The Soil Outside: Corn as Food

When I tell my former colleagues about my personal experiments with corn oil, those who take an interest promptly ask me, “What happens when you eat organic corn oil?”

The answer is, “I haven’t tried it.”

There are a number of reasons for that. One is that my most recent experiment was excruciating. It set me back for weeks and I want to give my body a few months to recover. Another is that I don’t know of any corn oil that is biocide-free.

However, life does offer up “natural” experiments, and I can now report that I have tried organic corn meal.

On a recent visit to New Mexico, I had the opportunity to try corn grown in the traditional way in a place where the soil was never altered by added chemicals, natural biocides appear to be rare, and corn has been grown for a millennium. It was white corn and it tasted great. And it had no detectable effect on my health.

During that same trip, I had the chance to try a couple of organic restaurants that are located on Central Avenue in Albuquerque across the street from the University of New Mexico campus. One was Frontier, a comfortable place that serves affordable southwest favorites. I had a burrito with green chili sauce, the first in a long time. It was filled with ingredients that generally make me break out in a rash, bloat, and take to bed with flu-like symptoms.

I enjoyed the burrito immensely, and then—nothing happened. I experienced the anticlimax that follows any effective prevention. That week I tried dishes at restaurants around Albuquerque and Santa Fe, including a margarita and some Kakawa chili chocolate. It was like going back in time to the years when I lived in Denver and could eat anything, anywhere, anytime. I ate a lot.

I also visited Sky City, known as the Acoma Pueblo, which was featured in a documentary film about architects who are blending indigenous and modern forms. On a tour of the old pueblo, our guide noted that indigenous peoples built with stone until the invading Spanish forced them to use adobe. The guide also pointed out several depressions where water collects and where women once drew water for personal use. The largest can no longer be used; colonials watered burros in that place and algae from burro saliva penetrated the rock. Whenever water is present, the algae bloom and render the water unusable. This tale serves to remind us that regardless of our beliefs or intentions, we will err; that no way of life is safe or secure; and that the smallest imprudent act can despoil a natural feature on which life depends.

In retrospect, I take my experiments as confirming that I suffer from biocide poisoning; that the soil outside matters as much as the soil inside; that biocides are not yet ubiquitous; that personal evidence-based care can yield relief; that empirical medicine can lead to step-by-step sevenfold cure; and that “quick and dirty” research can reveal practical truths that multimillion-dollar research may or may not clarify.

If you are ailing and seek to thrive, I hope you can take inspiration from my healing and cure and join me in developing emerging forms of self-guided healing and cure, personal evidence-based care, and empirical medicine.

<strong>Next Time: Aches and Glutamates</strong>

To read about soil contamination, you can go to <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_contamination&#8221; target=”_blank”>Wikipedia</a>. To learn more about the health effects of soil, you can read Lady Carnarvon’s Almina-Downton-Abbey-ebook/dp/B005O0BRTE” target=”_blank”>Lady Almina and The Real Downton Abbey, in which she describes how the soils faced by the RAMC in WWI did not prepare them for the soils of WWII in France, where they encountered gangrene, tetanus, typhoid fever and trench mouth.

To learn more about plant plagues that originated in the New World, you can read about the <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)&#8221; target=”_blank”>Irish Potato Blight of 1845-1852</a> or the <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylloxera&#8221; target=”_blank”>worldwide phylloxera plague</a>.