Joan's Journal

Saturday before Yule blues

2009-12-19T18:35:39Z

No, not Seasonal Affective disorder. Rather, it's about my specific situation. Everyone I know who is putting on a public Solstice celebration is putting it on today. I'm home with a cold. Just a little cold as yet, with one nostril always open, and with luck that elderflower tea and hot shower I just had will prevent it from getting much worse. Still, the fun plans of today are not happening. Sitting at home all bundled up is what's happening.

Day before yesterday, new housemate Lennon moved in, helped by his dad, who is about my age. Furniture included a queen size bed and of course the box spring could not get up the little narrow stairs. We opened the seldom-used door out the back of my closet onto the roof of the addition (the only part of the house that is one story rather than two). Lennon stood in the back yard and boosted the box spring up to his dad, then came up upstairs and the two of them walked it in through my closet, through my bedroom, down the hall to Lennon's new room. Then Lennon's dad, having noticed that my closet door was not hung properly and therefore didn't shut, borrowed a screwdriver and hung it. First time I've been able to shut the closet door since I moved in here.

Last night, ex-housemate Felix, former occupant of the room that is now Lennon's, came for dinner. Dodging around everyone's dietary limitations was a challenge but I did come up with three dishes: a venison roast which was a gift from Felix on an earlier visit, thawed and broiled like steak; carrots and potatoes boiled in a broth made from lamb, deer and hog bones; and Dutch Red Cabbage. We talked about Felix's fantasy of opening a Native American inspired restaurant or deli. I do know a little about Native American cuisine and a little about starting a business, especially the part that involves renting real estate, so I was able to make some suggestions. He is looking for investors and I may become one of them if he gets some numbers together and they look good.

In the meantime, I am gradually getting the gift thing together. For my brother and his wife I have bought an extravagant present: a factory-made solar over. I know the PC thing to do is to make your own out of salvaged lumber and glass, but I have yet to get it together to do that. This solar over is made of plastic (mostly recycled) and steel. It's lighter than a wood-and-glass one and more tolerant of bumping around, so they are more likely to take it on vacation. For my mom I will get The Answer, a long metal tube in the shape of a stubby question mark about three feel long and two feet in diameter, with a plastic ball on the end about halfway in size between a tennis ball and a golf ball. It's for massaging the middle of your back. The nephew will, of course, get books. He has so many toys already that his parents have had to put limits on them, but there is always room for books.

Nose is blocking up after all, I think because I haven't had enough liquid. Time to go downstairs and heat up the broth.

A meme I couldn't resist

2009-12-11T16:29:47Z

Hey, readers!

If I came with a Warning Label, What Would It Say?

(Ganked from sidhefire.)

Any space flight fanatics out there?

2009-11-29T14:03:02Z

Buzz Aldrin on why NASA's decision to cheap out on a vehicle to replace the Space Shuttle is a dumb idea.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/buzz-aldrin/in-search-of-a-real-space_b_371205.html

Fake Virginity $29.90

2009-11-28T18:09:05Z

Mainly marketed to women in sexually conservative countries, the Artificial Virginity Hymen is a very small balloon filled with fake blood. You insert it into your vagina, it expands to fit and, well, check out the Japanenglish ad copy:

When your lover penetrate, it will ooze out a liquid that look like blood not too much but just the right amount. Add in a few moans and groans, you will pass through undetectable.

Now, brides have been faking an intact hymen for centuries. It's done right after that first act of intercourse while the man is in what they call the refactory period, lying there with his eyes shut, panting. You bite the inside of your lip until it bleeds and spit the blood onto the wet spot. Easy, takes a matter of seconds, and there's no telltale line in the credit card bill for him or his snoopy relatives to find later. What this device does is make the fakery official. A news report says that at least one Islamic country is talking about banning its importation, which will only encourage local production and possibly the invention of a home testing kit to reveal whether the red stain is really blood.

In the 18th century, women above the working class wore skirts with panniers, side-bustles that increased the apparent width of the hips. They became wider and wider as the century went on, with the widest having the most status because a wearer couldn't pass through an ordinary door without undignified sidling. Only the doors in grand houses and palaces were wide enough. Then someone invented the hinged pannier, which could be raised to pass through narrow doors, and that was the end of panniers in women's fashions. Something similar happened in the 19th century with men's top hats. As long as those things were awkward (and therefore labor intensive) to transport and protect, they were an important status marker. After the invention of the folding top hat, which could go in a suitcase, the gentleman's topper vanished into costume history. It might take a little longer for the burst-hymen standard to disappear, given that the world in which it is still important is a much larger one, but clearly its days are numbered.

Artificial hymens on sale at http://www.gigimo.com/main/product/Artificial,Virginity,Hymen,2299.php?prod=2299
Article on Egyptian political debate about it at http://www.nydailynews.com/lifestyle/2009/10/06/2009-10-06_artificial_virginity_kit_imported_from_china_causes_uproar_amongst_conservatives.html
Slate article that put me onto this tidbit: http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/humannature/archive/2009/10/06/the-beauty-of-artificial-virginity.aspx

Every once in a while...

2009-11-28T15:26:25Z

...you read something that whacks you in the head not by saying something new and shocking but by putting into words something you were sensing but had not yet made sense of, giving you the perspective that allows you to adjust your worldview to include the new information.

In this case it was not even a whole sentence, just a descriptive phrase: "the meta-language of race and/or gender that drowns everything else out."

The reason I experienced it as a whack in the head was that it brought into focus one of the real changes to this society over the course of my lifetime: the meta-language isn't as loud as it used to be. My generation, people who were young and fairness-minded in the Sixties and Seventies, believed in looking beyond stereotypes and treating people as individuals, but we were better at the theory than at the practice. We had spent our childhoods in a world where white supremacy was, not an extremist position characteristic of a small and scary sliver of the population, but part of the mental bedrock of mainstream thought. We had it built into us, like it or not, and despite our good intentions most of us have only partially overcome it.

During my time in the Valley I've come to know enough members of the generation that has arrived on college campuses here in Western Massachusetts in the 21st century to notice that they are different from us in this way: they really do connect first to individuals and second to the races of those individuals; they don't have to struggle to hear beyond the meta-language. Given their start in a less unjust time (not perfect, just not as bad) they have succeeded where we only tried. I had guessed that we might have a black President around my 80th birthday, but we have one already and I'm not 55 yet.

I'll probably be struggling to get past the meta-language for the rest of my life. There are still lots leftover deposits of that old bedrock to be dynamited out. Barring some kind of catastrophic change, however, the major work is done. The United States of American has changed. It will never be the same again.

Packaging that pollutes the food in it

2009-11-21T18:43:56Z

This is the first lecture I've ever created as a specific request. Craig sent me one of the links that started me investigating this issue and then urged me to work up a lesson on it and present it ASAP. Once I dug into it, I realized he was entirely right to do so. It's a short one, only four pages, but the lecture I had planned for Monday's class isn't a long one; I can tack this on at the end.

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Bisphenol A and Phthalates
Radical Nutrition Fall 2009

This is a short lesson I'm adding to the main one, even though it's off topic, because there's some news in the field, just this month. It's about unstable plastics, plastics that ooze some problematical chemical into any gas or liquid they're touching, whether that's air, water, chicken soup or some human bodily fluid.

You know that new car smell? Or the smell of a new shower curtain when you first get it out of the package? Both the curtain and the upholstery in the car are made of polyvinyl chloride, which we generally call vinyl or PVC. Among the chemicals that go into PVC are the plasticizers. The word plastic literally means capable of taking on a wide range of shapes, and a plasticizer is a chemical that is added to other chemicals to make a plastic that stays plastic in the sense that it stays flexible. For example, this little bit of packaging here [picture me holding up this transparent thing] is what they call a blister pack. It starts as a flat sheet and then is blistered up to the shape of the product it's meant to package, in this case a nutmeg grater. And unlike glass, which used to be the stuff used for clear packaging before plastics were invented, you can bend this blister pack pretty severely [I do so] and it won't shatter or tear and it will spring back to its previous shape with only a little persuading. [I let go of it and poke it in the middle to get it to spring back]. That flexibility is a result of the plasticizers that were included in the formula for this plastic when it was made. PVC is flexible enough to use for clothing and car upholstery and shower curtains and, most relevant to this discussion, cling wrap and other flexible food packaging, only because of the plasticizers in it.

The most widely used plasticizers are the phthalates. [Pronounced "thal" (rhymes with gal) + ates.] They do a great job, they're transparent, and they make the plastic durable. The problem is that, once a phthalate is added to a plastic, it doesn't actually form chemical bonds with the other ingredients, so it isn't inclined to stay there. It leaches out into its environment, whether that's air, water, food or human bodily fluids. That new car smell or new shower curtain smell? That's the phthalates escaping. Really old plastic will sometimes shatter because it has lost all its phthalates.

Once they're in the air, phthalates do biodegrade. They're not a persistent pollutant However, in the short run, if they get into your body, either via your nose when you're smelling that new vinyl smell or in food that was packaged in PVC or in any of several other ways, they can cause trouble. For one thing, they have been statistically associated with childhood asthma and allergies as well as insulin resistance, a condition which is considered a precursor to Type II diabetes. This is why many phthalates are banned in baby bottles, and baby toys. For another, they are endocrine disruptors, specifically anti-androgens. (The androgens are the broader category of male sex hormones which includes testosterone.) This is where the news comes in: a study just published this month in a medical publication called the Journal of Andrology involved, first, testing the urine of 145 women pregnant with boys to see how much phthalate their bodies were getting rid of, which is our best measure of how much phthalate a body is taking in; and, second, 3 or 4 years after the boys were born, having a researcher watch the boys play and make notes on which boys chose to do what they call male-typical things such as play with trucks or pretend to fight and which ones preferred more gender-neutral activities like playing with blocks. Then they correlated and, what do you know, the more of two particular phthalates the pregnant women had in their urine, the less interested their sons were in masculine-type play.

In the public debate over sexuality, there are still a lot of people who believe that gender identity and gendered behavior are entirely learned and if little boys aren't choosing male-typical play activities that must be because they aren't being brought up right. Within the scientific community, however, there's more and more evidence piling up that gender identity and the behavior that flows from it are hardwired into the brain and this hardwiring happens before birth in response to the presence of certain hormones in the uterine environment. It only takes a little bit of endocrine disruption to knock that process out of kilter so that a genetically male child ends up with a male body but a not-so-male sense of self.

Bisphenol A (or BPA) is also in PVC and is a main ingredient in the most common form of the hard clear plastic called polycarbonate. CDs and DVDs are made out of polycarbonate. So are most eyeglass lenses. So are some baby bottles and water bottles. Bisphenol A is also in epoxy resins which are used to coat the insides of most food and beverage cans. In the Seventies and before, canned food was in direct contact with the bare metal of the can, which was okay most of the time but occasionally unfortunate. In the student kitchen where I learned to cook for large numbers of people, there was a sign on the wall that said “Tomatoes + can + air = bad news.” It was to remind students that, once a can of tomatoes or any food containing tomatoes was opened, it shouldn't just go in the fridge because the acid in the tomatoes would react with the metal in the presence of the air over the course of a few hours of storage, giving the food a funny color and a nasty taste. That isn't a problem anymore because of that epoxy resin coating on the insides of the cans. The food never touches the metal.

Instead, it touches this coating, which leaches BPA into the food. Thus we as a society have traded an obvious but minor problem for a subtle but serious one. Bisphenol A is also an endocrine disruptor, one which has been shown to affect female behavior: new mother mice were less likely to bond with their infants, spending less time nursing and more time outside the nest. It's also statistically linked, in humans, to breast and prostate cancer as well heart disease, Type II diabetes, and liver damage. It has also been shown, in mice, to disrupt the function of the brain chemical dopamine. Dopamine functioning is essential to our ability to control the movements of our bodies, to memory, attention focus, problem solving, resistance to pain, and ability to recognize and respond to nonverbal social cues. Funny thing how the rise in BPA in our environment correlates with the increase in learning disabilities.

In the environment, Bisphenol A leached into the soil has been shown to disrupt the process of nitrogen fixing, which is essential to soil fertility. In water, it interferes with reproduction in all aquatic animal-kingdom species on which the effects of BPA have ever been studied, and causes deformities in some of them. Like the phthalates, it biodegrades pretty quickly, but because there's so much of it from thrown-away packaging, it's a major pollution problem.

Currently the EPA puts the safe upper limit of human exposure to Bisphenol A at 50 micrograms per kilogram of body weight per day. (A microgram is a thousandth of a milligram. For a person who weighs 50 kilograms, which is about 110 pounds, the limit would work out to 2,500 micrograms per day, a little less than the weight of 8 grains of salt. Micrograms are also equivalent to the usual measurement of contaminants in food: parts per billion or ppb.) That 50-microgram number was set in the 1980s. In light of more recent research showing that reproductive abnormalities can show up in doses as little as 2.4 micrograms per kilo per day, that limit is now being re-evaluated, along with safe levels of exposure to phthalates and four other groups of widely-used chemicals. They're expected to complete the first phase of the study around now and will post the results online at http://www.epa.gov/oppt/existingchemicals/pubs/ecactionpln.html staring next month.

Some city and state governments have gone ahead and banned BPA in baby bottles, sippy cups, pacifiers and toys intended for the use of babies and toddlers. The six largest producers of baby bottles sold in this country have voluntarily stopped using it. Sunoco, a company best known for motor oil and gasoline but which also makes Bisphenol A, (yes, it's a fossil fuel product), is now refusing to sell it to companies that are going to use it in food and beverage containers. And just this month the Consumer Union published a study in which they tested canned food and drinks from nineteen brands bought in three cities and found that almost all of them had some BPA, including some of the organic ones and some that said “BPA-free” on the label. The highest concentrations were in Del Monte green beans; the three cans averaged 123.5 ppb. Let's assume a 14-ounce can, that's about 397 grams, multiply that by 123.5 and you've got roughly 49,000 micrograms of Bisphenol A. Assuming four servings per can, that's 12,250 micrograms per serving or 4.9 times as much as the EPA says a 110-pound person should have in a whole day.

Your body can eliminate both phthalates and Bisphenol A. If you reduce the amount you take in, the amount in your body will go down. Taking in none at all will probably be impossible until after it's banned all over the world, but in the meantime you can reduce your intake substantially by avoiding any food or drink that comes in cans; in PVC, which is recycling category number 3; in polycarbonate packaging, which is one of several kinds that fall under recycling category 7; in blister packs; in cling wrap and other flexible packaging; and in drink boxes, which have a coating of a cling wrap type plastic as their inner lining.

The longer the food has been in the container, the more BPA and/or phthalates it will have. So, for instance, where a store is cutting meat and cheese and wrapping it in cling wrap, the food will only have been in contact with the plastic for a few days, so it won't have picked up very much. Cheese or meat that was packaged by the producer somewhere in the Midwest will have much more of a phthalate load. The worst of all are the ones that don't need refrigeration, that could have been sitting on the grocery store shelves for months. Temperature also counts. Plastic-wrapped frozen food probably isn't leaching very much. On the other hand, heating, especially in a microwave oven, speeds up the leaching process. If you must microwave, let it be in glass or ceramic. There are some very old camping guides out there that tell you you can tear the paper label off a can, use it to start your campfire, open the can while the fire is getting going and then set the open can right in the fire to heat up. That worked before cans had epoxy resin coatings inside. Doing it now would be a very bad idea.

Beyond avoiding it, there's the longterm goal of having less to avoid, in other words, stopping its production. BPA and phthalates are not the kind of accidental pollutants that come out of a factory's waste pipes. They are made on purpose in order to sell them or use them to make something that will be sold. That means if no one buys them there will be no point in making them, so they will not be made. Activism around pollutants like these is therefore a process of persuading people and organizations to stop buying them.

Getting something made illegal will not totally stop people from buying it, as the drug laws prove, but where there are halfway-adequate substitutes (as there are for these chemicals) it can reduce the market by about 90%. The EPA is reconsidering its regulations on these chemicals right now, so this is an optimal time for citizen input. Research the issue. Write a thoughtful, well-informed letter to Lisa P. Jackson, the new head of the EPA, appointed by Obama. (Her official title is Administrator.)

Before the laws change, people can voluntarily switch to food that comes in other types of packaging. The people who buy, not just for their own households, but for large organizations that have cafeterias are especially powerful in the market. Some hospitals are already phasing out PVC bags and tubes for plasma and other intravenous fluids specifically because of BPA and phthalate leaching; the issues around food packaging can be explained to them the same way.

Finally, you can talk to anyone you know who is pregnant or trying to become pregnant. The time when these chemicals do the most harm is during pregnancy. Marketing research has shown that word of mouth – communication between people who know each other personally – is still the most effective for getting people to change their behavior. So, when the time is right, speak up. Who knows what difference you might make?

Article on prenatal phthalate exposure and reduced male-typical play in preschool boys: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091116085040.htm

Summary of Consumer Union findings on Bisphenol A in canned food & juice: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-starkman/tests-find-wide-range-of_b_342967.html

Report of correlation between BPA in urine and heart disease, diabetes & liver disease: http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/300.11.1303

Images from the Wikipedia entry on Bisphenol A.

How to be healthy while vegetarian

2009-11-19T21:18:35Z

This was the vegetarianism lecture for Radical Nutrition, the class I'm teaching at the North Star homeschoolers' resource center. ignited_spark expressed interest in it, so I'm posting it.
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Vegetarianism
Radical Nutrition Class 6

We're going to talk mainly about the health issues because those are the difficult ones. It's kind of ironic. The political and economic and environmental effects of what you eat are invisible when you're sitting down to a meal, but they're straightforward and simple compared to the health effects. The health effects for you individually are right there with you wherever you are, but because the human body is still so poorly understood, knowing the effects of what you eat takes more than reading about it. You have to experiment on your personal body. You have to try things, or try leaving things out, and see what they do for you or to you. I'm going to talk about some of the major health-related issues around the choice to eat or not eat meat. Maybe some of it will be relevant to you.

Vegetarianism is controversial. There are writers out there with large followings who argue that humans thrive best eating only meat and others arguing that humans were never meant to eat meat. The first group hold up as evidence the fact that all the traditional peoples we've ever observed have eaten some animal protein and a few, mainly living in areas where plants that humans can eat are scarce, such as the Arctic, live or have lived almost entirely on animal protein, and that even our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, do some hunting and eat some meat. They tend to minimize the fact that no people eats entirely meat; all eat some plant matter, some going to great extremes to get it, such as eating the small intestines of large plant-eating animals raw, with the animals' last meal still inside. The second group argues from physiology: that carnivores have fewer molars and much shorter and simpler digestive systems than humans, and that we more closely resemble herbivores such as the rabbit.

Now, I'm going to state my bias up front. I think the second group is exaggerating the similarities between us and rabbits. We do, after all, have those pointy canine teeth, and for its size the rabbit digestive system is much more complicated than ours. I discovered an amusing vegan video presenting the argument that if humans were meant to hunt, we would be able to bring down game with our bare hands. By sheer coincidence I was reading an anthropology book called The Old Way in which there is a description of hunter-gatherers on the African savannah in the 1950s running down large hoofed animals and killing them with their bare hands.

When Weston A. Price did his world tour studying traditional peoples' diets and health, the healthiest people he found were the ones who ate a diverse mixture of unrefined plant and animal foods. That idea of a diverse diet is my idea of what works. However, I am also comfortable with the idea that meat really isn't good for some people and that it really is necessary for others. The person who convinced me of this was Fred Rohe in The Complete Book of Natural Foods. He ran one of the first natural food stores in the United States for eight years and he saw many people following some strict dietary philosophy that might make them healthy or it might not. As he put it, “a couple's guru would put them on his enlightenment diet. She feels great, he feels lousy.” Seeing over and over that the same diet would have different effects on different people, he came to be a great believer in metabolic typing. He has a test at http://www.naturalhealthyellowpages.com/metabolic/self_test.html that you can take to place yourself in one of three categories: roughly “Meat will make your health worse,” “Meat will make your health better,” and “Meat won't make much difference.”

I should also say up front that most vegetarians are not in it for their health. For them, the important issues are ethical and/or spiritual. Buddhism and Hinduism both forbid their adherents to eat meat. Buddhists are supposed to consider the good of all sentient beings (sentient: able to feel pain) in their every action and they can't see how killing other beings in order to eat them is in any way good for them. Hindus have a similar idea, ahimsa, which roughly translates “not harming”. Hindus also see spirit and flesh as opposites or competitors and believe that eating flesh causes the eater to be more focused on physical life, leaving less attention for spiritual matters. Both also believe that humans can be reincarnated as animals and therefore when you eat flesh you could be eating someone you loved in their last life. In Asia, where Hinduism and Buddhism originated, the rules are often written to allow some flesh foods. For instance, the definition of “sentient being” in certain Southeast Asian Buddhist traditions does not extend to scallops, oysters, clams, and other shellfish that stay in one place all their lives like plants. In the West, however, these allowances are usually ignored. No flesh means no flesh. Western Buddhists and Vedantists (you have to be born a Hindu; Vedantists are those who came to the Hindu religion as adults) generally also don't wear leather or silk because producing them involves killing. The more politically aware of them will also avoid buying milk and eggs because the cattle and chickens, even if pasture raised and humanely cared for, are always killed and sold for meat when their producing life is over, so these purchases are unacceptable because they support a killing business. Keeping a cow or goat or a flock of chickens, treating them well and letting them die of old age would be acceptable, but very few people in Western Civilization are in a position to do that.

People committed to animal rights would not keep milk animals or chickens in any case because they consider keeping animals for food to be oppressive. To be committed to animal rights is to be vegan more or less by default. Some animal rights people also have pets and will go to great lengths to keep the diet of their cats and dogs vegan.

So the vegetarian question becomes: once people are committed to not eating flesh or to not eating any animal products, is there anything special they need to do to maintain their health? Getting enough protein is usually the question that first comes to mind, but there are two others known to science right now:Vitamin B-12 and essential fatty acids. I'll be getting to those today, but first I want talk about plant protein.

The first principles of a healthy diet for meat-eaters – avoiding refined foods and eating a diverse diet involving many species – turn out to be the first principles for vegetarians and vegans, too. Incomplete proteins, having some but not all of the essential amino acids, are plentiful in the plant world; artful combinations of beans and grains, grains and nuts, or any of the above with dairy products within twelve hours of each other will be sufficient to meet the protein needs of the mythical average healthy adult. Whether that works for you as an individual has to be explored.

Now I'm going to review the concept of an antinutrient. This is a substance in food that not only doesn't nourish, it blocks absorbtion of other nutrients in the food. For instance, untreated phytic acid in your food can combine with certain essential minerals (essential as in necessary to your health) such as calcium, magnesium, copper, iron and especially zinc in the intestinal tract and take them right out of your body without them doing you any good. Phytic acid is mostly found in the bran or outer hull of seeds. If you run into someone who says they are allergic to whole wheat but refined wheat is okay for them, they're probably reacting to the phytic acid in the bran. Same with most of the antinutrients: they are found in seeds, that is, nuts, beans and grains, the same foods that are your best sources of plant protein. Their purpose is as part of the seed's system of preservation—they prevent sprouting until conditions are right. Some of them are literally enzyme inhibitors; they are there to keep the seed dormant through the winter or the dry season. The enzymes in the food are your best digestive helper. Eating seeds with those enzyme inhibitors intact will not only cancel out the nutritional value of any enzymes in the seed, it may inhibit enzyme action in your other foods. This is why traditional methods of preparing grains, beans and nuts tend to include long soaking and/or fermentation. You're basically sprouting them and possibly using mircrooganisms to help with the breakdown of the antinutrients. Phytic acid, in particular, breaks down most effectively in a mild acid bath, which is why the slow sourdough yeasts, which are slightly acidic, produce a more nutritious result than the modern quick-rise yeasts.

A little corner of the natural foods industry is just beginning to catch on to this. Sprouted grain bread has become popular enough that Trader Joe's now sells it. There is one company producing sprouted grain pasta and granola and another making sprouted grain tortillas. I expect more sprouted products (hummus with sprouted chickpeas, for instance) as the antinutrients become more widely known.

(Just as a digression, phytic acid has its uses. Another mineral it removes from the body is uranium, so it is used medically for people who have uranium poisoning.)

There are a few plant foods that have complete proteins all by themselves. These are particularly attractive to those of us who tend to forget what all we've eaten today, who are prone to skip meals, and who therefore can't count on ourselves to come up with adequate combinations. They fall into two categories: the soy foods and everything else. The soy foods, in turn, fall into two categories: the traditional fermented soy foods and everything else. Soybeans have more phytic acid than any other food that's been studied and a plentitude of enzyme inhibitors, so the traditional ways of turning soybeans into human food all involve long soaks to get the sprouting process going and, usually, fermentation. Western Civilization's industrial food system ignores the issue. Modern soyfoods (including soymilk, most non-diary ice cream substitutes, soy cheese, soy protein isolate (which is seldom sold by itself, but you'll see it on a lot of ingredient lists), meat substitutes like vegan hot dogs and the textured vegetable protein that often stands in for hamburger in vegetarian spaghetti sauce, meat extenders that let sausage makers use less actual meat without you noticing, toasted “soy nut” type snacks and soymilk-based infant formulas) all come to us with their phytic acids intact. The production of tofu used to start with a long soak. (Recipes for homemade tofu still tell you to soak the beans overnight.) Factory production, however, substitutes a quick plunge into a solution of sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) in boiling water and substitution of hot water for cold at later stages of the process. More efficient, you know. Saves time. And there's lots and lots of advertising out there proclaiming that soy is healthy with no mention of antinutrients.

Happily the fermented soy products still get a good long soak. Only three are significant sources of protein: tempeh, miso and natto. All three were invented in Asia, where the soybean was domesticated, and all three involve fermentation with some species of mold. Yes, they are literally moldy. But these are friendly molds. They improve the food. Really.

Tempeh, invented in Indonesia, now eaten all over Southeast Asia, is the only food I know of that is fermented with just molds, no bacteria or yeasts. The beans are coarsely ground, the mold (some member of the genus Rhizopus) is stirred in, and the whole thing ferments in a day or two into a solid cake. In Southeast Asia it is sold fresh with the molds and their enzymes still alive to people who will generally cook it the same day. In this country it gets a blanching (a brief boiling) so that it will keep. Tempeh is generally not very good raw or boiled; it is best fried, possibly after some time in a salty marinade. Inventive modern producers have started adding grains to tempeh including rice, wheat, wild rice, barley, millet and oats.

Miso is a popular condiment in Japanese cooking. To make it, soybeans are always combined with a grain, usually rice, and lots of salt, It gets fermented with three microorganisms: a mold (this time an Aspergillus, scientifically known to break down phytic acid), a yeast and a lactobacillus. The result is a salty paste which can be smooth or chunky. It is most famously stirred into miso soup, which is eaten daily by most Japanese and served in every Japanese restaurant, and used in sauces and spreads. Traditional unpasteurized miso, with the cultures still alive in it, is sometimes recommended instead of yogurt for people with dairy allergies who have taken antibiotics and need to have their gut flora restored. In North America new varieties may involve other beans (such as chickpeas or aduki beans) as well as other grains.

Natto is another Japanese invention, known for more than 1000 years. This is the only one I haven't eaten. In fact, I don't know that I've ever seen it for sale. What I have read is that it involves a unique fermenting bacterium called Bacillus Natto which produces lots of valuable enzymes and nutrients, that it is stinky like certain European cheeses, and that it is eaten for breakfast all over Japan.

Besides the antinutrients, there are other problems with soy. A big one is that soy, even when prepared in traditional ways, is a goitrogen: it interferes with the absorbtion of the mineral iodine, thus depressing the function of the thyroid gland. This is not a problem in eastern Asia because people there eat lots of ocean fish and seaweed, which supply enormous amounts of iodine. In our culture, however, sensitive individuals may find that as little as two glasses of soymilk per day is enough to produce the low energy and memory problems symptomatic of low thyroid function. If you eat a lot of soy, you need a lot of iodine.

There are a lot of other issues with soy. Rather than take up the rest of the hour with it, you can go to http://www.westonaprice.org/soy/.

So what about those other plant proteins? The ones commonly available are quinoa, amaranth, buckwheat, hempseed and spirulina.

The first three are what are known as the “leafy grains”; their foliage can be eaten as a vegetable and their seed eaten as a grain although they are technically not grains because they are not members of the grass family. Amaranth is the same species that is grown for its flowers in North American gardens. The varieties grown for their seeds are called grain amaranth to distinguish them from the decorative breeds. Quinoa is also related to the amaranths. It has a natural soapy coating on the outside of the seeds that needs to be rinsed off before cooking. Both quinoa and amaranth were domesticated by New World peoples, quinoa in South America, amaranth in Mexico. (Both of these places are known for not having very many domesticable species of animals. The protein content of quinoa and amaranth are probably the only reason civilization was possible in those places.) They were considered sacred in the native religion, so when the Spanish conquered them and imposed Christianity, they suppressed the growing of those grains. They were preserved by being grown quietly in the back country beyond the reach of the colonial government. In the 1970s they once again came to the attention of Western Civilization but this time it was academic agronomists and nutritionists, who figured out they had something special here and began promoting amaranth and quinoa as commercial crops.

Buckwheat is an Old World crop known and grown for thousands of years. It likes cool weather and poor soil and only needs a short growing season, so it's popular in places like Poland, Russia and Korea. In Asia it tends to be made into noodles, while in Eastern Europe it's more often eaten whole like rice. The seeds are called groats rather than grains for some reason. It tends to be expensive compared to the true grains because it cannot be harvested by machine. To us it's mainly familiar as the first ingredient in buckwheat pancakes. Most buckwheat pancake mixes are half wheat flour, but I have worked with 100% buckwheat batter and I find that it comes out a darker color with a more interesting flavor but not that different.

When we talk about hempseed, also known as hemp nuts, we find ourselves in the legal and taxonomic mess around the marijuana laws. A peculiarity of U. S. law is that it doesn't distinguish between industrial hemp, cannibis sativa sativa, and marijuana, cannibis sativa indica. The way the drug laws are written, all members of the cannibis sativa family are illegal to grow, even though industrial hemp doesn't get people high. There is a political movement advocating the legalization of industrial hemp for the sake of all its practical uses, including the food value of the seeds. (The source book of the movement is The Emperor Wears No Clothes by Jack Herer.) Hemp seeds are nevertheless legal to grow in most other countries and legal to import and sell here if if they are sterilized. When raw, they are soft enough to chew easily, like nuts, and very popular with raw vegans.

Quinoa, amaranth, buckwheat and hempseed all contain phytic acid and should be soaked overnight or longer before eating.

Spirulina is a different matter entirely. It's an algae, a one-celled organism that grows wild in certain kinds of tropical and subtropical ponds. In both ancient Mexico and West Africa its value as a food was discovered many centuries ago and it was incorporated into the traditional diet. As with grain amaranth, the Spaniards effectively put a stop to its use in the New World, but in Chad you can still buy it dried in native markets. Spirulina has wads of protein. At least 50% of it is protein, as compared with between 5% and 20% for the other plant sources. Because it is one-celled and reproduces by splitting (mitosis) it doesn't form seeds, so it doesn't have the antinutrients. The only problem with it is that we Westerners aren't used to the idea of eating dark green powder, so it seems very strange to us.

One last comment about protein from seeds: even the best are only 20% protein, so to get the two ounces of protein that is the minimum a healthy adult needs, you'd have to eat ten ounces of grains and beans.

Remember the Vitamin B-12 and essential fatty acids? Those are two other nutrients that vegetarians, especially vegans, can become deficient in if they're not careful.

Vitamin B-12 is the one vitamin that is unavailable in any plant food. There are some older books out there that mention B-12 in certain seaweeds or in spirulina or miso or whatever, but later research has found that these are forms of B-12 that the human body cannot use. B-12 is also unusual in that, unlike the other B vitamins, animal bodies, including ours, can store it and pass it to offspring in eggs and milk. This is why you can get it from animal products. The herbalist Billie Potts wrote that in her practice she has seen people feel great for the first three to five years on a vegan diet and then begin to have problems with low energy, depression and poor immune function when their B-12 reserves ran out. While B-12 deficiency is famously associated with a condition called pernicious anemia that is fatal if not treated, it is also a factor in heart disease, cancer and a variety of mental and nervous system problems.

The ultimate source of B-12 in the ecosystem is certain (fortunately very common) bacteria that make it. Some herbivores have those bacteria among their gut flora; the rest get it from bacteria that live on the plants they eat and from soil accidentally taken up while grazing. (The soil has to be healthy, of course, not too heavily sprayed with pesticides to support bacteria.) Predators get it from eating the herbivores or, when they're infants, from their mothers' milk. Humans can get it from animal products and from the outer surfaces of plants that grow close to the ground provided that we don't wash it off. (Brushing off the bigger chunks, grains of sand and so forth, is okay.) Billie Potts recommends eating leaves of low-growing organic or wild leafy green vegetables within a few seconds of picking. Dr. Charles Attwood in his book A Vegetarian Doctor Speaks Out has seen both healthy and unhealthy vegans in his practice and has noticed that the healthy ones are gardeners. Having been a gardener myself, I know that gardeners often nibble the garden plants while they work and don't bother taking the plants inside and washing them. I'm sure you can see that this category excludes all plant foods that you buy, even from farmers' markets, because they've all been washed. In this climate, that means going three months or more without, but since the body can store three to five years' worth, it's generally not a problem.

There is some very new research suggesting that, while tempeh in the U. S. and Europe has no B-12, tempeh made in Indonesia and Thailand contains something that looks like B-12 in laboratory tests. Tempeh all over the world is made with molds of the genus Rhizopus, but the Thai and Indonesian process also involves a bacterium, identified as Klebsiella pneumoniae. In the U. S. and Europe the bacteria are regarded as contaminants and are kept out of the process, but maybe those traditional Southeast Asian tempeh makers are onto something. We won't know for sure until we've seen whether it cures symptoms of B-12 deficiency in actual people.

You can also buy Vitamin B-12, both by itself and in multiple vitamins, particularly those labeled “Vegetarian Multi” or “Vegetarian Support”. Also, when processed foods are “fortified” by adding vitamins, B-12 is one of the vitamins commonly added. This industrial B-12 is produced by growing the bacteria in vats. The chemical name for B-12 In its pure form, as made by the bacteria, is cobalamin and it's so unstable that light alone will destroy it. Then, usually, it's filtered through charcoal. In the filtering, the unstable cobalamin picks up a cyanide molecule and comes out as cyanocobalamin. On the one hand, cyanocobalamin is very stable, so it can be added to crackers, flour and cold cereals and sit on grocery store shelves for months, and it's cheap. On the other hand, this isn't the kind that our bodies are used to dealing with. It's very rare in nature and after we get it into us we need to break the cobalomin off from the cyanide and bind it to something else so we can use it. Then we have this tiny amount of cyanide floating around in our bloodstreams. In the 1990s the forms of cobalamin that the body actually uses, the forms found in food (hydroxocobalamin, methylcobalamin and, adenosylcobalamin) have come onto the market as supplements. They are more expensive but preliminary results suggest that methylcobalamin in particular is a much more powerful antioxidant than cyanocobalamin so it may be worth the extra money.

Finally, there's new research showing that the ability to absorb B-12 from either food or pills varies a lot between individuals. B-12 digestion requires enzymes and if all the enzymes aren't in place, the B-12 may pass through undigested. This is why B-12 is also available both by injection and sublingually, that is, under the tongue. The mucus membranes under your tongue and inside your cheeks have certain glands in them that allow all the B vitamins to be absorbed directing into your bloodstream, bypassing the digestive system altogether.

Essential Fatty Acids: there are a whole bunch of fatty acids used by the body, but only two groups are considered essential because they cannot be made by the body; they must be eaten. These are the omega-3 and omega-6 groups. (There is also a group called the omega-9s that can be synthesized by healthy humans but may be needed in food by people with liver problems.) The omega-3s and omega-6s need to be in balance, with no more than four parts omega-6 to one part omega-3, with 2 to 1 being ideal. This was easy before the industrialization of the food supply because that's about the ratio in which they occur in nature. The balance has been thrown off by the development of corn, soy, cottonseed, sunflower and safflower oils, which contain lots of omega-6 and little or no omega-3 and are in just about all processed food. The widespread use of these oils has pushed the ratio in the typical modern diet up to about 20 to 1. The omega-3s, on the other hand, are found in a very few foods, most of them oily cold water fish (mainly salmon, herring, anchovies, and mackerel) and wild game. Animal products from grass fed domestic animals are also good sources, but not from grain-fed animals. The plant sources are few and relatively unfamiliar. Flax seeds are the big one, with 1 part omega-6 to three parts omega-3, which makes them useful for restoring the balance. Flax seed oil is very fragile and goes rancid easily; it should only be bought from a store that keeps it refrigerated. I find it's easier just to keep the whole seeds on hand and grind them as needed – or make them into raw crackers and chew them. Something similar applies with walnuts. The oil in walnuts features about 1 part omega-6 to 4 parts omega-3 and the oil, once extracted from the nut, is fragile (not to mention way expensive). There is also an algae oil which has tons of omega-3 but it's also expensive and so rare you have to special order it.

The omega-3 in the oil from plant sources is in its simplest form: as alpha-linolenic acid (known as ALA). The omega-3 in the fish oil has been assembled by the fish from ALA into the form in which our bodies use them: EPA and DHA. (Those are acronyms for long hard-to-pronounce chemical names that you can look up if you're curious.) In theory our bodies can do the same. In practice, some bodies can and some bodies can't. Julia Ross reports that in her clinical experience the people who can't tend to have ancestors that come from northerly coastal areas where oily cold water fish have always been plentiful and a staple of the diet. They never needed to make their own EPA and DHA so they never evolved the ability and therefore could not pass it to their descendants. On the other hand, there are people who find the fish oil hard to digest but do fine on the flax oil and/or the algae oil. Once again, it's an individual matter.

So there's the current wisdom on how to be healthy while vegetarian: sprout your seeds, combine your proteins, keep the complete protein foods on hand for times when you're too busy to keep track of your combining, and be sure to get your B-12 and your essential fatty acids.

WTF?.

2009-11-19T02:27:58Z

Tuesday I found myself awake around 4;45 a.m. so I decided to get online. No can do. I signed onto the Wifi but couldn't get any pages. So I went downstairs and reset the router. Still no access. Craig comes down and reveals that he has not been to bed yet, that he was online at about 3:30 when his access went away and furthermore so did our landline phone service. Since we get them both from Comcast, it seemed likely that the problem was on their end.

Next morning I was on the phone with Comcast customer service from 9 to 10 a.m. before the CS person concluded that fixing the problem from her office was not working and she would send somebody. A technician showed up around 2:30, checked outside at the spot where the cable enters the house, checked down in the basement, found no problems. Opened up the modem, took the battery out, put it back in, and everything worked fine again. I noticed that the dial tone was stuttering, indicating voice mail messages, but I was in the middle of putting in a tulip bed and didn't listen to them.

About 7:30 p.m. Craig listened to the voice mail and found a message for me: that it was "very imperative" for me to call Mary Ann at one of my banks that day. Well, too late by then, but first thing the next morning I called, only to find that Mary Ann was out and nobody other than her knew anything about it. When I left a message the person taking it asked for my account number. I got out the checkbook just to be sure I recited the number correctly... and the problem became evident. I've had this checking account since 1991. In the days before online banking I used to phone up to get my balance and in the process I memorized my account number. And what was printed on those checks was wrong. Typo in the fourth digit, just enough to make the bank's computers not recognize the account.

Fortunately that was a new batch that I had only written three checks from, two of them to local businesses. I went around to those two and made things good with cash. The third one is probably on Mary Ann's desk right now and I will hear from her tomorrow.

It wasn't major trouble, but it was a real defiance of the odds that these two failures should occur simultaneously and should have this kind of synergistic effects. Makes me wonder what astrological influence had befallen me.

I made alcohol! On purpose!

2009-11-17T23:52:23Z

No, actually the yeasts made it. I just provided the right environment.

It started a week ago when I put butternut squash in to bake and forgot it. It wasn't burned (well, only slightly) but it was very well done, some of it caramelized. What to do with this stuff? Online, looking for recipes, I kept running into Pumpkin Ale. I've had store-bought pumpkin ale and liked it, so I decided that this would be my first attempt at brewing something like beer. (I've been reading a book called Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers which inspired me with how easy and uncomplicated some of them are, and gave me enough confidence to go forward with this.)

I started with the squash, peeled and de-charcoaled and cut into chunks, in a gallon pot of heating water. I had read that there isn't enough sugar in the winter squashes to make a good ferment, so I scrounged in the pantry for sweeteners. I added a cup of dates, about a third of a cup of malt syrup (the favorite of all yeasts; I used to use it when I made bread, but since I started patronizing the Hungry Ghost bakery it had just been sitting there), and however much organic molasses was left in the bottle. Stirred and watched it dissolve. The dates pretty much collapsed; they're really just solid sugar with a pit, a skin and a little fiber. While it cooled I assembled the spices I intended to add once it cooled. I scrubbed my cider jug, disinfected it inside with a tiny amount of rum, strained out the stuff in the pot (which is called the "wort") and poured it into the jug. I was thinking of adding organic raisins as since they seem to bear on their little wrinkled skins a suitable years, which made accidental alcohol in kefir-brewed ginger ale. Craig disuaded me from doing so, pointing out that the raisins are quite old and may have picked up any number of undesirable microbes. Along about this time I discovered that the bung I'd bought was too small for the jug mouth. I pressed an old envelope onto the lip of the jug to get an exact size, put the screw-top lid on the jug and buzzed off to the brewers' supply store. (Noho is the kind of cool town that has a brewers' supply store that is a real store that keeps regular hours, rather than being in someone's garage and only open on weekends, as I have found all too often in other towns.)

The proprietor did figure out the size of bung I needed and sold it to me along with a packet of generic beer yeast. (All the gear is so cheap, I don't understand why most beer drinkers don't brew.) When I got home I poured the yeast straight into the jug, which I later learned you're not supposed to do; you're supposed to dissolve the yeast in a small amount of the wort, then pour that into your main batch. Put the airlock into the new bung, put the bung in the jug, and carried it over to the fermentation shelf. There were already bubbles coming through it. Those store-bought beer yeasts are fast workers!

The rest of Friday and much of Saturday it bubbled pretty much continuously. On Saturday I discovered the spices, which I had forgotten to put in, and added them a day late. On Sunday it was down to about a bubble per second. Yesterday I couldn't see any bubble activity at all and a sludge of dead yeasts had accumulated at the bottom of the jug. I figured it was done and I tasted it. Still kinda sweet, not very strong. I liked it, although I think it would be better if the spices were stronger. That's what I get for my forgetfulness. Today it's faintly stronger, faintly less sweet. Still liked it.

Craig says this is not real beer, that to qualify as beer it has to be bottled or something so it will keep. He says what I have, drinking it right out of the fermentation vessel after three days of fermentation, is small beer. Okay, so I made small beer. It's good. I may make it again. There's something faintly outlaw about fermenting one-gallon batches out of anything handy, even though it's perfectly legal. I'm pleased with myself all out of proportion to my actual accomplishment. Homebrew is good. Long live homebrew.

Zarathustra Brownies

2009-11-07T01:17:02Z

Many years ago when I was living in Ithaca, NY, I developed a wheat-free vegan brownie recipe. The basic idea was this: the ideal brownie texture is dense and gooey. Wheat flour isn't naturally dense and gooey. To get it that way, the cook has to load it down with eggs and milk products. Rye, however, is naturally dense and gooey, as you know if you've ever tried to substitute it for wheat in a recipe. In Ithaca there was this coarse rye flour available that responded very well to a combination of carob or cocoa powder, maple syrup, mashed banana, salt, baking powder and whatever oil happened to be handy. (I was much less clued in about healthy eating then.) It turned out well enough that some of those who tasted it thought I should make it for sale.

When I moved out of Ithaca, I no longer had any place to get the coarse rye flour and the recipe totally didn't work with the fine-ground rye flour sold in New England, so the recipe laid fallow. Then over the last few months I have got to thinking: what if I sprouted whole rye berries and ground them up in the food processor? They'd be coarse, like the Ithaca rye flour, but even more nutritious. Wetter, but that could be adjusted by substituting unrefined sugar for the now-unaffordable maple syrup.

So I gave it a try. Soaked a cup and a half of whole rye berries until they were soft enough that I could cut one in two using the nails of my thumb and forefinger. (It took about 24 hours and they almost doubled in volume.) Dumped them into the food processor with two thirds of a cup of coconut oil, a little salt and, in place of the banana, about half a cup of butternut squash, of which we have excessive amounts right now. While it was processing, I put 2 cups of sugar, 2/3 cup of carob powder and 2 t baking powder into a bowl and spent a minute stirring and crushing lumps with a fork. Then I stopped the machine.

"This won't work," I thought. "The rye mixture is already so thick that a spoon will stand up in it and I haven't yet added these nice powders. What do I do now?" What I did was to open a 14-ounce can of organic coconut milk, turn the machine back on, and pour it in through the tube. In less than a minute I had something liquidy enough that it absorbed all the powdered ingredients and was still a batter, as it should be, rather than a dough. I greased a brownie pan, poured it in, and slid it into the oven.

Now, my notes from the Ithaca days said to bake it at 350 for half an hour, no longer, because it burns easily. This did not work with the sprouted rye recipe. When I pulled the batch out after the thirty minutes, I saw that the top surface had obviously risen a tad and fallen. When I tasted a corner I found that the top surface was done to the texture of cake, the edges to a crunchy cookie texture, and the great bulk of it was still raw. Seeing this, I looked up the one recipe I've ever seen in print that calls for sprouting grains and then grinding them the way I did: the recipe for Zarathutra Bread in Nourishing Traditions. Let's see. Baking instructions. Yes. The recipe said to put it in a very slow oven, like 150 degrees, for 12 hours. It was Craig who suggested that I might do that in the dehydrator.

The batch went into the little machine at about 9 last night and came out about 11 this morning. The edges had gone from cookie-like to dried-out-pizza-crust-like, but the rest of it was excellent, with that dense gooey texture, halfway between cheesecake and fudge, that the really decadent brownies have. Craig was wierded out by it (having not lived through the Golden Age of Carob Everything, he expected them to be chocolate) but likes the flavor. I suspect that if I had done the dehydrator thing to begin with, the edges wouldn't have been a problem. Also, the baking powder is clearly superfluous and can be left out. I rather think I could do an all-raw version with cacao powder and agave syrup or maybe ground-up dates. Raw vegans luuuv sweets. In the meantime, here is the recipe if anyone is curious to try it:

1 & 1/2 c rye berries.
2/3 c coconut oil
1/2 c baked butternut squash
1/2 t salt
1 14-oz can coconut milk
2/3 c carob powder
2 c unrefined brown sugar

Put the rye berries in a quart jar and fill it with water. Let stand 8-12 hours, then change the water. After another 8-12 hours, squeeze a berry between your thumbnail and fingernail. If you can split it in two, they're ready. If not, change the water again, let soak another 8-12 hours, and repeat until they do soften up. Drain them, put them in the food processor with the coconut oil, salt and squash, and process until you've got something like cookie dough. With the processor running, pour in the coconut milk. Now combine the carob powder and sugar in a large bowl and stir until homogeneous, breaking up any lumps. Add the contents of the food processor to the bowl and mix until it's all thoroughly combined. Pour into a greased 9 x 14 inch baking pan and bake 12 hours at 150 degrees, turning it 180 degrees at about the halfway point if you think of it.

Security Notification

2009-10-22T11:53:17Z

LJ addresses are being used to spread viruses by email. I just got a couple myself. One purports to be from DHL, the package delivery company. The text is:

Hello!

The courier company was not able to deliver your parcel by your address.
Cause: Error in shipping address.
You may pickup the parcel at our post office personaly!

Please attention!
The shipping label is attached to this e-mail. Print this label to get this package at our post office.

Thank you for attention. DHL Delivery Services.

The virus is in the "shipping label".

The other claims to be from Microsoft. The text is:

Update for Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express (KB910721)
Brief Description
Microsoft has released an update for Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express. This update is critical and provides you with the latest version of the Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express and offers the highest level of security and stability.
Instructions

* To install Update for Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express (KB910721) please visit Microsoft Update Center:
[I removed the actual link in case someone's finger slips.]
Quick Details

* File Name: officexp-KB910721-FullFile-ENU.exe
* Version: 1.5
* Date Published: Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:22:11 +0100
* Language: English
* File Size: 100 KB

System Requirements

* Supported Operating Systems: Windows 2000; Windows 98; Windows ME; Windows NT; Windows Server 2003; Windows XP; Windows Vista

* This update applies to the following product: Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express

MS and DHL both have warnings about these viri on their websites. They don't need to be notified. If you get one, just tag it "spam" and toss it.

What's that out the window?

2009-10-16T12:36:49Z

Can it be?

It is.

Snow.

Y'all can go out in your fur coats now.

Tired...

2009-10-14T23:47:49Z

Thing I forgot about having shingles or any virus: the body will divert energy from other things to deal with it. I went for a walk, about a mile each way, level ground, the kind of thing I ordinarily do with no problem. About halfway back I had to stop and rest. I never have to stop and rest, not if I can go at my own pace, which I could this time. I just don't have what I usually have.

Lysine. More lysine.

Full of complaints

2009-10-11T12:35:15Z

It's a beautiful weekend morning, the height of Fall Color Season here in scenic Western Massachusetts, and I have the shingles.

For those of you who have never had the misfortune, shingles is what happens when the chicken pox virus, having done its classic performance on the stage of your body in elementary school, decides to go for an encore. Having less power in the adult body, it can only manage to infect one line of nerve branching out from somewhere on your spine, usually on the lower torso.

The first symptom is pain. In this case, it came on Friday night during the Orange Dance, forcing me to stop dancing and go home when I'd only been there an hour. I thought it was a digestive problem, a reaction to something I'd eaten. It took another 24 hours, eating only familiar and trustworthy foods, to conclude that this is something else entirely. By last night I had it figured out. Took a couple of doses of Vitamin B12 and it looks like the rash, which would have showed up by now, isn't going to come out.

Now I just have to have patience. Shingles is what they call self-limiting. It does no long term damage and never goes over into anything more serious. It causes discomfort and sometimes ugliness for a while and then it goes away. Maybe it'll respond to an anti-inflamatory. Maybe not. Gonna go do some research now.

A food called silverberry

2009-10-07T23:37:51Z

Been hearing for years about a tree called the autumn olive. Foliage sort of looks like that of olive trees but it's a completely unrelated species. First I heard of them was that they are nitrogen-fixers and so can restore depleted soils. Second thing I heard was that they are very vigorous growers, so much so that they can crowd out other species, and in some areas have come to be regarded as a noxious weed. Nobody ever told me that they were a food tree.

Then Craig brought home a bag of the fruit, which he picked from a friend's tree. They're called silverberries because the berries, when on the tree, are covered in silvery scales. By the time Craig got them home, however, they were definitely dark red. You know how, when you open a pomegranate, there are all these little red juicy berry-like units (technically called arils), each with a seed in the middle of it? Well, if you can imagine that instead of being crammed together inside the fruit, each aril was on its own little stem out in the open and was therefore free to be round, but was otherwise unchanged in terms of structure, color and tart-sweet taste, you'll have a pretty good picture of what these silverberries are like.

Craig took that first batch, added some sugar and boiled them down into a jam. Turns out that silverberries have their own pectin content and therefore do not need Sure-Gel or any such additive. The jam was yummy, but I found the seeds too fibrous. Craig likes them. He brought home another, larger bag of berries a few days ago. I took half of it, boiled it with a little apple cider, and strained out the seeds by mashing the pulp through a strainer with the bottom of a glass. Then I spread the result on a Teflex sheet, slid it into the dehydrator and made leather. Way yummy. He is in class full time all week, so maybe he'll give me permission to do the same with the other half of the bag.

I did some research on this species. It's amazing. Not only does it thrive on depleted soils, it can stand a relatively wide soil Ph range and tolerate salt spray. So not only is it good for controlling coastal erosion, it is one of the few species that can grow on coal mine tailings. It will also enter into symbiosis with black walnut trees, increasing both wood growth and nut yield. Furthermore, the berries stay on the trees almost until spring and are a valuable getting-through-the-winter food for, it seems, half the birds in the Northeastern ecosystem. Furthermore, it is very generously endowed with the known anti-cancer nutrient lycopene, about five times more than tomatoes, the best commonly eaten source. And yet, because it is such a vigorous grower, it's been labeled a threat by this one government website that advocates using some horrible glyphosphate herbicide on it. Heh. If they really want to beat it back, they should promote the wild berry as a "Miracle Food!" It'll be endangered in no time at all.

Now this is politics

2009-10-06T09:57:35Z

Click on the picture and it will enlarge in a new window.

From http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/business/global/06milk.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Where'd the month go?

2009-09-29T16:35:08Z

Just looking at my calendar and noticing all the notable events I intended to post about this month and then didn't. Therefore I'm going to use this post as a kind of digest, attempting to curb my usual longwindedness and get more or less caught up.

August 7-9 Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) summer conference, on the UMass Amherst campus. I've known about this annual event since I moved to the Valley, ten years ago now, and it's taken me this long to actually get to it, mainly because none of my New England friends are really into the whole organic/sustainable societal transformation thing. I was actually feeling kind of isolated because of it. Then I went to this con and, whoa shit, there's hundreds of us! Every speaker I heard was My New Hero; every new set of ideas I was exposed to, I wanted to put into practice immediately. Well, with exceptions. The sheep workshop, which took place around a temporary pen containing five live sheep, convinced me that I really don't want to work with sheep or with any livestock. Working with animals is a gift. I don't have it. Nor am I that big a gardener. I'm a kitchen worker, processing the harvest into meals for now or later. To the extent that I am drawn to primary production, it'll be about trees, bushes, vines and, now that I know more about them, the amazing world of fungi. Out of a roster of impressive speakers, the one who most impressed me was Paul Stamets, the pioneering mycologist. (That's a biologists specializing in fungi, in case your obscure academic Latin is a little rusty.) His keynote speech was a variant of his talk "6 Ways That Mushrooms Can Save The World" (on video on his website) and now that I've heard it, I believe him. And Bill McKentley, the self-described druid and proprietor of an all-organic tree nursery in upstate New York who gave the workshop on black walnut trees, made me want to immediately buy some forest and get intimate with it.

September 6th: Prayer for the Earth and the People of the Earth, Starseed Sanctuary, Savoy, MA. In the course of thinking about buying land, I got really clear that I am a social animal, not the type to hole up on my own little property with just trees for company, wonderful as trees are. In particular, I need some sort of regular group spiritual activity to keep me inspired. (I left off attending that little Christian church last spring after the preacher asked the group "Who here wants a closer relationship with Jesus Christ?" and I was face to face with the hypocracy inherent in my presence there.) So I went on the Intentional Communities website (http://www.ic.org/) and searched the directory and was connected with Starseed, an ecumenical retreat center in the Berkshires, the kind of place where the meditation room has images of the Buddha, Jesus, Mary, Kwan Yin, Ganesha and some Native American mythological figures I don't know the names of. This ritual was the next open event on the calendar. Beautiful land. Beautiful ritual. Afterward I spoke a little with Satyena Ananda, priestess and proprietor, about my interest in finding a place to move to. We have no specific points of contention. Right now we are working out the specifics of a date for me to go up there for a work day, maybe this week.

September 11th: First Sacred Ecstatic Dance Sanctuary, a.k.a. The Red Dance, Inspirit Common, Hadley, MA. This was something I hadn't seen before: a dance with both a DJ and a drummer playing along. It turned out to work really well. The refreshment table was serving chocolate truffles made with my drug of choice: raw cacao. And the crowd, although I knew almost none of them, was my kind of crowd: diverse, energetic and creative. There were three men who danced together. There were outrageous dykes, each with her own style. There were a het foursome that did contact improv. There were moments of breakdancing, moves from capoeira and other martial arts, the occasional vogue. And somehow, between the sound, the substance and the free and open vibe, I got back, for one night, the energy level I had at 30, while still having available all the moves I've learned since then. And I got compliments! An African American woman, one of the few other middle-aged people there, said I inspired her, and a tipsy young thing (she must have brought her own and drunk it in the parking lot because the event was alcohol-free) said "When I'm your age I want to dance just like you! High five!" and our palms met in a slightly unsteady overhead slap. One of the ego-boo highlights of my time in the Valley. There's going to be another one, The Orange Dance, on October 9th. This will be a 2nd Friday series that works its way up the chakra system: http://inspiritcommon.com/workshops/dance_sanctuary.shtml.

Mondays starting September 14th: Radical Nutrition, North Star homeschoolers' resource center, Hadley. Yeah, the semester has started and I'm teaching again. Because of the relative number of holidays, the fall semester has fewer weeks than the spring, so I'm having to compress my material into a shorter time frame. The full-length videos had to be dropped, but there is a Social Justice Film Series at North Star on Tuesdays, so I contacted the presenter for that and he's open to fitting nutritional subjects into the lineup. Teaching is the usual emotional roller coaster for me: enthusiasm, stage fright, confidence in my material, painful awareness of how much better I could be doing this, and a peculiar lack of concern stemming from the fact that my students are mostly of middle school age and therefore not a real demanding audience. So long as I'm comprehensible, I'll probably do fine.

September 19th: Home Food Preservation Workshop, Northampton Town Farm. (Sponsored by NOFA.) This was the one mild disappointment in the list. The description gave equal emphasis to canning, freezing, dehydrating, pickling and root cellaring, but in practice the distribution of time was roughly 70% canning, 10% dehydrating, 5% freezing, 3% pickling and 2% root cellaring. There wasn't actually a root cellar, just a few minutes of talk about root cellaring in general. Ironically, this workshop convinced me that as a sustainable technology for New England, canning is outmoded. Because of the high heat involved, it takes a lot of energy and destroys a lot of the vitamins in the food. It was important in the 19th century, before refrigeration, especially in wet places like England and the Pacific Northwest where dehydration is unreliable, but here and now its only advantage is that it creates what amounts to convenience food, ready to eat right out of the jar. That said, I had a good time, tasted some very yummy food, and met some cool people, so overall it was still a worthwhile Saturday.

More later.

Raven rocks

2009-09-19T11:20:33Z

Raven Kaldera is a personal friend and a brilliant writer with a twisted sense of humor. Ever since he got together with Josh, the techie boi, the availability of his twisted brilliance on the Web has been steadily advancing. Check out their latest venture: http://www.ravenkaldera.org/overlord/

Score one for gay history

2009-09-11T13:56:48Z

The British government has apologized for what it did to Alan Turing.
http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page20571

Thanks to iarwain.

Drum & Dance is back!

2009-09-05T13:08:58Z

The first one of the new school year was last night. It was one of those nights when I fell into the groove so perfectly that I could just watch my hands work on the drum head, no need to consciously direct them. This morning my hands hurt and my ears ring. It's good to know that being off the grid (should I ever achieve that lifestyle) does not have to mean giving up Really Loud Music.

Their schedule through May is at http://ritualarts.org/

This past couple of days I've been mentioning to people I run into that I've decided to finally acquire some land. A response that I've heard more often than I expected is "Yeah, us, too." I guess this is a movement.

I recalled in the course of last night that, of those living situations that I chose myself as opposed to just followed along with those around me, the one I was happiest in I found by picking the neighborhood first and then finding an apartment there. Choosing the right neighborhood is going to be even more important this time because I want a place where everything is in walking or biking distance, where the Prius only comes out when I need to travel at least 30 miles or haul some kind of major load.. So I guess the next thing I ought to be doing is getting maps of the general areas I'm looking in - mainly Franklin County and the more remote parts of Hampshire County in Mass, the entire state of Vermont, the adjacent areas of New York, and northern New Hampshire. Rural enough to be cheap, but with enough cultural lefties like me that I won't feel totally isolated.

Lesson from the life of Thomas Berry

2009-09-02T18:14:55Z

This is from a tribute to Berry written by the staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society and sent out to everyone on their emailing list. I'm posting this little snippet because it's such a great example of a smart guy who isn't too proud to learn from his mistakes.

An inspired student of Teilhard de Chardin, he was deeply in love with the
planet itself, as a living being. Its visible signs of deterioration
grieved him. Concerned, he thought at first to use his gift of speech to
describe the scope of Earth's devastation, believing that such a picture
would lead his listeners to acts of restoration.

But his approach, he admitted candidly, had the opposite effect. His
audience grew depressed and disempowered.

So instead of a history of destruction, he began to describe a Universe that
might be -- a future Ecozic Era in which human-earth relations were again in
harmony. And this Universe Story moved his audience to new action.
Neglected lands of monastaries and convents were put in fruitful production
growing vegetables for the local region and creating sites for affordable
housing. Groups met in church basements and Grange halls, in town meetings
and UN gatherings to discuss their responsibilities to shape a healthier
world for the children, because of Thomas Berry.

The rich are fleeing

2009-09-02T14:02:53Z

Dmitry Orlov, anticipating widespread collapse, sold his condo and moved with his wife to a houseboat in Boston Harbor. He outlines his reasons, together with some advice for those who are moved to follow suit, in his essay "The New Age of Sail".

Now it looks like ultra-wealthy individuals are doing the same, giving up their U.S. citizenship and moving permanently onto their yachts, according to a group of law firms that handle renunciations of citizenship.

See http://www.wealth-bulletin.com/rich-life/rich-monitor/content/1054959505/_.

Gonna move to the country

2009-09-01T12:01:15Z

One month ago I signed the lease for another year in this house in Northampton with Craig and Nick and, in another ten days or so, Felix. I did not feel okay about it then and I don't now. It isn't a matter of getting along. I like the guys although I am dismayed at the extent to which I have sunk to their level in the housekeeping department. No, my issue is this: I think of myself as a caring person when it comes to nature, the environment, and the related issue of our longterm survival as a species. I have actually taught, in my Radical Nutrition class, just how bad I think our current system is. And yet I live in a house heated by an oil furnace. I eat things like rice, which is definitely not a local food. (It could be. The Koreans produce rice in a climate almost exactly like New England's, but it's very labor intensive.) I drive when I could walk or bike.

This was one thing when I was at the young-and-broke stage of my life, as my housemates are, as Craig, because of his disability, may be for the rest of his life. But I'm not that helpless anymore. I still have the money from selling the Pagan House sitting in a CD in a local bank. I'm debt free and have no dependents.

What stopped me for so long was that I was also looking for a group that would meet my emotional needs. I was looking for an integrated life, everything in one package, housing and work and a social life and a spiritual path. My model was the church youth group summer trips I participated in as a teenager, only this would be Pagan and would last for life. I have believed in this model in the same sense that conventional romantic young women believe their prince will come. It's still my fantasy ideal. But I'm no longer willing to hold out for it. The need to quit waiting, to find a place that will give me the small environmental footprint I'm looking for, is rankling and itching and won't let me be.

So I've started looking now. So far it's been a matter of searching online, mapping potential real estate search areas, contacting a few groups. (I may not live in such a group but I definitely want to have one in the neighborhood.)

My most recently read book is The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith. The book has a lot to say about adult knowledge. The author is talking about giving up the fantasy of living without any member of the animal kingdom dying so that you might eat. It doesn't work that way, not on Planet Earth. But I think I've arriving at another kind of adult knowledge, the knowledge that fantasies don't always come true and that life doesn't have to conform to an ideal in order to be good.

Another cool thing at Mill River Market

2009-08-30T12:01:27Z

A Wink and a Smile is a booth in the flea market specializing in vintage and historic reproduction items including books, tools, clothing, tchatchkas and generally anything cool. Leans toward the World War II stuff but other periods are represented. I got a pair of woolen knee breeches, authentic Revolutionary War style with buttons made out of deer antler. (Now all I need is a three-cornered hat and a flintlock musket.) The proprietor is Joe Potter. He and his wife Allison do WWII re-enactments/living history and deal in artifacts and historic displays. If you can't make it to the market (on Sundays before 2), private showings can be arranged by calling 413-789-7772.

Part of the deal we struck on the knee breeches is that I promised to tell all my friends about the booth. So I'm telling you.

When I am an old woman...

2009-08-16T12:56:27Z

"...I shall wear purple
With a red hat that doesn't go and doesn't suit me."

You know that poem, right? And you know the kind of world it was written in reaction against, the kind of world I'm in now, at my mother's apartment in an Active Seniors' Community in the South: pastels, white, floral prints, khaki and grey and dull blue, maybe red and dark green for the holidays and, in the decor, some little touches of burgundy and burnt orange. The only real color is in the flowers and in the pictures of flowers, framed on the walls, which are the only art. Everything is chosen with a view toward avoiding negative reactions, so strong design elements of all sorts are excluded. Emotionally it's all earnest and wholesome and cheery and in deep denial about the stage of life people here are in. May all the gods spare me an old age in this aesthetic.

At the same time, though, is the purple outfit with the red hat really for me? It was one thing for the poet, a Brit writing in 1961, but for someone of my generation it would look like Nostalgia For Woodstock, a different form of denial. The very idea makes me want to throw away everything in my wardrobe that has any color at all.

No, when I imagine myself an old woman, I prefer to imagine that I shall wear black and be the Goth eldress I never was. I shall live in three rooms. One will be my bedroom, writing room, and the room where I receive guests, as Colette did in her celebrated old age. It will be done in mirrors, well-filled bookshelves, dark draperies, and selected objets de art including, if I have amazing luck, the copy of Rembrandt's "Man in the Golden Helmet" painted by some nameless Viennese art student, brought back from occupied Austria by my father at the end of his military service there and currently owned by my mother.
(She has designs on the large gilt frame it's in, wants to pull the Man out and replace him with a landscape. I'm hoping she never gets around to it.) In this room the dishes must all be white because I will serve dark things on them: dark cherries, berries and grapes, black walnuts, seaweeds, chocolate when I can get it, mint and nettle teas, buckwheat honey, licorice and the superb South African jerky called biltong which is dried in thick columns, two inches by two inches by up to two feet, and sliced thin just before serving. In this room I shall overdress or wear nothing at all, and when there is sun I shall sit by the window and do needlework and make quill pens out of the flight feathers of geese and swans.

The second room will be a big kitchen, not mine alone - I hope not! I hope it is shared by many! - with a large solid table in the middle. In this room I shall wear simple, sensible Zen black while I ferment and sprout and pickle, make cheese and biltong, dry fruit, crack black walnuts, cook large meals and teach what I know. There will be a stationary bicycle that can be attached by chains and gears to the various kitchen appliances that usually use little electric motors, so that the work can get done by leg power. There will be a grain grinder and a meat grinder that work with hand cranks. There will be cast iron cookware that endures for decades. There will be a food dryer overhead. This room will open onto a large yard with a kitchen garden, a solar oven for baking on hot days, and a large rusty cast-iron cauldron suspended on a tripod. Most of the time it will have a piece of window screen draped over it so that the rain falls into it with a minimum of detritus. On fine days in October I will put black walnut husks into it and boil the result to make that liquid which our ancestors once used for both ink and black dye. (It does not fade as sepia - octopus ink - does, but it fell out of use when steel pen nibs replaced quills because it corrodes the metal.) Some of it I will put into little jars and sell or barter away, with the quill pens. Into the rest will go all the cloth that has become hopelessly stained or that was too ugly a color to begin with. What is left will stain the bases of new solar ovens and anything that will be used to maximize solar gain.

The third room will belong to the whole community. It will be large and bare and usually empty, neither heated nor cooled except by solar gain and a clever arrangement of the windows. It will be used for meetings, rituals, classes, festivities. Musical instruments will be kept there. And every day, long after it is something that people want to see, I will dance. For this I will wear flights of fancy, gauze and glitter, beautiful rags with enough stretch in them to allow my wrinkled body to move. For I will continue to move. My father said very little to me about my mother, so one of the few things he did say, many years after they were divorced, has stuck in my mind ever since. "Your mother," he said, "will never stop." He was right about that. She is 89 now, so crippled with arthritis that she can barely walk. She suffers from the beginnings of macular degeneration and consequent night blindness, enough so that last Thursday, when she renewed her driver's license, she got the little code forbidding her to drive at night. And yet she has not stopped and no one expects her to stop until the day she drops in her tracks. I hope and intend to follow in her footsteps, not in the exact things she has not stopped doing, but in that quality of never stopping.