A Response From My Student ( Don Thornton)
I'm experiencing my first crisis of faith in my new religion.
I recently wrote an article about getting religious about my diet and health. I came from a religious background, which I adhered to faithfully for over 40 years. In the last 10 years of my life, I’ve been writing my own commandments, so to speak, but I’ve still got the knowledge of living a life filled with religious fervor. As I’ve watched my belly and my bald spot getting bigger, as I’ve seen my muscles and teeth lose their strength, and as my joints complain more and more, I thought, “This seems like a good time to get religious about my health.” Not quite a death bed repentance, but, at age 51, dangerously close…I should have made this choice decades ago. But even if I had, I didn’t know then what I know now, due to a fortunate encounter I had this year with one African Chef.
Chef Njathi Kabui, a native of Kenya, and a brilliant researcher in the science of food, indigenous diets, and their connection with global health, gave me the opportunity to take some classes from him at the start of 2022. The friendship we’ve developed over the last few months has been a privilege and a joy. It has given me the unique experience of being able to interview him about his purpose and his philosophy, as well as the food literacy projects he’s working on here in the United States, and in Kenya.
Chef Kabu discovered a powerfully significant connection between diet and health, which he experienced personally, as he immigrated from Kenya to the east coast of the U.S. to attend college, back in 1989. This connection is so significant because it links elements of our modern world in ways that I haven’t seen put together by anyone else, and the implications are staggering!
Before becoming a student here in the United States, he lived with his parents in both the city and in his indigenous village in Kenya. There he experienced, and thought of as normal, the nearly 100% living food supply chain of the Kenyan traditional diet. Refrigeration, canning, or freezing were not part of the diet he enjoyed as a child and young man. Because of this, he developed a microbiome used to the freshest, most nutritionally packed, and cleanest food anyone could want.
When he experienced for the first time not only US college education, but the food of a Western diet, sourced from the modern centralized global food chain, the impact on his health and pallet was powerful and mind-blowing. He’d grown up without the daily experience of television which I had had as a kid, but the food commercials, glimpsed on the few TV’s he encountered in his childhood, still managed to sell him on the promise of bottled milk and magically tantalizing canned food, instantly heated in microwaves.
The actual experience for him, when he first arrived in America and sampled western cuisine, was a huge let-down, as his body rebelled against the processed and nutritionally barren bulk food of the U.S. diet. His pallet was tantalized by the explosion of new flavors and potent concentrations of sugar, oil and meat, but within weeks or months, as he felt the physical effects of this diet on his body, he realized that the western diet was a scam.
Young Njathi Kabui began to see that, in a quest for big sales, targeted flavor combos, ease of availability, and low pricing due to mass production, the cost of achieving this quest to the western diet was the nutritional content of food and any actual food value. He began to see that the western diet has become food in name only, with little to no honest claim to the word.
Even the seemingly vast selection of variety in the American diet created what he saw as a contradictory desert of selection. Seeing that a centralized food supply chain must rely on specific suppliers for specific foods, he began to recognize that the seeming wealth of choice in the western cuisine had, in actuality, become like the visible light spectrum—a mere slice of the total possible.
Human eyes are capable of detecting only a tiny segment of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, the light we call ‘visible’. The western diet had done something similar, by the necessities of mass adoption and centralization, offering a narrow food spectrum to the world, making that slice become, of all of the foods humanity had discovered and developed over millennia, the only food people could see.
As I’ve interviewed Chef Kabui, one of the most shocking revelations he shared with me was the connection between the quality of food we eat and dentistry. This tidbit he threw out casually might be the most powerful of his messages he is sharing with the world, for it demonstrates so simply the impact of diet upon our health.
He told me that when British missionaries first proselyted their way to Kenya in the late 1800’s, they were shocked to find that there were no established institutions of dentistry among them. This wasn’t due to a lack of technology or wealth, but because there was no need. The missionaries and other early European colonizers of Kenya would even make bets with newcomers. They would challenge them to find a Kenyan with a cavity. They never lost the bet.
The implications of this story were so shocking to me because it shows that even the relatively mild industrialization and processing of the western food system that had become the norm 130 years ago was enough to have a seriously harmful effect on the teeth of its consumers. Tooth decay and the dental institutions we’ve built to combat it are so normal a part of modern life that a world without cavities isn’t quite believable. Of course, we’ve all heard stories about isolated people, such as Pacific Islanders, or isolated tribes of humanity throughout the world, who have perfect dental health, and the narrative used to explain this aberration to the ‘normal’ is the magic word—genetics.
Where is the scientific literature to back up this narrative? No where, that’s where. Science has made absolutely zero progress in finding the ‘dental gene’. Are they even looking? Why bother. The narrative and the status quo are so well accepted that there is no motivation. Just the opposite is true, in face. The dentistry and toothpaste institutions are highly motivated to keep the western diet headed in the direction it is now going. We just know that tooth decay is a normal part of life, and that we’re going to have to give our dentist a crap ton of money over the years. Death, taxes, and tooth decay are the accepted rules of our lives.
The fact that these ‘isolated exceptions’ of people living with perfect dental health are, without exception, isolated as well from the western diet has been identified and preached as a fundamental of human health by no one I know of, except Chef Njathi Kabui. But like any self-evident truth, once seen, it cannot be unseen.
The western diet was so debilitating to human health that cavities were status quo over 130 years ago. The quality of the western diet was initially harmed by the introduction of chemical fertilizers, food monoculture, pollution, and the siren song of the profitability of flavor additives and addictive substances like caffeine and sugar. If our ability to profit from such deleterious misapplications of technology has done nothing but increase over the last 130 years, how much worse is our present western diet than that of 13 decades ago?
Chef calls himself a food missionary. When I ask him what he’ll be talking about in an upcoming lecture or class series he’s teaching around the world, he says, it’s always centered on food. He has connected the politicization of food, the damages of British colonization and the resulting cultural deletion that has taken place, the loss of our ancestral understanding of sovereign indigenous food systems, and the gatekeeping of third world economies by first world economic powers. He talks about the third world culture that exists in the modern western world, which he calls Fiat. He talks about the tragedy of global educational systems that promote the adoption of fiat food, and the global medical crisis that is its direct effect.
He has made so many significant connections that my mind boggles at the breadth and scope of his approach to what he calls food literacy. I can’t help but pester him for specifics as to the topics he chooses to speak about. But all he tells me is that it’s gonna be about food. He is a food missionary indeed.
My personal stake in this is, as I mentioned above, is a determination to get religious about my own health. I have unique and privileged access to Chef’s brain at the moment, and I’m trying to mine as much knowledge as I can, as fast as I can, from the vast mental stores he’s acquired. I’m doing this in the form of helping him write recipes, doing interviews, creating Youtube content, collaborating on books and essays with him, as well as helping him to refine and expand his educational curriculum. I’m also benefiting tremendously from the opportunity of having a personal chef as a friend, and I’m learning to cook and prepare meals that are completely new to me, bringing with them a richness and variety of flavor, and a quality, that I’m very much enjoying.
Chef has developed his own cuisine over the years. It’s his attempt to re-introduce real, actual food to the western, fiat diet, while at the same time, converting fiat-addicted taste buds to tantalizing new flavors and combinations. He recognizes the strength of the enemy he is facing—a world of food addicts, victims of centralized food chains, and food systems that have evolved from a careless and unwise adoption and miss-application of food technology. He sees the danger of a switching purpose.
From the dawn of our ancestor’s food journey, food has been a matter of necessity. Evolution of the human genome, microbiome, and the accidental and intentional evolution of human food over the course of perhaps a million years, has created the human diet that got us here. That victory of natural and slow evolution of the human diet ran headlong into the new opportunity of the emerging modern food industry. The purpose of the human diet was no longer built on necessity, but on the profitability of appealing to flavor, availability, and consistency.
This switching purpose has created a version of humanity our world has never known—food addicts who are so drugged out, and so used to a poor quality diet, that we don’t see the fact that we’re no longer eating food with food value. We even glory in the fact that our food is no longer food, with phrases like “convenience food”, “fast food”, and “junk food”. We joke about the fact that our food no longer has food value, and, admitting our knowledge of how far we’ve fallen, while at the same time defending our status as drug addicts, we say things like, “I’d rather die than change my diet”.
Chef knows better than anyone I’ve ever heard of, the nature of the enemy he’s facing. He calls himself a food missionary, and I can see that he is one of the last of the ‘chosen people’, walking through the land of heathens, attempting to bring enlightenment.
He converted me after our first few meetings. I'm beginning to believe more and more what Chef tells me, while at the same time I'm beginning to experience more and more of my Fiat culture from his new perspective.
When I met Chef Kabui in January of this year, 2022, I was around 255 lbs. This is the heaviest I’ve ever been. I’ve watched recent videos of Chef’s morning exercise routine, as this tall, skinny, 54 year-old African cranks out 25 pull-ups in under a minute, and performs yoga moves that demonstrate a powerful flexibility. Seeing that, and talking to him daily for several months now, I’ve realized that I’m missing out on a better life.
He talks about the extra weight that American children and American adults carry around with them, not as a natural part of them, but as a small, or in many cases, a very large bag of concrete, that they are forced to lift, and which their hearts must then heat, cool, hydrate, and circulate blood through. It’s a stark perspective, and has driven me to, like I said above, get religious about my health.
Chef has a weight loss and health restoration course of classes he teaches, and I’ve begun his program. I’ve been privileged to have him as a personal coach, due to our writing and project collaborations, and we’ve adapted his course to my specific situation.
I've named my appetite Bernard. I know this seems silly, but I've never really struggled with my appetite before. As I’ve worked my butt off to fast for more than one meal at a time, my appetite has become this beast that I must battle, and it made sense to name the beast.
My food journey was so different from Chef Kabui’s. Our microbiomes are different. I’m experiencing first-hand the struggle of attempting to deliberately recolonize my microbiome, as well as my taste buds. In the fiat food culture, the flavors, the textures, the quantities of food available, the ubiquitous nature of the food I’ve always known, the familiar feel, the camaraderie of meals shared with others who have the same appetite, all of it adds up to a potent force, which anyone wishing to improve their diet must consider, or ignore at their peril.
Chef has been doing what he can for me, but he can’t understand Muthoni's dilemma the way I do, or the way Muthoni does (see the article titled “Muthoni’s Dilemma). Chef has had a unique food experience in the world, as far as I can tell. He grew up with one of the last indigenous sovereign diets left to humanity. He encountered the western world of fiat food, then in less than six months, rejected it. He was seeking the familiar, and far better food quality standard he knew in Kenya. He attempted to understand the global food system, and relentlessly worked to replicate the sovereign food supply chain he grew up with through a continuing search for the best quality food producers available to him here in the United States over the last thirty years. He has kept his pallet sacred, so to speak. After a brief college fling, he’s never allowed himself to become a food addict. He kept his fiat food experience recreational, and limited to a few months of his college life. Everything else his taste buds and microbiome know has been either accidentally or deliberately a pure food experience.
So here he is, separated by thousands of miles from his student (me). All he can do is call, video conference, text and share media, and encourage me to learn how to cook, and what to cook, as quickly as possible. He’s managing many different projects while doing this. That leaves me with a plan, but it also leaves me alone, to behave in regards to my health goals as an adult, or not, as best I can.
Early successes got me confident. Through his coaching and by adopting his cooking techniques and food recommendations, I was able, through a combination of fasting and breaking those fasts with his gourmet food cuisine, to drop from 254 lbs down to 229 lbs in 20 days or so. It felt great! Already, with just the loss of 25 lbs of my “bag of cement”, I was moving easier. I was less tired, and have been enjoying the benefits. But as Chef says, success is dangerous. It often comes with complacency and over confidence.
The last few weeks have been brutal. Bernard has been winning many of my battles with him (my fiat-trained appetite), but I couldn’t tell Chef. I told him I broke my scale. I stopped reporting my weight to him. I had fiat food snacks and items from my pantry, not to mention easy access to the whole fast food and restaurant supply chain passing before my eyes every day as I went to and from work.
I had tasted several of Chef’s meals, but I made a bad tactical error. My new faith, my new religion, as I called it in another essay, was fragile and delicate. I figured that I had so much weight to lose that I’d spend most of my time fasting, and when it was time to eat, then I’d confidently apply my new cooking skills, and casually prepare and consume the best quality (and some of the most delicious) meals I’d ever had from Chef’s 100 series cooking courses. But battles with serious opponents require good planning and great preparation, if you want to win. I’ve spent the past week or two woefully unprepared.
Chef is working to solve one of humanity’s grand challenges—the escape from centralized fiat food systems that are poisoning our diets and destroying our health. He is attempting to build competing institutions to recover our lost sovereign decentralized food systems. There is an incredible challenge lying before all of humanity, to reverse this horrible trend of environmental and human health destruction, caused by our mass-scaled centralized food systems, and to reinventing technologies that can help us bring organic and other high-quality foods into mass production, perhaps in decentralized ways. He doesn’t have the time or the proximity to be a food therapist to me, or anyone else. He and I have joked about forming a support group we’d call the FFA, Fiat Food Anonymous. I’m beginning to see that it is no joke.
To a large extent, if I’m going to recover my health and eat better, I’m going to have to first recover my adulthood. I never suspected how childish I’d become through my lack of food literacy. I feel like a parent who is trying to keep their kids from the cookie jar. But the jar everywhere, and the kid lives inside of me. The battle is real, and I have to get my weaponry and armor in good shape if I plan to succeed. For most of my life I never even knew there was a battle. It's only been in the last few months I've realized the necessity to fight, and have begun to resist the overwhelming power of my fiat food programming.
My weight is bouncing between 230 and 240 lbs. I know too much now, to abandon my new faith. This small crisis of faith I’ve experienced, and the lies of “all is well” I’ve told Chef over the last week or two, as my fasting broke, and as some of my meals were full of crap, has been very illuminating. The body remembers. I remember life at 170 lbs. That’s my new weight goal. I never had so much interest in reaching a target body weight, as I do now. But I’m battling my body’s most recent memories, as well. What my body most remembers is consist decades of buffets, fast food meals, and unregulated quests to satisfy Bernard and my fiat taste buds.
Obviously, I’m not trying to destroy Bernard, but renegotiate our future relationship. Everyone needs an appetite. Appetite, by my definition, is simply the aspect of a person’s mind that fuels their purposes. We can have an appetite for success, or an appetite to write, or to be with someone. We can’t live without our appetite. But we can present it with new purpose.
I know now what I have to do. I must never let another day go by without having two or three days of actual food available for me to eat. I can't afford to battle Bernard as I try to fast, and not have a backup plan if I buckle. What happens in such a scenario is I end up eating fiat food. But I envision a time when Bernard will be reprogrammed, and my appetite will do nothing but serve my ideal values.
I am so grateful for my personal access to Chef’s life and work these days. He talks about being purpose-driven, rather than people-driven. I’m starting to know what he means, and I’m doing what I can to adopt better purposes. I’m not yet the food missionary that he is, but I’m starting with myself. I’m seeing that I have a massive job to reprogram my pallet.
I have control over three aspects of my relationship with my food: quality, quantity, and frequency. Chef has given me a crash course on the tragically low-quality of the food I’ve been eating, and on the places I can go to find actual food ingredients (vegetables, fruits, and meats that are free, or nearly free, of all the poisons that are so prevalent in most of the foods available to us through our fiat food supply chain). He’s given me the skills to prepare it, and a pile of recipes to play with. His fasting course is helping me to practice changing the frequency of when I eat. With mastery of the quality and the frequency of my food, I’m guessing that the quantity of my food won’t be much of a challenge, but will come into line naturally as my broken appetite recovers a lost health it has never known.
My faith in my decision to become religious about my health is stronger than ever. The crisis I experienced wasn’t so much a crisis of my faith, but the shock of realizing the true power of the enemy I’m now determined to fight. I have to treat these recipes as my scripture, and I have to cleanse my pantry of temptation. I have to recolonize my microbiome, my pallet, my refrigerator, and my food supply chain.
This is the power of Chef Kabui’s message, the way I see it: He has spotted a battle worth fighting—the battle for our health. He has identified the key element of this battle—our food supply chain and our food systems. He is fighting a fight that the rest of the world doesn’t even realize should be fought. Like the slaves of Egypt, looking for a savior, we haven’t recognized the prophet in our midst. And should we follow him, en masse, to wander the desert of freedom from our fiat food masters, if my experience is any kind of indicator, most likely we’d quickly wish to return back to our captivity after a few short weeks of liberation.
Freedom isn’t a thing. Freedom is simply the absence of something or someone able to stop you. Freedom in our health means our escape from fiat food. That freedom from bad food can’t stand on its own, since that freedom it isn’t a thing. Freedom from bad (fiat) food is just the absence of poison, and the absence of food that lacks nutrition and flips our appetites into overdrive, in an attempt to find what can’t be found.
My freedom from fiat food, if it is to be a lifestyle change, can only grow if it is accompanied by my successful attempt to copy Chef’s cuisine and food supply chain knowledge. As a fiat food addict, I can’t afford to ever be far from food I can eat that doesn’t sacrifice quality in order to satisfy my fiat taste buds. Chef’s food is freaking delicious. I’ve got to be adult about this. I’m confessing my failures. I’m not going to be afraid of failure in this area any more. I know this journey isn’t going to be one continuous string of successes, but, as with any attempt to build something great, will be sprinkled, sometimes liberally, with failures.
Chef is 100% of my FFA support group, but I need to make his job easier. I’m going to go cook something delicious and nutritious, and, thanks to his work, I know what this means better than I ever did before. I’m going to make a lot of good food, and play with the desserts and drinks he’s taught me to make. This way, I’ll always have something good on hand. I don’t want to face another battle with Bernard when I’m this unprepared. I’ll toss this beast a bone, and it won’t be a fiat one.
I can’t wait to meet my new friends. Which friends? Well, of course those of you who have heard and believed Chef’s food gospel, but also these—I’m so excited to meet: my target body weight, my new set of taste buds, and my new microbiome. Perhaps in the next few months I’ll be skinny old guy busting out 25 pull-ups in under a minute. What a fun adventure! I can see why we invent religion. Such a powerful tool. Keep the faith!