Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I. Energetics

1 Quality and Quantity: Beyond the Realm of the Senses

2 The Decline and Fall of Energetics

3 Enter the Age of Sanity

4 Your Most Intimate Relationship

Part II. Choosing Your Food

5 The Essence of Choosing

6 Habit: Appetite’s Nemesis

7 Choosing with Your Senses

8 Circumstantial Choosing

9 Choosing with Your Personality

10 Choosing from Reaction

11 Choosing from the Bigger Picture

12 Big Picture or Big Brother?

13 More “Choosing Under the Influence”: Concepts, Advice, and Dietary Trends

14 Five Familiar Faces

Part III. Working Models

15 Character Study

16 Food’s Essential Character

17 Food’s Temperament

18 A Basic Food Character Chart

19 Shaping Characters

20 Preparations

Part IV. The Cast of Characters

21 A Symphony of Flora and Fauna

22 A Matter of Meat

23 A Chicken in Every Pot

24 Birds of Another Feather

25 Living on the Egg

26 Mammals

27 Creatures of the Deep

28 Dairy Foods

29 The Animated Life of Plants

30 Some Unusual Characters

31 The Staff of Life: Cereal Grains

32 Beans/Legumes

33 Nuts and Seeds

34 Fruits

35 Condiments and Seasonings

36 Algae

Part V. A Forbidden History of Food and Agriculture

37 The Origins of Agriculture

38 The Prehistory and Reemergence of Agriculture: Reconsidering Human Origins

39 Traditional Ancestral Diets

40 Cacao: The Essence of Chocolate

41 The Gift of Grain and Flowering Plants

42 Dangerous Brains: The “Lo-Carb” Fad and Diet Extremism in the Twenty-first Century

Part VI. A Call to Common Sense

43 The Golden Spiral of Traditional Foods

44 Choosing a Healthy Diet

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

About the Author

Index

About the Author

Steve Gagne is a natural health and nutrition counsellor who began researching and teaching food energetics in 1972. He teaches throughout the United States and Europe and continues to study traditional cultures and their dietary practices in remote parts of the world.

Reviews

“Food Energetics is a comprehensive, easy-to-understand, and absolutely essential explanation of the spiritual dimensions of food. If you believe in the concept of living things having a soul, this book describes the soul qualities in all of our foods. Here is the ultimate explanation of the term soul food.”
*Russell Mariani, author of Healing Digestive Illness*

“Nobody understands the power, magic, and impact of food better than Steve Gagné. Prepare to read, eat, and be transformed!”
*John David Mann, coauthor of The Go-Giver:A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea*

“This book is exceptional in the field of diet today. Steve Gagné’s deep, informed perspective helps elucidate the thoughts of Michael Pollan and gives us access to a simple, user-friendly way of understanding food.”
*Joshua Rosenthal, author of Integrative Nutrition*

“One of the most important insights for anyone who has personally experienced the diet/disease, diet/symptom connection is the awareness of inevitable food diet dogma--meaning, the initial tendency for any student of natural health to create fairly hardedged principles around what is Right Food and Wrong Food and believe them as incontrovertibly true for the rest of their life and for all of humanity. Generally at that moment, a student of natural health will join one of the groups that best fit those beliefs, be it the All Raw group, or Vegetarianism, or Macrobiotic/Vegan/ Natural Hygiene/Paleolithic or any other of the well-known food philosophies. Gagné gently helps dislodge this dogma and gets us to see a wider view of what food is, what it isn’t, and how it has been used by healthy cultures throughout the world to heal and stay healthy. Whether you are just waking up to the realization that most of your symptoms are diet related or are an old salt in the study of the food and health connection, Food Energetics is simply a must-have book.”
*Scott Ohlgren, author of The 28-Day Cleansing Program*