Culinary Roots - The Joy Of Eating (Part 1)

How I Became a Foodie

Yoda’s Hut: my grandmother’s homemade cottage had this same vibe. Located in northeast Arkansas, her acre backed up to “the big woods.” She maintained a large truck garden and a chicken coop. Her home, constructed piecemeal, had a quietude and serenity about it. She lived alone with her menagerie of dogs and cats. She was a rustic Zen master, effortlessly in tune with nature and her primal surroundings. The best meals of my life, gourmet peasant food, were constructed by her on a tiny propane stove that sat on an uneven kitchen floor covered in faded linoleum.

Rutha McAbee-Foster-Moore and Gourmet Peasant Food

From a culinary perspective, as a child and teen, I was spoiled stupid. I thought everyone had a grandmother like mine, Rutha McAbee-Foster-Moore, and everyone experienced food as superb as what she made. Her cooking opened my eyes to the wonder of taste. I immediately and whole-heartedly embraced the vice of craving deliciousness. She was a master at taking the cheapest, simplest ingredients and creating something spectacular.

When I visited, and because I was appreciative and a voracious consumer, she liked to dust off her cooking chops and stuff me until I burst. She ate like one of the tiny songbirds that lived in the peach tree outside her kitchen window. I ate like a pig every meal, every day. After a stuff-fest meal, I would go lie on the wonderful glider swing that sat in the shade of the giant willow tree in her front yard with a fat pillow under my fat head.

I would immediately fall into a deep, narcoleptic sleep, dozing off while listening to the symphony of crickets, bullfrogs, cicadas, grasshoppers, and mockingbirds that inhabited the small stream that ran through her property. I was in a continual state of culinary-induced, post-meal bliss. Eat, sleep, wake up in a state of refreshed alertness, go drink some strong coffee.

Food, Sleep, and the Skinny Powerlifter

Visiting her was the perfect undertaking for a skinny powerlifter, me, seeking to add muscle and size to become competitive. I would routinely gain ten to twelve pounds during a week-long visit. That was my experience, not a universal formula. In later years, before coming to her Yoda cottage for my stay, I would diet down and lean out. I wanted to set the stage for what I called an “anabolic burst.”

Athletes have long used low-carbohydrate dieting to lean out. Long before anyone ever heard the phrase dietary ketogenesis, Dave Draper was using the infamous “fish and water” diet in 1965 to attain a ripped physique. Whenever hungry, Dave would have a can of oil-packed tuna fish. Water-packed tuna was still in the future. Dave could also have all the water he wanted. Fish and water.

Keep up this prison-camp-style nutritional approach for ten straight weeks and, in old bodybuilding lore, get shredded. True, you might be weak as a kitten, listless, foggy, exhausted all the time and cranky, but so what, you will be ripped. That was the brutal old-school logic. It is not a general nutrition recommendation.

Dieting Down Before the Arkansas Visit

I would use a semi-keto diet in the month leading up to the visit. When calorie- and carb-depleted, if you suddenly flood the body with calories and carbs, for a small window of time the body can soak up a shocking amount of food as it refills glycogen, restores training energy and rebuilds from previous work. In my old-school strength language, the body was primed for an anabolic burst.

That does not mean the body forgets how to store body fat. It does not mean all excess calories become muscle. It means a depleted, hard-training lifter can sometimes look, feel and perform dramatically better after food, rest, and carbohydrates return. The scale jumps. The muscles fill. The attitude improves. Then, if the feeding continues too long, spillover arrives.

Long-term, excessive carb intake and calorie surplus will lead to fat accumulation. The trick, in my experience, was to push the burst, enjoy the food, refill, recover, and then stop before the good thing turned into a sloppy thing.

The Anabolic Burst, in Old-School Strength Language

Whenever I ate and drank my fill at Rutha’s place, my muscles would swell like bullfrogs in a spring downpour. I was sleeping hard, eating hard and resting hard. I was training by not training. My stressed-out body, the highly trained and often-trained soft machine, was getting a deserved break.

Carbohydrates can be incredibly useful for hard-training lifters. They help refill glycogen, support hard sessions and add muscle fullness. That said, individual tolerance varies and carbohydrate intake is not a religious issue. The question is always the same: what is the goal, what is the person, and what is the result?

Going Offline to Recover

While I was sleeping in the glider, post-meal, my body was supercompensating. I was giving my stressed-out body a deserved break. I had been subjecting my off-season body to an ungodly amount of training on account of my high aspirations.

Going offline, no formal exercise, was the perfect prescription for healing, repairing, and rebuilding. Back home, refreshed, revitalized, rested, physically larger, and aggressive, I eagerly tore into the weights, which jacked my gains up further, for a little while.

Farm-to-Table Before It Had a Name

Rutha prefigured and exemplified the modern, all-organic, farm-to-table, rustic-cookery philosophy embraced on a widespread basis by elite chefs. I experienced farm-to-table meals prepared by an expert. My grandmother’s gourmet peasant cooking set culinary benchmarks that I abide by to this day. I was one lucky boy.

The Biscuit Pan and the Cat Herd

One year, after two hard days of driving from DC to Arkansas in a loud, slow, underpowered Jeep CJ7, I arrived in Arkansas stiff, sore, exhausted, stressed out, and twitchy. I said my hellos and did not want to sit down to chat after sitting for ten straight hours in a buckboard masquerading as a passenger vehicle. To exorcise the mental and physical kinks, I walked the circumference of her acre property. I felt better with each accelerated step and with each deep breath of the bracing, cold November air.

As I circled back around, I saw Rutha open the back door and set out dinner for the outside cats. She fed them twice a day, in the morning and again around 3 or 4 p.m. Unable to afford commercial cat food, she fed the inside and outside cats her ethereal biscuits with white gravy, sans pepper.

Rutha set down the steaming pan of this godly food, stepped back inside and shut the door. Without thought or hesitation I bull-rushed the pan, knocking cats and kittens out of the way. Famished, I tried to steal the biscuit pan. I scooped the hot pan off the stoop. These were country cats, feral, aggressive animals that killed and ate other animals for their protein. They were having none of my nonsense.

Their leaders started leaping at my legs, some clawing, others rubbing up against me. I fended off the clawing alpha cats, burning my fingers and tongue while stuffing too-hot gravy and biscuits into my mouth. I must have looked like a lunatic street person committing some sort of animal-cruelty crime.

Her loud admonishment stopped me dead in my tracks as surely and quickly as it did when I was caught doing something bad as a ten-year-old. She scolded me and shamed me. I replaced the cat food. The cats immediately formed a circle around the tin of biscuits and began devouring it.

Later, stuffed, the cat herd would settle in for the cold November night by laying in a big cat pile underneath the house, directly underneath the gas heater in my grandmother’s living room that she sat next to in her old worn recliner chair on cold winter nights. The cats absorbed the radiant heat emanating from the floorboards a few inches above their heads. On that particular night, they went to bed a few biscuits shy of full.

Safety Note for Keto, Calorie Surplus and Hard Training

This article preserves Marty Gallagher’s RAW first-person perspective on food, appetite, old-school dieting, powerlifting, recovery, and family cooking. It is not individualized medical, nutrition, eating-disorder, diabetes, weight-gain, weight-loss, bodybuilding, powerlifting, or programming advice.

Keto dieting, semi-keto dieting, carb depletion, fasted cardio, large calorie surpluses, rapid weight changes, severe contest-style dieting, and deliberate rebound eating are not automatically appropriate for every person. Age, diabetes, blood-sugar history, medications, kidney disease, cardiovascular disease, gastrointestinal disease, eating-disorder history, pregnancy, breastfeeding, training status, sleep, and stress all matter.

Do not treat depletion and overeating as a universal muscle-building method. Stop or seek qualified guidance for dizziness, fainting, confusion, chest pain, unusual shortness of breath, hypoglycemia symptoms, severe weakness, rapid unexplained weight change, disordered eating patterns, persistent nausea, severe fatigue, or any symptom that feels different from normal training effort.

Equipment Notes for Training Around Food and Recovery

Equipment does not create the joy of eating, and it does not create recovery. The food, the rest, the training plan, the appetite and the timing do that. Equipment simply gives the lifter a way to put the recovered body back to work.

For the resistance-training side of this story, readers and facilities can compare dumbbells, barbells, and kettlebells. Specific options such as IRON COMPANY urethane hex dumbbells, the IRON COMPANY urethane barbell set, and IRON COMPANY premium powder-coated kettlebells may fit certain training spaces when the user, room, floor, and intended training style align.

For conditioning that supports appetite, recovery, and work capacity, compare exercise bikes and indoor rowing machines. Specific options such as the Concept2 RowErg indoor rower with PM5 and the Throwdown HIIT Bike Pro may fit some home or facility settings.

The equipment supports the training. It does not replace the food, the rest, or the judgment.

Related Culinary and Nutrition Reading

For more Marty Gallagher writing on nutrition, food culture and culinary judgment, read The Food Taliban and What We Can Learn from Elite Chefs.

RAW with Marty Gallagher, J.P. Brice, and Jim Steel Podcast.

About the Author: Marty Gallagher

As an athlete Marty Gallagher is a national and world champion in Olympic lifting and powerlifting. He was a world champion team coach in 1991 and coached Black's Gym to five national team titles. He's also coached some of the strongest men on the planet including Kirk Karwoski when he completed his world record 1,003 lb. squat. Today he teaches the US Secret Service and Tier 1 Spec Ops on how to maximize their strength in minimal time. As a writer since 1978 he’s written for Powerlifting USA, Milo, Flex Magazine, Muscle & Fitness, Prime Fitness, Washington Post, Dragon Door and now IRON COMPANY. He’s also the author of multiple books including Purposeful Primitive, Strong Medicine, Ed Coan’s book Coan, The Man, the Myth, the Method and numerous others. Read the Marty Gallagher biography here.