a robot, i am not » food

Toby Hemenway on Permaculture: Reaching Beyond Sustainability

jritch — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:30:17 +0000

This week’s Deconstructing Dinner podcast featured a fantastic talk by Toby Hemenway on agriculture systems and permaculture. While we speak about sustainability as an alternative to the currently implemented degenerative systems, what we really need to talk about are regenerative systems. Toby says, “If you ask how a marriage is going and you answer that it is being sustained, that’s not what you’re aiming for.” (a rough paraphrase on my part)

Toby goes on to speak about evidence regarding the hunter gatherer lifestyle vs. the sedentary agriculturalists lifestyle and presents the usual evidence that our ancestors were in better health than we thought. Well worth a listen even if you are familiar with many of the cases for permaculture.

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Post tags: audio, farming, food, permaculture, Podcasts, sustainability

The 100 Mile Diet on Vancouver Island

jritch — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:24:43 +0000

Loved this short little animation for the 100 Mile Food Society! Home is Where the Food is:

Home is Where the Food is from The Juki Museum on Vimeo.

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Post tags: canada, eating, farming, food, video

permaculture: a short film

jritch — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 05:34:15 +0000

Jane and I just finished watching this outstanding short film on the problems facing the UK (and ultimately the world) in supplying food while facing the reality of declining energy supplies. Unfortunately so much of the dialogue around peak oil centers on “Collapse” but the more I learn about permaculture, the more I think the future has potential to be better than our current one. A reason for optimism indeed.

This ~48 minute film is a fantastic way to enjoy an evening or to gain a great introduction to concepts behind the design science of permaculture.

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Post tags: food, peak oil, permaculture, video

Dr. Jason Bradford on how our agricultural system is primed for collapse

jritch — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 02:19:09 +0000

I just read over some troubling facts from Dr. Jason Bradford, an expert on food economics and the the problems with the US Food System. In light of the information below, I’m surprised we can keep the whole industrial ag. juggernaut moving forward. Throw in the variability of energy scarcity over the next few decades and maintaining this complex system looks to be impossible. Most shocking? Our food system requires 7.36x the output for production. That’s not even including transportation. Imagine if you had to work 7 times as many hours as you were paid on an hourly wage? Maybe we can right the ship before its too late but unfortunately we pay too little for our food and government policies cripple the small farmers trying to make a difference.

Commercial agriculture consumes 10.3 quads (quadrillion BTUs) of primary energy in order to produce 1.4 quads of food energy. The inputs are mainly fossil fuels used in running tractors, producing artificial fertilizers, producing seeds, trucking, refrigeration, processing, freezing and cooking.
Commercial agriculture not only depletes non-renewable resources and degrades soil, air, and water, but it also releases 5 billion pounds of harmful chemicals and massive amounts of greenhouse gas emissions into the environment per year.
Animal waste provides critically important fertilizer to small distributed farms, but in the modern massive feedlots of concentrated animal populations it becomes an environmental hazard. All the feed transported to the feedlots uses petroleum fuels, and the hay is grown using ancient “fossil water” pumped from deep, essentially non-renewable aquifers.
Over the last four decades or so, runoff from commercial agriculture has resulted in massive “dead zones” near our shorelines caused by algae blooms that suck the oxygen out of the water and create anoxic environments where nothing can live. (The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico has grown to an estimated 8,500 square miles.)
Just three crops comprise 71% of U.S. crop acres: corn, soybean, and wheat.
Monsanto, Pioneer, and Syngenta — all basically chemical companies — dominate the seed industry with patented GMO seeds. Those seeds are finely tuned to the temperature, rainfall, and so on of the recent past, making climate change a major threat to the whole food regime (more on that here).
Likewise, a handful of giant companies now control the vast majority of the food supply system — a stark contrast to the millions of small family farmers who dominated it prior to the 1960s.
Nearly all of the food delivery system uses just-in-time inventory methods, so there is only one to three days’ supply at any point in the distribution chain.

[bullet points via Chris Nelder at GetReaList]

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Post tags: collapse, farming, food, peak oil

other people like sardines?

jritch — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 23:22:47 +0000

I’ve recently become enamored with sardines. Anyone who knows my eating habits can attest to the fact that I’m going through Trader Joe’s sardines soaked in olive oil at a rapid pace. Oddly enough, I enjoy them for breakfast. They are delicious little fish that also have great implications for nature. The Washington Post has even tackled what apparently is a new sardine movement,

Eating smaller fish… offers health benefits. Because sardines eat mostly plants, they do not accumulate high levels of mercury or PCBs the way larger, carnivorous fish such as tuna or salmon do. Sardines also live shorter lives: six years vs. about 10 for tuna, meaning less time in the ocean to absorb hazardous toxins. Those factors, say the Sardinistas, plus high levels of protein and omega-3s, make sardines an excellent option for pregnant women, children and eco-conscious college students on a budget.

Intellectually, it’s a strong case, but to succeed, the Sardinistas must overcome a big cultural hurdle. Sardines look like fish. And most Americans would rather not be reminded that the meat they eat was once a living creature. “The reason we eat big predators [such as tuna and salmon] is not because they are big predators; it’s because they can be cut into steaks,” said Alton Brown, host of Food Network’s “Good Eats,” …”Bluefin tuna is like crack cocaine if it’s good. But we all know what happens if you try to live on crack cocaine.”

[via the Washington Post]

confronting the American Paradox

jritch — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:22:36 +0000

Americans have a curious relationship with food. Despite thinking drastically more about health and its relation to eating than citizens of other nationalities, the American finds his or herself increasingly less healthy. This is the American Paradox. Much like the nutritionist’s examination of the “French Paradox” or the Mediterranean Diet, Michael Pollan aims to examine the effect of “nutritionism” on American society and our health epidemic through, his book, In Defense of Food.

This all began for me back in 2006 as I sat in my dingy apartment across from University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Following the usual evening ritual, I was cooking some canned food or quick microwave item before sitting down to watch the Colbert Report on Comedy Central. This particular evening, Colbert has Michael Pollan as a guest. At the interview table, Pollan lays out corn, peanut butter, soda and a piece of meat claiming that all of the above was naught but corn. This was a grand hypothesis from my perspective and I immediately took to Amazon to order the book that discussed this Omnivore’s Dilemma. After quickly devouring the story of the path from producer to consumer, I was struck at how much I simply didn’t know about the things in my possession. Where they came from and who made them was a mystery and I had simply never thought about it because I had no need to. The reason for this failure of consideration was the fact that money is the great anonymizer, replacing relationships with cold hard digits as I would later learn from Charles Eisenstein in his book Ascent of Humanity. So as the 2008 New Year rang in, I was in the Dallas airport on my way to Austin for the American Astronomical Society conference when I saw In Defense of Food on the shelf. It’s been a busy and and only now in 2009 did I feel that I was ready to read it. Once again Pollan changes the paradigm for food through a complete and thorough dismantling of the nutritional mindset that has used the American populace as its ginuea pigs over the last 50 years. An experiment that is weakening its grip as claims like, “fat is always bad for us” are being proven as having weak links to truth at best.

Nutritionism makes three fateful claims about the things we eat,

First: What matters most is not the food but the “nutrient” contained inside the food

Second: We need expert help in deciding what to eat because nutrition is incomprehensible to everyone but scientists, this is very similar to holding nutrition scientists as being little more than a ruling, mystical priesthood complete with its own esoteric and confounding initiation rituals through the “church” of the FDA

Third: The purpose of eating is to promote a narrow concept of physical health. Simply put, other cultures do not think of their food as a health item. The majority of the world’s citizens eat because they have well defined and very important cultural codes. Taboos and reasons that have developed over a very long period of time guide daily choices for eating. These mechanisms were developed because they work. The human species has adapted to a large number of foods, culture has encoded generations of information in this system.

The puritanical foundation for American society has long decried the pleasure of life, and eating was not spared from this mindset. The joy of eating has fallen to the wayside. We are told to exert willpower upon our “imperfect” bodies through drinking, “exactly X glasses of water a day” or through getting, “100% of our daily minimum allowance of vitamin A.” In a recent study by University of Pennsylvania psychologist Paul Rozin, Americans associated chocolate cake with nothing other than guilt, while the French remarked that it represented celebration.

Faced with epidemics of Western diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer, a plausible solution is to embrace our cultural past. Only in the last 50 years has our species diverged from its original diet, a diet that we have adapted to over thousands if not tens of thousands of years, encoded in the cultural rituals mentioned above. In the early 1900s, Weston Price quit his job as a dentist in Ohio to explore the health of indigenous societies, finding them far healthier than their “wealthier” counterparts in “developed” nations. Price watched the introduction of processed foods into these cultures and quickly saw that these tribes became obese and unhealthy in the same way we are. The problems for the natives resulted from the diet and the new culture being built around the habits of eating. Price’s observations were largely ignored because it was bad for business. Food companies, ever agglomerating, were looking to solve the “fixed stomach” problem: that demand for food is fairly constant with the growth of populations.

How could these food companies grow their market, attracting new investors that could promise of rapid profits? The method food corporations could grow their business was through processing food products, over and over. And this is exactly the route they pursued. Food companies propagated the ideals of nutritionism because they were profitable. As Gregory Scrinis wrote, “…if foods are understood only in terms of the various quantities of nutrients they contain, then even processed foods may be considered ‘healthier’ for you than whole foods if they contain the appropriate quantities of some nutrient.” For the international food conglomerates, Pollan remarks: “How convenient.”

If the nutritional quality of an apple in 1940 is 3x that of a modern apple it just means Cargill and Monstanto can profit from our need to buy three times as much. The agricultural policies instituted during the Nixon era with Earl Butz as Secretary of Ag had respectable motives, increasing the access of food for everyone was a noble goal. But years of overproduction and increasing monoculture indicates that now is a a time to re-evaluate, not romanticize the past while falling into the ever growing black hole of Western diseases.

This situation reminds me of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens, a humorous novel about the apocalypse. When the four horsemen arrive, Famine is a major food corporation executive, implementing business practices to ensure that people will consume more; more items that masquerade as food with increasingly less nutritional benefit from doing so. This parody has become reality. Food must be more than fuel.

The familiarity of the human with the life cycle of the plant or animal is so deeply tied to the maximum nutritional value that food can provide. When tomatoes can give their maximum benefit to us, they are most attractive, they call out to us by turning red and smelling ripe. So is the way of other plants. Processed food removes this tie to nature.

But there is hope, when Kerin O’Day took ten aborigines back from the confines of a modern diet to their native bush, after seven weeks of a hunter-gatherer diet, the diabetes that plagued the group dissipated. We can avoid many of the negative effects of the western diet by adhering to some simple principles that Pollan closes out the book describing. Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Most important among his explanation of this mantra is the recommendation to, “shake the hand that feeds us” because only as we develop an intimate relationship with the substances constituting the sacred act of eating will we truly know what to eat and how to eat it. Deeply in agreement with my recent read of The Yoga of Eating by Charles Eisenstein, In Defense of Food is more rational as opposed to spiritual but still just as revolutionary.

a union with eating

jritch — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 02:54:53 +0000

When reading Charles Eisenstein’s Ascent of Humanity a few weeks ago I was amazed at the depth and breadth of his scholarship. Unfortunately the book is so tremendous, weighing in at over 600 pages its enough to scare most people off. The Yoga of Eating is a focused piece of writing that takes all of Eisenstein’s core philosophies of separation from core humanity and presents in an easily accessible 160 pages.

However, while Ascent of Humanity is focused on the entire scope of existence, Yoga of Eating is solely about our attitudes and approaches to food.

Charles begins by stating that, “the health crisis engulfing the modern world is a spiritual crisis, and a precocious opportunity as well. Pain and illness in the body can illuminate what is important in life.” And it is that approach which forms the basis for his thesis. By listening to our body when we eat and truly, wholly trusting it we can begin to find our actual dietary needs. Modern western medical practice indicates that our bodies are imperfect and need discipline but as we have imposed more and more willpower the results have been continually diminishing.

Only by practicing the occasional eating in silence, attentive eating and focus on breathing can we reunify with the sacred practice of consuming life in the form of plants and animals.

To highlight one example, we will examine the sweetness of our food, something I have particularly noticed in US foodstuffs (with the emphasis on ‘stuff’). This sweetness may be a result of the ever increasing desire to break free from bland lives filled with illusory “choices” between Kmart and Walmart, CBS and NBC, focusing on security above all else. The sweetness is a glimpse of the fullness of our true existence.

Key to practicing the Yoga of Eating is understanding that our bodies are adapted perfectly to the conditions we have experienced. If we look at the world around us, we must understand that if I were you, I would do the same things you do. If God were you, he would do those same things. We must embrace this understanding of our perfect bodies. A body separate from a false image propagated by the establishment. By effortlessly trusting ourselves, we will likely lose weight, eat less and exercise more but without the pain and struggle of diets and willpower.

Perhaps the Yoga of Eating will be too irrational for many, and if the approach Charles advocates will make you skeptical, challenge yourself by reading this book. You will not emerge from the final page the same. It is time for a call for true selfishness. When we are good to ourselves we can embrace the abundance nature provides and we can relax into the change the we most crucially desire.

Jane’s India-inspired party

jritch — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 15:39:35 +0000

Saturday was a warm-up for our Miracle Berry party in a few weeks,as Jane and I hosted Kevin, Mary and John over to cook out of Padma Lakshmi’s Tangy Tart Hot & Sweet (which Jane got for her birthday from Korey).

Jane printed out a fancy menu, starting us off with raspberry champagne spritzers and spiced candied pecans.

For the main dish we drank blueberry and ginger mojitos using a recipe from Tyler Florence. Unfortunately, they were a little too sweet and if you try them use more lime and a little less ginger.

Followed by tilapia in coconut milk with curry leaves, the mojitos were great at cutting the heat. With the jalapenos, red peppers and other spices, the fish was burning hot! Carrot and cilantro salad also ensured that our mouths didn’t melt. After all the heat, we ended our meal with lychee sorbet and homemade masala chai. The lychee sorbet was really easy to make but incredibly delicious and the hot chai matched the coolth from the sorbet. Highly recommended!

Afterwards we played Bohnanza (the bean game that is always a lot of fun) and a round of Cranium! It has been a while since we’ve done a board game night but everyone had so much fun we’ll be doing it again soon.