Chef Njathi Kabui’s Thesis in One Lesson
It’s been very close to two years since I became a student of Chef Njathi Kabui. In that time I’ve not only been trying to swallow his Afro Futuristic Cuisine, but also the key element of his 30-year thesis. The first part is the easy one. I love his unique cuisine. If I were to compare it to Bud Light’s catch phrase, I’d say “Tastes great, more filling.”
A few months ago, he introduced me to a new word. It’s a word for which we’ve lost the concept, many decades ago, but I think it perfectly describes his cuisine. The word is batian. See? Even Google doesn’t recognize the word. It’s a verb that combines concepts which, for us today, don’t go together. It seems like a contradiction. Batian means to fatten or to get fatter, but in a specific way. It means to fatten, but in a way that also improves, lets its subject get better, and heal. Chef’s food batians. To say that it feeds is only part of the story. To describe his cuisine fully, we need to resurrect a word like batian.
While his cuisine is very easy to swallow, the second thing he teaches is, strangely, much, much more difficult. His thesis, which he’s had well developed for over thirty years now, is that our food is lacking nutrition and in most, if not all cases, is actually toxic to human health. He’s like all of the California cancer warnings concentrated into one person. In short, he’s teaching anyone who will listen, to “stop picking your poison”.
We use that phrase about poison blithely, and almost a century of tradition. I’m 53 years old, and I think I’ve heard it for as long as I can remember, in reference to alcoholic drinks. Apparently it goes back a few decades before that. Around that time, Australians exercised brutal honesty and renamed their pubs “poison shops”. But Chef Kabui isn’t just trying to help alcoholics. He uses this concept for not just hazardous drinks, but he argues that our food is just as bad, or even more insidious, than the toxic stuff we happily chug in poison shops.
I love the word insidious. It means “sneaky evil”.
Chef teaches that our food is insidious, having become both sneaky and evil. Through a long chain of events over the last two centuries or so, the human diet has evolved to depend on a globally centralized production and distribution system which is built on many values, none of which include nutrition. Remember, batian is to feed in the way that fattens, strengthens, and heals. Our food system today values convenience, price, flavor, texture, dependence, well-established supply chains, popularity, etc. Batian is not in the equation.
This situation has created a world of alcoholics and food junkies. We are so lost to the concept of batian that we know and even embrace the fact that our food and our drinks are killing us. We take mental pills to cope with the situation. We tell ourselves that this world is a “lone and dreary wilderness” we are fated to wander, until we finally escape into the paradise of the grave. We convince ourselves that we’d rather die than change our diet, which so many of us do with full commitment.
As I’ve been explaining to my friends, family, customers, and acquaintances about my adventure in food with my Kenyan Chef friend, they seem to have as much trouble swallowing this core element of his thesis as I have done. They ask me if it’s okay to have french fries occasionally. They ask if the toxicity of our food can’t really be managed through eating less and exercising more. They suggest that “organic”, or non-poisonous food, is just a scam in order to sell food ingredients at higher prices. They look for the FDA to explain the benefit of Chef’s cuisine through a nutrition label, in effect asking me to point to the government’s recognition of Chef’s thesis. In short, I’ve rarely met a person who, learning about Chef’s thesis, smoothly absorbs the information and really thinks about it. Instead, I run into a mental immune system which has evolved to make us okay with poisoning ourselves every day with our food and drink.
The things that our global food system values aren’t theirs alone. The resistance to Chef’s thesis, mine and everyone else’s, isn't a symptom of a centrally imposed set of values which are authoritatively forced upon the world. Remember the word insidious? Sneaky evil. The food system we have is our “friend”. It’s like the snake in the garden of eden. Over the centuries, it has adapted to the values we all hold, but which our ancestors couldn’t afford to pursue, when food was much more difficult to obtain. Our global food system is like a bartender, offering comfort and advice, while serving dose after dose of poison to his or her willing victims. Like a bad psychiatrist, it gives advice which keeps the client coming back, not what will cure and heal. In doing so, it has helped foster and reinforce the toxic food values we all hold today.
For example, I love canned food. It’s convenient. It’s reliable. It’s got so many cool flavors and textures. I love my frozen meals. Same reasoning. I love the microwave. So convenient and quick. I love fast food. It’s fast, and I pretend that it’s food. I love sauces and sandwiches. Pastas and meat patties. The list goes on. Fizzy drinks in a bottle or a can. Hot dogs and potato chips. And when I want to “eat better”, I grab a bag of “salad” and throw on some “dressing”. In none of these values is the concern for nutrition. Convenience, texture, flavor, and the joy of sharing a meal with friends and family are the values I was taught to swallow along with my fiat food (food only by decree). Besides, don’t we know that the government takes care of all that detailed stuff? They’ve got our back, don’t they?
This leads us to the biggest mental obstacle to swallowing Chef’s thesis, along with his food. It’s something I think most of us have said at one time or another. If we haven’t said it, we’ve definitely heard it. It’s the phrase: “If it was that bad, someone would have told us.” Or another variant, “How can millions (or billions) of people be wrong?”
It’s taken me a full two years to choke down Chef Kabui’s pill, his thesis about our global food system. I think I’m just now really starting to believe it. His message is a horror story of betrayal and doom. He’s like the prophets of the Bible, declaring a disaster which nobody wants to hear. But, like them, he also offers a cure, or a way to repent.
Silently and consistently, Chef has been building a set of farms in Kenya. I call him a druid sometimes, because he holds his land sacred, and fights like a warrior to protect it from any toxic influences. The foods he grows there are magical in their purity and in their ability to batian. He has identified other suppliers around the world who are doing what he does, if not quite as religiously. “Organic” is the label most use to accomplish the same thing he’s doing on his farms, but many are pure in name only, which has led him to do what he’s doing in Kenya.
The horrible truth I’m trying to swallow along with the delicious meals I eat off of his cuisine is that I live in a world of addicts. Like the videos of homeless drug junkies in the streets of San Francisco, and other major US cities, who have embarked on their various projects to “help” the homeless, we are wandering our own streets with vacant minds and hollows where our bump of nutrition should be. As fat as we are, we are starving for nutrition and purity in our food, which, for our ancestors of more than 200 years ago, was the primary requirement for the food they produced and consumed. You and I have been born into a world where we’ve inherited a global addiction, where the entire human race, with very few exceptions, has lost the common knowledge of farming, having traded it for dependence on a centralized food authority.
Chef’s message is simple. Stop picking, and eating, poison. Through his cuisine he attempts to compete with marshmallows, soda, and saltine crackers. He can’t offer poisonous apples which outcompete our poisonous apples, so he offers oranges instead. All we have to do is work slowly, consistently, and happily, to re-train our taste buds and our pallets. Oh, and we have to learn how to cook. And, we have to completely switch our supply chains and the contents of our pantries. And maybe re-learn how to farm. See? Simple.
Okay, maybe Chef Kabui is asking a lot. I know he is, because while he’s been preaching for over three decades, he’s found very few addicts willing to begin the recovery process. I’m starting to truly understand why. It’s like being in a religious bubble where everyone around you tells you that the invisible, the contradictory, and the impossible is the truth. When your barber, your teacher, your family, your government representatives and clerks, your realtor and your plumber all agree that what seems nonsense to others is actually the truth. It’s very tough to go against such a tide of opinion.
We live in a world where we’re all each other’s bartenders and therapists. We all belong to the same fiat food and fiat drink religion. We are the opposite of alcoholics anonymous. Imagine an A.A. meeting where alcoholics meet to drink more, not less, with drinking games for everyone to play, and sporting contests streaming on the walls. Oh, I guess that’s just the local poison shop. Well, our cities, our grocery stores, and our restaurants are all poison shops, according to Chef.
That’s his message. It really is hard to swallow, because he’s accusing the governments of every nation, the suppliers of nearly all of our food and drinks, and nearly all of the chefs of the world, of a massive global conspiracy to value flavor, convenience, abundance, etc. over, and in place of, nutrition. He’s accusing the global supply chain of serving junk for us to eat, and of destroying the concept of a healthy form of the verb “to feed”, like batian. It’s a major accusation he delivers to a multi-trillion dollar global business model. Not only that, he’s accusing the global medical system, including the health insurance industry, of complicity in these crimes, profiting from an ever-expanding customer base of poisoned humanity.
Is it any wonder that his message is hard to swallow?
The biggest problem I’ve found is that his thesis gets stuck in my throat, so to speak. Yes, it’s hard to swallow, but I can’t spit it out, either. The reason why so many people find his message so appealing is that he’s right. The evidence is everywhere.
I remember going on a quest, shortly before I met Chef Kabui, to discover what the best human diet really was. I watched five different T.E.D. talks on the subject, and they all had wildly different theories. I read so many articles with contradictory advice that I had to give up. Chef’s thesis explains the difficulty of my attempt. He claims that humanity lost its dietary brain almost two centuries ago, in exchange for modern food convenience, abundance, and all the rest. He tells me that there are, even today, a few people around the globe, like himself, who grew up with an uninterrupted indigenous connection to those ancestors. Some humans never forgot how to eat. These relics of a lost civilization have been slowly and nutritiously chewing their way through time for generations. But they are becoming more and more an endangered species.
Isn’t that a weird concept? Humanity, those of us who still know how to eat, is becoming an endangered species. We’ve had a kind of evolutionary split. I keep telling Chef that he’s an alien. But the truth is much more frightening. He’s one of the last representatives of a nearly lost humanity. We’re the aliens. When he first came to the U.S. to get “the best that the first world had to offer”, he was handed a hot dog and a Coke from 7-11. That was the birth of his thesis. He knew something was very wrong, when the cafeteria food from his university made him sick, and the convenient and fast food offered everywhere was like that first hot dog and soda, being sold as food. He was one of the last of his tribe who had grown their own food, eating nothing but the freshest farm-to-table cuisine, where nutrition was still the standard.
For my alien, human, Chef teacher, the message is so simple. Stop picking your poison. He never has voluntarily chosen what most of us so easily choose every day. He’s eaten only the best food he could find his whole life, first from the hands of his parents, and then, as a foreign student in the United States, deliberately, out of a strong survival instinct. He’s raised his two children on his tailor-made cuisine, in an attempt to batian, in an otherwise toxic food environment.
But for the rest of us, man what a job we have in front of us! Here in my 50’s, my youthful health tickets have nearly all expired. I have nothing left of my free health-lunch. All the health I have, moving forward, has to be earned and deliberately maintained. If Chef is right, then I have nowhere to eat but my own kitchen. There aren’t even any restaurants. I’ve checked! Some say “raw”, and others “organic”, but the ones I’ve found so far offer real food in name only, “having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof.” There’s my religious background coming through.
We human mutants of today have the job of rediscovering the ideal human diet. Fortunately, we have access to Chef Njathi Kabui and a few others who are still human, as alien as they seem to us modern people. Speaking from personal experience, his cuisine is very accessible and very delicious. The ideal would be for us to produce the ingredients ourselves, but that’s the Master Class level of learning. In the meantime, there are suppliers of mostly pure food ingredients we can tap into.
They say the first step to recovery is to admit that there is a problem. I believe Chef is right, and that we all have a major problem. We may be slightly better off than the drugged out zombie homeless of San Francisco, but we’re not nearly as unrelated to them as we think. I’m getting better at implementing Chef’s curriculum, but it’s so hard. The best, like any recovering junkie, is to join a community of one other person who thinks like you do. With just a little support, we can do it. With a lot of support, it will be easy.
I wish you all the best. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Let’s do our best to stop picking our poison. Instead, let’s rediscover the joy of eating well. May we all batian.