More on food

Not something I'm about to suffer, but this article about orthorexia, when people's lives become taken over by food dogma, is very interesting.

I am still reading as much as I can easily get my hands or eyes on about immune system building foods. It all seems to come back to the health of the gut. I'm watching Nikki's blog with great interest as her family embark on a diet to heal their guts, specifially in support of Nikki's young son who has had big health challenges of late.

Today I found some more broth ingredients. We had to go to Hokitika to get the car fixed, so got to shop at the fishmongers and at the local craft and produce market. The fishmonger gave me bones for stock for free and checked that I knew how to make the fish stock without it going bitter. So tonight I am putting beef bones to cook overnight and tomorrow I will make fish stock. I am looking around and thinking of recipes to use my broths in to expand from my standard risotto and soup usages.

I found the Hari Hari butcher's caravan and had a chat with the butcher. He doesn't use West Coast animals for his meat either, though he would very much like to. He has a homekill service as part of his business but is not allowed to sell that commercially. The costs of setting up a commercial abbatoir are prohibitive (I've heard this from another butcher on the coast recently too) and so his meat comes from Canterbury. Drives me insane. The logic of these regulations is very unclear. I was relaying this to the goat cheese people on the way home when I stopped to buy feta and they agreed. They had huge hoops to jump through to get their cheese production okayed and are still not allowed to export.

But the cheese people had another story for me. They used to farm beef cattle. Two of their three year old beasts tested positive for TB and so they were given $100 for each animal. They were not allowed to buy them back themselves. So they researched and found out where the animals went. They go into the supermarket meat chain. They calculated that each beast would have produced, for the people who paid only $100, six thousand dollars' worth of meat. Errrm, where are the ethics in all of this?

Last night I got out in the garden. I weeded the old chook run and pulled out spent plants and thinned where things were growing too thickly. Some of the lettuce has bolted or become bitter already so much of the lettuce went to the compost or the chook run. I removed zillions of caterpillars and eggs and still found some fat caterpillars feasting on the same plants this morning. I am part way through mulching the old chook run with pea straw.

Returning to term time, with school runs, tired children and me working part time, has turned me into a weekend gardener for the moment. It has also had an impact on my projects inside - I've nearly forgotten the kefir. But slowly I am getting some rhythm back and I've got my kefir tasting nice again. I bought a huge bunch of basil today (and somehow spent $23 on less than 400gms of pine nuts later on - ouch) and so have pesto to make tonight. I also want to get some sourdough going again. There isn't much point me paying good money for freshly milled organic flour if I leave it in the container untouched for months...

Then there are the tomatoes I bought this afternoon for making pasta sauce...

I fall off the good food wagon on a fairly regular basis, almost always when I am short of time. Today's pie for breakfast is an extreme example, but it isn't a once a year phenomenon. The hot chips we shared after swimming this afternoon now scream 'naughty' at me given all the reading I've been doing on carbohydrates, but they did taste very yummy. As I wasn't dressed this morning when our kind panelbeating friend rang to say it was time to get going and meet him, a chilly bin full of healthy goodies to sustain us on our day out was a romantic and pleasant idea, not something that was going to become reality. Once we were home again and the children had two parents in the house at once, I cooked proper food for dinner. I made raita to go with the fish, potatoes and salad and reflected that raita is probably a good condiment for probiotic purposes.

I've been seeing something called 24-hour yoghurt crop up in my gut healing reading. I presume this is any old yoghurt (including easiyo?) which has been fermented for 24 hours before going in the fridge? Because if it is, then I've been making that for a while now, 100% because I so often forget about the yoghurt's existence until 24 hours after I've put it down to culture. Although the packet says 8 hours, I generally do a minimum of 12, even on days when my memory is functioning well.

I will stick to using up my wool scraps...

Last I wrote that I was part way through the gorgeous homespun and home dyed wool from Granity and that after that I would move on to other balls in my stash. A stash which I had thought was too small to be called a stash before I cleaned the study and faced the sum total of all the balls previously in bags all over the place. Today I used up the homespun wool and thought how very beautiful the dress would look if I picked out the green in the variegated wool at our local wool shop and did the rest of the dress in soft green.

Two things.

The wool shop is not open on a Sunday, it is Sunday today and I want to carry on with the dress.

We were at friends for lunch today and one of our friends talked about how people on secure jobs (very luckily, this includes us) are in an improved position and should spend up a bit. This really jarred with me, as it did the first time someone I heard the idea (from someone else again). It doesn't feel right. Is it because I feel there is too much wasteful consumption clogging up our planet? Is it because I feel sick, as I do, at the idea that I am benefitting from the misfortune of others as our mortgage interest rate drops and shop prices fall while others no longer have a job?

So I am continuing on the dress using up my odd balls of wool. I am knitting in black now.

cow farts

Morag raised this vexed issue recently. Could the world be better without cows? Some time last year further research came out which demonstrated that the ecological footprint of a cow was huge. And bad. I found the snippet from the New Scientist and went googling at the time but it appeared then that research was in pretty early stages. So I could not find out to what extent the conditions of living of a cow made a difference or how sheep compared on the fart impact scale. Or chooks or goats or pigs... Given how very different the conditions of a cow raised on grain, living in a concrete "paddock" in a US feedlot are to a cow raised entirely on grass in New Zealand, pretty significant questions remain in my opinion.

Beyond the basics of how stock are raised in different countries, I'd also like the research to go further and help us to understand whether some breeds are more efficient producers of meat than others when their fart impacts are compared to their meat production rates. I would very much like to understand how the impacts in terms of farts (colloquialism for methane emissions unless I have misunderstood things badly) compare between the different types of meat commonly available to me. For example, beef vs lamb vs pork.

Morag raised the issue of milk and the byproducts of the dairy industry in terms of unwanted calves. A proportion of each season's new female calves will be kept by the farmer in New Zealand as new milking cow stock, to replace old cows who will be phased out of production in the coming year (yes, that will translate to being killed). But almost all male calves in New Zealand and some female calves will be sent to 'the works' (an abbatoir) within two days of being born. My Dad worked in such an abbatoir for almost all of my childhood and I rang him yesterday with a few questions.

Bobby calves in New Zealand have not had time to acquire much meat on their bones. Dad explained that unless practices have changed (he left the works about five years ago), NZ bobby calf meat goes to the US and is turned into luncheon sausage.

I have never seen veal for sale in NZ but I know it is available in the UK and Europe and is a contentious practice. This involves calves being reared especially for their tender meat. Animal welfare activists have fought successfully to ban crate-reared veal in Britain. I don't know a lot beyond that.

I am thinking that the small or self-sufficient holding in the past probably carried a cow and a bull and a calf. Cow for milk and cheese and bull for ploughing paddocks for growing food in and a calf to initially keep the milk going but at some stage either to provide meat or to replace the ageing cow or bull. Or to provide a dowry I suppose. In terms of land usage and amount of meat in the diet, it is a far cry from today's meat-rich eating practices in the western world.

Most satisfactory events of today

Pay day.

Fish and chips night.

The June issue of NZ Gardener arrived in the post. Under Lynda Hallinan, this magazine has really developed into something fantastic. There are still the profiles of beautiful and expansive ornamental gardens and rare plants, but there is now much much more on growing edible fruits and vegetables. They are even talking about digging for victory. It is a glossy and positive magazine and well placed to appeal to mainstream readers. Lynda herself is pretty and sexy (and clever) and does lots of talks, including on television, which have raised the magazine's profile. It's all welcome in my view.

Went to Alf Harrison's menswear shop. This shop is a small locally owned business in our small town and it is something of a blast from the past. The current window display is of tweed caps. Very nice they are too. Anyway, I was looking for dress trouser socks for Favourite Handyman for use in his other life where he doesn't do jobs around our home and garden. And here in our small local shop I found just the thing, in a merino and possum and nylon blend which is made (most of the raw materials and all of the secondary product) right here in New Zealand. A rare opportunity to make such a satisfyingly ethical purchase.

From the library: the autobiography of Clarissa Dickson Wright (of The Two Fat Ladies fame).

I have started another bread making venture. It uses an overnight yeast liquor method. I did this once before for the High Fibre bread earlier this month and it all got so brothy that the mixture overflowed out of the bowl, the towel and onto the sheets below. Both the sheets and the liquor were in the hot water cupboard. So I have used a bigger bowl this time. I got to use up a bit more oat bran. I'm through nearly all of the Surebake yeast (the expensive kind with added improvers) and now I'm working my way through the ordinary dried yeast container. Once they're all used up, I'll go back to sourdough experiments for the most part, I think.

retirement ethics

As you might expect of a leftie girl, I'm not keen on the world of the sharemarket and of large corporates. I'm not keen on structures in which working people are paid as little as possible in order to maximise returns for totally absent persons known as 'shareholders'. I believe financial returns should be for productive work, not merely for already having money.

And this has led me to ponder the ethics of retirement funds. As far as I can work out, plans like Kiwisaver, involve 'investment' of my funds and then when I'm much older, those funds will be worth more and thus will pay for me to live when I am no longer able to work productively myself.

So where is all this productivity margin going to come from? If myself and all other supposedly sensible people in wealthy countries invest in funds which are the product of someone else's not fully recompensed toil... this is where I'm at in my thinking. Something doesn't feel right. In my view, I already use and abuse working people all over the world when I purchase items made with exploitative labour. This gives me a level of unsease which I try to deal with by making careful and somewhat minimal purchases and also by refusing to let the issue and it's magnititude so swamp me that I give up and do nothing about fair trade/ethical shopping/reducing consumption.

I think a turning point for me on this topic was listening to the National Radio one weekday lunchtime and hearing matter of fact discussions about investment in retirement homes. If we can put aside the irony of possibly investing in retirement homes businesses in order to fund my own retirement, What concerned me was such a business being run at a profit. It more than concerned me, it made me feel sick. And it still does.

I don't have answers, but I certainly have questions.