{this moment}

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.

If you're inspired to do the same, leave a link to your 'moment' in the comments for all to find and see.

The Danger of Food

So, my dad gave me a great gift this week. He’s been cleaning out his bookshelves, and ran across his collection of Foxfire books. For those who aren’t familiar, Foxfire is an organization that started as a student magazine in 1966. The students gathered stories, tips, and techniques from the elders in their community. They asked questions, helped out, ate food, and took pictures. Most importantly, they wrote it all down. Later, editions of the magazines were compiled into books. I believe there are currently 12 volumes, and they are being republished, much to a large audience’s delight. Seriously, these are some of the coolest books on the planet. This is information about simple country living relayed, not by scholars and reconstructionists, but by people who grew up living this way, often without electricity or combustion engines.

Yesterday (in Foxfire 3) I came across a section on apple butter. It comprised several different recipes, nothing wild, usually just apples, sugar, and cinnamon. The amazing thing though? There was quite a lot of talk about how to construct the recipe so that the apple butter didn’t go bad. Nowhere in the section was it even considered that you would use refrigeration or modern canning techniques. I found that fascinating. What a shift. You know, we as a society talk a good line about saving energy and going greener, but you have to stop and wonder… how much energy is going into the preservation of food? I mean, I think about my freezer, and my refrigerator, and I think, wow. That is something that just wasn’t available a hundred years ago. The truth is that humans have preserved and stored food without electricity for the vast majority of our history, and yet, I’m sure that most of you reading this would not consider living without it. Myself included. We believe that food must be cold, or sterilized and sealed in plastic in order to be safe. So I did a little research.

Of the top four causes of food related illness, not one of them would benefit from freezing over the most acceptable traditional preservation methods. That blew my mind. The problem is that very few people are prepared to go to the trouble of curing and preserving food properly. For instance, during my research, I read over and over that brining (soaking in extremely salty water) and subsequent smoking were not enough to keep ham safe. Duh. Ham is a cold climate food, traditionally pigs would be slaughtered and hams made after it had already gotten pretty cold in the fall. Then the hams and bacon were brined and smoked, then hung somewhere that was unheated and allowed to freeze. The rest of the pig was processed into cuts of meat, sausage, and soused hogs face, wrapped in waxed paper, and also allowed to freeze. As a matter of fact, the folks in the Foxfire books (who lived in Appalachia) make a point of the fact that if you have a warm winter your pork is going to go bad before you eat it. And in fact, studies bear this out; brining, smoking, AND temperatures below 4 degrees Celsius (39.2 degrees Fahrenheit) inhibit the growth of pathogens. Why does your sandwich ham go bad in the fridge then? Well, because traditional preservation methods are no longer used. Now they pump it full of chemicals instead of real salt and smoke. Jerky is another fine example. People used to make it, put it in jars or cloth, and it would keep just fine as long as it was dry. Why? Because there wasn’t enough water in it to allow anything to grow. No plastic necessary.

Oh, and let me tell you about vinegar and lacto-fermentation. This is really, really cool stuff. White distilled vinegar is 5-8% acetic acid, a substance that is more effective at killing salmonella than chlorine bleach. Seriously. Straight up, it has a ph of approximately 2.4, which will kill almost anything. When you add salt to it, it creates a double whammy, add in the temperature of a well-designed root cellar, and you have a potent cocktail against the growth and spread of food pathogens. How does that work? Well, in the season you would use it – winter – a properly designed root cellar will maintain a temperature of between 0 and 4 degrees Celsius (32 to 39.2 degrees Fahrenheit), which is the same as an extremely cold refrigerator… only it uses absolutely no electricity whatsoever. Also, pickles are delicious. So I say again… I think our ancestors might have known a thing or two.

Lacto-fermentation is a process that starts with inoculating food with bacteria. Sounds like a weird way to preserve food doesn’t it? But the thing is that lactobacillus is incredibly good for your digestive system. It’s one of the bacteria in live yoghurt, in fact. The wonderfulness is threefold – first, it lowers the ph to a point where most other things won’t grow. Second, it creates an anaerobic environment; it eats up all the oxygen, which inhibits some more pathogens. Lastly, it just simply crowds out other microbes. All that, and it heals your digestive tract too, creating the same inhospitable environment for pathogens in your body. Which may have something to do with why lacto-fermented vegetables, such as sauerkraut, are traditionally eaten with preserved meat, like sausage.

Now, before someone gets on my butt, yes, you can get sick from traditionally preserved foods. Let me say this again. If you use traditional preservation methods instead of industrial ones you may get a foodborne illness. Consider that my disclaimer. HOWEVER, let me point this out – according to the CDC your chance of contracting a foodborne illness each year in The United States is 16%. That’s pretty high in my opinion. And you know what? Personally, I think that I run a healthier kitchen than a commercial packing facility. That, as it turns out, is really… well the vast vast majority of the battle. You know what? I know that I am not going to process a big batch of food and put it up while I have a foodborne illness. I can count on that. I cannot count on the same from a commercial packing plant. People go into work sick. Now, I don’t blame them, they have families to feed, and in this economy calling in sick is often enough to endanger your job. But here are some more foods for thought. I know that I’m not going to put spoiled ingredients into my preserved foods. You can just forget about expecting that from commercially prepared food. For instance, did you know that commercially canned cranberry sauce is allowed to be 15% moldy? That’s an FDA regulation my friends. And that’s not the only thing. They allow 20 maggots of any size per 100 grams of canned mushrooms. Just think about that one for a minute. That means that a 15 oz. can of mushrooms is allowed to have *85* maggots in it. 45% of your ketchup is allowed to be moldy. Forty. Five. Percent. That’s to say nothing of the regulations about rodent hairs, feces, and BODY PARTS. 5% of your peanut butter, peanuts, or sesame seeds are allowed to be rodent feces. Think about that. Think about what the storage facility for those peanuts would have to look like for 5% of your peanut butter to be rat poop, BY WEIGHT. And if this isn’t horrifying enough, all of these so-called defects stack. That apple butter? Well, it’s allowed to be 12% moldy, and for each 100 grams the manufacturer is allowed to have 4 rodent hairs, and the equivalent of 4 whole insects. This is what we’re eating people, don’t for a minute think that it’s not. Suddenly my own home-preserved food is looking quite a bit healthier.

{this moment}

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.

If you're inspired to do the same, leave a link to your 'moment' in the comments for all to find and see.

Aunt Nell

I just got a phone call from a family member. The worst kind. My beloved Great Aunt Nell has passed away. I have so many feelings about this. On the one hand, I know that at 86 years old she has had a good long life here on earth. One I suspect with very few, if any, regrets. My Aunt Nell was what one might call a pistol. In fact I have called her exactly that for years. Yet for all her spunk, I can tell you that she was a class act. She had great taste, spoke well, wrote well, and had a razor sharp mind. That woman could flay you alive in two sentences, and leave you blinking, not quite sure what had happened. And yet, rarely have I ever been greeted and treated so warmly, sure from the first moment to the last that I was treasured, that I belonged, and that she loved me. To my knowledge no one ever walked into her home without being greeted, fed, and cared for, and she could talk to anyone from a ditchdigger to a head of state. In addition to that, she served her country, got married, raised a family, and had a career in an era when women were told it was inappropriate. Like I said, she was a classy lady. And I loved her.

Which leads us to the other hand. She’s gone. The pain of that is just now, hours after hearing the news, beginning to sink in. I feel like I have lost something immeasurable, for feel no confusion about this, my grief is about my own loss. As grief always is I suppose. She taught me more about being a class act and a strong woman at the same time than she ever knew. More than I know, I suspect. And though there is the peace of knowing that she is no longer struggling, no longer sick, no longer old, I feel that there is so much more that I could have learned. So much of an amazing life just… lost in translation. I will never know what it meant to stand my own ground in a world before feminism. I will never know how it felt to be on that frontier. To raise a family and champion a cause before it was acceptable for women to do both at the same time. I’ll tell you, her daughters? They are some pretty amazing people. Not really shocking, is it.

So today I’m spending my time thinking about Aunt Nell, and thinking about all of my beloved friends and relatives of her generation. I’m thinking of our inconceivable loss as they pass away, one by one. I have written before of the hubris we as a culture, and as individuals, commit when we throw away our past, so convinced that the future is all that matters. On days like today it is at its most painfully clear. It is always hard to lose someone you loved, but for me, there is something ineffably tragic about losing an elder. So much knowledge, so much experience, so much life, not just her own, but of all of those she knew who are now gone. And who is left to tell their stories? We are. And that is why it is so important to treasure our elders, to listen when they speak, to listen, over and over, as they tell the stories of their lives. To take their hard earned knowledge, earned with blood, with sweat, and with tears, and carry it in our hearts, passing it on to our children, so that they in turn can do the same for their children. Without this sacred chain, we are forced with every generation to start anew, and we leave nothing of ourselves, departing this world as though we were never in it at all. Well I can tell you this. I refuse. I refuse to bring my children up believing that old people are anything less than the great and inestimable treasure that they are. And in that spirit, tonight’s storytime will be for Nell. I’m going to tell her stories to my children, every single one of them that I can remember. And in the days to come, I will tell my children the stories of their grandparents, their great grandparents, and their great great grandparents and so on.  I will continue to tell them. I will tell them over and over, until my children carry their heritage in their hearts, until they carry Aunt Nell, Uncle Bill, Uncle Chum, Grammie Alderman, Bupa, Nanna, Grammie Bran, and everyone else inside them like a great foundation stone that says, “This. This is where I come from.” For even though they are now gone, these are some of the people who held me up to the world, who believed in me, and loved me. They gave me the courage to face my life, and the skills I needed to thrive. And you know what? That really means something.

So here’s to you Aunt Nell. Even on the way out, you’re still teaching me about myself, and that’s really quite amazing. I miss you already.

{this moment}

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.

If you're inspired to do the same, leave a link to your 'moment' in the comments for all to find and see.