If you boil cauliflower until it is soft and mushy and then throw it in a blender, it has about the same appearance and consistency (and taste, if you put enough salt on it) as mashed potatoes.
Hat tip to Primal Blueprint: Quick & Easy Meals, by Mark Sisson. It is essentially a very low carbohydrate cookbook/diet, similar to Atkins (but with more fruit). Hence the attempt to replace potatoes (a delicious but high carb food) with cauliflower (which has no carbs, but unfortunately doesn't taste like anything unless I can pretend they are potatoes). I've been reading one of Sisson's other books, Primal Blueprint, and find it quite interesting even though I don't agree with every point. It argues that our modern lifestyles - which we have only been living for a few thousand years - do not agree with our underlying biology, which is the product of untold hundreds of thousands of years of genetic changes ('evolution').
It is truly fascinating to think about all the ways our modern lifestyle does not agree with our evolutionary trajectory in recent centuries, and how (it is supposed) that explains why modern man is so ill-adjusted. We have been molded by evolution to live as hunter-gatherers, yet our lifestyle today is one of several possible roles for which we are biologically ill-conceived: "cubicle drone", "motor vehicle driver", "factory worker", et cetera. We spend our days sitting in traffic, sitting on our rear ends staring at our computer screens, talking into telephones, or performing dull and boring repetitive physical tasks. Nearly all of the fruit of our labor goes to pay off other people in similarly unfulfilling occupations - bill collectors, bank loan officers (your home mortgage, or your landlord's mortgage if you are a renter), tax collectors, and the like. Walking from place to place - the standard mode of transportation of our ancestors - is looked down upon; the adjective "pedestrian" is often a condescending insult. We find ourselves entirely ill-adjusted to our situation, in both a physical and mental/emotional sense; witness the number of people who need to take drugs (natural or unnatural, legal or illegal) or engage in some high-risk hobby in order to feel good about themselves. Would you believe one in nine people takes an 'anti-depressant' drug in order to cope with their life here in the United States - the supposed pinnacle of human social evolution?
We spend our days sitting in traffic, working in cubicles, paying a substantial portion of our earnings to people we'd rather not, and eat highly processed "fast food" cooked by strangers that tastes great, but isn't likely really what nature intended for us. We are too tired to play with our children when we get home, and so stressed in general that we do not feel inclined to have enough of those children to maintain the species in 'developed' countries. We struggle with all manner of diseases unknown to our ancestors, thanks to our modern 'improved' lifestyle.
Is this really the way we are supposed to live? I can't stop thinking that I'd be much happier living in some primitive alternate reality where I hunted for my own meat, grew my own vegetables, did not know what an alarm clock sounded like, never had to sit in traffic, had no bosses/customers to satisfy or answer to, no mortgage, no taxes, no bills to pay, and no nuclear holocausts to worry about. Of course, in this alternative reality, I'd also have to face being eaten by bears, the dreaded North AmericanCave Lion, death from disease that is easily curable with modern medical technology, and an average lifespan of about 29 years. And life without air conditioning in the summer. More than once each day, though, I think the switch to the primitive life would be entirely worthwhile. Perhaps you can never entirely take the caveman out of the homo sapiens. At least, not until our genetics catch up to our evolution in another twenty or hundred thousand years from now.
