around to help weak people, although it can. The glaring indifference and laziness of the world is enough to finish off the religious fervor of any casual believers. This is my religion because I made it mine. I spent the time and effort to study and understand it, to find answers to the questions and doubts I had and still have, and made a conscious decision that it would be an important part of my life. I will probably never stop having doubts or achieve perfect faith, but I will try because I have chosen this way of life, it's mine now. I'm free because I have chosen this path.

  Growing up in the American West I loved to hear my grandfather's stories of hunting and fishing, of being a man's man (which grandpa was), of supporting self and family. This culture of fierce independence and self is one of America's greatest gifts to its people, but there aren't many trailblazers left. Today's "fiercely independent" Americans fritter away their time in offices afraid that they'll lose their jobs if they aren't careful. The get into debt, take out non-recourse mortgages and spend their way into a hole until they have no choice but to stick it out in the office, stay down and shut up or they'll be in big trouble. When your company moves to China? Bankruptcy, the great American dream. I am free because I have no debt. I'm not free in the sense of financial independence based on an inheritance, but I am free because I live within my means, save my money, and don't pine after things I can't buy. I plan.

  I came from a family of very conservative Republicans, so I became a raving Democrat as soon as I got out of the house. Today I'm neither. If you insist on asking my party I'll either tell you Anarchist if I think you're a Democrat or Communist if I think you're a Republican, whichever I think will get a rise out of you. All of the political parties a
re wrong. All of the politicians are corrupt. The system is run by special interests from top to bottom. The mighty greenback is the only thing that matters, except for maybe where the next hit of crude oil is coming from. So what's the solution? I don't know, and if I did I'd probably write a book about it and become financially independent. (Just kidding.) The solution is democracy, giving the power to the people. Whether we make good decisions or bad, we should at least have the chance to choose. We don't really have that today, but that may be changing as well. Perhaps the legions of dissatisfied Obama-ites and the fleets from the Tea Party can find a place to meet in the middle and something really politically independent will happen. I just know that living outside the country has helped me to view American politics in a much more dispassionate way, and hopefully that helps me to make a better choice with my absentee ballots.

  Intellectual freedom is a hard thing to come by. No one is right even part of the time, although since I spend so much time with myself it is hard for me to imagine that I'm occasionally wrong. (Again, just kidding.) Admitting that you are wrong is difficult. I was wrong about a lot of opinions in the past, but probably most wrong on global warming and global climate change. It is folly to think that these are problems that we can ignore, they are real and need action or else it will be too late. It doesn't matter what you believe, some things are just true, and the fact that the climate is changing is one of them. What helped me to change? Thomas Friedman's book "Hot, Flat, and Crowded" was a start. After reading it, I decided I needed to find out as much as I could and what I have learned tells me that his conclusions are correct, we do have a problem. What does global warming have to do with being intellectually honest? Most of my life has been spent with the default intellectual setting set to "cynicism," and a lot of good, true ideas have passed me by because of it. I grew tired of cynicism because it just made me unhappy. Now when I learn something that seems to go against what I think should is correct I study up on it and try to base my opinions on the best evidence I can find. When I'm wrong I accept it and change.