Have you ever tried Laputa food? Rye bread and Pazu's bag

March 9, 2022

I've seen "Castle in the Sky" five times.

Pazu and Sheeta, chased by Dora's family, take refuge in Grandpa Pom's mine.

So the two of them had lunch together.

Oh, Pazu's bag looks like a magic bag!

Bread, green apples, candy, and even a fried egg were brought out, and Pazu ate them all up.

I wonder how many boys, including myself, have attempted to swallow a fried egg whole .

That's not what I'm talking about today. Bread, bread.

Laputa is set in the late 18th century, when rye bread was the most common type of bread.

From the Middle Ages to the early modern period (in Japan, from the end of the Heian period to the Edo period), the Earth was in a "Little Ice Age" and was much colder than it is today.

Rye is extremely cold-resistant, and sprouts at just 1 degree Celsius. In northern Europe, this variety, originally a weed, was the only one that could be cultivated.

Rye is more nutritious than wheat.

It is low in calories and high in protein. It is also high in dietary fiber and contains many times the amount of minerals such as potassium, calcium, and magnesium.

However, it tastes worse than wheat bread. Because it does not contain gluten, the dough is tough.

At the time, it was whole wheat flour with the germ still attached (equivalent to brown rice). It hadn't been selectively bred and was probably quite hard.

However, the diet of farmers at that time was amazing. Apparently, they ate rye bread, which was 4000 kcal, as their staple food .

In Japan, farmers ate 5 go of brown rice a day, and soldiers 7 go. In terms of rice balls, this amounted to 2-3 softball-sized balls.

Even though the average height of people in the past was less than 160cm, the amount of food they ate was incredible.

(It is also said that women in their twenties today are consuming fewer calories than women in 1946. This, along with the trend toward later marriage, is also thought to be one of the reasons for the declining birthrate.)

I still remember the scene in "Antarctica" that I saw when I was in elementary school, where Tsunehiko Watase explains to Ken Takakura the calorie requirement for the Antarctic wintering team , which is about 4,600 kcal per day.

In other words, in a world where everything was physical labor, you couldn't work unless you consumed enough heat to make up for the amount of work you had to do in polar regions .

However, brown rice and whole wheat rye bread probably provide less nutritional imbalance even if they provide more than 70% of the calories you consume .

The "Laputa food" that came out of Pazu's bag is actually a completely nutritious meal.

...

Nowadays, polished rice and milled white wheat are the norm.

In both cases, the price to pay for their deliciousness and ease of eating is that they are heavily biased towards starch (carbohydrates) with almost no B vitamins or minerals .

The missing part must be made up with side dishes.

However, I don't know who is to blame, but this dietary habit of eating foods that are easy to prepare (and buy) and are rich in fats and have strong flavors, which has been around since childhood, starts to wear down when we reach middle age.

1. Make brown rice or whole wheat your staple food
2. Use mineral-rich natural salt and raw sugar
3. Exercise by walking at least 10km a day

Once you do this, your life itself will become a "diet."

In an age where more than one in two women live to be over 90 years old, it would be awful to be unable to walk after turning 75, right?

I think this is a habit that started when I was young.
　
However, brown rice and whole wheat flour are not tasty, so I can't keep eating them.

Therefore, if you are going to use white rice, we recommend mixing it with grains such as glutinous barley or pressed barley, or using polished germ rice, which is less nutritious than brown rice but is much more nutritious than white rice.

2. Refined salt that costs 115 yen per kilogram is almost 100% sodium chloride, which is a significant bias.

3. Simply be proactive about doing housework (moving around the home) and create opportunities to move around on your own as much as possible outside.

It's not impossible to make it a habit.