Going Around the Bend

"The food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine, or the slowest form of poison."

- Dr. Ann Wigmore, ND

It has been pointed out to us several times lately that we (meaning my husband and I)  have "gone round the bend" a little with regards to food.  Some come out and say it simply, "You guys are nuts!", others (like my mother) are more subtle, "Oh, it was nice to go visit your sister, we could talk about food....she even goes to Sam's Club" to which I give a small, involuntary shiver of horror and then smile and nod politely.

I don't deny that we have drastically changed how we live in the last 8 years and we actually are aware of how unusual we must come across to people.  We sometimes go out at night to the local bar and eat nachos and drink cheap beer and discuss how stilted we have become about our food while playing a few games of pool, but here's the hard part....once you know the truth about food and what you eat, how do you put the blinders back on and go back? 

Our progression into "craziness" went something like this:

• Watching one of your children become sicker and sicker wondering what was going on!
• Child diagnosed with a genetic disease that causes her body to react to gluten.
• Realizing that gluten is in just about everything.
• Freaking out in grocery store over what to feed your two -year-old that won't end up poisoning her.
• Learning to read labels.
• Wondering what exactly carrageenan, carnauba wax, and soy lecithin actually are.
• Finding out what they are.
• Applying Occam's razor to the food concept and realizing that, in general, the simpler foods are the better they tend to be for you.
• Finding a source of these "simple" foods.
• Realizing that it is cheaper and a ton more fun to raise/grow/process/store them ourselves.
• Raising/growing/processing said food.
• Watching as your friends, neighbors and relatives all think that we have slipped off the deep end.

The luxury, (and I do realize what a luxury it is) is that we have time.  We have had a lot of time.  Time to read, to research, to analyze, to try stuff out, to grow food, to process food.....it uses a lot of time.  We have, by some small miracle that I haven't quite figured out yet, set ourselves up to get by on only one income from one outside job.  In today's society, that is no easy feat.  To some extent it is because we really don't want anything - no cable TV, no high tech gadgets, no brand new cars, no foreign holidays, no new clothes, nada.  We do without and, personally, I am totally cool with that.  Less overhead equals less income needed to support it.  "Simplify, simplify, simplify"....Thoreau was on to something there.  So our entire source of entertainment comes strictly from living and raising our kids in the best way that we can.  One way to look at it is that I have learned to garden, can food, raise chickens, spin thread and knit due to sheer boredom, but the irony is that I am not bored....ever.  Maybe it is a mindset that we have fallen into that we actually love what we are doing all the time, instead of constantly working at a job that we hate so that we can go out and have fun later.

In my mind it comes down to the fact that every man, woman, and child on this planet has 24 hours in each day in which to do something.  For the great majority of us, what we do during those 24 hours is not likely to be earth shattering or life changing to the population at large, but what we can do for ourselves and our family can have a very large and lasting impact.  Thinking back to the jobs that I have held - waitress, food service worker, lab technician, animal caretaker, veterinarian - none of those.....none.....have meant as much to me as taking care of my kids and family.  I am never happier then when I am home, either working in the garden with the kids raising food, or cleaning a barn taking care of animals that I know will help to feed us. There is a very direct relationship between these activities and the lives we lead.  Working at a job, for me, is an indirect relationship - still very helpful and necessary, but not nearly as fulfilling.  It is a very basic desire - to provide for oneself and family. 

 

Another reason we have jumped off the deep end with regard to food....it's political.  Eating a meal, feeding your family, buying groceries - those things are political statements whether you want them to be or not.  Where your fork goes, so goes your money.  Buy your food locally and your money goes locally.  Local money, creates local jobs.  Local jobs help to maintain local infrastructure.  If you understand the food market - from how the food is grown, picked, processed, inspected, shipped, stacked and purchased - then you have a pretty good handle on how messed up the system actually is. All too many of our kids (and adults) think that the food just magically appears in the grocery store without any thought to the deep and twisted roads that food must take to reach those shelves.  For instance, if you don't like big capitalistic businesses, then don't buy things containing high fructose corn syrup or soy because most of the corn and soy in the country is planted, grown and chemically sprayed by Monsanto and other big Ag corporations.  If you don't like illegal immigrants then don't buy produce that has been harvested by immigration workers.  If you don't like government agencies then don't buy meat that has been inspected by the USDA.  If you don't like pollution then don't buy groceries that have been shipped thousands of miles so that you can have a nice ripe strawberry in December.  Hard to know what to buy now isn't it?  All over the board there with political problems and no one party is to blame.  We have simply chosen to cut out the middle man entirely and just raise our own or buy it as locally as we can from people we know.

So yes, we have 'gone round the bend' and will probably continue to do so until such time as the population at large realizes what a screwed up mess the food system is and actually takes steps to change it.  My guess is that when the food system changes, so will the medical system because people will suddenly realize what they have been doing to themselves for so long.   In the meantime, fair warning for any friends and relatives that come to the door for dinner, you may be asked to eat such things as organic, homegrown potato soup with onions grown in the garden outside and cheese that was produced in my kitchen.  I know it is a hardship when you really crave Sam's Club frozen fish sticks, but we do what we can to please, and I promise you won't leave hungry.

"A bend in the road is not the end of the road...

unless you fail to make the turn." ~ Unknown

Mr Pig Goes A Courtin'

Spring is starting to roll slowly around.  The sun is peaking up over the horizon a little earlier and staying up a little later every night.  There are many times when the weather has been warm enough lately to even smell the warmth of the earth, but the biggest signs that lets us know that Spring is on its way is that love is in the air.  Valentine's day isn't just for the humans of the world....our pig gets to have her love affair as well.  Granted, her pool of eligible bachelors was somewhat smaller than she might like, but then a kept pig can't be choosy.

For the last four years, we have purchased baby piglets to raise and then eat, but in the last two we have thought about saving the gilt (that's the female) and have her bred so we could farrow and raise our own piglets.  Last year's gilt was fine except for one small thing....she liked the taste of chicken a little too much and whittled away our chicken flock significantly with her ravenous habits. 

Mr Pig

But this year's gilt?  She was taught at a young age by the local rooster, Dominique (which is both his name and his breed....we aren't very creative with names for the animals that we might one day have to stew in a pot..."Bob-noodle soup" turned us off to that practice).  Anyway, Dominique taught her not to mess with the two footed and feathered crowd.  She happily allows chickens (and cats) to partake of her bounty of cracked corn and kitchen scraps without so much as a proprietary grunt.  In short, she is a really nice pig.  And so, she was nominated to stay and hopefully pass on not only her beautiful chops, but also her winning attitude to a herd of small screaling piglets. 

The question, however, was where to find the boy?  Technically, we would most like a Large Black - this is a particular breed that is easier to raise on pasture since they don't rut it up quite as much, but we weren't  into spending the prices being asked for a purebred boar, not to mention that you have to be able to house them and feed them - no small task to be undertaken when they can reach approximately 700 pounds. We found a rather nice one that was due to go to market unless they could find him a home, but he was already full grown, exceptionally large and more than we were up to paying once again.  Craigslist has any number of fun and interesting items for sale....including pigs, and we contemplated these options, but none of them stuck out as suitable matches for our pig. Our breakthrough came with finally taking the time to meet some of the neighbors. 



First encounter



My husband had been told about a farmer just north of us that had cows and pigs and sheep - doing basically what we are doing, but on a much larger scale.  It had been suggested that we stop up and see him some time and finally, one chilly December day, we made the trip of six miles and found a resource for bottle/bucket calves, milking advice and .....you guessed it, a boar.  All too often we forget to look around and tap into local resources.  We get caught up with the idea that we are the "lunatic farmers" of the neighborhood amidst an ocean of "conventional farmers" and we forget that there are, in fact, more and more of the us lunatics out there all the time - small family farms that are starting to make a small but significant difference in how food is raised.  But we need to work together and depend on each other - just like farmers did in the past.  All too often now, conventional farmers are out there on their own - big fields, big equipment, big risk.  The competition to produce more and more soy and corn has led to isolation and a general lack of public interest in farming in general.  Ask any non-farming person if they would want to farm and most of the time the answer is "No - I don't have the first idea how to do that!"  Conventional farming is daunting - even for the farmers that do it, and unless you are born into a family that farms, it isn't likely to be something that you would want to jump into.   But small farms, such as ours, are do-able.  With a little time and sweat equity we have been slowly turning this old homestead back into a productive farm.  One adage that I have stuck to when it comes to trying new things is, "Learn by doing" - you can read all the books on a subject you want, but until you are up to your elbows in it, it doesn't sink in.  So we were up to our elbows with a gilt that needed a boyfriend and, in this case, all it took was making a neighborhood connection to provide us with the answer.  The Rent-a-Boar.

A purebred Berkshire boar with proven quality...essentially meaning that he has been with a pen of sows and proceeded to get them all 'with pig' as the case might be.  Originally, the plan was to take Miss Pig for a visit up to the other farm and let her hang with the rest of the pigs, but Bill (the farmer) was a little worried that his sows might beat her up, so it was decided that Mr. Pig should come hang out in Shangri-La at our house.

Any time that you mix two 350 pound animals together there is a certain amount of blind faith that goes along with it because you realize that if they really don't like each other, there isn't anything that you will be able to do to stop the ensuing battle until the smoke clears.  We didn't need to worry with Miss Pig, she was smitten almost immediately and we are fairly convinced that he was taken with her as well. 

If you ever hear a person say that an animal doesn't have feelings, do me a favor -first, kick them in the shins and then direct them to this post.  Our Miss Pig had been without her pig friends since about late September when we took them to market.  The first few days had been difficult and she had mopped around without her buddies, but her gregarious nature and love of food brought her around fairly quickly.  On Sunday, however...when Mr Pig showed up....suffice it to say that it was love at first sight.  If you have never seen a happy pig with her new friend smile....you really should.

The Loneliest Appliance

We have a very lonely appliance in our house, it really doesn't see much use any more other than for the odd emergency and as a nice flat place to set things.  It has been relegated to the same useful level as the iron and the hair dryer - almost completely unnecessary.  Instead, it has been replaced by string....well, clothesline, to be more exact, and clothespins. The dryer has been laid off and is looking at permanent unemployment.

I originally set out trying to figure out just how much energy and money  this might save us - it isn't too tough of an equation really (how many kilowatts a drier uses) x (price per kilowatt hour) x (number of hours of use per week), in other words, information that can be readily found on the manual and electric bill.  But then it came to me that it doesn't really matter if it saves me 5 cents or $500, it is simply the right thing to do.  Convenient? - no, not really.  Good for the world in general?- Absolutely!  Last I checked, sunlight and air were both free, and any coal that I can save from being mined, hauled and burned for my mere convenience....so much the better.   It does definitely take more time to hang out clothes and it can get to be a little dicey when it is cold outside, but even below freezing, hanging clothes out to dry works.

I have heard any number of stories for why people don't want to hang out clothes. My favorites are the stories I hear from people that live in a housing development that won't allow clothes lines because they are unsightly.  Unsightly!  Clean clothes, bedding, towels and yes....God forbid.....underwear!  Seriously, have we become so prudish that we don't like the sight of clothes that everyone wears?  Or is it that we are so focused on appearances that we wouldn't want our neighbors to know that we actually have to wash our clothes rather than just constantly buying new?   Personally, I love seeing clothes on the line.  It shows a certain amount of dedication, thriftiness, cleanliness and care.  The other day, while driving around the Amish farms, I saw a place where they had rigged up a pulley line that stretched from the house to the silo - that clothes was flapping in the breeze 20 feet in the air!

Hanging clothes out can also be a rather meditative task.  It doesn't take a lot of skill - although if you have to fit three loads of laundry on a line that typically can only hold two, it takes a little planning.  I find myself talking with the cats that come to see what I am doing, or planning what to plant in my flower beds, or watching deer cross the field north of our house, or watching the birds chirp and flit around and, before I realize it, all the clothes are hung up and drying nicely in the sun.

"But", you say,.... and I totally get this because I have a hard time with this also..."it is just so convenient to go from the washer to the dryer - I mean, they are right there next to each other!  Hanging them out will involve a basket, clothes pins and hauling them to the line and then hanging them up and then taking them down again.....ugh!"  I know, it can seem like just too much.  This is where I invoke Nike's ad campaign...."Just do it!"  The hardest part of any job is starting it.  Once the ball is rolling, it is really very easy and surprisingly enjoyable.  I often realize that my family is one in about 100 that actually hang clothes out, but I like to imagine a day when it becomes the standard rather than the exception, and when you think about it, it was the standard less than 70 years ago.  That was the way that clothes got dry....period!  In fact, I still have some clothes pins that were my grandmother's and I will often think of her when I reach into the bag and pull out one of the pink ones that she used to have and it is something of a comfort, in a weird way, that we are sharing some of life's tasks - I try to imagine what the world was like when she was hanging out her clothes - that alone makes the time fly.

The other thing that people will say is, "I just don't have the room for a clothes line."  They live in an apartment, or have some other living arrangement that inhibits them from having a line, and to this I say, "Be creative"  I really don't like hanging clothes up outside when it is frigid - I like my fingers too much to freeze them off.  So, in order to appease the clothesline god of the house (my husband) and save my fingers, I rigged up a clothesline in the basement of the house.  I tied up a few stray pieces of line between the stairs and my treadmill (those things can be good for more than just running) and viola' - dry clothes and no frozen fingers.  It also worked out well that the wood burning stove is in the basement, so the warm air being given off by that helped to dry the clothes in record time.  The point of it is, clotheslines don't need to take up a lot of room and they can be taken down easily.  There are also wooden clothes drying racks that dry an amazing amount of clothes in a very small space - these are especially handy for socks and undies...or in the case of my kids playing outside in the winter....mittens.

Just out of curiosity, I did run some numbers to see what it costs us to dry our clothes. The US has roughly 115,000,000 households that all have laundry to wash.   Using some average dryer specifications of 5kW per load, and an average energy bill of $0.10/kWh we come up with 5kW x $0.10 x 115,000,000 million households = $57,5000,000 for one load of laundry per household per week. Granted, that isn't really all that much per household, but it does start to add up.

I went a little further and checked into how much coal it takes to produce 1 kWh and there were ranges cited from 0.8 pound per kWh to 2.1 pounds per kWh. I averaged the amounts cited and came up with 1.3 pounds of coal per kWh. Assuming that a dryer uses approximately 5 kW, that ends up being about 6.5 pounds of coal for each dryer load of clothes. Now, when you figure in the number of households....we are talking 747,500,000 pounds of coal per week for each household to dry one load of clothes. Even if only 1 out of 10 households dries their clothes per week, we are still talking about 74,750,000 pounds of coal! 

I couldn't even picture that much coal unless it was in a rail car that I see fly by me while stopped at a railroad crossing.  Figuring that rail cars can carry roughly 244,300 pounds of coal (and that was the largest capacity I could find) - that is roughly 305 railroad cars full of coal for one tenth of the households just to dry their clothes once weekly.  Please, someone tell me I figured these numbers wrong, because that is really kind of disturbing.  Now, when I see a coal trains, I think of it more in the number of dryer loads.....dryer loads that could be free - free of energy cost and pollution.

 It is hard, sometimes, to feel like we make any difference at all just being one person trying to do something good for the environment, but if we all do small things and we all encourage others to do small things....it starts to make a difference.  And maybe, if we are very lucky, there will be housing developments eventually that won't allow dryers and will insist upon there being only clothes lines instead.

A Case of the Hives

I have something of a bull-headed streak. Probably stems from being born in the year of the ox, but if I get something in my mind that I would like to do, or imagine myself doing, it tends to eventually happen.  That is just the way that I have always been and likely always will be- sometimes to my benefit, sometimes to my detriment, and very often to the consternation of my husband, but at least I am consistent.  I see things in my head that just seem right and if I feel strongly enough about them, then Fate seem to help me out on many occasions - such is the case of the hives.

Over a year ago I mentioned that it would be nice to get some bee hives and start collecting honey.  We looked at trying to find some used hives from people that were getting out of it, but they are somewhat hard to come by.  We checked into ordering some from a catalog, but it just never quite seemed to be the right time for it, they were too expensive, or both....we shuffled our feet.

Then I mentioned it to one of my friends at work who also happens to be a mail carrier.  Let me digress here for just a minute and say, if you ever need to know something about the neighborhood that you live in.....ask a mail carrier!  I am constantly amazed at the amount of information that they carry around in their brains that has been accumulated from years of delivering mail to the same houses.  I once had a stray dog show up and managed to find his home simply by asking the mail carrier.  After describing the dog to him he said, "oh yeah! That's Toby. He lives at such and so address.  Noticed he wasn't there today to bark at me when I dropped off the mail.  The owner won't be home though until sometime after 6 pm because he works in town."  Then, thirty minutes after talking to the mail man, someone drives up to get the dog because the mail man had called the owner and the owner had sent his cousin out to retrieve the dog.  Wow!  Seriously, we should make better use of these people and pay them more for their abilities.  Anyway, I happened to mention to my co-worker/mail carrier that we were looking for bee hives to get us started.  She paused for a minute and then said, "You know, I think Hans used to have bees out at his place.  I have delivered supplies to him in the past."  And from there, as all good grapevines go, I tracked down the person to contact about Hans's used bee hives.

Contacted......No response.

Tried again......No response.

And then, Fate stepped in, as it often does.  Hans had been rather ill for quite some time and then rather suddenly passed away.  As always happens when people pass away, there is the process of sorting out all the stuff of their life and deciding what to do with it.  Someone in the group remembered that I had been looking for bee hives and called my office. 

But I was on vacation and out of range to be called.

My very astute assistant, however, knew that I was looking for hives and made the deal for me, and picked them up herself. The hives, beekeeping suits, a smoker, a honey centrifuge, and enough books to keep me happily busy all winter long.

And so, we have hives - two full hives to be exact and all the accoutrements  They will need a little cleaning and fixing here and there, but they are hives none-the-less.  Next up.....bees.

 Most of the texts on the subject recommend getting to know the local bee keepers, so I hopped on the Internet to see what I could find.  Eastern Iowa Beekeepers Association proved local and rich in information.  Shot off an e-mail to the person in charge and within an hour or so was notified that the following day they were due to have one of their meetings.  They only have four meetings per year - one for each of the seasons - and a day or two later and I would have missed it entirely.  Again, Fate seemed to step in and see me through.

I am not one to like going to meetings, especially meetings in which I know absolutely no one, but I felt compelled to tackle this one. When Fate had handed me so much all ready it seemed like a snub to not make the effort at going to the meeting.  I came in slightly late and sat in the back of the meeting room.  There were approximately 30 people there, most of whom were somewhere in their late 60s.  The main topic of conversation was to highlight some of the findings that had been discussed at the state wide bee keepers convention that had taken place in November.  Many of their facts were somewhat worrisome.....There used to be 6 million bee keepers in the U.S and now it is down to roughly 2 million.  Well over half of all the honey in the U.S. is imported from oversees.  Over half of the hives in the U.S.  have been dying over the winter- unable to produce enough honey to support themselves.  Many bee keepers are not even able to collect honey from the hives because the bees are having a hard time making enough.  Colony Collapse Disorder is all too prevalent and no one, as yet, has a good handle on why.  It wasn't encouraging information, and I found myself sitting there thinking that maybe this is a little more than I might be up for this spring. 

One of the first things that I asked a few people was, "where do you get your bees" and several of them gave me different names of companies that sell Queens and a few pounds of bees.  One bee keeper swore by a company out of Texas that he buys bees from every year, and then it dawned on me to ask why he had to buy bees all the time.  He was having about 70% die off each year, and I thought 'well, if these bees are so great why are they dying off?'.....on to the next person.

Finally, I worked my way forward in the crowd to talk to Floyd - he had been one of the speakers that had gone to the convention and had given much of the information on what had been discussed and some of his own tips for helping hives to make it through the winter.  A quiet, soft spoken man, probably more comfortable in the company of bees than he is around people, but he was happy enough to answer my questions.  I knew that maybe, once again, Fate had thrown the right person into my path when I asked him the standard question, "where do you buy your bees" and he looked a me with a slight smile and said, " I haven't bought bees in over 9 years.  I have nucs (short for nucleus) that I raise up"  So, of course my second question was, "Do you ever sell those nucs?"  to which his response was "Yeah.  I will have 30 of them to sell come this spring."

My psyche, at this point, heaved a huge sigh of relief - here was a person who knew what he was doing and apparently did it well since he had several dozens of bee hives all over the county and in my local area.  In fact, he suspected that I was probably driving right by several of them on a daily basis.  Fate has a funny way of eventually making things happen.  I like to think that if I am open to Fate and the possibilities that come with it, and then bull-headed enough to stick it out, my plans eventually come to fruition in most cases- not always, but I have found that even failing miserably at something has always served to teach me something as well.  You never know just when Fate will reach out a hand and help you along, however, it is my belief that most people are simply to scared to grab hold and run with it.  I very much agree with the Serendipity sentiment that "life is not merely a series of meaningless accidents or coincidences...But rather, its a tapestry of events that culminate in an exquisite, sublime plan....that if we are to live life in harmony with the universe, we must all possess a powerful faith in what the ancients used to call "fatum", what we currently refer to as destiny."
Floyd and I talked a little more about various start up tips and then I asked him when he starts checking his hives in the spring...."First week in April.  Give me a call and you can tag along."

Tag along I will.  See you in April, Floyd.