Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude;
How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?
What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?
- Walt Whitman, Song Of Myself
“We are what we eat.” It’s an old adage but it has a grain of truth in it. For me, that grain has become millet.
A few months ago, I had a chance encounter with a rather cous-cous looking substance in the supermarket. It was super cheap - $10 for 5kgs. About a fifth the price of rice or pasta or flour or wheat.
I’ve been eating it ever since, to my own benefit. Millet.
It goes with everything. Can be a dessert, a side dish, a main dish. Bake it. Fry it. Mike it. Cold. Hot. However. I make it for the week, mix in some other things like peas or chili peppers and keep it in the fridge. It has a soft, nutty taste.
The main changes I’ve observed, after getting off the rice and wheat and potatoes gravy train have been;
Fiber. My stool is just rock good. It cleans the pipes like nothing other. Feels like I have my own personal, daily chimney sweep. I sit at the same time, each morning, reading my Whitman or Bukowski and having a dump that sometimes the bowl can barely contain. Immense. EnLIGHTening.
GI (Glycemic Index)- Wheat and rice spike your sugar and insulin levels. Millet does none of that funky, unhealthy, up and down stuff.
Less Craving. Don’t know why but I don’t get this addicted, craving feeling for millet, like I do with bread or wheat. Is it perhaps that it has no gluten?
There are so many other benefits, the video I posted reviews some others, especially the nutritional composition of millet - unprocessed, full of potassium, iron and others … And one thing you can be sure of … If something is labeled or becomes “a poor person’s” thing - you can be damn well sure it is most like good for you. Like beets or berries (until they become the next big marketing spin).
One of the things I’ve loved about my life / lifestyle - I could eat almost anything I wanted without much consequence. I have exercised extremely, my whole life, so always just shoved food into me. Oh sure, I ate healthily for the most part but underneath was the thought that “Hey, it’s just calories, eat what you like/want.” I was and still am that fat faced boy, my mom said would eat and eat and eat, anything put infront of him.
Now, 60 years on/in, I needed to change things up. Despite my vigorous daily activity, whatever I ate would just cling to my gut. Fit as a friar’s fiddle I am but still, given my appetite, diet, I could see the German farmer in me, waiting to come out. Strong, brawny, fit but with this big solid ball/pouch once called a stomach.
But millet is resolving that. Perhaps it is why so many Indians are lean?
Who would have guessed at the simple, miraculous qualities of “grass”? Maybe you should try some millet today? Worth a shot, why not? Let me know how you fair.
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
Walt Whitman, Song Of Myself
I wrote this poem many years ago, probably at the age of 18 or 19. When I would carry my Leaves Of Grass under my arm everywhere and inspired by Whitman, sing freely to the universe as a liberated man, alive, enamoured with being here. I thank Whitman for being a poetic mentor and also like Blake (who I was also devouring at the same time), showing me that the small world was as beautiful as the large one - eternity indeed, in a grain of sand.
Grass, O! Little Blade Of Grass
- to Walt
Grass, O little blade of grass
How is it that you sit so still
Through summer’s heat,
Through winter’s fury?
To I, it is quite a feat
That you are never in a hurry.
Often I have wondered
How you came to be – right there.
Often I have wondered
Why it is you are anywhere,
So silent do you pass through life.
I don’t need to know
The categorical imperative
Nor understand completely
The holy trinity.
I need not know the reason why
It all began
Nor how come with firy splash
It will end.
I only long to know
Of your sweet solitude,
You little blade of grass.
Then,
Contented I will be
To sleep with questions
In this house of broken glass.
What We Are ...