Consumable Earth – Kamloops

…. simple ideas to accomplish well nourishing your body without a lot of work. Super Fast “In a Pinch” recipes. Looking at trends in diet, raw, vegan, low-fat, high fat, blood type, paleolithic, macrobiotics and more. What to look for / avoid at your market or grocery store. How to effectively include local eating in your everyday, regardless of season.

Back in the 20s, North Americans could buy fresh raw whole milk, real clabber and buttermilk, luscious naturally yellow butter, fresh farm cheeses and cream in various colors and thicknesses. Today’s milk is accused of causing everything from allergies to heart disease to cancer, but when North Americans could buy Real Milk, these diseases were rare. In fact, a supply of high-quality dairy products was considered vital to North American security and the economic well being of the nation.

What’s needed today is a return to humane, non-toxic, pasture-based dairying and small-scale traditional processing, in short . . . a campaign for real milk.

In an effort to provide this for my family and my community I would like to put out there to anyone interested in joining a cow share in Kamloops. A cow share is basically an arrangement in which a group of people all own shares of a cow collectively. Because we all own the cow it is then legal for us to distribute it’s raw unprocessed milk amongst ourselves. Not sell it. We can get together and make cheeses for our families. Enjoy fresh real cream and home whipped butter.

If this is something that you would be willing to support please contact me or leave a comment. I have pasture in Westsyde and husbandry skills. I need milkers; minimum two for morning shifts and two for evening shifts. There would be benefits to being a milker. For more information on cow shares please visit the hard working folks at http://www.wildthingorganics.ca

Fall is harvest time. There is something truly magical about it and I love hearing about the many ways in which people prepare for the coming cold season. Here at home we continue our path of exploring food storage and choices that we make.

I was fortunate enough to inherit a large box of pears and apples earlier this month. The apples were easy they went into small shallow boxes and in the root cellar. I was then posed with the daunting task of what the heck to do with 50+ lbs of pears! I cold packed and canned half of them, dehydrated half of what was left and the rest we ate. We must have eaten at least one or two pears a day for two weeks. There are still pears in my fridge that I have been told to make pear sauce with. Oh yeah pear sauce is really really good.

Urs Bauman of Quail’s Farm has been so kind as to supply my flour for years now. Fall is when I buy it and the night before I pick it up is when he grinds the grains. I purchase 10kg bags of rye, spelt and wheat flour and then store them in large rubbermaid bins, in my cellar.

What I am interested in sourcing locally is nuts and seeds. Being vegetarians we eat a lot of these and so finding a local source would be beautiful. Currently we order them bulk through a wholesale food order that gets put in twice a year. They get stored in the freezer.

Frost hit rather suddenly this year and I know that a few farmers were hit somewhat unexpectedly which resulted in loss of crops. I remember a recent cold market morning chatting with growers who frantically picked the last of their produce late the day before and what they could salvage that morning.

One thing we’ve loved in exploring food storage is how it is bringing us in touch with where our food comes from. We are also discovering how ‘convenient’ our world has become in such a short time, how we are about to lose an entire generation of knowledge regarding food storage and household husbandry skills that our grandparents took for granted. It makes me thankful that I have had the realization to bring it back so that I might pass it along to my children maybe even living to see a shift in how we all think about food.

I happened across this the other day and my first thought was, ‘Hey what I cool idea I can do that.’ And then I thought about it a little more and then I read a few of the articles and comments that people were making about the idea and I thought, ‘yeah food is easy if you are homeless’. And then I thought about it a little more…. what if you aren’t homeless? What about the single mother who is struggling to make ends meet? I bet she would sure appreciate a few PB&J sandwiches for the kiddos. What about the senior who never eats anything that is all that good for her? I bet if you sat and hung around with her for a while munching on a sandwich you’d be the highlight of her week.

The point being. I love the idea. I love the simplicity of it. Our problems can really be that simple. We love to complicate things and say oh but what about this or that or when blah blah blah. Why can’t we just smile at each other a little more and start with that?

So what is a simple solution? How about socks? It’s getting cold out and I would hazard a guess that most people who live outside could use another pair of decent socks. I go into thrift stores all the time and I am going to start buying socks. Good ones, thick ones, wool ones and ones that have no holes in them. I am going to put two pairs of socks in my bag and when I see a man on the street who looks like he just might live not too far from there I am going to give him a pair of socks.

Another simple thing is that I donate all of my clothes to the women’s shelter. I have a clothing habit like most women. I purchase clothing from thrift stores on a regular basis and am constantly rotating my closet. Most of the clothes are perfect, relatively in style and will do a girl just fine, maybe even excite her to find, during a rough patch of her life.

Please feel free to share your simple ideas for giving back and helping to support your community.