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Food – are we facing a Crisis or an Opportunity?

August 11, 2022

Food – are we facing a Crisis or an Opportunity?

This post shares four things. The one that takes up the most space is about those two little words “food crisis” that are starting to make headlines. There’s a reason they’re making headlines, and it might not be the reason you think.

The other items in this post are two tips for ethical buying/browsing choices, and a little piece of wisdom about the language we use.

Ethical internet searching

Ecosia.org is an internet search engine (like Google) that plants trees (unlike Google).

Planting — Image by Rommel Diaz from Pixabay

They do a lot of other things unlike Google, too. In their words:

“We dedicate all our profits to the regeneration of the planet. We even signed a legal contract binding us to our not-for-profit purpose forever. Ecosia can’t be sold … and we can’t take money out of the company.”

Also in their words:

“… if everyone switched from Google to Ecosia, we could plant 300 billion trees — every year.”

Google offers so many free tools in addition to its search engine that it’s hard to go past them for sheer convenience. That’s one of the reasons they’re so influential and powerful.

What might a company like Ecosia achieve in the next 10, the next 20, 30 years… if enough people supported them to enable them to start offering other services the same way Google did?

You can read their manifesto here.

Ethical undies

Do you wear socks or undies? Me too. And the other day I finally found a socks ‘n’ jocks company that I feel good about buying from. I was so excited, my kids rolled their eyes. What’s Mum on about now.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ginger in a RealFood Garden

December 19, 2021

Ginger in a RealFood Garden

Ginger has thrived at our place since I learned to think about what it gives and what it needs in terms of its connections to the other plants around it, to me as the ginger-grower, and to me and my family as the ginger-users.

Ginger (Zingiber officinale) is a super useful plant. But no matter how potentially useful a plant is, its usefulness is only actualized when you learn to use it consistently. The more consistently you use a plant the more useful it becomes, and the more you come to rely on it, the better care you take of it.

I’ve been keen on ginger for a long time, but I’ve neglected and lost a lot of ginger plants because I kept putting them in places where I’d forget to take care of them and use them.

Ginger connections…

Plants that thrive in what I call “a RealFood garden”* are plants with connectionsⁱ. The more the better. Here are some of the connections I think about when I think of ginger.

*Can be linked to the other post I’ve sent with this one, “Connections in a RealFood Garden.”

… to the kitchen

I use ginger in salad dressings and its also a key ingredient in my sauerkraut. I’m not very good (yet) at using it in other culinary ways, but there’s always hope. (If you have easy tips for adding fresh ginger to meals that don’t involve taking classes in Asian Cookery, please share in the comments down the bottom!)

We make ginger tea regularly. Cooled ginger tea quenches thirst much more effectively than water.

And a cup of ginger tea before a meal helps digestion and may provide a raft of other benefits from reduced inflammation to helping keep cholesterol levels balanced. Which leads us to the next kind of connection.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Empowered Thinking for Deep Change

November 21, 2021

Empowered Thinking for Deep Change

We’re so in the habit of controlling each other/being controlled that we’ve forgotten how to think for ourselves. We’re so overwhelmed by the challenges we face that we assume there’s nothing we can do (and it’s all our fault). And we assume that controlling each other is necessary and failing was inevitable because humans are just basically bad.

Let’s re-examine these habits and assumptions.

I’ve been searching for a better name for the category of blog posts that I’ve been calling “Thinking Differently.” I’m leaning towards choosing “Empowered Thinking.”

Paying attention to the kinds of thinking we choose to engage in is critical to our quality of life as individuals, and to how we handle our collective challenges.

In his foreword to the book Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble, Charles Eisenstein writes that,

Cultures older than our own widely recognised that words carried a magical, regenerative power. They were not mere [symbols] connected through arbitrary social convention to the real world of things. Words were emanations of land and life, partaking intimately in the beingness of the things, processes, and qualities they signified. To name a thing was to invoke it.”

~ Charles Eisenstein (bold emphasis is mine)

These two words, “empowered thinking”—or any words we chose to use and especially if we use them repeatedly, with strong emotion or intention, or with ritual—are not just words. Words and thoughts name and shape our world, and choosing them carefully, deliberately, is one of our responsibilities as stewards of our world.

Are you authorized?

Here are some synonyms (alternative words with a similar meaning) for the word “empowered”:

authorized
allowed
sanctioned
permitted

In our culture (the dominant culture on earth today), words like these mean you have permission. You’re allowed to be somewhere and/or to do something.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

2 Ways to Preserve Leafy Greens From Your Veggie Garden

October 19, 2021

2 Ways to Preserve Leafy Greens From Your Veggie Garden

In my experience, leafy greens are among the easiest kinds of veggies to grow. But they don’t keep for very long and after you’ve given basketfuls of them to your friends and eaten stir-fried leafy greens, leafy greens in soups, in stews, and added to salads, and they’re still coming, what do you do with them next?

Below is a basket of produce from our modular veggie garden. I’ve lost count of how many of these I’ve brought to the kitchen or given as return gifts to friends in exchange for music lessons, fruit, preserves, and general good-will.

But lately I’m finding that I even have more green leaves than I can reasonably give away. Here are two ideas for preserving leafy greens when this happens to you. The first is a bit of an experiment. The second is a tried and true favourite in my kitchen.

The experiment: can you make sauerkraut with green cabbages that haven’t formed heads?

There are quite a number of cabbages like this one in the garden that haven’t had time to form heads yet and are starting to get a bit chewed by caterpillars. We’ve been eating the outer leaves from them for a while but yesterday I decided to harvest some whole cabbages and use them to make ‘kraut, even though they haven’t headed yet.

Because:

I’m not certain they will head at all; our hot, dry weather is approaching and they may not have time to form heads before they think about going to seed.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Seeing through the seductions of science and technology

May 23, 2021

Seeing through the seductions of science and technology

The history books in our schools tell us that scientific and technological advancement have freed us from boredom, ignorance and oppression; from drudgery and repetition; from dirt, disease and malnutrition.

Let’s briefly examine these assumptions about what “progress” has achieved, and consider where we go from here.

Freedom from boredom, ignorance, and oppression

To be free from boredom, ignorance and oppression, first we condemn our children to approximately two decades of mind-numbing “education” during what should be the free-est years of their lives. (Education, depending on how it’s conducted, can either be liberating or it can restrict children’s thinking and experimentation to such an extent that most of them forget how to think for themselvesⁱ.)

“So long as our kids get the 3R’s and plenty of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) drummed into them,” we might think, “they won’t be disadvantaged.”

Next, we enshrine a screen in every home; even in every room of every home; even in the car! (Because, now that we have all this leisure time thanks to technology, we need something to fill it with.)

Numbed by popular media, programmed for consumption to support a never-ending-growth economy, we adults send our kids to good schools and exhort them to work hard and earn good grades so they’ll get good jobs, while we keep our own noses to the grindstone and our feet on the treadmill.

We’re sure that once the mortgage is paid off and the cars and screens are upgraded, THEN we can start having fun.

Freedom from drudgery and repetition

School prepares children for their working lives.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Nature’s Original Toothbrush

March 6, 2021

Natural Toothbrush — Photo by vadim kaipov on Unsplash

Nature’s Original Toothbrush

Researching the topic of homemade toothpastes recently, I began to wonder what people did before there were plastic toothbrushes.

Turns out that we’ve been cleaning our teeth since probably before we walked upright on two legs. In this article, I’ll share what I’ve recently learned about how it was done (and in many parts of the world, still is).

Teeth Cleaning In Its original Form

Cast your mind back to the last time you were out on a picnic, you’d finished eating, and you were lazing about on the grass in the sunshine.

Did anyone in the group pluck a grass stem and start poking about between their teeth with it? That’s teeth cleaning, in its original form.

Now, think about the last time you threw a stick (or saw someone else throw a stick) for a dog? Did the dog ever stop bringing the stick back, plop down on the grass, and just gnaw on the stick? That’s also teeth cleaning in its original form.

Teeth Cleaning Goes Way Back

Mass production makes modern materials like plastics, and widgets like toothbrushes, so readily available to us that we who rely on supermarkets have forgotten there was ever any other way.

But there are other ways, and they go way back. Here are some bits and pieces I found when I searched for how pre-historic people cleaned their teeth.

An article called “Teeth cleaning: an ancient habit” describes how fossilised teeth from ancient hominids, and experiments done to replicate grooves in the teeth, suggest that early humans used grass stalks as tooth picks, just as we do today when we go on picnics. (Grass contains hard, abrasive silica particles, which may explain the grooves seen on those ancient teeth.)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Easy Ways to Increase the Available Minerals in Your Food

August 25, 2020

Nettle Infusion — Image by author Kate Martignier

Easy Ways to Increase the Available Minerals in Your Food

Assuming you’re eating the healthiest plant foods, grown in the healthiest soils, that you can find or afford, what else can you do to increase your mineral intake without using pills?

In the first article in this series we discussed the relative nutrition available in supermarket veggies, heirloom veggies from bio-diverse gardens and farms, and edible wild plants.

In the second article, we explored what’s happened to the mineral availability of the plant foods we eat as a result of soil management, and also as a result of our food selection and preparation choices.

In this final article for this series, we’ll explore some ways to maximize our absorption of the minerals that our plant foods offer.

We Need “Outside Help” To Digest Plant Foods

Plant cells have a cell membrane, and then around the outside of that they have a rigid cell wall made out of cellulose and lignin (substances that are particularly hard to digest), which gives plants their structure in the absence of bones to hold them up. We need ways of breaking down this tough cell wall if we are to digest and absorb the nutrients held in plant cells.

Animal cells, in contrast, have a thin, permeable cell membrane which can regulate what comes in and out of the cell but provides nothing in the way of structure[i].

Cooking with heat, fermenting, pickling, or dressing with an oil and vinegar salad dressing are some examples of preparations that break open plant cell walls[ii] and liberate the nutrients they hold.

All these processes cause plants to lose their crunch and change their colour; that’s how you know the cell walls have collapsed.

Think of it as pre-digesting tough plant foods that our digestive systems are not equipped to handle without some outside help.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Beyond Eggs – Part 1

November 16, 2019

Beyond Eggs – Part 1

The Pros and Cons of Free Range and Mobile Chicken Pens

Well-managed chickens can provide eggs and meat as well as composting assistance, sanitation and pest reduction, soil amendment services, and entertainment.

But poorly managed chickens tend to focus all their talents and energy into very destructive pursuits, as you know if you’ve had your seedlings repeatedly dug up or your fruit trees efficiently de-mulched.

How can we harness all that chickens have to offer, in ways that keep everybody happy, healthy and productive?

Design and management for maximum integration

A major key—perhaps THE key—to making a Permaculture system work is the relationships between the parts (or elements) of the system.

A flock of chickens is an example of an element in a Permaculture system, and it can potentially have relationships with many other elements in the system that it supports/is supported by.

Anybody can stick a flock of chickens in the backyard.

But if you were approaching it from a Permaculture perspective (a holistic perspective) you’d carefully consider how to locate and manage the flock well so that ALL of the outputs it produces, or functions it can perform, are put to use in service of the surrounding ecosystem.

Healthy ecosystems teem with diversity, each life-form inter-connected with all the others in a complex web that would be weakened and compromised if just one strand were removed. This is what we are striving to emulate.

It’s the interactions, exchanges, and synergy between the components of the system that provide the stability, adaptability, flexibility, efficiency, productivity/abundance, and beauty that we find lacking in a monoculture or in a less integrated system.

With this concept in mind, this article Series will discuss:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Two Different Kinds of Healthcare–Part 1

January 30, 2019

TWO DIFFERENT KINDS OF HEALTHCARE – PART 1

The doctor visit and the pharmaceutical prescription usually get us back on the job quickly and with a minimum of inconvenience.

Modern pharmaceutical medicine is like the medical equivalent of fast food – it’s fast, it’s convenient, and too much of it erodes our health over time.

In contrast, at-home healthcare and natural remedies are like home-cooked, real food, in that they take more time and effort. They also work more slowly, and they work best if there is already a foundation of healthy living habits in place.

Home healthcare and natural remedies may sometimes be less convenient, but over time they build robust health on many levels.

Recently, one of our children had a bacterial skin infection called impetigo or “school sores.” It took several weeks for us to resolve it, and there was a point in time when I was not sure that home remedies were going to be sufficient.

In my search for solutions I spoke to women who have dealt with school sores in their family and community, I did lots of reading, and I made an appointment with a doctor. That was our first doctor appointment since well before my children were born more than 11 years ago.

Everyone I spoke to and everything I read told me that I’d end up using oral antibiotics,because that was the only alternative to a long, traumatic battle with a dubious outcome.

I’m relieved and happy to report that although we did go to a doctor and receive a prescription for antibiotics, we never had to use it.

The experience left me pondering the contrast between these twovastly different kinds of healthcare, which led to this article.

AT-HOME HEALTHCARE, VERSUS THE MODERN HEALTHCARE SYSTEM

On the one hand, we have at-home healthcare.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Backyard Chickens, and the Interconnectedness of All Things, Part 3

October 19, 2018

BACKYARD CHICKENS, AND THE INTERCONNECTEDNESS OF ALL THINGS. PART 3

This article is Part 3 of a Series that is mostly about chickens. It’s not a how-to-care-for-chickens article, but a how-to-appreciate-the-specialness-of-chickens article.

If you are interested only in chickens and would like to read about the funny things one of our roosters gets up to, this article will be fine to read by itself.

But if you missed the earlier articles in the series, and you’re interested in what backyard chickens have to do with the interconnectedness of all things, you’ll need to go back to the beginning of Part 1.

ROOSTERS ARE A LOT OF FUN TO WATCH

Roosters are gentle, generous, and protective, particularly as they get older, feel they have their place well established, and don’t have to compete with other roosters for space or mates.

They show the hens all the good things to eat that they find, calling them and sharing the food in a similar way to how a mother hen shares with her chicks. And they come running to defend the hens when they hear one in distress.

In our flock of about 30 hens, there are currently three adult roosters. The oldest has his own family group of hens who go with him to forage in the same areas each day, to rest in the same shady spots, to dust bath in their designated dust baths.

The other two are younger, and very different. One, a large white rooster who stars in the stories I’ll share below, seems to be where-ever there is food to share with hens, or where-ever there are good spots for hens to lay eggs.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Backyard Chickens, and the Interconnectedness of All Things

October 3, 2018

BACKYARD CHICKENS, AND THE INTERCONNECTEDNESS OF ALL THINGS

This 3-Part Series articles starts off with our cultural lack of understanding about our place in the web of life, which is at the root of why our efforts to address ecological destruction aren’t working yet.

If you were mainly interested in chickens, stay with me – I’ll get onto backyard chickens in the second part of Part 1, and then I’ll stick almost entirely to chickens for the rest of the Series.

Please note, though, that this is not a “how to take care of chickens” Series (you can find those everywhere). This article Series is about “how to appreciate chickens as more than just egg-layers and garden-scratchers.” You’ll find out the importance of this, as you read the following section.

WE NEED A BETTER APPRECIATION OF OUR CONNECTEDNESS TO ALL OF LIFE:

I’ve been reading some of Charles Eisenstein’s writings. In his books and articles, Eisenstein points out that regardless of how hard we work in a piecemeal way or on a superficial level to address the social and ecological challenges we face, collectively we are still missing a fundamental piece of the puzzle. It’s a piece that must fall into place before deep change can occur on a broad scale.

That missing piece has to do with our culture’s ways of interpreting reality, and our place in it.

Ecological destruction and social upheaval will continue until we as a culture experience a fundamental change in the way we view our place and role on earth, and our relationship with the rest of life.

So long as we continue to hold onto a (now obsolete) scientific worldview that says we are alone in the universe, we will continue to place ourselves above and apart from nature, and to prioritize our own wellbeing at the expense of other lifeforms.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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