Peasant Food Rules

        Peasant is to be defined in it's strictest terms; Humans committed to tending to the land for survival.  These are not necessarily squat, stumpy fingered morons,  rushing around with torches and pitchforks every time there's a lunar eclipse, or a woman learns how to read;   peasant food rules is a phrase that, to me, means peasant food decisions lead all other ways of thinking about food,  and gives us a simple,  daily approach to better,  more nutritiously beneficial behavior. 
      Let's start with fat and it's place in our diet. A fat peasant would be an anachronism in ancient times. And fat was a prized ingredient, gobbled whenever available. Think of your body as a machine in need of fuel; energy;  also known as calories. Carbohydrates give you 4 calories, that's literally the food's energy, per gram. Fat is closer to nine calories for the same weight. Wouldn't a working entity, without cultural bias, want more energy per gram? What life form would choose to get less energy from their weight of food? Wouldn't a hard working human machine want, no, need, to choose the higher octane food? They would and did.  But the peasant life style just didn't lend itself to the body storing alot of energy by putting on useless weight it had to carry around all day. That would be body fat. In America, it is said that now  more people get sick from an excess of food than from starvation. But an excess of what kind of food?  Yes it's too fatty, salty, sugary, but, because of over processing, it's also stripped of nutrition, actual food energy value, which might mitigate the other excesses somewhat.  
                  You are born with a set number of fat cells. That never increases. When you eat more, or less, fat than you metabolize, the size of each fat cell changes, not the number of them. When you are active, and physically involved in your waking hours, your body will hum along happily burning up the fat you're eating first, and storing the energy of those carbohydrates you eat, like Captain Crunch, Twinkies, and Baked Potato Chips, in your fat cells,  for a time when you don't have enough food, and could live off those reserves.  But you always seem to have enough food,  and what's stored in the fat cells just stays there, and when more gets stored,  the cells get bigger.
        Carbohydrates is not a bad word. Broccoli, Melons, Lettuce, Yams,  are all carbohydrates, but they are more complex than the Captain Crunch and Twinkies, so your body, designed millions of years before refined sugared breakfast cereal and snack cakes came along, knows how to metabolize them, and keep your body in a shape that should be able to survive on the planet without a mobility scooter. 
  In future blogs, I will discuss peasant cooking; No haute cuisine technique is beyond a peasant cook's ability. It's about ingredients and integrity, as is haute cuisine.   Also: early colonial Boston's indentured servants' demands as regards lunch... hint: lobsters were involved in the negotiations.   Cheers!  Heychef