Sustainable, LOCAL Agriculture KEY to our Survival

We have really gotten off of the straight and narrow in our modern food system!

I mean, would our grandparents have thought that Velveeta "cheese" and Margarine, i.e. congealed chemically derived vegetable oils were good and healthy???

We've been on a slippery slope for a long time, and just like a frog in a gradually heating pot of water doesn't know his peril, we are now like that frog- 

The water is near to boiling, and we still have not woken up!!

We need to totally revamp our food production system, to what it used to be.

Listen to Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms and "Yoooh- what's up Y'aaal!" Sean Croxton of Underground Wellness to get a good overview of the basic problem, and what needs to be done.

We all need to know what to eat- "Just Eat Real Foods" JERF...

But we really need to know that these REAL FOODS

WILL STILL BE 

AROUND!!!

J

Sustainable Small Scale Farming and the Four Hour Chef!

There is a new book in town: The Four Hour Chef, by Tim Ferriss.

Check out the trailer for the book:













Tim is the author of The Four Hour Body, and The Four Hour Workweek.  Both books are well worth reading, just for an alternative view on nutrition and exercise (the first book), and on your work life (the second).  He researches everything to the max, and comes away with interesting insights, to say the least!  (Some of his "experiments" are downright weird, but hey- that's just 60 year old me talking!).

He is basically a Paleo diet advocate, but he does include things such as a "cheat day", where he consumes multiple pastries, and also allows legumes, i.e. beans as "slow carbs", meaning they take a lot of time to digest.  He can get away with such licenses, since he is:

#1. Young
#2.  Eats a basically paleo type of diet, most of the time

He has the idea that anyone can master just about anything, given 6 months of "practice".

This is his idea that I really like, and I think he is on to something!  Hence- The Four Hour Chef as a means to master cooking skills!  I like that...

Here is a quote from the intro to his book, which I find compelling, and in line with my own thinking about sustainable farming:


"Here are a few of my notes, from multiple sources:

• In the U.S., the last generation of career farmers is retiring. Specifically, more than 50% are set to retire in the next 10 years. Their farmland will be up for grabs. Will it go to an industrial agro-corp like Monsanto, and therefore most likely lead to monocrops (wheat, corn, soy, etc.) that decimate ecosystems? Will it be strip malls? Or might it become a collection of smaller food producers? The last option is the only one that’s environmentally sustainable. It’s also the tastiest. As Michael Pollan would say: how you vote three times a day (with the meals you eat) will determine the outcome.

• Going small can amount to big economic stimulus. Let’s look at the economic argument for shifting from a few huge producers to many smaller producers: by diversifying crops beyond corn and soybeans in just six agricultural states, the net economic gain would be $882 million in sales and 9,300 jobs, according to the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University.

• Environmental impact? Converting the U.S.’s 160 million corn and soybean acres to organic production would sequester enough carbon to satisfy 73% of the Kyoto targets for CO reduction in the U.S.

In other words, the fun you have in this book will do a lot of good beyond you and your family. In many ways, our eating behavior in the next few years will decide the future of the entire country.

The magic number and my target is 20 million people. It is the tipping point: 20 million people can create a supertrend.

To dodge the submerged iceberg of industrial-scale food production and its side effects, to alter the course of this country and reinvigorate the economy, all I need to do is make you more interested in food. In total, we need to make 20 million people more aware of eating.

This will lead to changes, starting with breakfast. Then the snowball of consonant decisions takes care of the rest.

Stranger things have happened."

Go Tim Ferriss!!

J

Healthy eating, Paleo style, on the road!

Here are the hands of your own PaleoJay, cradling the sumptuous supper of lamb, sweet potatoes, zucchini and sausage at the Trempealeau Hotel in the small Mississippi river town of Trempealeau, Wisconsin!  The menu was replete with shrimp, steaks, salads etc., all ready for a traveling Paleo person to have a tasty meal packed with nutrition!

It seems that there are still many places to go where good, ancestral types of food are readily available.  Just as in buying our food, the very best quality food is available from small, independent restaurants; places where great pride is still taken in excellence of ingredients, and in careful preparation- quite the opposite of the big "Chains" that are all about cutting corners, using the cheapest ingredients to maximize profits, and spending most of their extra money on advertising to seduce you into patronizing them.  

The Trempealeau Hotel is one of these small eating places of excellence.  If you are passing by La Crosse on I90, it is well worth your while to get off at hwy 157 in Onalaska and head north to the Trempealeau sign, and then west to the Hotel!  You will even pass within a mile of the fabled home of yours truly...  be sure to wave!

My point, besides being a brief travelogue, is that of bypassing what has become the degraded nature of  the Mass American diet and culture of today, and seeking out those places that are more like what our culture embraced 50 and more years ago.  Small independent restaurants, small and independent farmers- this is where we need to be spending our dollars!  Not on fast/crappy food, or big/crappy chains, but to those who have traditional or ancestral values of quality.

I believe one of the most important figures today in a sustainable farming model of excellence is Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms.  A working farmer, Joel is also an excellent speaker, and a convincing role model for traditional agriculture.  Joel's most recent book, Confessions of a Lunatic Farmer, is must reading for any modern person seeking health and sanity in our crazy modern world!

He shows a real, viable alternative to the failing Big Agribusiness model prevalent today...

Bottom line:  Caring about your health, and the health of the land beneath your feet, and the animals and plants under your care, is the essence of Good Stewardship, and is really what we were created to accomplish.  To quote John Wesley, founder of the Methodist movement:


“Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can.” 

I think Polyface farms is following that tradition.

J

J, Phil and Holly at our last nursing home "gig"

Independence Day, the Founding Fathers, Paleo diet, and Conservatism

Independence Day!  So what does that have to do with Paleo living?  Well, quite a bit, as it turns out...

The founding fathers of America had a strong vision of what they wanted this new country to be!  They wanted to escape the class structure that had so stratified the countries of Europe; the prevailing vision was of a country of small farms, where each family was largely independent and self-reliant.  Most of the settlers in America were of English stock at this time, and they were acutely aware of the top down, autocratic, controlling nature of that society: they meant to avoid that!  

And, for a long time, our country was pretty much what our Founding Fathers had envisioned- small, largely independent, self-supporting small towns, peopled by small, local businesses and small, well-run family farms that grew a wide variety of crops and a variety of animals.  Government was largely local,  and so those who lived within a community were pretty much the ones that ran it!  Charity was provided by the local churches, not government.

Things began to change in the 1960's, and by the '70's we had really started to go a different, dangerous path- ironically, we started to turn more into a European, top-down, big Government and big Food corporations and big Medical all started to morph into GIANTS.  Probably the main way this power was concentrated was by the advances into media: Television, especially was perfect for gradually brainwashing people into believing things that, before they were constantly being bombarded with such ideas, they would have found ridiculous, just by using their common sense!  Things like:

1. Fat is bad!  Don't eat butter- eat margarine, which is a kind of fake, industrial seed oil we'd like to sell to you, rather than to pay for its disposal.
2. Eggs are bad!  Instead of eating the eggs your own chickens lay, eat a big bowl (or two!) of processed grains, wheat and corn, from these great cereal boxes we will gladly sell you!
3. Meat is bad!  Red meat is a "heart attack on a plate!"   Eat this soy stuff; it tastes like pretty much nothing, but we will gladly sell it to you in all sorts of shapes and forms.
4. Grains are wholesome!  Make them the foundation of your diet, even though your ancestors hardly ate any at all (unless they had to), and they thrived on a diet of meat, eggs, veggies, fruits and nuts... we will gladly put grains into almost any product you buy, and we will engineer them to be positively addictive.  You will eat them all day long, day after day!
5. You are all sick.  You need the government to tell you how to eat, and you all need lots of medicines; statins, insulin for your diabetes, gastric bypass operations since you are all fat since you don't walk on your treadmill enough, and you are still eating too much fat.
6. This is how it's been going since then, with the top-down, autocratic Government itself taking more and more authority away from us as individuals, and increasingly telling us what we should eat, how we should exercise, what medicines we should be taking, taxing us at ever-increasing rates because they know much better how to spend our money on the common good than we do ourselves.

Today, July 4 2012, let's remember the spirit of those original Founding Fathers of the United States, who would be 100% behind the Paleo diet's notions of buying food locally- growing it locally, eating wholesome, real foods prepared in your own kitchen instead of in a factory, and eating all foods from local, trusted sources that raise their animals humanely, feeding them grass if that is what they are meant to eat by Nature and God.  We need to get away from the control of the New Self Appointed Royalty of America today:  Big Government, Big Medicine, Big Food!

Luckily, we can take back control- Television is on the wane, who watches commercials any more, for that matter who watches the evening news?  We don't need "filtered" news anymore; now we have the internet!  We can read the unvarnished truth instead!

The original American Revolution was a profoundly conservative revolution.  Nothing really like it had come before.  The French revolution, in fact virtually all other revolutions have been liberal, left wing, "Power to the people" socialist revolutions; ours was totally unique in that it was conservative, 

saying not to "take away from everyone else to share", which results in the powerful ones in the revolution itself just taking it all for themselves, and their cronies. 

In the American revolution, afterwards we were all free to provide for ourselves.  This is a profound difference, and resulted in the single most successful governmental experiment in history.  I think the only other political system on that level is the ancient Greek city-state; but then our American revolution incorporated most of their ideas from that earlier "experiment".

So, let's get back to our roots!  Think for yourself.  Don't listen to self-appointed "experts" that are shills of big corporations.  Read the real science behind things; don't get the "filtered" versions.  Here is a brief video featuring Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms, who really has this thing of sustainable agriculture, as the founding fathers of America intended, all figured out:

As Angelo Coppola of the "Latest in Paleo" podcast says: "Humans are not broken by default"!

In other words:  "We are made in God's image"; hardly "broken"!

J