The knot expresses itself in the neck muscles, the scalenes I think, but nothing superficial. Not the SCM. I feel it up through my ears, and at the hinge of my jaw, and also around C4, then downward, C5, 6, 7, and then it expresses itself under the collarbone. An acidic holding pattern. It feels like anger and fear trapped in my throat. It feels like the node of repression that holds down the structure of the right side of my body in its vice grip. And what does it have to say?
Why are you eating so much protein? Why are you so obsessed with protein?
There’s this advertisement for pasta in front of me on the metro: Classic good taste, plus a dose of protein. Protein. Seventeen grams of added protein. More, more, more, more, more protein. One hundred percent plant-based.
What? Plants are carbohydrate. Why force them to make more protein when you could make do with very little animal protein? You don’t need to eat much, you’re not having second dinner. Laure, you don’t need to eat more protein. It’s just an idea, they’re just trying to implant the idea of more protein into your mind with bright colours and bold block letters.
At noon you ate a small delicata squash and a big sweet potato, cod liver in its oil. You ate dark chocolate today, you had grains today, you ate maybe two hundred grams of kamut sourdough. Your stomach is full, it’s emptying itself right now, you don’t need to give it more.
You can wait for that weight on the right side of your body, your liver pulsing, to get into conversation with its bile releaser, so it can come and transform what’s in your intestinal transit right now. Thank your liver. Thank your gallbladder, for spending your time on all that beautiful fat and all those beautiful grains, which together contain an amino acid profile diversified enough to say yes, you had your protein today. No need to add more. Thank you.
I’m writing on the metro right now, and it’s really loud, in Montreal, on the blue line. And in front of me there’s an advertisement for pasta. Extra protein. It apparently has a classic pasta taste and a dose of protein, it’s a source of protein. Why? I don’t understand. White pasta with added protein, this is where food in Quebec has got to. Why?
Most added-plant-protein sources come from peas. Peas, being extremely nutritious, or sometimes lentils, or beans. But often it’s peas, often pea concentrate, that makes the added plant protein. So yes. Peas and grains together make complete proteins, meaning they contain an amino acid profile that the human cannot create internally and must therefore receive from food. It’s useful as a food combination, to ensure the proper functioning of cells.
However, it’s a million times more effective to eat a complete diet. That is, foods that are not transformed, and to make the combinations yourself. That gives a food that is not only more digestible, meaning easily assimilable, so as to become the tissues of the body, in strength and vitality, but also less industrially heavy for society to carry.
If whole grains composed the pasta, and if that pasta were unrefined, it would suffice. On its own. Pre-transformed foods burn more gas before they get to you. A less transformed food has a lighter carbon footprint, simply.
Eating a simple diet is as much a health choice as an ecological one. Simple.