Heirloom Gardening, Food and Other Thoughts
The second podcast segment I recorded for the Alternative Kitchen Garden on heirloom gardening is available for download.
This week’s podcast also included a segment done by Rebsie of Daughter of the Soil about historical beetroot varieties. A really facinating segment, and very well done! For me this is also my first time hearing the voice behind the blog I’ve been reading for years now.
Also featured was Madeleine who talked about preserving herbs, also a really interesting segment!
I posted previously on this spelt I’m growing, here and here.
Here are some of the heads after harvest:
The plants were quite productive. A rough estimate would be I planted 20g of seeds and ended up with a harvest of about 1Kg, or a 50-fold increase.
This is something of an ongoing experiment. Spelt is an old wheat variety, and is known for having a difficult to remove husk. I am going to try building a hulling machine, and see how it goes. This year I don’t have enough to make harvest or threshing difficult to do by hand, but in the long run I will have to see if this is a good variety for this. This particular variety of spelt was used originally for making German pretzels.
I’m sorry for all of you reading this outside of the European Union, this doesn’t really apply to you.
There is a Dutch language article on the subject here.
For you Europeans, there is an important vote coming up on Tuesday in the EU parliament on the issue of pesticide use in Europe. For Holland this is a very important issue, because there is a great deal of pollution caused by agricultural poisons. A large percentage of these pesticides are used by the flower industry in order to grow blemish free cut flowers and flower bulbs for export. These pesticides are of course different than what is used for food, and have different criteria for safety.
These pesticides are polluting the surface water, meaning drinking water has to come from deeper and deeper wells, a process that can’t continue forever.
Holland also has many important and fragile ecosystems that are kept under constant stress by the use of these chemicals.
The upcoming vote, this Tuesday 17 July, is for a series of amendments to an already agreed upon resolution. Among other things these measures call for a 50% reduction in pesticide use in the next 10 years (amendment 119), creation of a new pesticide tax (amendment ITRE 2) and allocation of money for organic agriculture (amendment 287).
A secret vote on these measures is planned! In case some of you thought we lived in a democracy that was sensitive to the wishes of the people, apparently in this case they don’t want the pressure of public opinion. As well as encouraging your representatives to support these measures, please also encourage them to voluntarily make their votes public so it’s clear who should be supported in the next elections.
I came across this recent Danish invention (via Riverrim). A weed killing robot that recognizes weeds and is used together with:
“High-tech tools for weeding that at a later stage can be implemented are tools like laser, micro spraying and mechanical devices.”
Are robots that travel through our gardens using a laser to kill weeds what the future holds?
A recent study in Italy discovered a link between aspartame and cancer. Aspartame is the artificial sweetener used in soft drinks and over 5000 other products in the US. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is not concerned, and says there is no reason to review the safety of this product.
This is kind of interesting, because in 1995 a document containing data from the FDA, which was released after some considerable effort and a Freedom of Information Act request, shows the FDA is aware of 92 symptoms associated with aspartame, including cancer, neurological problems, even death! It’s worth having a look at some of the other links on this same site on the subject too. One of the reasons for all of these symptoms is aspartame breaks down in your body into several different chemicals including formaldehyde, a known neurological poison and carcinogen.
One of the things many people don’t know about aspartame is it causes weight gain. It does this because it makes you crave carbohydrates.
Aspartame can aggravate medical problems associated with diabetes.
Aspartame is one of several controversial products that does not itself contain modified DNA, but is made with the assistance of micro-organisms that do. This technique is used in a number of products including rennet used to make hard cheese, as well as a number of pharmaceutical products and food supplements. This is how Unilever’s famous fish ice cream anti-freeze is made. This technique was apparently behind the manufacture of the now restricted food supplement L-tryptophan, which was the source of a very serious poisoning epidemic in the US in 1989 involving at least 707 people in 48 states.
Monsanto, the well known GM seed company, holds the patent for aspartame.
Because aspartame is not itself a GM product, rather only made with the assistance of GM organisms, it does not have to be labeled nor is it’s sale restricted in Europe.
The approval of aspartame in the US was surrounded in controversy. Donald Rumsfeld (of all people) was first the CEO at Searle laboratories, where aspartame was developed, and then on Ronald Reagan’s transition team after he won the presidential election. Rumsfeld appointed a new head of the FDA, who then quickly lead the way for the approval of aspartame.
The economics behind aspartame are pretty obvious. While there are clearly some initial development costs and production facilities need to be built, there should be virtually no ongoing costs because it is simply a matter of letting the GM micro-organisms do the work. Considering the volume of aspartame sold worldwide, this should bring the cost down to almost nothing.
While sugar doesn’t cost very much, when considering that sugar beets or cane (or corn for the high fructose corn syrup used in the US) need to be grown, processed and transported, it’s easy to see that aspartame should cost far less. When you consider for example how many cans of soft drinks are sold worldwide, it’s pretty easy to see why there would be a lot more money in selling drinks made with aspartame rather than sugar.
To me this situation looks a lot like Big Tobacco from a few years ago. Massive profit margins meant unending advertising campaigns and paid spin doctors telling us there was no proof tobacco was addicting or breathing other people’s smoke was unhealthy. They would tell us things like, of course tobacco is unhealthy, we’ve known it for decades, that’s what it says on the package, but smokers have the right to smoke anywhere and everywhere at anytime, because they have rights too. Remember those years? Now of course we all have a different view of the situation. Many people now have serious health problems because the tobacco companies were able to drag their feet for so long, and the politicians were only too happy to go along.
Something very similar is going on with aspartame. When challenged on the issue company spokesmen will tell us of course some people have allergies to it, but there is no proof of anything more serious than that. They tell us there are many conspiracy theories on the Internet! In the recent discussion on sugary drinks being sold in schools where they might be temping to children, the soft drink industry was very quick to suggest aspartame as a healthier alternative to sugar.
If there was any ingredient for all of us to avoid in processed foods, this could very well be the most important!
