If You Happen to Eat Food...

"Canada urgently needs a national food policy. Close to two and a half million Canadians are food insecure. Farmers and fishers are going out of business, our natural environment is being pushed to the limit, a quarter of Canadians are considered obese, and we are the only G8 country without a nationally-funded school meal program. The status quo is no longer an option.

The need for change is widely recognized and plans to develop national food policies or strategies are being advanced by many sectors, including all five federal political parties and influential industry groups. The People’s Food Policy is significantly different from these initiatives. It is the first-ever national food policy to be developed by the food movement itself – a diverse and dynamic network of organizations and individuals working to build a healthy, ecological and just food system for Canada.

The People’s Food Policy embodies a wave of concern, interest and action by citizens who are increasingly questioning how our current food system is organized. From connecting directly with food producers, to reclaiming indigenous food systems, to setting up food policy councils, people across Canada are taking actions daily that are transforming our food system from the ground up. These actions need to be translated into policy." - People's Food Policy Project

Read the entire document here. It's simply brilliant, even if you're not Canadian.

Mega Quarry or Farms?

Gotta' Go: The Internet is Frying My Brain

My brain on the internet. Quick pop and sizzle.

I've been a wee bit absent from my blog lately. I really enjoy the avenue blogging affords me, but I'm finding it a bit tougher to find relevance in it all. A few weeks ago, I started reading, "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains". Let's just say it hasn't helped the gnawing feeling that something is going on in this internet saturated noggin of mine.  I highly recommend the book. Get it.

I have been noticing, as of late, that my hunger for information has only grown as I've been given access to more of it. Right, my name is Tara and I'm an information addict. Seriously, I am. I want to know more about everything. I want to reinforce my beliefs with all sorts of studies and authorities giving me the a-o.k. so I can feel secure in my position. I can carry forward with confidence knowing that bright minds around the world say 'it's all good'.

It's nice to have a group of people reinforcing one's beliefs and opinions. I don't know many people that feel the way we do about food and health so it's pretty cool to find 'a community' out there that does. Comfort in numbers and all that jazz.

But, I do know some people, like for real, like in flesh and blood and all, that do feel the way I do about farming, about eating and living in a responsible way. And the people I know that are doing the most profound work in the direction of changing our food systems and policies, our farming practices, and our approach to health, are doing it by making real connections with real people. They are standing up with a voice, getting in the face of the issue. They do it away from a screen and they are so much more effective than I.

There has to come a time when we have enough information doesn't there? When I can say, hey I know this is good, I don't know everything there is to know, but it's enough for me. I can now bow out and immerse myself in more pertinent work where I can see forward movement, changes if only small. A lot of you who have been reading my blog know that I'm working to having my own farm. I'll be heading a couple of provinces over again in a few months to work at my dear friends' farm. It's in this work that I feel most empowered and effective as an agent of change.

Very shortly, we will have our own farm where I can put my energy towards learning what I need to know so I can produce the very best food I can for ourselves and our community. I'm looking forward to join forces with food policy activists to make changes in our broken system. People have a fundamental right to good food. Children have a right to good food. Maybe being a Mama makes me sensitive to it, but it breaks my heart to see how disconnected children are from their food. I'm going to do something about that.

I think I've written what I wanted to write. I've said what I wanted to say. I'm not interested in posting recipes and reasons why someone should eat this or that. There are many fine people doing that on the internet. I'm also hesitant to be swallowed up in the ever growing paleo net. We eat well, the way people should. I don't need a title or group for that. I think, if anything, naming it as something dilutes how we eat. We eat the way people were designed to eat, without the invented foods of man. Pretty simple.

So, all this rambling brings me back to where I started. That book I mentioned earlier, "The Shallows". I've been feeling like something has been changing in my brain for the last while. Why can't I sit and read for an hour like I used to? Why am I always multi-tasking instead of just sitting with one task until it's completed? Turns out there's a very real reason why. Pick up the book if you want to learn more.

I want to live a life my body and spirit were designed to live. To move, to lift, to eat well, to build and participate in real life communities. I seem to lose that real stuff with my consumption of digital information. That's just me though. Remember, I said I have an information addiction? I'm a bona fide junkie my friends. I'm pretty good at stepping back and seeing areas of disfunction in my life and peering out at the horizon, looking for ways to improve. I can see it many a thing out there. Time to do something about it.

With that, I bid you all adieu. For me, it's back to books and dirty fingernails. My deepest appreciation for the time you have all invested in reading my words. I look forward to popping into your blogs every now and then, but for now, I know what I need to know to live a healthy life. Time for me to start enjoying that health to do the stuff I need to do.

... like hunt for frogs with my lovelies.

Definitely Not a 10 Minute Lunch

Ohhh mama, you need smell-o-vision to really get what's going on here. Slurp.

I like to post a couple of quick lunches every now and then to show people that eating well doesn't have to be a long, drawn-out endeavour. Still, I also happen to think that it's important to take time to make some longer, involved recipes. There's something very rewarding about taking my time and really paying attention to what I'm doing in the kitchen. I like marveling at my ingredients, injecting a steak with gratitude or some raw butter with admiration. I have no doubt that the energy we have when cooking shows up on the plate.

One of our most beloved, takes-a-long-time-but-is-well-worth-it meals is braised Chinese oxtail with a bunch of chopped and roasted cauliflower to soak up all of the saucy deliciousness. The recipe comes from one of my favourite cookbooks, Bones by Jennifer McLagan. I always triple the recipe (a little trick I employ to make the time spent in the kitchen pay dividends via multiple meals afterwards). If you've never had oxtail, I can't think of a better recipe to start with. After experiencing this meal for the first time, we all agreed that we'd rather have oxtail over ribs any day. Yes, it's that good.

Hunting for Good Food and Roaming Bison

I updated that menu bar up there. See that? The tab that says, "Hunting for Good Food"? I had a few people contact me about where I find good food in Ontario. Well, I've lived in almost every province in Canada so I've developed a system of sorts to help me find good food no matter where I live. I've tried to condense that information in that page. I hope you find it useful.

These bison roamed in herds like they would in the wild. When we harvested one, we would drive for a long while, looking for the herd and then shoot it. No stress to the animals, instant and humane. 

Thank you, Dr. Harris, for thinking my bison comment worthy of a whole post on your illustrious blog, Archevore. I thought I'd post a few more pictures of one of the bisons we butchered. If you're squeamish, check out now. Otherwise, marvel at what a beast, descended from wild bison, looks like when the animal has had thousands of acres of native prairie grasslands to forage on and has lived a species appropriate life, roaming and carrying about as a bison should. For anyone thinking that wild, grass-fed meat has little fat, I present the following:

 Beautiful gut pile. See how healthy, pink and vital the tissues are?

 Rumen. This is where the bacteria are fed with grass, where the magic happens. In grain fed cattle, the rumen is often red and badly inflamed. You can see how healthy this rumen looks. The green stuff is grass being broken down.

Beautiful kidney and leaf lard.

A cooler full of grass fed bison, beef, lamb and an antelope we hunted. Fat-o-rama.

Bountiful Africa

2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge Winner, Operation Hope. Allan Savory and Holistic Management Africa have shown the world that poverty and hunger are aided by empowering people with the knowledge and skills to produce their own food on their own land. Watch the video below to see how ruminants on land, managed properly, produce not only healthy food systems, but sustainable economies and vibrant biodiversity. Then, compare that to the devastation of big agribusiness.

"Allan Savory's project, titled "Operation Hope," is an ongoing effort to reverse the desertification that is spreading across the world's savannas and grasslands like a disease. It is rapidly changing farmland into deserts.

What makes the effort unusual for Savory, a biologist, is his use of what he called "the most universally condemned tool in the world" -- livestock. Farming is perhaps the oldest means by which humans have affected the world's climate.

The destruction of healthy soil by compaction, overgrazing and toxic levels of manure that poison the earth and emit climate-warming methane are some of the reasons raising livestock has traditionally been discouraged as an environmentally conscious farming technique.

But Savory was not impressed by environmentalists' arguments, nor by the efforts of commercial seed companies to engineer genetically modified crops to be drought-resistant. "Any scientist can grow green plants with technology," he said. What was unsustainable was "to be growing more green plants on soil that is failing us."

The technique Savory devised does not simply rotate the herds from one nearby plot of land to another but couples their migration with military precision."  NY Times, read the full article here

I Will Be a Hummingbird

Spotted at The Royal Ontario Museum: Eat Grass-fed Beef

We gathered up the kiddos and hitched up our wagon to go on a little adventure into the big city. We hit up the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and polished the day off with dinner at The Drake. The ROM had an exhibition on water. It was really amazing to see those tubes of water filling up, showing the consumption of usage per household in different countries around the world. I especially liked watching people's reactions when they read about how grains were playing a part in destroying the land. A lot of them were totally taken off guard and looked at each other with bewildered expressions. Huh, tofu isn't saving the planet?

Sorry about the quality, these were all taken with my iPhone. 

A single, grain-fed steer eats more than 2870 lbs of corn, soy and other grains in its lifetime (which is about one, miserable year)! Evidence of a completely broken food system. The steer in my freezer ate 0 lbs of grain. In fact, he feasted on glorious pasture, which builds topsoil and increases viability in mixed ecosystems. And, my steer had a good life and a humane death. I know because I know the farmer that raised him and I've walked the land that he lived on.

I was feeling a little defensive when I got to the farming and agriculture section of the exhibition. I, wrongly, assumed it would be the same old crap about eating a vegetarian diet and laying off beef. In fact, there were displays discussing the environmental destruction of the environment from factory raised beef that suggested, as a sustainable option,  consuming grass-fed beef. I was pretty impressed.

In addition, there were models displaying root structure differences between native prairie grasslands and annual crops like wheat.  It's the native grasslands that offer any promise of maintaining our topsoil, that precious resource that is blowing away with the wind. Those grasses, our quickly depleting resource that is being destroyed by our intensive agriculture practices. Without topsoil, there is no food. If we want to save our environment, putting ruminants back on grasslands would be one helluva' start.

Please ignore the glare from the placard. Poor picture, but too important not to post. On the left, you can see a sidecut of native grasslands, on the right, a swath of wheat. A good demonstration of the grasses ability to reach deep into the soil, nourishing it with beneficial bacteria and holding that topsoil firmly in place. Grains are responsible for soil erosion and the destruction of the fertility in our soil.

The alternative: happy Dexters on beautiful Alberta grasslands.

Hungry Girl Eats

Gargantuan venison meatballs, leftover from a big batch made the day before. Bacon fat roasted asparagus, tossed with my latest obsession, mixed sea vegetables. 

Ghee Makes Everything Better

If you haven't tried ghee you are seriously missing out on one of life's greatest culinary delights. I love ghee. My kids love ghee. My man loves ghee. When I cook for other people, they marvel at how I can make even the lowly carrot taste so glorious. My secret? Roast it with ghee.

Have you seen that video, "Put a Bird On It"? Well, my lazy girl kitchen motto is 'put some ghee on it'. I don't think I can think of anything that doesn't taste better with ghee. A thick, plump, grass-fed rib-eye seared in ghee and sea salt is your ticket to taste-bud heaven, my friend.

I've tried purchased ghee and it was so different from what is made in my kitchen. It was bland, lacking that deep, rich flavour I've so come to love. Ghee, from grass-fed cows, is loaded with Omega-3 fat, vitamins A, D, and K2. It's also packing some CLA and wonderful unknown health promoting stuff that we don't even know how to label or breakdown. In Ayurveda, ghee is considered to be "sattvic", meaning that it has the essence of the grass and plants the cow munched on.

Ghee has a high smoke point making it ideal to cook with. Nothing tastes as delicious as some pastured eggs cooked in ghee or roasted veggies glistening with ghee and some coarse sea salt. It's my favourite way to cook veggies, any veggies, and it's always delicious. The flavour of the foods cooked in ghee is enhanced. There is something grounding about this food, a richness and a bounty in its qualities that evoke a sense of gratitude for being able to experience something so damn delicious.

I add some organic, virgin coconut oil to my ghee for a couple of reasons: it stretches the ghee (which can be pretty pricey if you're buying raw, grass-fed butter), coconut oil is also great for cooking with, it adds some MCTs and other goodies to the mix, and the taste remains true to the ghee if you just use a few tablespoons of the coconut oil.

Without further ado, here's what I do:

Start with some raw, grass-fed butter. If you can't find that, get some grass-fed butter. If you can't find that... that sucks, but you can use some organic, local butter. 

Put butter in a heavy cast iron, non-reactive pot. Put pot on medium high, when butter has melted and starts bubbling, bring temperature down to lowest setting.

As the butter melts, a film will form on the surface. Skim away this substance, which is the milk solids separating from the fat. Take care not to mix the butter when you do this, just skim along the top.

When the butter has formed a hard crust on the top and you can see some browning bits on the bottom, the ghee is ready. It should smell nutty and deep. Take care not to burn the butter, it should be golden, not dark brown. You want to cook all of the solids out, but you don't want to burn it.

I pour the ghee directly into a large, pourable glass container. From there, I have better control as I slowly pour the ghee for filtering. Line a sieve with cheesecloth, folded multiple times. Hang the sieve over a large, glass bowl and slowly pour the ghee through the cheesecloth. Be careful, it is so hot (says the girl with the sock saturated in hot ghee, sizzling away on her poor,  innocent toes). Allow the sieve to drip for a few minutes after you finish pouring. You can wash the cheesecloth after you're done and reuse it.

Doesn't that look glorious! So much good stuff in one little bowl! Once the ghee has cooled for a couple of minutes, I stir in some coconut oil. You don't have to do this part if you don't want to. From here, you just ladle the ghee into small glass jars. It will keep for months on end, especially in the fridge, although it will last for a long time without refrigeration as well.  That's all there is to it!

Hungry Girl Eats

Grass-fed beef burger made with some curry paste, green onion, cilantro and other Thai tasting stuff with shallots sauteed in bison tallow, guacamole with mega lime and cilantro, some sun cured olives, mixed seaweed, and cultured pickles. That was lunch. I ate every last morsel. I also made more than I needed and put the exact same thing in the kids' lunches.

Go, Mommy, Go!

I was so proud of my Mama when I got these pictures in my email yesterday. Look at her, eating all this good stuff! My mom has always been a good eater, aware of the power of solid nutrition. She has always believed that food has an effect on our health, even when the doctors told her that was "ridiculous".

That's Jen, my MaBelle. Isn't she purdy? I seriously wish I could tell you how old she is so you could all marvel at what good eating gets you when your... ahem.. a bit older, but she is so darn sensitive about her top secret age and if I mentioned it here, she would disown me. Still, I could tell you my age and let you guess? I'm almost 40 and not shy about it at all. Pretty hawt, right?

She was one of the rare birds, back in the day, hauling my sister and I to the small, dark food coops she went to in search of nutritious food. Then, people eating real butter were considered fringe, and anyone not feeding their kids sugar were considered odd. Thanks Mom, for feeding us butter, even when the people around you were lining up to buy tickets for the margarine train to hell.

For Christmas this year, our family and my sister's family split the cost of buying my mom a load of meat, good meat. We found a farm in B.C. that raised their animals on organic, lush pastures and used low stress handling. We picked out a whack of meat and had it delivered. Are we cool or what?

A little 'danka' to my Slovak Mama who always fed us real food in spite of what anyone said. You showed us what it felt like to live in healthy bodies and you used your hard-earned money to buy good food even when you didn't have much of it to spend. Moreover, thank you for teaching us to question 'conventional wisdom'. You taught us to think for ourselves and to disregard nonsensical rhetoric, regardless of its source.

To Jen: For all the times I thought my friends had it good with their Cap'n Crunch cereal and their white bread sandwiches, I come to you now, ego in back pocket and say "you were right Mom".  Wow, I am such a good daughter. Way better than my little sister. For sure.

Here's a couple dishes mom has come up with. Makes me hungry just looking at them.

Homemade broth with veggies and pastured, heritage pork.

Pastured, heritage pork, broccoli, and squash with coconut oil.

Pastured eggs, bacon, butter and homemade coconut flour muffin.

Grass fed New York strip steak and organic kale salad.

With a Little Help From My (buggy) Friends

I've struggled with an autoimmune condition for years. It was through this pain that I started looking at the things I could control. I thought my vegetarian diet was the epitome of health. When that started to fail, I moved on to the land of vegans. That seemed to make me feel better for a while, until it did not. I lost huge amounts of muscle and was constantly sick. My adrenals were a mess and the pain was ever present. My hair was dry and thinning, I was 25lbs underweight, cranky and exhausted.

Card carrying member, my friends.

Then, in walked my husband with his chiseled 8 pack and big ole' manly man arms. Hmm.. I want muscle too, I thought. I decided to reevaluate. I started adding wild caught fish and organic chicken into my diet. I felt better, not great, just better. I was eating all the "healthy" foods I needed to in order to be lean and mean. It was chicken breast-o-rama! Egg whites, and zero fat yoghurt, and protein powder by the gallon. But no worries, I knew I needed some fat so I added a couple of teaspoons (measured of course) of flax oil to my salad. Sigh. I feel sad for that hungry girl. I looked good. I felt like shit.

Hubby's aforementioned manly man arms. Oh baby, you still do it for me, even without the butt striations.

It was around this time that I was introduced to the Weston A. Price Foundation. My husband and I attended a presentation by Sally Fallon-Morrell. We walked away not convinced. It wasn't that what she said was lacking in credibility or science, it's just that we were bodybuilders damn it! and that woman put down our holy grail - protein powder! We loved us some protein powder! How could we ever get the five gazillion grams of protein we needed to build our precious muscles without it? And what was that she said about meat?! Eat fatty meat? That lady was Caraaaazeeee! Looking around the room at the people espousing the virtues of sourdough bread and raw dairy, well... let's just say that there wasn't a lot of athletes. Keep in mind, this was quite a few years ago, testosterone and vanity ran strong. Still, we left the presentation with a field of seeds planted in our wee brains. The big one: fat is good. That mind blowing tidbit set us off on a path of research and experimentation.

It was around this time that I noticed that my diet was directly related to the constant pain in my body. Certain foods were tantamount to swallowing an inflammation pill. My beloved protein powder betrayed me. The egg whites I ate by the half dozen, daily, now prevented my fingers from bending. Potatoes caused my lower back to seize up when I bent over to lift up one of my children. And so it went. I removed food after food after food. I removed everything except the whole grains I loved because we all know whole grains are necessary for good health and good health is what this girl wanted.

From there, we expanded our knowledge on the sources of our foods. We started purchasing all of our animal products from farmers that were raising their animals on grass from organic pastures. We bought our eggs from farmers that didn't feed their chickens soy and allowed their birds to roam. We became aware of the importance of ruminants on grasslands for the sustainability of our land.

Regardless of what foods I removed, the pain only faded, never completely left. I would notice it during my workouts when my body wouldn't move the way I wanted it to, or in the inflammation that would unveil itself 'randomly'. During this time, I never once stopped to consider the health of my digestive tract. I continued to live, me and my pain, hand in hand. Then, floating down from the heavens came the book, "Gut and Psychology Syndrome (GAPS)" by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride.

My kefir grains that multiply faster than rabbits. Kefir is one of those cultured foods that are teeming with probiotics and is really easy to make. Raw milk, grains, and a day or so for culturing is all it takes. You can learn everything you ever wanted to know about kefir at Dom's site.

I read Dr. Campbell's book and then I did it. Suddenly, light bulbs were going off all over the place. The years of tetracycline my doctor put me on as a teenager may have had an affect on my gut. Yah, just maybe. Being a vegetarian and a vegan only served to accelerate my deteriorating health. Eating refined foods (egg whites/protein powders) prevented my body from healing and, in fact, created food intolerances. I learned about the importance of cultured and fermented foods. It's still astonishing to know how healing these foods are, but how lacking they are in our diets. I also learned about the problems with grains, something that I further expanded my knowledge on and decided to eliminate from our family's diet. It was definitely the right choice. The kids noticed their thinking was clearer and we noticed that they weren't getting sick nearly as much. Keep in mind, we weren't giving up refined grains here. I was soaking and sprouting all of our grains before we ate them. I once heard Robb Wolf draw a parallel between soaking grains and diluting a poison - it's still a poison. I totally agree.

My beloved bone broth. Nothing makes us feel more nourished than this.

Following GAPS brought me to a pain-free place in my life for the first time in over a decade. I healed my gut with bone broth soups and with a lot of help from my gut-friendly buggy friends. In return, my body moved and bent, lifted and leaped with ease. Probiotics were instrumental in my regained health. Let's be clear, these are probiotics found in naturally fermented and cultured foods, not in a pill. Pills never helped me.  If you're the type of person that needs science to back up the anecdotes, do a quick Google Scholar search on fermented and cultured foods to see the boat-load of studies on the positive health effects of these foods. I can tell when we let the consumption of our fermented veggies slide. Nightshades are poison to me. Grains are garbage. Nuts bring on cramps, even when I soak them for 24 hours, before dehydrating them.

My kefir, ready for drinking. I think it's so pretty when it gets all squiggly on the top.

Since the era of GAPS, we've continued to research and evolve our diets. We are fascinated by nutrition and we are blessed by the relationships we have developed with our local farmers. Our children, now 18, 14, and 8 know what it is to live in pain-free bodies. They have eaten this way so long that it's just how they eat. They recognize the disfunction in our society's relationship with empty foods. It's a foundation they will go out into the world with. I worry for the children that grow up never knowing what it is to feel good in their bodies and clear in their minds.

Fermenting veggies. I make a few different types at once. Once they're done fermenting, they will keep forever in the fridge. Combined with some good meat and fat, they make the perfect, fast lunch.

Fermented vegetables, grass fed meats, soy-free pastured eggs, healthy animal fats, grass fed butter, cultured raw dairy from grass-fed cows, fermented veggies, and bone broths make up our family's diets. Today, I live pain free. That sounds like a light statement, but if you have ever lived with chronic pain, you will understand how huge that is. If I deviate from my diet, the pain comes. It's that simple. I have the power to live in a body that is not inflamed. I wish that feeling of empowerment to every soul roaming this planet, housed in their beautiful bone cage.

Here I Am

cattle - where they belong

Sorry for my prolonged absence. The thing about blogging is that one has to have something to blog about and I've been feeling decidedly unmoved in that department. I'm feeling myself less interested with what I'm putting on my plate and more concerned with whether or not people are even eating in other parts of the world. Those are grandiose thoughts, to be sure, but something I feel passionate about. I'm looking at taking my background in nutrition and chugging my caboose onto the food sovereignty track.

Cliff Swallows build their nests on, appropriately, cliffs in Alberta. I marveled at the miracle of each home, built with such architectural finesse! The natural world has so much to teach us.

Of course, I still care about what we're eating, but that stuff seems a given by now. I'm brewing up some kefir and kombucha right now and I plan on writing about that in the next couple of days. Speaking of kombucha, I need to move to New York City and sell this stuff so I can send my kids to university!

Deer on the same grasslands that the cattle graze on. There is something decidedly appropriate about that.

In the meantime, here are some things I've been reading/investigating/pondering/getting involved with:

• Agriculture and Human Values
• In Corrupt Global Food System, Farmland is the New Gold If you think eating grains shipped in from other countries is a way to save the earth, think again. Learn the reality of what happens when ecosystems are destroyed to monocrop land in unending swaths of grains and legumes. Bigger still, investigate what is increasingly becoming a crisis within our broken food system. We eat food grown on land that is stolen from peasants to grow food for the rich. This article is a good place to start. We need to buy local food from local farmers that work to sustain the biodiversity of our land if we are to leave a viable legacy for our children and their children.
• La Via Campesina - Peasant Women on the Frontiers of Food Sovereignty
• "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race" by Jared Diamond. If you haven't read "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Diamond, you're really missing out. This article isn't new, but it was foundational in my understanding of how agriculture destroys people, ecosystems, and the very planet we're trying to protect. It was a huge jumping off point from which I was able to explore Jared Diamond's concepts further.
• Indigenous Food Systems
• Food Secure Canada
• "The Have More Plan, A Little Land, A Lot of Living" by Edward and Carolyn Robinson. I'm really enjoying this book. Vintage, dated, and still completely relevant.
• "All Flesh is Grass" by Gene Logsdon. Just sit with that title for a bit. If you don't understand how this is, you need to read this book. If you already get it, you still need to read this book.
• Nyeleni Declaration on food sovereignty
• "Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in America" by Richard Nelson. If you don't hunt, this gives you a perspective you may not have considered. If you do hunt, this book will deepen your appreciation for the incredible gift we have been given with the deer. Either way, we can all agree on the conservation of our wildlife and wild lands and Nelson argues so eloquently in favor of both.
• "The Good Life" by Helen and Scott Nearing. I just started this one so I can't say how it all pans out, but self sufficiency over sixty years in one book is good enough to spark my interest. 
• And, of course, I will read anything by the brilliant Dr. Vandana Shiva that I can get my paws on. I'm finishing "Soil Not Oil" right now. What can I say? If it wasn't profound in its intelligence, clarity, and understanding, I would be surprised. This woman is a force. My hope is to spend some time at her Earth University in the future.