The Wonders of Vanilla

The Wonders of Vanilla

by Diana D, 2019 Apprentice

Vanilla is the second most expensive spice in the world. Being sold for between $600-1200 per kilo, that is more expensive than silver!

What makes it so precious?

Vanilla comes from the largest family of flowering plants, the orchids, as well it is the only orchid that produces pods. Every stage of vanilla bean production needs to be completed by hand, making it one of the world's most labor intensive crops.

This orchid originated in Mexico, it's cultivation is being practiced from Mexico to India . Being producers and exporters to the world market these countries each produce up to 200 tons of vanilla annually. Madagascar is by far the largest producer of vanilla, accounting for over 80% of global production. Although the value of vanilla is very high this has had some unfortunate repercussions for vanilla farmers as crime and theft of their valuable product has increased. This has led to instability in the lives of the farmers. Natural disasters have also affected them deeply, wiping out entire crop yields for the year. With such a delicate and refined production system It could take up to 7 years to regenerate the vanilla and return to the same levels of production. As with any single crop production system, it is a high risk strategy to rely on one crop for all of your income. There is a growing awareness of these issue for vanilla farmers and some new more sustainable and resilient techniques are being adapted.

To learn more interesting facts about vanilla, its history, creating a sustainable way to grow vanilla and support the farmers read this great article. This article was written by the first company to have an integrated, sustainable, vanilla supply that began transforming the Malagasy vanilla business in 2006. 

My interest in vanilla arose when I started to take care of it and pollinate it as part of my morning experiential learning tasks at Rancho Mastatal. The production of vanilla is a fascinating delicate and attentive process that if done successfully is extremely rewarding. I am able to experience the growth of the vanilla plant, the pollination of it's flowers , and after many stages of fermentation, curing and extraction we are able to enjoy the amazing product of this magnificent plant.

During my year long apprenticeship here in Costa Rica, I am able to immerse myself into the plant kingdom as well as learn the essential skills for self sufficient homesteading. I also get to apply and practice other skills such as carpentry and natural building which will allow me to lead a more sustainable lifestyle .

Vanilla is only one of the many fascinating things I have learned about here. I warmly invite you to come visit us in Rancho Mastatal in the rainforest of Costa Rica. There is so much to learn about how we can improve our lives within our communities and in harmony with nature. How we can all provide our own food and support our community with their projects. 

What I have learnt from the vanilla plant is that I would love to grow it on my own land, it's prices are rising so why don't we grow it for ourselves? Let's take little steps to self sufficiency by growing our own food as much as possible and by supporting the companies that treat the farmers well. 

Leon (2017 Apprentice) drying vanilla

I hope we keep growing vanilla and benefit from the heavenly smelling pods in our delicious deserts.

On that note I'm off to prepare a vanilla cocoa wine! 

P.S This article contains the basic hooch recipe, check it out if you want to learn how to make delicious homemade hooch :)

Blessings,

Diana D

Tropical Brewing

Tropical Brewing

by Connor Harron

The craft brewing movement has migrated to Central America and the Caribbean. A growing number of small scale artisanal producers are building on the American Craft Brewing tradition by incorporating local spices and fruits into traditionally brewed ales. To distinguish themselves, from their temperate counterparts, they are adding a tropical flare and creating innovative flavor combinations. For example Domingo7’s Maracuyá Pale Ale (that’s Spanish for Passionfruit) in Costa Rica, Ocean Lab’s B.O.B. - Blood Orange Blonde in Puerto Rico and Lu Bru’s Maiz Azul (Blue Corn) Ale in Mexico all demonstrate how local producers are beginning to incorporate regional ingredients into local craft beer movements. This is surely a positive development and one that leads us to consider other ways we might be able to further highlight local and seasonal ingredients into craft beers.

 These efforts will help to make brewing both more sustainable and position craft brewing as a vehicle for more thoroughly exploring terroir, which describes the potential for fermentation to be used as a method of expressing the unique environmental conditions of the places in which our ferments are produced. By using exclusively local ingredients as well as wild captured yeasts, we have the power to capture the unique flavors of seasons and regional differences that allow for near infinite variation and creativity to explore new combinations of flavors that are rooted in cultural tradition while simultaneously pushing the frontier of artesian brewing. As much as I love finding good craft beer in places like Mexico and Costa Rica, I constantly find myself asking if it really makes sense to be brewing beer with imported German Barley and Hops from the Pacific Northwest United States when there are such a plethora of sugar sources and bittering herbs available locally in nearly every corner of the globe. Could we instead develop beers using a hybridized process and create products that are truly local while still maintaining the key characteristics that make beer, beer?

Speaking of, have you ever asked yourself what it is that really makes a beer? It turns out, the answer really depends on who you ask and where you live. In the most general terms, beers are fermented from carbohydrate rich starches (typically grains such as barley) that first need to be enzymatically converted into simple sugars and extracted into a liquid malt before the substrate can be fermented to produce appreciable levels of alcohol. Wines and Ciders on the other hand, are fermented from fruits and simple sugars that can be fermented into alcohol with limited or no processing. In the case of beers, bittering herbs such as hops are commonly added to provide antimicrobial properties, improve shelf stability and add complex flavors to ferments. In the United States, it turns out that hops are not required in the production of beer and that there are many malt substitutes that are allowed in the production of beer, including “rice, grain of any kind, bran, glucose, sugar, and molasses (TTB Ruling, 2008).” This definition is actually quite liberating, and creates the opportunity to experiment with non-traditional malts and bittering herbs in ways that will promote creativity and improve the sustainability of the craft brewing market globally. This flexibility in malt production will be especially important given that recent climate models suggest that the regional distribution of barley production will become increasing restricted over the next 20 years (Nature, 2018).

In Costa Rica, we have been experimenting and finding repeated success using a wide range of local ingredients including banana, corn, rice, cacao beans, coffee and local cane sugar for producing malts. Corn and bananas, for example, both have long cultural traditions of being used in the creation of local beers. In Eastern Africa, Bananas have long been used to create malt for the production of banana beer (Urwaga or Mubisi as it is locally known). Bananas make for an interesting malt base because they fall into a relatively unique category of fruits that when ripe are rich in both simple sugars and complex carbohydrates that can be easily fermented into a strongly alcoholic brew while maintaining a mouthfeel that is remarkably similar to beer brewed from barley. When the ripe bananas are boiled for several hours, the sugars begin to caramelize, transforming the flavor of the malt into a sweet, neutral flavored base that remarkably, tastes very little of banana, making it an ideal substrate for mixing with bitter herbs or other local products such as coffee and chocolate that can be fermented into either an Ale or Stout like brew.

Conversely, in many parts of South America, but perhaps most notably in Peru, Maize has been used for centuries to produce a corn beer called Chicha. Unlike barley, which when sprouted produces a large concentration of Amylase Enzymes (the key types of enzymes needed to convert complex carbohydrates into fermentable sugars), to make a corn beer, these enzymes need to come from another source. The indigenous peoples of South America developed an ingenious solution to this challenge when they discovered that chewing the cooked corn would transform the starchy, carbohydrate rich grain into a sweet masa that could then be re-boiled in water and strained to create a fermentable Wort made purely from Maize. Although many foreigners cringe when they first learn about the process, for the Inca’s, it was a powerful community building practice that would bring people together to sit around the fire, alternating between sharing stories and laughter while chewing the cooked corn and then depositing all of the masa into a large pot. Although they almost assuredly could not have fully comprehended the transformations that were taking place, their solution was so ingenious because human saliva is packed full of the enzymes needed to break down the carbohydrates in corn into fermentable sugars. I experimented with the traditional process a couple years ago, and I have to admit it was a powerful community building process that for me, took the idea of collective fermentation to a whole other level. Talk about terroir!

The problem with the traditional process is that it is incredibly labor intensive. If you are lucky, like me, you might be able to convince your friends to help you chew a few pounds of corn once or twice for the novelty of the experience, but you are likely to be hard pressed to find a consistent source of labor to chew through the many pounds of corn you will need to produce even a few gallons of Peruvian style Chicha. Fortunately, today we have access to many sources of amylase besides our saliva. As it turns out, ripe bananas (and in particular, ripe banana peels), contain a very high concentration of the same amylase enzymes needed to convert the starches in Maize into fermentable sugars. If you think about it, this actually makes a lot of sense. Unripened green bananas and plantains are a very starchy staple food crop that is used culinarily in a similar fashion to potatoes. As the skin yellows and the banana ripens however, the banana naturally transforms those carbohydrates into simple sugars that make dessert bananas so pleasant to eat directly out of hand.

Due to the high concentration of amylase enzymes present in ripe banana peels, they can be dehydrated and pulverized into an enzyme rich powder that can be mixed with ground maize and water and then mashed similarly to a barley based beer between 140-160 F for 2-24 hours (depending on the ratio of corn to powdered banana peels used) before being strained and boiled to make a fermentable wort. You’ll need to taste the Mash or use iodine strips to determine when the conversion has been completed. There are actually lots of fruits and vegetables that are rich in amylase enzymes. Sweet potato, for example, has such a high concentration of these enzymes that its peel is often used in the commercial production of Amylase.

Alternatively, instead of using the enzymes present in another product, it is also possible to ferment grains with certain types of molds that consume starches and in turn naturally produce the enzymes needed to convert the grains of carbohydrates into fermentable sugars. In Japan for example, Aspergillus Oryzae (or Koji as it is better known), is a humble yet miraculous mold that has been grown on rice for millennia in order to sweeten the rice and make Sake. It is also the key ingredient for making naturally brewed Soy Sauce or fermenting Miso due to the rich diversity of enzymes Koji produces that not only sweeten carbohydrate rich foods, but also break down proteins into amino acids that are the basis for savory foods and the flavor of umami. Due to these impressive properties, koji has now made it’s way out of Japan is slowly become increasingly familiar around the globe. This is assuredly a wonderful thing, because it has now been well established that Koji can be grown on a variety of substrates and virtually any grain, including rice, barley and corn, making it an ideal candidate for assisting in the brewing process anywhere on Earth.

To further explore local flavors and novel combinations, while boiling our worts we have been experimenting with using a variety of local bittering herbs and teas to add complex flavors to our beers, including ginger, turmeric, lemongrass, vanilla and many others. During either primary or secondary fermentations, we use nylon mesh bags weighed down with boiled volcanic rocks to infuse fresh fruit from the farm such as Pineapple, Soursop, Starfruit, or freshly roasted Cacao Nibs, just to name a few examples. Finally, by fermenting our beers with mixed cultures, wild captured yeasts and/or locally adapted strains, we have been able to produce ales with several layers of harmonious flavors, which provide depth and complexity that is only possible to achieve with mixed culture fermentation.

I would not have believed what a powerful role yeast and bacteria play in the creation of complex beers and wines when I first started brewing over a decade ago. Now however, I have learned first hand just what a difference the cultures we use can make. The experience of trialing yeast captured off of different fruits and flowers has led me to encounter flavors I never would have dreamed possible. Some have certainly been on the far side of the funky extreme, including cultures that produce the dreaded odor of sweaty feet or burnt rubber. This however, is exactly the reason for small scale trials rather than placing our faith in large scale spontaneous fermentation. Once you discover the joy of fermenting a simple malt of dissolved sugar or Dry Malt Extract with wild yeast and tasting apples, pears, or other citrus fruits magically appear in the finished product, I believe that like me, you will never want to use a commercialized yeast strain on it’s own again.

I believe that by drawing from the richness of our cultural traditions around the world, we have the potential to greatly expand the breadth of our palates and to more intimately link our brews to the time and place in which they were crafted. The craft brewing revolution is still in its infancy and if I am to have a part of to play in it’s development, then Ginger Hibiscus Sake Hybrids, Banana Coffee Stouts, and Mayan Chocolate Ales will be just the tip of the iceberg.

If you would like our simple Hooch recipe, read our blog article with step by step instructions. If you want to learn more about the wild world of fermentation consider joining us for our year long apprenticeship where apprentices go deep into advanced fermentation techniques.

Dairy Dairies: How to Make Cream Cheese with Dairy Kefir

Dairy Dairies:

How to Make Cream Cheese

with Dairy Kefir

By Ryan Roberts

2019 Apprentice

That's right folks, we're making cheese with the champagne of yogurts.

Dairy Kefir is so interesting to me because it embodies stacking functions - like alchemy, it's possible for 1+1 to equal 4. Milk, grains (scoby) and a days time and voila, you have a delicious base product better than the milk you started with. It's now lightly carbonated, stable in the fridge, resistant to microbial incursion, lower in lactose, tangy, creamy, probiotic and great for your gut.

Furthermore, that stable base product, can be used to create a wide variety of different specialty products that carry with it those unique value-added characteristics that we impart with our time, energy and expertise. During our last diary entry, we discovered Dairy Kefir Creme Fraiche, which you can read about here . This time we'll be making luscious, spreadable and customizable cream cheese out of dairy kefir.

In our first diary entry we discussed dairy kefir's characteristics and how it's made. You may recall that the dairy kefir scoby acidifies the milk as a defensive (or offensive) measure against other microbial life, which have difficulty surviving with such a low pH.

I've discovered for myself, though I don't claim to be first, that we can utilize that acidity to accomplish what is usually done with rennet, vinegar or citric acid: separating the curds (fats) from the whey (protein). Though the exact function of this process is unknown to me, the result appears to be the same. Left for a few days at room temperature, reveals to me that the dairy kefir will separate on its own. But there's a trick!

While leaving the scoby in the milk will speed the process of acidification, we want to be able to easily separate the scoby from the curds and from the whey. We do this with a sieve that catches only the grains, allowing the kefir to flow thru to your ready container. When the kefir is left to ferment longer and it separates, it makes it difficult to capture the curds and grains separately.

Instead, I remove the grains from the dairy kefir prior to separation. The dairy kefir will continue to acidify, though slower, but you'll be left without the headache of hunting thru the curds for your grains.

So starting with the previous step, here are the steps. Now that you have your dairy kefir and scoby separate we can begin:

1. Make your dairy kefir. Follow the instructions laid out in my first blog entry here (link 1st blog).

2. Remove scoby and place in a container with fresh milk.

3. Secure cheese cloth around the rim of a tall container. Make sure there is room for whey to drip to the bottom and accumulate.

4. Pour dairy kefir into fine cheese cloth hanging over the container.

5. Wait 24 hours, allowing time for the remaining whey to drain from the curds. I repeat this process a few times till it quits draining from gravity. The remaining cream is our cream cheese. The live-culture whey can be used in a variety of ways, including starting new ferments by inoculation, using as a probiotic protein supplement, and for cooking with in soups.

Dairy Kefir Cream Cheese

Whey - delicious for soup stock

6. Spread the cream cheese out on a pan with a rubber spatula. Sprinkle in salt and your choice of herbs or dried vegetables. Imagine sun-dried tomatoes, garlic, onions… yes please!

7. Now fold the cheese onto itself, repeatedly, which helps to mix the ingredients in evenly.

8. Place in a container and serve. Buen Provecho!

How to Make a Simple Hooch

How to Make a Simple Hooch ?

by PJ Barton, 2019 Apprentice

Hooch is the name we use to refer to our own homemade alcoholic beverages. In this blog I am going to explain how we make our delicious home brew. Interested in Fermentation? join us for our upcoming workshop THE ART OF FERMENTATION.

During the peak season at Rancho Mastatal we drink around 15 gallons of Hooch a week. We brew our Hooch in Corny kegs, these are great as they are made of stainless steel, they are easy to clean and easy to maintain as you can easily purchase all of the replacement seals.

Our Corny Kegs

For thousands of years humans have been fermenting for recreational, spiritual and medicinal uses. Fermentation allows us to safely store ingredients without the need for refrigeration and prior to the advent of electricity it was the primary way to store certain foods and drinks. Although hooch is an alcoholic beverage, it can also be brewed for medicinal purposes, by adding herbs and spices with the desired properties. By actively harvesting fresh fruits and yeasts from our surrounding area, creating and exploring new brews, we are able to connect to our environment in a fun and practical way. Hooch is a great way to use up fruits which are already naturally fermenting and processing them into something enjoyable to consume, turning our waste into something useful.

Yeast is a culture that is one of the base ingredients for making Hooch. It feeds on sugars when we mix it with sugar and water creating carbon dioxide and alcohol. We can buy commercial yeast strains, which are sold for brewing or we can harvest our own wild yeasts from our environment. Different wild yeasts will impart different flavors and characteristics to our homemade brew, try experimenting with these wild yeasts and see which ones produce flavors you enjoy most!

Harvesting Wild Yeast

To harvest wild yeasts from fruits and flowers

1. Collect them in a sterile jar and leave in a dilution of 20 percent sugar to water (eg 40g of sugar to 200ml of water).

2. After 48 hours (although this will depend on the ambient temperature), sediment should start form on the bottom of the jar, bubbles will start appearing, and your solution will begin to ferment. this is a sign of a healthy solution!.  

3. Remove the fruit or flower from the liquid.

4. Continue feeding with sugar every day for a week and you will have you own yeast culture that you can use to start brewing with.

Basic Hooch recipe

This basic Hooch recipe is really simple and uses 3 simple ingredients. You can add fruits or herbs to extract the taste that you desire. There are many opportunities for experimentation when you start making your own alcohol and hopefully you can create delicious beverages to enjoy with your family and friends.

Simple recipe to make your homemade hooch:

        For a 2 gallon batch

·        2 pounds unrefined cane sugar (we use Tapa Dulce)

·        2 gallons of water – 1 gallon tea

·        2 cups of wild yeast solution (see above instructions on how to harvest wild yeasts)

Tapa Dulce

How to prepare:

1. Melt the sugar into a gallon of hot water, until the sugar has dissolved.

2. Mix in the remaining gallon of water to help cool off the sugar water, make sure you cool it down to 100F degrees. This process is creating a wort in which you pitch the yeast.

3. Once the liquid has cooled down pitch the yeast. Stir it well and transfer it to a container with an airlock for a minimum of 1 week before consuming

   

This is a standard hooch consumed on the ranch other enjoyable combinations such as coca, vanilla and ginger or oranges, cinnamon ginger. In every available resource there’s a new taste to explore.  Enjoy and have fun experimenting

Want to learn more? Join us for a day workshop or a longer residential workshop

How to Make Dairy Kefir Banana Creme Fraiche

Dairy Dairies: How to Make Dairy Kefir Banana Creme Fraiche

by Ryan Roberts, 2019 Apprentice

Welcome back, it's Ryan again!

In our last conversation I shared a little about dairy kefir; the history, chemistry and process for making it. This time we'll talk about an exceptional use of dairy kefir - making banana kefir creme fraiche!

Velvety smooth and udderly delicious, this topping is ideal applied atop crepes, pancakes, granola. Next time you're making a pancake breakfast-in-bed for your bae, you can blow their minds with this yummy topping.

Here's the kicker: the bi-product of this process will yield a delightfully flavorful and intensely proteus “banana-infused” whey. I recommend drinking it straight or adding it to your morning shake to spike it with great flavor and a boatload of protein.

If at this point your finding yourself lost on the fundamentals of dairy kefir, check out my first installment of Dairy Diaries here, before proceeding to the next section.

So diving back into the science for a moment; Dairy kefir is a specialized symbiotic colony of organisms, favoring lactose sugars, and adapted to consume them, but this doesn't preclude it from utilizing what sugars are available. Bananas are intensely sweet, potassium rich and full of minerals, making it a fine fuel for your SCOBY friends. The process will break down and alter the banana, unlocking new flavors and heightening nutritional qualities.

This process will take you through the steps of making dairy kefir first, then walk you through separating your two products and processing them to completion.

Ingredients

- Whole organic milk

- Spoonful of dairy kefir SCOBY (or “grains”)

- Glass container for your next batch

- Two medium-sized bowls: one for your creme fraiche, the other for your whey

- Spoon

- Funnel (optional)

- Fine mesh strainer

- Hand blender or food processor (optional)

Process

1. Sterilize your container, using boiling water for your first clean.

2. Chop bananas to your desired quantity and thickness. I chose to use three small bananas. Note that increasing the surface area of your banana by chopping it will make it easier for the SCOBY to access the sugars in the banana. In this step, I quartered the bananas then chopped them horizonally into thin pizza slices. Put the bananas into your container.

3. Put a spoon-full of dairy kefir SCOBY into your container.

4. Pour your organic whole milk into your container, taking care to minimize splashing.

5. Place a lid lightly over the container, creating only a light seal to allow CO2 to escape. Let sit for 12 - 24 hours depending on temperature. Warmer temperatures will yield a faster process. The goal here is to stimulate the mixture to self-separate into the whey on the bottom and the cream on top. It looks funky, but don't sweat it. The cream along with the bananas will become our creme fraiche and the whey, whatever you want to do with it.

6. Pour the whole mixture into a fine mesh strainer. Let the whey drip through the mesh, which will happen mostly on it's own because the cream is now chemically separated from the whey. Light stirring is ok, but seek to minimize the amount of cream that falls through the strainer!

7. Now hunt for your SCOBYs amongst the cream! The goal of this step is different from that of making plain dairy kefir. We want to recover our SCOBY, but we don't want our banana kefir cream to fall through into the whey, so we place our bowl under the strainer now. You may use a gentle scooping motion along the bottom of the strainer to find your grains. Whatever cream falls through should be added back once you've recovered your SCOBY babies. This step can be challenging and awkward.

8. Place your SCOBYs back into their home container, refill it with milk and lightly stir the milk with a clean spoon.

9. Now we have whey in one bowl, cream and bananas in the other and our SCOBYs happily in their new batch of milk.

10. The final step is optional and that is blending the mix. You can certainly enjoy the cream and banana bits mixture at this point, or you can thoroughly blend the bananas and the cream until you produce a uniform appearance. This final step is what yields your creme fraiche.

11. Keep refrigerated till consumption.

That concludes this little adventure into this novel dairy kefir product. Next installment, we'll be exploring a savory herbal cream cheese, YUM!

Have you always wanted to learn about SCOBYs, fermentation or brewing? Check out our upcoming workshops for anything that might be of interest!

From Tree to Bar: How to Process Raw Cacao

From Tree to Bar: How to Process Raw Cacao

by PJ Barton, Apprentice 2019

Living in the tropics I found myself surrounded by cacao trees, which was something you’d dream about as a kid. “Chocolate trees” But like so many things we’re used to consuming we don’t have the knowledge of how to process a raw material into something we can use, within the society we live convenience has removed us from the source. A simple act of making something gives us a connection to our environment. Walking through a supermarket we are surrounded by products readily available with a seemingly endless supply leading to a mass consumerism in our present society. This unsustainable consumption stems from our lack of involvement in the food we consume. So let us connect through raw cacao.

Throughout history so many cultures have cultivated cacao. From Mesoamerrica through to Europe. Its a world wide sweet enjoyed by millions, like most things the origin was much different to the present. Dating back 1400 BC chocolate was fermented into alcohol. It was a common commodity throughout Mesoamerica and the seeds were thought of as a gift from Quelzaledol, the goddess of wisdom.  It was actually used as a currency.

Processing raw cacao pods into beans is easy, tasty and fun!!

Processing 

After harvesting the seeds which should be a yellow or bronzed color you crack open the pods to reveal a white flesh seed with a brown centre.  The fruit itself is commonly eaten in Indonesia and reminds me of a mangosteen.

Scrap the seeds out leaving them to ferment. Place in a bowl and leave with a lid to keep off flies. We used banana leaves. To help the fermentation, yeast can be added we put kombucha to inoculate the ferment. During this process maintain temperatures of around 40 degrees and gradually increasing to 50 degrees. It’s not dependent on this I’ve made cacao before by just leaving it alone but by monitoring the temperature you’re going to create an optimal environment from the enzymatic reaction breaking the acidity of the bean.

After the beans have fermented for 4 – 5 days spread the beans out in the sun to dry the beans. This can also be done using a low heat in the oven but let’s harvest the energy of the sun which will enrich the bean. This can take a few days. The outer shell will be easy to break and the raw cacao is ready to use as desired.

Alternatively you can then roast the nut in a wok or in the oven paying close attention not to burn the seeds. It will start to crackle and a fill the air with an intoxicating aroma of chocolate. Leave to cool and break off outer shell. These roasted chocolate beans can be used how ever you desire.

Chocolate doesn’t grow on trees but if we understand the process it suddenly feels like it. Using ingredients from there raw form makes us more conscience intertwining us with the food we are consuming leading to a sustainable outlook towards life.

In Mastatal we are fortunate to not only grow our own cacao but also live next to a family run buisness, The Iguana Chocolate. Why not come and stay with us as a guest and do a tour at the local chocolate farm!

Dairy Diaries: How I Make Dairy Kefir

Dairy Diaries: What is Dairy Kefir and how do I make it?

By Ryan Roberts, 2019 Ranch Apprentice

 My name is Ryan and I'm part of the apprentice team at Rancho Mastatal for 2019. I've been navigating my lactose-intolerance since I was a child and gluten-intolerance since I identified it approximately five years ago. In this and the following installments of Dairy Diaries. I'll be exploring dairy kefir, in my personal effort to find ways to make dairy products I enjoy healthier, more digestible and more delicious.

I have a mixed understanding of my dairy sensitivity, in part because throughout my life I have chosen to accept the consequences of consuming dairy products that I enjoy such as cheese and ice cream. Over the last few years, in an effort to better understand the nuances of my sensitivity, I've taken to experimenting through exposure and carefully observing my reactions.

Since arriving at the Ranch, I've taken a fascination with dairy kefir, a cultured milk product which we make regularly as a base for salad dressing. My interest was piqued upon discovering that the salad dressing failed to upset my sensitive stomach.

Dairy kefir is tangy, effervescent and probiotic, closely comparable to yoghurt, with origins in the Caucasus Mountains of Eastern Europe. It is made using a dairy kefir SCOBY, which stands for a "symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast", which are often called "grains" in the case of dairy kefir. Dairy kefir grains look like clumped grains of rice that are yellowish white. They tend to clump together in spongy, somewhat tough little colonies.

The SCOBY consumes the sweet lactose in the milk, converting in into lactic acid and multiplying the microorganisms beneficial to the health of our stomach, intestines and the whole ecosystem of our body. This makes it possible for folks with a sensitivity to lactose to consume delicious milk products fermented with this SCOBY.

It's delicious, it's great for you, and I'm excited to share that it is stupid easy to make and maintain.

It really is as simple as adding the dairy kefir SCOBY to your milk and letting the little SCOBYs get to work. When you are ready to consume your freshly fermented kefir, strain out the grains using a fine mesh strainer and a spoon, wash your container lightly and reintroduce the SCOBY and a new batch of milk.

The Process
1. Clean your container, using boiling water for your first clean. Let the glass cool.
2. Put a spoon-full of dairy kefir SCOBY into your container. 
3. Pour your milk into your container, taking care to minimize splashing.
4. Place a lid over the container, creating only a light seal to allow CO2 to escape.
5. Let sit for desired level of tanginess.
6. Pour fermented milk and grains out through a fine mesh strainer.
7. Gentle rinse your container, ensuring you clean areas where the milk is splashed above the milk line.
8. Use a gentle scooping motion along the bottom of the strainer to find your grains.
9. Place them back into your container, refill with milk and lightly stir the milk with a clean spoon.
10. Enjoy your dairy kefir!

Here are some considerations when raising and caring for your dairy kefir babies:

Temperature:
Warmer temperatures accelerate the work of the dairy kefir SCOBY significantly. Here at the Ranch, we let our kefir sit for 12 hours to 20 hours through the heat of the day and the temperate evening. Generally after 12 hours, we put the fermented dairy kefir in the refrigerator overnight, but leaving it over night has led to a tangier, more desirable final product and an easier process.

Time:
The longer you let your dairy kefir SCOBY work, the tangier, thicker, more probiotic, and in my opinion, more delicious the kefir will become. Sit time varies based on your preference from 12 to 48 hours, depending on temperature. Refrigeration will allow you to store the kefir for up to a week. Note that while this significantly slows the metabolism of the SCOBY, the enzymatic activity remains active, breaking down the milk into more bioavailable and nutritious bits for our stomach.

Sanitation:
Like many ferments, the SCOBY creates an environment for itself that limits the growth of competing organisms through increased acidity and the production of ethanol (though in dairy kefir the alcohol is negligible). This means that the risk of contamination is limited to that which remains outside the milk. The best way to mitigate any rogue elements is to wipe away any splashed or remaining milk that won't be under the liquid. Other than that, thorough cleaning of the container for the dairy kefir is unnecessary - a simple water rinse will suffice.

The SCOBY:
The little yellow white SCOBY is actually quite durable and resilient, so don't worry about being terribly ginger with them. The only thing we want to avoid doing is pressing the grains through the fine mesh, which will cut and damage them. Prevent this by using a light scooping motion along the bottom of the strainer.

The SCOBY is also resilient to being left in the milk. If you want to take a break from the dairy kefir, you can do so by refrigerating the SCOBY in milk for weeks at a time. Every two weeks replace the milk with a little bit of new milk. It doesn't needed much.

The SCOBY will also grow in size and multiply. When you begin to find more grains, you can remove them and place them in a separate container to make even more kefir, or better yet, gift them to a friend! Dairy kefir, like many ferments, is the gift that keeps on giving.

So go forth and spread the love: for your taste buds, your gut, and your friends.

Check out Ryan’s other blog on dairy kefir crème fraiche

If you are interested in fermentation why not join us for our upcoming tropical homebrewing workshop?

Sources:
Rancho Mastatal Food Skills , Dairy Kefir, Laura Killingbeck

Brazilian Journal of Microbiology
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3833126/#!po=0.595238

The Basic Pantry Analysis: Design, Food, Sourcing

The Basic Pantry Analysis:  Design, Food, Sourcing

By Laura Killingbeck, Porvenir Design's Food System Designer

The Human Diet as An Ecological System
Cuisine is diet that's unique to a physical place and a human cultural group. We can taste the patterns of modern cuisine in the melding of characteristic ingredients into characteristic forms. Wheat noodles with tomato sauce points us in the direction of Italy. Fermented spiced cabbage leads us to Korean kimchi. Even amid tremendous variation, and even as these cultural foods are exported, appropriated, and evolve in different ways in different places, we are still able in many cases to recognize a cultural and geographical narrative embedded within relational patterns of flavors and forms.

Across the span of human agricultural history, cuisine sprung from ecological relationships—people ate what grew well in their area, and they grew what nourished them. Humans shaped the morphology of plant, animal, and microbial species by selective breeding; in turn, these foods changed the physiology of the human body. Cultural groups vary widely in their tolerance and desire for certain foods—these are genetic adaptations to their peoples' long history of evolution with specific cuisine. The co-transformation of people and food species was exquisitely mediated by the opportunities and limitations of the ecological niche of the place where they lived. Growth was balanced and calibrated within an ecological feedback loop of regenerating resources.
But in recent human history, globalization expanded our access to place and people, while simultaneously breaking this ecological feedback loop. We travel, and food travels; neither is linked, necessarily, in place. People are still connected with the world, but now we are connected differently. This shift is transforming the evolution of cuisine in unprecedented ways.
 

If you imagine the path of human ecology as a train traveling down a railroad track, globalization is the conductor turning the train onto a new track. Human relationships with food are now evolving in a different direction than they did before. The foundation for cuisine is no longer an ecological relationship between people and place; it is an economic relationship between people and business. Businesses grow or produce food and ship it around the world, where chains of distributors buy it and warehouse it in grocery stores. Surely this is not the only way that food works, and local food cultures still thrive in many areas. But it is a style of human-food interaction that is growing and replacing such local cultures. As we become increasingly separate from our direct relationship with the ecological patterns that once mediated food and diet, we become more deeply fused with a new, abstract, relationship with global commerce. The foods we like to eat often have less to do with healthy ecology, and more to do with macroeconomics and marketing.

We know there are a lot of problems with this. The Western Diet (aka, global cuisine) is correlated to chronic disease and poor health. Mass agriculture depletes soil and species diversity. Industrial pesticides and fertilizers damage ecosystems. There is a lot more to say but I don't have to say it—on some level we know, all the time, that this is bad. And even as we know, we still eat global-industrial foods, because we're hungry, its what we know, and its what's there.

Post-Harvest Permaculture Design
Permaculture design is essentially applied ecology for human development. It studies and teaches how life relates to place, with the object of sustaining that life and that place. A lot of the literature within Permaculture Design centers on the infrastructure development of building, landscape, and agricultural systems. It most often highlights the agricultural side, with ideas and methods of learning how to integrate human agricultural systems with the larger ecology of life on earth.

But interestingly, the focus on agricultural systems within Permaculture Design methodologies often only lightly brushes post-harvest food handling and cuisine development. The general thinking is that once people understand food production as a functional part of ecological systems, they will be able to grow more food. This has been very successful for many people, with one caveat—growing plants, animals, or microbial species that are edible does not mean you are growing food that is ready to eat. A a plot of wheat and a chicken pecking bugs can be wonderful parts of an agricultural ecosystem, but if you want a chicken sandwich there is still a lot of work to do.

Over the last nine years I've worked with two farms and education centers who dedicated themselves to the process of farm-to-table food production—one in temperate Massachusetts, and the other in tropical Costa Rica. This allowed me to study and practice food preservation and processing across climates, and see the similarities and differences that unfolded.

At Rancho Mastatal in Costa Rica, even very common foods, like malanga, tiquisque, cuadrados, pejibaye, and chaya were all new to us. And what do you do with a sudden hundred pounds of ripe bananas? At Round the Bend Farm in Massachusetts, we needed to preserve large quantities of food seasonally to last the winter, in a way that was totally different than in the tropics. We also transitioned from a home-scale cooking facility to one which could serve hundreds, and had to scale our systems up to meet new demands. At both organizations, it took us a lot of time, and a lot of trial and error, to acquire the skills, tools, and labor to do these things. And to do these things efficiently, it took structured seasonal planning. The teaspoon of ginger you need now in your recipe had to be grown a year ago, then harvested, dried, powdered, and stored. We had to learn how to organize ourselves in relation to local food, in ways that were intrinsically different from how we used to organize ourselves in relation to globalized foods.

The human element of how we interacted with food based on our personal and cultural backgrounds was another huge piece of the puzzle for local eating, especially in Costa Rica. We craved western-style bread products; people didn't always like Costa Rican cuisine; some people were afraid of new foods like fermented bananas. Eating locally meant coming to terms with the cultural references for desirability of foods we had brought with us, in relation to the ecological and cultural backdrop of a new country and climate. We had to adapt ourselves to new styles of cuisine, and adapt that cuisine to ourselves as newcomers.

Most of my work in Costa Rica and Massachusetts was to create, systematize, and implement post-harvest food processing and preservation strategies based on farm foods. I also worked with numerous farm owners, communities, and homesteaders who were and are in the process of divesting from their dependence on global-market food supplies. It is through these relationships and experiences that I began to notice consistent patterns in the challenges people faced in transforming their farms into food. I started comparing patterns of limitations and successes that people were reporting, with those of the organizations I was working with. I used permaculture design to organize these patterns into a systematic format that I could use to consult with people about how to achieve more efficient and accelerated farm-to-table food system success.

I call this consultation service the Basic Pantry Analysis. The title and process drew inspiration from many collaborators in the fields of permaculture design and farm-to-table cuisine; in particular the work of Costa Rican ethnobotonist Rafael Ocampo, as well as that of the Sat Yoga Institute. A similar process focused on family nutrition has also been promoted by the Instituto de Nutrición de Centroamérica y Panamá (INCAP). My version of this process is based on my experience working with farms and communities, and is an adaptation of a wonderful wealth of collaboration among many individuals and organizations.

The Basic Pantry Analysis
The Basic Pantry Analysis matches the ecological needs of your land, with your cultural and personal frames of reference, your dietary needs and desires, and your resource capacity, to form a “basic pantry” of ingredients, whole and value added, that you will use to develop your own dynamic cuisine—that is, the meals you eat every day to sustain yourself in the place you live. This process is useful for anyone who wants to accelerate their ability to grow, process, and eat local foods.

Your Basic Pantry will be designed through a combination of personal decisions and desires, which inform a multitude of what are often very simple tasks. Those big ideas and those little tasks are what build the complex whole. The consultation service is divided into four primary parts: Vision, Layout, Basic Pantry, and Adaptation. The scope of service varies depending on the client's needs and desires.

Sample Outline of Basic Pantry Service
Please note this varies based on client needs.

Vision
This is the overall concept of your cuisine. Exploration of goals and values, and how those relate to your capacity. Make decisions about priorities for ecological, cultural, dietary, financial, factors.

What the client receives:

    •    A one paragraph vision statement for your cuisine.
    •    A one page analysis of the factors and values that contribute to that vision.
    •    A sample set of meals you could expect to eat over the course of the year.

Layout
This is the architectural layout of your plan—it shows clearly how different food elements and tasks fit into your cuisine over time.

What the client receives:

    •    Daily, weekly, monthly, and/or annual list of post-harvest food tasks for your mature food system.
    •    Analysis of tools and infrastructure.
    •    Analysis of skills and labor needed.
    •    Basic five year analysis of how your food system transitions through time.
  
Basic Pantry
You need lots of ingredients to make meals—this is the list of those ingredients, whole and value-added. I work closely with the agricultural team to make recommendations about food species.

What the client receives:

    •    Sourcing and Growing list
    •    Processed and Preserved foods list

Adaptation
Your Basic Pantry Analysis is a starting point, not an end. It will grow and shift and evolve as you and your land do. This section is a structured feedback loop to help you grow and shift your cuisine based on your priorities.

What the client receives:

    •    Design concept follow up questions
    •    Blank harvest, processing, and/or other charts for feedback
    •    Supporting appendix—contains client-specific documents on further skills and strategies, and/or other supplementary documentation as needed.

For more information on costs and deliverables of this service please write our team at info@porvenirdesign.com.

For information on food related workshops at Rancho Mastatal please see go to our Workshops page.  
 

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.

How to Make a Real Tortilla

How to Make a Real Tortilla

by Laura Killingbeck

This article was originally published in the Tico Times. Please follow the link for the original article.

When I was a teenager, I traveled for a few months with a Mexican shoe-shiner I met in Mazatlán. We thumbed rides across the country and were taken in along the way by a dozen or so of his relatives. I often found myself in the kitchen with his aunts, cousins, and nieces, making tamales, sopes, or other dishes that were new to me.

Due to my lack of skill, the family often sent me to the local store to buy tortillas. Everywhere we went, no matter what town we stayed in, there was always some tiny store that sold stacks of them, fresh and hot. For me they came to represent the spirit of family and sharing in Mexican culture, and a deep pleasure in simplicity — there was really nothing better than those fresh tortillas with a slice of homemade cheese.

Most of the tortillas we bought or made were thin, six to eight inches in diameter, and made from corn. They tasted nothing like the giant flour disks from the grocery store that never went bad. They tasted original.

Later, traveling around Latin America, I came to realize that those corn tortillas really were original. In the different countries and communities I later visited, I tasted tortillas in vastly different forms. Some were fatter, some thinner, some made of yellow corn, or white, or blue, some pressed flat, others slapped into shape between two palms.

Most tortillas made by hand in Latin America are made with corn rather than wheat. This is because corn grows well here, whereas wheat in general does not. Some also incorporate pejibaye (fruits from a native palm, Bactris gasipaes) or ojoche (seeds from a a rainforest tree, Brosimum alicastrum). Variations stem from economy, culture, and landscape.

Tortillas do not have the same widespread status of daily consumption in Costa Rica as they do in Mexico or many other Latin American countries. But they do have a rich history here, and are still often eaten in the form of gallos (a tortilla curved in the hand around meat or a savory picadillo) or as an addition to a typical breakfast. There is no better way to impress your Tico and Tica friends than with a gallo made with a homemade tortilla! Where I live now in rural Costa Rica, a homemade tortilla is one made from whole corn that has been nixtamalized and ground into dough, also referred to as masa.

Corn

There are at least 150 different varieties of corn. They can be divided into four major types: sweet corn, popcorn, flint, and dent. Sweet corn is bred for its sugar content, and is eaten before the kernels are mature. Popcorn, which is usually round in size, has a specific protein ratio that makes it ideal for popping. Flint and dent varieties are generally flattish and oval, and are used to make corn flour, dough, and other foods for both humans and other animals. The corn used for making tortillas is usually a flint or dent variety that has been grown to maturity and dried. This is often referred to as field corn.

Many Costa Rican farmers still grow field corn for their families or to sell at market. A number of our neighbors grow corn and make tortillas and other corn dishes, such as tamal asada and chorreadas, at home. You can inquire about purchasing local corn at any major market, or ask your neighbors if you live in a rural area. Most people are usually quite excited to help you source this great product, and if you’re charming enough, someone’s grandma might help you make your first tortilla!

Nixtamalization

Mature dried corn presents a special challenge. Its outer seed coat, or pericarp, is hard and creates a strange texture unless you remove it. It also has a substance that can inhibit the body’s ability to uptake the vitamin niacin. You need to cook the corn in an alkaline substance to dissolve the seed coat and to ensure that niacin is bioavialable.

For populations that eat large quantities of corn, this process is essential to dry corn’s nutritional value. In addition to improving corn’s nutritional qualities, nixtamalization gives the corn structure and pliability, and improves the flavor. Ancient peoples cooked their corn in wood ash, or powders made from bones or shells, to achieve this. Many people around the world still use wood ash or other variations of alkaline substances to cook corn in this way.  The following recipe calls for hydrated lime (calcium hydroxide). In Spanish this is referred to as cal.

There are many different methods to nixtamalize corn. The qualities of corn vary widely based on variety, post-harvest handling, and age of the dried kernel. The boiling time and temperature varies (15-90 minutes) depending on the type of corn you use. The following is a great recipe that works well for us with our local corn.

Nixtamalized Corn Recipe

Ingredients:

15 cups whole dry field corn

3 tablespoons hydrated lime (calcium hydroxide), sifted

Water

Instructions:

DAY 1

1. Rinse the corn thoroughly in water. Remove any particles, floating pieces, dirt, or corn silk.

2. Cover with at least four inches of water and let soak 12-24 hours in a covered pot.

DAY 2

1. Drain the corn, rinse again, and add nine liters of water. Mix in the 3 tablespoons of sifted lime. Stir. The corn should turn bright yellow-orange as you stir in the lime.

2. Put the corn and lime water on the stove and bring to a boil.

3. After the corn reaches a rolling boil, reduce the heat to a strong simmer and cook 30-60 minutes until the corn is tender and skins are separating and dissolving away from the kernels. The corn should be easy to bite into, but still have a bright white point in the center. The kernels should be firm and intact with the germ and tip still present.

4. Take the corn off the heat and let it rest for at least one hour. (We have tried many variations of this resting time, including letting it sit overnight, or not resting at all. Letting the corn rest in the alkaline solution after boiling is thought to further transform the starches and give the tortilla a better structure.)

5. Drain the corn into a sturdy metal colander and rinse with water. Rub the kernels between your hands and/or against the holes in the colander to remove all lime and the clear kernel skins. Use plenty of water. Once the corn is thoroughly rinsed and cleaned, it is called nixtamal.

Uses:

Nixtamal can be used whole in soups, casseroles, salsas, and side dishes; it can be ground for tortillas, corn crusts, or made into polenta, tamales, or atole. The whole nixtamal will keep for several days in the fridge, but once ground should be used within a day.

Tortilla Recipe

The dough used to make tortillas is referred to as masa. To make the masa, grind nixtamalized corn in a corona hand mill or other grinder. You may want to double grind for a finer texture. Mix with salt to taste and just enough warm water to make a dough that is soft and pliable, and adheres to itself but not to your hands. You should be able to roll it into balls that retain their form completely when you hold them in your palm.

The easiest way to make a tortilla is with a tortilla press, but if you don’t have one just substitute two cutting boards.

Grab a small chunk of masa and roll it into a ball. Use two sheets of plastic (zip lock bags work fine) and put the ball between them in the tortilla press. Press down the handle and open it back up. Carefully peel the tortilla from the plastic bag and flip it into a hot cast iron skillet.

Cook for about 40 seconds and then turn it over. If your masa is ground fine, you will see the tortilla puff up. If it is thick it won’t and that’s fine. Tortillas should be cooked through and golden (or another color depending on the color corn you started with).

“Food for Thought” is a Tico Times series from Laura Killingbeck, is the Director of Food Systems and Fermentation at Rancho Mastatal Sustainability Education Center. The Ranch is a community and education center in Mastatal, Costa Rica, that hosts residential workshops in food, permaculture, natural building, and more. Laura co-manages the Ranch facilities and programs, teaches fermentation workshops, and writes about the intersection between food, body, and place. To take a class with Laura or visit the Ranch, please visit www.ranchomastatal.com.

Farm to Table Tales

Farm to Table Tales

by Lydia Blocksidge

Good food takes time. I've heard this phrase many times before, but after nine months at the Ranch, I've truly come to understand what it means to me. The local Costa Ricans are called the Ticos. The Ticos live by the mantra "Pura Vida", which directly translates to pure life. This is indefinitely how they choose to live. "Tico time" is another phrase I've heard and come to understand here. Ticos work at their own pace, never feeling the need to hurry or stress at time. They are the happiest people I've ever met. The western way of life has much to learn from this, no more so than in the world of food. I have three stories to tell that I think shed perfect light on this matter.

Beans

One day back in April myself and my fellow apprentices were asked by one of the local farmers and Mastatal old timer, Chepo, to help him with his black bean harvest. We were so excited by the opportunity to see and learn how black beans get from the soil to our plates, given the fact that we eat them with almost every meal. We started with a trek from the road through the jungle to the black bean field.

Here, Chepo was harvesting stems of beans that had been cut a week prior and left to dry on the ground. It was a blistering hot day, typical of the dry season and the sun was beating down on the exposed field. We jumped in and helped him collect the many hundreds of black bean vines from the undulating ground. We took them to the side of the field and mounded them up beside the bean bashing station, a big blue tarp strung between four bamboo poles. When the beans were all collected we started piling them onto the blue tarp, then Chepo stood at one end with two heavy wooden poles in both his hands. He started bashing the mounds of dried bean vines to release the beans from their pods. We rotated around, all getting in to have a go. The poles were much heavier than I'd expected and after about five minutes my shoulders started to burn and my sweaty palms started to blister.

Once one pile was done we tossed the bean vines to the side, bagged the loose beans on the tarp then loaded up another mound. It took our group of eight almost two hours to release and bag all of the beans. Once the bags were tied up we each grabbed one, slung it over our shoulders and started our slippery, steep 30 minute hike to the road, each one of us slipping under the weight of the bags and the tough terrain. But this didn't phase us, we all still had big smiles on our faces feeling accomplished and grateful for having this experience. We also all recognized that if we hadn't been there to help Chepo, he would have been doing all this work alone, as I'm sure he and fellow farmers have done many times before.

I will never eat beans the same way again. I have a new appreciation for this humble staple food. When I worked at an organic food store back home, it was regulation that if anything fell onto the floor we would throw it away. We had no compost system at the time so anything that fell onto the ground was destined for the landfill. I can't tell you how many times people struggled with the manual bean dispenser, spilling beans all over the floor. Never did we think twice about throwing them away, it was just what was done. Looking back on this now breaks my heart more than it initially did because I've seen the amount of work and effort that goes into growing and harvesting this food crop. One sweep of our broom and all the time, effort and resources that went into getting those beans into our shop were binned. Something that I never would have learned if I hadn't come here.

Pejibaye

Another story from the ranch is about the pejibaye season that has sadly just ended. Pejibaye is an incredibly nutrient-dense palm fruit. This season, each of our trees produced roughly nine bunches of fruit, each bunch containing about 30-40 fruits. Every golf-ball-sized fruit contains 200 calories! As you can imagine for an aspiring self-sufficient community, this is valuable food crop. But it doesn't come easily.

Pejibaye or peach palm in English is a tall skinny Palm tree. It's trunk is covered with needle-like spikes that will pierce through even the thickest rain boots. To harvest pejibaye we use our home crafted 20 meter long pull saw. It's a very useful tool but rather difficult to maneuver around a spiny trunk. Once the bunches of fruit are released from the tree, they splatter on the ground and we forage around the spine covered slopes to collect every one of these protein packed nature balls.

When these guys arrive in the kitchen they must be processed within two days or they will mold and spoil. So we remove them from their stems and boil them in their skin for 40 minutes. Then we drain them and have a peel party, each one of us delicately peeling and de-seeding around 60 fruits per weekly harvest. Once peeled they're ready to use in puree, soup, burgers, pancakes, torte and an endless number of other delicious recipes. It is a long process but well worthwhile when we enjoy the fruits of our labor for the next week and share this taste of the tropics with our guests. 

Jackfruit

Jackfruit is a similar story. Harvesting just two mature jackfruit can feed ten people three meals. Harvesting jackfruit requires you to climb into the tree and up to the fruit, chop the stems with your machete and watch as the 5kg spiky football-shaped fruit catapults to the ground. It's not rare to get a splatter of glue-like sap on your clothes, hands and cheeks at this stage, as well as the canopy company of wasps residing in the trees. Once harvested, we take the fruit back to the kitchen, grabbing a few banana leaves on the way, oil our hands and knives, and get to work.

First we cut it open, separating the flesh from the seeds. To use the flesh we must brine or boil it. Brining takes one to three weeks and boiling takes 45 minutes. Then the flesh is ready to use in another recipe. The seeds must be dried, peeled and boiled. By the end of this process, our hands are covered with latex sap and so are the knives, despite our efforts to oil everything prior to processing. It's just the reality of processing your own food and a rather exciting part of it. 

Good food really does take time. And I believe that this time and effort always makes our food taste better. Because we've put our hearts, our sweat, our blood and sometimes even our tears into growing, harvesting and preparing the food. It's an entire new way of eating that gives you a deep sense of appreciation for the food on your plate and on the plates of the people you love and care about.

News from around the permaculture community

The Monteverde Community Fund has a job opening for their Executive Director position. This is a great opportunity for the non-profit sector in Costa Rica.

What's your favorite permaculture present? We got a pack of the Permaculture Playing Cards from our friends at Permies.com this past year. We love the funky artwork and all the permaculture principles, founders, and strategies.

Abrazos

The Ranch Crew

The Peace in Knowing Yeast: How to Brew Your Own Ginger Beer

The Peace in Knowing Yeast: How to Brew Your Own Ginger Beer

by Doro

I knew there was something wrong when the fraternity brothers put codeine in the keg, when my friends got so sick that they went splat, when thirteen year old me took a sip of every wine bottle in the house when mom and dad weren't looking and I felt like I had done something naughty. European culture is renown for serving alcoholic beverages to children, yet in the USA where I grew up, something about alcohol is taboo. The cultural history reflects just that. Alcohol in Native American early history is absent, contraband could put you behind bars or blind you, prohibition made speakeasies a mischievous and alluring excursion, and even today a cultural lag in how we enjoy alcohol still exists. 

It became very apparent to me in college that with alcohol, etiquette falls flat on its face. Why? Japanese tea ceremonies, to draw a stark comparison, dedicate hours to enjoying a tablespoon of liquid in the most refined fashion, yet the common bar pumps out wasted resources, wasted fools, and wasted dreams. People may drink so much as to make themselves sick, both physically and mentally.

The Origins of Homemade Hooch

Alcohol is actually an ancient substance that has been intentionally brewed since the beginning of mankind itself. Some people even go as far to claim that alcohol IS the reason for civilization. One theory suggests that contaminated drinking water in Europe warranted humans to grow grains and ferment them to cleanse the water. In this process, humans needed to orient themselves to the earth's growing cycles, work together to organize and specialize in different tasks, then celebrate communally with a drink because clever Homo sapiens managed to retrofit their pollution problem. 

Health is a major benefit to why people drink. Medicinal plants have traditionally been brewed into alcoholic beverages and can prevent or cure illnesses. In the "blue zones"- regions of the world where people have measurably longer lifespans--one of the factors is that residents enjoy moderate alcohol intake. Blue zone residents also benefit from strong social relationships, so community is a major piece of healthy alcohol enjoyment. Sharing drinks with other people also lubricates and warms a gathering. So-- yes! You can have your brew AND drink it too. Alcohol gets the psychological, physiological, and sociological stamp of approval. Where did clever man go astray?

Time is the essential difference in how we relate to a drink we make ourselves and share compared to a drink we buy commercially. Like many good things in life, it takes a lot of time to see a good brew from start to finish-- or in the grand scheme, from seed to chalice. Modern "conveniences" allow people to buy Budlight from the cornerstore, then smash a can to the forehead before thinking twice about going for more. Woah, Nelly! Lack of restrictions on consumption could cost an eye, a tooth, and a frontal lobe if you're not careful, and then what kind of Homo sapiens would that be? Anthropologists suggest that it's our frontal lobes that allows our brains to use foresight and therefore be more aligned with the process of time. My suggestion goes beyond sipping more consciously, more graciously; start from the beginning and make the whole brew yourself.

Meet your Microorganisms

Did you know that one in ten cells of your body share the same human DNA. As for the rest, they are trillions of bacteria and yeasts that live symbiotically with your body. Microorganisms are a great tool for living in your body, or they can be a great tool for brewing the brews that will satisfy your body. There are numerous strands of yeasts that eat sugar and through their metabolic processes, they create alcohol as a waste. What a life! Some of these yeasts are more effective at creating alcohols than others. For example, the yeasts that you can buy in the grocery store were grown in sanitized laboratories to ensure that a very specific strain is repeatedly created. This is an effective means for getting a brew consistency. If you live in the middle of the Costa Rican jungle and cannot access such luxuries, or if you have pride in your local yeasts as San Fransciscans have in their sour dough bread, then you can easily grow your own brewing yeast.

The Ginger Bug

A ginger bug is the first step in brewing your own alcohol. Think of it as a little pet, like a fish in a bowl that you feed everyday. You nurture your ginger bug, and your ginger bug will nurture you. This is how you can deepen your awareness for the beverage that gave rise to humanity, and could propel it forward, or send it tumbling back down to dust.

Step 1: Locate fresh ginger. We happened to dig this rhizome up in our Zone 2 garden. The fresher the better, as it means more active enzymes that ultimately will nourish your bug, and in turn your body.

Step 2: Grate the ginger to increase the surface area. You're going to want about 2 tsp of ginger for 8 oz of water, which will yield a decent size ginger bug.

Step 3: Add 2 tsp of sweetener to your bug. If you can avoid heavily processed and pasteurized sugars, then do so. Honey, maple syrup, and fruit syrups are excellent choices. For this recipe, I used our locally preferred option, tapa dulce, or sugarcane. Bleached white sugars can impose genocide on your microbial populations and are best to be avoided.

Step 4: Stir your water, sugar, and ginger "bug" gently, then cover with a cloth and rubber band. This will allow yeasts in the air to get in, but keep larger creatures out.

Step 5: Carefully observe the nature of your bug. If it starts bubbling, this is a great sign that "it's working". Carbon dioxide, like alcohol, is a process of the yeasts' respiration, and it creates a fizzy bug.

What's happening is that you are creating a mini ecosystem that allows local yeasts from the air a free place to get some lunch (sugar), hang out in a safe environment, maybe meet some cool other microbes; and if all goes well, fall in love, divide, and start a yeasty family. That's right, you are creating a yeast breeding ground, and because ginger tea is the base of the medium, the antibacterial properties of the ginger are keeping the population of "bad" microbes at bay. You can feed your ginger bug once every two days with the same ratios of sugar and ginger as before, but only if necessary. Avoid over feeding your bug and creating a viscous solution. Your bug is your pet. Know it, feed it, and it will reward you with love and affection. If your bug has some fizzy action-- congratulations!-- your pet is ready to use.

Fermentation Experimentation

Ginger bugs are good for inoculating teas with yeasts that will allow them to ferment into alcoholic beverages. The next step in creating a brew is to find a tea recipe or make one up using locally available resources. Fruits and herbs make great tea flavors. I brewed two separate teas for this occasion. The first is a ginger sour guava tea, in which the ingredients were chopped, boiled, and strained. The second is a cacao tea that used the same process except using the fruit that bears the infamous chocolate seed. 

Once the tea is prepared, add a sweetener, just as in the ginger bug process. Sugars will continue to feed the microbial populations you are brewing. Like mentioned before, the less processed the sugar the better. Sometimes sugars even carry wild yeast colonies. This will encourage your brew to ferment.

Once you have your ginger bug and sweet tea, you can use the bug's yeast to inoculate the tea. Like a small fish released from bowl to small pond, your ginger bug yeast is off to fend for itself. Ensure that it is going into a safe, clean environment, and that your tea is not too hot. Room temperature to 105 degrees F is a safe range. Since you know that the health of your yeast will ultimately intertwine with the health of your own being, you continue to monitor the brew. 

Thus, you have entered the experimental phase. The ultimate flavor and quality of your brew is at fate's discretion. Proceed valiantly! Check your brew at least once a day to ensure nothing is growing inside of it except for good microbes, that the texture is liquid and not thick, and that there is enough sugar. 

It may take one day, it may take ten, but you will try your home brewed alcohol and realize that all that time you spent caring for your ginger bug and your brew was very well worth it. "This is delicious!" you'll say one day, "And my gift to humanity." A successful brewer is an artist-- one who reorders the chaos of water, sugar, plants, and airborne yeasts, and transforms them into a product that brings humans together. It turns out that it was never about the buzz, or the story the morning after-- it was always about the process. As humans face the coming challenges of the environment that our culture has shaped, it is important that we remember that each of our actions continues to evolve our relationship with the natural world. Even something as simple as brewing gives proof that the things we provide care for will in turn care for us. Sit back, sip back, and celebrate the pleasure of good brew and good company. Cheers!

News and Notes from around the Permaculture World

We are scheming and dreaming about expanding our chicken program in 2017. More eggs, meat, better breeding strategies, and figuring out how to get the birds to weed our orchards has got us motivated. If any of you are trying to do the same, you should check out the Permaculture Chicken Film from the guys and gals at Permies.com.

One of Scott's past PDC students, Levi Gardner, from a course taught in Nicaragua, is doing some excellent urban farming work in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Check out this article about Urban Roots. Levi states that for him, "a big turning point was going to Nicaragua for a month last year to study permaculture. I left there going, ‘I’m not just a guy that wants to be an urban farmer anymore. I want to build something.'" We are inspired!

As you know we practice agroforestry at the Ranch and love sharing our experiences with others. The USDA Inside Agroforestry publication is full of similar experiences from the states and around the globe which we are hope to contribute to in the future. Considering signing up for their quarterly publication to up your agroforestry skills!

Abrazos

The Ranch Crew

Food, Familiar Stranger

By Laura Killingbeck

When I was a teenager thumbing rides around Mexico, I quickly realized my vegetarianism would not survive. If my friend Valente and I got in some dusty car with a family that brought us back to a tin-roofed house and gave us chicken soup, we ate that soup. The kindness of strangers humbled my big picture ideas of right and wrong.

Wherever food comes from, as soon as it touches human hands, human mouths, it transforms into an intimate thing, a thing we all need, a thing we all want. As soon as it's prepared, or shared, or savored, it carries with it something beyond itself, a new richness. A new complexity.

***

For thousands of years, people and the food they ate grew together in the same place. Bodies—plant, animal, microbe, earth—co-evolved together in direct relationship. Communities of people created food traditions that reminded themselves how to eat, and how to live, in the place they were a part of.

But now, generations of individuals, and entire societies, are born into places dissociated from themselves. The objects of our lives that surround us—shelter, food, clothing, stuff—come from someplace else. Industrialized, machine-scale food systems and globalized food markets (food from everywhere, transported anywhere, warehoused in grocery stores) form the foundation of our new food traditions. They remind us not of a place we are connected with, but of a world we know little about.

Increasingly, the objects of our lives we know the least about are the things we recognize as most familiar. Food, and most other objects we surround ourselves with, are familiar strangers.

Recently I began researching different types of vinegars to incorporate into my fermentation classes. The vinegars I make (pear, apple, and watermelon in Massachusetts, jackfruit, banana and pineapple in Costa Rica) are easy to ferment with whole fruits and indigenous microorganisms, and the history of this type of fermentation goes back thousands of years. But I wanted to know more about the vinegars someone might buy in a grocery store.

Culinary fermentation is a radical transformation and engagement between living things—microbes, people, plants, animals. Industrial scale production cannot really make vinegar in the way an artisan would understand vinegar—it makes a replication. Large, factory scale production simply can't manage the inherent variability of wild life, so it homogenizes, standardizes, and in doing so changes the intrinsic nature of the product.

Most of these products are replications of something that was once made by human hands, from something in nature those hands could access, an original source. But what happens when we forget what the original source was to begin with? White vinegar, for example, is not made of “white”. Sometimes its made of grains, like genetically modified corn, but often its made of petroleum. Most people who buy rice vinegar or apple cider vinegar could probably wager a guess that apple cider vinegar has something to do with apples; rice vinegar something to do with rice. But white vinegar? Would anyone guess it was made from oil? Its a familiar food that has no natural precedent.

And yet, the richness and complexity of eating still exists, and we still identify, very personally, with our strange-familiar foods. As food and objects scatter around the globe, so do people. Many of us will live in or between several places over our lives. This sudden mobility exposes us to more of the world, but in less depth, and breaks the chain of linear trans-generational traditions that once held people, food, and place together. Many food traditions now dissipate and replicate laterally, around and across the world. They travel to us wherever we are, and travel with us wherever we go.

Once, on a bike trip across Colombia, my partner Scott and I stopped in a tiny town in the Andes. We went into a little country store to get some food. The man at the counter answered our Spanish with English, and started pulling things off the shelves to show us. “Look, tuna fish!” He said, waving the can, gleeful. “Peanut butter!”

“Actually, we’re looking for Colombian foods,” we replied, smiling. We had hopes of some fresh-made cheese, vegetables, corn cakes sculpted by little old lady hands. Things from the place we were in, the people we were with.

But the man wanted us to have tuna, desperately. Later he told us why. Though technically born in Colombia, he had lived his entire life in Idaho, until that past year when he was deported back to his little Andean “home town.” But it was no longer his home, or never had been. He missed the foods of the place where he grew up—not foods from the place where he grew up, as tuna fish does not hail from Idaho—but the foods he ate when he grew up in that place. The foods that surely did not come from Idaho, or even necessarily the United States, were now the foods he identified with, the ones that made him feel the nostalgia of home.

People sometimes talk about food traditions as if they were all lost, like socks that didn’t make it back from the laundromat. And its true, countless recipes and food traditions are disappearing, never to return--and it is a loss. Yet we don’t live in an absence of food traditions. People in both industrialized and developing countries increasingly now identify with the flavors, smells, textures of global market and laboratory created foods more than the real thing from the place they live. Global market food may be a stranger, but it's a stranger that we recognize, and feel comfortable around. We relate to something we can’t relate to.

Its important to recognize our personal attachment to globalized food markets, because its real, and I think its a piece of the puzzle that sometimes goes missing in the argument for local food. Only a few generations ago people felt attached to foods embedded in social lineages of cultural heritage and co-evolution. We identified with foods that only the people of the place we lived in could produce and make. But in a globalized food system, we now get attached to pop tarts, nacho flavored frito lays, diet mountain dew—foods that no one, no single person, anywhere, could really produce or make. Most of the foods on the grocery store shelf are conglomerates of ingredients from many places, products of laboratories and mechanization. No one person could make, from start to finish, a pop tart, or chips, or industrial soda, or white vinegar, in its current form, from scratch—there are too many additives, components and processes that can only be done in a factory or laboratory.

Beyond the oft quoted statistics about the vast benefits of local food systems—that local food is more nutritious, more flavorful, better for the environment, better for people, can mitigate climate change, can regenerate local economies, and much more—eating food from the place where we live, cultivated and crafted by the people of that place; be it a home, a community, or a region--connects us deeply to something meaningful, powerful, and comforting. It connects us to a world we can relate to, that we truly are a part of, and reflects something real, and unique about us.

***

Since my teenage years I’ve changed my perspective on eating animals. My vegetarianism did in fact die, replaced by a combination of opportunitarianism and locavorism. (I’ll still gladly eat any soup you give me, but if I’m giving you the soup, I’ll make it with foods from the place where I live.) But the original ethical dilemmas I chewed on in those years remain. How do we match our values with our reality, in a world so vividly layered in tangled truths? How do we live sustainably in a world that is clearly no longer structured for sustainability? How do we reconcile a felt attachment to the objects of globalization that we grew up with, but don’t represent us?

Of all the complicated steps and solutions we can take, I think the first and most immediate one is simple: we need to engage with actual food from the place where we live. Somehow, some way. We need to “get to know” living things with our senses. To smell tomatoes ripe on the vine; watch living beans swell in water and sprout; listen to farmers talk about the plants and soil they care about; taste the salty crunch of fresh cucumber dills; touch soil, plants, animals—anything, anything real. We need to go to the source of food—the thing itself—and get to know it, remember it. On a farm, in the wild, in the kitchen—we need to engage with real foods, in real life. We need to forge identities and food cultures accessible on a human scale.

Food and our relationship with it is complicated, and to create sustainable food systems I think we need to do lots of complicated things. We need to re-skill ourselves and our communities; re-purpose tools and technologies to work for us in different and better ways; build new networks of tangible and intangible food infrastructures that make local economies easier than they are hard. But this one starting point—engaging with the real thing—is the place we can all begin.

Engage with Your Food: Upcoming Workshops with Laura

In Massachusetts or nearby? Take a class with Laura this Fall at Round the Bend Farm in Dartmouth:  Fermentation Fervor: A Vegetable Fermentation Series.

Or travel to the Ranch this May 2017 for Laura's annual The Art and Practice of Live Culture Fermentation workshop.

Cultured Butter & the Culture of Butter

Cultured Butter & the Culture of Butter

When my dad was in third grade, his class followed the curriculum laid out in a workbook. In times of boredom and monotony, he would flip ahead and learn new material the class was soon to arrive at. One day he came across a particularly interesting bit: a tongue twister. My dad spent the next six weeks practicing the tongue twister in secrecy of his classmates until, finally, the class caught up to that point in the workbook. The teacher gave each student the opportunity to recite the tongue twister from the book, and each student who attempted this tongue twister stumbled through a slew of "Betty botta buddhas," until it was my dad's opportunity. Without even glancing at the page, he busted out the tongue twister:

"Betty bought a bit of butter for the batter, but said she, 'This butter is bitter. If I'd bought a bit of better butter it would have made the butter better.'"

With impeccable clarity and speed, my dad enunciated each syllable with the swiftness of an engine. Every kid's jaw in the class dropped.

My dad told me this story when I was a kid, and at that time, it was just a funny story. Now having spent some time at the Ranch where foresight, accountability, and sustainability are key, the story has adopted some unique and colorful undertones.

We prepare a lot of our own food at the Ranch. Dark, leafy and salad greens are grown and processed right around our kitchens. Jackfruits, soncoyas, and mamonchinos are fruits grown in our orchards and slipped into our diets. We grow many of the ingredients processed into red curries, our chickens lay a portion of our own eggs and we even grate and make coconut milk. A lot of time and intention goes behind the scenes of preparing one of the 22,000 meals the Ranch serves on a yearly basis. The latest ingredient to pass through our team's newly established food processing kitchen is cultured butter.

Although butter whipping is a simple business, conventional agricultural processes have complicated matters. Imagery of sprawling fields with shady orange trees and golden sunsets are merely a misleading, commercial scheme that draws in consumers. If the same Betty from my dad's tongue twister had seen a butter package of a concentrated animal feeding operation, she may have consulted her local dairy neighbor instead.

In the campo of Costa Rica, we are fortunate enough to have two neighbors that milk their cows and preserve the cream with a microbial culture. Those two neighbors are Daisy, and coincidentally enough, Betty, who does not make bitter butter at all, but rather fresh butter. When we walk down the road, we can see that their land is integrated in Costa Rica's biological reserves, or protected forest lands that weave through the countryside's agricultural sites. A low intensive dairy system means that farmers can give more attention to the quality of the ambient environment. The flavor of the ecology shines through in four simple steps of processing sour creme into butter.

Step 1: Buy sour cream from your local dairy neighbor.

Step 2: Whip the creme with the keystone appliance, the food processor, until it has thickened.

Step 3: Pour the product through a food strainer. This separates a rich, cultured butter from the liquid, buttermilk.

Step 4: Add salt to the butter and use a spoon to press out any excess buttermilk and drain. Once this process is complete, you'll be left with your very own cultured butter product.

Freshly sourced cultured butter has revealed some illuminating assets to Ranch food culture. Like everything else served from our kitchens, the butter is delicious. It's a medium for live microbes that actually form symbiotic relationships with the microbes present in your gut. It's produced by our neighbors, so we are able to see the land and the cows and ensure we are sourcing responsibly. A simple price comparison even reveals that our homemade, cultured butter is less expensive than supermarket butter by about $1 per stick.

These are all great reasons to process your own butter, but the most important relates to reading and learning from patterns. When my dad was in third grade, he predicted the pattern laid out by the structure of his class. Each day, the class moved forward in the workbook, all of the information having been laid out before him. Patterns similarly exist in the ways cultures are interacting with their foods. We can read these patterns and change our behavior to make sure we are eating foods that are healthy for both our bodies and our land.

In 1963, maybe Betty going to the store to buy butter was the growing custom because social norms suggested that this is how the batter comes out best. As proof of the tongue twister, the only butter bought was an obviously unsatisfactory product. Global patterns in the vast mechanization of agriculture without cultural or environmental conscientiousness has contributed to their degradation. Industrializing a simple process such as butter-making means that the vitality in microbial life is significantly decreased, land ethics are overlooked, and the wheels of economic engine and government subsidies can keep the price of this process competitively low. Plus, the taste is never fresh, never pure.

Patterns are not just ways of reading into the past, they are tools for looking ahead to the future. As people make more conscience decisions about where they source their foods, they regain their food sovereignty. They can be a part of a cultural and environmental shift that heals their bodies, waterways, soils, and communities. The pattern of regeneration is exciting enough that reintroducing skills like simple butter making become more appealing. When we sit down together for a Ranch meal, we recognize a labor of love that goes into every ingredient.

In questions surrounding the ethics of sustainability, answers are never obvious. As we navigate these territories, we are met with the awesome challenge of reconstructing a culture that respects land and people. Sometimes that means we just want our butter to taste better! Whether that culture come from your food processing practices or your live microbes, it's a robust tool in assuring that nobody be left with bitter butter.

Dorothy

NEWS AND NOTES

Have you ever wanted to build your own home? Just bought a piece of land in Costa Rica and want to create a jungle paradise? Well in 2017 we have the classes you need to re-skill and build your place in this world.

• Timber-Frame Construction--January 18th to 27th, 2017

• Earthen Walls, Plasters, and Artistry--April 11 to 22nd, 2017

We also have a few spots left in our Sustainability Primer program. If you know anyone interested in joining us please spread the word!

Abrazos,

The Ranch Crew

Lard, the new Super Food?

Lard, the new Super Food?

Hola! My name is Jessica, and I am one of the five apprentices of the 2016 crew. Health and food are two very important topics I hold dear to my heart and are in my everyday thoughts. Essentially these are some of the main reasons why I decided to come to Costa Rica and apply for the 11 month apprenticeship at Rancho Mastatal. Some of my many roles here as an apprentice are harvesting, processing, and creating the delicious food we serve here at the ranch.

Everything we eat at the Ranch is homemade or made from scratch as we'd say on the east coast of the United States. It takes a lot of time, and is made with a lot of love, which makes it taste even better. Since I am someone who cares a lot about what is going into my body, I became very interested in how our food is grown, where it is coming from, and how it is being cooked.

During my first interview with Tim and Robin in the summer of 2014, they mentioned that the food at the Ranch is cooked in lard within the mix of all the details about the apprenticeship. After our hour long interview, the only thing that left me puzzled was the conversation on lard, and why would a sustainable center that grows such healthy food cook with lard?

What do you think about when you hear the word, Lard? Before coming to Rancho Mastatal I thought of lard as a sludgy, disgusting fat that was seemingly the most unhealthy thing you could put into your body and would make you obese. The name alone sent chills down my spine. All I could think about was a Family Guy episode where Peter chugged a whole barrel of lard and went from fit, skinny Peter back to overweight Peter. I never pictured cooking with or eating lard in my future. Tim assured me that the Ranch did their research on lard and it was the most sustainable and practical option for them. Feeling intrigued to learn more about this mysterious lard, I decided to dive into the research and see for myself. Was lard really unhealthy? Could it be a sustainable cooking oil? How does it compare to other cooking oils? These were some of the questions I set out to answer.

While conducting research using the Ranch's food cookbooks and articles about lard, I learned about the American history of lard. Did you know a hundred years ago lard was found in every household and was a big money maker within the meat packing industry? At the time, animal fats were the main use for all pan frying, until the invention of the light bulb. What does the light bulb have to do with lard?

Well, Procter & Gamble, a candle and soap making company, had all this extra oil from dropping candle sales and they needed to find a way to use the extra cotton seed oil. In 1907 a German chemist, E. C. Kayer came to Procter & Gambles' company with his invention of hydrogenated cotton seed oil. It looked and cooked like lard and it was cheaper than the American household staple. They called it Crisco. With an amazing marketing roll-out including advertisements, demonstrations, and free cookbooks promoting the use and purchase of this hydrogenated vegetable shortening, soon Crisco was all anyone was talking about. To top it off, in the 1950s, scientists claimed saturated fats, such as lard, caused heart disease which made consumers switch to the new vegetable shortening substitute.

Most of America soon ditched lard from their homes and restaurants. Today's health studies now say having a moderate consumption of saturated fat in your diet is not unhealthy. For example, coconut oil is a popular oil to cook with today and it has an 86% saturated fat level.

Given what we know now; why is lard the best choice for Rancho Mastatal and its guests? First, lard is local! We know exactly where it is coming from and it is very fresh. Secondly, we are supporting a small butcher in Puriscal, the closest town to Mastatal. The Ranch does all we can to eat only local and support small businesses. And finally, and most importantly, the taste test. The taste of a homemade falafel or yuca bammie made with pig lard is in no comparison to one cooked in sunflower seed oil. In a normal week, our meals are made with only vegetarian ingredients and the cooked dishes are sauteed in our local pig lard. We have all kinds of guests visiting the ranch for a tour or to take one of our amazing workshops, and between 5-10% of them are vegetarian or vegan. We always ask our guests if they have any dietary restrictions, some decide to opt out of trying our local based diet and instead have their food cooked in a mass produced sunflower seed oil. As a former vegetarian, I understand the reasons to not eat meat products, especially when you don't know where it is coming from.

Here at the Ranch we know where everything we eat comes from and it feels good knowing we are eating as sustainable as possible. Pig lard has a respectable 40% saturated fat and 45% unsaturated fat compared to butter which has a 60% saturated fat and 23% unsaturated fat. For our vegetarian and vegan guests, we use non GMO sunflower seed oil which has 13% saturated fat, 24% unsaturated fat, and a not so well known active ingredient TBHQ- 0.02%.

TBHQ is a chemical cleaning agent and stabilizer to keep the oil from going rancid due to the low percentage of saturated fat in the vegetable oil. Most vegetable oils have low saturated fats and need to be chemically altered to preserve the oil, especially oils that are okay to use at higher cooking temperatures. Lard on the other hand can sit at a room temperature without any alterations. With limited knowledge about the mysterious TBHQ and its health risks, the decision to cook with local lard seems to be a no-brain-er.

Since the Ranch takes such pride in what we grow, source, process, cook and eat, I thought it would be only fair to bring awareness to our future guests and reveal the reasoning behind why we cook our meals with pig lard. It feels good knowing our food is always fresh, we know where it's coming from, and have the opportunity to build strong relationships with the people who grow and process the food we put on our plate. With one bite of our homemade corn empanadas cooked to a crispy perfection, you will understand our love for locally sourced lard.

Jessica

Resources:

http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/lard-the-new-health-food

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/02/03/146356117/who-killed-lard

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/04/how-vegetable-oils-replacced-animal-fats-in-the-american-diet/256155

On Food and Cooking: The science and Lore of the Kitchen, Pages 799-802, Harold McGee

NEWS AND NOTES

We are planning some exciting new workshops for 2017 on plant propagation, soil re-mineralization, forestry and more. Keep an eye on the calendar for new additions. We still have space in the following workshops.

• Timber-Frame Construction--January 18th to 27th, 2017

• Earthen Walls, Plasters, and Artistry--April 11 to 22nd, 2017

We also have a few spots left in our Sustainability Primer program. If you know anyone interested in joining us please spread the word!

Abrazos,

The Ranch Crew

Extreme Food Processing: Flaming Nuts and Poison Ivy Spray

Extreme Food Processing: Flaming Nuts and Poison Ivy Spray

I was harvesting fruits down by the classroom this week when Jenny walked by with a line of high school students, en route for the river trail. She paused for a moment as she passed.

“We're roasting cashews at five tomorrow. Why don't you gather some from the ground here and bring them?”

As I nodded in reply, she kept walking, the line of students slowly disappearing into the trees.

I looked down at my harvest—a small sack of red lovi-lovis, pink water apples, and green peppercorns. Friendly faces of the fruit world, each one unique in form and function. The lovi-lovis bright and tart, the water apples soft and quenching, the peppers prized for their addictive pungency. Understanding each one's harvest, preparation, and usage is one of the true joys of farming and cooking; each new discovery a revelation in the subtle and powerful nuances of the life around us.

The cashews, though. The cashews were dangerous temptations.

I looked up from my harvest. The Ranch cashew trees were close enough that I could smell the fruits, softly sweet, with a piercing astringency. Cashews are mythical beasts of the fruit world, strangely formed in an unlikely combination of parts. The fruits themselves are soft and oval, and vary in size and color like apples do, most red or yellow. They have a soft, waxy skin and extreme juiciness—which ironically leaves your mouth completely dry when you bite into one, courtesy of the high quantity of astringent tannins. But the strangest part is the seed. Instead of hiding buried inside the fruit's flesh, the cashew seed dangles in a curved shell on the bottom of the fruit itself, like a tiny curled finger, beckoning and warning.

Each February and March at the Ranch, as soon as the first mythical cashew beasts begin to form and dangle from the trees at eye level, an urgent announcement is made to all apprentices, guests, and passersby: do not touch the cashew nuts or they will get you!! Like all mythical beasts, cashews come with a set of strange powers. In addition to the fruits sucking all the saliva out of your mouth when you eat them, the nuts are covered in urushiol, the same chemical substance that gives poison ivy its poison and people a terrifying rash when they touch it. Nuts nuts nuts!

I happen to be extremely allergic to lots of plants, including plain grass. My legs from the knees down still bear hundreds of poison oak scars. Urushiol is my nemesis, and I always lose our battles. So when Robin warned us about the cashew nuts' latent danger—don't touch them the wrong way, don't look at them the wrong way and above all else, don't try to roast them—I took the message to heart as fair warning and good advice. After all, this sound advice was preceded by experience: on the two occasions when people attempted to roast the nuts at the Ranch, both events ended in trips to the hospital for steroid injections. Swelling of the entire body after consuming urushiol is apparently even worse than itchy legs. “Robin had a cashew trauma,” Jenny later described it. Some fruits are better left untouched.

And yet. My friend Amanda who, bless her lovely heart, is afraid of nearly everything in the jungle, including insects, sounds, and rainstorms, happened to tell me just that morning that she was enjoying cashew processing with her four-year-old daughter Lily. “We just cooked them in the fire and then Lily broke open the nuts with a rock and they were really good,” she said. And then there was the time last year that we filled a whole sack full of cashew nuts from the driveway, and Junior was thrilled to lug the things back to his place to roast and eat. And of course the fact that there are cashew trees everywhere in Mastatal and everyone seems to eat them. Maybe it was time to try again.

The next morning at meeting I announced my plan to collect the nuts and bring them to Jenny and Marcos's to roast. A small sea of terrified faces looked back at me. “Its okay!” I said, “It's okay!” Having no idea if it would be okay or not, but hoping.

“For anyone that chooses to participate, we will help you in any way we can, but you will be responsible for the cost of your own transportation and hospital visit,” added Robin.

That afternoon I took a bag to the cashew tree patch, scavenged for fallen nuts, and thought about my future. Would it be bright? Painful? Delicious? It was easy to gather a good quantity of nuts in a half hour or so. I stuck them in a backpack along with a take-out container of salted Maya nut seeds to share. Just before leaving I asked Robin what part of the roasting process she had been allergic to. “The nuts, the utensils that handled the nuts, everything that touched the nuts, the smoke, and everything the smoke touched,” she said. I added a bottle of benadryl and an emergency inhaler to my backpack, and Rachel Jackson, Jess, and I set out walking to Marcos's.

When we arrived Arabela was sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch, and Chilo wandered up with a shovel in his hand. I could see smoke coming from behind the house, and Chilo pointed us around the corner.

There was Marcos, shirtless and stirring cashews over the fire with a very long stick. In front of him sat a small crowd of young tourists and volunteers, watching, chatting. Someone strummed a guitar. No one looked terrified or swollen. Jenny greeted us. Smoke wafted from the fire onto the crowd, and Rachel, Jess and I stepped back out of its reach. We explained our trepidation to Jenny, and she shook her head. “It's fine!” she said. “As long as the toxins spray out and burn up its no problem, its good.”

We handed Marcos our sack of cashews and he tossed them on a roofing sheet over the fire and poked them around with the stick. “You have to stir them until they pop,” he explained, “then they open and spray out all the toxins, and it runs into the fire and burns.” After a few minutes the cashews looked black and charred, and I heard the hiss and pop of shells breaking. Marcos pointed out the rivlet of liquid running off the roofing sheet onto the ground. Once he deemed that all the shells had opened, he dipped the end of the stick into the fire, and brought the burning tip up to the cashews. They ignited immediately, and burned like an enormous flambe. After a minute or so Marcos told us to step back, and he flipped the roofing sheet with the flaming nuts onto the ground, where they burned out in the dirt. Jenny used a stick to gather them into a pile and brought them over to us. They were completely charred, the husks burned through. She put one on a rock and tapped it with a piece of wood. The husk fell off, and she picked up the nut. A cashew! Golden brown, with one end toasted slightly black. “If its wet, and bends, don't eat it, its got the toxins,” she said, pressing the nut between her fingers. “This is good.” She handed it to me to eat. It was warm, and tasted sweet and tender-crisp.

We spent the rest of the evening by the fire, cracking open cashews and passing around May nuts. The Maya nut, also called ojoche or ramon, is a native rainforest tree that produces an edible, high-protein nut. The week before, Jenny accompanied us deep into the forest in Zapaton to track down one of the last known mature trees in the area. We hope that by valuing the Maya nuts as a food source and the trees that produce them, we will help drive sustainable food economies that are financially viable and promote conservation of forest ecosystems.

One of Marcos's volunteers took a Maya nut and popped it in his mouth. He looked at Marcos poking another roaring ball of fire on the roofing sheet. “If cashews were in the states people would go crazy, there'd be like cashew parties every year or something. Its so cool!” He took another Maya nut. “What are these, these are good?”

Around dusk it began to rain, and we crowded under the awning of Marcos's house, snacked on Maya nuts, and talked about the cashews. Marcos explained the differences in varieties and processing techniques. We concluded that the Ranch Cashew Trauma was probably a consequence of ingestion of un-combusted urushiol and a serious allergy to it. Even though Marcos made it all look easy, the complete combustion of the toxins in cashew nuts is an extreme food processing technique honed by many seasons of experience. I certainly won't be roasting them by myself any time soon. But hopefully Marcos and Jenny will let us continue to celebrate the season with them in years to come.

A Ranch guest recently asked me why local food traditions are important in Mastatal. Why trek into the jungle to gather rainforest seeds? Why feel the adrenaline spike of watching someone combust toxic nuts in a ball of fire? Why prepare three meals a day from local foods--no boxes, bags, or can openers involved? Why do we do this, and why is it important?

Food is constant. It builds us, it forms us, it unites us. Sustainable food systems are the heart of resilient communities and regenerative ecosystems. If you can do this one thing—food--on a sustainable community scale, everything else will follow. Community cohesion, local economies, conservation of diverse ecosystems, health and wellness, celebration—all fall into place as we create successful, vibrant local food systems. Its not just about the flaming nuts, its about the whole picture, and that's why it worth it.

Laura Killingbeck

NEWS AND NOTES

We have a number of life changing workshops coming up.

• The Art and Practice of Live Culture Fermentation--May 10th to 13th

• Wilderness First Responder--June 8th to 17th

• Sustainable Homestead Design--June 22nd to 26th

We rely on all of the amazing ambassadors to our project to spread the word; if you know of anyone who needs a get-life-into-gear experience, send them to one of our classes!

Abrazos,

The Ranch Crew