I grew up on fast food, TV dinners, mac & cheese, like most middle class Americans. And I liked it, like most middle class Americans. Because, I didn’t know any better. Like most middle class Americans.
We had a constant supply of chips, cookies, candy, coke, and all things convenience. Our cupboards and fridge were never empty. I never worried I would go hungry.
And yet, I know now, decades later, I was malnourished. I know this in retrospect, like I know now I was also vaccine injured. It is not until you know what real nourishment feels like, what real health feels like, that you can recognize its opposite.
I feel like I was one of the lucky ones. I saw it in time. I traveled, so I saw how different my normal actually was, in the wider context. No other culture ate like we did. Every other culture was healthier than we were. It has since changed in the last decades, as more cultures adapt to Western, particularly the modern American, faux-food diet.
But this realization is far from new or unique. As James Corbett so well documents, and I’m elaborating on now with personal anecdote, food as a weapon is not new or unique.
When was food weaponized? Well, let’s just say, it’s been a minute.
My food upbringing was normalized and enhanced— baby formula replacing breast feeding, a dozen vaccines added per decade, cooking from scratch becoming obsolete, supplements becoming de rigeur, pharmaceuticals coming to rule the world of health where food once reigned.
And the conquering continues.
Corbett: “The answer is simple. We are witnessing a controlled demolition of the food supply chain, one that is intended to result in the destruction of the current industrial farming system as we know it. But this changeover is not intended to return us to truly sustainable farming practices, with local, organic farmers producing crops in accordance with age-old agricultural wisdom. Far from it. As it turns out, the “solution” to this food crisis being proffered by the billionaires of the corporate-pharmaceutical-medical-industrial-philanthrocapital-military complex is being engineered in laboratories and sold to the public via a bought-and-paid-for mainstream media. One thing is for certain: the future of food will look very different from anything that we have seen in human history.
Scientists are bioengineering spores that can be inserted into crops and livestock, allowing companies to identify and track food products all the way through the food system, from farm to factory to fork. DARPA is doling out multi-million-dollar contracts for researchers to find ways “to turn military plastic waste into protein powder” for human consumption. A company called Amai Proteins is using genetically engineered microbes to create peptides that taste like sugar but are digested like proteins. And the best (read: worst) part is that, “[a]lthough these microbes are technically genetically engineered, the desired products can be purified and legally sold as non-GMO”!”
Just as my home cupboards were full, todays grocery stores are full. As we suffer mass malnutrition.
Yes, some claim shortages because they can no longer find cheap cat food. Whatever.
A food supply abundant with non-nourishing food is worse than empty store shelves. Exponentially worse. We are a population lulled into the illusion of abundance for the last six decades plus.
If you think that’s not a deliberate and highly effective conquering strategy, you are a fool.
I ran out of attention span last post before I got to talking about cheese. Now that we have three mamas in milk I’ll be having a ball experimenting with new cheeses, which along with kombucha experimenting, is my favorite homesteady sort of thing to do.
Gardening and cooking being not far behind, to be sure!
Aged chèvre (goat cheese) in the French tradition is made of the highest craft and care, even when they are whimsically-named, like Crottin (Little Turd) and Sein de NouNou (Wetnurse breast).
But here in the U.S., Land of the FreeTM, Velveeta is ‘safe’ for consumers and aged goat cheeses, ideal for homestead creation, are completely illegal.
Because they care so very much, right?
“Chèvre evolved in frugal farming households of the sort that continue to make it today. It is a cheese that’s very economical, in both time and ingredients; made on the family farm, where there are many chores to take care of and livestock to feed, a cheese that didn’t need much attention or many costly ingredients fit right in.”
That is in Central France and other locations where it’s not illegal to sell. These are cheeses that require few inputs and no regular purchases—you don’t need a cheese press, or any expensive cultures, or even rennet. Fig sap (or other coagulants like nettles) can easily be substituted for rennet as only a few drops are used to set a gallon of milk.
Straight from goat to curd is the best way to make chèvre, no refrigeration, no heating, at all. Pictured from left: 1. Straining the milk with fine mesh. 2. The soft curd, after sitting in the pot for two days, now draining in their forms, made from small tuperware poked with many holes. 3. After 24 hours of draining, sitting beside a homemade cheese ready to be cut: A signature Kensho cheese experiment.
These are also cheeses suitable to make in warm climates, similar to the more well-known goat cheeses like Feta or a fresh goat cheese. What makes the aged chèvre so unique is that it can only be made with raw milk. You may find hard raw milk cheeses in your grocery store or farmer’s market, like Gouda or Cheddar, these are pressed cheeses aged over two months, which are legal to sell with all the proper licensing. (I have NO interest in that!)
Feta, aged in salted whey for 2 weeks, some still soaking for a sharper flavor and others now drying for packaging in Foodsaver bags for longer storage.
These illegal aged goat cheeses sit at room temperature for about four days.
Imagine the horror the germophobes have with that!
You most certainly can’t do that with pasteurized milk. These cheeses were invented before pasteurization and before refrigeration and aged for a month or two in caves.
Mine will be aged in Tupperware bins inside a small beverage fridge I use for aging cheeses. (I would prefer not to use plastics at all, but they work just fine and I don’t have other options at the moment.).
I use natural cultures, not store-bought or freeze-dried, developed from previous cheeses, and stored in the freezer. Once the cheeses develop their fungal coat after a couple of weeks, they will be wrapped and aged for about a month.
Traditionally wrapping for these cheeses include leaves, like grape and fig, and even hornet’s nests. A few will also be coated with ash, instead of wrapping, like the traditional Sein de NouNou.
It is positively amazing how differently the cheeses will taste based on just a few variables in the process!
“Relatively unknown in North America, this class of cheeses includes some of France’s most famous fromages: ash-coated and pyramid-shaped Valencay; Sainte Maure—pierced with a blade of straw (the industrial version of Sainte Maure features plastic straws!); and small, moldy Crottin are all aged chèvre cheeses. Perhaps the only well-known North American aged chèvre is Humboldt Fog, a creamy, ash-ripened goats’ milk cheese from Humboldt County, California.”
(I’ve not looked into why or how the Humboldt Fog is legal to mass produce and sell. I plan to dig into that, but my initial guess is they’ve been able to either find a way to use pasteurized goat milk or they have a state-of-the-art affinage ‘cave’ where they can age it over two months without losing the creamy texture.)
“Goats are a belligerent species that have rejected the rigorous production regime thrust upon their bovine cousins. Unlike cows, who contentedly chew their cud in confinement and produce enormous quantities of milk year-round, goats refuse to be cogs in the machine of industrialized dairying.”
On left: Cutting into the last Kensho cheese experiment, aged two months, a washed-rind cheese similar to something between a Muenster and Gouda. Result: Delicious Success!
A most excellent resource, and the source of the above quotes:
Goats, a belligerent species? HA! The perfectly adorable non-conformists more like!
The latest and last addition to the herd this year (in the foreground) yet to be named, and already twice the size of our wee Athena (in the background, about 5 days old), formerly Zena, we decided we prefer the former. Any name suggestions on our newest? We are at a loss so far with this big girl who is sure to be a lifetime keeper! She came out huge and most active and ready to suckle immediately and play within 1 day!
In its typical, now routine, fashion ‘science’ comes to save the day and leads everyone astray.
Once upon a time they desperately wanted us to fear cannabis, so they fudged some data to make it look like not only is marijuana a ‘gateway drug’ but it will kill all your brain cells and transform you into a moronic, lethargic two-ton-Tessy with crossed eyes.
Sassafras, that most delicious natural ingredient that used to make up root beer and was enjoyed by our ancestors for centuries—science data decided it’s a carcinogen and it gets stripped from the marketplace for half a century. Then the data decides, oops, nevermind. Then they decide it makes an awesome illegal street drug known by “Ecstasy” aficionados as “Sass” and it’s then highly processed active ingredients are exploited by twisted chemists and greedy marketers and pushed on curious kids around the world. Thanks, again, Science!
So, forgive me when I heard for the first time the panicked cries about the poisonous pokeweed I had to roll my eyes a little. I heard repeated the usual crazy as I tried to research it myself—the ranchers trying in vain to eradicate it permanently before it kills all their cattle; the dying children whose dumbass parents didn’t perform the proper ceremonial procedures before consuming; the dead chickens who consumed the poisoned berries, etc. All nonsense. We’ve never had a chicken or any other animal fall ill from this ubiquitous ‘weed’. The four-legged show no interest in it and the birds, wild and domesticated, love the berries at the end of summer when little else is available for them.
And, it is the most delicious green I’ve ever tasted, no exaggeration.
Signs spring has sprung: pokeweed, poison ivy and dogwoods in bloom
I’m not alone in my palate preferences.
“For many, getting a springtime poke-sallet fix was indeed a psychological if not necessarily a medicinal shot in the arm. Azzie Waters remembered a saying by ‘old Doc McClain’ of Marble Hill, Georgia, who declared that ‘if you’ll eat one good mess of poke sallet in the spring of the year, you won’t have typhoid fever.” (Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, & Scuppernong Wine: The Folklore and Art of Southern Appalachian Cooking by Joseph E. Dabney, p. 263)
It’s simply miraculous our ancestors managed to survive at all before the Great Age of Scientism came to our collective rescue! Though I do suspect back in the day folks knew better where to draw that very fuzzy line between science and politics. Yet more crucial life skills lost to Progress.
As for the ‘proper ceremonial procedures’ I’m referring to the often repeated ‘requirements’ of fully boiling the greens three times, rinsing them and changing the water each time before consuming. I tried this, wanting to give these nincompoops the benefit of the doubt, knowing full well this had to be overkill. Simple logic told me there’s no way mountain folk would waste that much time and resources, hauling huge pots of water, burning all that fuel, and still consider these greens such a great Spring treasure. My hunch was correct, considering the mess of greens that resulted was the equivalent of green soup with hardly a solid piece of green remaining. Clearly that’s not what all the Southern old-timers rave about.
A bit more research and I’d bet only one parboiling is necessary. But, I’ve been giving it two, just to be on the safe, but still delicious, side. From there it can be used just like spinach and the taste is far better. Traditionally it was popular to fry it in bacon grease or coat it in cornmeal and deep fry it like okra.
Tonight we’ll be enjoying it smothered in homemade Mexican queso. Mmmmm. 🙂
Can you tell who your ancestors were from the sorts of foods you like?
Folks say you develop a taste for the foods you grew up with and keep a sort of inner-scent nostalgia from childhood, like when Proust describes his semi-conscious love affair with Madeleines.
I’d say that’s only the surface layer of the story. The first time I smelled beans cooking from scratch, as in not coming from a can, I felt I was wafting on scented dreams that could not possibly have come from my own limited lifetime.
We didn’t eat sourdough or sauerkraut either growing up. We ate Oreos, McDonalds, KFC, TV dinners, mac & cheese, and we loved them. All the way through university I lived on mostly fast food and had little clue what cooking from scratch actually meant.
So, considering I was well-adapted to such convenience foods growing up and had developed such a taste for them that I craved them after moving to areas where they were not available, what gives?
Hubby had a much more traditional outlook from his childhood than I did. More than any other single influence in my move toward better nutrition, he was my inspiration. He introduced our household to fermented foods, and now I’m primarily the one who nurtures those crafts. His folks had already been gardening in his youth and still had a ‘subsistence’ mindset, and by that I mean they still ‘put up’ food, something that was unheard of to me growing up.
Do you eat to live or live to eat?
Breaking bread together still means something in our country, I think, but barely. Somehow even the traditional ‘pot luck’ is hardly lucky anymore when food sensitivities reign and diet dictocrats menace and folks’ general health is so poor who knows what will set them off the deep end.
New film: Like Beans for Beef? I don’t think so!
Sensual, comforting, beautiful, sublime, simple, food is far more than sustenance, just as depicted in a popular and a most favorite film of mine, Like Water for Chocolate. Can your mood affect your meal? Can your meal affect your mood? Any true cook or gourmand knows, indeed, it can, and often does. That is ‘the weather’ both inside and out, tempers the dish, for better or worse, and that’s a fact I’ll swear by.
Which came first: the cheese, the beer, the wine, the bread, the kraut or the Kombucha?
In Czech they say their beer is liquid bread. Fermentation is a key miracle of life that I had no idea existed until I was nearly 40. I’d visited caves in France where Champagne is aged and others where Roquefort is crafted and been to festivals where the ‘new wine’ and liters of beer were copiously enjoyed and obviously had eaten pickles in my lifetime, but none of these experiences cemented the notion of fermentation in my mind.
“In all raw whole foods, the food plays host to beneficial bacteria that are particularly suited to devouring it. These native cultures also help to transform the basic foodstuff into traditionally fermented foods: Cabbage contains all the bacteria it needs to become sauerkraut, wheat has all the bacteria and yeasts it needs to become bread (or beer), and grapes have all the culture they need to become wine. Milk is no exception: The native biodiversity of raw milk provides microorganisms that help infants digest their mothers’ milk (and cause the milk to decay if it is spilt); these microorganisms are all that the milk needs to become the many different styles of cheese.” The Art of Natural Cheesemaking: Using Traditional, Non-Industrial Methods and Raw Ingredients to Make the World’s Best Cheeses by David Asher
The first time I tasted Camembert with onions was in Germany, partnered with great beer, and it was instantly a favorite meal. At home I bought an American-imported version of both, but they were not the same. Once I started to make cheese myself I realized why, and also realized, I’d become a bonafide cheese snob. A freeze-dried culture is very different from a ‘territoire’ cultivated culture—as different as Velveeta is from the homemade ‘Mexican queso’ it’s supposed to imitate.
“Generations upon generations of traditional cheese makers evolved the diverse methods of making cheese while carefully practicing their art. All classes of cheese were discovered by cheese makers long before they had a scientific understanding of the microbiological and chemical forces at play in its creation. Industry and science hijacked cheers making from the artisans and farmers some 150 years ago, and since then new new styles of cheese have been created; yet during that time hundreds, possibly thousands, of unique cheeses have been lost.” (Asher)
These cheeses were made from my own fungal cultures and have a far superior taste compared to the cheeses made with the typical freeze-dried cultures: brevibacterium linens, geotrichum candidum, penicillin roqueforti
I know how bizarre this will sound to many, because that’s how it sounds to me, now. I didn’t even know vegetables had seasons and I’d never tasted cheese that wasn’t processed and wrapped in plastic, but I assure you, for a girl raised in the American suburbs this was/is typical.
I remember the first time a visiting Czech friend tasted an American beer, he remarked, “That’s an interesting beverage, not bad, but it’s not beer.” It was Budweiser, the ‘beer’ that was originally from Plzen, called Budvar. Even then, already as a ‘worldly’ adult, I didn’t fully grasp his meaning.
Now I understand he was noticing the obvious lack of real fermentation. Like breads made from instant yeast instead of natural yeast, or cheese made from freeze-dried cultures instead of natural cultures, there is most definitely a difference and once you are sensitized to it you cannot even refer to this difference as subtle. It’s glaringly elementary, yet it’s pitifully difficult to describe.
We grew up with artificial sodas like Coke, but we don’t drink them now, because once you master your own favorite Kombucha flavors, artificial flavors become unpalatable. Ditto on the artificial condiments—ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, Tabasco—these all fared from real and healthy foods that once kept our ancestors thriving for centuries before science learned how to mimic them, but not in nutrition, only in taste, and even then, only sort of.
It’s similar to the modern rose that is hardly a rose but in looks alone. And even then, only sort of. Do modern cultivars creating the equivalent of fake boobs recall that roses, like boobs, once had a nutritive purpose that surpassed mere vulgar voluptuousness?
It would appear that no, they do not, because even here in the ‘rose capital’ of Tyler, Texas, boasting a very popular annual festival with a Queen and everything, I’d never have fathomed roses were once cultivated primarily for their hips.
Selective breeding and shortcuts require compromises that are most often not worth it once you develop refinement and can truly appreciate how unsurpassed is the luxury of time. Two days for decent bread, two days prep plus six months aging for a great Alpine cheese, a year for a drinkable wine, a century of painstakingly crafted cultivation for a beautiful yet still nutritious rose—when you nurture the sensitivity of your palate and your gut, you realize there really is a hierarchy of taste and fake is never going to be an adequate substitute.
I’ve set goals all my life, many of them I’ve achieved and many more I’ve not and many more still I decided were not worthy of achieving once within the goal posts. But there is always remaining this matter of food, and it always fits. Not the short-term convenience foods I grew up with, but a much wider tradition that settled into our lives rather organically and that reflects the ancestral wisdom I believe my own ancestors were mistaken to leave behind, which I feel very fortunate to have the time and inclination to revive and cultivate.
With Handy Hubby perfecting another lost art—growing, slaughtering and butchering all on-site—perhaps we should up our game goals? ‘Luddite Power Couple’ is that a thing? 😉
I realize it’s already a thing, considering it’s now a $600 million annual industry, but I thought I didn’t like it. I couldn’t have been more wrong, I’m happy to say. I haven’t been this excited about a new thing (for me!) since I started making cheese.
In fact, it’s not at all new, just popularized and mass marketed these days. Kombucha has an ancient and fascinating history and far more uses than just a really healthy and delicious beverage. I’m just learning about them all, but I’m keen to incorporate this little miracle into our homestead lifestyle.
Sally Fallon, my favorite cookbook author, believes as I do that, “the craving for both alcohol and soft drinks stems from an ancient collective memory of the kind of lacto-fermented beverages still found in traditional societies.”
And it’s so much more than just a wonderful beverage.
“Kombucha’s numerous applications make it a natural component of ‘closed-loop’ systems, in which its waste products can be converted into toxin-free commodities. Whether as compost or foodstuff, there is some way to turn every by-product of the kombucha brewing process into something useful.” The Big Book of Kombucha by Hannah Crum & Alex LaGory
If you’ve only tried commercial Kombucha you might be like I was and think you don’t like it either. My home-brewed version taste nothing like the store-bought brands I tried. And, the first time I tried home-brewing I was doing it all wrong. I’m so grateful to a friend who gave me another SCOBY and insisted I try it again. Following the tips and tricks from several great resources, I’m hooked.
A SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast) is kind of like a sourdough starter, shared among friends and self-replicating.
There’s far more information available than the first time I tried home-brewing many years ago. The key to my new love is the 2nd fermentation bottling with flavors, when the tea becomes carbonated. Even if you’re not a tea-lover you might be surprised, I think it tastes more like a mild, flavored soda. Some Kombucha lovers have claimed it helped them kick their cola habit and replace it with something far healthier in every way—for the body, the paycheck, and the environment.
Besides the excellent book mentioned above, these sites are also great resources to help you get started, learn more, or stay addicted.
Kensho Homestead 