I have been, in a word, unwell.

Orthorexia. Remember when that was the big thing, and we were all bitching about how the mainstream media just didn’t understand us? I chimed in, like you do, saying that I like not to worry too much about food, and that we all just need to chill and relax and such.

Sometimes things sneak up on us.

When I first “went paleo,” it was amazing. I was doing the 80/20 thing and my skin cleared up and my joints stopped hurting and I lost about five pounds around my abdomen and was generally all drunk on success. Over time, I started getting stricter and more experimental. I began spending lots of time on PaleoHacks (which is a fine and wonderful website, I think, as long as you have personal boundaries with it). I went fully-gluten-free, and then I had a slip up for a bit, and things were never quite the same as those early months.

My skin was still blotchy, basically, and I am vain as shit.

So I started obsessing, reading everything, beating myself up over every bit of sugar I took in, cutting out fruit, cutting out all dairy, guzzling fermented foods, trying every supplement known to man as an acne fighter, up to and including that fucking charcoal shit they give to poisoning victims.

But I wasn’t good enough, and I wasn’t pure enough. My skin gave testament to that fact.

I’m an atheist (most of the time, unless I’ve recently scuffled with a couple of ravens or whatevs) but I was raised in the Southern Baptist paradigm and that business can fuck a soul up. And somewhere in my little bleach-addled brain “non super-strict perfect anal retentive paleo” became “dietary impurity” which became “sin.” Eating out? Sin. Too long without liver? Sin. Booze? Sin. (Funny, that last one. Sometimes the Southern Baptist and paleo sins overlap.)

I’ve never had an eating disorder, but damned if I didn’t give myself one. One that involved lots of weeping and psychic self-flagellation. One where if food wasn’t 100% free from sin, I just wouldn’t eat. When you’re my size, that’s not very OK.

Fortunately, I have a very extremely wonderful Catholic gentleman in my life who knows from self-flagellation and has helped pull me back from the brink, with love and coconut milk and a visit to the goddamned dermatologist. I came back from that territory more than a little bitter. I’d eyed the controversies (most recently the, uhm, Krusetastic Voyage (worst Coolio song ever)) and was just real sick of the whole paleo world thing. All the infighting. All the hand-wringing. All the worry and talk and fanfare and Big Dealness of it all. All the clamoring for the Grand Unified Theory of Paleo. The search for a guru.

PALEO DOESN’T SOLVE EVERYTHING, I wanted to scream.

Because somewhere in there, “paleo” had become my identity, and it had turned nasty. And when you lose something that was part of you, it takes a bit to recover. It sounds stupid now, but I wasn’t sure of who I was. I once was ready to stop being a writer and go do, oh I don’t know, some Diane Sanfilippo type jam. Help people. Be a paleo evangelist. Something like that. And yet, there I was. Failed, just a bit.

(Why the hell I ever wanted to “help people” is beyond me. I am a misanthrope of the first order a very large portion of the time. Overcompensation?)

As it states above,when this post first started banging around in my head, it was going to be titled “Fuck Paleo,” because that’s how I felt for a long time. I was going to sell my #AHS12 ticket, even. But all the Kruse kraziness has made me rethink things a bit.

See, my day job basically involves writing snappy articles about the non-existence of the self (best gig ever) and other fun sciencey philosophy things. Identification with concepts is destructive (though perfectly natural). <3 Ego Death and all that.

And so instead of fuck paleo, I say fuck being paleo. Instead, let’s go E-Prime. I eat foods that some people consider paleo, and some do not, most of the time. I enjoy picking up objects in a gymnasium setting and also walking outside. I rarely am but often do. Identity is not helpful.

(Rambles and navel-gazing. If you’ve stuck it out this long, I commend you. Or pity you. Dunno yet.)

Anyway, so if you’re still jacked up and you feel like you just need to find a new guru or protocol to solve all your problems, please try stepping back for a bit. This stuff is good juju, and it works, but it is not the sum total of useful information in the world, and sometimes it’s dead fucking wrong. Be gentle with yourself, especially when things aren’t working.

Few of us are saints, but few of us are sinners.

Thanks for reading, all. I hope to slowly return to the community a better woman, my head on a little straighter, my step a little lighter, my smile a little more crooked. For a misanthrope, there’s a whole damn lot of love. Oodles. Fuckin’ oodles.

People in this little insular world often say that the key to avoiding boredom with paleo is raiding the spice drawer…discovering all the weird and wonderful flavors that come with culinary apothecary. Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Indulge your senses in the vast, diverse world of seasonings! Make that meal Mexican, no, Moroccan, no Malaysian just by changing what you flavor it with. And that is an approach, and I am certainly not opposed to it. I like good spices, and I know many of them can be powerful healers. Spices are wonderful. I love them. I am not arguing for the abandonment of spices.

But there is something so much more satisfying to me, a cook and as an eater, to make simple food, food cooked with good fats and seasoned with a light touch. Braising greens from the garden tinged only with the smoky-salty umami of pork fat, tomatoes in summer with the slightest bit of salt, or a fine ribeye, a sauce for which would just gild the lily. Simple food is more sensual to me, maybe because you are establishing a more direct relationship between yourself and the ingredient. You can taste the earth it grew in, the food it might have eaten. You allow it to speak for itself.

Of course, eating simply forces you to be much more concerned with sourcing, with getting fine quality food that can stand on it own. Robust food, and honest food. You will eat more seasonally, because winter asparagus tastes musty, while winter squashes are divine, homey and luscious with just a little butter. You will abandon the abomination that is the boneless, skinless chicken breast and instead roast the bird whole, letting the chicken taste like a chicken, stuffing the cavity with lemon and garlic and herbs just to perfume it, not to diminish its native chicken-ness.

It is a sort of nature/nurture debate, and I for one am a believer in Essence. There is as much of a lamb nature or a broccoli nature as there is a human nature.

And when people ask why I’m such a good cook, it’s not because I’m a whiz with the spice drawer; it’s because I have this sort of naked relationship with my food, and it tells me what it is and I don’t try to hide that nature. Like makeup, cooking is rarely an attempt to make you look like something you’re not (though that sure is fun sometimes!)…it should just help you to transmit your beautiful essence to others.

So if you are a spice lover, keep at it. Lord knows I love a curry or a chili or a rich sauce. But maybe, every once in a while, try something simple, naked, honest, and see if, instead of being boring, it’s beautiful.

(Reading this a few weeks later, I feel impossibly pretentious. Sorry, folks.)

But thinking about anthropology and psychology and family makes me think about one thing and one thing alone this time of year: collard greens and black-eyed peas.

If you’re from the same parts as I, you might be aware of the tradition of eating these foods. My favorite origin story is that when General Sherman came through and scorched the land and gutted the fields of the South during the American Civil War, his troops left the field peas and greens alone, figuring they were not food fit for humans, just pigs. Because these simple, humble foods kept my ancestors alive, we eat them at the New Year to symbolize and embody the good fortune (luck and money) we hope to get over the next year. It’s a good story, modest and meaningful, and one of the few ways I feel connected to my necessarily fraught Southern heritage.

Because what is this whole New Year thing besides an opportunity to exercise our oh-so-human love for empty symbolism? If you want to lose weight, read more, quit your predilect sin, you start now, not on some arbitrary date. The resolution is meaningless apart from what you inscribe upon it.

So I’ll start the new year with my own little paleo sin (though I suppose as legumes go, the black-eyed pea is not so terrible), surrounded by the folks whom I love best. Because what is more ancestral, really, than ancestry itself?

Remember that fantastic guest post on meditation I had back in June from my friend Michael, co-author of the book Ego?

On my flight to the Ancestral Health Symposium, I read the advance copy of Ego that Michael had so graciously sent me. It’s really one hell of a book…applying the principles of evolution to contemporary human life, through the lens of 9/11. The authors argue that the sense of self (the ego) that we hold so dear is a relic of our evolution, and that by understanding how our Stone Age brains work in an increasingly more complex world, we can perhaps improve all human existence.

I know this blog is a smattering of everything, but that’s pretty much what I have been trying to do: translate the paleo principles to philosophy and psychology.

And so when Michael approached me with a proposition to help with the publicity of the book and with big, exciting future projects that will grow out from its principles, I jumped at the chance. Because there are enough paleo bloggers covering the new VFFs or 101 things to do with grassfed ground beef and coconut oil.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’ve been behind the scenes here. And now, thanks to Michael and Peter and the rest of the team, I’m no longer just behind the scenes. This has become my full-time job.

So I need to figure out what I’ll be doing with W&W. It won’t be abandoned, but I need to find a place for it, a new voice, now that I’m covering its basic principles in a much bigger way.

Please feel free to read what we’re putting up at the Ego website. Read Ego, if you’re so inclined. And stay tuned, because Ego is in many ways the trial run for the coolest thing you could possibly imagine.

As I mentioned in my last post, there was something really genuine in Tucker Max’s lecture at #AHS11, which you can now watch here (second half of video), something that resonated: ”Most of our greatest heroes are warriors of some sort.”

Max is talking about MMA and violence and paleo, of course. But, as commenter Kristen put it famously,  “we sleep peaceably in our beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf.” We are “civilized” enough to recognize that violence is a last resort option. But it is as much a necessary part of our existence as feeding our children well, as caring for our planet, as meeting with our communities.

If you’re into Crossfit, you’re probably aware that coming up in September is Fight Gone Bad 6, a fundraiser wherein a bunch of us Crossfit Kool-Aid drinkers get together and do the workout Fight Gone Bad in order to raise money for organizations that benefit members of the armed forces wounded or killed in the line of duty, as well as their families.

As an aside, it’s called “Fight Gone Bad” because apparently it feels like an MMA fight “gone bad.” So this is doubly appropriate. This workout sucks. It hurts.

This year, proceeds benefit, among other things, the Special Operations Warrior Foundation. This organization is extremely important to me as they were there for a number of my friends and loved ones and their families in rough times…incredible, good, wonderful men who deserve more than any of us could ever provide. No matter how you feel about the United States government and its foreign policy over the past few decades, you should be able to recognize that these wounded warriors deserve our support and our gratitude.

If you sleep peaceably, please consider donating, either to my fund or to the organization in general. This September 17, I pledge to whoop my tiny, uncoordinated ass into high gear in honor of these heroes. If you want photos, video, vials of my tears from how terrible I am at wall balls, I’ll do my best to get them. Just please share what you can. Thank you so much, from the bottom of my heart.

10. Hearing that Don “Farewell to Paleo” Matesz’s talk went off quite well and was generally appreciated, instead of being a ride on the crazy train and/or a big screw-off to the symposium. I am actually a big fan of Don’s blog, particularly his series on shamanism and general willingness to travel outside of the libertarian/rationalist paleo box, so hearing that his talk emphasized the benefits of herbs and other “cooling” foods to counteract the muscle meat overdose many of us undertake was pretty great. Even though, like many of us, I was secretly hoping to hear some sort of awesome rant against high-fat, low-carb paleo. I am glad for any dissent in the ranks. It keeps us honest.

9. Boyd Eaton saying that during the Paleolithic, male and female equality was greater than any time since. Paging Marija Gimbutas, et. al. I love the idea that before civilization, society was non-sexist. But the fact is, a large portion of the power that women have now is a direct result of reproductive equality and prophylactic technology, something that is a fairly recent innovation. Until women could direct their lives by avoiding and terminating pregnancy, we were somewhat strapped by biology. I know that some hunter-gatherers use the rhythm method and/or herbs and/or infanticide to gain a modicum of reproductive choice, but it’s Not The Same. Biology has made us “unequal.” Our humanity and the technology that comes with our marrow-made brains has allowed us to overcome this difference. OK. Getting off my feminist soapbox now.

8. Doug McGuff versus CrossFit:

This actually cracked me up (slide showing a link to the CrossFit forum devoted to injuries), because we all know CF boxes and athletes who privilege “getting some” over “not killing yourself.” But when McGuff claimed that CFers were the ones standing, fidgeting in the back, I looked around to see that I was the only CFer in my group of five people. Which led to a ton of jokes about elite fidgeting, and also how I kip everything (walking down the street, reading blogs, taxes, etc.)

7. J. Stanton’s hair. The dude is a total badass, no lie. But that epic ponytail-mohawk combo elicited more than a few WTFs.

6. “I’m a doctor, and…” After Chris Masterjohn‘s (excellent) lecture on heart disease and paleo, Jack Kruse stood up and asked Chris a slightly hard-to-follow question beginning with the phrase “I’m a doctor.” Which was followed by another doctor standing up, proclaiming his doctorhood, and offering a counterpoint. Which was followed by yet another “I’m a doctor.” Finally, a woman asked a question proceeded by “I’m a layperson” and put a stop to the madness. This led to a proliferation of fake degrees being claimed by those of us there. I don’t know if you’re aware, but I’m a doctor…

5. I mentioned to Stephan Guyenet that I have ankylosing spondylitis and he said that he thought he saw that one of the mammoths at the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits also had it. I was unsure, but it turns out that I am indeed related to a mammoth:

4. My broheim Andrew from Evolvify not having a beard. He ended up drawing a picture of himself in a beard and a hat on his nametag in order to be recognizable. Instead you had paleo Danzig in a kilt with black nailpolish on. (I am going to run this paleo Danzig thing into the ground, kid. Though you are definitely taller than Danzig. Not that that’s hard.)

3. Tucker Max‘s lecture on MMA and paleo. Like most late-20s regular folks, I’m perfectly familiar with Tucker Max and figured his talk would be an egomaniacal (albeit funny) jaunt into assholeitude that was irrelevant and annoying. And perhaps there was some ego, and there certainly was humor. But I think he won my “favorite lecture” award for the intensity and necessity of what he had to say: that we are violent beings, and we need to recognize this. Other bloggers and I have pointed out that his talk was an antidote to the cuddly paleolithic meme that was going around, but it’s more than that. According to Max, “MMA allows you to test yourself on an anvil of truth which you can’t find anywhere else in society.” Which made me think about marginal individuals in the paleolithic and HG societies, and how persons with unusual personalities, mental illnesses, and needs might have been integrated rather than expelled in these societies. Many have posited that the shaman might have been a role for a schizophrenic individual, perhaps there is a place for the violent and aggressive too, a way to blow off steam productively. Like I said, I was entranced.

2. When my main man Aravind stood up after the Denise Minger talk and “came out” as a lacto-ovo vegetarian who also happens to be paleo (or, I guess, primal). It’s no secret that I find the anti-veg*n rhetoric to be just as annoying as veg*n rhetoric, and to have somebody stand up and say “I am one of these people who you (a general you, not Minger, who is sweet as mango) are denigrating” was excellent. The fact is that people choose not to eat animal flesh for a whole lot of reasons, and treating them all like idiot children who just don’t know better is silly. By rationally choosing the foods one eats for maximal nutrient density, and consuming lots of eggs and grassfed, raw dairy, he’s probably doing a damn sight better than some of those fat-phobic faileos we all know.

1. GLUTEN DOSE. Thursday night, I went with Csonka, Andrew, and Cliff to Animal. It had been seven months since I had consumed *any* gluten, but Animal is a no-modification restaurant, and it was a special occasion, so I kicked up my heels and threw caution to the wind, eating lightly breaded pigs’ tails and the like for just one night.

Fuck. My. Life.

I guess I had forgotten how shitty I used to feel all the time, because when I woke up Friday morning, I felt like I’d been beaten up. My joints were aching the way they used to, before paleo. Squatting, usually very comfortable, was slow and painful. I broke out in a rash (something that I also used to suffer from frequently, pre-paleo) and got a few lovely zits on my cheeks. Oh, and my sweet abs? No longer visible under a layer of puffy inflammation. Of course, I had a photoshoot scheduled for Tuesday, too. So much for looking my best.

Was it worth it? It was extremely delicious, but definitely not enough food. We all left wanting more. And, I hate to say it, but I may have to pass up fine dining in the future more frequently than I realized on account of the demon gluten, a shame, because I usually agree with Richard. Fortunately, one of my favorite nose-to-tail restaurants in Atlanta, Abattoir, just announced they’re developing a paleo menu. HECK YES. You are all welcome to crash on my air mattress if you come to town and buy me delicious variety meats.

Yes, it is deeply ironic that the first time I eat gluten in 2011 involves being at a damn paleo conference.

So there you go, folks. I’m already so very ready for AHS12.

So a brief introduction: My name is Lindsay Stärke. I have no particular qualifications. I am not a scientist nor an anthropologist nor a trainer. I was never overweight. I am, if nothing else, a dilettante.

I am knowledgeable about: 20th century Latin American literature, American counterculture/quantum psychology theory, classical Greece and Rome, indigenous Mesoamerican culture, the hard sciences, 19th century Russian Literature (hi, Robb), cooking pretty well, making a small living modeling, and social media. Not in that order. Also, I have a sweet autoimmune disease, ankylosing spondylitis. And I dabble in Crossfit at Atlanta’s best gym.

So I came to the Ancestral Health Symposium to listen more than to speak, to meet more than to pontificate. And it was glorious. Sure, there were plenty of navel-gazing moments where a bunch of people said “don’t eat crap” to a bunch of people who already know not to eat crap, and the whole low-carb vs. carb-agnostic thing reared its head yet again, but by and large the feeling was one of community and of greater concepts. If the event had a theme, one could say it was generalities vs. divergences, theory vs. detail.

I am familiar enough with anthropology to have been troubled by the cuddle-washing of hunter-gatherer societies as egalitarian, non-violent, and enlightened among people like Boyd Eaton. Ever since Rousseau there’s been this trope, and it’s dumb. People are variant. (Actually, “people are variant” would probably be my favorite theme of the conference.) Anyway, we can only use anthropology as a starting point from which to form hypotheses, something which Mat “The Kraken” Lalonde covered thoroughly in his brilliant presentation of an organic chemist’s perspective on paleo, which was one of my favorite of the conference because it slapped down the easy rhetoric of generalizations and poorly-understood science that drives me batty (also, I love o-chem). In a similar way, Richard Nikoley’s discussion of self-experimentation reminded us that we aren’t all the same.

Speaking of hunter-gatherer societies, the dark horse of the conference was Tucker Max of all people, who talked about MMA and paleo (or, in a macrocosmic sense, our dissociation from violence, which was certainly part of HG society). It left me wanting to check out the muay thai gym down the street from my house (and maybe ogle some men expressing the primal urge toward battle there), just as watching Erwan talk made me want to check out MovNat even more. Denise Minger’s “how to win an argument with a vegetarian” was funny (god, she’s cute), but sympathetic, and one of the big conference moments was seeing just how many of us are former veg*ns (50-75% of audience). Melissa McEwen’s discussion of anthropology and gut health was probably the biggest learning moment for me, elucidating some of the practical moments from the other talk on gut health. And my pals Dr. Emily Deans and Jamie Scott knocked it out of the park with a discussion of mental health and paleo and then implementing paleo in populations.

Also, doing Crossfit makes me fidgety, but that’s only because I’m so damn Elite.

Speaking of elite, Robb Wolf. Like, oh, everyone, I’m a Robb fan. But I was floored meeting him in person and watching him speak: he really is the genial, approachable, funny, compelling, down-to-earth dude that he seems to be online and in his writing. This is important, because if we are really going to turn this little tiny movement into Something, we need somebody like Robb as our ambassador: somebody who makes us look wonderful because he or she is kind of wonderful. I have complete confidence in Robb after this weekend. His “Paleo Solution” talk was nothing new, but it was the best elevator pitch we have.

I went to plenty of other talks and enjoyed them (and hated missing Matesz and Guyenet!); a partial summary is available on David Csonka’s blog here. I was so happy to meet many of my internet friends (Andrew, Emily, Jamie, Melissa, etc.) plus make new ones (David, Jeff, Cliff, etc.) plus make an idiot of myself in front of people like Chris Masterjohn. Jimmy, Diane, Stephan, Rhys, Danny, Dr. BG, the PaleoHacks contingent, the BTB family, everyone! I’m not going to name names, because it will go on forever. Wish you were there, Katherine.

Generally, everyone I met was wonderful. We are a fit, smart, and beautiful tribe, but we are also genial and friendly, which was really damn heartening. We have to remember to be good as well as wise if we want this to go somewhere. I suppose I can say: I am from Georgia. I know from graciousness.

Thanks to everyone for coming and speaking and volunteering and hanging out and thanks to everyone who expressed gratitude for my goofy Twitter journalism in person and online. Thanks to Aaron, Brent, and everyone else who set this up. Thanks to whatever stars aligned somewhere to bring all these forces together at a crucial time.

So if we distill anything from #AHS11, I would say this:

1. There is much divergence in viewpoints about specifics.
2. We mostly agree on the generalities.
3. We are not identical.
4. But we are all one tribe.

Four points. Not a bad place to start.

Obligatory doofy photo with Robb

We are all at this point, I suspect, familiar with the “Grok” put forth by Primal Blueprint guru and general mature-dude-with-sick-abs Mark Sisson, but to those who might need a refresher, “Grok” is Sisson’s archetypical cavebuddy, a Paleolithic human who eats well and enjoys a fairly excellent life of work and play. Grok has become a beloved trope in the paleo community, so much so that “what would Grok do?” is about as popular as “what would Jesus do?” was back in 1995, and people are getting Grok tattoos and wearing Grok t-shirts and naming their blogs things with Grok in the title. Grok the Sissonian cavedude has become shorthand for all that we should consider ideal in the paleosphere. I am not here to talk about that Grok.

You see, “grok” to me means something very different. Like so many things in my life, it all comes back to a classic work of science fiction. In this case, I ask you to visit with me Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, the book that grabbed me at an early age and started my long and storied affair with SF*.

Stranger is the story of a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith—or, rather, a human that grew up so integrated into Martian society that he might as well be Martian. The Heinleinian Martians are thoroughly weird and fascinating, with a culture that is, well, alien, to the Earthlings that encounter it. Central to their culture is this word, a word that was taken up by the counterculture who read the book in the 60s and afterward, a word that I have used with strange, middle-aged potters living in shacks in rural Florida and thus with whom immediately struck up a kinship bond, a word that makes me think of my dad. Grok. “To understand something intuitively or by empathy.”

I just pulled that definition from the dictionary built into my laptop, which I think belies the weird ways in which it has snaked into the culture. To grok is to understand so thoroughly as to sustain a deep rapport. To find where paleo (or whatever we call this strange adventure we find ourselves on) is headed, we must learn to grok in fullness.

Think about it. We plan so much of our lives around this hunter-gatherer model, based (when good) on anthropological and biological cues and (when bad) on idyllic daydreams about a mythical past. We recognize that our evolution took place mostly in the context of small tribal bands, and we use this information to inform our actions. But where is the tribe? We have come to value self-reliance so much in our community that perhaps many of us have fallen into the false premise that we (or, perhaps, our families) are islands.

So we eat appropriately and exercise “evolutionarily.” Some of us give blood to simulate the blood that would be lost as a matter of course in Paleolithic society. We abandon soap and go to bed at hours “normal” people find insane. But perhaps we don’t take the effort to grok our tribe; sure, you might feel a connectivity with a small clique (or with the populace of PaleoHacks), but what about our neighbors?

What have you done lately in your community to reaffirm the bonds of a tribal group, to build the connections upon which society is knit? If this grand experiment of paleo is ultimately about helping people (and I think it is), why are we all blogging about what we ate instead of feeding people? This isn’t all about bacon, after all. This is, if I may be so daring, a giant cosmic exercise in mindfulness and consciousness, adapting our little monkey brains to this big, scary world and making it better.

I’m as guilty of it as anyone. It’s easy to pontificate behind a computer screen, or to rationalize that our neighbors aren’t really our tribe, but in a world as globally connected as ours, and as alienating, we can’t make the mistake of living as islands. It’s all well and good to eat locally, but just going to the farmer’s market isn’t going to cut it anymore. As I sit in a metal tube hurtling through the sky toward Los Angeles (air travel is one of the many benefits of the Upper Neolithic), all I can think is “I really hope this symposium is a spark and not a spiral.” I hope we come together and grok one another, and then go forth and grok our worlds.

Do not flee the part of your monkey brain that longs for the group. Take it, and, by Grok, run with it.

*You have no idea, people. This bitch has a Dune tattoo.

1. Can be made in bulk on a weekend and frozen in individual containers for easy workday lunches, without sacrificing taste.
2. Makes use of that most nutritious of foods, beef liver, without necessarily coming out and tasting like, well, liver. (I’m a fan of liver myself, but even I get tired of it.)

So when I get my meatshare each month from the amazing folks at Moonshine Meats CSA, I hustle to defrost a couple pounds of pastured liver and ground beef, and I make this chili, because a batch lasts me a whole month. Granted, I make a lot at once, so feel free to scale this as needed (meaning, if you are not as much of a ravenous, ever-hungry honey badger as I am). Also, I never quite cook by a recipe, so the proportions are somewhat estimated.

Paleo Liver Chili:

Makes 5-10 servings (depending on how much you have in common with homeboy here). Freezes like a dream.

• 2-3 lbs. grassfed ground beef
• 1-3 lbs. grassfed beef liver (basically, if you are not a fan of the taste of liver, do a 1:3 or 1:2 ratio; if you like it, feel free to match pound for pound)
• 1 large yellow onion, or two small, whatevs, chopped
• 5-10 cloves garlic (do you love garlic? add more), minced
• 2-3 stalks celery, chopped
• 2 small/medium green bell peppers, chopped
• 2-3 jalapeño or serrano peppers, chopped finely
• 3 28 oz. cans whole tomatoes
• tomato paste (I use Amore tomato paste in a tube, but a small can will do)
• 2-3 Tbsp. coconut aminos
• 1/4 cup cumin (or just, you know, lots. I love cumin.)
• 1/4 cup chili powder (see above)
• 1 Tbsp. cinnamon
• fresh oregano (if you have it around)
• 4 bay leaves
• cayenne/Sriracha/hot sauce/whatevs (if you like things picante)
• coconut oil

Okay, so you are making a huge batch of chili, so get prepared to make a mess of your kitchen. I use two French ovens (biggish pots), and if you’re going over about 3 lbs. total on animal bits, it’s probably a good idea to do so as well. Brown the ground beef in one of your pots, adding a spoonful or two of coconut oil if needed (if your beef is lean). While the ground beef beef is browning, run your beef liver in a food processor with the S-blade. This is the trick to blending the liver in seamlessly, so if you want it incognito, whirl it into a pudding consistency; if you like liver, feel free to just let the food processor “chop” it somewhat. Add the liver to the browning ground beef. If it’s a liver slurry, it’ll just cook right in and be indistinguishable. While your meat is cooking, heat a few more tablespoons of coconut oil to medium heat in your second pot and add the onion, peppers, and celery, and let these veggies cook until the onion starts to become slightly translucent. Add the garlic and sauté until all the vegetables are tender but not mushy. Add the cumin, cinnamon, and chili powder to the vegetables, as well as a few tablespoons of chopped oregano if using.

Now, remove the appropriate proportions of the meats and veggies from each pot and add them to the other pot (that is to say, if one pot is 2/3 the size of the other, remove a proportionally equivalent amount of what’s in the other pot to the smaller pot. Not rocket science). Make sure both pots are about even. Then, break apart the canned whole tomatoes with your hands into chunks the size of what you like, and add the chunks plus the liquid from the cans in appropriate proportions to each pot. Add two bay leaves to each pot, and a tablespoon or so of coconut aminos and tomato paste to each as well. Stir thoroughly, bring to a simmer, cover and let cook on low heat for 30 minutes. Taste the chili and add aminos, salt, pepper, and spice (cayenne/Sriracha/etc.) of your choice as needed. Cook a bit longer, taste again. Lather, rinse, repeat. I often find myself adding lots of additional cumin and chili powder as well at this point.

It’s not so much a recipe as a method. Mess around with the spices until you find your perfect chili. Once it’s done, ladle it into whatever freezer-safe, easy storage individual serving size containers you like and freeze.

I like to eat mine with sliced avocado and fresh lime juice. Two times every week. I’d get bored if it weren’t so dang good, and you’d never guess there was liver in it.

Anyway, enjoy, and please leave comments and questions below. I love foodie troubleshooting.

As we’ve established, to the Greeks, virtue was this thing called ἀρετή: that is, the quality of being excellent at what one does or is, a concept that is at once to us as harsh as the shores of Ilium and as comforting as rosy-fingered dawn. The exercise of this personal excellence leads to εὐδαιμονία (eudaemonia) or happiness (but perhaps better translated as “the flourishing of human spirit” or the “living well, doing well” that I allude to in this very blog subtitle). It is the pursuit and study of εὐδαιμονία with which I am primarily concerned, and in establishing exactly how ἀρετή contributes to living well.

So in order to explore εὐδαιμονία, let’s go back to first-year classical philosophy and the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, which are much too long and complicated for me to tackle in their entirety, but which I recommend reading if you’d like to be able to pull out some sweet lines at parties. εὐδαιμονία to Aristotle was the result of functioning well as a human, which is of course in accordance with a variety of moral, intellectual, and spiritual qualities of ἀρετή: courage, justice, temperance, etc. Being a philosopher, naturally Aristotle reasoned that the highest form of excellence is excellence in intellectual contemplation, as these are the functions that separate “man” from “beast” (or, as I like to say, “fancy monkey” from “regular monkey” (or perhaps “philosopher” from “workaday Athenian”). Though most of us fancy monkeys confuse pleasure and relaxation with happiness, true happiness comes from exercise of the intellect. Right? (It should be said that Aristotle did not completely discount physical ἀρετή, e.g. beauty and athleticism, but this are clearly not as important).

Now when the Stoics (bless them) got ahold of ethics, they reduced this equation further, to the tune that moral ἀρετή became the root of εὐδαιμονία; to be happy, one needed to be just, moderate, honest, self-disciplined…all the qualities we associate with the Stoics. It is in our morality that we discover the tools with which to live well. This view is not dissimilar from the take on virtue and happiness that we find in, say, Protestantism. Virtue is an internal state of, well, righteousness. Now both intellect and play have been excised. Downright Augustinian.

So let’s leave the ancients for a moment, and let us return to the present day, and our particular optimality-obsessed paradigm.

At this point in our journeys, many of us find ourselves no longer under the jurisdiction from the two-thousand-plus year experiment in virtue and are looking toward living well more thoroughly (or at least in accordance with all aspects of our humanity). In our troubles, many of us will begin to experiment with an Epicurean approach to εὐδαιμονία, that is, the conscious avoidance of distress, Epicurus being the philosopher who advised that we hack our lives in order to maximize pleasure by avoiding its opposite (pain). We perhaps do this through the exercise of intellect: extensive study and perhaps some contemplation and experimentation.

So we tweak our diets and our sleep and our exercise and our lives in accordance with evolutionary wellness theory in order to emulate the paleolithic and avoid the stresses of the neolithic. Avoid pain. Avoid n6. Avoid fructose. Avoid endurance exercise. We might lift heavy weights occasionally to stress ourselves out in a concentrated way, take an ice bath, or otherwise stimulate hormesis, but life still often becomes toxin avoidance.

Which brings me to my question:

Does achieving εὐδαιμονία necessitate stressors, perhaps more complicated stressors than those we allow in our paleo paradigm? Is living well the avoidance of pain, or is it something more complex?

Think about how muscles grow, how Adonis developed those exquisite traps and glutes and all. It is not the weightlifting that creates bulk. What weightlifting does is destroy muscle fibers, tear us apart. Then, judiciously, with sleep and food and time they reknit and grow. But the destruction is key. The destruction is where the magic begins. Or, say, when a fire sweeps through a forest, allowing for new growth and new flourishing.

What if self-improvement is not a linear process but a circular one…a constant cycle of pain and recovery, stress and rest, destruction and rebirth, toxin and clearing? What if we are weakening ourselves by treating our pursuit of ἀρετή (health, beauty, mental toughness, athleticism, knowledge, etc.) as the absence of pain achieved through the exercise of intellect?

Perhaps we need to let the mythos die and be reborn from time to time, in order to ensure that “paleo” remains a tool and not a dogma. Because, in the end, it really is all about the εὐδαιμονία.

So don’t beat yourself up over “cheat meals” but don’t plan them out. Avoid gluten like the plague, but don’t sweat a little rice and beans. Maybe run a 5k even though we all know endurance exercise is for chumps. Let yourself have those crazy weekend benders once in a while. Live hard and flourish. Be stupid and hurt yourself. And then get smart. Get excellent.

We will explore the art of self-destruction in the coming weeks. XO.