A few weeks ago, I started a rotation at a remote inpatient resort-type hospital for people afflicted with eating disorders.
The man in the picture on the left is currently a patient at one of these type facilities. He is currently 40 years old, 5'9", and weighs 106 pounds--that's up 30 pounds from when he was brought into the hospital 6 weeks ago.
My time at the hospital has brought to light for me a whole aspect of dieting that should be scary to a lot of people, particularly those with certain personality types and personal issues that could make them susceptible to this vicious cycle of "diet addiction."
Obviously there are plenty of resources online about eating disorders and so I won't bore you with running down the particulars. I will say a few things that I think are overlooked:
* Why Starve?: Anorexia is self-perpetuating on a physiological level. If you starve yourself for about 3 days by going on a 0-400 calorie diet, by the 3rd day you will probably experience a kind of euphoria and empowerment. People with anorexia usually have an addictive personality to begin with, so this feeling reinforces this behavior. Moreover, eventually the lack of nutrition causes the body to go after the brain tissue, causing gross atrophy of the brain tissue that you can actually see on a CT scan of the head (later stages, usually). This causes delusional, irrational thinking that also tends to perpetuate the process.
* The Media?Many feel anorexia is caused by society idolizing celebrities who are unrealistically skinny if not underweight. The counselors even talk about this at the hospital. This, I believe, is wrong. People afflicted with anorexia have a view of their body as fat. If you ask them to draw a full-sized outline of what they think they look like, they draw an outline of a morbidly obese individual that they could fit into two or three times over. I've seen them do it, it's dumfounding. It's not necessarily that their goals are unrealistic, it's mostly that that they get positive reinforcement for their eating disorder and to a lesser (but significant) degree that their sense of self is skewed. I don't see unrealistic expectations as the issue, as they commonly fall below their 'goal' weight and still feel dissatisfied.
* Like A Drug: Compulsive overeating, as well as Anorexia and bulimia nervosa are addictions to destructive behavior. They provide positive chemical and emotional reinforcement that the user becomes dependent upon. As such, these disorders should be viewed and treated similarly and from the point of view of an addiction. It doesn't matter what the addiction is for most addicts, just that the need is fulfilled. In fact, in many instances you can just feed a person with an eating disorder some Xanax and their disorder will be transformed into a Xanax addiction.
* The Flip Side: Self-esteem issues are central to eating disorders, but that doesn't mean we should "let the fatties off the hook" for fear that calling them out will worsen their condition or cause them to have an eating disorder. First off, many already have an eating disorder, and second, you're not doing them any favors. You hear all the time about how we need to "accept people for who they are" and therefore accommodate the obese, as if it's within the normal operating specifications of human beings to be that large--their size isn't who they are, it's a pathology that needs to be corrected. We're taught never to confront people for being fat and yet to call-out other vices like tobacco like their users are the devil. Both approaches are wrong. People with eating disorders have core issues that will cause them to fall into any trap you can think of from gambling to alcohol to drugs to abusive relationships. The people who can live healthy and aren't should not be given a free pass to continue. Likewise, we need to identify those who need help and make them feel uncomfortable with their situation--but in a productive way. I'm not saying we should just make fun of the fatties, we should however encourage them to seek help and don't give them a moment's peace until they do. You are literally standing by and watching these people kill themselves by doing otherwise.
Around the world there's a growing anger against fashion shows and hollywood for portraying beauty as 5% body fat and perfect abs. European governments are even fining designer showcases that feature skinny women. The reality is that if a person can't watch a TV show without going on a demented death-spiral of over or under-eating, that person needs help. There are many addictions that can fill their need and can kill them faster than an eating disorder. By taking body-image fixation away (which unplugging the TV or banning skinnies in the media probably wouldn't even accomplish), at best all you're doing is pushing them into some other obsession. More often than not, the busy-bodies who make it a point to censor or decry the "dangerous body imagery" in the media have some sort of personal axe to grind and are totally ignorant as to what anorexia is. Helping your fellow man isn't always about knocking down doors, holding marches, and donating money. Sometimes it's just about sitting down with them and getting them to admit that they need to help themselves.
On an ironic note, my own personal diet is going awesome: Down 0.75 inches in 2 weeks. (56,831)
This guy is Dr. Ken Lunde. He's the author of two groundbreaking books on the handling of ideographic languages (e.g., Japanese and Korean) in information processing, "Understanding Japanese Information Processing" (1993) and "CJKV Information Processing" (1999 and 2008 editions). [CJKV, by the way, stands for "Chinese Japanese Korean Vietnamese"] He works for Adobe and is kind of a big deal in the global infotech scene.
In addition to his landscape-altering work in that field, he's a notable collector and photographer of fine weapons. His photographic wallpaper of pistols is extremely popular, and his extensive collection of firearms and knives is the subject of endless slavering by gun buffs.
Dr. Lunde kindly granted us this one-of-a-kind email interview where we ask about everything from firearms to "Terminator : Salvation." This is an amazing window into one of the most intense minds on the planet -- check out Dr Lunde's Web site at http://LundeStudio.com for great photos and more info, and follow him on Twitter @Ken_Lunde . So read this interview and learn how to be far more awesome than you are now.
Here's the interview, presented in its entirety :
LW) For the benefit of our readers, what is CJKV information processing?
KL) In a nutshell, it is everything about how the languages that include ideographs (aka, Chinese characters) as part of their writing system are processed on computers or by digital means. Character sets and encodings are the fundamentals, because everything else depends on those two aspects.
LW) You're known as the authority on CJKV type and computer science. What first interested you in working on CJKV information processing?
KL) My interest began in the summer 1985, when I was deciding which non Indo-Eurpean language to study as part of the graduation requirements for a degree in linguistics. My choices boiled down to Japanese and Arabic. I spent time with both languages, and chose Japanese because I found it to be more challenging. Given the events that took place in subsequent years, combined with the fact that I was in the military at the time, I am glad that I chose Japanese over Arabic. Otherwise, I might still be taking sand out of my boots.
LW) Have you lived in East Asia for an extended period of time? If so, tell us about it.
KL) I have been in East Asia only for business trips, and only once or twice for a vacation. I have not lived there for any extended period. I have been to China once, South Korea twice, and Japan several times.
LW) This kind of work seems dauntingly difficult. Did you have to attain fluency in all four languages before starting this work?
KL) Of the languages in question, I have moderate fluency only in Japanese. I studied the simplified forms as used in China, and thus have rudimentary Chinese reading ability, but I cannot understand it when spoken, and cannot pronounce its words.
LW) What are the most significant challenges you face in your CJKV work?
KL) The most difficult challenge is keeping track of changes. Then again, if things stayed the same, that would be boring and stale. How we deal with challenges define us as a person. I see challenges as opportunities.
LW) Our rough understanding is that Chinese has thousands of characters. How is this handled with respect to input devices?
KL) Fundamentally, languages are spoken. The written form is simply a way to record spoken language. For this reason, the most intuitive way to input the thousands (actually, tens of thousands) of ideographs is by reading. Of course, many ideographs share the same reading, meaning that the user must often choose among several candidates. The longer the input string, meaning words that are composed of two or more ideographs, the lower the number of candidates. Modern input methods, such as those bundled with the OSes, handle this quite well.
LW) Is your work the first of its kind?
KL) Apparently it is. My first book, "Understanding Japanese Information Processing," was published in 1993. I have been told by many people that it changed the landscape, and enabled many companies to develop software for the East Asian markets. My next two books are best thought of as expanded and revised versions of that first work.
LW) On a scale of "pretty awesome" to "inexpressibly awesome," how would you rate your job at Adobe?
KL) I don't believe in such scales, but on a scale from 0 to 10, with 10 being the highest, I would rate my job as a solid 9, and possibly a 10.
- on photography :
^^ One of Lunde's beautiful photos -- this of a customized Colt Delta Elite in 10mm
LW) Your photography is remarkable for its inviting atmosphere and warm light. How do you achieve these effects?
KL) Practice. I found that I am my best critic. I discovered several years ago that photography is all about capturing or recording light, and the better one controls the lighting, the better the results. All other factors are not nearly as critical.
LW) Were you formally trained as a photographer?
KL) No. I leaned through trial and error, and my earlier days had lots of the latter.
LW) What equipment do you use to get your results?
KL) I use a Lowel three-light set for lighting. My camera for the past 1.5 years has been a Nikon D300. My preferred lens is the Nikkor 60mm Micro lens, which I have had for over seven years, and which has transcended four digital SLR bodies. For post-processing the photos, I have been using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (aka, Adobe Lightroom) for about three years. I used Adobe Photoshop before that.
LW) What subjects apart from weapons do you most enjoy photographing?
KL) Nature, family, and friends.
[-on firearms, etc:]
LW) Your firearms collection is very well-curated. How did you first become interested in firearms?
KL) I was raised by my father to have a strong appreciate of and respect for firearms and other weapons. I see them as specialized tools, and nothing more. I appreciate the craftsmanship that is required to make functional weapons.
LW) Does living in California present special challenges for the firearms enthusiast?
KL) Definitely.
LW) You note on your site that 10mm is one of your favorite cartridges - it's one of ours as well. Why do you favor this cartridge, and what is your preferred loading?
KL) I favor the cartridge partly due to the Glock 20 being an excellent platform for this powerful cartridge. The Glock 20 is my hunting sidearm. I do not handload 10mm, but I do handload for all of the rifle cartridges that I use. There are plenty of quality 10mm loads available today.
LW) You have some wonderful Colt Delta Elites. Have you had any reliability or durability problems with that model?
KL) I have only one Colt Delta Elite, which has been highly customized. I have not had any issue with it. Although it is significantly heavier than the Glock 20, it has more felt recoil. As much as I appreciate the Colt Delta Elite, I prefer to use the Glock 20.
LW) Which weapon in your collection would be your preferred daily carry, and why?
KL) When I am out of state, generally for hunting, I tend to carry a Glock 20. I cannot carry in California. If I could carry in California, my EDC would be a Glock 33.
LW) What are some problems you see in firearms design and how would you improve them?
KL) I am a firm believer that there is no perfect firearm. But, there is an ideal firearm, and which one it is depends on the person who needs it. To be honest, I don't see any problems in firearm design, and most of the problems that arise tend to be the result of the nonsensical firearm laws that we have, either at the State or Federal level. The ten-round magazine capacity limit is a perfect example of this.
LW) Have you trained formally with firearms? If so, where?
KL) I have had very little training with firearms, and most of it has been while in the military. Starting at an early age, like studying a foreign language, has benefits in that you develop life-long skills. And, like any sport, it is all about practice, which includes mental preparation. Some people can mentally prepare themselves on their own, and some require formal training. Still, I would like to take more formal training, when I have more free time.
LW) Some of our readers find the trigger on the original Walther P99 to be impossible to get used to, that the pull is too long and insufficiently crisp. As someone who shoots both P99s and 1911s, how do you recommend that shooters new to the P99 get acclimated to that trigger?
KL) My best advice is to dry-fire the trigger to get accustomed to it. The AS (Anti-Stress) part of the trigger is what confuses most people. Becoming accustomed to the AS trigger overcomes this issue.
LW) What are some firearms you'd like to try or acquire in the coming year?
KL) At this point, I really have nothing on the immediate radar. The Kahr P380 intrigues me, as does the new Beretta Px4 Storm Compact. (The Beretta Px4 Storm Subcompact did nothing for me, and I never developed an interest in acquiring one.)
LW) What do you look for in a handgun? In a rifle?
KL) For a handgun, I look for quality and durability. For a rifle, I look for quality and accuracy. I didn't mention accuracy for a handgun, because most have comparable accuracy, and how it fits one's hand and how well one can control the trigger are greater influences in practical accuracy.
LW) Many people ask about firearms for home defense. Some experts say that a shotgun is the most appropriate home defense weapon, while others advocate for the handgun. What in your estimation is the most suitable firearm for home defense?
KL) A typical shotgun is a bit too large (long) for home defense. If you live in an NFA-friendly state, a shotgun-based AOW would be ideal for home defense. In the end, simply having an accessible weapon is half the battle in one's ability to defend their home from intruders.
LW) Some of your firearms have beautiful aftermarket finishes. Which among these finshes do you like best?
KL) Hard chrome. In fact, that's the only aftermarket finish on any of my firearms. Everything else is factory-applied.
LW) What is it about Del Fatti holsters that you like so well?
KL) The workmanship and attention to detail. I specifically like his ISP-SS holster with the Slotted Pad belt attachment. The holster is no bigger than it needs to be, and the Slotted Pad belt attachment protrudes very little.
LW) You also have many Busse knives. What attracts you to those items?
KL) I am attracted to Busse Combat knives due to their hard-use nature, and the fact that they hold an edge for a long time. Busse Combat also stands behind their knives. I also like other brands, such as Randall Made, Scott Cook, Chris Reeve, and others.
[- on hunting]
LW) What game do you enjoy hunting?
KL) I hunt prairie dogs with my dad, who is 74, in Spring or Summer, sometimes both. I hunt pronghorn antelope in Fall. I am interested in both because the shooting distances are generally long, usually 250 yards are further. Pronghorn antelope are also North America's fastest land mammal, so there is inherent challenge in hunting them.
LW) Where are some of your favorite locations to hunt?
KL) Wyoming and South Dakota.
LW) What arms and cartridges do you prefer to use while hunting?
KL) I favor .204 Ruger for prairie dogs, and have been using 6.5x55 SE for pronghorn antelope for the past four years. The rifles that I use are made by Cooper Arms, which is located in Montana.
[- on the arts]
LW) What music (genres / artists) do you like to listen to? What exactly is it about that music that resonates with you?
KL) I would have to say that my favorite artists are Tangerine Dream, Rush, and TCM.
LW) What visual art do you like?
KL) Photography.
LW) What are some of your favorite movies?
KL) I very much enjoyed "Avatar" and the new "Star Trek." Both resonated with me extraordinarily well.
LW) What foods do you enjoy? Do you prefer to cook at home or eat at restaurants?
KL) I like pastas, pizza, anything on the grill, and salads. We eat out very little, and do most of our cooking at home.
LW) What was the last book you read? Did you like it?
KL) I don't read much in terms of books or novels. Most of what I read tends to be reference manuals, where I read specific pages or chapters. I would say that I do more writing than reading. (In retrospect, I probably should have learned how to type.)
LW) Did you see "Terminator : Salvation?" Did you think it rocked?
KL) I enjoyed that movie, and while I thought it added to the "Terminator" story line, I felt that "Avatar" rocked much more.
[- Other topics :]
LW) What's your favorite comic strip?
KL) I really don't have any.
LW) What fiscal and monetary policies do you favor with regard to the USA?
KL) No comment.
LW) Do you believe that computer programming is an essential skill for all knowledge workers?
KL) Computer programming is skill for those who develop software. Most people wouldn't benefit from this, unless they need this skill, and can practice it. The ability to use a simpler scripting language can benefit a broader range of people.
LW) Do you have a garden /.grow your own food?
KL) Yes.
LW) What is the matter with kids these days?
KL) Of course, it depends on the kids. For those with issues, I am sure it is related to how their parents raised them. Instilling respect would go a long way to raising kids better.
LW) How should the balance between freedom and security be handled with respect to US domestic policy?
KL) No comment.
LW) What's the most effective pickup line?
KL) No comment.
LW) What do you think about the recent move to deep-six the NASA moon mission and greatly scale back public space exploration?
KL) Say, maybe it is NASA's way to acknowledge that we have been contacted by extraterrestrial life.
LW) In your opinion, does time exist as a fundamental feature of our universe, or is its apparently unstoppable arrow merely an artifact of consciousness? What is the nature of time?
KL) Time is clearly a constant and does not stop, but the nature of our existence makes its flow seem relative. And, our ability to preserve memories allows us to transcend the flow of time, relative to events that have already taken place.
LW) Do you believe reality is fundamentally deterministic or indeterminate / stochastic?
KL) Our reality is based on our perception of the universe, which is based on principles and rules. So, I would vote for the former.
LW) Do you play any musical instruments?
KL) I played percussion in high school. That's about it. I prefer to appreciate music, not create it.
LW) Do you think that the present educational system in the US is adequate?
KL) No educational system is adequate.
LW) Can folks contact you on Twitter? If so, what's your Twitter name?
KL) Of course. My Twitter name is ken_lunde. I am also on Facebook.
LW) Do you believe that humans will continue to exist after the Earth and our Sun are gone in a few billion years?
KL) Given our tendency toward self-destruction, probably not. Interestingly, I believe that humans and other life on this planet were engineered. In other words, something created us.
LW) Thanks very much for taking the time to answer some of our questions.
As a relative newcomer to urban agronomy but a very experienced practitioner of cynicism, crypto-radicalism, and anti-everythingism, I knew already that the current corporate approach to commercial seed-and-plant selling was doomed and damned. It's a fact that many commercial seeds and plants are bred for appearance and not function, and that many of them are genetically designed to be infertile.
However, there is another practice in which I am highly experienced : that of doing things at the last minute. So, when I realized that planting season was upon me and that there was very little bee activity in my food-production area, I zoomed out and hastily bought a lot of started flowers in an attempt to bring th' bees over to where I wanted them. I spent about $75 (that's my strychnine money for a whole week) on snapdragons from Home Depot and marigolds and petunias from Whitfill's Nursery. I planted the suckers in my two containers and in sunken beds that I'd freshly dug, interspersed appropriately with my early food crops' seeds and transplants. I figured that since they'd been locally grown (all were marked with Arizona grow sites) that they'd be 'native' enough to be appropriate for my application. [dun dun duuum!]
Now, there is a big mass of weedy flowering plants on the other side of my yard that is always full of bees, so I figured that a few smart bees were likely to venture over to the new beds and find their tasty flower snax. [Why didn't I just plant my food crops closer to the existing flowers, you ask? It's because there's not enough shade / light filtration in that area for the crops I'm growing.]
I planted the things, and kept them well-watered with a buried soaker hose, and was ready for a bee essplosion!
So imagine my surprise when I watched bee after sleepy bee buzz around and sniff these new flowers, only to turn up their noses at them and pass by without landing! I was like WHAAAT
Meanwhile, the weedy flowering plants on the other side were budding more flowers and attracting more bees than ever. What the snake was wrong?
Here's what's wrong. Instead of planning ahead and planting native wildflowers earlier, I decided to cut corners and buy commerical garbage varieties of subspecies from other states that have nothing to do with my climate and also are unfamiliar to the local insect population (and being sold as ornamentals, may even be engineered to repel insects). See, bees and other benefical critters know to look for plants that grow normally in their area. And when they see and smell a native plant, they know it's good eatin'. But when they see a non-native blooms, they're like "well what is that" and sometimes they don't even recognize it as a potential nectar source. Even if they do recognize it as a flower, its alien smell will not likely entice the little beastie to munch. It's like if you put a big dish of palak paneer in front of a Wyoming cowboy. They'll just be like "now whut in tarnation is that racket" and move on.
So, I then spent all night doing what I should have done way earlier : I dug up some new sunken beds and sowed them with all-native desert wildflower seeds from http://NativeSeeds.org .
There are two lessons here. 1) Don't be lazy and then try to do everything in a quick-fix panic state. 2) Buy only native plant and flower varieties because your local beneficial insect population will know what to do with them.
Get your urban ag cranking in 2010 -- it's not too late. (38,751)
Care and maintenance of your soil and ecosystem Now that you've started rocking down to Urban Agronomy Avenue, it's time to take it higher with some maintenance basics. - Ground cover : dying plants and so-called 'cover crops' function as 'living mulch' to protect your soil from excess solar damage, discourage weeds, and keep moisture in the ground. - 'Cover crops' as they're traditionally known are nitrogen-fixing plants that are aggressive and will kick out grass from your garden. Classic species are brassica, clover, and the delightfully-named 'hairy vetch.' Cover crops can be cut down and added back to the soil for a soil nutrient boost. Take care : cover crops will kick out not only noisome Bermuda grass, but a lot of other species as well.
Cycling the addition of compost and amendments : - You need inputs to get output. Plants use up the food you give them, so for best results, follow a regular schedule of 'feeding' the ground mulch, compost, and other amendments every season. Look at the nitrogen cycle diagram to see how the whole soil fertility thing happens :
If a plant looks sickly, feed it with compost. As the seasons pass and you keep up the soil-maintenance schedule, the problem of soil nutrient deficiency will decrease and your soil will stabilize.
Soil deficiencies and their signs : - Purpling of leaf edges = phosphate deficiency - Red + yellow leaves = potash deficiency - Yellow at leaf center : nitrogen deficiency - Red leaf tips : magnesium deficiency - Spotted leaves : disease, not deficiency - Striped leaves : nutrient deficiency, could be several nutrient culprits - Curled leaves : drought, not deficiency - Crazy and messed-up looking : chemical toxicity (remedy with compost tea or so-called "effective microorganisms")
Pests : - Serious pest problems are a sign of an unbalanced ecosystem (such as that seen in monocropping arrangements). Most pests, such as cutworms that chomp on leaves, can be controlled by companion planting and by controlled bird activity (such as letting chickens into the garden for a short while each day -- but be aware that birds like to eat what's growing as much as they like bugs). Below are a few common pests and things you can do to control them : - Cutworms : they're repelled by molasses - Ants : they're repelled by cinnamon, or lure them away with sugar bait - Burrowing pests like groundhogs : bury hardware cloth / wire mesh 24 inches deep around the perimeter of your growing area.
The danger of over and under-watering : take care! Under-watering results in drought, while over-watering leads to fruit splitting and mushy crops. Use your head and read the watering instructions for the crop at hand to avoid these pitfalls.
Pollination : - Pollination is required for food production, and low pollination = low yield. There aren't enough bees to go around these days, so do your best to attract and retain a healthy population of mason / wood bees, which are good native pollinators and don't sting (see the article on bees and their housing at ?k=urban.farming#234 ). Wasps should be dissuaded; if they're really causing problems, a solution of one part bleach in nine parts water will harm them a whole lot. Likewise, honeybees can be kind of a drag with their stinging habit, and if a killer bee queen takes over your honey bee hive it's nightmare city. So, encourage mason bees (with a bee block), butterfiles (with bright red flowers), and hummingbirds (with flowers and a feeder).
Excess carbonaceous material in soil (like dry organic matter) will cause nitrogen leaching as the nitrogen moves into the carbon material in order to break it down and decompose it. [see the article on composting for more detail on how this works : compost#230 ] This is one of the reasons why you want to be sure that compost is fully broken down before you put it into your soil.
Frost can be a problem in winter, even in arid climates. Cover your crops with a light sheet or cloth at night when there's a danger of frost. You can also bury jugs of water underground to store solar heat collected during the daytime.
Protect against sun excess by having good shade structures in place for both summer and winter solar patterns.
When planning, building, and evolving your urban agriculture setup, aim to have each item and plant serve more than one purpose - this is called "stacking function." For example, if you grow grapes over the mesh roof of your chicken coop, they'll keep the chickens cool as well as providing you and the birds with tasty grapes. - Use observation and incremental experimentation to learn how the system works and the most efficient ways to harness it; plan for the next season with the things you learn and look at the "big picture." Write everything down so that you can study what's happened. - An old but useful cliche here is : "The problem is the solution." That is, don't try to fight against natural processes -- instead, harness and work with them. - Things are going to die and crops will fail. Learn from your mistakes, and don't take failure too hard.
Notes : On beans : pintos, etc grow well in summer, but green beans need cooler weather. Bats eat flying pest bugs, give them a bat house.
The bulk of this information is taken from Heather Welch's lecture series "Designing a Vegetable Garden," presented November 2008 courtesy of the Phoenix Permaculture Guild. (138,966)
Today, I wrapped up a weekend of Italian food adventure with a trip to Pizza Fusion in Mesa to check out their organic pies and general vibe. It's very hard to find restaurants that serve organic chow in Phoenix, and I'm a stone-cold pizza fanatic, so I was uber stoked to experience this joint.
Now, when I mention my pizza fanaticism affliction, I'm not kidding around. I was a regular haunter of Bianco's before it blew up and turned into a day trip instead of a date, and I've pored over every word of Jeff Varsano's blog like it was Henry Jones' Grail diary. Pizza gets created from scratch weekly in the DiBiase haus, and if there's a pizza on a menu, I order it. The way that some guys treat wine, I treat my ancestral home's gift to the universe.
Pizza Fusion is a small multi-state chain that started in 2006, but I never heard of it until local cool person K. Van Slyke (@KrysVS) mentioned it today. They sling organic flatbreads, pizzas, salads, and beer. We hit the joint at 3pm for Happy Hour, when drinks and certain appetizers are half-price.
First off, I'll express appreciation for Pizza Fusion's choice of brand in my preferred libation, soda water : they offer Boylan's, which even for a greaseball like me is a welcome change from the ubiquitous San Pellegrino. Boylan's comes in 12-ounce bottles with nice 50s-style graphics that please the lamp. My co-diners K.J. Van Slyke, W. Nash, and T. Trainor filled their 'Lil Jon' chalices with Lost Coast Great White and New Belgium Blue Paddle. The draft beers were $2 per pint -- unbeatable pricing, especially on a Sunday. There was a significant selection of organic beers on tap, including an $11 pint whose label insisted that the beer was free of crustaceans!
Notes on atmosphere : the whole place is slathered in strangely-attractive green paint, with digital prints everywhere that are emblazoned with green slogans. The prints are a little hokey, but nothing really bothered me until I got to the bathroom, the mirror inside which has the words "This person is changing the world" written on the bottom BAAARF . Some points were won back, though, after I tried the hand dryer, which appears to be a reclaimed jet engine from a downed MIG or something -- it's one powerful blower! My hands were drier than a boozehound in Bridgewater, Connecticut after about ten seconds. One thing that was really great was the countertop of the bar, which was made of concrete mixed with recycled glass and high-polished; a cool touch. The manger told us that everything -- building materials, paint, chairs, etc, are totally green'd out, made from reclaimed stuff when possible, and LEED-certified. It's a nice gesture for sure.
Van Slyke ordered up and graciously shared the flatbread appetizer with marinara, which was pretty good. The flatbread had good texture and wasn't too heavily-seasoned (the latter being a common pitfall of wack flatbread); the marinara was tangy and not bitter or overly-sweet.
There was no pizza Margherita on the menu (what the hoot!?), so we strong-armed our host into making us one, with a multigrain crust. In reality, the guy was more than happy to make us the requested pie -- super nice fellow with fresh ink on his arm that offered us excellent service and didn't complain as we proceeded to nerdily occupy his bar for the next three hours.
A chicken -topped salad was ordered as well. The chow was served with good speed. The manager informed us that 75% of the ingredients are certified organic with the balance 25% being non-certified but 'all-natural,' pesticide-free.
[This last point is worth mentioning -- I've been speaking about the iffiness of the "organic" certification for a while, as it still allows a fair number of chemicals both natural and synthetic, and foods only need to be 95% organic to meet certificate standards. Places that eschew bad chemicals completely but don't jump through the government hoops to get certified, like Desert Roots Farm for example, are more desirable to deal with than mass-produced "certified organic" producers (many of which have lately been rocked with scandal).]
The pizza verdict :
The oblong pie was good, though the most crucial aspect, the crust, didn't have a lot to do with my concept of what pizza crust is about. It was very dense and totally flat. The denseness is probably partially attributable to the heavy multigrain dough; as an amateur pizzaiolo myself, I can attest that whole-grain doughs don't rise as much as white doughs do. Still, there were no air pockets or structure at all -- weird. So I asked the nice manager guy if they rolled the dough out; it happens that they feed it through some kind of flattening robot before loading it into the fancy rotary oven. I'd have much preferred a nicely structured hand-shaped crust. These issues aside, the crust had very good flavor; not too salty and with plenty of interesting grain flavors. The outside was well-charred after a nine-minute cook time. I asked what the oven temperature was set at, expecting it to be in the 700 Fahrenheit degree range; it turned out to be 525, just 25 degrees more than a standard residential oven (which never char well) can get. Props to the oven designers for getting great results at low heat. The crust was also confirmed made in-house, which is a philosophically important point. [Note : they do offer gluten-free crust, but it's not made on-site]
The crust was very crunchy and satisfying to eat; i enjoyed it. It had a real hearty texture that complemented the riot of grain flavors.
The sauce had good flavor and excellent color, though I suspect that it may have been pre-made and bottled rather than made that day from whole tomatoes; it didn't have that fresh kick that just-made sauce has. It wasn't bitter, grainy, over-sugared, or flavorless though; instead, it was a mild, soft-textured sauce.
The fresh mozzarella was undoubtedly the real deal, judging from the characteristic uneven melt pattern. It had a pretty firm texture and wasn't too salty -- nice choice. Mozzarella is probably th' least important ingredient in a pie, but it's much appreciated when they don't skimp on it.
The chicken salad thing was big enough to feed MC Hammer's posse circa 1992. Massive, it was like a huge platter of vibrant greens topped by about a pound of diced chicken breast and accompanied by two vessels of Chelten House Raspberry Vinaigrette. I don't eat birds, so I can't attest to the flavor of the salad directly, but my compatriots seemed very well pleased and scarfed it down like a college kid with an overdue assignment and a bag of Chee-Tos [Am i projecting too much here?] I did sample the vinaigrette, which ranks with my favorite flavored dressings -- specifically, it's not overly sweetened. Nice choice.
The bottom line : Pizza Fusion has good food, though it's not in tune with my preferences for "pizza proper." Tasty and not your average pie, though; a welcome new flavor in flatbread. The beverages and pricing were outstanding. The atmosphere, while a little overwrought, was sufficiently inviting. And the recycled-glass-n-concrete countertop and the hi-power hand dryer were nifty bonuses. the fact that they use strictly organic and pesticide-free ingredients alone makes it a must-visit for Phoenicians who like to avoid poison.
Nicholas' EatHouse Rating : B+
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A window into the DiBiase pizza method and results :
Above you'll see my preferred sauce ingredients : very fresh local pesticide-free Roma and little yellow tomatoes and fresh garlic, all from Desert Roots Farm. The tomatoes are de-seeded and crushed with a hand blender; never cooked. It takes less than ten minutes to make the raw sauce, including washing time. The cheese on this pie was Trader Joe's very good organic shredded mozzarella; the knife of choice is a Wusthof Classic. Not shown in this shot : fresh basil, also from Desert Roots; organic olive oil; true Pecorino Romano cheese, which I apply liberally (even though it voids the 'true Margherita' status, it's hella tasty).
This dough has lots of structure; it's prepped the night before using only flour (one-third whole wheat, two-thirds unbleached white; all organic), water, yeast, and salt. I knead it by hand (even though I should probably start using the pictured KitchenAid mixer for efficiency's sake) and it ferments in the fridge overnight for best flavor. The dough is at just about 50% hydration before cooking; very wet indeed. I prefer it like this to promote structure. In defiance of the Neapolitan rules, I coat my hands with olive oil before hand-shaping in the air. The entire dough process from mixing to shaping only takes about 5 minutes, fermentation time excluded.
The results : Delicious pizza. The crust is thicker and puffier than the Neapolitain rules alllow, but that's just how I've come to like it. The 500-degree maximum heat on my oven precludes good charring, sadly. The sauce tastes incredibly fresh, yummy, and flavorful, with a strong hint of garlic kick. I like my pizzas that use shredded mozzarella to be very cheesy [I use fresh mozz more sparingly]. The basil is put on the pie about 5 minutes into an 11-minute cook time. I used to cook for only 8 minutes, but have come to value a more-cooked crust with cheese at the edge.
Scratch-made organic pizza is a taste revolution! Once you start taking command of your pizza supply chain, you'll be rocketed into unexplored realms of deliciousness. Give it a shot and demand better pizza from your local pizza joint! (493,704)
[Bonus points for spotting a Latewirer in th' above photo by Joe Johnston aka @RealJoe !]
I'm so used to slouching in th' back of rooms, dissecting and criticizing what folks have to say, and scowling at presenters from behind my composition book that I'm generally unprepared to hear a talk from someone who is inarguably, scintillatingly awesome. This Wednesday, I was sulking around Gangplank as usual, prepping for another in a series of usually-pretty-darn-good lunch presentations on business, tech, and marketing. Somewhat bafflingly for me, on deck for that day's talk was Joe Johnston (real name!), an oldish guy that I'd heard of before, as the restauranteur behind Joe's Real BBQ, a place famous for giving away free BBQ sandwiches once every year. This guy, I knew, was also behind th' latest in-crowd hangout, Liberty Market.
Now, see, I respect successful businesspersons. I also have a basic, reactionary, but often-justified snobby attitude about "latest in-crowd hangouts" and other signifiers of hipster culture. Never having been to Liberty Market, and having been to Joe's real BBQ only once (and I have to admit, I still prefer Honey Bear's), I didn't have a clear idea about what sort of insight this old sandwich-slinger would have to offer a room full of bad-attitude tech goons and myself. His topic was "Social Media and the Third Place," which sounded pretty bog standard except I wasn't sure what any of this had to do with baseball. And, gee, social media advice is like bad debt : a lot of people have it and would love to pass it on to you.
As it turns out, Joe Johnston is a real interesting cat who puts a lot of thought into what he does. He's got a wide range of knowledge, a compelling story and some pretty darned neat ideas about how to run a real live brick-n-mortar business. He showed up wearing a breezy Hawaiian-style shirt and a straw porkpie hat (indoors, which is bad manners if you ask me, but hey, he's the millionaire). Here's the brief :
Joe Johnston is an old-school Arizonan who grew up on a family farm in Gilbert in the 1960s. He studied electrical engineering at Stanford and practiced that lucrative trade for several years, until a backlog of pleasant memories from his college coffeehouse haunting days and Ray Oldenburg's now-classic book "The Great Good Place" drove him to become heavily interested in and soon professionally involved with what Oldenburg called "Third Places."
According to Oldenburg, the "First Place" is the insular place where we live with our families, sleep, and play 'Scrabble.'. The "Second Place" is the workplace, a much more structured environment where we might spend even more time than we spend at home. The "Third Place" is a highly unstructured environment away from home where conversation is the main activity, ideas are exchanged, and culture is created. Classic examples of "Third Places" are pubs in Britain, cafes in France, barbershops, and coffeehouses in the 1960s USA. Phoenix has often been derided as being bereft of an indigenous urban culture; Joe figured it was high time he did something about it.
His first attempt at creating a "third place" began in 1989 when he and his pal Tim Peelen realized that there weren't any coffeehouses in metro Phoenix and decided to give it a shot. They started by developing what they believed to be a superior product -- good-quality "gourmet coffee," buying various raw bean varieties and test-roasting them in Joe's popcorn popper. When a few winners were ready, they opened up a joint on Mill Avenue in Tempe, right near ASU, and called it Coffee Plantation. To hear Joe tell it, it was a pretty good "third place" and the first coffeehouse of its kind in Tempe.
[ That last bit is funny to me, because by the time I got to ASU (after Joe and Tim had sold it to some business swine), Coffee Plantation was boring, stifling, had mediocre product, and was mobbed with lame folks at all times. Goes to show maybe how one person's persona can anchor a whole enterprise, and the whole thing can spin off into the choppy seas of wackitude when that person leaves).
Johnston and Peelen offloaded Coffee Plantation because it got too big. This is interesting and gives a little insight into what these guys are about. Joe said that after opening up a few more locations and a separate roasting facility, totaling over 150 people on the payroll, it stopped being fun and conceptual and started to turn into a real operations drag. Idea-guys don't like dealing with stacks of HR paperwork and worker's comp claims filed by reefer-sick baristas who burned themselves with cappuccino foam while chatting up fellow Phish fans on the other side of th' counter.
So, Johnston took a year-long sabbatical to travel around th' country eating delicious food. [Tough life huh] Like all non-alien humans, he has a special love for barbecue. He got an idea to start a BBQ of his own, and spent a lot of time in Texas sampling the local variations and looking for the best site designs and delivery / service systems. In 1998, he opened Joe's Real BBQ, which as I mentioned is pretty good. I give him definite props for developing his own distinctive sauce, which is worth a try.
That highly informal restaurant was a raging, hoot-n-hollering success, so Johnston figured he was on a roll and opened up Joe's Farm Grill, which uses fresh produce from his urban farm (more on this later), and then Liberty Market, the most abstract sort-of-restaurant of them all. With Liberty Market, Johnston unplugged completely from the heavy operations chores to focus on design, menu, and conceptual guidance. He seemed pretty stoked about it.
[fun fact : I realized after I'd spent a long time typing the previous section that this story had probably been typed out before, considering that this guy is like super famous. Sure nuff, I could have just cut-and-pasted from the 'About' pages on the restaurant Web sites]
After hipping the crowd to this background, Johnston ripped into a discussion of Oldenburg's "8 characteristics" that define the Third Place and what they mean for business. He also passed around nice handout sheets, which is something that I've never seen before at Gangplank but that was much appreciated :
[Note : despite all th' talk about class, I'm no Marxist and I doubt that Joe is either]
1) Neutral ground : the third place has no formal leader, is not 'hosted,' has no time constraints [e.g., no waitresses rushing you out of your table after the dinner], and is designed for maximum comfort level -The key things here are the lack of hierarchical structure and lack of serious time constraints. Re : the latter : most places have to close sometime, but if you're only open 4 hours a day, that's not going to give people enough flexibility to get really comfortable)
2) Leveler : the experience is designed so that people from all walks of life feel comfortable; all socioeconomic classes are eligible to participate. This illustrates the idea of commonality and requires that the barriers to entry be reduced to the lowest levels possible. - Low barrier to entry is vital here. At Liberty Market, Johnston sets the barrier at $1.66 -- the price of an espresso. He says he'll even work out deals with homeless people who have no cash (what about Pee-Wee Herman?). Of near-equal importance is that what staff there are don;t behave in a snobby way that turns people from certain classes off. This leveling concept is necessary for the exchange of ideas between classes that sparks creativity and interesting convos.
3) Conversation : This is necessarily the main activity at the "third place." The convo must be "lively, with lots of discussion, and lots of buzz," says Johnston. The idea here is to foster communication. - Part of this is making sure that it's easy to converse in the space. This means tables put together to encourage groups to mix, and music that's not too loud. This last point is seriously overlooked by many establishments aspiring to be 'third places,' 78% of whom deem it essential to blast "Stir it Up" at 97 decibels while I'm trying to hear someone speak.
4) Accessibility -- this is related to #1 -- the place has to be accessible during a broad swath of time throughout the day. People need to be able to drift in and out according to their own natural schedules. - In Johnston's example, Liberty Market opens at 7am and closes after a late dinner. Again, it's crucial that people not feel rushed.
5) Regulars : Any establishment wishing to be a "third place" needs to take care that its regulars are looked-after and that the stage is set for their enjoyment. The regulars foster conversation, draw in new participants, and provide the cultural spark of the place. - The regulars set the cultural tone, so it's vital to recognize them and not tick them off.
6) Low-profile : The physical design of the space should be kind of plain (though inviting), utilitarian, and not over-wrought. it should just be a comfortable structure that allows focus to remain on the people and conversations. -Gangplank is a good example of this. Th' place looks like a classroom and is inside an industrial space, but that 'blank' atmosphere is ideal for free-ranging thought development and unconstrained talk.
7) Playful mood : The overall vibe must not be serious, boring, annoying or pretentious. -Instead, it should be upbeat, joking, and full of enjoyment. Overbearing atmosphere stifles conversation and culture, and will keep 'fresh' people far away.
8) Homelike : this means that the place should have an element of physical and psychological comfort that puts one at ease. -In practice, this means having couches and other homey touches around, reading material, etc
A lot of places recognize the value of being a "third place" and aspire to be one, but they're not. Restaurants want to bundle you out of there as soon as your check's paid; Starbucks charges for Web access, Burger King feels like an Orwellian nightmare, etc. Neglect of any of the principles above can prevent the third-place culture incubator from forming.
How 'social media' relates to the "Third Place" concept : -Twitter is kind of like a 'third place' online. Very low barrier to entry, all-inclusive, strictly conversation-based, etc. In practice, it's possible and advisable to 'leverage' this virtual 'third place' to promote the physical 'third place.' The place owner / organizer / idea person can use social media not only to generate word-of-mouth (and keep track of what the word is), but to directly keep in touch with customers. The latter is especially important when considering the vital nurturing of regulars that all 'third places' need to succeed. You can pass along special offers to them, get their invaluable feedback on potential changes and plans (from menu to construction ideas) and keep track of / thank them for their visits and reports. Social media helps you let the regulars know that they're relaly important. - In social media interactions as well as those in 'meatspace,' it's advisable to hew close to the old rules of conversation as possible : 1) Remain silent your share of the time -- don't hog th' airspace 2) Be attentive while others are talking 3) Say what you think, but be careful 4) Avoid topics not of general interest. You might really really want to talk about how your toothbrush tasted funny this morning, but others likely give no hoot. 5) Say little or nothing about yourself, talk about others and their adventures and achievements ( note : some have suggested an 'eight-to-one' rule : for every comment you make about yourself, spend eight talk segments on others ) 6) Speak in as low a voice as will allow others to hear.
In addition to these ideas and his business history, Johnston spoke briefly about his 'mid-century Modern' housing development, Agritopia, which also contains the sustainable, no-pesticide-or-herbicide farm he uses to supply his restaurants. This idea of a self-supporting urban agriculture community is radical and, while I wouldn't live there personally as a matter of lot size and loathing of HOAs, this idea probably represents a good model for future community development.
Johnston's focus on design, "third place" ideas, and self-reliance are seriously invigorating. Judging from the audience reaction, he inspired quite a few other folks to take a big-picture view with an eye for vital details and invest some energy into doing something right -- or as he says, "from the heart." (47,620)
The PhD who taught us nutrition at our medical school was this old skinny vegetarian guy who, after three decades of teaching, still had a modicum of enthusiasm for professing, but none left for research. On the rare occasions he did update his lectures, he'd do it by just adding an addendum to his PowerPoints stating the exact opposite of what he'd just spent 45 minutes talking about. Through no fault of his own, he taught us the folly of thinking you know everything, and the skepticism required when dealing with statistics and studies.
One thing that always did strike me as extremely solid, however, is the role of potassium in diet. After going through a list of foods that were high in potassium, I could see right away one immutable fact: If you are American, you are almost certainly potassium deficient.
At the time, I was new to biochemistry working hard to get through it, but I kept this thought in my head until my physiology teacher finally taught me what potassium does.
Special K+ Makes Kidneys Happy
The most important function of the kidney is to regulate electrolytes (for reasons I'll get to later). A close second, however, is management of blood pressure (BP). Without adequate blood pressure, your tissues run out of oxygen and nutrients, and then die.
The kidney produces urine at a roughly constant rate 24 hours a day. 20% of blood volume that goes through the kidney ends up in urine. This ends up being about 34 gallons of urine per day.
You may saying "Listen idiot, you need to learn some math. 34 gallons would weigh 280 pounds. Converting to metric, that's about 1,400 milli-Oprahs a day. I'd have to drink like 70 Mountain Dew big-gulps to keep up with that!"
The reason why you don't end up peeing out all that liquid is because the kidney reabsorbs what it wants to keep. The nutrients it chooses to reabsorb with that water depend on the hormone levels in your blood that tell your kidney what to do (there are many).
The problem with this kind of biological machine is that it's not very exact when it comes to blood pressure.
The kidney manages blood pressure in part by regulating the total amount of urine excreted. One of the mechanisms it uses to do this is by actively pumping sodium into the urine. The higher salinity of the urine will draw water from the body through osmosis. More water in urine means less water in the blood.
The reverse is also true: The more sodium you have in your blood, the less urine you will pee. This is why high-salt diets cause high blood pressure.
One such pump is actually a molecular machine (enzyme) that exchanges a single potassium ion (K+) for a single sodium ion (Na+)--one at a time. This sounds ineffective, but it when you consider that there are millions of these things each moving faster than a migrant worker at an AFLCIO meeting, you realize that it is more than adequate.
The problem with this particular pump is that the urine has to have an equal amount of potassium to the amount of sodium you want pump into the urine (and remember, the more sodium you pee out, the more water comes with it, and therefore the lower your blood pressure is).
You see where I'm going with this?
Being as how you need potassium to reduce your blood pressure, if you're potassium deficient like most Americans, you're going to have higher blood pressure.
So Should I Eat More Potassium or Less Sodium?
The Unrealistic Dick™ answer is "both." However, the more useful answer could actually be potassium!
In a study done of blacks (who are less tolerant of sodium than whites), it was found that higher potassium diets lowered blood pressure better than restricting sodium in the diet.
Potassium is also highly effective at lowering blood pressure in whites, but it's inconclusive how much.
What about asians? I'm not sure. You guys can use google as well as I can though.
Obviously reducing your sodium is a smart thing to do, so don't totally overlook it. Nor should you think you can get away with eating more of Mr Ed's salt-lick just because you're eating more bananas. Though technically you can, it's incredibly tough to gauge your salt and potassium levels without a blood test (remember what I said about BP not being exact?)
Great! So I'll Just Take a Potassium Pill Then!
"No you fucking wont, asshole!" -- Food and Drug Administration
The problem with taking too much potassium is that having too much potassium in your blood will upset the electrical system of every cell in your body... This includes your heart. High potassium in your blood will literally cause your heart to short-out and start misfiring.
Ahh, now you know why electrolyte balance is the most important thing the kidney maintains: Your heart wont pump right without it.
So why does the FDA say you can't have it in multivitamins? The simple answer is that Americans are, for the most part, damnable idiots that can't be trusted.
People overdose on vitamins all the time, and it so happens that taking too much potassium will kill you in just a few minutes. Compare this with taking too much vitamin A, which takes weeks or months to die of.
So what the hell do I eat then?
Luckily, high potassium foods are usually quite good for you. In general, we're talking about high fiber foods, green vegetables, and certain fruit.
Also, there is no risk of overdosing on potassium from eating it in foods unless you have certain medical conditions.
Here's a list of some really good ones that are easy to throw into just about any diet:
Okay maybe that was an overreaction. Some of my best friends are vegetarians, I swear!
Really, all you need to do is eat more veggies. As you can see from the above list, staples of the vegetarian diet are very high in potassium. That, combined with the way meats are usually seasoned (read: bacon) is why vegetarians usually have lower blood pressure.
With just a few, albeit painful, changes to your carnivorous lifestyle, you may be able to avoid being stuck on a blood pressure pill. The best part is, changes in blood pressure can be seen within a few days.Electrolyte consideration in diet and weight loss is curative for hypertension in the majority of those who have it.
Addendum on black licorice: For those who don't know, black licorice is a disgusting candy eaten by home-schooled children, old ladies, and goths. Black licorice has a chemical that acts similar to a certain salt-regulating hormone (aldosterone) and can decrease blood potassium levels. It is for this reason that you should NOT eat large amounts of black licorice. The level of the chemical varies in each batch, and too much can kill you. This became news a few years ago because people lady died after eating nearly a half pound of it per day. Can you guess her symptoms?: High blood pressure and muscle (including heart muscle) weakness.
Update: black licorice addendum needed to be corrected, as it was backwards: It is certainly not a diuretic, but a pressor. (157,024)
Soil is the most important aspect of any urban agriculture setup. It's the soil that nourishes the crops, and so it's important to understand its composition. As mentioned in the previous section, geologically speaking, soil is composed of sand, silt, clay, organic matter, water, and air. For effective food production, the soil must have enough sand for drainage, enough silt (a sediment often originating from glacial erosion), clay, and organic matter for nutrition, and be sufficiently moist and loose for planting. In high-quality soil, all these components are balanced to create a highly desirable soil type known as "humus." [not to be confused with "hummus," though I've eaten at some restaurants that don't seem to acknowledge the difference]
The chemical makeup of soil varies greatly by region and site, and influences the growing characteristics of what's planted there. Three of the most important elements present in soil and their roles are : - Nitrogen : helps green growth - Phosphorus : helps fruiting, flowering, and root development - Potassium : helps plants resist disease and drought Together, these three elements are called "NPK," and their concentrations in a soil are a key part of assessing site suitability. Other elements are also vital ro plant growth. In the Southwest United States, soils tend to be lacking in phosphorus, manganese, boron, and zinc. Liberal application of high-quality compost and mulch will generally solve these problems, though there are element-specific amendments available (see note below).
Beginning to Plant
It's vital to consider your local climate when planning your urban ag adventure. Arizonans are lucky in that the planting season there is year-round. Check out this planting calendar put together by the Phoenix Permaculture Guild, especially if you live in an arid climate : http://bit.ly/UIWwN
Regional climates are generally discussed in terms of "climate zones." Each "zone" indicates a specific "hardiness" level that plants are recommended to have for planting in that zone. Most commercial seeds are clearly labeled with zone recommendations. The greater Phoenix area is "zone 9b," for example; this corresponds with a "low desert" climate. It's wise to choose plants that are known to thrive in your climate zone -- native plants or plants from seed that are marked as OK for your zone (one zone "higher" is generally OK -- for example, zones 9 and 10 are usually OK in Phoenix). Note, however, that seeds for which your climate is on the outer range (for Phoenix, that'd be like a seed packed labeled "Zones 3 to 9") are not a very safe bet. It's best to pick seeds for which your climate fall in a moderate range ("Zones 6 through 9").
Seeds and Transplants
Most seeds take 7 to 14 days to germinate, and then they have to sprout and grow. 60 to 90 days of growing are then needed before the plant will fruit. Transplants, on the other hand, are already germinated and sprouted.
Transplants are sometimes faster to grow, but there are factors you'll want to consider before opting for transplants : After transplantation, "buffer time" is needed for the plant to acclimate itself to its new environment, as each transplantation diminishes its resistance to drought, disease, and pests for a time until the plant recovers from the transplantation "shock". Accounting for this, leafy greens generally take about 30 days to grow after transplantation; fruiting plants, 90 days; and root crops, more than 90 days.
The bottom line is that it's generally better to grow from seed, where you'll control the entire plant life cycle. If you must start a plant indoors, try starting seed in a container of the same soil into which it'll be transplanted (the soil from your planting bed) in order to minimize the "shock" effect.
Notes on planting in November, December, January in Phoenix :
If you have seed packets that say "plant after danger of frost," that means winter planting in Phoenix. This is the time to plant what other people call "early spring vegetables." If you hear a warning of frost (rare, but it happens), just cover the plants with lightweight material (newspaper, old bedsheets, etc) by nightfall, preferably over a simple frame or stake. This will slow heat loss and prevent frostbite. Be sure to remove the cover in the morning.
Asparagus (note : must grow for one full year before you eat it), lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, potatoes, and other traditional "spring" crops are ideal to plant at this time. Seed packet instructions indicating "warm" climate mean Arizona fall through spring -- not summer.
Potatoes and root crops are best grown in loose, well-drained soil; mulch can be added to the soil to improve drainage. For potatoes, cut up the seed potatoes into one-inch pieces (this small cutting encourages them to grow quickly) , place the seed potato cutting eye-up in a depression you've made in the soil, and cover with a mound of mulchy soil. Keep the mound well-watered. When the flowers begin to bloom, you can start "robbing" new potatoes (don't take too many at once or the plant will wig out).
Notes on planting in February and March in Phoenix :
February and March are the times to plant what other people call "summer crops." These include tomotoes, peppers, okra, eggplant, melons, squash, and similar items. These need to germinate in cool 70-to-80-degree conditions and flower before the temperature hits 90 degrees. Plant early to encourage strong root systems, because a summer harvest demands roots that will bring in plenty of water and nutrients to support the plant. Don't plant late! Leave the plants in after harvest to keep weeds away and promote soil health.
A note on soil amendments :
In order to get your leached, weak soil up to snuff for planting food, you'll need to supplement its composition with "amendments" -- that is, additives. Now, many people use chemical fertilizers and such to boost productivity, but not only is that approach expensive, but it can have grave effects on your soil health in the long run and plants in the short run. Chemical fertilizers, which generally contain a lot of potassium and nitrogen, can degrade your soil's quality by increasing its salinity and raising its pH to high levels of alkalinity (these factors are worst in arid climates), and can lead to "fertilizer burn" (the symptom of which is leaf tips turnign yellow), which damages crops.
Therefore, it's best to avoid these chemical amendments altogether and stick with quality compost that you know is free of chemical rubbish. Compost will feed the crops with a broad menu of needed elements, at concentrations that are healthful for both the plants and the soil. Plan your urban agriculture setup well and with a mind toward growing region-appropriate crops, avoid monocropping in favor of rotational and companion planting, and apply sufficient compost, and you should never require the use of man-made chemical amendments.
In addition to traditional compost and compost tea, a very effective natural soil amendment is work castings -- that is, worm poo. This high-powered yet safe soil amendment is available commercially; you can also get yourself a "vermiculture" setup or "worm farm" and grow your own.
There are several other "natural" amendments which are viable for urban agronomy in cases where available compost and worm castings prove insufficient. For nitrogen boost, alfalfa meal is available. For phosphorus addition, rock and colloidal phosphates (ideally added to nitrogen inputs like manure at the composting stage, but also possible to spread directly on the soil) are options; it's advisable to check to be sure that these haven't been processed in ways that might leave harsh residues.
A note on hanging gardens :
Hanging gardens are believed to have been prevalent in Babylonian and Sumerian societies. Those were some of the hippest desert civilizations of their time, so they must have been onto something. In hanging garden arrangements, the plants actually grow upside-down. Ideal candidates for this method are tomatoes, eggplants, and similar crops. Hanging gardens create shade, double your available space, cools the environs, and is generally efficient. Old or dead trees are ideal platforms for hanging gardens, but rebar structures, chicken coops, and big fences serve very well. Terra cotta pots with a hole in the bottom can function as hanging planters.
Part 4 coming soon
The bulk of this information is drawn from the lecture series "Designing A Vegetable Garden" as presented by Heather Welch at the Phoenix Permaculture Guild (89,614)
Many sites are landscaped with rock and pavement. This creates what is known as the "heat island problem" -- that is, the rocks and paved elements absorb and hold solar heat, raising the temperature of the site, permitting little vegetation or evaporation. Another common landscape approach, xeriscaping, attempts to simulate a natural desert environment by using no deep-rooted plants, but only things like cactus and succulents. The problem with this approach is that it leads to erosion and a soil that is heavily leached and will not retain water; this is not conducive to growing food.
In contrast, permaculture-style landscaping that features a variety of rooted plants and water-managing features raises the water table and, though it requires more water input, may actually conserve water in the long run by cooling the site and creating more in-site moisture recycling (whereas xeriscaping creates a hotter, more arid environment by retaining little water). Plants cool a site, while rocks heat it up. So what's a person with rock on their site to do?
Don't remove the rock -- it's expensive and laborious to do so, and recall that 'using what's on hand' is a guiding permaculture principle. So, instead of removing the rock, redistribute it. Rock's heat-retaining characteristic is directly proportional to its surface area. Therefore, we want to arrange the rock in a way that minimizes the surface area and yet is useful.
The best way to do this is to use the rock on hand to create narrow, deep pathways around your planting areas such that the planting area will be sunken relative to to paths. This will help conserve your precious water -- the water will drain over and through the rock paths and be collected in the sunken beds. Sunken-bed agriculture has long been favored in desert Africa and other arid climates as a key water-management strategy. Repeat : sunken beds and raised paths are the best approach for growing food, especially in hot and arid climates. Raised beds will fry the roots of your crops when the sun beats on them.
Sidebar : the horror of Bermuda grass
Bermuda grass is a 'marginal' or 'fringe' plant -- it exists when land has begun to fail due to erosion and desiccation. It's an especially hardy species that is highly invasive, and is very difficult to control in an edibles-growing setup.
The 'conventional' approach to removing Bermuda grass is to use an herbicide, but smart people know that herbicides are poison and don't use them near their food crops. Instead, use the 'brute force' method : obtain a sod-cutter, "bobcat," or strong shovel (for the Calvinist) and remove the offending grass before planting. Attempt to scrape it off the top of your site. Due to its omnipresence and hardiness, it will continually stage comebacks, but this step will give you a head-start on it. If you're serious about keeping this hardy grass out of your planting beds, don't include removed Bermuda in your regular compost, as some of its seeds may survive the 140-degree temperature and come back to haunt your garden.
One tactic that has proved successful for keeping Bermuda grass at bay is the introduction of red clover, another 'marginal' species that is likewise invasive but has two advantages over Bermuda grass : 1) it attracts bees, which are vital for pollination of your crops, and 2) it smells better than Bermuda grass.
The 'Pre-Landscaped' problem
Many sites will already be landscaped with trees, shrubs, etc, before you arrive. This can be seen as an obstacle to your planting design, but the smart urban agronomist will incorporate existing green features into their plan. Rather than remove existing trees, remember that bees like trees and you need bees. Therefore, introduce gourds, grapes, and other hardy vines to grow up on and around the pre-existing features (including rocks of all sizes). This will create a photosynthesizing, water-producing heat barrier that requires little watering (because these thrive in dry conditions) is excellent at counteracting the effects of the urban "heat island."
Achieving microbial balance
Healthy plants are abetted by numerous symbiotic worms, insects, microbes and fungi living in the soil. Each type of helper organism lives in a certain "trophic level" -- that is, stratum -- of the soil. Microorganisms often move through fungal networks around plant roots to enhance crops' nutrient uptake. Helpful organisms come in several classes : - Bacteria - Fungi - Nematodes - Protozoa - Arthropods - Annileds - Birds and animals are also in symbiosis wit your crop, but we'll treat them elsewhere in this series.
Soil trophic levels are an important consideration in urban agriculture. It's important to work with the organisms in each level, rather than against them, to maximize yield and minimize the amount of work you have to do. The first rule of working with these trophic-level-dwellers is : 'don't upend, displace, and massacre them with a rototiller.'
To dig or not to dig?
Tilling displaces the organisms in each tropic level, disturbing them and causing them to die quickly. A few inches means a lot to microbes and tiny animals. The "no-till revolution" currently under way in urban agriculture allows the trophic levels to remain healthy and undisturbed by specifying that rather than digging and tilling. it's better to layer mulch and compost on top of existing levels to allow the natural action of symbiotic-critter level adjustment as these new mulch and compost layers are watered in and self-percolate.
The "traditional" method of bed preparation, "double-digging," is wherein soil is dug up from one end of the bed and moved to another end. This is disastrous for microbe and fungal colonies and, even worse, is very hard work.
The new method : "Lasagna gardening"
I wish that "Lasagna gardening" was a way to grow lasagnas, but alas, it's only a slang term for building up soil in a layered fashion and avoiding disturbance of the native soil's trophic levels. Here's how to do it :
1) Spray / soak the site liberally with compost tea or "effective microorganisms" to bacterially control pre-existing environmental toxiins 2)Put a layer of black-and-white (only) newspaper over the selected bed site. This is nontoxic and will discourage pre-existing weeds from erupting in your planting beds. (note : stay at least 3 inches away from trees ) 3) Layer equal thicknesses of mulch and compost on top of each other. Ideally, you want an ultimate planting depth that is equal to your root size; this is roughly the same as the height of the above-ground plant greens (hence the old saying "as above, as below"). This may seem daunting and silly, but after the first couple of seasons, the new material will be integrated with the original soil and the landscape will even out. 4) add new layers of mulch and compost after each harvest to continue enriching the site soil.
Kelp meal is a phosphorous-containing soil amendment that many have found to be beneficial to this process. However, those who live in landlocked areas may object to adding sea-based additives to their soil.
Coming soon : Part III
This information principally drawn from the lecture series "Designing a Vegetable Garden" as presented by Heather Welch in late 2008 courtesy of the Phoenix Permaculture Guild. (85,599)
Water management is key for success, especially in desert environments. One of the determining factors in water management is the overall slope of your site space. Observe where water flows and pools when it rains. The areas where water pools are ideal planting locations for root crops (carrots, beets, etc).
You can influence the flow of water by constructing "swales" along the elevation contour lines. "Swales" are geographical features that are constructed by digging along contour lines and mounding the removed soil on the lower-elevation side of the ditch, creating a depression and berm that guides water runoff. This method can be effective for minimizing water loss and guiding flow to where you need it - your planting beds with water-hungry crops.
Rainwater and 'greywater' harvesting are good ways to maximize the self-reliance of your urban agriculture project. Rainwater harvesting requires a well-designed gutter / catchment system and collection barrel. When deciding how to apply your harvested rainwater, be aware that if your house has asphalt / tar / composition shingles, the roof runoff will contain toxic residues from the shingles. Therefore, you don't want water that runs of an asphalt roof to be used on your vegetables; it's probably OK to use on trees and anything you don't eat (though there's some argument about whether you should use it on trees that bear edibles -- see note on toxin concentrations in fruit). Water that runs off tile, tin, concrete, ceramic, wood shingle, or other non-volatile roofing materials is kosher for all plant uses.
'Greywater' is relatively uncontaminated water that's been used once in your home - for example, to wash clothing or the dishes. By using biodegradeable, nontoxic detergents, the urban agronomist can collect that water -- which is quite a lot - and re-use it directly on trees or and non-edible plants. You'll need to plan how best to get the greywater from its source (e.g., the clotheswasher) to the destination (e.g, your orange tree). For example, a hose can be run directly from the clothes washer to the orchard or collection barrel; catchments and barrels can be used to store greywater before use. Note that since greywater can harbor bacteria, it should not be stored for more than 24 hours before use (unless cured by UV rays). For collecting greywater from the kitchen and bathroom sinks, the simplest way is to simply collect the water in bowls and decant it into a bucket to take outside; you can also do minor plumbing alterations to make it easier. There are numerous books and commercially-available systems on the market with more detail about how to install greywater systems in the home; be sure to consult local laws governing greywater before starting on the project.
Some municipalities offer irrigation as a city service. This provides very cheap and plentiful water, sufficient to grow even the thirstiest crops. The downside to this convenience is that irrigation always brings with it numerous seeds (such as Bermuda grass) and insects. Take care to be on the lookout for invasive species when using municipal irrigation. Avoid placing plants directly in front of the irrigation channel to avoid damage from water movement.
When using forced city water -- that is, tap water -- there are several concerns to bear in mind. The most crucial is that tap water is chlorinated and fluoridated; left untreated, it'll kill vital garden bacteria and fungal microrhizome 'residents.' If you have no bacteria, you'll have no worms, and no worms spells doom for vegetable gardens. Without symbiotic fungi, your plant roots won't be able to take in vital nutrients from the soil. Therefore, if you use tap water, install a filter system that's designed to eliminate chlorine and fluoride contamination. If a commercial filtration system is beyond reach, these harmful elements will also evaporate if you leave the water in an open barrel or bucket for 24 hours or more. It's been hypothesized that toxins in water are concentrated in plant tissue to a factor of ten, so prenez garde!
Sun and shade
As important as water management is the practice of solar planning. It's essential to plan your plantings with a mind to the patterns of the sun on your site and the needs / tolerances of your crops. Plants can be sunburned just like animals can.
Pay special attention to summer sun patterns. In arid climates especially, avoid planting vegetables in places where they'll receive direct solar radiation (cactus and desert succulents are OK in direct summer sun). This is one of the reasons why it's desirable to create a multi-tiered "canopy" with trees or trellised sun-tolerant vines providing shade for edibles below. Creating such a canopy system improves not only the soil and plant health, but also site air quality.
You'll note that the sun pattern in your space will vary considerably between summer (the sun will be directly overhead) and winter (sun will come in at more of an angle).
The best spots for planting on your site are those that are in partial shade in the winter sun pattern. Determine your sun patterns by carefully observing the shade patterns as they shift throughout a day. You can approximate the patterns of whatever season it isn't by drawing a bird's-eye-view map of the site, putting objects on it to represent shading structures (for example, a tissue box for the house and saltshakers for trees) and moving a bright flashlight over the model, imitating the sun's sweep, to see how the shade patterns move.
The ideal type of shade is "filtered shade" -- that is, shade that doesn't completely obscure the sun. For this, trees with smaller leaves such as mesquite, palo verde, and palo brea are ideal. These types of trees are also "nitrogen-fixing" plants -- that is, they take elemental nitrogen from the atmosphere and convert it into nitrogen compounds in soil that can be used by other nearby plants. Note : if you have a dead tree on the site, don't root it out - introduce a trellising vine like grapes to grow up it and provide shade. Using what you've got on hand -- like pre-existing structures -- is a key permaculture principle.
Understanding microclimates
Microclimates are local variations within a regional climate. For example, the Phoenix area has an overall climate that is hot and arid. However, variations in elevation and airflow patterns make the North East section of the valley significantly cooler and more verdant than the southwest section. The urban center is hotter than the surrounding areas due to to high concentration of heat-retaining structures and pavement. Likewise, there are microclimates within individual sites. It's a good idea to walk around the site in he middle of the night, making notes as differences in temperature, humidity, and wind movement are perceived. These microclimates will influence the planting layout.
Soil : analysis and composition :
Soil is composed of sand, silt, clay, organic matter, air, and water. It's what plants grow in, and is ultimately the source of all food. It's important to think about and analyze the soil on any planting site.
Typical Arizona soil is heavy with caliche -- a mixture of clay with mica and montmorillonite particles. The clay and mica particles lay flat against each other, making for poor permeability and drainage. It's hard to break up and very challenging to grow in. The type of soil that's ideal for planting is called "loam" -- an equal balance of all particle types and sizes with plenty of organic matter. This soil type is very "friable" -- that is, easy to plant in -- and is nutritious for nearly all plant types. Any soil type can be made to take on the characteristics of loam with the addition of time and natural soil amendments -- compost and mulch. Never use gypsum to break up clay deposits, as it will make soil terribly alkaline.
The site soil should be tested for pH before the project is started. A pH between 6.8 and 7.5 is considered to be neutral and good for most plants; desert soils tend to be alkaline (~8.5 pH); some soils are acidic with a lower pH. The correct way to manage soil pH that's too high or too low is to add plenty of compost, which will help neutralize the overall pH. Any nursery can test the site soil for pH.
If you believe that your site may be heavily contaminated with industrial toxins, motor oil, pesticides, or other hideous stuff, many major universities (such as U of A) will test your soil for poisons (for a significant fee). If you find that your soil is contaminated, but still want to plant, you can attempt to "bioremediate" it using liberal amounts of compost tea and / or so-called "Effective Microorganisms."
Note : never use raw manure or fecal material directly on your soil, no matter what you hear-- it will introduce pathogens and can potentially cause 'nitrogen burn' in crops. Compost all manure before applying to your soil.
How to determine your soil's composition : This is easy. Just fill a lidded jar halfway with the soil to be tested (it's recommended to test multiple parts of your site), fill rest of jar with water, shake it up well, and leave it to settle for 48 hours. The sample will then separate into layers and reveal its composition. The bottom layer is sand, the middle layer is silt, the next and lightest-colored layer is clay, and floating on top is organic matter. The composition of your soil samples will tell you what amendments should be added to optimize the soil's friability.
If clay is present in excess, coarse compost or mulch can be added to help make the soil more permeable over time. Clay does have redeeming characteristics -- for example, it's rich in plant nutrients, as is silt. If your soil is sandy, that's not necessarily a bad thing -- sand is vital for good drainage. Just add plenty of finished compost to amplify the nutrient value. If your soil is weak in organic material, add mulch and compost (the more, the better).
Getting started
A good plan for starting your urban agronomy adventure is to pick the best-shaded, well-watered spot on the site and create a 4 by 8 foot bed (planting your favorite native food crops using the companion-planting strategy -- more on that later). This functional size is manageable for the neophyte and is modular, so that your planting beds can be easily added together or rearranged. Once you have success in the 4x8 bed, create more. A key permaculture principle to apply here is "start small, get big."
Basic tools
The basic tools you'll want to embark on your planting experiment are : - Gloves - Shovel - Rake - Hoe - Wheelbarrow - Rebar stakes are useful for many things including water and air management - Compost and compost sifter - Velcro for plant ties
The bulk of this information was drawn from the lecture series "Designing a Vegetable Garden" as presented by Heather Welch, November 2008. Part 2 to follow (83,717)
Here's Nicholas DiBiase from Hepnova (@Hepnova) laying down th' rap on urban agronomy and food security at Ignite Phoenix 4 :
Transcript :
Food security : what does it mean?
Food security is regular, reliable, daily access to sufficient quantities of nutritious food.
It affects everybody, and it has to do with income, access, and information.
Let me tell you a story about access. In the late 90s when I was at ASU and they shut down Stabler's Market, suddenly I was left without a grocery store within a mile of where I lived. So, I started eating a lot of ramen and fast food -- how many students hear that?
Now, at the grocery store, you can get produce, but a lot of the stuff we find there is grown with chemicals that we don't necessarily want to put in our body.
Now, we can look for food that's labeled by the USDA as "Organic." But there are a couple of problems there, too : 1) it's hella expensive, right? And 2) there are over 2 dozen chemical approved by the USDA for use in foods labeled as organic.
On top of that, most of this stuff comes from far away, other states or other countries, so it spends a lot of time on container ships, in planes, and in trucks, using up a lot of energy and fuel just to get to our supermarket and losing nutritional value every day it's on the road.
The solution is urban agronomy : the scientific approach to gardening in the urban environment. It's efficient,
because we get a lot for what we put in, there's little waste, and we save on all those transportation costs. It's edible : we get the food at the peak of its perfection and the peak of its nutritive value.
It's all about community -- this is what makes it work. This is a grassroots movement that's growing every day. Here's Ryan and Ericka Cero Wood showing 70 interested people around their house and garden.
As much as this is about nutrition and supply security, it's also about taste. Fresh food tastes amazing! I never liked squash until I had one that was raised here in Phoenix. It was like I was eating wax before. It's a revolutionary experience to taste food as it's really meant to taste.
We can do this stuff without changing our lifestyle tat much -- we can keep our urban identity. This is a simple approach that yields real results.
For the apartment dweller and those living in small spaces, we use containers to grow delicious leafy greens, and other good stuff.
Those who have some yardspace can design sunken planting beds with raised paths that conserve our precious water and conserve resources. Vital to success is the use of native plants. We live in the desert, we exist in the desert, and so we eat in the desert. Foods that we eat in the desert should grow naturally in the desert. Native foods like corn, beans, and squash are designed by nature to thrive and be easy to grow in the desert -- and I don't know about you, but I don't like to work any harder than I have to -- especially when it comes to food!
You can enhance your system by using biodegradeable soaps and recapturing the water you use for washing at home -- this is called greywater, and it can be as simple as a bucket!
You can also add chickens to the setup, I love these guys! They're cute as all-get-out, they're great at controlling pests, they eat scorpions - that's true --, and they give us eggs at a fraction of the cost of organic eggs from the store!
The most important thing here is to share your surplus! This is what makes this work at a scale that's a the community level. When you produce more than you can eat fresh during the season, share it with someone who has something you want! Or better yet, share it with someone who may not have anything.
Food insecurity is disturbingly prevalent in America and in our community. If we use some of our extra space and resources to grow some food for these folks, everybody will benefit.
The inspiration and the information that brought me here here came from the Phoenix Permaculture Guild. These folks are full of energy, have a wealth of knowledge and are eager to help anyone interested in exploring this stuff.
We can shred up a guitar neck; we can rev an engine -- I wanna grow up this landscape, take back our food supply, and have a rockin' fun time doing it!
You hear a lot of chatter these days about "food security" and "nutritional security". What th' hoot, you may well ask, does that ish mean?
The crisp answer is that one is considered to be food secure if one has regular access to sufficient food and does not live in fear of going hungry. One is considered nutritionally secure when the food one is able to get contains the nutrients needed to remain healthy and active. [DeadCowX touched upon this topic in his last post, in fact -- a food supply filled with pathogens is not secure.]
These ideas are usually talked about in the context of the 'developing world'. In what we used to call 'third world countries,' extreme poverty is commonplace, famines due to lack of modern farming practices and infrastructure are frequent, and political instability often interrupts the food supply with wars and outright institutionalized theft. These supply interruptions and lack of money result in food insecurity. Available food is often incomplete in nutrition -- as with the millions who live on only rice for weeks at a time -- or marginally nutritive at best, as in the heartbreaking mud-and-shortening cakes consumed by Haiti's poorest. This is nutritional insecurity, and malnourishment creates a host of health problems that make quality of life worse for those who suffer it, as these illnesses greatly sap productivity.
Fact is, though, that folks in urban America have to struggle with food and nutritional security as well. Not only do lack of quality education and blighted neighborhoods create poverty, which itself causes 11% of US households to be food insecure at least part of the year (see http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/FoodSecurity ), but long, inefficient delivery supply chains can cause supply interruption and in fact, many economically-disadvantaged in urban areas (a cohort that is less likely than others by a long shot to have a car) do not live within walking distance of a grocery store or other source of fresh food. This often results in folks who are technically food-secure (that is, they have the means / scrilla to buy enough food) being nutritionally insecure as a result of having only prepackaged convenience-store poison and 'fast food' available within their transport radius. This can lead to the same types of nutritional problems that result from poverty, with added risks from unhealthy ingredients often included in these food categories.
Think I'm jiving around here? Wrong, kid! Sit back and think it through. Check this out : -As anyone who suffered through ASU in the 90s will attest, Stabler's Market on Mill Avenue was the only place within reasonable walking distance of the university (and surrounding jects / housing clusters) where one could get fresh food and produce. When they closed that place down to make way for more ugly engineering buildings, suddenly, the closest grocery store was well over a mile away. As a result, I spent more years than I care to remember living on Chick-Fil-A from the M.U. and peanut butter crackers, Sun Chips, and 40s of OE "800" from Circle K. Anyone who knows me personally, especially my pancreas, will testify that this is the truth. The cold fact is that though I made enough money at my $6.25 / hour ASU job to afford to eat, I was still nutritionally insecure because fresh, nutritive food was not available in my immediate area.
Is this just another pathetic collegiate sob story? Chea it is. But it's one that's shared by a whole grip of folks who've lived in high-density urban areas with no grocery stores around. How many Latewires have eaten ramen and / or Jumbo Jacks three or more times a week because the only places you can walk to are 7-11 or Snake in the Box? This is real. We pay a high price for living like this -- how many times have those same Latewires been sick this year? Before I stopped living like an animal and got a girlfriend with a car, I used to miss about a day of work every month because my body was mounting an insurrection against the Dorito-and-hot-dog diet that I was telling it to build itself with.
How is it that people who live in dense areas can't get ahold of good food? It's because they're not sufficiently educated on the importance of nutrition to demand the right food access. A person can't live on Chee-Tos and vitamin pills alone, but try telling that to a stubborn Lit Crit major with a tallboy of Icehouse in his hand. If this aspect of our bleak urban food security picture is going to get fixed, folks need to be motivated enough to drive this change from the demand side. And face it, if everybody who walked into the Circle K on University and McCintock asked for fresh broccoli instead of a carton of Kools, we'd see some changes pretty fast. Hell, I'm not suggesting burning down th' WeinerSchnitzel or anything.
Part 2 of this overview will go over a few key points about the food supply chain and what it means for your food and nutritional security. We'll get real about "organic foods" and why your $4 Costa Rican pear is your enemy.
Some of you may or may not know this but May is the month of the beef. That's right folks, National Beef Month. http://www.jg-tc.com/articles/2009/05/19/features/farm/doc4a135ee2942d9477518007.txt As you can see from the link there are many fascinating statistics about the beef industry as it relates to Illinois. They sure take pride in their beef, we should have a big beef parade in their state.
Hurray for beef month! The children sing songs of praise and slap big beef in each others faces. You know all true Americans would partake in a festive beef burger with all the mouth-watering fixings. Sorry non-meat eaters you aren't American.
But there is a villain amongst the celebration... http://www.kpho.com/health/19525483/detail.html It looms over like a plague and sweeps its bacterium into the soft meaty tissue of the finest ground beefs. E. coli 0157:H7. Engineered in the future and sent to the past, E. coli 0157:H7 has infused nano machines that accelerated and enhance the normal strain of E. coli to cause the worst mass anal bleeding to those who consume it. The White House classifies this a "Class One" recall on all beef. Eating this beef means you will have some really terrible anal bleeding and also eventually look like this: (55,914)
There's a simmering icy volatility deep in the reality crevice tonight. I can feel the parasite crows pecking away at the chinks in my spiritual armor. When I start to feel like that, I know that there's only two things that can help me : a stiff dose of The Book of Joel, and some delicious and effortless flatbread.
Flatbread as we understand here it has a lot in common with pizza, but is less formal and not subject to the strict pizza rules. This is like the distinction between a Reuben and a standard sandwich -- one is a highly Platonic construct that borders on religion, and the other is a broad category of expedient chow. It's impossible to mess up a flatbread -- it's like fingerpainting with dough and toppings.
This flatbread, which I call the Collegiate, is one of my favorites for late-night wolf action and subsequent lunch noshing. I start, as always, with a modified version of Jeff Varasano's dough recipe, some of which I keep started in my fridge most always. Ideally, you want this stuff to sit in the fridge overnight and be ready to go when you make the bread, but I've also made this work with just a couple hours' autolyse and rise time. Note that the modified Varsano dough is very, very wet; this is because I like this flatbread to be crazily-formed, fairly dense, and yet with structure. Experiment with your own ratios of flour to water if so inclined.
Step 1 : the modified Varasano dough :
1 cup warm filtered water 1 cup organic whole wheat flour 1 cup organic unbleached white flour 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon yeast
Step 2 : the toppings :
Freshly grated Romano cheese -- don't skimp -Note on cheese and poisons : I always get organic cheese if buying American, but make exceptions for Italian and someother European cheeses. Dairy farming standards are a lot different over there, and I'm more confident in the wholesomeness of the 'normal' cheeses from those countries. Also, I've never seen an organic authentic Romano. Just consume it, like all cheese, in wise moderation 3 cloves fresh organic garlic, sliced Organic extra-virgin olive oil
^^ these are the basics, but you can pretty much put anything on a flatbread. I like to chop some pistachios and put them on there, for example, or sliced green olives or any vegetable
Combine the water and yeast in glass bowl; stir until yeast is dissolved. Add flour in half-cup increments and mix with fork as you add. Add salt and mix until mass is thoroughly wet, soggy, and shaggy. Let sit out for at least 20 minutes -- I usually let it go for up to an hour, until it starts to rise a bit. This is the autolyse period, when the structure of the dough begins.
Lightly grease the inside of a small glass bowl with olive oil.
Turn dough out onto flat, floured surface and knead for a bit, turning the dough over and in on itself and squashing it down with the ball of your hands. Keep the surface and your hands floured to avoid sticking. During this stage, I usually end up letting about a quarter-cup or so of flour get soaked into the very hydrous dough mass as I knead. Knead for a minute or two -- the more you knead, the more structure your dough will have when done; however, this isn't pizza dough, so don't worry about achieving Varasano's 'windowpane' effect. Since this is lazy flatbread, I usually knock it off after about a Ramones song length. Of course, if you have a strong stand mixer, by all means use that instead.
When kneading is complete, form the "gluten cloak" on the dough ball (stretching its surface over itself and pinching in back) and set it seam-down in the greased glass bowl. If leaving overnight, cover and place in fridge; if just letting rise for a few hours, leave out on counter.
When dough has sufficiently risen (about doubled in volume), fire up your oven to 500 Farenheit degrees or as high as it'll go. You want to start heating up your baking stone about an hour in advance to get the best crust result from an electric oven.
Get your Romano grated, your garlic sliced, and your olive oil ready to pour. Stage everything so you can get to it real quick. Lightly flour your pizza paddle with rice flour to prevent sticking (rice flour is what you want to use for this, it's the move). Here comes the hard part.
Get the dough out of the bowl by flopping it out onto your hand, then start working it into a vague disc shape, taking care not to pop the 'bubbles' in the dough. Handle it gently; no need to throw the thing at the ceiling fan, but do kind of rotate it on your hands. When more or less flat, set it on the pizza paddle and push it into final shape with your fingers as quickly as possible. Remember : every second it sits on that paddle is another second for moisture to soak through and make the dough stick. i like my flatbread to be wildly shaped, with a modest roll to the crust perimeter.
NOTE : if you don't have a pizza paddle and stone, build directly on the baking pan you'll use to cook the bread on.
When shaped, apply the olive oil to the dough so that you have a thin coating over the surface with a few small pools for Italian charm. Then, quickly distribute the garlic slices across the dough, followed by the grated Romano and any other toppings. Again, speed is key, and it's OK if it looks a little sloppy.
Get that thing into the oven pronto! If you've done it right, it should transfer to the stone with little or no sticking and start a-cookin' Cook for not more than 7 minutes (if your over is 500 degrees). When done, cheese will have browned somewhat and crust will have taken on a light-brown coloring and feel hollow when tapped.
When done, take out of the oven, let sit for a minute or two, then slice and scarf! Generally, one of these will make a 14" flatbread and feed two very well.
All this sounds more involved than it is. Since time does most of the dough work (just like the New York Hassle-Free Bread), it's really just an assembly process once the cheese is grated.
This flatbread is great dipped in soups (thick like broccoli-leek or thin like minestrone) and is the perfect platform for any ingredients / toppings you feel like adding. The fiber from the whole wheat flour and the olive oil kind of counteract some of its carb-bomb attributes. It's an all-occasion staple in the Hank house.
Stay tuned for more tasty, poison-free organic bread recipes! Just don't tell Dr. Roe, OK? (98,724)
Last time on Poisoned foods, I ended with a teaser about the artificial sweetener Aspartame (NutraSweet) and made the blanket statement that it shouldn't be used by dogs, cats, rats, or, I guess, you.
There's this old lore floating around which may or not be true regarding the Romans and lead pipes. Roman plumbers used to use lead because it was cheap and extremely easy to work with--low melting point, very soft, etc. In fact, the latin word for "plumber" is named after their word for lead, "plumbum." Lead is a rather annoying poison with subtle effects like infertility, anemia, and mental retardation when exposed at low levels for long periods of time. Some even claim that lead poisoning contributed to the decline of Rome.
It's a fascinating story, but it may not actually be true. The Roman people were exposed to a lot of lead, but the pipes may not have been to blame. Sucrose (found in cane sugar) was extremely scarce in ancient Rome, so they sweetened their foods with, among other things, defrutum, carenum, and sapa. These were basically all the same but sapa is the most concentrated form, and was highly sought-after. Roman prostitutes were sometimes even paid in sapa. The problem with these sweeteners was that one of the main components was, you guessed it: plumbum.
Cato (a Roman senator, philosopher, and cooking hobbyist) wrote about how sapa should be used in moderation--noting the agitation and nervousness accompanying acute lead poisoning. However, since it didn't actually kill anyone, and the health effects were subtle, their use continued to be very popular.
Lies, Damn Lies, and Organic Foods
Unfortunately, like many subjects on the internet with maybe a tiny glimmer of truth to them, google results for "Aspartame" are inundated with a shitstorm of nonsense. Most of this, of course, is propagated by morally gray competitors and cult-like followers of "organic foods."
In the case of aspartame, I believe the main driving force behind most of the FUD can be summed up in a single word: Stevia. Stevia is a "natural artificial sweetener." That's right, it's both natural and artificial. Mind-blowing, isn't it?
Like all things natural, it has to be better for you.
Here are some other things that are natural (and therefore "good for you"): - Cyanide - Arsenic - Acetone (paint thinner)
Cyanide is a deadly poison found in cashew nuts (especially the shells). Arsenic is found naturally in soil (especially in Bangladesh--where it gives cancer to thousands every year via the groundwater). Acetone is a "ketone body" made in tiny quantities by the liver when you haven't eaten in a few days. In larger quantities, it is deadly-toxic to the liver and kidneys.
So now that we're sold on natural bull-crap, we'd better turn around and put some hate on heavily synthetic products like aspartame. Let's just find all the dumb-ass, nonsensical FUD we can and repeat it like it's gospel.
....
Unfortunately, this is the thinking that wasted a good half hour of my time today when I went to research this subject.
Aspartame IS bad for you. However, that doesn't mean 99% of what you read about it isn't BS put out there by Stevia salesmen and natural food ex-hippie failures to get you to switch to their products.
As an aside, according to this wikipedia article, among the patchouli-infused cloud-O-stupid that surrounds this issue, there was some sort of elaborate hoax related to spreading rumors around about how aspartame managed to get through FDA approval due to some mass corruption in the system. Actually aspartame did have a tough time getting though, but there was no actual documented corruption, as far as we know.
Of course, this begs the question: even if aspartame did manage to get through the FDA smoothly, does this mean shit? Not only can the FDA not find their ass with both hands, but they really only test what they can find in laboratories. Can lab rats tell you if they have headaches or feel lethargic? Is this some new hip music that I don't understand?
Insulin
By whatever mechanism, aspartame does raise insulin levels. This causes lower blood sugar and increases appetite. Though it likely doesn't result in weight gain directly, it would definitely make it harder to exercise and lose weight. Studies have shown people who switch from regular soda to diet do not lose weight (or the other way around). This is probably why.
Aspartame mongers will respond to this fact by referring you to the recent large study done of aspartame and insulin. In this study, participants saw no significant changes in insulin levels. However, this is kind of moot, because all the participants were type II diabetics, who are by definition jacked on insulin and resistant to it at the same time! Other, smaller studies done previously show the correlation quite significantly.
Personally, I'm not a diabetic, are you? You are? Oh, okay, you may eat aspartame, but the other 92% of Americans will have to abstain.
While I seriously doubt aspartame products raise insulin levels high enough to cause severe hypoglycemia (life-threatening), moderate hypoglycemia (AKA hunger) is still not good for losing weight or resisting the urge to punch people in the head at random intervals throughout your day (it's harder for some of us than others.).
Naughty Bits
Aspartame, when broken down in the body, turns into four chemicals (by the way, the first 3 are all naturally-occurring): Methanol -- The shit in moonshine that makes you go blind. Phenylalanine -- The shit that is a cause of severe mental retardation in infants. Aspartic Acid -- an "excitotoxin" that damages nerve cells. Aspartylphenylalanine diketopiperazine -- May turn into a chemical that causes brain tumors.
Now, the question is: how are the above tolerated by the human body in the quantities included in, say, the standard 16oz Diet Coke. That's the question right there: Given that all these chemicals are bad, are the low doses ingested with every piece of gum or soda enough to cause illness?
The truth is fairly complicated, and the research (what little there is) states that whatever the health issues with aspartame, they're probably fairly subtle, unless you have a predisposing medical condition.
One of the problems with research is that poisons can work very differently. In the case of carcinogens, low levels for long periods of time can kill you. In the case of acutely poisonous materials, it's more about blood-concentration than total amount. The body can handle almost anything as long as it doesn't overpower the natural metabolic pathways, but once you get past those, the poisons can wreak serious havoc. It all depends on the poison.
Another problem is that it's nearly impossible to detect extremely diffuse damage. If 1,000 random and non-contiguous neurons die in your brain within the next 5 minutes, you might notice, but tests would reveal nothing--even if they opened up your skull and dissected your brain!
Keep that in mind when reading studies: They can only report on what they can quantify, and they can only quantify what they can detect with equipment. If a test subject says "Yo doc, I feel like festering putrid ballsack over here," the study may not have a standardized ballsack detection device on hand to verify his "anecdotal" claims. Therefore, that information may get thrown out--especially if the data is collected by worthless good-for-nothing grad students.
Let's start with methanol. Methanol does cause blindness and even death in large doses. The aspartame manufacturers claim that since there are higher levels of methanol in say, an apple, than in a diet coke that it makes aspartame safe by comparison. While, strictly speaking, there is more methanol in apples than Diet Coke, this argument discounts the fact that the blood level of methanol goes up disproportionately higher in aspartame-laden sodas than in an apple. This is because apples have pectin and fiber and junk that slows the rate at which the methanol enters the blood stream. In fact, much of the methanol in fruit does not get absorbed at all!
It's common sense: taking any chemical on an empty stomach will increase blood-levels faster--same principle. Does methanol cause problems for people who eat aspartame? I don't know. What I do know, however, is that it passes through the blood-brain barrier much easier after physical activity, which may not have been factored into the big aspartame studies.
Phenylalanine is kind of a mixed bag. Phenylalanine is a vital amino acid, which means it's necessary for people to consume at least some of it in their diet. For some people, however, high doses can have serious side effects. When fetuses, infants, or small children are given high doses of phenylalanine, it causes severe mental retardation. This doesn't actually occur very often, because the body is quite good at breaking it down. However, in some people, this is not the case, and they (or their children) suffer. The inability to break down phenylalanine properly is called phenylketonuria (PKU). In this rare but serious disease, blood-levels of phenylalanine can be extremely high. In adults, this doesn't usually cause problems... unless they're pregnant. Pregnant mothers with PKU need to watch their diet, or risk poisoning their unborn children. Children are regularly screened for PKU so they can be put on a low-phenylalanine diet until they grow up.
Phenylalanine is definitely okay and even necessary for the vast majority of people--not that it matters, considering the levels in aspartame containing foods are not really that high. Interesting note: Phenylalanine is also metabolized into adrenaline.
Aspartylphenylalanine diketopiperazine is a weird one. Apparently it could possibly turn into some chemical that might cause brain tumors. I call bullshit, this seems a little far-fetched to me.
Aspartic acid, on the other hand, is kind of a wild card. It is an excitotoxin, which means it does increase neuronal activity and, in high enough concentrations, neuron death. Not a whole lot has been studied with lower aspartic acid levels as far as clinical effects, but it is likely the source of the anecdotal reports of headaches (which are very real, and I've personally done double-blind experiments verifying them). Whether or not aspartame products raise the levels of aspartic acid high enough to cause damage, let alone significant damage, is unknown at present. What we do know is what it does in higher doses is scary.
So what?
In cases like aspartame, you have to go with simple facts: half of its byproducts are evil poisons, and there are plenty of alternatives out there. It seems aspartame fans and manufacturers are making an awful lot of excuses to try and keep people on the stuff. What a total waste of time: it's sketchy biochemistry and it's a totally unnecessary product attempting to supplant many that were already proven cheap and safe.
I'd recommend just stop trying to cheat calorie intake and use good old-fashioned sugar in moderation...
Woops, I forgot: this is America... Moderation is not an option, let's all switch to Splenda. (88,518)
The kids on the Internet seem to find this site when they're looking for organic bread recipes, like the one I wrote last year. Pretty encouraging, huh? Poison-free food is for everybody. That recipe is pretty labor-intensive, though, and I'd hate folks to get turned off from the home-baking thing because of the hassle factor.
So, in the spirit of the classic New York Times no-knead five-minute bread recipe, here's the preferred Easy Organic Bread Recipe, now heavily favored for daily use at the house of Hank. The wife and I now often use the Dutch oven method recommended by the NYT instead of direct-on-stone baking; it really keeps the steam in contact with the bread and eliminates the need to spray or baste with water, making a crispier crust. Winner! You can do this recipe as no-knead, but I'm a kneading fool, so I recommend a light knead for this recipe.
2 cups organic whole wheat flour 1 cup organic white flour (unbleached, natch) 1.75 cups warm filtered water ~ 1 teaspoon salt (or to taste) !/2 teaspoon yeast
Dissolve yeast in water; whisk. Add flour in half-cup increments, and then add salt, mixing in with a fork until a loose, shaggy mass is achieved. Cover with plastic wrap or a damp towel, let sit out on counter overnight -- ideally, for about 24 hours. This period is when the flavor and gluten develop; it's like a super autolyse.
It's going to get huge. The next day, flop it out onto a smooth floured surface and knead for a little bit, folding the dough over on itself, pressing and turning, keeping the surface dusted with just enough flour to prevent it from sticking to your hands. I knead this version for about a minute and a half. After kneading, you form the so-called "gluten cloak" by stretching the dough's surface over itself and pinching a seam in the back -- imagine that you're making the surface smooth and making it into a round ball by closing it on itself . This makes for a nice crust. Then, wipe the inside of a glass bowl with a little organic olive oil and place the dough seam-down in there.
Let it rise, covered, in the bowl for two hours. Then, lightly flour the bottom of a Dutch oven (note : this is just fancy speak for a big put with a cover that you can put into the real oven -- we use this :
).
Preheat your oven to 450 to 475 degrees (depending on your oven -- mine is wack, so I set it high).
Carefully release the dough from the oiled bowl and put it, seam-down, into this floured Dutch oven. Sprinkle a little flour on top for looks. Put the lid on the thing.
Bake covered for 30 minutes, then (using an oven mitt yo) remove the lid and bake four about another 15 to 20 minutes. When the bread is browned on top, and sounds hollow when tapped with a fork, it's done. Cool well on a wire rack, slice up, and enjoy with some nice cheese or butter (such as our favorite, Beurre d'Isigny).
You'll find that this Dutch oven method really gets the crust happening. It's like having your own, tiny, professional steam-injected oven.
If you want more substance in your bread, you can add soft wheat berries (my personal fave), raisins, rye berries, millet, etc, in the initial mixing stage.
Do more for yourself. Learn to self-suffice. Start eating poison-free.
Note for people with brains : bread is a high-carbohydrate food. This recipe has plenty of fiber, so it's not like eating a stack of Wonder Bread, but for those following Dr Roe's poison-free diet advice (and you all should be), eat this and other carby stuff in wise moderation, with vegetables and stuff. (95,891)
So far in Urban Agriculture : the Road To Self Reliance, we've talked about composting and the utility of bees. These topics fairly easy to digest because they don't get too close, conceptually or in practice, to the Darwin-soaked reality of traditional rural farming. Today's topic, though, brings us to the DMZ-like frontier that separates recreational gardening from serious urban agriculture.
When people think about raising chickens, they generally envision Napoleon Dynamite's dollar-an-hour stint for the FFA or old Foghorn Leghorn shorts. Urban chicken raising has little relation to the stinking hell-evil that is factory farming , and doesn't much look like Warner Brothers either. Urban chickens are about harnessing symbiosis and reducing your overall cost, while breaking yet another link in the chain of modern slavery.
Animals are a pain to have around, so there'd better be a pretty good argument for getting involved with them. If you grow food for yourself, it turns out that there sure is. Adding chickens to your urban agriculture setup is not only a way to get verified poison-free eggs and / or meat, but help address certain key problems that confront the poison-free urban agronomist :
1) Chickens are a powerful pest control solution. Insects that eat crops and arthropods that bite humans are among the bigger drags for the urban farmer, and they're a natural part of the chicken diet. If you have awful leaf-munchers or hideous scorpions plaguing you, and you let some chickens run around your crops for an hour or so a day, the chickens will cold massacre the offending bugs and leave you with fewer problems. It's kind of amazing that chickens like to eat scorpions, but it's a keen fact.
2) Chicken poo will kick-start your compost with a high concentration of nitrogen. It's easy to collect from the bottom of your chicken coop.
3) Chickens scratch the ground to a depth of a couple of inches, which beneficially aerates your soil without disrupting its 'trophic levels' (more on this next time)
4) Chicken eggs, which most reasonable people consume in some form, are a valuable source of protein and effective emulsifiers for cooking. If you want poison-free eggs from the store, though, you'll have to pay in the neighborhood of $5 per dozen, which is a lot, considering that poison eggs can be had for about a buck. If you grow your own, you can get your cost per dozen down to three bucks and change.
5) Chickens can also be deployed for weed control after your crop plants are past the seedling stage, as they'll look for tender shoots popping up between your plants, and eat them.
Chickens are a key component of permaculture systems and can make your overall urban agriculture plan more efficient.
* What you need to raise chickens in the urban environment *
- Most municipalities allow citizens to keep chickens on their property. Check with your local government office to see what the regulations are for your 'hood. In Cake City, for example, you can keep up to twenty hens on any lot of 10,000 square feet or more, and on smaller lots with the notarized permission of neighbors. Note : roosters are generally illegal in urban areas because they are hella noisy. Fortunately, they're not needed at all.
-Space planning : you need at least four square feet of space per bird within the coop and seven square feet of bird in 'run space' (where the birds can roam about regularly at will). This adds up to eleven square feet of living space for every chicken you keep. Most single-family urban chicken farmers keep five to seven chickens.
-Coop construction : you have a choice between stationary coop construction and what is known as a 'chicken tractor,' which is a chicken coop that is mobile and is shifted regularly for the purpose of preparing ground for planting.
In the chicken tractor method, the chickens' scratching lightly tills the soil while the straw and droppings from the bottom of the coop compost to improve the soil quality. The coop has no bottom, which means that the chickens scratch directly on the soil and bedding. The tractor is not cleaned out, but rather picked up and moved over its width every couple of weeks to prepare the next planting bed. Advocates of the tractor method point to good crop yield and low cleaning hassle as advantages.
The stationary coop, the edges of which must be buried six inches below ground to foil burrowing mammal pests, does not have to be moved around, but must be cleaned (you can shovel the bedding shavings or straw straight into your composter).
The coop should be be built out of wood and covered with half-inch metal mesh hardware cloth -- not so-called 'chicken wire,' which invites other small birds to visit and steal all your chickens' food. Their bedding can be straw, wood shavings, or shredded newspaper (but be aware that you'll be composting the bedding, so don't use bleached or highly treated paper). In constructing the coop, you need two elevated sections : the slightly elevated 'nest boxes' (one for every 3 or 4 of chickens) where the eggs will be laid, and the 'roost,' which is simply a ladder of thick dowels and moderate incline where the chickens will sleep.
The nest boxes should be about fourteen inches on all sides and have a roof with a fairly sharp slope to prevent the birds from hanging around up there. The chickens do not sleep in the nests; they will roost on the highest available part of the coop (the roosting ladder).
Chickens need shade, so be sure that you have the coop situated in a shady spot. Many urban agriculturalists grow grape vines over the roof of stationary coops -- this both shades the birds and provides them food with fallen grapes; the vines also cool the coop. Also be aware that chickens don't like to be cold and windblown, so be sure to install a windbreak for them during cold or windy weather. Cover the coop with a blanket in cold weather so that their combs don't get frostbitten. In hot summer days, you can place frozen water bottles in the coop to help them stay cool.
Generally, coops are best designed with an enclosed / covered roost and nest space and an open 'run.' While rain doesn't bother chickens in warm climates, they prefer to sleep in enclosed roosts.
It's not advisable to let your chickens range completely free -- you'll the lose ease of composting benefit, chickens may be eaten by predators, and they'll generally just go ape in your space. A controlled forage time of an hour or so a day is recommended.
As Dr. Roe points out, chicken poo is full of microbes that are potentially dangerous to humans. For this reason, I recommend that urban agriculturalists use the stationary coop method and compost all bedding to zap the nasties. Don't forget to wash your hands after handling birds, and as always, wash produce thoroughly before eating.
-Chicken feed : you can buy commercial chicken feed ('starter' feed for chicks and 'lay pellets' for mature birds; the difference is in the higher protein content of the 'layer' feed) or feed them straight mixed grain that you buy or grow. Each chicken consumes about one-third of a pound of food per day. Now, if you're trying to be poison-free, you'll either have to shell out for organic feed or grain or grown your own feed, which requires a lot of space. You can let your chickens forage and scratch around freely; chickens will find tasty critters (insects, arthropods, and even rodents), seeds and seedlings to eat. [The also scratch to find dust to bathe in.] Now, they'll also eat your crops if left to their own devices for too long, so keep an eye on them. Chickens will also eat all your table scraps except for those on the following list :
Not to feed chickens :
-No salt or heavily salted stuff,
-No chocolate
-No avocados or other slimy stuff
-No raw potatoes
-No stuff that's gone bad
Be aware! Chickens must have food and water at all times. Put marbles or rocks in their water dish to prevent them from sitting in it. Chickens should be fed twice per day. Buy a or build a tube-type gravity feeder and waterer, and load up several of them if you go out of town for a few days. If you can get someone to check on your chickens while you're gone, do so (let them keep the eggs if they want).
The most useful chicken feeding vessels are troughs with adjustable-height legs and an 'anti-roosting wheel' at the top that prevents the birds from dawdling in their feed, which is gross.
Chickens, like all birds, have no teeth and need to be provided grit to digest their food. Crushed oyster shells are favored, and they'll get grit while foraging. You can mix one part grit to ten parts grain in their feed, or just put a handful of grit once a week.
Chickens' feed should also be supplemented with grass. Add a capful of cider vinegar to their water once a week to bolster their health.
*Getting started*
Get this : you order chicks and they come in a box. A freaking box! Different breeds produce eggs with different characteristics. 'Americana' chickens lay eggs with green shells, "Araucanas' lay blue eggs. The 'Rhode Island Reds' are favored for reliable brown egg production and mild character; the 'Barred Rock' is similarly esteemed. The 'Orpington' breed is known for high egg volume. The common commercial 'Leghorn' variety is to be avoided -- in poison-free conditions, they don't flourish and don't lay as well as the Reds. Not to mention, they're not nearly as funny as the cartoons lead us to believe. 'Bantams,' which are chickens that are pint-sized when fully grown, lay eggs just fine, but they're more likely to fly around and give you headaches. P.S. -- if you get a rooster in a box of chicks, you'll have to give it away to a farm or something. You can tell the difference between male and female chickens two ways : first, the hens are much wider with bigger breasts. Second, roosters start crowing pretty early.
You're going to need about a square foot per chick at first, indoors. Get some boxes about 2 and one-half feet tall and put a heat lamp over each, clamped to the size of the box so that they can move. . You don't need a lot of heat; a standard 65 watt incandescent bulb is a-OK. If the chicks huddle around the lamp, they're too cold; if they stick to the edges of the box, they're too hot. Their bedding should be pine shavings rather than straw at this stage, and cleaned regularly. They eat 'starter pellets' at this stage.
The temperature in their box should be about 95 Fahrenheit degrees the first week; drop the temperature five degrees each week for six successive weeks. At the end of six weeks, they are more or less grown; chickens should be in full feather before being exposed to 100-degree or higher temperatures.
You can check local classified for 'pullets,' which are chickens 10 to 12 weeks old. This can save you a little time and bread on the raising process.
Chickens start laying eggs at about 20 weeks' age, and that's the dang payoff. They'll lay very well for the first couple of years, tapering off slowly after that. Maximum life expectancy is about a decade; in Cake City, they live about five years.
*Eggs n thangs*
I was pretty surprised to discover that you don't need roosters around to get eggs from your hens. Those hens crank out eggs no matter what; the roosters' only function is to fertilize them. Chickens will start acting real friendly when they're ready to lay eggs. They'll go into the nest box to lay, and the first eggs will be very small. Egg size will gradually increase over time. Healthy chickens will lay one egg approximately every thirty-six hours, but in practice it ranges between two and six eggs per week per chicken. Egg production is mostly dictated by solar cycles, and you can fool your birds into laying more by artificially lighting the coop. Beware, though : this will exhaust your chickens.
If the chickens are reluctant to lay, you can trick them sometimes by putting golf balls in the nest boxes. They'll sit on them and eventually lay actual eggs there.
Check your chickens twice a day (feeding time is convenient for many folks) for eggs and also to observe their general health. Don't wash eggs too much after collecting them -- just wipe them off lightly with a cloth. Eggs come out of the chicken covered in an invisible natural sealant that can keep the eggs fresh for several days with no refrigeration.
To determine egg freshness before consuming them, immerse them in water. If they sink to the bottom, they are fresh, If they stand on end, they're safe but borderline -- these are OK for hard-boiling. If they float, they're rotten -- toss 'em.
Fresh eggs are uber tasty, and it's a good idea to give some to your neighbors to butter them up a little. Chickens can get noisy, and egg-sharing is a clever way to maintain goodwill.
* Chicken behaviors and health *
Chickens do weird things, largely because they have bird-brains. Understanding these behaviors will help you deal with them without being freaked out. Here's a list of some of the main chicken mood syndromes :
-The pecking order : this cliche is literal and is real -- chickens have a pretty rigid social hierarchy that is kind of gross. The alpha chicken will peck at the beta chicken, and so on down through the strata of wimpitude. This is sad, but normal. You'll see some of the lower-order chickens showing bald spots near the tail where their feathers have been pecked out; don't worry unless the bald area seems bloody. If you discover that you have a psycho chicken on your hands, one that pecks others bloody regularly or causes real injury to others, you'll have to get rid of it. Such aggro bully birds aren't good for the coop, but they make a fine stew. You can attempt to stop the pecking with 'Rooster Booster' brand product; you apply it to the victims, and the attackers detest the taste.
-Molting : chickens molt, that is, lose their feathers, during conditions of short days and low light. Molting feather loss occurs all over the body of the hen, whereas pecking loss is localized at the tail area. The birds will lay fewer eggs during the molting period.
-Getting 'broody' : sometimes, chickens will get it in their heads that they ought to have some babies. This is called 'getting broody,' and they'll mope around in the nest box. We can't have them sitting there all the time, so if they won't snap out of it, put some ice water under the next box to chill them out. Another tactic is to get a new chick and sneak it into the nest box at night -- the broody hen will raise the chick as its own.
-Flying : Most full-size chickens don't care much for flying; they're fat and heavy and flying is hard work. However, some chickens are wily and will stir up the other birds to wing. Therefore, it's wise it clip one wing of each fully grown hen. This is like getting a haircut and doesn't hurt the animals if done properly according to the sketch below. Do this when the bird is not molting, and not when the bird is very young.
-Sick chickens : if a bird acts listless and nonsocial, it's probably illin'. Likewise, if the bird is unclean with a messy 'vent' (this is the excretory orifice), it's probably sick. Once you notice this, separate the bird from the rest to prevent the spread of disease. There are bird antibiotics available, but if you use them, the eggs will be inedible for a long time. You can administer a weak solution of vinegar and water through a syringe; sometimes this helps. Since chickens only cost a couple of dollars to replace, it's not sensible to take them to veterinarians or otherwise spend a lot on them. It's best to just keep them separate, try to make them comfortable, and let nature take its course.
-Mites : chickens are susceptible to mite infestation. Mites are nasty little parasitic arthropods. A major purpose of the dust bath is to control these little buggers. The best way to get a handle on them is to buy a bag of diatomaceous earth (food-grade, not pool-grade) and put it with the chickens' grit supply and on the floor of the coop. Diatomaceous earth is in reality the tiny skeletons of animals called diatoms; these skeletons are extremely sharp but so small that they can't hurt humans or chickens. To mites, though, diatom skeletons are like deadly land mines. It's kind of sad, but these mites have to die horrible, horrible deaths so that your chickens can be healthy.
-Flies : these shouldn't be much trouble if you keep the coop clean, but diatomaceous earth can keep these under control as well.
-Stress : birds that are uncomfortable or bothered won't lay eggs. Be sure to maintain a comfortable and clean environment for them.
-Predators : the main beasties you need to worry about that might hassle your chickens are the following :
Poultry Enemy #1 : Hawks and owls. These buddies will snatch up your flock with glee if they can, which is one of the most convincing reasons to keep the birds cooped most of the time. If you just let the chix run for an hour or so and try to supervise them, you shouldn't lose many. Leave them out all day or especially at night, though, and Eddie the Owl is going to party down. Chickens are always instinctively scanning the skies for predators, so when they're out, be sure to leave the coop door open so they can get back in. Note that chickens don't know the difference between an airplane and a peregrine falcon, and they'll cry out at the sight of aircraft.
PE #2 : Dogs. Non-hunting dogs usually don't cause a problem if they're yours; aggressive or hunting dogs should probably be kept separate. Generally, your dogs will want to please you and not eat what they will recognize as your birds. Any foreign dogs should be kept away from the birds, as they won't be as keen on staying in your good graces.
PE#3 : Cats : If you have cats, they probably will leave your birds alone for the same reasons that your dogs will. They will also keep alien cats away. Cats that aren't yours may attack, so again, keep the chickens cooped most of the time. However, many larger chickens can beat up the average cat.
***
There you have it -- the short beans on how to use chicken power to make your life more efficient and your agriculture more productive. It might seem like a big step, and it's a different bag for sure. The benefits to your crops are substantial, and controlling all the inputs that go into your eggs, and saving bread on them, is a serious win in the battle to take back your food supply. And, of course, chicks dig it.
---
This piece was drawn largely from the lectures on urban chicken raising presented by Rachel Bess and Myron Mykyta at the Phoenix Permaculture Guild in late 2008. (65,178)
Last time on poisoned foods, I explained how PhDs are full of crap, and how it is that this comes to effect doctors and their advice to patients (you).
Unfortunately, this time I'm going to have to get a little bit more scientific on you. Sorry for the diversion, but once you understand at least some of the science behind metabolism, you too will be able to "call bullshit" on the PhDs. They'd like to keep science confined to the narrow confines of their tiny pinheads, but the reality is that science is for everybody, and it doesn't take an especially smart person (or someone who just thinks they're smart, in the case of the PhD) to come to conclusions based on scientific fact.
First, we're going to talk about insulin. If you get nothing out of this article, you should associate insulin with weight gain. So if I were to say that "this food stimulates insulin release", you would say ....? ...? That's right! it makes you fat!
Insulin, under normal circumstances, is created and released by the pancreas usually, BUT NOT ALWAYS [ -- Note this], in response to a rise in blood sugar. The insulin is merely a SIGNALING hormone that tells your muscles, fat cells, etc, to take up sugar from the blood (sugar is actually converted to fat in the liver and dumped into the blood, then the fat cells take it up and grow plump). These muscle/fat/liver cells are primed and ready to suck up the free sugar. As soon as insulin gives the go-ahead, *FOOM* the sugar is burned / stored like an inferno from that movie Backdraft. This is why when diabetics inject insulin and forget to eat, they can put themselves into a fucking coma™ due to lack of blood sugar.
So, to kind of summarize: in the same way that 'roids tell your pecs to turn into a couple of chest-hams and balls to turn into peanuts, insulin tells your ass to get fat and your belly to inherit the Earth.
Resistance
You may have heard of insulin resistance. I'm not going to cover that here in detail, but it's incredibly important to understand:
Insulin resistance is caused by hormones released by fat cells in the belly and it forces the pancreas to secrete more insulin to compensate. The fatter you are, the more resistant you are, and the more insulin your pancreas releases;
The liver is immune to the resistance hormone, so while muscles aren't eating and burning the sugar, the liver's responding to the high insulin levels by going crazy turning the sugar it into fat, leading to weight gain and even hunger! Therefore, in a person with insulin resistance, more ingested sugar is going to be converted into fat than in a person without resistance.;
Eventually, the give-and-take between insulin and the resistance hormones may result in the pancreas being overworked, damaged, and eventually being unable to compensate. This condition is known as Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus [Pro tip: This is how most diabetics acquire their condition.];
Often, the pancreas will get so chewed up that the person can give themselves a big fat case of Type 1 Diabetes, meaning that even after the person loses the resistance-hormone-secreting fat cells (think treadmill), they will still have overly high blood sugar.
Almost everyone has some small amount of fat cells making them insulin resistant. We're going to assume that you haven't gotten to the point of extreme insulin resistance... yet. However, insulin is still a great barometer to determine how fat something's going to make you. Remember, MORE INSULIN = MORE FAT.
The Carb
Now that you've learned the magic of insulin, you're probably wondering how you're going to use your newfound knowledge to control your weight.
Sadly, there's no way around this: Carbohydrates stimulate insulin release. I know, it's sad, but those low carb numb-nuts actually had a point. Atkins is an extreme example, but really any amount of carbohydrate abstention helps.
You might be asking: "So how does my bagel become sugar in my blood? It doesn't taste sweet, it must not have sugar!" You know what it takes to turn starch into sugar? Saliva (spit). Starch (the main source of carbs from wheat, rice, corn, potatoes, and others) is actually just a whole crapload of sugar linked together in a weak chain. One tiny snip by an enzyme (present in saliva and elsewhere) and a little bit of water added and they turn into single-monomer sugar molecules that float into your intestine cells just as fast as a Jolly Rancher candy.
Carbs are pretty much all the same. The only difference is what other food you mix it with to change the peak and duration of the sugar high. FYI: Though I wont go into too much detail on it, the peak and duration of the sugar high is called the "Glycemic Index."
The fact is, carbohydrates have ZERO nutritional value outside of providing energy for cells. If you're overweight, you already have more than enough energy in your body to burn for a while. Therefore, you don't actually require any carbohydrates if you have sufficient fat stores.
By contrast, in order to burn ingested protein, the body actually has to tune down the insulin and increase levels of the antagonistic hormone glucagon.
A study done of Atkins dieters found that they routinely consumed fewer calories than those not on the diet. The rules don't say they have to do this, but the dieters found they were compelled to eat less due to the the satiety caused by the foods they ate due and due to the lack of an insulin-induced blood sugar dip (which leads to people getting hungry again quickly after carb-rich meals).
The brain, unfortunately, loves to eat sugar. It cannot eat fat directly, so the only choices are ultra tasty sugar and unpleasant, slow burning, ketone bodies, which is like leaving your brain stranded on a desert island with nothing but mulchy disgusting powerbars for eternity--you're alive, you're technically healthy, but you wish you weren't.
That's why a lot of diets simply encourage cutting back on carbohydrates and not eliminating them. The goal is to burn stored energy, so don't be a fool and introduce more energy into the system than you have to, however, keep in mind the only diet that works is one that you can stick to. Carb cravings can drive you nuts, so cutting back may be more to your liking than abstaining completely.
No Fat? No Deal!
You're probably wondering: if the goal is to consume less energy, why not ditch the energy-rich fatty foods instead of that tasty CocaCola? After all, Fat has about twice the calories per weight than carbohydrates, and it can dissolve directly from the food, float right through the intestinal wall, and fly right into that adipose tissue on your already overly-plump posterior.
The fact is: if you're overweight, you're probably already insulin resistant. If you're insulin resistant, more of the carbohydrates you eat go into making fat than being burned by muscle (when compared to a normal person). Also, since the insulin levels are higher than normal in the resistant, the liver will be making fat out of the sugar long after your blood sugar has normalized. This will actually cause low blood sugar, making you even hungrier!
So, to summarize, with sugar: you eat, you spike your insulin, you crash, you feel hungry, you eat again.
"Okay!!" you say "But what about fat? You said you were going to talk about fat, stop stalling!!"
I only mention carbs so that you can keep it in mind when you compare it to fat:
Fat does not spike insulin, period. It also increases satiety directly by release of special hormones.
Fat decreases the rate your stomach empties into the small intestine, leaving you feeling "full" for longer and therefore decreasing your desire to eat
Fat, when combined with a regular helping of carbohydrates, can actually reduce the rate at which it is absorbed, lowering the insulin spike. This reduces the 'crash' effect and therefore reduces the urge to eat again later.
Fat is burned highly effectively by muscle, and does not increase lactic acid levels (so you can work out longer and harder than you can on sugar).
Products that change recipes to gain their "low fat" moniker almost always raise sugar to compensate for taste. This decreases the satiety caused by the fat and increases the urge to eat again later due to the sugar
It's the combination of all these facts that lead many, including myself, to believe that the "low fat" diet craze is one of the prime reasons for America's obesity problem. Fat is not good for you, but it's a necessary addition to carbohydrates, and certainly not any worse. Fat may be more "energy dense" than carbs, but that hardly matters when you're eating three times the food twice as often because it's not filling you up, and it's making you more hungry.
Fiber
For God's sake. Eat more fiber.
Fiber lowers the rate of absorption of carbs, so eat high-fiber bread.
Fiber increases satiety, so eat more fiber.
In the same way that sawdust is used to clear up oil spills, fiber absorbs fat and cholesterol in the gut and prevents absorption--decreasing blood cholesterol and therefore the risk of heart disease. So eat more fiber.
Fiber is incredibly important for GI health and prevents a long list of possible ailments including diverticulitis.
Perforated diverticulitis is where your colon blebs off, fills with puss, gets inflamed, and then pops. When it pops, it leaks out puss into your abdomen, sending you into septic shock. Your immune system goes nuts and starts telling your platelets to clot all over your body so you get little bloody patches on your skin and your internal organs. You start out with blistering fever but the shock is so bad you don't have enough blood to fill your vessels so you get very cold. In the event you survive, you have severe damage to every organ in your body including your brain. This isn't something that takes long to develop, either. The patient I first saw this in was 30. So you're going to eat your fiber now, right?
Oh, fiber also prevents colon cancer. Heard of it? Yeah, fiber's the most important factor in preventing colon cancer behind genetics, so eat more fiber.
Fiber has somewhere between zero and almost zero calories, so why the hell aren't you eating it? Shut up, I know you aren't.
High(er) Protein
Disadvantages (?):
I'm only going to say a few words on protein. First of all, you've probably heard that the Atkins "high protein" diet causes kidney problems. Most of the hubbub about this was from exaggerated claims made by puppet organizations setup by PETA (a pro-animal and therefore anti-high protein diet organization).
Even if that were true: Far and away, the #1 and 2 causes for for kidney failure in the US are Obesity and Tobacco (I don't know which is #1, sorry). Being fat is way worse for you, stop making excuses! Having diabetes is going to eat your kidneys faster than any steak, even that one John Candy ate in "The Great Outdoors."
Luckily, it's not actually true. High protein diets will not wreck your kidneys... unless you're dumb, but dumb people run into trouble with many things.
One of the results of increased protein in the diet is an increase in ammonia (ammonium, actually, but it's almost the same) concentration in the urine. This is normal and natural in animals, and the ammonia in the urine of animals is a necessary part of the ecosystem. If you were to somehow eliminate all the ammonia from the waste of all the living things around the world, it would literally end most life on earth in a matter of months.
If the world ends, what's the body count on Panda bears?? Take that, PETA!!
Alright, fine: Theoretically, higher ammonia concentrations are bad. It may have actually resulted in one or two people suffering some problems. That's why we're going to drink more water, which lowers the concentration of ammonia to safer levels, right?
If you're losing weight, you should be drinking more water anyway. Just add another little bit if you choose to augment your diet by eating more protein.
Advantages
Protein does not increase insulin. In fact, you need to lower insulin just to convince cells to burn protein as fuel.
Protein also increases satiety, meaning you feel full faster.
When insulin and sugar levels are low, the body makes new sugar (to feed the brain, heart, and red blood cells). It sucks ass at this. I mean it's pathetic. Animals are terrible sugar-makers, and they know it. That's why they only do it when they're hungry. In order to make sugar, the body combines protein with stored fat. The body stores fat, but it doesn't "store" protein, so it has to cannibalize itself to get it. With low insulin levels, muscle protein is broken down. This is why when people lose a lot of weight, they tend to lose muscle mass as well.
With a high protein diet, instead of burning muscle, your body will use the dietary protein, leaving the muscle intact. It's actually been proven that high protein dieters end up with more muscle mass after they lose weight than people who diet without high protein.
Verdict
When losing weight, you probably want to eat more protein and definitely want to drink a lot more water. Higher protein will keep more muscle and may allow for faster weight loss.
As an aside, it's not a choice between the Atkins "I ate Bambi's Mom" diet and the Vegan "Suck my Potatoes" diet. That's the kind of binary PhD nonsense that you see all over the literature on this. Some sources on this subject made it seem like you couldn't even eat oranges because it made Dr. Atkins hit-list. It went on to complain that this meant all higher protein diets resulted in scurvy, and that this was the reason "all low carb diets are bad." I'd just like to say that I can eat whatever 'the fuck I want, thanks very much. Yes, it's possible to eat lots of healthy foods, eat fewer carbs, and consume more protein all in the same meal, or at least in the same diet.
Diet Sweets: The Devil You Don't
I wanted to conclude this edition of Poisoned Foods with something definitive and instructive, but really everything I've told you so far is solid fact, and why start pointless controversy by mentioning specifics?
However, one of the things I can say specifically is: avoid artificial sweeteners. No, this is not a "maybe just a tiny bit" situation. Just don't.
Recently, a team of researchers discovered what many of us have already known: artificial sweeteners increase insulin levels.
Unfortunately, the study only tested Nutrisweet (present in nearly all sugar-free gums and beverages). We'll assume (because let's face it: it's true) that this applies to all artificial sweeteners, not like it matters because if we can get people to stop drinking diet coke, the world's going to be a better place hands down.
Side note: I wrote a report for my organic chemistry class on aspartame (nutrisweet). I may make the next edition entirely on that, you're gonna flip when you see the evil. EVVVVILLLLLL!!!
Remember when I said insulin decreases blood sugar in part by increasing the creation of fat? especially in people who are already fat? Hint: I said it like 10 times already.
YES: Diet drinks have no sugar, NO: You will not lose weight if you drink them.
Studies have definitively indicated that switching from regular soda to diet soda will not automatically lead to weight loss. Now you know why.
When you eat carbs, your blood sugar spikes, your insulin spikes, your blood sugar declines, you gain weight, you crash, you get hungry again.
When you consume artificial sweeteners, the exact same thing happens, only without the blood sugar spike. Artificial sweeteners make you hungry for real food, which you have to consume more of to make up for the blood sugar you've locked away into your fat cells.
Usually, these products mask some of the crash effect by being mixed in with caffeinated liquids. In the case of aspartame (nutrisweet), part of the molecule is actually converted into adrenaline (yes, that adrenaline). These effects may not be entirely obvious, but they are occurring.
I'm not saying you should switch from Diet Coke to Dr. Pepper. That would be stupid, now wouldn't it?
What I am saying is: if it tastes sweet, don't eat it if you want to lose weight. Especially soda.
In fact, there was a study done of childhood obesity. It found there was one unifying characteristic of most obese kids. We're talking undeniable correlation here. What was it? The one thing that commonly separates fat kids from skinny kids?: Soda.
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That's it for this edition. Join us next time. (82,465)
Pollination of crops is achieved variously by insects, birds, and wind, according to plant species. Some plants can be helped by hand-pollination, but this is a very time-consuming process and works poorly on many plant varieties. The most simple and effective way to improve overall pollination rates (and therefore, yield) for a multi-crop system such as is encouraged in permaculture design and self-supporting gardens is to introduce and / or augment the population of bees.
Bee populations have been in general decline in recent years, and this is cause for alarm. It's not yet clear what factor or group of factors is mostly responsible for the precipitous drop in bee numbers, but it is clear that the self-supporting food producer and the casual gardener alike must do what they can to draw bees to their crops, and encourage them to stay around and reproduce.
Planting flowers favored by local bee species is part of the solution; check with your local department of agriculture to find out about native bee species and the flowers they prefer. The other best tactic for improving pollination with bees is to provide housing for them. The keeping of honey bees is a valuable and rewarding endeavor, but requires a significant time and effort commitment, along with the hassle of potential stings. In areas that are naturally favorable to solitary (nonsocial) wood-boring bees such as the 'orchard mason bee,' however, there is an easy, maintenance-free, and stingless solution.
Wood "Mason" bees have no sting and are solitary, which means that they don't build hives or make honey. Instead, they live in holes that they chew in wood. They are effective pollinators, require virtually no upkeep, and can't hurt humans. We can attract and retain these helpful and stingless bees by constructing a simple 'bee block,' which is a piece of wood with holes already started for the bees, and mounting it in an appropriate spot in our cultivation area. Arizona, Carolina, and many other states naturally host these bees, along with a great deal of places outside the United States. Contact your local department of agriculture to see if these bees inhabit your area.
The 'bee block' is a simple construction. All we need to build one is some untreated wood of at least 50 millimeter depth (~2 inches) at at least 100 millimeters (~4 inches) in height; width can be anything 50 mm or over. It is essential that the wood be untreated, or bees will avoid it. Wider (and taller) bee blocks will attract and house more bees. Tools are fasteners and a drill with 4mm and 6mm bits.
Assembly your bee block by fastening together the wood to be used. If you have a solid wood block that is as wide as you want the bee-block to be when finished, you can skip the fastening step. Strong carpenters' staples or brackets and nails can be used; do not use glue.
When the desired width has been attained, drill a series of holes about halfway through the block, spaced in a grid pattern about 19 millimeters (3/4 of an inch) apart. To improve probability that more than one bee species will be attracted to your block, drill 1/2 to 3/4 of the block with 4mm holes and the remaining space with 6mm holes.
After the blocks are fastened and the holes drilled, attach a sloping roof to the block in order to partially shade the entrance of the holes from the sun and sluice rainwater off the top of the block.
Most bees prefer a bee block that is hung in a sunny area, so hang yours in a spot that is in the sun most of the day. It's not known at present whether this is because they prefer sunny conditions outside their home or because they can more easily find block in well-lit areas. If you want to hedge your bee bet, you can make another block and place it in a shadier place.
After the block is hung, you need do nothing but wait for the bees to arrive. Again, planting flowers favored by your local bees will help in the initial attraction. Check the block once in a while to assess the occupancy rate. A hole covered or partially covered by the typical mixture of wood pulp and bee saliva is the sign of occupancy.
Common occupancy rates can range as high as eight bees per bee-block hole, giving us as many as 800 active bees from a 100-hole bee block.
This simple addition to your growing environment can bring considerable improvement in crop yield through improved pollination, with very little effort or maintenance. Attracting these bees will benefit not only your crops, but the health of your entire neighborhood ecosystem. After the bee population is established, spend a little time observing their flight patterns and use this knowledge to adjust next crop placement to achieve the desired effect (for example, improving pollination of a given crop by planting along the ‘bee line’ or controlling unwanted cross-pollination by placing plants of the same family but different species away from the same bee line).
Enjoy your bees and the benefits they bring, tell your buddies about them, and promote self-reliance through food raising for all!
Note on bees and cold climates :
Bees can thrive in nearly any climate. For example, the long summer and ample supply of fireweed has produced a healthy honeybee industry in Alaska since the Russians brought bees over in the early 1900s. More common than wood bees in cold climates are bumble, 'sweat,' and 'digger' bees, all of which nest in the ground. The cold-climate beekeeper should encourage soil-burrowing bees by identifying local species and planting the appropriate flower species (for example, bumblebees are particularly attracted to the lupine flower).
Depending on the species, bees in cold climates may migrate, may flat-out die (except for their queen, if social) or may 'winter.' Helping bees with wintering is done through a few simple steps :
1) Wrapping the hive or block : You'll want to give the bees some extra insulation, such as wax-impregnated cardboard, Styrofoam, or the Reflectix (mylar/foam sandwiched material) to decrease their need for food by means of keeping them warm. Bees literally shiver to stay warm in winter, so it's in the keeper's interest to promote their warmth.
2) Reduce the number of entrances to the hive if applicable. This applies primarily to honeybees, but if you have a block with unoccupied holes, cover them during winter. This step limits predation and 'robbing,' and eases bee comfort.
3) Open an entrance at the top of the hive, if applicable. This is to facilitate the escape of water vapor from the hive and convenience for bees to take flights as needed, for example to remove dead bees. This is not a rmajor concern for solitary wood 'mason' bees, but some advocate drilling additional holes in your bee-block toward the top (and cover with a slightly raised roof) to allow ventilation.
4) Be prepared for heavy bee attrition. Colony / hive bees lose 60% or more of their population in winter no matter what you do. Try not to choke up as you pick their dead bee bodies out of the snow. Also be aware that dead hive bees can pile up in commercial drawer-style hive, in the bottom drawer, blocking the bottom entrances. Empty these dead bees to prevent a hazard. This factor points up that it is usually wiser to encourage native bee species than attempt to cultivate imported bees.
Addendum regarding wasps :
Beware of wasps, several wood-boring species of which exist and can be a general nuisance with painful stings. Some wasps (those of the Sapygid, Mutillid and Tiphiid families, and some Sphecid wasps known as “Bee-Wolves”) prey on bees or are bee parasites. Sometimes a wasp will take occupancy inside a bee-block. Wasps are pollinators just like bees are, but their lack of body fuzz makes them much less efficient than bees. Most wasps will not attack humans unless disturbed, but some can be aggressive.
If you see a wasp entering your bee-block, you can choose to let it be or you can try to get rid of it. If you want to make it gone, you can either attempt to evict it yourself, or call a professional pest control operator. Note that we do not recommend or advise that you attempt to evict a wasp or wasps yourself, as they can be aggressive. However, those that choose to do so have had some success with the following method :
-Wait until nightfall and hold a flashlight on one hand for illumination. Wasps are less active at night.
-Fill a syringe or small spray bottle with a solution of one part isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol to nine parts water (1:9 solution)
-Wearing full protection (long sleeves and trousers, gloves, hat and face shield), approach the bee-block and positively identify the hole or holes occupied by the invading wasp(s).
-Taking great care not to get any solution on neighboring holes occupied by good bees, spray the alcohol solution directly on, or if possible, in the wasp hole(s). This will kill the wasp(s) after a few minutes.
-Carefully remove the dead wasp or wasps if practical, and allow the alcohol to evaporate. Do not excessively jostle the bee-block.
-Fill the contaminated hole with a screw slightly larger than the diameter of the hole and be sure that it is securely fastened. This is to prevent any bees from trying to use that hole and being poisoned by any remaining residue.
Many permaculturists, who generally try to avoid struggling with nature, will choose to live with the invading wasps as long as they don’t become overly aggressive or eliminate many bees. (48,982)
Like Jack in 'Sideways,' we're an infant - at least as regards our ability to look after ourselves in a real and substantial way. If we're going to get our sovereignty back, we like the bambino must first learn how to feed ourselves.
Food matters, big time. Most crucially, it's what we choose to use as fuel and building material for our bodies. Nearly as importantly, it's a major component of our cultural and social reality. No factor is as crucial to our bodily and mental health as food security -- reliable access to nutritious food.
Food can be transformed in numerous ways, but ultimately all food comes from the ground -- the soil. The food chain starts with that which grows in the ground, and much what we eat comes directly from the dirt. Everything that is in our food was once in the soil, chemically speaking. It follows, then, that anything we put in our soil will end up in our food.
This last fact, coupled with expense and ecological factors, makes plain that for best health and nutrition, we want our soil to be free of poisons. Poisons, as we understand them here, include among other things all chemical and synthetic toxins such as pesticides, herbicides, and artificial fertilizers.
How, though, are we to raise an adequate amount of food for serious self-support without the use of 'fertilizers.' especially in harsh climates?
Organic, self-produced compost is the answer. Compost that we make ourselves, controlling all inputs and results, gives our crops the nutrients they need in abundance, while freeing us from chemical residues created by commercial fertilizers. Compost is so effective at increasing crop yield that it has earned the sobriquet ‘brown gold.’
With a properly-implemented composting plan, we can raise really substantial amounts of our own food without much delay. Here's the scoop, starting with a brief overview and FAQ :
- What is compost and what benefits does it provide? -
-Compost is organic matter that has fully decomposed, becoming a uniform dark, microbially-active but non-toxic, soil component material that is much like the soil type known as 'humus.'
-Compost, when added to soil, acts as an addition of live matter that promotes plant growth.
-Composting recycles spent plants back to the soil
-Compost, with its active microbe communities, attracts beneficial worms that aerate the soil, promoting root growth and good water drainage
-Compost buffers excessive sodium content -- a common problem in many arid and depleted regions
-Compost provides high-density nutrients to plants
-Compost protects plant root systems from heat and cold, and fortifies entire plant against the elements by means of better nutrition
-This same nutrition, combined with the microbial community it brings and the underground ecosystem is engenders, protects crops from disease.
-Compost application is very effective at balancing the pH of soil, quickly bringing it to the 6.4 to 6.8 range that is ideal for cultivation of food. This is of great value in areas with harsh, alkali soil, such as deserts.
-The application of sufficient compost completely eliminates the need to till the soil. Eliminating tilling altogether dramatically improves soil health.
- Are mulch and compost the same thing?
- -No. Mulch is relatively large-sized chunks of relatively dry organic material (for example, wood chips) whose primary functions are to improve water drainage, to protect soil from harsh sun and cold, and to choke out weeds by denying them sun. Its secondary function is to help clay-heavy soils become more permeable to root systems, which occurs as mulch breaks down. Some mulch is partially decomposed when delivered, some is not. Mulch, added to a compost batch as a ‘carbon input’, will become compost over time. Note that there exist products known as ‘plastic mulch,’ which are bits of plastic marketed for use as mulch. These are harmful to your growing environment, will not break down, and should be avoided. Beware also of mulch that may be covered in insecticides, such as commercial landscaping byproducts.
- What tools do we need to start composting right now? -
-A bucket for the compost material
-A shovel to spread and stir the compost
-A pair of clippers for getting raw materials like branches down to compostable size
-A long-stemmed thermometer ("compost thermometer")
-Compost screen -- you can make this yourself in minutes
-A dust mask or respirator
-Other useful but nonessential equipment includes a wheelbarrow, chipper / shredder, blender, gloves both rubber and leather, and pitchfork.
-What are the popular methods of composting?
There are three major methods of composting. Each requires a correct balance of raw materials (more on this later), regular turning / agitation, and monitoring of the internal temperature of the compost as it breaks down.
1) The Pile Method : This is where you simply layer your raw organic materials into a pile in a specified place and allow it to decompose in the open. This method is popular but can be susceptible to weed germination and pests within the pile, and can be unsightly.
2) The Bin Method : Construct a wooden bin from scrap wood, old pallets, or drill aeration holes in a 30 gallon rubbish can. This method offers more control than the pile method.
3) The 'In-Vessel' Method : where a closed, rotating vessel known as a 'Compost Tumbler' or 'Compost Drum' is used. These can be bought commercially or made with some effort. The advantages of this method are considerable convenience of agitation and material addition, and nearly complete protection from weeds and pests.
-What raw materials should I use?
-We need a proper ratio of two classes of materials in our compost :
1) "Carbon inputs" - this means dried brown material like dry leaves, wood chips, and clippings
2) "Nitrogen inputs" - this means green and / or moist material such as green plant and grass waste, discarded fruit and vegetable material, coffee grounds, and manure
NOTE : the proper ratio is 25 carbon to 1 nitrogen by weight, which works out in practice to about 1 : 1 (half and half) by volume.
-What must I avoid composting for use on food crops?
-Dog, cat, and other predator manure -- these can carry persistent pathogens
-Castor and oleander products -- these materials contain persistent toxins
-Pine needles in high quantity -- these contain a persistent natural herbicide.
-So what manure is OK to compost?
-Cow (as opposed to steer) manure is best, and has properties that in practice appear to protect against certain plant diseases, such as dollar spot disease and sweet basil wilt.
-If cow manure is unavailable, look for horse manure. Horse manure is available from stables and, as a bonus, comes with straw (so you get both nitrogen and carbon inputs from one source)
-Avoid steer manure - this contains harmful amounts of sodium -- this includes all commercial manures
-Be aware that if your manure comes from animals which are fed non-organic diets and / or treated with chemicals, certain of these residues may remain in your compost. See addendum on bioremediation for details on how to mitigate this factor.
- What exactly is going on in my compost bin?
-What's happening is the biological process of decomposition, which converts solid and liquid waste into a stable, humus-like product. This is acheived through the action of bacteria. There are three types of bacteria :
-Aerobic : bacteria that need oxygen to live
-Anaerobic : bacteria that can thrive without oxygen - such as those inside your stomach
-Facultative : bacteria which can adapt to either condition
We want to encourage the action and propagation of aerobic bacteria in our compost, because this type of bacteria is best at controlling the odors of decomposition. This is done by regular agitation (mixing) of the compost as it decomposes.
-Why do I need to take the temperature of my compost every day?
-There are two reasons for this :
1) To be sure that your compost is achieving what is known as the 'thermophilic temperature range' - 114 to 160 Fahrenheit degrees. This is essential for the elimination of pathogens, pests, and weed seeds from your compost. If your compost doesn't get this hot at its core, it's not properly decomposing.
2) To judge when the compost is 'done' -- this is when it returns to the low end of a temperature bell curve.
-The heat described here is caused by the action of living microbes as they go about consuming and processing the composted material.
-If your compost isn’t getting into the proper heat range, that means that your carbon / nitrogen (“C/N”) balance is off target.
Understanding Carbon / Nitrogen Ratio and Temperature
If your C/N ratio isn’t close to the recommended 25:1 (by weight) mark, your compost will not break down properly. If there is too much carbon input in the mix, you will see very slow decomposition rates. If there is too much nitrogen input, you will detect an ammonia smell coming from your compost container. Note : Compost should not create unpleasant odors! If your compost stinks, mix it up and add more carbon inputs.
The temperature of your compost will rise and fall on a bell curve over the processing time of the batch. From the starting temperature, it should gradually climb to 114 to 160 Fahrenheit, and then begin a gradual decline back to near the starting temperature. Because we rely on the action of aerobic bacteria for this progress, it is important to aerate (turn) the compost regularly, up to once per day but at least twice a week. This is how we introduce oxygen to the aerobic organisms that need it. If you are using the pile or bin method, use your shovel or pitchfork to turn each batch; if you have a compost tumbler, you simply turn the crank.
Be sure to stick the stem of your stainless-steel compost thermometer into the very center of your compost batch to ensure an accurate reading, and take the temperature every day.
It is important to keep the average size of the particles in your compost batch small to encourage speedy decomposition – this is where the chipper/shredder (balance horsepower with cost according to your needs when selecting these) and blender can come in handy. The smaller your starting particles are, the more easily they will be processed by the bacterial action. Smaller particles are also easier to store – note that you can store carbon and nitrogen inputs separately in plastic rubbish containers for future use, and it is wise to do so.
In addition to being properly oxygenated, each compost batch must be properly hydrated. The proper moisture level of the compost batch should approximate that of a wrung-out sponge; there should be no standing water. Standing water will attract pests and insects – if you detect excess water in your compost batch, add more dry inputs. Typical sources for moisture in your compost will be green nitrogen inputs such as plant trimmings, household waste (non-animal-product food scraps) that has been blended with water, and ‘compost tea,’ the making of which is described in the addendum.
You can add water directly as necessary, being careful not to overwater, but beware! Do not use water direct from a tap or garden hose unless you have a whole-house filtration system. The chlorine added to municipal water will quickly kill the bacteria you need for successful compost and leave you with a soggy, inactive waste mass. Chlorine also combines with other compounds in compost to produce harmful methane molecules. If you have no filtration system available, you can put water in a watering can and allow it to sit outside for 24 hours before using it – this will cause all the chlorine in the water to evaporate. De-chlorinating filters are also available, which attach to faucets and hoses.
When the compost batch returns to the bottom of the bell curve, decomposition is complete and the batch is ready to use. Take care! If you do not wait until the compost is ‘done’ and at the bottom of the curve (that is, until the bacteria are done processing), the active and voracious bacteria will eat the seedlings you’ve planted. Waiting until your compost has completed its thermal bell curve is known as ‘resting to maturity.’ A well-executed, efficient compost batch will go from start to finish in about two weeks; less efficient batches will take longer.
Understanding the Role of Manure
Manure can be a helpful and inexpensive addition to your compost batch. It’s important to understand the nature and role of manure before deploying it, however, to avoid potential serious problems.
-Manure is animal waste. As noted above, only cow (not steer or commercial) and horse manure are acceptable among mammal wastes. Chicken and other bird manure is also good for composting. Cow manure has properties as an antifungal compost additive and a unique complement of nutrients, and is therefore widely sought.
-Rule #1 : Never apply raw manure directly to your soil. This is a grave error made by many, from commercial farms to home gardeners. Direct application of raw manure to soil has the following negative effects :
-Raw manure contains numerous pathogens that will be passed on to your crop – potentially a deadly situation in the case of vegetables like leafy greens that grow low to the earth. One has only to recall the recent salmonella outbreaks to understand the gravity of this problem.
-Raw manure contains weed seeds that you likely do not want to introduce into your growing environment.
-Raw manure contains high concentrations of nitrogen that can cause ‘nitrogen burn,’ wherein the plant uptakes a harmful amount of the element and suffers what is in effect chemical burn, and ‘junkie plant syndrome,’ wherein a plant will get ‘high’ after the first application of raw manure, growing rapidly, and then ‘crash,’ wearing out and withering rapidly before producing a substantial harvest. Both of these effects substantially reduce your yield and biologically damage your plants.
Worms and Composting
Worms are basic to healthy soil. Their action is to consume microbes and small material and leave behind nutrient-rich ‘castings’ – this is not considered to be raw manure and can be applied directly to soil if desired. When in soil, the worms also aerate the ground, allowing roots to more easily penetrate (essential in areas like Arizona with hard clay-rich soil) and water to drain and distribute. Worms from the nematode and annelid families are both needed for healthy soil, and annelids such as nightcrawlers can be cultivated. Commercial ‘worm hotels’ are offered by many companies, and a side-science of ‘vermiculture’ has grown up around this activity. Generally speaking, vermiculture involves growing many worms at once, in a contained system that allows their castings to be easily obtained (usually in trays). These worms can be added to the soil to continue their work.
It is possible to attract considerable numbers of worms to even arid soils without the need for expensive vermiculture set-ups. This is done through the practice of ‘cold composting.’
Cold composting is the addition of blended, hydrated carbon and nitrogen inputs, most often in the form of non-animal kitchen wastes blended with water, directly into the soil without the step of allowing them to first decompose through microbial action. These blended wastes are put in a shallow depression dug in the ground and then covered with soil, each application in a different spot. Worms are attracted to this ‘cold compost’ from far beneath the surface of the ground and will quickly make their way to the upper soil layers to consume this treat, bringing with them all their benefits of aeration and castings. When cold composting, remember to clip all scraps to a small size before blending, and to dig a new hole for each batch of cold compost. This can be done daily, with great effect coming from little effort.
Screening Your Compost
In order to maximize the effectiveness of your composting effort, make or buy a compost screen and use it with a wheelbarrow. The way that this is done is by building a simple wooden frame of two-by-fours to a size that will sit closely in the opening of your wheelbarrow, securing half-inch steel mesh across the frame, and shaking and raking your compost through it with a trowel before applying compost to your cultivation area. The chunks that don’t fall through the screen into your wheelbarrow are not fully broken down and can be added back to your next compost batch to ‘finish.’ A finish of boiled linseed oil will improve the durability of your compost screen. It’s also possible to build a rotary screen by cutting out panels from a large plastic bucket, covering the panels with screen, and adding a loading gate and hand crank similar to those on a compost tumbler. Once built, this method makes for rapid screening.
Applying compost
Compost should be applied directly to your planting beds before seeding, and then regularly around the crop rows. There can never be too much compost in your cultivation area, so apply liberally. If you manage to generate more compost than you can use in one application, it will keep for a long time in a covered plastic barrel or bin.
Composting and your climate
Those of us who live in climates that are warm year-round can enjoy an uninterrupted composting cycle throughout the year. Those who live where cold temperatures are common and freezing often occurs, however, will be faced with a compost cycle limited by the seasons. It does no harm to leave compost and compost inputs out in the cold, but it simply won’t produce finished product until it’s warm enough to achieve the 114-160 degree temperature range at its core.
Compost will not decompose much during the wintery months in temperate and colder zones. The producer has a choice to either :
1) Compost only when it is warm enough to do so outside
2) Move the composting process indoors, such as in a garage or unused room, during the winter.
Since properly-done composting does not generate offensive odors, we advocate the practice of indoor composting in cold winters. This can either provide a substantial store of compost to be applied in the spring, or provide compost for continuing indoor container gardening. Since compost will keep for months, there is no need to worry about an apparent excess.
Conclusion and end notes
Composting is the way for us to rapidly take control of our food supply by greatly increasing our crop yield and re-using our food waste. As we’ll see in better detail later in this series, the best way for the new food raiser to get a jumpstart is to apply compost and mulch in layers of equal depth directly to the crop area with no tilling, and to plant directly in this, according to season. With good compost, costly and ultimately damaging chemical fertilizers are made obsolete, along with tiresome and time-consuming digging and tilling. With the knowledge presented here and the right inputs, the novice food producer can begin planting within a few short weeks, and can start producing poison-free food and look forward to an expeditious trip down the road to self-reliance. It will be beneficial to the new food raiser to record the data about their endeavors, such as inputs used, daily temperatures, and total length of processing for each batch; in this way, one can learn the most effective methods for their own environs and resources. More information about the actual planting and cultivation process will be presented as this series unfolds. For now, begin collecting inputs and start that compost batch!
Addendum : Bioremediation and ‘Compost Tea’
Most people in the industrialized world live on land that has been subject to the ravages of commercial urban horticulture (landscaping, which tends to use a lot of insecticides and herbicides) or ‘factory farming’ (which also uses chemical fertilizers). What goes into your soil goes into your food, and subsequently into your body when you eat that food. Therefore, the presence of these industrial residues, along with whatever unintentional pollution may exist in your soil (for example, motor oil dumping, waste from mills that has seeped into soil, etc) is troubling for the food raiser.
One way to partially mitigate the effects of these toxins that are in your soil through no fault of your own is to employ a strategy known as ‘bioremediation.’ This is a term that means the use of microorganisms to neutralize chemical toxins – a biological remedy. The technique is used extensively by governments in the cleanup of ecological disasters like oil spills, and can be employed by the self-maintaining food producer as well.
The basic idea is to identify microbes that consume toxins, cultivate them in quantity, and spread a liquid solution containing them across the area that is affected by chemical pollution. The microbes work through the soil, consuming and neutralizing the toxic chemicals.
The government uses classified blends of microbes to achieve its ends, but the private citizen has other options available. The two most popular are the purchase of commercial ‘effective microorganisms’ and the making of ‘compost tea.’
‘Effective microorganisms’ is a trademarked term that generally refers to a specific commercial product, available for sale online. This product is a suspension of a proprietary blend of microbes in a water and molasses solution. The manufacturer contends that the organisms offered in this product can ‘bioremediate’ a wide range of toxins. If one chooses to buy this product, one need buy it only once – these microbes are like yeast and can be propagated indefinitely by adding more molasses and water to the solution as it’s used. Also, we recommend ignoring the ‘expiration’ or ‘use by’ dates on the package, for the same reason. Unless left in the sun or otherwise killed, these organisms will keep and reproduce indefinitely, similar to the behavior of a sourdough starter. The commercial preparation is diluted with water and sprayed directly onto the affected soil.
‘Compost tea,’ simply, is what is produced when a cloth bag of compost is suspended in a barrel of filtered water and ‘brewed’ for 48 hours, preferably in the sun. The resulting liquid is certainly rich in nutrients and helpful bacteria and can be added as an enriching amendment directly to crop areas or compost batches. Proponents of this ‘tea’ often employ it as a bioremediation tool, claiming that the microbes present in the average compost tea batch are similar to those in the commercial preparation, work effectively to neutralize toxins, and can be produced by the grower at little cost (whereas the commercial preparation is very costly).
More research into bioremediation of agricultural soil, particularly for the urban food producer, is urgently needed. Better and more widely-informed science on this subject will go a long way in helping the food producers large and small achieve higher yields of less-toxic crops.
Whichever method you choose, it is wise for anyone growing their own food to apply one of these preparations to their soil before beginning the initial growing process. In addition, if using inputs from non-organic or non-poison-free sources such as non-organic cow / horse manure, or grass clippings and tree trimmings from around the neighborhood, it is advisable to add bioremediation solutions to your compost container to neutralize toxic residues. Unless you have a full laboratory at your disposal, you won’t be able to truly gauge the effectiveness of your bioremediation efforts. Therefore, it’s best to use only organic inputs for your compost when you have the option. There is a mounting body of anecdotal evidence, however, that these solutions can be effective in rehabilitating land tainted by chemical inputs and polluting residues, making food grown in that soil less toxic to consume. There will be more information presented later in this series about the concentration of soil toxins within the food produced. Suffice to say that bioremediation of our soil before planting is a low-cost bet that it makes sense to take.
Acknowledgement : A large part of the information presented here is taken from the lecture “Composting in the Southwest Desert,” by master gardener and writer Jim Muir, as presented on 11-13-2008. (57,718)
So I'm sitting up here in Cake City trotting through my second year of medical school and I thought it was time to stop and take stock of some of the things I've learned.
For instance, I can tell you first-hand now that the reason doctors give conflicting advice is because the professors from whom all us pre-doctors learn the academics of our profession don't actually profess correct information, but actually a mixture of up-to-date facts, out-of-date facts, and outright lore in unknown proportions they've concocted from many years of palling around with fellow squirrel-faced PhDs.
Let me tell you about PhDs. PhDs are funny. If you get a medical doctor (or DO) in a room with two PhDs and ask them what the best flavor of ice cream is, the two PhDs will debate for hours and then pat themselves on the back, for they have somehow served "the scientific community" by spurring debate, though they have not reached a conclusion. Meanwhile, the real doc has walked out hours ago, leaving a note in his stead reading "Best flavor? sometimes chocolate, sometimes vanilla, and sometimes PhDs are as useful as sex organs on a pair of Nikes."
After the two PhDs are done giving each other high-fives and reach-arounds, they'll meet up with the D.O. at the bar, much to his dismay. Some girl will walk up eyeballing one of the three, introduce herself and gesture for reciprocation. The PhDs seem to always push their title around like it demonstrates some kind of social prowess, so they'll answer Drs. Douchebag and Pedant, while our buddy the MD will simply say "Jim." It's baffling, really, because all a PhD represents is that you had a masters degree and then fellated a few other PhDs for a couple more years--sort of a bizarre hazing ritual--in lieu of joining the workforce. With the infinitely more expensive, difficult, and humbling feat of a medical degree, one would think medical doctors would be showing off their "Doctor" status at every occasion; not so. In fact, we call those kind of doctors "assholes." You can look it up in Dorland's medical dictionary.
With their anal-retentive attention to detail, one would think that PhDs would be the prime source of accurate and up-to-date information in their respective fields. This is not always the case, since PhDs are also incredibly lazy. They complain endlessly about their "terrible" jobs in which they have no responsibility but to read, word for word, the same slides they wrote 5 years ago at least 3 hours a week. It is true that some PhDs do revise their lectures and put in some effort to teach effectively, however it is not a requirement for employment.
Luckily, medical students like myself don't have to suffer PhDs and their ilk for more than the first two years of medical school. The last half of "school" is on-site training. Unfortunately, the poisoned seeds of misinformation have already been planted in our minds and we'll carry those with us until such time as we can have patients of our own to recommend chamomile tea instead of nitroglycerin--just like Dr. Douchebag told us to.
Obviously wrinkles in reality such as substituting vasodilators with diarrhea-flavored herbal teas would get ironed out in training. However, things such as patient education are very commonly tainted with the narrow-minded pea soup that gets sprayed on us daily in our first two years of hell (think Gallagher stand-up).
Calories Are BULLSHIT
The first thing PhDs will tell you about dieting is the synopsis we've all grown tired of: Eat fewer calories and burn more energy, and the pounds will disappear magically!
Yeah, no shit. Thanks Dr. Dipshit, who's you're employer? I want recommend they promote you to full fucktard.
Yes, everybody knows they need to exercise more, eat less, blah blah blah. That's of course technically correct, and I'm sure Dr. Obvious will roll you around in the dry-rub of thermodynamic laws for a few minutes before baking you in the "energy dense foods" oven. I'm sure that's what Dackow was really all about: just a friendly debate between the prison guards about calorie counting.
What people really want to know are what foods to eat, not how much of it. Obesity essentially fries your hormones and makes plain "calorie counting" extremely difficult. It takes an incredible amount of willpower for an obese individual to lose 10% of their body weight without use of a malignant cancer (which you may order from our online store any time!)
Of course if you eat enough of anything with any nutritional value, the body will retain weight, but there are simple things you can add to or subtract from foods to actually increase satiety--the feeling of fullness--so that you will not feel the need to eat so much.
This doesn't just work on the obese, it works on anyone, including the mildly overweight and even athletes.
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Well this is my intro to the 56-part series on "poison foods".. it may be two weeks for the next one (85,365)
A few weeks ago, I started a rotation at a remote inpatient resort-type hospital for people afflicted with eating disorders.
Many feel anorexia is caused by society idolizing celebrities who are unrealistically skinny if not underweight. The counselors even talk about this at the hospital. This, I believe, is wrong. People afflicted with anorexia have a view of their body as fat. If you ask them to draw a full-sized outline of what they think they look like, they draw an outline of a morbidly obese individual that they could fit into two or three times over. I've seen them do it, it's dumfounding. It's not necessarily that their goals are unrealistic, it's mostly that that they get positive reinforcement for their eating disorder and to a lesser (but significant) degree that their sense of self is skewed. I don't see unrealistic expectations as the issue, as they commonly fall below their 'goal' weight and still feel dissatisfied.
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As an aside, it's not a choice between the Atkins "I ate Bambi's Mom" diet and the Vegan "Suck my Potatoes" diet. That's the kind of binary PhD nonsense that you see all over the literature on this. Some sources on this subject made it seem like you couldn't even eat oranges because it made Dr. Atkins hit-list. It went on to complain that this meant all higher protein diets resulted in scurvy, and that this was the reason "all low carb diets are bad." I'd just like to say that I can eat whatever 'the fuck I want, thanks very much. Yes, it's possible to eat lots of healthy foods, eat fewer carbs, and consume more protein all in the same meal, or at least in the same diet.
