I spent last weekend at the Weston A. Price Foundation Wise Traditions conference in King of Prussia, PA.Here are some highlights:

Spending time with several people in the diet-health community who I’ve been wanting to meet in person, including Chris Masterjohn, Melissa McEwen and John Durant.John and Melissa are the public face of the New York city paleo movement.The four of us spent most of the weekend together tossing around ideas and making merry.I’ve been corresponding with Chris quite a bit lately and we’ve been thinking through some important diet-health questions together.He is brimming with good ideas. I also got to meet Sally Fallon Morell, the founder and president of the WAPF.

Attending talks.The highlight was Chris Masterjohn’s talk “Heart Disease and Molecular Degeneration: the New Paradigm”, in which he described his compelling theory on oxidative damage and cardiovascular disease, among other things.You can read some of his earlier ideas on the subject here.Another talk I really enjoyed was by Anore Jones, who lived with an isolated Inuit group in Alaska for 23 years and ate a mostly traditional hunter-gatherer diet.The food and preparation techniques they used were really interesting, including various techniques for extracting fats and preserving meats, berries and greens by fermentation.Jones has published books on the subject that I suspect would be very interesting, including Nauriat Niginaqtuat, Plants that We Eat, and Iqaluich Niginaqtuat, Fish that We Eat.The latter is freely available on the web here.

I attended a speech by Joel Salatin, the prolific Virginia farmer, writer and agricultural innovator, which was fun.I enjoyed Sally Fallon Morell’s talk on US school lunches and the politics surrounding them.I also attended a talk on food politics by Judith McGeary, a farmer, attorney and and activist, in which she described the reasons to oppose or modify senate bill 510.The gist is that it will be disproportionately hard on small farmers who are already disfavored by current regulations, making high quality food more difficult to obtain, more expensive or even illegal.It’s designed to improve food safety by targeting sources of food-borne pathogens, but how much are we going to have to cripple national food quality and farmer livelihood to achieve this, and will it even be effective?I don’t remember which speaker said this quote, and I’m paraphrasing, but it stuck with me: “I just want to be able to eat the same food my grandmother ate.”In 2010, that’s already difficult to achieve.Will it be impossible in 2030?