Yuca(n) Do It All - Processing Yuca in Rural Costa Rica

Yuca(n) Do It All - Processing Yuca in Rural Costa Rica

 By 2025 apprentice Maivy Xuân Nguyễn

At Rancho Mastatal, yuca is a staple in the kitchen and our bellies. You can find it in at least one of our meals nearly every day in one form or another. Yuca is also commonly known as cassava root or tapioca (in its powdered form). So, if you’ve ever had boba–a Taiwanese milk tea drink with chewy black pearls, or tapioca pudding, you’ve had yuca!

My affinity towards yuca grew rapidly during the past two weeks when we experienced a boon in our yuca supply! I already love yuca, having grown up on boba drinks which had taken its foothold in the San Francisco Bay Area while I was a child. It has since only grown in popularity. Tapioca starch is also a key ingredient in my favorite Vietnamese dish: bánh bột lọc. It’s one of the first dishes that my mom taught me how to make and I intend to find some time to make a Rancho Mastatal version in the future. Look out for upcoming blog posts—perhaps they will have some yummy recipes.

But, my appreciation of it has grown tenfold and beyond after having worked with it on so many levels.

We have planted, harvested, processed, cooked and eaten yuca. Each step has its own set of steps and we’ll get to those in future posts. For now, I’ll talk about processing and preparing yuca for cooking. Yuca must be cooked before we consume it because it does contain some toxins, especially in its skin, that will need to burn off. Plus, it is a hard and starchy root that would be difficult to enjoy raw.

The edible parts of yuca are their tuber roots and also their new baby leaves. There are actually some varieties of yuca where only the baby leaves are eaten because the rest of the plant contains too many toxins. Luckily, we have the sweet kind with delicious roots!

Processing

If you get your yuca from a store, it will have likely gotten a parafin wax treatment. This is to prevent oxidation of the tuber which happens quickly. You’ll want to wash and scrub that off first.

We got ours straight from the ground so our first step was to wash and scrub off the dirt.

Then, cut the tuber into sections.

Make a cut along the tuber and using a paring knife, spoon or your fingers, separate not just the papery skin, but also the thicker white skin from the tuber. The layer of white skin contains cyanide, so you'll want to be sure to get it all off. Sometimes the skin comes off easily with just some maneuvering and other times it is stubborn and you may just need to cut through it.

Once you have the peeled root, give it another rinse and process it further as you'd like. We chunked it and shredded it so it could be cooked for our brunch time fried yuca or hash. The raw yuca will last about a week in the fridge. I will turn black as it oxidizes so try to keep it in airtight containers.

We also made yuca flour by dehydrating the shredded yuca and then blitzing it in a blender or food processor.

To make yuca starch, soak your shredded yuca in water overnight. Then strain and squeeze out the solids and keep the water. The starches will have been released into the water. Let the starch settle to the bottom and then pour off the water once it’s separated. You’ll end up with some wet starch. You can then dehydrate the starch and break it up into powder.

If kept dry and airtight, yuca flour can last for up to a year.

Now you’ve got a few ways to process yuca!

Planting

During one of our earlier work parties in the agricultural systems, we remade two zone 1 garden beds and planted some yuca, among many other plants and veggies.

The method through which we planted the yuca was through cuttings.

Yuca tubers take about 8-12 months to mature. So the ones we planted then are not the ones that we harvested or processed these past weeks. The boom came from outside of the Rancho and from the wider community of Mastatal.

Harvesting

A neighboring farmer, Don Jaime, had been forced off a piece of land that he's been farming for the past 20+ years.

The first week, the apprentice crew just came to pick up the sacks of yuca that Don Jaime had harvested that day, the four sacks totaled to 103 kilos.

It wasn't until the next week, when we came to help harvest more of the yuca from that land, that we got to see the full extent of his work.

Want to Learn More?

Join us for one of our yearly Permaculture Design Courses to get theory and practice in growing your own food.

What is Lacto-Fermentation

What is Lacto-Fermentation

By Constantin Demuth, apprentice 2021

One of our favorite lacto-fermented condiments- Green Papaya Kimchi

What would a traditional Korean Barbecue be without kimchi, your scrambled eggs without Tabasco and a hot, sunny afternoon without a fresh pickle? Lacto-ferments are around us every day. Often they are made into dishes that we don’t even consider as fermented. Many of which are staples that have backed up our diets for hundreds of years. Try and think of the last lacto-fermented goodie you ate.

Recently, lacto-fermentation is going through a renaissance. People are realizing how easy it is to recreate flavors of their cultural ancestry. Kraut is just cabbage, salt and water. Pickles are just cucumbers, salt and water. It’s easy to make at home and much better than the stuff you buy in the supermarket. In this article I would like to take you on a little journey through the wide world of lacto-ferments, share some of the Ranch’s deepest secrets, and how we take foods from the farm and transform them into delicious, nutritious, and long lasting dishes.

History

In a time where we can buy produce all year around from every corner of the world and store them conveniently in the fridge, the reason why people ferment their food is becoming obsolete. In the beginning, they were not looking for the most incredible flavors that people at Noma’s Food Lab try to create. They were more interested in preservation, keeping their produce edible, eliminating molds and buffering cold winters without harvests. As farm to table cooking is becoming more popular again, being able to preserve foods through the year is increasingly important. The easiest method of preserving large quantities of raw vegetables is by using salt. Salt creates an environment that allows good bacteria to survive while killing bacteria harmful to humans. Today, we know salt preservation also makes nutrients bioavailable, increases digestibility and creates a great source of raw foods in our diets.

Preservation

Lacto-fermented pickles

Let’s go into a bit more detail of what happens in our jars when we mix vegetables with salt. Adding salt or salt brine to vegetables helps Lactic Acid Bacteria (LAB) to develop. LAB then turns the natural sugars of the vegetables into lactic acid. This acidified environment inhibits the growth of bacteria that makes the vegetables go bad and mold. This way we can store lacto-fermented vegetables for long periods of time without worrying about spoilage. The acidity gives these ferments their original flavor and preserves the satisfying crunch that we all crave.

As opposed to other fermentation methods, lacto-fermentation does not require any input of certain bacteria. When using fresh (preferably organic) produce we are able to work with LAB that is native to the vegetables and helps create the environment we want. As a result of their work, LAB often produce oxygen that makes our ferments bubbly. In case you find bubbles in your jars, don’t worry. That’s a sign that it works!

Lacto-ferments at the Ranch

Here at the Ranch we use lacto-fermentation every week and we eat it basically every day. Our favorite staples are Green Papaya Kimchi, Salsa Starter and some sort of pickled vegetables. The most recent and exciting experiments in the test kitchen include pickled Katuk (our daily salad green) and fermented black beans for our home made Hoisin Sauce.

We use lacto-fermentation for three basic reasons. Reason one: It’s good for us. It makes all the nutrients that fresh vegetables have to offer available to us. Reason two: We can store fresh harvests and consume them later, which is super convenient when you have an amazing orchard that produces a variety of things all year around. Reason three: It is delicious and we love delicious food!

Green jackfruit processing

Green Jackfruit

Jackfruit is a perfect example of how we use lacto-fermentation as a way to preserve fresh produce. Jackfruit is the biggest fruit in the world and we have several trees in our orchards. Once jackfruit is ripe, it goes bad relatively quickly and some people don’t like its flavor when ripe. We started harvesting them when they are still green to incorporate them as a vegetable into our diet.  Even here where we feed many hungry souls every day, we cannot consume the amount of jackfruit we harvest. This is where our friend lacto-fermentation comes into play. We submerge all the jackfruit meat in a 2% salt brine, which inhibits growth of undesirable bacteria, prevents oxidation and gives a deep, rich salty flavor that we want in our dishes.

Green Papaya Kimchi

The purpose of our Kimchi is less for preservation and more for the “ooh “and “ahh” moments when we serve fresh condiments with all our foods. The kimchi accompanies eggs in the morning, hearty slow roasted pork on special occasions and provides the freshness in our weekday burritos.

We use green papaya, but you can use any local, seasonal, crunchy vegetable

As opposed to jackfruit, where we submerge the flesh in a brine, for Kimchi we use its own juice. Again, salt is our partner in crime. Shredding 20 kg of green papaya on Wednesday mornings is not everyone’s favorite exercise, but the result makes up for the work. We used to do this all with hand graters, but recently we purchased an industrial hand cranked shredder by Nemco Food Equipment. We highly recommend this tool if you are making large batches of sauerkrauts, kimchi, etc. By shredding the fruit, we make it easier for the salt to penetrate. After mixing papaya, salt and spices (aka the *flavor bomb) enough brine is being produced for the ferment to be safe. Three days in the fermentation bucket and voila, kimchi is ready. Pack this into glass jars that can be stored in the fridge.

Now it’s time to reveal the big secret you’ve been waiting for. Rancho Mastatal is giving out its kimchi recipe for the first time. Two things that are important: First, if you cannot find green papaya, use any type of cabbage. It’s important to use fresh, local and seasonal (when you live in a temperate climate please, please do not go to the supermarket and buy green papaya!). Second, fermentation is no science! Don’t get overwhelmed by ratios, phrases or utensils. Trust your senses; look at it, smell it and taste it. Your nose knows best.

Shredded ingredients ready to be combined with salt and flavors

Recipe

3 green papaya, peeled and seeded

1 carrot and/or 1 beet

Salt (2% of the total weight)

*Flavor Bomb

1/2 cup peeled ginger

1/2 cup peeled garlic

1 chili (optional) 

Equipment

Fermentation vessel: A food safe container that can hold all the vegetables plus at least 20cm of headspace (buckets, mason jars, big Tupperware all work perfectly fine).  

Instructions  

1. Cut the papaya in half and discard the seeds. Peel the papaya.

2. Using a kitchen grater, grate the papaya, carrot and/or beet and set aside.

3. Peel the ginger and garlic. Cut the chili in half and discard the seeds. Blend all the ingredients for your flavor bomb in a food processor.

4. Weigh out all your vegetables and place them in your fermentation vessel.

5. Add 2% Salt to the total weight of the vegetables (e.g. if you have 1kg of vegetables, use 20g of salt) and mix the salt in. Stirring it helps to break up the papaya and releases the brine.

6. Make sure your Kimchi is submerged in brine. Keep it on the counter at room temperature and wait for at least three days (this will depend on your climate). You will see bubbles and be able to smell the acidification after a few days. When it’s reached your desired flavor, bottle the Kimchi in jars and keep them in the fridge. Enjoy!

Green papaya cut in half

Learn more

Those are just a couple of the many vegetables we lacto-ferment. Lacto-fermentation has made our farm to table cooking and preservation more efficient, produce less waste, and create delicious, unique and fun foods.

Join us for a workshop to learn more about fermentation, farm to table cooking, permaculture and more.

Other Farm to table blog articles

Eating Local: Reconnecting to Food

Turn Local Rice and Beans into Fermented Bread

Farm to Table Banana Vinegar

Happy fermentation, happy microbes!

Farm to Table Chocolate Bonbons

Farm to Table Chocolate Bonbons

By Kara, Apprentice 2020

Beautiful beaches, abundant wildlife, fresh fruit, incredible coffee, and local chocolate; these are some of the things I anticipated experiencing in Costa Rica. While everything but the beaches has been a part of my experience here at Rancho Mastatal so far, one thing in that list stands out to me. The chocolate.

I’ve splurged on the good chocolate bars back home in Canada, the fair trade, single-origin, handmade stuff- and I enjoyed every bite to get my $10 worth- but I know now that I had never truly experienced chocolate. As fair-trade and handmade as all of that was, it was still flown halfway around the world and had sat on a store shelf for who-knows-how-long.

Cacao being toasted

It wasn’t long into my apprenticeship that Robin handed me a piece of a chocolate bonbon, made with raw cacao picked from the farm down the road, that I experienced something like awe; and that in the old sense of both amazement and terror. This is what chocolate is supposed to taste like? And I’ve been missing out on it for the last 27 years? Memories of foil-wrapped bunnies and coins surfaced, and I tried to make the connection between that waxy-sweet substance and what I had in my hand now; something subtle, complex, layered with sweet and smoky and earthy and bitter- no additives necessary.

I was hooked after that first taste, and when Robin said that she wanted a flight of bonbons for her
birthday dessert, I was ready to take on that challenge. The recipes we created for that event were truly a farm-to-table experience- nearly everything sourced from the Ranch property or from farms
around Mastatal (salt and peanuts being our exceptions). The focus on sustainable, local sourcing did nothing to impede the quality of our bonbons, in fact, it’s that parameter that brings out the most creativity (and the best flavors, oftentimes) of most food made at the Ranch.

So instead of going on waxing poetic about chocolate, I want to share those recipes we made and some tips on working with raw cacao. The funny thing about these recipes is that I don’t intend for them to be followed, not exactly, at least. We used what we had on hand; fruits in season, experimental condiments and flavorings from other projects- and I want to encourage the same approach in you. Look through the foods you have available, both in your pantry and in the local market. Can something be dehydrated? Fermented? Powdered? Turned into wine, vinegar or syrup?

Get creative, play, then eat some chocolate.

A productive harvest of cacao at our local family run chocolate farm, La Iguana Chocolate

Basic Chocolate mix

• 1 cup raw cacao

• 1 tsp salt (or to taste)

• 1 Tbsp grated tapa dulce (or sugar)

1. In a hot, dry skillet toast the raw cacao. They will blacken as they toast, and become wonderfully fragrant. You will know they are done when they start to make popping sounds as the skin separates from the seed.

2. Remove from heat, and let the cacao cool until you can comfortably handle them. Once cool, remove the outer skin by pinching the seed between thumb and forefinger of each hand, and twisting in opposite directions. Remove the skin, but don’t discard it! The little flakes of toasted skin make a wonderful cacao tea.

3. Grind the cacao. We use our hand-cranked corona coffee grinder, but a food processor or a mortar and pestle could work, too. Add the salt and tapa dulce to the cacao as you’re grinding to incorporate it into the resulting mix. You should end up with a mix the texture of gritty sand.

4. This is the base mix to which you will add all of your flavorings. For any bonbon flavor, you
will need something sticky to bind the cacao mixture. Syrups, dulce de leche, finely chopped gooey dried fruits such as dates, have all worked successfully for us. If you add liquids as flavoring, make
sure to watch the texture of the resulting mix. It needs to be wet and sticky enough to bind the cacao together, but not so wet that it slumps.

5. Roll your bonbons into spheres, or any shape of your choice, decorate, then refrigerate until serving.

Cacao seeds being crushed

A freshly picked cacao pod. The white pulp around the seeds is delicious!

Recipe Ideas

*all made with basic chocolate mix

• Ranch-oreo: Make two small balls of chocolate mix per bonbon, mixing in dulce de leche to bind, then flatten them into bite size discs. Add a dollop of dulce de leche between the disks, and top with cinnamon and grated tapa.

• Peanut Butter Balls: Bind the chocolate mix with coffee flavored syrup (we used a coffee kombucha reduced with tapa dulce), and make a quick peanut butter to fill the bonbon. Toast peanuts with salt, and put them in a food processor with sour cream until it reached your desired texture. Make a ball of the peanut butter, then wrap a layer of the chocolate mix around it.

• Ginger Jack Bites: Add ginger syrup and lime (we used powdered) to the chocolate mix, then incorporate finely chopped dried jackfruit. Roll into balls, and top with a slice of dried manzana de agua.

• Coffee Cinnamon Balls: Mix the chocolate with coffee kombucha syrup to bind, roll into balls and top with a coffee bean and sprinkled cinnamon

• Chilli Chocolate Bites: Mix the chocolate with starfruit syrup, chilli infused vinegar, lime, and dried chilli flakes. Roll into balls. Careful, this one gets hotter the longer you leave the chilli flakes infusing in the chocolate!

• Simply Sweet: Mix the chocolate with dulce de leche, roll into balls, then create an indent with your finger in each bonbon, and fill it with a dollop of dulce de leche.

want to learn more?

Come stay with us as a guest and you’ll get to enjoy and make these tasty treats on a day trip to La Iguana Chocolate.

Visit our guest page for more info on coming and being a part of the Ranch and Mastatal community.

Past blog articles about cacao and farm to table products:

From Tree to Bar: How to Process Raw Cacao

Life of Spice: Farm to Table Cinnamon

Vanilla Cultivation: A Practical Guide for the Tropical Homestead

Workshops we host and teach that are related to agriculture and homesteading:

Permaculture Design Certification

Agroforestry Skills

Plants as Medicine

Syntropic Farming

And more! Visit our website for more information on our upcoming workshops.

Locally sourced and made chocolate from our neighbors at La Iguana Chocolate

Life of Spice: Farm to Table Cinnamon

Life of Spice: Farm to Table Cinnamon

By Dani, Apprentice 2020

Farm to table cinnamon sticks!

Local Cinnamon

One morning at the Rancho, I was toasting some cinnamon to try to spice up an orange kefir water concoction. When cooking over a fire, I often imagine that I am a witch brewing a potion. As I stirred with a big wooden spoon, the cinnamon began to sizzle, wafting its wondrous fragrance into the air and taking me to another place.

The scents of spices are fantastical, and I have always thought that the spice rack is a mystical, magical place of otherworldly ingredients. As I learn more about spices , that magic has not faded, but rather has revealed new perspectives. We grow cinnamon in the permaculture orchards at the Ranch, and using this magnificent spice from tree to table has made me appreciate it so much more.

The cinnamon in my potion that morning is about as local as you can get. As the cinnamon toasted, the aroma traveled into my nose, triggering my memory, as scents often do. I was captivated by the smell when someone walked into the food smithy and exclaimed, “It smells like Christmas!” I snapped out of my cinnamon induced daydream and concurred. Even though it was a hot February day in the tropics, with temperatures around 85 degrees Fahrenheit, I could almost taste the crisp cold air of Wisconsin. It took me home. To me, the scent of cinnamon evokes feelings of cold winter nights with Christmas cookies by the fire. It feels like cool fall air and spiced apple cider at the orchard. It tastes like pumpkin pie at the dinner table. Cinnamon is for days of wool socks and sweaters. It smells like home to me. It is cozy. It is comfortable. It’s nostalgic.

But I had never even seen a cinnamon tree until coming to the tropics. So how did I come to associate this tropical flavor with with cold cozy evenings in Wisconsin? How did it become the holiday flavor of a climate where it doesn’t grow?

Origin of the Spice

By definition, spices come from the aromatic parts of tropical plants: roots, flowers, seeds, or bark. Unless you live in the tropics, the likelihood of consuming local , farm to table spices is slim to none.

Cinnamon comes from the bark of an evergreen tree which is native to Sri Lanka (Ceylon), and in ancient times, it was one of the most sought after spices. Like pepper, it has thousands of years of history in the globalization of foods and was known in China as early as 2700 B.C. It is even mentioned in the old testament as well as in Sanskrit texts. The globalization of cinnamon is not new, and the magical qualities of cinnamon ignited ideas of paradise in the minds of many, causing them to set sail in search of the heavenly lands from where they believed the magical spice must have come.

Cinnamon has a powerful scent, so powerful that it played a part in progressing the sharing of cultures and globalization as we know it. Some wonderful new cuisines came out of the spice trade, but it was not without a cost; the spice trade was also linked to slavery and centuries of abuse towards the local producers. It is important to remember both the fascinating and dark histories of the foods we eat.

Today, Great Britain is the leading consumer of cinnamon, followed by the United States and Spain, all places where the spice does not grow. The word, cinnamon, comes from the Greek word for spice and the prefix ‘Chinese’. Cassia is another spice, closely related to cinnamon, and they are often sold interchangeably, though cassia has a more delicate taste. Most of the cinnamon sold in the United States is actually cassia. Cassia is native to Myanmar and northern India as well as some Indonesian islands. Records of this spice date back over 6,000 years, and it was grown around present-day Hanoi during the Han Dynasty.

Cinnamon and Cassia can be distinguished by their color, true cinnamon being tan and cassia being more of a darker reddish brown. I had no idea that most of the cinnamon I have consumed in my life was probably not even cinnamon

Cinnamon sticks rolled and drying

Permaculture Processing

The journey of cinnamon from the farm to our tables is neither short nor simple. After harvesting and processing cinnamon here at the Ranch, I would argue its processing is truly an art.

Ideally, cinnamon is grown to be long and straight to maximize yields. The offshoots should be pruned as they take energy away from the trunk, which is where the good stuff is. The darker bark is harvested to use as the spice. Once the tree reaches about 2 meters and the trunk is about 2-4 inches thick, it is ready to harvest. It’s good practice to chop the tree down to 10-15cm at a 30-degree angle for water and sun protection. After the tree is chopped, it will produce 2-6 new shoots, increasing the yield of the next harvest which will be ready in about 2 years. This practice can be continued for the lifespan of the tree. With a permaculture mindset, we harvested some cinnamon at the Ranch with hopes that in a few years, yields will increase with the new shoots. After chopping the tree, we took off the lateral branches and leaves. The wonderful cinnamon flavor is also contained in the stems at the base of the leaves so we saved and dried these for tasty tea. We then chopped it into smaller, more manageable pieces, and using a knife, we shaved off the outer bark. The next layer down is called the cambium, and that is the stuff you want in your carrot cake.

The cambium is the part of the tree between the outer bark and the heart wood and what we know as cinnamon. To separate it from the heart of the tree, we made an incision using a knife down the entire length of the piece. Then, we slowly began to peel it off using a spoon, trying to keep it is one piece. It was not easy, especially if there was a knot in the wood. Finally, we rolled the cinnamon cambiums and tied them, and put them to dry. Sometimes cinnamon is cut into quills of over three feet in length! Though I have always thought that cinnamon sticks were beautiful in form, after struggling with my three-inch piece, I realized there is a whole layer of beauty I had not seen. I was blind to the artists behind them, the growers and processors of this special tree.

The outer bark shaved off, exposing the cambium layer

The new shoots coming up

A healthy cinnamon tree re-growing

Conscious Consumption

There is so much in the food we eat: natural resources, back-breaking labor, rich traditions, culture, history, and beautiful artistry. It is important to consider where our food comes from, not only for our health, but for the well-being of those who grow and process our foods, and for the sake of our planet.

I think this is more difficult when it comes to spices. But these days, there are companies striving to produce fair trade spices through sustainable farming practices. Vermont-based Forestrade, started in Sumatra, demonstrated to local farmers how cinnamon can be grown without clearing huge sections of land that would endanger the surrounding national park. They now collaborate with 6,000 indigenous producers in Indonesia and Guatemala. Another example is a group of Hindu People on the mainly Buddhist island of Sri Lanka, the Salagama, who traditionally peeled the cinnamon bark from the trees. These people were devastated by the spice trade, controlled by the English, the Dutch, and the Portuguese. Today, the situation has changed, and they are able to sell their product to a fair trade association for 4o percent above the market rate.

These programs only work if we as consumers are aware of where our spices come from and are willing to pay a little more for our products. Through our consumption habits, we have the power to improve the lives of so many. I encourage everyone to enjoy cinnamon in their hot chocolate on a crisp cold evening, but as the aroma fills the room be mindful of how it got there. Spices truly are incredible, and I hope that while we are doing our best to eat local, we can be conscious of the magic contained in the spice rack.

Achiote to be made into paste

Fresh turmeric harvest

Farm to table peppercorns

Want to learn more?

Stay tuned for my next Life of Spice blog! And if you didn’t read my last blog about farm to table black pepper, read it here!

Want to learn more about growing your own foods and spices? Join us for our annual Permaculture Design Course or Agroforestry Skills Workshop, you can find more info on both these workshops here.

Check out these past articles about farm to table foods we are planting and processing here:

From Tree to Bar: How to Process Raw Cacao

Farm to Table Tales

Farm to Table: Chile Recipes

Sources and Further Reading

Heinerman’s Encyclopedia of Healing Herbs and Spices by John Heinerman

Spices – A Global History by Fred Czarra

Bamboo Shoots

Bamboo Shoots

By Nic, Core Team member

Bamboo

Bamboo is a wonderfully sustainable building material due to the speed in which it grows and its weight to strength ratio (stronger than steel for its weight!!).  Bamboo is of huge economic value and is not only used in the building industry, but it can be used also for eating (more on this later!), as a cooking device, burnt for charcoal, woven into a fabric, made into paper, used as a musical instruments, and much more!!  At the Ranch we use it for many of these things; the most noteworthy being our use of it in our natural buildings (read here about how to treat your bamboo).  We have 6 structures that are built almost entirely from Bamboo including a nursery, a meeting room, our classroom and the popular guest structure the Hooch.  We have also used it as firewood and to make biochar and we have several bamboo instruments. Today however we are going to talk about the latest way we have learnt to use bamboo and that is in our farm to table world!

A clump of bamboo on our farm

Bamboo as Food

Humans have a long history of eating bamboo, but we are not the only animals that love eating bamboo.  The Giant Panda loves eating the young bamboo shoots as well as the leaves and stems, along with a number of other animals including the bamboo lemurs of Madagascar and mountain gorillas in central Africa.  Chimpanzees have also been seen drinking fermented bamboo sap which has turned alcoholic.  It will not be a surprise then to hear that Yes! we can eat bamboo too, in fact its delicious and during the beginning of the wet season it is an abundant source of food. 

At Rancho Mastatal we have some of the most revered species of bamboo for eating and for building.  The species that we have that are known for providing tasty bamboo shoots are Dendrocalymus asper, Gigantochloa sp. and Bitcheeyana sp.

These are just 2 week old bamboo shoots!

Farm to Table Bamboo Shoots

Bamboo shoots contain a cyanogenic glycoside that produces cyanide in the gut.  This is not good for you as you might know, cyanide is very poisonous, so we have to be careful to process our bamboo shoots carefully in order to make them edible.  As it turns out this is relatively simple!  Just boiling the bamboo for around 10 minutes removes that compound and can also remove any bitterness that can be present in the shoot. We found that adding ample salt and some sugar to the water before boiling makes them instantly a delicious crunchy snack!  We have also lacto-fermented them (make a very pungent ferment!), pickled them in vinegar, and just boiled them and added them to dishes.  But before you get to eat the bamboo shoots you have to know when to harvest them and how to prepare them.

Harvesting bamboo shoots

Peeled bamboo shoot

Generally speaking you want to harvest them as young as possible as they can become bitter if they are too old. As you may know bamboo grows incredibly quickly, so you will need to keep an eye on your clumps as a daily practice.  As the rains start here in Costa Rica around April/May (on the pacific side) we found that initiated the growth of the new shoots.  There is a delay though between the start of the rains and the shooting of the bamboo and this will vary be species and by the year.  So its safe to say that once it starts to rain you need to start checking your clumps regularly.  We found that this year the Guadua started shooting first (not a good bamboo to eat) and Dendrocalymus was the last one to start shooting in late June/July.  Ideally you will want to harvest the bamboo shoot when it is around ~10-15” (~25-35cm) tall. Cut it at an angle as low as you can.  This will then shed water and is less likely to lead to disease entering the plant.  Generally speaking from a well-managed clump you should be harvesting about 33% of the new shoots.  Take them from the places where they are not as ideally situated ie. Close to another shoot, with a blocked path etc…  To learn more about how to manage you bamboo, join us for our bamboo management workshop.

Processing Bamboo Shoots

Take the bamboo shoot back to the kitchen and cut it lengthwise in half.  You should be able to get your thumb and then your hands between the outer layers and the inner solid part and pry off the sheathing.  This will leave you with a rather alien looking shoot.  At this point it’s a good idea to chop it into strips several inches wide and then slice across the strips into thin pieces.  The thinner the pieces the more bitterness is removed by cooking. At this stage you have the option to lacto-ferment the bamboo in a 2-3% by weight salt brine.  This produces a very pungent ferment that smells very reminiscent of canned bamboo shoots from the grocery store.  By lacto fermenting the shoots you also remove the cyanogenic glycoside and you gain the nutritional value of a raw bamboo and the probiotic qualities of the ferment.

By cooking these thin pieces of bamboo in a salty and slightly sweet brine we were able to produce a delicious treat with a great crunch, the flavor is not too dissimilar to Heart of Palm, although there was a large spectrum of views on what it tasted like.  Everyone agreed that it was a delicate flavor that had an excellent texture.

Cut lengthwise

Then using your thumbs peel off outer layers

Bamboo Tea

The upper parts of the shoot that will have been left attached to the sheathing when you pried it out makes a very nice and refreshing tea.  By taking a paring knife you can remove any of the soft parts still attached to the sheathing and dry them in the sun (or a dehydrator).  This can then be added to hot water and left to steep. 

Fresh bamboo shoot

Want to Learn More About Bamboo?

Join us for one or both of our upcoming bamboo related workshops!

Bamboo Management April 6 - 9, 2021

Bamboo Construction April 12 - 17, 2021

Stay tuned and up to date on what’s happening around here by subscribing to our monthly blog and visiting our website.

Check out our past blog article on Bamboo Treatment

10 Things You Didn't Know About the Banana

10 Things You Didn't Know About the Banana

By Moanna, Apprentice 2020

They are funny looking, absolutely delicious and have so many gifts – here’s some interesting facts about the banana.

The banana with the permaculture lens on is an element that serves many more than just 10 things. Especially with the diversity of varieties that is grown here at Rancho Mastatal in Costa Rica, with 13 different types of both edible and ornamental bananas in our agroforestry systems. We are always looking at how to work with nature, and in case you already knew all of these amazing things about the banana, this blog shares how the banana can be used as a perennial staple and an easy farm to table crop.

A pink ornamental banana in front of our guest, bamboo cabin, the Hooch

10 Amazing facts about Bananas

1) Bananas can be black, red and blue!

Red and blue, long and thin, fat and short, round or softly squared, there are more than 300 varieties of the Banana, which is in the Musa family. The classic yellow banana found in supermarkets is called the Cavendish, after a British dude who found a way to grow them in greenhouses in England, making it possible for Iceland to be one of the biggest exporters of bananas. Mostly people who leave Rancho Mastatal and who live outside of the tropics, stop eating bananas because the supermarket ones (grown in monocultures far away or in greenhouses) are just not worth eating anymore.

They can be very tiny too!

2) Bananas are not a tree, but a very big herb!

Bananas are such a majestic fruit, but they do not grow on trees as they have no woody trunk or bough. The “trunk” of the banana is rather a leafstalk, as it is a dense clump of leaves ready to curl out.

3) You can eat the flower.

Like so many wonders of the world, it is both beautiful and edible! Here at the Ranch we have cooked it into a picadillo: chopped fine and cooked down with a bit of oil, salt and farm to table pepper. It is delicious. Especially if you’re a lover of the consistency of artichoke or mushroom!

A banana flower

Lacto fermented banana flower

4) The “trunk” can be turned into weaving material.

Peel the skin of the “trunk” from top to bottom, dry the strips in the sun and you’ll have very strong fiber material to make baskets, mats or belts out of. Banana fibers can be woven into an attractive silk like fabric, which in Japan and Indochina are used for clothes and hats. In Tahiti the leaves and “trunk” of the fe’i variety is used as weaving material and turned into thongs, lashings and fans!

5) You can eat the trunk.

If you are actively managing your bananas you probably cut away younger ones in the clump, only keeping the three generations (grandmother, mother and daughter) growing. In south East Asia they eat the young “trunks” as commonly as lettuce! Very thinly sliced, and then soaked in water and vinegar for a while, they add it as a fresh garnish in their soups, or turn it into a salad adding herbs, fish-sauce and toasted peanuts.

6) Green bananas are a perennial staple.

They can be used in cooking like we use the potato, simply boil them in water – the whole thing with its skin – and do as you please! You can also cut them into smaller pieces to add to a delicious stew, blend them with herbs and fry them into fritters, grate them and make a green banana hash, slice them thin and dehydrate to make banana flour. We enjoy all these creative ways to use a local food as a staple in our diets.

Green bananas getting ready to be boiled

7) Banana skin helps reduce itching.

The plant itself flourishes in tropical, hot and damp environments, mostly filled with mosquitoes – fortunately the banana skin eases the itch. I’ve tried it, and it worked!

8) Dirt or ash helps remove its sticky juice.

Harvesting bananas gives off all kinds of juices, especially when you process the green banana and flower. You can clean the machete, knifes or cutting boards by rubbing dirt or ash on it. It may sound crazy but it works.

When harvesting, rub the stem in dirt; when processing/cooking them green, use as much banana leaves/paper to protect table and other material from the juice. But once you have it on a knife or cutting board, it helps to rub any kind of dirt or ash and then wash.

9) Once they are too ripe, you can turn them into wine or vinegar!

You can never have too many bananas. Well maybe you can have too many to eat out of hand, which happens to use often. That’s when we make homemade banana vinegar! The super ripe, falling off the bunch-juicy-black-kinda ripe, means loads of sugar, which is an opportunity for yeast to have a big feast, eating the sugars and making alcohol! Permaculture principle- produce no waste.

Aging banana vinegar

10) PACKED with potassium that reduces muscle spasms very efficiently.

After one month on the Ranch, where the average daily banana intake is about 3 to 5 bananas, many find that their muscle spasms has completely disappeared. Bananas also contain the neurotransmitters, dopamine and serotonin that lifts up the mood.

Bananas make you strong too!

Do you understand why we’re going bananas over the banana? May the awe and excitement that you felt going through this list make you want to go deeper into the world of bananas. They serve well in the tropical permaculture garden or agroforestry system, provide a variety of uses, and are a nutritious food to be used as a perennial staple.

A bunch of bananas blossoming

Hope you’re as excited about bananas as we are! If you live in the right environment, go plant some, they’re super easy to plant and maintain!

want to learn more?

Join us for our upcoming Permaculture Design Course or Agroforestry Skills Course to learn about bananas and more! Learn more about all our upcoming educational workshops on our website here.

Check out these past blogs that are also about the banana

5 “Grow Your Own” Mulch Plants for the Tropics

Farm to Table Banana Vinegar

Farm to Table: Chilie Recipes

Farm to Table: Chile Recipes

By Marco, Apprentice 2020

Before we get hot and saucy…

…is it chile, chilli, or chili? Good question. I usually hedge my bets and switch between the three spellings. Actually, all of them are correct. They all come from the Aztec Nahuatl word “chilli”, which became chile in Spanish and eventually the anglicised chilli. Chili, with one l, is the American spelling and is the reason my spell check is red-lining me right now. Anyway, glad we got that out the way. Moving on…

A Brief History of Chiles

When Columbus first landed in the West Indies (in modern-day Dominican Republic and Haiti) in 1492, he noted that the locals (Arawak) were preserving meat using pepper juices, specifically one type called “axi”. This is where the Spanish word aji was derived. (It was around this time that they noticed the Nahuatl word “chilli” being used as well). These plants were very valuable to the natives and were used extensively in most of their cuisine. The Spanish discovered that the peppers were easily preserved when dried and that the seeds kept well, leading to their far, wide and rapid dissemination throughout the world. (Thanks also, in no small part, to birds, of course. Cheers guys.)

Peppers vs. Chiles

One last bit of nomenclature clarification is the common confusion between the various peppers – bell peppers, black/white pepper (peppercorn) and chilli peppers. This goes back again to Columbus and his crew. Back in the day, peppercorn was as valuable as silver to Europeans. Thus, when they arrived in what they thought was India, they also expected to find peppercorn. Instead they found chillies. Nobody’s sure whether they dubbed them “pimiento” (pepper in Spanish) because they mistook them for peppercorn, or if they were trying to pull a fast one…my money’s on the latter. Learn more about black pepper from Dani’s last article “Life of Spice.”

Farm to Table Chile Recipes at the Ranch

At the Ranch, we try our best to follow permaculture principles. A couple of big ones are obtaining a yield and transforming/repurposing waste. Hence farm to table recipes abound and we are consistently trying to find novel ways of using our yields and decreasing our reliance on outside produce. This dry season has been particularly productive for our chillies and has hence inspired some spicy condiment creations. Below are a few spicy specials you can try at home:

Different types of chiles drying

Tabasco Sauce

Tabasco is perhaps the most famous hot sauce ever made. First synthesized in 1850, when Maunsel White decided to boil and mash up some chiles he’d brought back from Tabasco, Mexico and add vinegar and salt. The peppers found their way into middle-aged banker Ed McIlhenny’s hands whence they were blended, lacto-fermented for 30 days (nowadays they are fermented for 3 years in oak barrels) and then put into wine vinegar, creating the hot sauce we all know and love today. It’s a simple and delicious way to preserve chiles and comes in two varieties: quick and slow.

Ingredients:

·         Chiles

·         Vinegar

·         Salt

Method 1 (quick version)

Step 1:

Chop up the chiles and weigh. Add 2% salt by weight (e.g. 100g chiles = 2g salt) and mix. Put them into a large container and make sure they are completely submerged in brine – you might have to add brine to achieve this. [Brine = water + 2% salt].  Leave the chilies to ferment for 1-2 weeks.

Step 2:

Remove chiles from brine (keep the brine!) and blend them into a chunky paste. Put the chiles back in their brine and add vinegar. Leave to ferment another week.

Step 3:

Strain off the liquid – this can be bottled and used as (quick) Tabasco.

[Pro-tip: The chilli solids can be dehydrated (in the sun or in an electric dehydrator) and used as chili flakes!]

Method 2 (slow/proper Tabasco version)

Step 1:

Same as quick version

Step 2:

Same as before - strain, blend and put into a jar but don’t add vinegar or brine this time. Place a muslin cloth (we just use a repurposed pillowcase) over the top of the jar and press down.

Step 3:

Add a thick layer of salt on top of the cloth – this will help seal the sauce whilst absorbing much of the moisture. This salt can then be dried and used as chile salt, once the sauce is ready.

Place cloth on top of jar and press down

Add thick layer of salt

Fold edges into the jar and cap

Step 4:

Leave to ferment for 6 – 36 months.

Chiles fermenting away

Finished Tabasco Sauce!

Chilli Jam (approx. 800ml)

This is one of my favorite condiments. It goes great with anything fried, meaty, cheesy and/or salty. Yum. The ingredients are few and the method easy. You can play around with this one as much as you like, substituting, adding and subtracting ingredients to your heart’s (and tongue’s) desire…

Ingredients

- 4 tomatoes

- 4 bell peppers

- 20 chiles

- 2 onions

- 2 heads of garlic

- 5-10grams of ginger

- 700grams sugar

- 300ml malt/balsamic vinegar

- [fruit of your choice]

You can smoke your chiles to give it a smoky taste!

Method

- Start by blending everything (except the tomatoes, sugar and vinegar) to a chunky consistency.

- Roughly chop the tomatoes and chuck them into a pot over medium heat. Cook them until they are softened up and the skins are starting to come off (5mins).

- Throw in the rest of the blended ingredients. Stir and cook (2mins).

- [You can throw in any fruit of your choosing here to give a unique flavour to the jam. We've had success with: pineapple, passion fruit, pickled limes, papaya and roasted zucchini.]

- Add sugar. Stir until dissolved (2mins).

- Add vinegar. Stir.

- Cook on a low-medium heat stirring occasionally until the jam has cooked down to a jammy consistency (30-45mins).

- Leave to cool - flavours will combine and take on new dimensions once the jam has cooled!

- Put in a glass jar and store in the fridge. Should keep for at least 3 months.

Jalapeno & Lime Pickle Hot Sauce

This is a two-step recipe that involves an initial lacto-ferment. Like the chilli jam, you can get creative and substitute the lime pickle for other fruits.

Ingredients

- 20+ Jalapeno peppers (or another chile of your choosing)

- 2 onions

- 2 heads of garlic

- 5-10grams ginger

- 2 carrots

- 250ml orange juice syrup*

- 2 lime pickles / juice of 2 limes

Lime Pickle

Method

Step 1 - Lacto-ferment:

- Roughly chop the: 20+ Jalapeno peppers, 2 onions, 2 heads of garlic, 5-10cm ginger, 2 carrots

- Weigh the total and add 2% salt. Mix.

- Put into a jar and submerge in brine (salt water).

- Leave to ferment for 1-3 weeks.

Step 2:

- Take your lacto-fermented ingredients and blend them (brine 'n all) to a paste.

- Mix in orange juice syrup.*

- Finely chop lime pickles / squeeze the juice of 2 limes and mix into sauce.

- Bottle it up and enjoy!

*Make the syrup by mixing 1 part orange juice to 1 part sugar. Cook over a low heat until the liquid reduces down to a syrupy texture.

So, there you go. Three simple chili sauce recipes to spice up your meals and make your grandmother proud. Hope you enjoy them as much as we do! Stay tuned for more farm to table tips, tricks, and recipes!

Life of Spice: Pepper

Life of Spice: Pepper

By Dani, Apprentice 2020

Farm to table is an inspiring movement whose time has come. As anxiety about our environment and health increases, awareness is spreading about the impact our diet has on not just own well-being, but the well-being and future of the entire planet. Alarms are going off worldwide. Our eyes are opening. People everywhere are waking up. We’re waking up… and eating breakfast.

Eating Black Pepper

It’s a typical morning in the conscious kitchens of North America. Today’s special is one of my favorites, a spinach omelet with caramelized onions and a side of roasted potatoes. The eggs are from a permaculture farm’s weekly CSA box, the onions and potatoes from the local farmers’ market, and the spinach is from the garden in the backyard. The omelet slides off the skillet, smothered in rich butter from a small scale dairy farm nearby. The potatoes, piping hot from the oven, make a great companion on the plate. It’s a mouthwatering sight, dotted with black pepper for a little bit of spice.

Mmmmmm, pepper: king of the spices, maker of meals, creator of cuisine. The pepper in our breakfast today came from… somewhere. Somewhere local? Probably not. Spices are the sorcery of every meal, turning bland into brilliant, mediocre to magical. Most of us are blessed with a diet full of spice, but when we talk about eating local, the spice rack often gets overlooked. One way we can work towards restoring the health of our bodies, our minds, our society, and our home planet is to bring more awareness into our diets. Think local. Practice permaculture. Eat farm to table. We hear these terms all the time now, but while people talk about where the eggs on their breakfast table came from, what about the pepper on the eggs?

Black pepper is consumed more than all other spices put together. It sits next to salt on the tables in every diner in America and in most people’s homes. It is hard to imagine a kitchen without pepper, but it hasn’t always been this way. The globalization of food has been happening for so long, a lot of us are completely unaware of which foods are native to where. Chickens originally came from the jungle. Asia used to be without chilies, Italy without tomatoes. What does eating local mean, and how long has it been since people actually ate that way? We’re making big efforts to be conscious consumers, but how often do we stop and appreciate the spice in our lives?

Origins of Black Pepper

Pepper is native to India and is one of the spices that sparked the global spice trade and in turn the globalization of food. Pepper has been traded for thousands of years, and there are even references to pepper found in Egypt from 2600 B.C. For centuries, it spun the wheels of the trade world and brought wealth to many merchants, and it wasn’t only a way of making money. Pepper itself became money and served as hard currency throughout much of the middle ages. In some places, people’s wealth could actually be judged by their pepper assets. Imagine if they could see the casual way in which it is consumed today.

The Value of Black Pepper

Currently, the average price of pepper across the globe is $4.34 per kilogram. These days, Vietnam is the leading country in pepper production, producing about one-third of the world’s pepper. It’s followed by India. Vietnam is also the leading consumer of pepper at 166 thousand tons per year. Again, India follows at 88 thousand tons. That makes sense, right? The places producing pepper are consuming it, local eating. The third biggest consumer of pepper is the USA at 68 thousand tons per year. That is a lot of pepper for a place that doesn’t produce any. On Amazon, a kilogram of McCormick’s Whole Black Pepper costs about $30. The biggest cost in pepper production is labor, but the average price farmers collect for pepper is just $2-$4 per kilogram.

Farm to Table Spices

Understanding where things grow, how they are processed, and who grows them is one way to create a deeper appreciation and understanding of the food we eat and nourish our connection to the earth from which it grows. Trying to live a life embodying permaculture values at Rancho Mastatal has given me a wonderful opportunity to see how different foods are grown and processed. Until recently, I had definitely taken spices for granted. My experience with pepper here has led to reflection on the spice in my life and an appreciation for the sources behind the sorcery. So how does pepper get from the farm to our table?

That black pepper on our omelet and potatoes is from a fruit, often referred to as a berry or peppercorn. It grows on a tropical climbing bush, and the white pepper in so many well-loved curries comes from the same plant. The pepper plant is a vine grown best on a living post, from small bushes to massive trees. Here at the ranch, we grow pepper on Gliricidia sepium, (known as madero negro in Costa Rica) a nitrogen fixing tree. Pepper has its origins in forest ecosystems, so it is a fitting plant for a permaculture food forest in the tropics.

How to care for your Black Pepper plant

To maximize yields, pepper plants need to be pruned properly. Once the vine is at least 8 nodes tall, it can be pruned from 3-4 nodes up from the base of the vine, just above a node. After pruning, the plant will send up two new shoots, and the vine cutting can be propagated by placing the stem in soil where it will grow new roots. People have given pepper new roots all over the world. Global trade increased the demand for pepper and sparked efforts to grow it in tropical places across the globe. Now, pepper is grown in 26 different countries, including Costa Rica.

Red Pepper and Green Pepper

White Pepper and Black Pepper

How to Process Peppercorns

The first time I had pepper that was farm to table was here at Rancho Mastatal where we spent a day harvesting and processing pepper. Pepper is ready to harvest once one of the fruits in a bunch has turned red. First, the we collected the peppercorns in bunches and took them off the branches. We then separated the red berries from the green ones. The red berries become white pepper by soaking them in water for a day and peeling off the red flesh to reveal the white seeds. The seeds are then dried to make the white pepper on our spice racks.

The green berries we picked were destined to become black pepper. We blanched these for 1-2 minutes which starts an enzymatic reaction that turns the pepper black. Then we spread them on a drying rack. They can either be sun-dried, or you can use a dehydrator. Pepper dries to one-third of its weight.

Though the steps may seem simple, this was a very labor intensive process. It took seven of us 3 hours to harvest and process 4.5kg of pepper which dried down to 1.5 kg of pepper. This is about 40 dollars’ worth of pepper. It is truly a wonder that pepper is relatively inexpensive and so readily available. I wonder how many working hands and how many miles it has taken to bring pepper to my meals all these years.

Farm to Table Black Pepper

Farm to table has become a mainstream movement, and the growing awareness about the connection between our health and the well-being of our planet in relation to our diets is such a positive shift in our consciousness. But how would all those amazing farm fresh, local foods taste without spices? What would our omelet be without the king of spice itself?

Permaculture & Spices

While I don’t think people should go into their kitchens and empty their spice racks, I do think it’s important to appreciate all the resources and labor that go into every food we eat as well as understand the history of how it got from the forest to our table. Part of the word permaculture is culture, and it is incredible how pepper affected cultures everywhere and added to a permanent globalization of foods. It influenced the way people prepare, experience, and appreciate food. It changed people’s tastes. It changed cultures’ cuisines. Pepper was a powerful initiator in the transition away from eating local. With the globalization of our diets going back millenniums, what does it mean to truly eat local these days? As I continue to live my life of spice, I will keep asking these questions.

Hope you have a better understanding of the process of black pepper and how it gets from the vine to your grinder.

Speaking of spice… check out our past blog posts about vanilla!

And stay tuned for Dani’s next article on Life of Spice, featuring cinnamon!

Sources and Further Reading

Heinerman’s Encyclopedia of Healing Herbs and Spices by John Heinerman

Black Pepper- Piper Nigrum edited by P.N. Ravindran

Spices – A Global History by Fred Czarra

Applied Permaculture Principles

Applied Permaculture Principles

By Nic, Core team member

There are a lot of misconceptions about what Permaculture is. Most people think of it as an agricultural system, typically some sort of food forest and whilst maybe it does make sense for you to have a food forest, maybe it doesn’t!  The specifics of applying the principles will vary based on your environment, project , goals etc… but the principles will always remain the same.  In permaculture there are 12 underlying principles that help guide us through the design and thinking process. We have highlighted below how we apply each of these principles, many times in more than just one way, at our site. We hope this helps inform you how these principles can be applied in practice. If this article intrigues you, check out our annual Permaculture Design Course!

Permaculture Principle: #1 - Creatively Use and Respond to Change

This is an almost everyday occurrence here, with such a huge diversity of projects and systems at the Ranch.  One of the big changes that many people experience here is the change in diet, coming to a tropical region we focus on locally available food sources.  In this photo we showcase a typical meal of rice, beans, picadillo, salad and plantains and green papaya kimchi,  all sourced from within 20 miles of the Ranch.  Each year apprentices learn about how to creatively use these new food types, and learn from our experience of eating and preparing these food items for the last 19 years.

Yucca bammies, green papaya kimchi, fresh garden salad and a mango salsa…yummy!

Patacones, lacto fermented Jalapanos, pickled turmeric, green papaya kraut, dairy kefir sauce

Permaculture Principle: #2 - Observe & Interact

We love fermentation here at the Ranch we use it for so many things but as every ferment in every climate is slightly different it involves observation and interaction to fine tune your recipes.  You have to pay close attention to each batch to make sure you get the perfect balance of flavors from the fermentation process, this timing varies throughout the year and depends a lot on the ambient temperature!  Here we have some different pickles and ferments that we make from Green Papaya, Chayote and wing beans….Yummy!!!

Wing bean pickles

Chayote pickles

Permaculture Principle #3 - Catch & Store Energy

For the last 12 years we have been using two types of bio-digestors at the ranch to catch and store energy from human (and cow) poop.  For those unfamiliar with the system, a large underground vessel is used to create an anaerobic environment where the feces is broken down, killing any pathogens and releasing Methane gas which we pipe up to our kitchen and use to cook on. The now safe effluent is used to passively feed, bananas, bamboo and cacao trees.

On the left a mosaic describes the closed loop system we employ at the Ranch and on the right the mosaic describes the open loop, linear system that is often found around the world when dealing with human feces.

Permaculture Principle #4 - Obtain a Yield

Jackfruit is one of the largest fruits in the world, it grows and begins to produce very quickly and is ideally suited to our tropical climate.  In our agroforestry systems we have many jackfruit trees of different varities.  Here is a typical harvest of Jackfruit when it is really pumping!!  We love to eat Jackfruit green (when it is more like a starch) and have been lacto-fermenting it, a great way to store and add nutrition to this abundant fruit. We then use the jackfruit to make a hash, or as a replacement for the pasta in a lasagna or even a pizza topping… its just so versatile!!

Permaculture Principle #5- Self Regulate & Accept Feedback

Rancho Mastatal is an education center, community and lodge.  We host a year long apprenticeship, 100’s of high school students and 100’s of guests throughout the year.  We eat together, live together, play together and work together.  Conflicts are inevitable and we have designed many systems to productively work through these.  We encourage feedback sessions with our one year apprentices through group meetings and one on ones to accept feedback and make the necessary changes to make all of our experiences living together more enjoyable.  Here we are all meeting in our wonderful meeting room, a round earthen structure.

Permaculture Principle #6 - Use & Value Renewables

Over our 20 years of existence we have always valued and used renewable energy sources, from our biodigestor, to our super-efficient wood burning cook stoves to our dry composting toilets, these are all ways to use and capture renewable energies.  We have also installed 10+ small solar systems at the ranch to power cabins far from the grid and to help community members in Mastatal and nearby villages have power.  We are lucky to live in a country that also values renewable energy sources. Costa Rica is powered by 95% renewable energy sources a magnificent achievement by world standards.

Bamboo, a fantastic renewable building material

Join us April 2021 for our Bamboo Management Class or our Bamboo Construction Course

Fuel efficient stoves

In these photos we are setting up scaffold to harvest bamboo to build with, installing a small PV system for a local community member to help them have lights in the evening, and cooking on our fuel efficient wood cook stove.

Installing some PV panels in the community

Permaculture Principle #7 - Produce No Waste

This principle is gaining a lot more traction in the modern convenient driven society, where single use plastics have become commonplace.  With the slow realization that we cannot keep throwing stuff away, the principle of produce no waste seems more relevant than ever.  Here at the Ranch we are a large consumer of food and goods, often feeding up to 50 people a day we go through a lot of food!!  Over the years we have used our purchasing power to convince/encourage local farmers to reduce their packaging.  Our vegetables are delivered in baskets, our tapa dulce is wrapped in cane leaves, our rice comes in rice sacks which we can re-use for storage of other goods such as sawdust for our composting toilets and we get our milk in gallon containers we wash and send back and forth with the dairy farmer.  We are not perfect, and we definitely still produce waste but considering the average American produces 4.5lbs of garbage a day we are well below that!!  As we have become more aware of this issue around the world, this is one of the simplest and most accessible ways to become a more responsible world citizen.

Our local sugar, tapa dulce

Sacks and baskets used to store food

Permaculture Principle #8 - Design from Pattern to Detail

Students in our annual PDC learning to use the A-frame

Nice lines of trees on contour

One of the biggest challenges in tropical climates is the huge amount of rainfall we receive, seeing the pattern of deforestation and eroded landscapes on our property we countered this by reforesting land using diverse perennial tree crops, which mimic the forest stratas, protecting the soil and producing food for us to eat.  We dig swales & retention ponds, plant on contour and use deep rooted species, mulch heavily all to help slow down the flow of water and build healthier more productive soils.

Lydia, an apprentice, planting and properly mulching this new fruit tree

Permaculture Principle #9 - Integrate rather than segregate

One of the ways we do this is by integrating different species known as guilds.  These plant guilds help support one another and diversify your site making them less prone to diseases and providing shade, fertility and structure.  We grow our black pepper vines on a living post.  This post produces some shade and the living post is also a nitrogen fixing tree. Nearby we have more nitrogen fixing trees and bananas to provide more shade, food and mulch to the black pepper. Stay tuned for our next blog on the Life of Spice: Black Pepper.

Permaculture Principle #10 - Use Small Slow Solutions

Apprentices building an adobe brick walled shower that’s under a timber framed structure

Everything that we build at the Ranch is by hand. People always ask us how long it takes to build things and it takes a long time to be honest.  Our goals are to give people educational opportunities in the building process not just to make something as quickly as possible.  We see the value in taking it slow and not using a lot of machinery to streamline our building process.  We use our buildings to create beautiful healthy homes that are not only using local resources but help us make connections with people and build community. Check out this article on how we built this Tadelakt shower

Permaculture Principle #11 - Use & Value Diversity

Don Chepo winnowing his harvest of beans

For many people the idea of becoming self-sufficient is an appealing one.  We look at things in a different way by using and valuing diversity we aim to create regional food security and value the food we grow equally to the food we can obtain from local farmers.  By supporting our neighbors and friends we build community, financially support local farmers and get to eat fresh local produce everyday! Beans from Don Chepo, Tapa Dulce from Don Gerardo, Eggs from Doña Flor and Coffee from Jose Luis are just some examples.

Don Gerardo using his ox to press the sugar cane

Dona Flor feeding her chickens

Permaculture Principle #12 - Use Edges & Value the Marginal

Homemade banana vinegar

As we said before we love vinegar and fermentation at the Ranch.  One of the simplest vinegar recipes we use is valuing the marginal, fruit scraps and peels make an excellent vinegar.  We pack them into a bucket add water and let the natural yeasts convert the sugars into alcohol and then into vinegar.  What is commonly treated as a waste product has now been converted into a sugar source for a vinegar which we can use to spice up some of our fresh garden salads! Read our latest blog on farm to table, homemade banana vinegar.

A variety of aging homemade vinegars

These are just some of the many examples of the way we implement the 12 permaculture principles here at the Ranch.

If you are interested in permaculture design and it’s principles join us for our annual 2 week, life changing Permaculture Design Course.

Farm to Table Banana Vinegar

Farm to Table Banana Vinegar

By Marco, Apprentice 2020

Permaculture Vinegar?

I know, it sounds like a weird flavor combo. Sour banana? Whaaat? But it works and it’s tasty. This recipe is a very accessible way of doing farm to table whilst utilizing and transforming “waste” into something productive and delicious – permaculture 101.

What makes a Vinegar

Firstly, let’s take a quick look at what vinegar is. The word vinegar comes from the Latin vinum acer – literally “sour wine”. Alcohol is fermented by a large family of bacteria called Acetic Acid Bacteria (AAB), who turn ethanol into acetic acid. These little guys are everywhere - airborne and on the surface of most living things including me, you and, as it turns out, bananas! AAB are aerobic, which means they need air (oxygen) to do their thing, unlike Lactic Acid Bacteria for example (the main players in lactic acid ferments, such as kimchi and sauerkraut) which are anaerobic.

Check out our last blog on home-brewing your own alcohol.

Farm to Table Vinegar

So, here is a breakdown of how we make our farm to table banana vinegar here:

• Go out and harvest them bananas, or maybe you already did that and you have far too many ripening… so next

• With our main and only ingredient: bananas we don’t even need to peel them. You can just smoosh ‘em all up, skin n all, and chuck ‘em into a bucket. Beautiful. This process works best when they’re very ripe. We’re talking leaky, mushy and black. The ones nobody wants to eat, which sit around in the fruit bowl way too long, eventually they get picked up by the loser of rock, paper scissors and thrown out with an overly extended arm and a wincing face… Yeah. These are the ones that make great vinegar. Waste? Nay, but a resource in the wrong place. It’s farm to table, not farm to trash.

• After you’ve smushed them all up and put them into a large container (we use a 5 gallon bucket, but you could use any large enough container), all you need to do is leave it and wait for the acetic acid bacteria to get to work on turning the alcohol into acetic acid. The time this takes varies depending on your conditions and the state of your bananas, but somewhere between 1-3 months. Remember that AAB like oxygen, so keeping a breathable lid on top of your vinegar, such as a muslin, will help speed up the process. o You could also attach an air pump and air stone (such as one that you’d use in an aquarium) to pump and diffuse air into your vinegar. This should significantly decrease fermentation time.

• [TIP: you can hammer a nail into the bucket near the bottom. Leave the nail in until you’ve finished fermenting. Once your vinegar is ready, you can remove the nail and all the liquid in the bottom of the bucket will drain out.]

• Upon opening your banana vinegar for the first time, you’re gonna get a bit of a shock as you see what appears to be a sprawling metropolis of mold growing all over your black bananas. Do not despair. Despite everything you were taught about rotting fruit, this is not a bad thing. Generally speaking, bright colored molds (pinks, yellow, greens etc.) are the ones to be wary of. Get another container and a sieve and pour whatever liquid you have into this second container through the sieve.

• Next, take those moldy bananas into your hands and squish with all your might. Get in there! Don’t be afraid! Squish harder, dammit! Get all those lovely juices out and dispose of the solids.

• Finished squishing? Good. It’s time for your first taste test. If the vinegar tastes too sweet and not sour enough, it probably needs more time. If this is the case, you can add a little sugar – this is to allow the yeast present to convert more ethanol for our AAB friends to metabolise into more acetic acid. Another option is adding a little vinegar from a previous batch (this is called backslopping in fermentation lingo). If you don’t have a previous batch, you can use a shop-bought vinegar - white vinegar is a good bet as it has a neutral taste that won’t mess with the bananary-ness. Check back every week or so until your vinegar has reached the desired level of acidity. And there you have it! Easy-peasy farm to table banana vinegar using permaculture principles – there is no such thing as waste.

• You can now bottle your vinegar and age them. This step is optional and will enhance the flavour profile of the vinegar. We use glass bottles that we recycle from the farm. It is important to use a sealed bottle and fill it as much as possible. If the AAB are exposed to oxygen they could begin to break down your acetic acid into carbon dioxide and water.

It’s that simple folks! This is a great way to use up all those old bananas.

Enjoy your farm fresh, homemade vinegar! This can be done with a variety of fruits that you have in excess off the farm!

Stay tuned for more farm fresh recipes.

Vegetables & Greens that Thrive in the Tropical Rainy Season

By Amy Dodds,

2019 Apprentice

When the rainy season arrived, it started with a sense of relief - dry season went on longer than expected and our trees and plants were scorching in the heat. For myself the cooler air was welcome comfort, and the rains a reminder of home and getting cozy. Mornings were beautiful with the sight of the sun rising through the dewy mist.

But very soon our zone one vegetable gardens with our recently planted greens began to suffer - the sheer force of the rains and the humidity brought fungal and mildew issues. Faced with the reality that our beans and delicate greens were going to die out, I thought about the potential of using cover crops, such as sweet potato, for the rest of the year. But this did not seem to fit in my idea of what permaculture asks us to do: observe and interact with the environment we are situated in and use that to our advantage. With this in mind, we at Rancho Mastatal have been planting crops that thrive both in the intense heat and thumping rain. Below are some of the most popular vegetables that we are growing in the Ranch that are suitable for the rainy season:

Cucumber:

Cucumbers have been abundant in our garden this season with us pumping out quick pickles nearly every day. Not bad for a community feeding 30-40 people daily! Thankfully, cucumbers like warm, humid weather. We grew ours by seed on a trellis to allow for more air flow and for the fruit to stay above ground.

Okra: 

Described as among the most heat-tolerant vegetable species in the world. It is planted for its seed pods which can be cooked, pickled, eaten raw, or included in salads. It does become mucilaginous so do consider this if you're sensitive to the slime.

Kang Kong spinach:

This leaf green is native to southeast Asian and is delicious stir-fried with soy sauce and garlic. It is a semi aquatic plant, a creeper that grows in or near the water on moist soils, so it is ideal for our climate.

Hibiscuses:

Both Green and Cranberry Hibiscus are delicious perennials that thrive in the warm and wet. They self seed easily during dry season so when the rains come you have a whole bunch of babies to keep your salad zesty and fresh. The leaves do contain oxalic acid so cannot be consumed in large, consistent quantities.

Chaya: 

Also known as tree spinach this is an excellent perennial green native to Mexico. It's leaves are edible once cooked, like spinach. It's easy to propagate by cutting and loves the heavy rain. 

Malabar spinach:

Malabar spinach is another heat and moisture-loving spinach-like green. The succulent leaves can be eaten both raw and cooked. We have only a few plants so we are trying to improve the population. We use a trellis to support its tendency to vine. 

Winged bean:

Also known as Goa bean and princess beans, these are sweet protein packed vegetables that do well in heat and humidity. They can fix their own nitrogen when the bacterium Rhizobium is in the soil. They are best harvested young and tender, and great raw in a salad.

Other more delicate greens we are growing in our nursery as they don't require as much water, such as Arugula, mustard greens and Asian cabbages. 

By having our covered nursery space we are able to grow things under cover that otherwise would not do so well outside, we are also experimenting with making some movable covered spaces for out outdoor garden beds….. we will update you with progress so make sure to Like and Follow us on Facebook & Instagram

Flexitarianism: Living and Sharing Solutions to Climate Change

Flexitarianism:  Living and Sharing Solutions to Climate Change

by Matthew Livingston
Matt is currently one of the Ranch's year-long apprentices.

DISCLAIMER: These are my thoughts and experiences on what can be a deeply cultural, charged and personal topic: diet. There is a lot we don’t know, especially when it comes to what a sustainable diet is. For one, most studies have been centred in high-income Western countries (Jones et al., 2016); it’s also still largely unclear exactly what a “healthy diet” should consist of, nevertheless what a truly sustainable society would look like. Integrating all of these concepts is an enormous challenge.

“Defining what represents a macro-nutritionally balanced diet remains an open question and a high priority in nutrition research.” (Song et al., 2016)

Before coming to the Ranch, I had been vegetarian for about a year and a half, predominantly for environmental reasons. Currently, I would probably classify as a “flexitarian” or “ethical omnivore”, as are most of the denizens here, with the majority of the diet being plant-based. Ideally ~95% of our calories would come from plants, due to extensive research on the health, longevity and environmental benefits of eating a predominantly plant-based diet (1, 2, 3). A 95:5 plant to meat ratio is manifest in all of the Blue Zones (4), examples being Okinawa & Sardinia, where people live the longest and most healthful lives in the world. Allow me to explain how I came to this decision and why I’m sticking with it for now…

My original swap to vegetarianism was influenced by my desire to live “more sustainably”, and healthily, as it is for many people now. I saw the documentary film “Cowspiracy” (bear with me) and this initiated my research into food and agriculture, which carried over into my environmental sustainability degree. It was also enough to shift one of my fundamental behavioural patterns – my diet. It was a little tough going at first,  but I soon found that I didn’t miss eating meat much at all. I felt a bit better about myself, “knowing” that I wasn’t contributing as much to global warming, as my research indicated that changing one’s diet can be one of the most impactful ways of reducing your carbon footprint (Aleksandrowicz et al., 2016)…

Fast forward to May 2017, when I travelled to Ridgedale Permaculture farm in Sweden for my Permaculture Design Course with Richard Perkins. Richard is a proud meat-eater, being particularly fond of freshly line-caught fish, properly cured bacon & sausages, and a nice, juicy steak from locally reared, regeneratively farmed livestock, as viewers of his Youtube channel will know. He was keen to point out that there are in fact “no ecosystems on this planet that exist without animals driving the nutrient cycling” (Perkins, 2016). Ecosystems depend on the cycling of nutrients (and minerals) in order to function, and these nutrients can be accumulated, dispersed and concentrated by animals in such a way as to benefit the whole.

One beautiful example of this is the salmon of British Columbia, that feed the bears, eagles, forests and pretty much everything else that lives there with nitrogen and other accumulated minerals from the ocean when they return to their spawning grounds. Another was the Great Plains of North America, where tens of millions of bison roamed. These prairie lands were extraordinarily diverse habitats for a multitude of co-evolved flora & fauna, micro and macroscopic. Now they have predominantly been turned into endless fields of corn, wheat and soybeans, using fossil-fuel powered machinery and chemicals to maximise profit whilst depleting soil of not only its nutrients, contributing to erosion and nitrogen runoff, but its life too.

Regenerative Agriculture aims to work differently. The challenge is to maintain healthy yields and livelihoods whilst simultaneously enriching soil, biodiversity and ecosystems and improving the system’s ability to regenerate itself. Through various mechanisms, we can actually draw down carbon from the atmosphere and store it in soils and vegetation. What’s more, animals can help achieve this goal. Grazing animals such as bison co-evolved with grasses (which are extremely efficient sunlight accumulators, astronomically more so than our photovoltaic panels), such that massive herds would graze through perennial grasses whilst defecating and trampling the remnants down to create a mulch that left the soil covered, before moving on. The grasses would get a natural fertiliser boost but wouldn’t be eaten down completely, which meant that they could grow back and not have to deplete their soil nutrient reserves. Over time, this kind of rotational grazing, especially when well-managed, can build significant amounts of soil. At Ridgedale, they have employed it, along with other techniques such as Keyline Design, to build over 6 inches of soil in just four seasons. There is even a project called Pleistocene Park in northern Siberia that hopes to repopulate the Mammoth Steppe, which historically supported one of the largest densities of herbivores in history and could function as a massive carbon sink. Surely we need animals as a part of our (agri)culture, then?

Well, you might point out that ruminant animals like cows and sheep that we are now cultivating in extremely large numbers produce methane as a part of their digestion, a greenhouse gas with ~30 times more “global warming potential” than CO2. Greenhouse gas accountancy is a complex topic and there is still significant debate as to whether the sequestered carbon pays off the methane produced during the lifecycle of the animal (see Garnett et al., 2017 & P.P.S.); that said, it’s also possible that the earth historically supported much larger numbers of herbivores, many of which were likely driven extinct by humans thus contributing to ecosystem disruption, as discussed in Sapiens and elsewhere (7, 8).

Another common argument is that eating animals is calorically inefficient when we could eat what we feed them. I would say this is a partially valid point in that animals, especially cattle, often need more land and water to produce than their plant-based counterparts, but it’s less valid when discussing purely grass-fed animals whose rumens are evolutionarily designed to digest grass, which most of us humans obviously don’t do very well; this suggests that if you want to obtain food from a parcel of land that wants to be grassland, you could force it to be not grassland, or you could manage and eat animals that are designed to live in and perpetuate that ecosystem. The Sustainable Food Trust goes so far as to say “the only sustainable way to obtain food from grassland is to graze it with ruminants”, which does sound a bit extreme especially considering that rabbits and geese are just two examples of non-ruminants that can be grass-fed. Livestock especially are getting a lot of bad rap due to the significant environmental damages of deforestation for pasture (an example of forcing an ecosystem to be something it doesn’t want to be) and their methane and nitrous oxide emissions (Steinfield, 2006; Stoll-Kleemann, 2015; many others).

Whilst not negligible, I’m concerned that many of the livestock systems under scrutiny aren’t representative of best-practice regenerative methods and that there is definitely the problem of reducing a living creature to the efficiency metric of its greenhouse gas emissions per kg of meat without considering all of its other beneficial functions and services; this metric has led people to the conclusion that “landless systems” or feedlots are better for the environment (Garnett et al., 2017), despite animal welfare being known to be abysmal and where wastes are concentrated and rarely dealt with properly. These factors go against the principles of regenerative agriculture and thus wouldn’t be allowed to continue; yes, grass-fed cows and other ruminants require more land, but we could limit the amount of land devoted to raising them and thereby reduce the total stock and consumption. In this manner, by allowing animals and ecosystems to express their true functions and behaviours according to the co-evolutionary properties of the animals and their environments, it might be possible for humans to yield ethically sound animal-derived food that positively contributes to the whole-earth system.

There are also a few points I would like to discuss with regards to plant-based (especially vegan) diets. Vegetables and whole grains, which form the staples of most healthful plant-based diets, as well as fruits and nuts, obviously take some amount of energy to produce, thus we need to consider where this energy or fertility comes from. We also need to consider where the dietary fat, protein and vitamin B12 will come from (amongst other nutrients/minerals) when meat is abstained from completely; I believe it is possible to meet your protein needs on a plant-based diet (Ranganathan et al., 2016), but doing so in the dead of winter in a temperature climate in a sustainable manner might be more difficult (are the Inuits an unsustainable people?)

Even the “most sustainable”farming methods I am aware of (which may or may not be organic certified) acknowledge that the inputs to grow food ultimately have to come from biological nitrogen fixation, conversion via animals, or inorganic elements (chemicals). For example, compost is vital to almost all organic, traditional and regenerative farms, and often incorporates animal manure, which adds additional nitrogen and biology to the soil and ultimately to the plants. The only exceptions I can think of to this would be Jean-Pain compost (which uses only wood chips and water) and Masanobu Fukuoka style rice and winter wheat cultivation, where the straw from the previous crop was left on the field as mulch and nutrients. Even the ancient and incredibly successful Meso-american Chinampas systems, as well as the rice cultivating nations of China, South Korea and Japan, have utilised ferti-irrigation techniques comprised predominantly of the wastes of fish as nutrients. Thus, since no sustainable farming methods can use inorganic chemicals derived from fossil fuels, most consumers that eat a purely plant-based diet are still deriving their nutrients from (the functioning and inclusion of) animals… Perhaps the question then becomes can, should and how would we integrate animals into our farming systems without eating them?

I’m still considering the implications of these questions and my position on the frequency and type of my animal consumption. We’ve had four “Pig Parties” in the four months I’ve been here at the Ranch, and chicken about once a week on average, all of which was reared and slaughtered locally in Mastatal. This corresponds pretty well to a 95:5 plant:meat ratio (see P.P.P.S.). For the first of the two pigs I visited the farm where it lived, died and bore witness to how it was processed; for the second we had an intro on how to properly butcher a pig. I think this is a crucial missing link for the majority of meat consumers and we need to continue building awareness of the realities of industrial slaughterhouses. Both of the animals I visited lived outdoors in tropical home gardens, feeding on bananas and other food scraps, although I’ve now been told it’s likely they were fed some concentrated feed. Pigs will eat just about anything, including chickens – they are probably the ultimate organic material recycling animal. Feeding farm animals to other farm animals is illegal in many parts of the world, but we need to always be searching for ways to turn “waste” into food, and pigs are one effective way of doing so. They in turn provide manure to feed back into the ecosystem and, when the time is right, are themselves converted into protein, fat and flavour for dozens of people for multiple meals. They can also provide piglets so that the system can continue, perhaps indefinitely. Without pigs in this system, you would have to replace the dietary protein and fat, which in our climate would likely come from more annual beans and palm oil from cleared forest land, as well as find another method of recycling the food scraps (vermi-compost is great, but doesn’t provide food in return).

Based on this discussion, I would like to present my initial take on a scale to classify diets based on their ability to be sustained, from best to worst:

1. Local regenerative

2. Local organic certified

3. Non-local regenerative

4. Non-local organic certified (many vegetarians/vegans in cities)

5. Local conventional

6. Non-local conventional (most consumers)

Where locality is on a scale from hyper-local (within 5km), to local (within 50km), to regional (within 250km), to non-local (further than 250km). Another important variable that goes hand-in-hand with locality is seasonality. Thus a checklist for regenerative dietary choices might be something like:

1. Is it local? (as the crow flies to place of origin): <=5km — <=50km — <=250km — >250km — Don’t know

   1. Does it come from your garden, your nearest farmer, your nearest market, or another country?

2. Is it in season?: Yes — No — Don’t know

   1. Are you regularly eating avocado, chocolate or coffee in winter in a temperate climate? What can you eat and drink locally and seasonally to replace imported goods you habitually desire?

   2. Are you consuming fermented foods and beverages? The Japanese have one of the strongest food cultures (called Washoku 和食) and longest lived people in the world, and 5/6 of their staple food ingredients are fermented foods. Fermentation is not only extremely beneficial for your health, but ties in beautifully with preserving the abundance of the harvest.

3. Was it produced regeneratively?

   1. Did it build soil and/or sequester carbon?: Yes — No — Don’t know

   2. Did its production support local farmer(s)/community? Yes — No — Don’t know

   3. Did it use no chemicals and no or very little fossil-fuel powered machinery in its production? Yes — No — Don’t know

It is my guess that many consumers would tick No or Don’t Know for every field, whilst falling into the worst category (non-local conventional). We need to shift first from ignorance to awareness before we can shift to understanding and action – behavioural change is flipping hard! All I can say right now is the link between diet and planetary health is crucial in navigating our transition towards a sustainable prosperity.

Let me be clear: plant-based diets are absolutely a big part of the solution, and there are many cases (including the average Western diet) where meat consumption should be reduced, but nevertheless animals aren’t the enemy. Vegans, vegetarians and ethical omnivores have a common enemy, and that is industrial agriculture (especially feedlots, which are completely awful). Meat in moderation, i.e. Meat Mondays as opposed to Meatless Mondays, may be a way forward for many people, rather than jumping straight to 100% plant-based diets based on quinoa and avocados shipped in from someplace slightly more exotic. I think this better follows the Transition Ethic that Rob Hopkins thoroughly emphasises via the Transition Network, by meeting people where they’re at – there is an irrepressible demand for meat due to complex sociocultural factors that will take time to shift away from, but if we can make ethical compromises that simultaneously shift mindsets, we will be well on our way to a more symbiotic relationship between humans and Nature.

May The Triforce (Plants, Animals and Fungi!) Be With You!

P.S. Follow the debate here, and here.

P.P.S. For the adventurous you can read my Regenerative Agriculture Brief and explore the references there too!

P.P.P.S. Three meals a day with chicken for 52 meals and pork for 12 meals in a year = (365*3-(52+12))/(365*3)*100 = 94.2%.

References, a.k.a. some of the things I’ve read:

• Aleksandrowicz, L. et al., 2016. The Impacts of Dietary Change on Greenhouse Gas Emissions , Land Use , Water Use , and Health : A Systematic Review.

• Badgley, C. et al., 2017. Organic agriculture and the global food supply.

• Beuttner, D. & Skemp, S., 2016. Blue Zones: Lessons From the World’s Longest Lived. American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, vol. 10 • no. 5.

• Davis, K.F. et al., 2016. Meeting future food demand with current agricultural resources.

• Garnett, T. et al., 2017. Grazed and Confused? Ruminating on cattle, grazing systems, methane, nitrous oxide, the soil carbon sequestration question – and what it all means for greenhouse gas emissions. FCRN, University of Oxford.

• Gephart, J.A. et al., 2016. The environmental cost of subsistence : Optimizing diets to minimize footprints.

• Hathaway, M.D., 2016. Agroecology and permaculture : addressing key ecological problems by rethinking and redesigning agricultural systems.

• Jones et al., 2016. A Systematic Review of the Measurement of Sustainable Diets.

• Perignon, M., et al., 2017. Improving diet sustainability through evolution of food choices: review of epidemiological studies on the environmental impact of diets.

• Perkins, R., 2016. Making Small Farms Work: A Pragmatic Whole Systems Approach to Profitable Regenerative Agriculture.

• Ranganathan, J. et al., 2016. Shifting Diets for a Sustainable Future. World Resources Institute.

• Reay, D.S. et al., 2012. Global agriculture and nitrous oxide emissions. Nature Climate Change, 2(6), pp.410–416.

• Smith, P.S. et al., 2014. AR5, WG3, Ch 11, Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU). Ar5, Wg3, pp.811–922.

• Song, M., et al., 2016. Association of Animal and Plant Protein Intake With All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality.

• Steinfield, H.G., 2006. Livestock’s role in climate change and air pollution. Livestock’s Long Shadow. Environmental Issues and Options, pp.79–123. Available at: http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM.

• Stoll-Kleemann, S. & O’Riordan, T., 2015. The Sustainability Challenges of Our Meat and Dairy Diets.

• Weber, C.L. & Matthews, H.S., 2008. Food-miles and the relative climate impacts of food choices in the United States. Environmental Science and Technology, 42(10), pp.3508–3513.

• West el al., 2015. Leverage points for improving global
  food security and the environment.