Towards suryaharam

Following up on previous post, time for some status check on shift to suryaharam. Modern food system involves staggering amounts of intervention between the time food is produced (suryaharam stage) and when it ultimately reaches the mouth.  Yesterday, i made a list of the intervening steps.

Stage-1: Food production process itself

• Application of pesticides, herbicides etc, traces of which enter our bodies ultimately.
• Genetically modified foods.
• Treat cows with antibiotics, growth hormones etc, to boost up production.

Stage-2: post-production processing steps

• “Polish”. Remove almost all of nutrient rich husk from rice, wheat etc.
• Add preservatives, colors and other agents
• Pasteurize/homogenize milk
• Treat some foods with radiation
• Long term refrigeration for storage
• Apply wax for shine

Stage-3: Post-purchase processing at home

• Heat, pressure cook, oil fry etc
• Add salts, oils, refined sugar etc
• refrigerate

These are just off the top of my head. Iam sure there are many many more steps involved. We can imagine how much potency of the food is lost, during these steps. My goal is to consume foods which have gone through least number of intervening steps. There’s a limit on how many steps can be eliminated when one lives in an urban environment (for example, difficult to get fully organic food), but there’s a lot i can work on even within those limitations.

So far, following are the specific steps i have taken:

• Increased water intake. I’ve also been conscious of when to take that water (preferably on empty stomach, Atleast 2 hrs gap after meal etc)
• Breakfast is 100% suryaharam. hurray !! Mainly consisting of sprouts, based on MSR’s recommendation.
• Trying to avoid coffee. I used to drink coffee first thing in the morning, but now i almost got rid of that habit. May have small shot sometime mid-morning if needed. The goal is to make it very very occasional, if at all.
• No changes to lunch. Standard indian vegetarian food.
• Have early dinner, say around 7pm. The trick is to make it light and rest the system at night. Some days i just had fruits for dinner, some days fruits + curd rice. Still experimenting..

This is just the very beginning. Over the next few months, I plan to shift to a predominantly suryaharam diet. Lets see how it plays out ….

Listening to the body — two years later

In November 2007, i put up a post titled “listening to the body“. In that post, i referred to one Dr. Manthena Satyanarayana Raju (MSR) and his natural life style ideas. Since then, even though i came across his programs on TV once in a while, i did not follow up and look into his ideas deeply. Big mistake !

Only recently, i happened to visit a store that promotes his ideas, and picked up couple of books written by him. He writes exclusively in Telugu, although some English translations are available. ( I picked up the Telugu versions, and it was great to read Telugu after long time ! Ancient wisdom is best read in a native language ! ).

What i now realize (two years late) is that his works are filled with great wisdom and common sense, and well grounded in science. As i read his works, iam stunned at how unnatural and messed up our modern eating practices are. Even normal Indian vegetarian diet (which i take, and which is normally considered “healthy”), does not appear healthy or natural anymore.

The core of MSR’s thesis is that cooked food is unnatural form of food for human body. He makes a fundamental distinction between “suryaharam” (food cooked by Sun), and food cooked on Fire. Suryaharam (Solar food) is grains, vegetables, fruits, nuts etc. This food is already “cooked” by Sun’s energy from elements of the Earth (water, air, minerals etc). MSR’s thesis is that this Solar food, taken directly, is the most natural food for a human body, and cooking this Solar food in fire makes it unnatural for consumption by human body. He says that most diseases have origin in this consumption of unnatural foods, and other unhealthy eating practices.

MSR gives a convincing defense of his thesis in his books, so i won’t reproduce it here. What he says makes great sense to me even from simple common sense point of view. Our bodies have evolved over millions of years, surviving directly on uncooked natural food. Fire is a relatively recent discovery compared to the evolutionary history of our bodies, and having a large percentage of our diet as cooked food is an even more recent phenomenon. So, it makes great sense to me that food cooked by Sun is the most appropriate and natural for our bodies. Also, Human being is the only species that cooks food on fire ! Another clear hint !

In food debates, we often hear about inorganic vs organic food, and GM vs non-GM food etc. We rarely hear about the impact of cooking foods. It now seems to me that this parameter is important too.

To start natural food life style, MSR recommends slowly adding more “solar food” in one’s diet. Solar food is nothing fancy. Just more sprouts, more fruits and more raw vegetables. Ofcourse, not just randomly adding, but there is a specific routine he recommends based on his observation of bodies needs and cycles. The eventual goal is to have say 75% solar food and rest cooked food. If one is totally in, one can shift to 100% solar food. Cooked vs Uncooked, is just one aspect of the debate. MSR’s system includes other aspects like avoiding salt, having more water, avoiding oils, time of eating, role of fasting etc etc. Iam just starting to incorporate each habit into my routine. I’ll blog every two weeks on the specific steps i’ve taken and how it’s going.

I feel that taking care of the environment of the body is an essential component of environmentally sustainable living. Activism starts at home.

Environmentalism as religion

Shiva's Cosmic dance at CERN

In his review of two books about global warming,  Freeman Dyson writes:

” There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world. Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.”

The quote has led me to ponder to what extent, if any, is environmentalism a religion, and what its implications are.

In any typical Econ-101 text book, one is introduced to two “branches” of Economics. (1) Positive economics: The branch which focuses on “facts, and cause-effect relationships”. A better phrase perhaps is “value-free” economics. (2) Normative economics: “The branch that incorporates value judgments about what the economy ought to be like, or what particular policy action ought to be recommended to achieve a desirable goal”.  Simply put, positive economics deals with “what is”, and the normative flavor deals with “what ought to be”.

Along the same lines, we can say, positive aspects of environmentalism deal with pure facts about the state of environment and how the humans are affecting it. Normative aspects deal with what our response should be.

Fact: Humans have eliminated much (more than 90%) of the old growth forest, taking with it a number of species. Human activities continue to extend into more and more natural spaces of the planet, resulting in further decrease in biological diversity.

Fact: Humans continue to pump enormous amounts of co2 into atmosphere, altering the gaseous composition of the atmosphere, thus mucking with heat regulating mechanisms of the planet.

Fact: Humans are starting to muck with nature at “operating system” level, through genetic, bio and nano technologies.

Now, coming to the normative aspects, there is a vast spectrum of opinion on what we should actually be doing about the situation. From primitivists / deep-ecologists who reject almost any use of technology, to techno-salvationists who propose extreme technological solutions to handle issues. Between the ultra-conservative deep-ecologist and  the ultra-liberal technologist, there is a vast spectrum of opinion on what is the best approach to handle environmental problems.

Much of the opinion is not based on blind belief / authority, but informed by a combination of instinct/emotions/intellect/intuition. Why opinions differ at all when everyone is looking at the same facts, is in itself an interesting question. Perhaps one’s life experience, education, psychological makeup etc, contribute to the widely differing opinions. A person who has spent major part of one’s life in Amazon forest is likely to have an opinion different from a person who has spent life in a megacity.

Anyway, we digress from the main point, which is — opinions vastly differ. But when does a particular opinion become a “religion”. Only when one holds onto one’s own opinion as the final truth, even in the absence of absolute evidence.

Although I personally have an opinion, based on my current understanding of the world, I do recognize that it could possibly be far from the ultimate correct view (if there is such a beast at all).  In fact, I wonder if any single person can really have a claim on the ultimate correct view (unless one is Enlightened). What all of us have are muddled opinions based on limited understanding of reality. And none of the opinions are objectively verifiable as the final truth. If that were the case, they would be called a “fact”, not an opinion. Suppose i take a view against using “genetically modified carbon eating trees” as a solution to global warming, because i somehow perceive it to be too much mucking with nature, and some scientist advocates it, is there a way to objectively judge which view is “right” ? I think not.

All that said, i guess we have no option but to continue to work with tools at our disposal, and try to hone our opinions to be as close as possible to the “ultimately right” views, through a right understanding of reality. That is why iam attracted now a days to Buddhist philosophy and practice of Meditation. Given sufficient practice, it appears there is a reasonable possibility of getting deep insights into nature of reality, which the physical sciences have been very very slow in delivering.

Buddhism 101

I recently finished listening to this series of lectures:

The Buddha’s teaching as it is, by Bhikkhu Bodhi

Its good to know the lingo and some important foundational concepts in Buddhism.

(Total running time about 13 hours).

Note on July 1st, 2009: There is no E=M*C-squared ‘ ism

I now regret using the word “Buddhism” above. Attaching a tag “ism” to Buddha’s teaching, i think, does great disservice to the teaching. Because, there is a danger that it is painted with the same brush as other ism’s — environmentalism, feminism, communism, capitalism, primitivism, hedonism,agnosticism etc etc.

One website defined “ism” as “representing a philosophical, political or moral doctrine or a belief system”. Agreed, many ism’s may have their validity in some relative sense, and Buddha’s teaching also may be considered a “philosophical system”, hence an “ism” too. However, it seems to me that Buddha’s teaching deserves to be referred as and elevated to the level of “scientific doctrine”.

In my novice intellectual understanding, following is the experiment that is central to the doctrine :

Tool: Observation. Sharp and focused observation.

Field of observation: Every aspect of body-mind complex. Every sensation that we normally regard as our own. That means, eventually, every physical sensation, every feeling, every thought, and every state of mind.

Method: Using laser beam like observation, observe each sensation and know it really really well.

Result: Well, the Buddha has apparently seen some result which he told everyone. One can see for oneself.

What beauty and simplicity ! Perhaps the most fruitful experiment a human will ever perform ?

All this brings up an interesting question — For a hypothesis to be regarded as “scientific” and “correct”, it should be verifiable by anyone through an experiment. But what if, as it is the case here, the verification is entirely subjective and personal. Who will verify the verifier ? . Wait .. that difficult process of bringing Buddhist ideas into ambit of science is perhaps underway through the likes of “Mind and Life Institute“.

pyramid of debt

Here is a good article from the newyork times, explaining the relationship between real wealth, paper money, and debt.

Key point:

Georgescu-Roegen and other ecological economists argue that wealth is real and physical. It’s the stock of cars and computers and clothing, of furniture and French fries, that we buy with our dollars. The dollars aren’t real wealth, but only symbols that represent the bearer’s claim on an economy’s ability to generate wealth. Debt, for its part, is a claim on the economy’s ability to generate wealth in the future. …

Problems arise when wealth and debt are not kept in proper relation. The amount of wealth that an economy can create is limited by the amount of low-entropy energy that it can sustainably suck from its environment — and by the amount of high-entropy effluent from an economy that the environment can sustainably absorb. Debt, being imaginary, has no such natural limit. It can grow infinitely, compounding at any rate we decide.

Whenever an economy allows debt to grow faster than wealth can be created, that economy has a need for debt repudiation.

Bingo ! What we are seeing with current financial crisis is “debt repudiation” on a huge scale and the resulting fallout.

The article actually has two very important points, only one of which is tackled clearly. The point made clear in the article is that there is an enormous pyramid of financial debt that is balanced atop the real economy.

But a more important point:

The amount of wealth that an economy can create is limited by the amount of low-entropy energy that it can sustainably suck from its environment — and by the amount of high-entropy effluent from an economy that the environment can sustainably absorbed.

What the article does not discuss in detail, is that our current real economy generating real “wealth” itself is perhaps un-sustainable in the long term because:

(a) it is sucking low-entropy energy from the environment without a guarantee that we can continue to do so in the longer term (excessive dependence on fossil energy).

(b) more importantly, our real economy generating real wealth, is spewing more high-entropy effluent than the environment can sustainably absorb.

Taken together, we have another enormous pyramid sitting precariously atop the real economy — the pyramid of ecological debt.

Just as we are in a debt un-winding phase, to bring the financial debt inline with the real economy, we may need to go through a ecological debt un-winding phase, to bring our human real economy inline with the larger realities of Nature’s economy.

——————————————————————————————

(full article follows. saved for future reference incase the article disappears off nytimes website)

Mr. Soddy’s Ecological Economy

By ERIC ZENCEY

INNOVATIVE and opaque instruments of debt; greedy bankers; lenders’ eagerness to take on risky loans; a lack of regulation; a shortage of bank liquidity: all have been nominated as the underlying cause of the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression. But a more perceptive, and more troubling, diagnosis is suggested by the work of a little-regarded British chemist-turned-economist who wrote before and during the Great Depression.

Frederick Soddy, born in 1877, was an individualist who bowed to few conventions, and who is described by one biographer as a difficult, obstinate man. A 1921 Nobel laureate in chemistry for his work on radioactive decay, he foresaw the energy potential of atomic fission as early as 1909. But his disquiet about that power’s potential wartime use, combined with his revulsion at his discipline’s complicity in the mass deaths of World War I, led him to set aside chemistry for the study of political economy — the world into which scientific progress introduces its gifts. In four books written from 1921 to 1934, Soddy carried on a quixotic campaign for a radical restructuring of global monetary relationships. He was roundly dismissed as a crank.

He offered a perspective on economics rooted in physics — the laws of thermodynamics, in particular. An economy is often likened to a machine, though few economists follow the parallel to its logical conclusion: like any machine the economy must draw energy from outside itself. The first and second laws of thermodynamics forbid perpetual motion, schemes in which machines create energy out of nothing or recycle it forever. Soddy criticized the prevailing belief of the economy as a perpetual motion machine, capable of generating infinite wealth — a criticism echoed by his intellectual heirs in the now emergent field of ecological economics.

A more apt analogy, said Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (a Romanian-born economist whose work in the 1970s began to define this new approach), is to model the economy as a living system. Like all life, it draws from its environment valuable (or “low entropy”) matter and energy — for animate life, food; for an economy, energy, ores, the raw materials provided by plants and animals. And like all life, an economy emits a high-entropy wake — it spews degraded matter and energy: waste heat, waste gases, toxic byproducts, apple cores, the molecules of iron lost to rust and abrasion. Low entropy emissions include trash and pollution in all their forms, including yesterday’s newspaper, last year’s sneakers, last decade’s rusted automobile.

Matter taken up into the economy can be recycled, using energy; but energy, used once, is forever unavailable to us at that level again. The law of entropy commands a one-way flow downward from more to less useful forms. An animal can’t live perpetually on its own excreta. Neither can you fill the tank of your car by pushing it backwards. Thus, Georgescu-Roegen, paraphrasing the economist Alfred Marshall, said: “Biology, not mechanics, is our Mecca.”

Following Soddy, Georgescu-Roegen and other ecological economists argue that wealth is real and physical. It’s the stock of cars and computers and clothing, of furniture and French fries, that we buy with our dollars. The dollars aren’t real wealth, but only symbols that represent the bearer’s claim on an economy’s ability to generate wealth. Debt, for its part, is a claim on the economy’s ability to generate wealth in the future. “The ruling passion of the age,” Soddy said, “is to convert wealth into debt” — to exchange a thing with present-day real value (a thing that could be stolen, or broken, or rust or rot before you can manage to use it) for something immutable and unchanging, a claim on wealth that has yet to be made. Money facilitates the exchange; it is, he said, “the nothing you get for something before you can get anything.”

Problems arise when wealth and debt are not kept in proper relation. The amount of wealth that an economy can create is limited by the amount of low-entropy energy that it can sustainably suck from its environment — and by the amount of high-entropy effluent from an economy that the environment can sustainably absorb. Debt, being imaginary, has no such natural limit. It can grow infinitely, compounding at any rate we decide.

Whenever an economy allows debt to grow faster than wealth can be created, that economy has a need for debt repudiation. Inflation can do the job, decreasing debt gradually by eroding the purchasing power, the claim on future wealth, that each of your saved dollars represents. But when there is no inflation, an economy with overgrown claims on future wealth will experience regular crises of debt repudiation — stock market crashes, bankruptcies and foreclosures, defaults on bonds or loans or pension promises, the disappearance of paper assets.

It’s like musical chairs — in the wake of some shock (say, the run-up of the price of gas to $4 a gallon), holders of abstract debt suddenly want to hold money or real wealth instead. But not all of them can. One person’s loss causes another’s, and the whole system cascades into crisis. Each and every one of the crises that has beset the American economy in recent years has been, at heart, a crisis of debt repudiation. And we are unlikely to avoid more of them until we stop allowing claims on income to grow faster than income.

Soddy would not have been surprised at our current state of affairs. The problem isn’t simply greed, isn’t simply ignorance, isn’t a failure of regulatory diligence, but a systemic flaw in how our economy finances itself. As long as growth in claims on wealth outstrips the economy’s capacity to increase its wealth, market capitalism creates a niche for entrepreneurs who are all too willing to invent instruments of debt that will someday be repudiated. There will always be a Bernard Madoff or a subprime mortgage repackager willing to set us up for catastrophe. To stop them, we must balance claims on future wealth with the economy’s power to produce that wealth. How can that be done?

Soddy distilled his eccentric vision into five policy prescriptions, each of which was taken at the time as evidence that his theories were unworkable: The first four were to abandon the gold standard, let international exchange rates float, use federal surpluses and deficits as macroeconomic policy tools that could counter cyclical trends, and establish bureaus of economic statistics (including a consumer price index) in order to facilitate this effort. All of these are now conventional practice.

Soddy’s fifth proposal, the only one that remains outside the bounds of conventional wisdom, was to stop banks from creating money (and debt) out of nothing. Banks do this by lending out most of their depositors’ money at interest — making loans that the borrower soon puts in a demand deposit (checking) account, where it will soon be lent out again to create more debt and demand deposits, and so on, almost ad infinitum.

One way to stop this cycle, suggests Herman Daly, an ecological economist, would be to gradually institute a 100-percent reserve requirement on demand deposits. This would begin to shrink what Professor Daly calls “the enormous pyramid of debt that is precariously balanced atop the real economy, threatening to crash.”

Banks would support themselves by charging fees for safekeeping, check clearing and all the other legitimate financial services they provide. They would still make loans and still be able to lend at interest “the real money of real depositors,” in Professor Daly’s phrase, people who forgo consumption today by taking money out of their checking accounts and putting it in time deposits — CDs, passbook savings, 401(k)’s. In return, these savers receive a slightly larger claim on the real wealth of the community in the future.

In such a system, every increase in spending by borrowers would have to be matched by an act of saving or abstinence on the part of a depositor. This would re-establish a one-to-one correspondence between the real wealth of the community and the claims on that real wealth. (Of course, it would not solve the problem completely, not unless financial institutions were also forbidden to create subprime mortgage derivatives and other instruments of leveraged debt.)

If such a major structural renovation of our economy sounds hopelessly unrealistic, consider that so too did the abolition of the gold standard and the introduction of floating exchange rates back in the 1920s. If the laws of thermodynamics are sturdy, and if Soddy’s analysis of their relevance to economic life is correct, we’d better expand the realm of what we think is realistic.

Hiatus

Since the financial crisis became full scale last September, i tried to educate myself about what really happened, where we are going and what steps i need to take towards maintaining my personal financial health. One of the outcomes of this investigation is that my distrust of paper currencies (as a medium for long term store of wealth) has increased. Blame it on the central banks who (through various debt monetization methods) have seemingly unlimited powers to create money out of thin air, or banks’ ability to lend multiple times of actual money that is deposited (fractional reserve banking), or governments’ ability to spend limitlessly simply by issuing new bonds. No body knows for sure where we are going with all this, but many pundits on the internet seem to believe that our money system is being seriously mismanaged, and it will lead to considerable inflation in the future as all the debt that has accumulated in the last few decades is simply inflated away. Although we seem to be going through a period of slight deflation now as a consequences of current credit crunch, iam in the camp that we will see inflation coming back roaring once the world economies turn around.

As a measure of diversification away from paper currencies, and to protect the value of my capital, i recently purchased a small apartment here in vizag ! As i currently live in a rented unit, i thought this is a reasonable place to park some money. So, gang, i was busy with that whole time wasting effort and that’s the reason for my long break from the blogosphere (pretty lame excuse, i agree ). I gotta say, i din’t enjoy the whole process too much. Buying a property is the last thing that excites me in life, but sometimes one needs to attend to least priorities as well. As some readers here know, i don’t formally work now-a-days (by choice ), so i have to atleast try to preserve the value of my capital. I sincerely wish i had deployed my capital into more useful channels but this seemed like the best/quick solution for the time being. I had toyed with some ideas of starting an NGO and using this as seed money for the organization, but i don’t have concrete plans on that right now, so that’s for later.