So as I was eating lunch today (a thin-sliced chicken sandwich with mustard and six baked tortilla chips with salsa) I noticed a box of Special K “Fruit Crisps” breakfast bars. I picked up the box to examine this new delicacy the beneficent Cosmic Wife had procured for me and was struck by how amazingly closely they resembled my idea of what “lembas wafers” from the book “Lord of the Rings” has always been. So I sort of chuckled and said “I’ll be eating lembas in the morning!”
Then I realized that 95% of my diet has become nuts, berries, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, beans and whole grain rice and breads.
Holy crap! I’m an elf!
11 users commented in " Unexpected consequence of new diet… "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackNo, my friend, you’re Euell Gibbons reincarnated.
Cripes I hope not. Gibbons died at the ripe old age of 64.
ha, so what’s a full diet day look like for you now?
Well, today it looked like this:
Breakfast – Special K breakfast bar and sugar-free tea. (90 calories)
Morning snack – handful of dried blueberries. (probably 50 calories or so)
Lunch – As described above. (probably 250 calories or so)
Snack – One pepperidge farm cookie (70 calories)
Dinner – Serving of hamburger helper lasagna (probably 400 calories or so) string beans and a small chunk of sourdough bread.
Other than that I had a late snack of cauliflower and a bit of brownie.
So probably about 1,000 calories overall, which is probably 200 calories less than I should eat.
Plus I had to shovel the driveway twice…
LOL! Seriously, that made me chuckle.
Pretty sparse caloric intake there, Cosmic, especially with the activity of snow shoveling. It’s interesting isn’t it, that after you get used to it, your body can operate just fine while burning “reserve.”
And, sure Gibbons died young, but you gotta respect a guy that can make it all the way in to his sixties with his diet.
He actually died from complications of a genetic disorder called “Marfan’s syndrome” so his diet didn’t have much to do with it. But still, eating pine trees can’t be that good for you.
that is definatively a caloric restrictive diet.
I think it has been pointed out before, but wouldn’t Tolkensian elves, living primarily in an arboreal environment, need to rely on hunting and foraging for most of their diet? In that case, wouldn’t it make more sense for them to have the meat heavy diet, and the men and dwarves to have more grain-based cuisine?
PS – I’m aware of how ridiculous it is to apply anthropology to fantasy societies. Tolkien was a linguist, not a biologist or anthropologist. Still, it crosses my mind at times – how would that really work?
Heh… OK, let’s play this out ASEI…
There are different kinds of elves in Tolkien’s world. The two primary versions are “high elves” (like Galadriel) and “wood elves” (like Legalos). The wood elves are clearly depicted in “The Hobbit” as eagerly and aggressively hunting the forest fauna, while also generously harvesting the forest flora. Their tables were set with feasts of both meat and vegetables.
The high elves of Lothlorian were depicted as much more of an agrarian culture, with special skill in growing and harvesting crops. In fact the ring that Galadriel wore was specifically helpful in growing, tending and healing plants. Lothlorian was a forest said to have no disease. The “lembas” that the elves used as their travel food was clearly a baked grain-based item. The meals the Fellowship ate in Lothlorian were never really described that I remember, but it is reasonable to assume that they were less rustic and more refined. Does that mean more veggies and less meat? I can’t really say, but that’s sort of how I imagined it.
Terry Prachett’s elves mainly ate meat they hunted and stole whatever they wanted from humans. They liked it when humans left out a saucer of milk. But his elves were a lot like cats and human beings were alot like mice. Actually humans were more like slaves that elves had exactly about as much compunction about (and pleasure in) torturing and killing as cats do with mice, but that elves didn’t eat.
The other kind of Tolkien elf might be sea elves. Don’t remember what they ate. If we add in AD&D, there are dark elves. In Tolkien, those were really orcs. Don’t remember what either of those ate, either. In Beasts, Men & Gods, the last medieval Fantasy RPG I played a lot in, the elves were more like Wood Elves, but I don’t remember what they ate. It seems like all my friends wrote their own rules, and I don’t remember what their elves ate. I did play a modern Fantasy RPG (World of Darkness), but I don’t think it even had elves.
What do WoW elves eat?
It’s an interesting issue, but I have just an almost total lack of elvish culinary knowledge here.
Yours,
Tom
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