Seasons are changing, we're fast approaching what I've always seen as time for contemplation. Schools started, garden seasons' wrapping up and trees are beggining to change colour. The last couple weeks have seen two great kick offs into fall. The first being the book club style meeting that was held at Collective coffee with Ryan Meili about his book "A Healthy Society." It was a great evening, and could have gone all night had many of the people attending not had families to go home too. The night started out great with a bit of a meet and greet with Ryan for those who came and don't know him, and quite quickly turned into political discussion. It was amazing to see a group of people that were diverse in age, background and profession come to so many agreements and be so passionate for change. The second night was last night.

 Last night SES (Saskatchewan Environmental Society) held the first meeting of a new book club. It brought a great turn out of another very diverse group. We came up with a great list of books with too many to chose from. The first book that will be read is "Everything Under the Sun." by David Suzuki, which is fitting as he is coming to town for a lecture at the broadway theatre early October.

The main reason though I wanted to write today was to answer a question I didn't have time to answer last night. I was asked as well as one other person to describe the close feeling that we have with "The Land" We both during out introductions stated that we were drawn to the natural world in a way other than just an appreciation of it's beauty. This is something I feel increadibly strongly about and is the reason I live the way I do. Our planet has for a long time been referred to by many names, probably the most common of these being "Mother Earth/Nature" It's an old name. Lots of time when people look back at things throughout history they dismiss it saying "Oh they just didn't know any better" I think a lot of time this is just wrong, people used to be much more connected than most people are now. We've created a cultural disconnect, a barrier between us and all other living organisms. Whether you look at it through the eyes of a thiest or atheist we all come from the same origin, dirt. Hummas, mother earth, she is our oldest of grandmothers, and like our other family members a personal relationship is possible. Like a relationship with your own mother a relationship with the natural world needs to be sought after. If you call she will answer. I always found the world to be a place of beauty, endless beauty. As an adult I went on my first hike into the alpine when I was twenty. Bear lake was the destination, high in the rockie mountains near one of the highest peaks; Mt Fisher.  An incredible place and an incredible walk. I remember how I felt the moment the water of a lake still encircled by the winters ice hugged me, it's a tight hug one as if from a good friend that has been away too long. I felt at that moment as though I had been baptized by the world. I really believe I came out from that swim a different person. I started the hike with an open mind and came home with a heart full of wonder and awe. Those mountains are old and they will tell you stories if you will listen. I have more recently I felt the same emotions when I went to the boreal forest for the first time visiting the Prince Albert National park. I encourage everyone who hasn't experienced this to take a weekend or just one day and go for a walk. Take the time to go slow, open your heart to the world. Stop at the peak of the trail or the spot you feel the most taken away with. If you truely listen you will find the wild is not silent, there is no silent retreat when journeying here. Listen and you will find yourself listening to the most beautiful poetry, a perfect symphony. Soon you will find yourself with the ability to connect with nature on an emotional level, not just experience it but connect and be involved in dialogue. The planet is living and we all need to live with her, co-habitation. We are the only species that have this idea that we can live separated from our mother.


On to a garden update, it's nearing the end of the season, it's really wrapping up. Not long and the squash will all be ready to pull out. I've harvested the majority of the tomatoes now, quite a bit of them. I had maybe twelve plants, all greenhouse orphans bound for the dumpster. And I'd say they all produced five pounds of tomatoes. I know I could have gotten mo out of them had I set them up better and taken better care of them. But for being plants bound for the trash can that weren't really maintained once transplanted they did amazing.

“It is to this new-found resolution to reassert our indivisibility with life, to recognize the obligations incumbent upon us as the most powerful and deadly species ever to exist, and to begin making amends for the havoc we have wrought, that my own hopes for a revival and continuance of life on earth now turn. If we persevere in this new way we may succeed in making man humane ... at last.”
― Farley Mowat

So I was at work today. Pretty fantastic thing that is, I was taking out the recycling, and I did what I often do when I do that. I stopped and looked around the alley, just simply to look, and look what I spotted! A great mural hidden in the alley. I've been told that it's from the Make Work studio, which is just at the end of this alley. I really liked the piece, I get the feeling of a vast mountain wilderness, but one that is in it's vastness empty. There's a patchiness to the painting that creates this feeling for me, the animals in it seem to be clumped together. The same way the trees are, much the way a patch work of clear cut areas look. At the same time the animals also look as it they're on the move. It's got three words on it as well, the one you can see in the picture here is home, I can't remember the other two but I remember they affected my thoughts of the message of the piece. I came to the conclusion that this painting is against industrial forestry.

  Secondly, I made kettle chips, without a mandolin... Man I wish I had a mandolin to work with, I sliced these things paper thin all by hand, while it didn't take me long as I was frying in batches anyways, my hand got a little sore. They turned out great though, the potatoes especially, go figure hey. The mix is Beets, Carrots, and Potatoes, being about fifty percent Potato, and twenty-five percent each Beets and Carrots. The salsa here is a sweet salsa made with Tomato, Cucumber, and Tomatillo. The Tomatillo was incredibly sweet, and almost apple like in consistency and flavour.

Thirdly, just because I love bikes, here's one for you. This is my polo bike, It's one of the six bikes that Kate and I own collectively. This one probably the most unique, not to say it's any better but every feature of it stands out as different than all the rest. Mainly the fact that it is a single speed, and a fixed gear. What's even more special about this bike is the gear ratio. I've got a thirty-six tooth gear on the front, (though I feel like I should double check the count on that I might be wrong.) and a twenty-three tooth track gear on the rear. I just put a bigger one on a week or so ago, went up from eighteen, on the rear. So this put me at a 3.1 gear ratio, It's incredibly low, nearly a granny gear. This makes it perfect for polo, I can ride backwards no problem, braking is much faster and my sprints have improved immensely. I love it, all except for bombing hills on it, I feel like my legs will snap like twigs doing that. Here's a video if you've never seen bike polo in action before.

Roasted roots

Roasted root vegetables; A recipe.

Potatoes; your favorite kind, or a mix. One ow two per person depending on size.

Carrots; same as above

Beets; one half beet per person.

Honey; 1/2 tbsp per person

Olive oil; enough to coat everything well

Fresh thyme; 1 tbsp per person

Fresh oregano; 1 tbsp per person

Chili flakes; 1 tsp per person

Salt; to taste

1: preheat the oven to 400* f

2: Dice all vegetables to roughly the size of dice, I like to leave the potatoes slightly larger, or if they're a really small type it looks great to have them just quartered.

3: toss together with honey, oil, herbs and salt.

4: spread put on a baking tray and pop into the oven.

5: bake for 20 minutes, then turn them all over and bake for another 20 minutes.

Your finished product may look like a few pieces have been burnt, that is thanks to the honey and I bet you they'll taste like cand and you'll love it. If you're adventurous try this on the barbeque, I'd you do leave them uncovered. Covering them will lead to them being steamed not roasted and you will end up with a much softer treat. With the honey you want them to really be able to Brown up nice and crisp

Harvest has begun

  Saturday, Market day. I work most Saturdays, so I don't often get a chance to head over to the market on it's busiest day. It's too bad, but there are the occasional days, like today when I can sneak away for a few minutes and run over there. I was picking up lunch so a co-worker could try out the new cafe that opened up in the market; Root Down. Great stuff, We've eaten there a few times now, and already I've got a favorite. They call it the Luisa Maria, It's a vegan BLT, Eggplant bacon, Lettuce and Tomato, with a nice sauce on a multi-grain sour. Worth checking out for lunch sometime. I also while waiting for the food wandered a bit. Had a wonderful conversation about soap making with a lady in the main indoor vendor area. Best of all though I picked up a pound of wild blue berries, straight from the boreal forest, one of my favorite places. They were delicious, the boreal forest is home to the best tasting blue berries I've ever had. I took some back to the cafe mixed some with a nice mint tea we have and had some blueberry mint ice tea, It was great.

Sam and I went over to the garden a few days ago to check on the potatoes. Ended up digging them all up. I'm quite happy to say they all turned out great, we had a few that had soft spots that you could punch right through the potato. Though I'd say at least ninety-five percent were good. We got a real variety in size too, some just the size of a quarter and others the size of a soft ball, average was about the size of a baseball though, which is fantastic.
Sam I think had a blast digging them up, we found quite a few worms in the process which he gladly added to the compost.

Kate's parents were in town and brought us quite a bit of stuff. They brought us a large pail full of goodies from Sue and Morris, beets, zucchini, carrots, beans, lettuce, potatoes. It's wonderful. Her parents stayed for dinner so I roasted some of my potatoes with Sues' beets and carrots, drizzled with a little bit of honey, Delicious. We were also sent some Jams and Jellies from her friend Shelly, I haven't cracked any open yet though I saw today that Kate has. They look great though, I'm especially excited for a certain pepper jelly that I saw in the basket. I'm really excited and thankful about all we receive, and for the people that we're surrounded by. We have some really wonderful and caring people all around us.

 We made another stop to the garden just today, mostly just to grab some onions, but also just to take a look around. The squash seems to be coming along really well, again being my fist time growing them I'm not sure how far along the process they should be, but I think for when they were planted it's great. This guy here is about eight inches long and a good thickness.

Lastly, I've begun to harvest my tobacco. I've still got a considerable amount of plant yet that needs to continue growing before I remove them. I'm amazed at how much I've removed and how much I still have left. Here you see two rows of tobacco hanging to cure, in our conveniently ventilated and cedar storage shed. I think this will provide the near perfect environment to create a nice light "oriental" tobacco which I'll use to roll into slender paper-less cigarettes. Though from what I understand without the use of a kiln I need to allow for a significant aging period to bring out any form of desirable flavour.

 

"The body is your temple, keep it pure and clean for the soul to reside in."

Living Sustainably by practicing Deliberate Moral Choice

As a request, It's been suggested to me that I should post again, in greater length and detail the subject of the last post. I want to do that, I think it's a good subject and was disappointed in how the last one came out because of it's limited length. The topic is Living deliberately; moral based decision making.




“How much evil throughout history could have been avoided had people exercised their moral acuity with convectional courage and said to the powers that be, 'No, I will not. This is wrong, and I don't care if you fire me, shoot me, pass me over for promotion, or call my mother, I will not participate in this unsavory activity.' Wouldn't world history be rewritten if just a few people had actually acted like individual free agents rather than mindless lemmings?” 
 -Joel Salatin, "Everything I Want to do is Illegal."

 We are living in a very bad age in history. Easy to say not just bad but the worst. We live in the most violent and wasteful of all times. We in the last One Hundred years as a global population have killed more people than the entire of human history, and we have created more permanent waste in the last Fifty years than every would have been thought possible. We have advanced so far in our technology many of us now believe we are free from the chains of nature. That we now have the unquestionable power to live exclusively by our own will and means. Of course this is wrong, technology can never sustain us alone as it itself is depended on the natural world just as much as we are. Thanks to all this we are now in a unique position, a position of choice, one that as mankind we have never been in before. We have two choices; the first is to continue down our path to destruction, and bring ourselves to the most common of pagan finales: our own destruction, or we can chose a more enlightened path and choose to stop our evil ways and learn to live as equals with the natural world.

Lets take a look briefly at the first choice. We're going to look at it through American commercial agriculture. And to narrow it down further we're going to look at three things, Corn, Soy and Wheat. I'm sorry that these figures are going to be old, but they are current enough to be relevant, and bad enough that the change since then is only worse.  **
                                  Millions of Acres
Corn;                                  72.7
Soy;                                    72.7
Wheat;                                53

In the United States there are approximately 382 Million acres of land in use for crop production. So looking at the three previous numbers we can see that they account for nearly 50% of the agricultural land.

Now lets take a look at each of the three individually.
Corn:
"According to the National Corn Growers Association, about eighty percent of all corn grown in the U.S. is consumed by domestic and overseas livestock, poultry, and fish production."** I don't even really want to touch on that as I'm assuming most of you are familiar with factory farming and grain-fed livestock / fish, If your not maybe we'll talk about it some other time or you could read one of the great books by Joel Salatin or Michael Pollan. Its much to large of a topic alone for me to get into. In short though Eighty percent of one of Americas largest crops is going to feed things that if we were to change our systems to a natural system would have things to eat already. Cattle should be grazing in pastures eating natural grasses, with chickens and pigs following them. Instead of all three being fed Corn. As well as fish, possibly the most disgusting of all three, because of my personal love of fish. That should seem obvious, fish should not be eating corn, especially carnivorous fish like salmon and tuna. Now Twenty percent is a lot of corn still a lot of food, sadly though the majority of that is still not being barbecued or salsafied. The large percentage of that remaining amount is making it to us indirectly through things such as corn syrup, in soda. Another percentage of that is going to make ethanol trying to make a "green" fuel. So in the end such a small amount of all that is grown is ending up as a good nutritional part of our diet, and for me has created a love hate relationship with corn. It's one of natures most amazing gifts, and we feed it to the cows who don't want it.

Soy being Sprayed.

 Soy:
The US produces about Fifty percent of the worlds total soybean crop. The majority of which is going to make oil, which is used for various purposes. This one is less negative than corn, but only slightly. Some of the oil produced from soy is very plain, it's used to make margarine and is one of the leading ingredients, far less canola is used than is often portrayed, as well as other cooking oils, for frying and all that great stuff. That wouldn't be a bad thing if it wasn't being produced in such high amounts just to supply all the fast food places that are deep frying your children's chicken nuggets and fries. Another large chunk of the oil is being used to make ethanol, more soy is used for this purpose than corn is, that isn't a positive thing. E85 a blend of eighty-five percent ethanol to fifteen percent gasoline is what is used for vehicles. You might say great that cuts down a lot on the fossil usage. It might not so much as you think. Vehicles that run on ethanol often end up with a lower gas mileage than running on a straight gasoline, requiring obviously that you use more of it. To be exact 12 gallons of ethanol has the BTU equivalency to 9 gallons of gasoline. Making the ethanol is another thing to take into account to, as machinery is required to separate whatever is being used into it's smaller parts. It needs to be heated to create the syrup, then it needs to ferment. The first to part are energy intensive of course. Heavy machinery and heat need a lot. And of course all the left over from the process goes to feed our wonderful friends over at the factory farms, how tasty. Soy is also one of the crops that uses the highest amounts of pesticides. I'm sure you all agree that that's bad and I don't need to explain. So yet again, we're taking something wonderful, who doesn't love a plate of steamed and salted edemame, and something so vital to a vegan diet, and yup we're just burning it.

Wheat:
Probably the mildest problem of the three, but still not something we're handling well at all. Here we have the largest percentage going directly to use through food, at seventy percent. That's great, I love to bake, I love wheat. Here's the problem, go the grocery store, look at the products that it's getting to you through, and how much of them are there. The majority of it is ending up in products like wonder bread, fruit-loops, and oreos. As a base food none of those three are bad things, Bread is in my opinion one of the best dietary parts of a persons life. A good loaf of bread will supply you with all the fibre you need to fuel your day, kick start your digestive system and serve as a platter for whatever you chose to have it with. Cereal is much the same as bread, I start most of my mornings with oatmeal. Cookies, everyone needs a treat now and then, there's no denying that and you shouldn't deny that. It's the super processed way that we are consuming them. Super bleached to no nutritional value bread, mega sugar doesn't resemble what it is at all cereals and get you sugar high treats. No wonder we have an obesity pandemic when the majority of our daily diet is made of grains that have been robbed of all their value and then given a face lift with refined sugar.

**  U.S. environmental protection agency - 2000

So lets sum that up. 50%, that is half, of all the vegetable crop land in the United states is either fed to our fast food industry through cattle feed or fryer oil, burned in our vehicles with bio fuel or making us fat. Isn't that a shame. We are wasting half of our land.

Here's the second choice, life runs in the agricultural world (the whole world for that matter) on a supply and demand system. They supply what we demand, you can't deny that. And so it's not the farmers fault, it's not Kellogg's fault, it's not the governments fault all this is happening. Sorry for this but it's your fault, it's my fault, it's all of us that keep that happening. Great news though, that means the solution is simple, and easy. We simply demand something different. That doesn't meant you write a letter to general mills and ask them to use whole grains in their cheerios. That means you stop eating cheerios and eat whole foods. That means that instead of saying we want a greener more earth friendly fuel, we cut back or better yet stop our dependency on fuel. Park your car, ride a bike instead, take public transit, car pool, walk, they're all better choices than the five cars a family of three uses now. That doesn't mean that we tell McDonald's to offer salads, it means we don't eat at McDonald's, instead we cook food ourselves, eat at home at the same table as our family. Who would have thought, living so simply could have such a positive affect. All of those are really easy things to change. You might say you don't have time to cook at home, well don't make dinner so complicated, there are a million cooks, and cook books out there dedicated to helping you cook good food faster. Some people say they're in too much of a hurry to ride a bike or walk. I feel sorry for them, they have messed up their priorities. If you're in too much of a rush to get to work to work a long day to make more money, then your life is simply costing you too much money to live. Slow down your life, live simpler and smaller. You'll find you start to feel relaxed, are working less but end up saving more money because your spending less money and simply don't need as much. If you want any help with any of those things, or feel lost as to how to start those changes please email me, or facebook me, I can and would love to help.

Ok so now lets take this solution to the waste that we just came up with and make it even better. So now we've effectively cut out fast food from our lives, we've cut down to an average of one car for every five families of three, we've all started cycling everywhere, and we now all sit around our tables together for at least one whole home cooked meal everyday. lets pretend we all did all of that. The first thing we're likely to notice  is that the city suddenly got a lot quieter, and hey maybe you noticed your head stopped aching. Man that's great. You'd probably notice after about a week that your fighting less as a family or with your co-workers, as lets face it most of your fights before you changed your life were because you were in a hurry to do something and lacked the patience to deal with it. You've probably noticed that your sleeping better at night. That's all thanks to your new diet. Not to mention that you've miraculously lost a couple inches off your waste, though you may not have dropped weight. Congratulations you just traded some fat for muscle, wow what a healthful improvement. Those are all very personal things you'd notice, and they are all fantastic and endlessly positive. Now lets look at the change that had globally. All of a sudden fast food joints are shutting down, and being replaced by locally owned good food restaurants, like the one that just opened here last week; Root Down. Now because they're gone suddenly we don't have a need for all the factory farming, or for the majority of the farming we just talked about. Wow, we just freed up millions and millions of acres. So lets do a little bit more number crunching with that in mind.

I`ve been told I look like these guys, Love it.

If before we were farming Fifty Percent of the land to produce food which only about Ten Percent of which made it to our tables in some edible form. Lets take a look at what we could potentially now produce on that land. This is going to be very rough. I realize that certain things cannot be grown everywhere, land conditions really affect what we grow where, so this will be a vague estimate but still very powerful. So lets say we just freed up two hundred million acres of tillable agriculture land. Lets look at what could be grown. If you use the practices which are pretty widely seen of the hutterite's. You would be able to feed one person off of two thousand square feet. Their food bill would be One hundred percent eliminated. There is 43560 square feet per acre. So that works out to be approximately twenty-one people per acre, multiply by two hundred million and you get four billion two hundred million. Which looks like this 4,200,000,000. That's half the worlds population. Much more than the United States population. Now lets fantasize a bit to improve the numbers. I have been practicing a method known as mini, or intensive farming. What I see as the ultimate small scale food production. The belief here is that you need only seven hundred square feet to feed one person ninety percent of their food bill. To feed them one hundred percent you have to up it to about one thousand square feet, this allows for grains and meat. so that doubles our number. And we now feed the entire population of the world with just the land currently being farmed in the United States alone. WOW, we have suddenly improved the quality of life on this planet in every conceivable way. Now imagine everyone was to grow a portion of their own food globally. This would mean that a family of three would need more space than the average now has. We`ll put each family on one half acre. That if they want is enough to have a small house, feed themselves nearly entirely, and have a bit of space to play. By doing this we would solve virtually everyone of the worlds problems at the moment, climate change, disease, world hunger, everything you can think of would be solved if people lived in a way where they did things by their own hands, and helped each other.



Now of course that`s an Ideal, and even if it`s exactly what we all wanted we would not be able to reach that for generations. So the question is how do we make positive change, how do we work to solve the worlds problems, and how do we as individuals make a difference. The answer is simple. We need, heavy on the need there. Need to start exercising our moral free will. We need to live with deliberate consideration of the environment and humankind with all of our decisions. Now your going to say that sounds like a lot of work, I don`t want to think about all that every time I buy a chocolate bar. Well I say why not *question mark(sorry my shift button broke I can`t do a question mark) Is your chocolate fix so important that you won`t consider others first *Insert question mark. Ultimately, Yes, this means that your life will slow down, you will not have time to do as much as your doing now, but you know what your retention rate of what you do do will increase and you will get more enjoyment out of one single act than you would previously out of ten. Yes please take the time to think about the impact you are having with every aspect of your life, I ask you as a parent, as a neighbour and as friend to do this. Living your life with Deliberate Moral decision making is the most important thing  you could do in  your life. It`s easy to do, often it means listening to your gut, listen to what your body tells you, what your mind tells you. If you feel bad about what your doing or gross it`s likely something that is harmful to you or others and maybe you should take a second to think it through. One last time I will say if any of this seems unclear or you want help, or whatever please feel free to ask me. Joel Salatin said above that history would have been re-written had people acted with their moral conscience, I agree and I don`t believe that it is too late. You are not a mindless robot, you have the power to make the decisions. As a great man once said be the change you want to see in the world. Live a more responsible life, live a life of example. One in which you are proud to live on display.

Thanks for reading.

Garden growth, Adventure amazing.

Sorry for the lack of structure here. This post was written half on a laptop half cell phone. The photos are from two days ago at the garden. There are definite mistakes I've made thanks to lack of experience. Overall though I'm impressed with how things have come. The potatoes are great, the onions are sweet, and the tomatos are plenty. The second thing i'd like to write about is my feelings of environmental development / resource development. I for quite some time have been in passionate dissagreement with the reckless behaviour of our countries.resource development. And this is a pressing issue to everyone (if its not you're pretty heartless.) I'm going to skip through all the climate change stuff and get to something else. I have been for a while struggling with one question. How do we fight against the way our environment is being attacked. I have decided for me that that means opting out. That means that at every opportunity I chose to do things by means that do not reply on a destructive industry. It gets complicated I can't cut fossil fuel out from my life entirely. I would have to denounce literally everything to do so. So what I try to do then is do only things where the positives heavily out weigh the negatives. Take cycling for example, steel frames, rubber tires and so on. These things come from a destructive industry. But the amount of impact that a bicycle creates is far less then a car, not to mention the on going impact of driving. I might say that the bicycle industry has a low enough impact as to be sustainable, meaning we could continue forever with out exhausting our means of doing so. People often ask me why I work in the coffee industry when I believe what I do. It is for this reason. There are coffee companies that buy only from organic farms, only from farms that grow with diversity in attempts to simulate rainforest. The coffee industry can be destructive but it also doesn't have to be, like all industry. And so we all need start using our own brains, not relying on others. We can all make better choices and there are no reasons good enough not to make them. And so I combat destructiveness by encouraging people to stop the demand for it. As long as we do things that are heavily dependant on it there will be demand for it, and as long as there is demand industry will meet it no matter what they have to do. Industry is not a person, it does not feel or care. So why should we care so much about its feelings. I don't hammer because my hammer is nice I hammer to build something.

Friday the 13th, I don`t think I have ever had a bad one. This particular Friday was exceptional. Sam and I spent the evening helping a neighbor build a section of a Rammed Earth wall he is putting up in his backyard. Rammed earth is a technique I`m entirely new to, I had heard of it but have never seen it used. There's not a lot that goes into it. Rammed Earth requires nothing more than a  little concrete, dirt and water. Unlike  the usual concrete mixture that you see in things like skate parks this takes a very low amount of actual concrete, making it a much  more economical means of building. That being said it is more physically demanding. Rather than just the spread and smooth of regular concrete, Rammed Earth takes a physical ramming, of course. The finished product is beautiful and strong.

The next thing I'd like to bring up is a website. FRESHNLOCAL.CA, I haven't had a chance to place an actual order yet, but the Idea is fantastic and I'm excited to try it out. What it is is a delivery order good food box. This Idea isn't new, small time market farmers have been doing things like this since the beginning of market days. The wonderful thing here though is that this is incredibly accessable for everyone. You go to the website, (which was wonderful put together by the same person who's wall I helped build.) choose a category; Produce, Meat, Bread, and so on. From there choose individual Items; Cucumbers, Tomatoes, Steaks, Sourdough... you place an order online and It's delivered to your house on wednesdays. Everything comes from local producers like Floating gardens, Wally's Urban market garden and Earthbound Bakery. And best part yet for prices that are comparable with shopping at the average supermarket. I'll have a more valid opinion on how it works once I've tried it out, which I won't have a chance to do until August, sorry.

Once last thing is check out how the container cucumber and zucchinis are doing, Plus I'm excited my corn is starting to flower. A little behind but it's coming, oh boy.

"Don't eat anything incapable of rotting.... Don't eat lots, eat mostly plants."
-Michael Pollan; In Defense of Food

“While it is true that many people simply can't afford to pay more for food, either in money or time or both, many more of us can. After all, just in the last decade or two we've somehow found the time in the day to spend several hours on the internet and the money in the budget not only to pay for broadband service, but to cover a second phone bill and a new monthly bill for television, formerly free. For the majority of Americans, spending more for better food is less a matter of ability than priority. p.187”
-Michael Pollan; In Defense of Food