Myra's Kitchen Blog » Musings on the traditional Swiss

I remember vividly the 1940 edition of Heidi that my mother had given me when I was ten years old. Heidi was a girl whose grandfather would send her out onto the grassy knolls for the day, where she would spend her time romping barefoot among the goats. Her lunch was a chunk of hearty bread with a big wedge of cheese. When she returned home at night, her grandfather would offer her, along with a bowl of fresh milk, another chunk of cheese that he had just toasted in the fire at the end of a long stick. This meal and lifestyle sounded like my idea of heaven. As I ate my breakfast of cheese-topped bread that I had placed in the broiler to blister, I would fantasize that I was Heidi. In hindsight, this version of bread and cheese was rather sad. The bread was store bought, and the cheese was that kind that came packed in individual plastic wrappers.

When I read about the Swiss in the Loetschental Valley that Dr. Price visited, scenes of Heidi came flooding back in my mind. Here were a people that mostly lived on bread and cheese and milk. Their cheese was extraordinary, made from cows grazing on verdant pastures near the glaciers. According to Price, the people “recognize the presence of divinity in the life-giving qualities of the butter made in June when cows have arrived for pasturage near the glaciers.….. The natives of the valley are able to recognize the superior quality of their June butter, and, without knowing exactly way, pay it due homage.” Their bread was rye bread that had been thrashed by hand and ground in stone grinders. Each family would take turns using the community oven, and would bake the amount of rye bread that they would need for a whole month.

The isolated Swiss also ate small amounts of butter, vegetables and barley, frequent bone broths, and meat about once a week. Ramiel Nigel does a breakdown of their caloric intake in his book Cure Tooth Decay that I found fascinating. Their calories in a given day averaged 800 calories of rye bread, 400 calories of milk, 400 calories of cheese, 100 calories of butter, 100 calories of barley, 100 calories of vegetables, and 100 calories of meat.

What impressed me most about these people is how hardy they were. Just like in Heidi, children would scamper around barefoot in temperatures low enough to have Weston Price and his wife don heavy clothing. The isolated villagers made their own clothes and were self-sufficient. They had cheerful temperaments, great facial bone structures and bodily physiques, and almost no dental caries. Upon analysis of the nutrient density of their food, Dr. Price found that they, like the other primitive cultures he studied, had 4 times the calcium and phosphorous of the modern day Swiss and 10 times the fat soluble vitamins. It is interesting to note that this was accomplished on such a seemingly limited diet. They didn’t have the food of the world at their fingertips, but the foods that they had were sufficient to build beautiful and sturdy bodies. Of course, as in all of the other cultures, when the refined foods (or displaced foods of modern civilization as Dr. Price called them) made their way into the Swiss villages, all of the immunity from dental caries and other diseases (like tuberculosis, for example), along with the fine physiques, disappeared within one generation.

It is also interesting to me that these people lived on food that happens to currently be the most demonized food in the world. I have just returned from the Wise Traditions conference, and a lecture on “the diet cure” identified gluten and dairy as two of the most addictive foods in the world. Yet these primitive peoples in remote Alpine towns were getting over 75 percent of their food intake from gluten (rye) and dairy. It seems that in a healthy individual, high quality dairy is a life-giving elixir, and a grain (glutinous or not) that is fresh and prepared properly is also mineral-rich and salubrious. It seems that now so many people have compromised systems that they cannot even tolerate the highest quality dairy or properly prepared grains.

We are in a strange time. While the majority of the food in a supermarket is devoid of real nutrition, it is possible to enjoy a diet of excellent food, provided one has the interest and motivation. I am fortunate enough to live one block from the Union Square green market in New York City (a four times weekly farmer’s market that sells all kinds of animal foods as well as vegetables and breads) as well as belong to a club where I can get an impressive variety of raw dairy products and pastured animal food. I recently started to buy traditional dense sourdough rye breads from my local green market, and I sampled an excellent specimen at this year’s conference as well. Now when I have a slab of bread with a hunk of raw milk cheese on it, I’m more in keeping with the spirit of the traditional Swiss villagers. I make bone broths and lacto-fermented foods regularly. I eat a lot of pastured eggs, I eat homemade liver paté rich with butter, I take fermented cod liver oil and high vitamin butter oil daily, and I soak my beans, grains, nuts, and seeds.

It sometimes seems as if life would be simpler if I were one of the primitives in the Swiss valley. I would eat my hunk of nutrient dense cheese a couple of times a day, eat my soup, and drink my milk. Since I have the whole world at my fingertips now, at every meal I have such a huge choice. I have to make an effort not to gorge at the “buffet”, even the nutrient-dense “buffet”.

I am truly grateful for my good health, which I attribute chiefly to good nutrition. I summon my inner “Heidi,” a fearless, robust, and happy little child romping about in nature, enjoying being alive.

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