agorism, gardening, homesteading

Grievance Studies and Virtue Signaling

While so many are focused on the doom and gloom of politics and environmental degradation and censorship and climate change and fake news and on and on, I am seeing glimmers of hope striking up everywhere.

beeglory — Our honeybees love the morning glory in late summer, which is considered an invasive and highly undesirable weed among most farmers who kill it with herbicides and then complain there are no bees to pollinate their fruit trees in the spring. Things that make you say, hmmm . .

And this poor sod just doesn’t get it either!

“Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/

You don’t have to be waving a flag on the Trump train to appreciate a politician making a public sport of the ‘Deep State’ –which is now a Front & Center label in the global lexicon–thanks to his administration.

Will he manage to drain the swamp? Was that ever his intention at all?

It doesn’t matter now! He’s put language on it, he’s given the corruption a popular catch phrase, which will survive long after any degree of embarrassment or hate speech or lack of diplomacy under which the American left currently feels they are unduly suffering.

And still another delicious dose of Hopium:

This little team of prankster scholars not only provided us with some great laughs, but got some great work done in the process. This is creativity at its finest and an inspiring look at how sometimes the gatekeepers can be beaten at their own game. Some of these fake papers were then published in peer-reviewed academic journals, including a hilarious one about the rape culture inherent in dog parks.

“This process is the one, single thread that ties all twenty of our papers together, even though we used a variety of methods to come up with the various ideas fed into their system to see how the editors and peer reviewers would respond. Sometimes we just thought a nutty or inhumane idea up and ran with it. What if we write a paper saying we should train men like we do dogs—to prevent rape culture? Hence came the “Dog Park” paper. What if we write a paper claiming that when a guy privately masturbates while thinking about a woman (without her consent—in fact, without her ever finding out about it) that he’s committing sexual violence against her? That gave us the “Masturbation” paper. What if we argue that the reason superintelligent AI is potentially dangerous is because it is being programmed to be masculinist and imperialist using Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Lacanian psychoanalysis? That’s our “Feminist AI” paper. What if we argued that “a fat body is a legitimately built body” as a foundation for introducing a category for fat bodybuilding into the sport of professional bodybuilding? You can read how that went in Fat Studies.” https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/

Of course we continue to have the usual misinformation and disinformation being shoveled out by the usual culprits:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/10/huge-reduction-in-meat-eating-essential-to-avoid-climate-breakdown

But then we have at our fingertips the rational-minded push back of real journalists, scientists, experts, researchers, whistleblowers, etc.:

https://www.corbettreport.com/interview-1117-jim-steele-on-how-bad-global-warming-science-hurts-the-environmental-movement/

“(Always) 10 years left to save the planet”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPGK6pNO0Qw

These are miraculous times!
On the wee homestead there’s always proof of that close on hand.

But in the attempted Globalist takeover of our cultures and our individuality it can be very tough sometimes to see past the fear-porn. And once that’s accomplished, it can be even tougher to get a personal clue as to what to do about it in whatever way one can.

But that’s happening!

Derrick Broze on 5G in Houston on DTube, not Youtube:

https://d.tube/#!/v/dbroze/q8uqc45w

Folks are rapidly moving away from the corporate-sponsored programming.

They are organizing, creating new platforms, sharing ideas and truth and camaraderie. It’s now already passé to be only ‘woke’ — the new fashion is to break the chains altogether.

https://sustainabledish.com/am-i-less-woke-because-i-eat-meat/

Folks are no longer satisfied with waking up and they are now standing up and those old neocons are dying off, but that doesn’t really matter, because it was never just about a group of white men. Just as it was never just about any one group, it’s not just the Jews, not just the Russians or Chinese, or the Communists, or the Nazis. The problem is, was and always will be the mindless, honorless order followers. That problem is being overturned on our watch and I am a thrilled witness and ardent participant in that sabotage.

What’s been revealed now en mass and which the masses have lapped up like starving kittens is the strategy. We have witnessed the Revelation of the Method and there’s no way to unsee it. Some don’t yet realize that’s what they are witnessing, they see only the chaos, they react in fear or trepidation. That’s ok.

Are you afraid of the future the technocratic Globalists have planned for us?

Good, that means we’re getting somewhere.

Now go do something about it! Please. 🙂

#Authentic Virtue Signaling

Celebrating Small Steps

Late summer here is my personal version of hell and I bitch about it every year.

What better time to take a break from my current reality where I feel like an indoor prisoner and wake up daily wanting to lash out at all the idiotic Geoengineering causing drought here and weather chaos all around the globe.

I even want to take a break from my last post pondering passivity and violence and just notice for a day, or so, all the little things and little ways we have improved upon since I last felt this level of droughtrage.

I know I am just a bit more blessed this year than last, mostly by my own sheer will and resilience, and that of Hubby as well, no doubt, and that of some inspiring neighbors and cyber-friends, and perhaps if I dwell on that fact just a bit, next year will be just a bit more blessed in turn.

Last year’s late summer garden

Or rather, lack there of 🙂

Last year’s late summer garden vs this year’s, not great, but still better!

A new young friend who loves plants as much as I do helps me identify the hardy, native heat-lovers of our area, and diligently and graciously watched our wee homestead so I could join my extended family at a reunion in July. I look forward to returning the favor when her family vacations in October. This is the sort of small steps a resilient community is made of, not the top-down control of Rockefeller’s ‘Resilient Cities’, because it’s the neighborly reliance that brings real hope and treasures and peace of mind.

borderpatrol — Collective Border Control, naturally 😉

I still don’t like okra, but I’m harvesting it anyway for the pigs and neighbors! Every once in a while I throw a few into a meal, along with other traditional Southern favorites we didn’t grow up with, but are learning to appreciate, like collards and Southern peas, eggplant and jalapenos, all which have survived the heat, but would not be here now without regular irrigation.

It’s very hard to keep up with the constant weeding and mulching requirements in such circumstances, but these plants, along with the sweet potatoes, are actually successfully competing with the grasses in some cases. Amazing!

I won’t mention the melons, because I’m hell-bent on keeping this post positive. So let’s mention instead the ‘mouse melons’, aka sanditas, or, Mexican Sour Gherkins. 🙂

Instead, let’s mention the fact that the young sweet potato vines and okra leaves are edible and quite tasty!

And the fantastic find this summer which I’m most excited to expand next year considerably, the Mexican Sour Gherkin.

Crop of the year, in my humble opinion!

Even in the dead of summer, of brutal heat and no rain, we enjoy meals raised primarily on this land. As an added bonus now my raw milk source is 5 minutes away, whereas last year at this time it was 5 hours round-trip!

The aging fridge is full of cheeses we will enjoy all winter: Cheddars, Goudas, a Parmesan and an Alpine, several Brie almost ripe, a Muenster even! YUM! Last week I taught a couple of neighbor ladies to make 30-minute mozzarella and we had such a nice time.

Next they will teach me skills they’ve acquired—spinning, dying, soap-making–a few more small steps in our agorism adventures. Skill-sharing has been such a crucial aspect of our most successful ancestors and I would be challenged to express how rewarding it is for me still, at 50 next month, to be learning so much that is new for me. It is indeed a sort of middle-age renaissance!

I also foraged for elderberries, mustang grapes and peppervine berries, dried some and made some syrups and preserves.

And, Another 400 pounds of pears, or so!

I do believe still that’s thanks to our bees. For several years we thought it was a weather issue, late frosts, whatever, but I am beginning to suspect it was a pollinator issue all along.

We will see, that’s just a hypothesis so far. And in any case we continue for another year to benefit from the cider, the preserves, the cobblers, and the pigs are getting their fill, too!

The Datura remains an absolute favorite of mine, blooming in crazy heat and exhaling the most exquisite fragrance into the evening air. The thyme, rosemary, sage, oregano are gracefully resilient as well, I appreciate all y’all!

And our dear Tori, who just as I was typing this post chased an enormous coyote off our chickens!

tori2018 — Tori today! Rewarded Homestead Guard of the Year 2018

The blessings are very close at hand, the frustrations a million miles away. I vow to maintain that truthful balance deep in my heart as I brave the coming days.

Peace and love to y’all, dear friends.

Renegade, Stupid, or Stubborn?

“I’m selling you bees on Friday so you can kill them in your top bar hives.” so smirks JC of Frost Apiary in the Ouachita Mountains, Arkansas. I drive 2 hours across the small mountain range from my dad’s place in Mena, which is a 6-hour drive from our East Texas homestead, mostly because gentle, treatment-free bees are not too easy to come by here.

We’ve got some bad genetics in these parts, as my nearby beekeeping friend and I can both attest to, only she got proof of her Africanized bees on video. Had someone been filming me as I tried to work with mine, it would’ve been cartoonish and probably hysterical as I ran circles around trees trying, in vain, to get the vicious little buggers off me.

I’ve yet to meet a commercial beekeeper who doesn’t scoff at the Kenyan-style hives known as ‘top bar’ or sometimes called ‘horizontal’ hives that are now trendy with hobbyists. I chose them as a completely novice beekeeper for 3 reasons only: weight, esthetics, and the personal preference of the teacher of the beekeeping workshops I took.

Clearly none of those reasons would impress JC even remotely, so I kept them to myself.

In all his decades of beekeeping JC has yet to meet a beekeeper successful with top bar hives. It’s good for business, he says, because they come back every spring for more bees, until they switch to Langstroth hives. He recites a string of reasons why this is, which begins with “they starve in the winter” and ends with “they starve in the spring.”

For those of you who might be curious about this less-traveled region of the fly-over states, but without the time or inclination to actually visit, here’s some of what I saw, and smelled in that 2 hours.

There were approximately 20 Jesus billboards, 10 churches, 2 banks and 1 gas station, thanks be to Jesus perhaps, because I was running on fumes by that time.

As for the smell, unless you’ve had the misfortune to experience the poorer areas of Bangkok in rainy season, you will not have approached this particular olfactory ballpark. It is directly related as to why you see houses on the left directly juxtaposed to houses on the right.

You might have guessed, get-rich-quick by factory farming. If the entire region then smells like you live in a baboon cage at the zoo, well, at least you have the means for air conditioning and Febreeze spray.

JC and his wife busy themselves moving around the shop and yard, bees buzzing all around, as he offers me advice. After 5 minutes of this he says, “I want you to go now,” which he repeats again after 10 minutes, and then again after 20.

“My health’s no good,” he also repeats several times, taking his ball cap off to reveal a fresh scar the length of the top of his scalp where a tumor was recently removed. He says he has a similar scar down his chest, a barrel of a chest still I notice, at nearing 80 years old.

“You might take it a bit easier,” I suggest, because I know how heavy those Langstroths get and I’ve just watched him effortlessly move several around the yard.

“He doesn’t believe in that!” his wife answers for him. Despite his stooped posture and some less than urban-refined social graces, his eyes are still bright and his mind and tongue sharp, which greatly softens any coarseness, in my opinion anyway.

They then carefully load up my impressively-packaged bee packages in the back seat of the car and I set the feeders on them overnight until my 6-hour drive home the following morning.

-trip

Calm, happy, well-fed, well-contained bees ready for a wee road trip.
Or, so I thought!

I’m not sure at what point I fully took to heart that the bees were not at all well-contained. At first, I just thought I had a few roaming co-pilots, not a problem.

Then about high noon, still 2 hours from home, I made a pit-stop for gas and a sandwich and return to the car buzzing with hundreds of loose bees, inside and out. I have a moment of panic before realizing I at least need to move the car away from the main traffic area of the convenience store while I devise a plan.

Once at the corner of the parking lot I realize there is no plan to be made. There was no quick fix to this problem; I had no equipment to get the boxes apart and even if I could I could not figure out where the leak was coming from. I had a single choice and no other, leave 4 packages of bees in the parking lot right now, be out the time and the money and the bees, or get back in the car and finish the trip with them. It was all, or nothing.

It was worth the bees crawling over my arms, my face, my sunglasses to see the passersby at traffic lights gawk in stupor! Handy Hubby, being the wise guy he is prone to being, suggested with a chuckle that I visit the McDonald’s drive-thru. 🙂

Because as an American I can’t resist a happy ending, I waited a week to write this post until I had one: We now have four queen-right colonies happily nesting and growing in top bar hives.

The first of my determined objectives, as I stated plainly to JC before I finally left his apiary, “I will be your first successful top bar customer, I betcha.”

More Foraged Favorites

Our dear Tori is a master forager. She’ll steal unreservedly from the melon and berry patches to the fig and mulberry trees, to even the unripe cucumbers and squashes.

Equally in the forest she is clearly divinely inspired–the perfectly ripe passion fruit she’ll scout, the bones get unearthed as her possessions no matter who has buried them, and she leads me to all the best bramble patches. The forest and our garden are her perpetual oysters–and while to see my melons walk away makes me want to cry, to her happy prance with edible treasure, well there is only to laugh!

And, apparently she’s not the only astute forager.

I love seeing how many foraging sites and blogs are currently flourishing. They inspire me to add on and spread the wealth.

Indian Strawberry

We have a big patch of these amiable volunteers just adjacent to the asparagus patch, natural companions, perhaps? In Scandinavia I met gardeners who insisted on planting their strawberries and asparagus and dill in the same space. I While these taste pretty bland compared to our cultivated varieties, they are still quite pretty, which is enough for me to spend the time to gather and prepare them.

I toss them in a salad with mulberries coming ripe at the same time. Or use them as a garnish with a spring weed pesto, along with the leaves, in moderation. Here’s a variation using chickweed, but it’s fun to get creative with whatever is in abundance.

https://nittygrittylife.com/eat-weeds-wild-weed-pesto/

Honeysuckle

While it is an invasive species for us in the southern U.S., at least it’s a useful one! While I’ve only made tea with it, some are patient enough to make jam. Maybe this will be the year I give that a try.

It’s also prized in traditional Chinese medicine.
(From: Dr. Mercola https://articles.mercola.com/herbs-spices/honeysuckle.aspx)

In TCM, the honeysuckle flower is commonly used to help ease the flu, colds and sore throat. According to Science Alert,¹¹ this plant has the ability to prevent the influenza virus from replicating. An animal study published in the journal Cell Research supports this, as it found that honeysuckle, when combined with a plant microRNA called MIR2911, was able to suppress swine flu and bird flu viruses effectively.¹²Xiao Er Ke Chuan Ling Oral Liquid (KCL), an herbal preparation that uses honeysuckle and nine other plants, was found to help treat acute bronchitis in children. A study in the Chinese Journal of Integrated Traditional and Western Medicine said KCL has antiviral, antibacterial and potent pharmacological actions.¹³Honeysuckle was also found to have wound-healing properties in rat models, according to the BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine journal.

Sassafras

A quite undermined tree of the South, considering its illustrious origins and conspiratorial fate. It is a tree widely cultivated in Asia-Pacific as an essential ingredient to the popular drug, or versions of it anyway, generally called “ecstasy”.

At first, like cannabis, it was classified among the most harmful of substances by the FDA, though our ancestors had previously been very acquainted and attached to these and so many other suddenly ‘dangerous’ plants. Then while they were deemed “carcinogenic” by our government, simultaneously expanding was its cultivation in foreign countries. This was actually before “Poppy Bush” but perhaps setting that very precedent for the former president?!

While I’ve no idea how to make the popular street drug, I can assure you it makes a deliciously fragrant tea, traditional root beer, and gumbo filé powder.

Mullein

One of the few things growing strong all winter in the South is one of the classic remedies of the typical seasonable winter ails–upper respiratory infections, cough, sinus, and so on. Go figure, mother nature to the rescue.

Yaupon

As a tea it rivals the Lipton or Lausanne you are paying good money for, it really does. It does contain caffeine and was used among the native populations regularly and as an alternative to coffee in hard times among new settlers. Drying it for a just a couple of days before roasting makes the process quicker, but roasting isn’t necessary if you like a more mild ‘green tea’ taste. The beauty is, it’s prolific and harvestable all-year-round for humans, and for the bees they have a reliable early forage in spring. Just don’t eat the berries!

Spring weed pesto and/or chimichurra sauce

Of course we love our traditional basil-based pesto with pine nuts, such a classic. But, whatever’s available in our time/space, we use it! Walnuts or pecans can replace the pricey pine version, or skip the nuts altogether. I often leave out the parmesan too (my own homemade of course), and either add that last minute, if appropriate, or make more of a chimichurri-style sauce, so yum!

We both love a combination of wild and cultivated plants and I let them blend altogether in the garden and in the sauce. Chervil, parsley, cilantro, or maybe arugula generously and gorgeously partnered with wild violet, chickweed, wild rose petal, or whatever is out there! Once prepared it’s a delicious condiment for meats, a base for dressing and marinade, or a sauce, stand-alone or blended, an instant topping for eggs or toast. It freezes really well too.

https://draxe.com/recipe/chimichurri-recipe/

Let your local, seasonal nature be your greatest guide. 🙂

A few favorite resources:

Idiot’s Guides Foraging by Mark Merriwether Vorderbruggen, PhD
http://www.foragingtexas.com

https://www.growforagecookferment.com/forage

https://sustainabledish.com

Nature’s Garden: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting and Preparing Edible Wild Plants by Samuel Thayer

Collective Utopia vs. Private Idaho

I lost my last hive just a few weeks ago, mysteriously. They dutifully pollinated the pears before their departure, sweet little creatures they are. Unfortunately, they didn’t leave a note, or much clue. I hope they swarmed and found a suitable new happy home, but I believe from what little evidence remained, that this was not the case.

The drama of the bees has been droning on now for decades. But of course, have no fear, technology comes to the rescue! First create the problem, then try to fix it while creating 3 new problems–that’s the modern, strategic, scientifically-advanced model at work.

Problem with disappearing bees? Solution, robot bees!

http://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-robot-bees-farming-patent-2018-3

The next big thing according to TV’s famed Dr. Oz, is the RFID chip. Keep losing your Alzheimer parent? Get ’em the chip!

Steve Hoffman gushes over the new tech which will allow our minds to merge with one another. He calls it ‘almost like heaven’—a state of all-inclusiveness with others where our individuality is traded and usurped by the collective, to the extreme degree we can actually feel another’s pain as our own.

But, only if we choose it, of course. Right. That’s good, because mark my words, I don’t want to be in his mind, and I certainly don’t want him, or anyone, invading mine at will either.

Will we get to choose? I’m pretty doubtful on that point. Right now, do I get to choose whether my region is cloud-seeded, or not? Nope. https://weathermodificationhistory.com/

Do I get to choose whether Walmart creates robot bees? Nope.

Do I get to choose whether scientists experiment with technology meant to replace nature, meant to manipulate the environment beyond measure, meant to research consciousness with the intention of controlling it, even replacing it? Nope, nope and nope.

Dr. Andreagiovanni Reina, Research Associate in Collective Robotics in the University of Sheffield’s Department of Computer Science, said: “This study is exciting because it suggests that honey bee colonies adhere to the same laws as the brain when making collective decisions.

“The study also supports the view of bee colonies as being similar to complete organisms or better still, superorganisms, composed of a large number of fully developed and autonomous individuals that interact with each other to bring forth a collective response.

“With this view in mind, parallels between bees in a colony and neurons in a brain can be traced, helping us to understand and identify the general mechanisms underlying psychophysics laws, which may ultimately lead to a better understanding of the human brain. Finding similarities between the behavior of honey bee colonies and brain neurons is useful because the behavior of bees selecting a nest is simpler than studying neurons in a brain that makes decisions.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22616-y

Is it for a love of nature and mankind that science and technology seek to study it so thoroughly and in this particular direction? Or, is it with the intention of replacing nature and mankind for the benefit of god knows whom?

Do they ever ask themselves if we all have the same vision of a collective utopia?

As they preach for the essential Oneness of humanity, the love and light of unity, the exalted state of community, the Kumbaya collusion of the hive, the higher consciousness of the collective, do they consider as well the famed quote by a character in one of Jean Paul Sartre’s most read plays, “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” (“Hell, it’s other people.”)

As they profess their profound compassion and concern, do they care that some of us don’t care to live with robotized nature? Have they considered putting their intellectual efforts toward saving nature, co-creating with nature, relating equally to it, rather than commanding it, deconstructing it, subjugating it, destroying and replacing it?

Do they tread so shallowly in their own individuality that they cannot conceive of the notion that one’s relationship to oneself and to nature is by far greater, more fundamental and essential, than one’s relationship to any other?

Keep your robots, your synthetics, your hive mind, your Internet of Things, your technological collective Utopia, I don’t want it.

Many of us don’t want it, but we seem to have no choice in the matter.

If I weren’t an optimist, I’d feel we are doomed here on the wee homestead; doomed to watch as we are driven from the heaven of creating our own private Idaho into the hell of another’s version of ‘progress.’

My idea of progress:

Companion planting 3.0 (gardening by aesthetics) — cultivars co-existing with native volunteers (yes, I mean weeds); edibles among poisons; annuals with perennials with crops, seasonal ‘layering’. More on all that coming soon!

Handy Hubby’s idea of progress:
Spending his entire vacation building! Color me impressed. 🙂

Signs of Spring!

This post contains farmish photos that may be offensive to some readers. But it also contains some images that could inspire you, too!

newmama — A new mama and our first lambs!

bubba.buttercup — The puppies have gotten so big we can hardly call them puppies anymore!

henbit.jjack — Jumping jacks surrounded by loads of henbit. Nature is telling me where to plant the tomatoes this year. Henbit can be an annoyance to some who like well-manicured grass or doesn’t like weeding, but it’s also a sign of high nitrogen in the soil. A great sign for your heavy feeders like tomatoes!

peartreebloom — The old-fashioned pear trees are the first to bloom here, by a long shot. We’ll have some happy honey bees very soon, and if weather permits, another huge load of pears to make our delicious hard cider.

bigchop — Slaughter time is man’s work on this wee homestead, a blessing for which I regularly thank my luck stars.

seedtrays — I love seeing the seedlings emerge under the grow lights.

It’s a wonderful, miraculous world, truly, or at least our little corner of it is.

Diet Pushing, Politics and Pigs

Warning: This post contains images and commentary potentially unsavory or offensive to vegetarians and vegans.

My most used cookbook has a provocative title–Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats by Sally Fallon.

I am not a diet pusher; I am a critic of diet pushing. I’ve long had an interest in diet and nutrition and like most Americans, by the age of 30 I’d heard it all said by the slogans of the diet dictocrats. Eat beef. Don’t eat beef. Eat eggs. Don’t eat eggs. Drink milk. Don’t drink milk. Watch your calories. No, watch your fats. Watch your sugar. No, watch your salt. No, make that sugar and salt. Caffeine causes cancer. Caffeine doesn’t cause cancer. Wine is good, or bad. Grains are good, or bad. I could go on for pages here, but I know you know what I’m talking about. Nutrition science is right up there with environmental science as being ever-changing and ever-controversial.

Currently the diet pushers are promoting vegetarianism and veganism. I say currently, though it goes back many decades, because it seems to be hitting a crescendo lately. As a case in point, a sociology professor demonstrates just how political diet can be, arguing in a recent article that eating meat perpetuates ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and ‘gender hegemony’.

“To study the link between masculinity and meat, DeLessio-Parson interviewed 23 vegetarians who live in Argentina to probe how they deal with their country’s “meat-centric” culture, finding that being vegetarian itself is a political act.”

“Refusing meat therefore presents opportunities, in each social interaction, for the [gender] binary to be called into question.”

https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10221

My immediate thought, after laughing out loud, was: “So if meat represents ‘hegemonic masculinity’ does dairy represent ‘hegemonic femininity’?”

But jokes aside, what I find most interesting about the vegetarian/vegan phenomenon is that it has so deeply penetrated a few sectors of society where it seems to me to be terribly misplaced: libertarianism, anarchism, paganism, and even among homesteading/sustainability advocates.

I have no criticism to direct at these groups and individuals making their choices to enjoy whatever diet and lifestyle they wish. Many vegetarians and vegans choose this diet for valid ethical and health reasons and I applaud this conscious choice on their parts.

My issue is when, and why, and how, diet becomes a tool of politics. And especially, when those politics are propagandizing and peddling false information.

There are many others out there with this same concern besides Sally Fallon. Some other powerful players have also spent considerable time and research adding to the conversation, like Michael Pollan, Wenonah Hauter, Marion Nestle, Nina Teicholz, Joel Salatin, among many more.

The only thing I can add to the wealth of knowledge already out there is my personal experience and opinion living now very close to the land and our own food sources for many years: Veganism is antithetical to sustainable agriculture, permaculture, homesteading, and any other system or worldview where decentralization is a valued goal.

Here is why, in words and pictures.

Growing grains and legumes requires vast expanses of managed land that is kept free from predators and pests. Our fruits and vegetables require keeping out the vast and varied competition from deer, rabbits, squirrels, feral hogs, birds, rodents and insects of all sorts. Eating vegetables and grains does not equate to NOT killing animals. You’re simply killing/trapping/disrupting other wild creatures other than the omnivores do.

farmscene.cz — Rape-seed (canola) fields, Moravia 1994

If it is not local, it is not sustainable. Pineapples from Hawaii, kiwis from Australia, grapes from Chile, grains from India–these are all great luxuries and it’s a treat to be able to enjoy them thanks to modern technology and transport. But anarchists and voluntaryists, pagans, homesteaders and all those who understand and recoil at the undue influence of Government power in our daily lives surely understand that without local control of sustainable food production the community, family and individual are forever at the mercy of a centralized system.

If it’s not local, if it’s not sustainable, it should be understood as the icing, not the cake. Leave the icing to Big Brother if you must, but certainly let’s get his hands out of the cake!

These skillsets have been lost and need to be reclaimed–it’s how we all got here, after all. Proper handling of a gun, knife, heavy carcass is skilled labor and if it’s men who are more capable and interested in handling these chores, praise be to the heavens, I say. This doesn’t mean every man must want to do these things, but it certainly means we should not be discouraging them with nonsense about meat as synonymous to a brutal patriarchy.

Vegetables, grains, fruits, most things that grow need good soil. Good soil is created with compost, manure and other fertilizing elements which, in the amount required for the large tracts of land required to produce grains efficiently, and in the absence of farm animals’ excrement, must be purchased, most likely from large corporations.

Cui bono, or, for whose benefit?

In the case of a truly sustainable setting there are many benefactors to a family’s pig slaughter: the dogs, the poultry, the vultures, the insects and the soil. Not to mention the human guests, of course.

In the case of a vegan diet? Big Ag benefits most of all. I know many vegans are well-meaning and will bristle at that comment, but this is just the plain truth. No small local farmer can compete with grain and vegetable prices of big ag. While it’s true they can’t compete with the meat prices either, in our case currently, and in most places without an ideal growing climate, pound per pound, meat is cheaper and easier to produce than vegetables or grains.

With the on-going geoengineering assault on the weather, I expect this will become more true in the immediate future. Even worse, I expect in less than a decade we will all be forced to grow vegetables indoors as the weather will become too unpredictable for even hobby and homestead gardeners to have reliable produce.

decrosentori — Roses blooming in December, and snow in south Texas = weather whiplash (geoengineeringwatch.org)

Not only do we get to enjoy the ribs, and the hams, and the bacon, oh my, but also the lard, the cracklins (aka chicharones or pork rinds), and the happy dogs when they get pork instead of poultry for a change.