“Let’s keep it burning, let’s keep the flame of love alive”
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I made all sorts of dank food at the farm, obviously. The first few nights I settled in while Benjamin cooked the day’s catch of fresh fish and a big plateful of fried eggs, two of the more abundant ingredients found on the farm, plus the obligatory popcorn and Sweet Potatoes. Once I was ready to take over the hot seat, it was time for the next step in the evolution of camp-style cooking. The cleanest eating that I had ever experienced. No GMOs, or chemicals, or propane, or silver nitrate, this was literally the place I had been dreaming about.
We had fresh milk every day that went into the rotation of two-gallon jars in the fridge. There was electricity on the farm, an above ground line, just enough to power a few refrigerators, freezers, and to charge electronics, which meant that I had everything I needed to finish typing 'Step One.' Funny how I was living in such a magical place, yet still glued to a screen for hours everyday and suffering from a laptop induced backache. Painfully funny.
Would have been nice to have been completely off the grid, but with the tiny amount of energy used here, it would have taken a lifetime to pay for itself. But what if during that same lifetime we experience inconsistencies with the influx of electricity? Won’t take much to slow the flow, especially with the increase of natural disasters, manmade disasters, and manmade natural disasters. This place could certainly be a safe haven if something big were to go down, but it sure would be cool if we could figure out the refrigeration thing.
Of course, it’s also worth considering that even solar panels might not be the most eco-conscious alternative under the Sun. Certainly miles beyond the fossilized petroleum industry, but still a manufacturing process requiring natural resources, plastics, and who knows what else. Let’s assume we can figure all that stuff out, a solar panel factory powered by solar energy that utilizes renewables and recycled refuse. With the low energy dependence of the farm, this all seems pretty feasible, and feasibly pretty, but the mainstream’s addiction to electricity may experience a culture shock of cutbacks. In order to meet our current demand, we’d have to litter every corner of the planet with panels, cables and batteries. Solar farms would take up space once occupied by ecosystems, while absorbing waves of star power which would otherwise be fueling an entire food chain of amino acids. But here we are, chained to a system of convenience instead. Sounds pretty inconvenient to me.
And sounds like indentured servitude, as we are pushed into a life of labor just so we can keep the lights on when we leave the room. A more practical practice would be to throttle our electric consumption, to limit our demands of excess that overstimulate the overflowing pockets of the overlords of capitalism. If we could reduce the powers that be, the energy crisis experienced only by a fraction of our species for only a fraction of our timeline, if we could just slow down the speeding up of convenience, I bet we’d find a way to power through.
Like, what if everyone cut back their electricity usage to what could be produced by their single rooftop solar panel? Or a rain fed waterwheel? Or a pedal powered phone charger? Or a giant hourglass that spun an alternator just fast enough to illuminate a digital clock? Bet they’d learn to cut the lights off, as they began to respect their way of life as a privilege and not a human right. In fact, they might understand that our privilege is generally at the cost of another’s human rights. Like, for every kilowatt we pump in, we’re killing water that is fundamental to us all.
Forget giant nuclear meltdowns contaminating the world’s ocean, this stuff is even happening in the small NC town I grew up in. Everyone around Lake Norman knows that there are giant Catfish all over the place, but they also know that nobody eats out of the lake. It’s poisonous. We flooded a habitat to create the lake, all in the name of dam electricity, and now we’ve destroyed that habitat too. Duke Energy, the largest energy monopoly in the country, also removes mountaintop habitats to extract coal, which releases over a hundred million pounds of carbon emissions each year, making them the third highest contributor in the nation. Recently, they’ve been in hot water with their leaky coal ash ponds, which are conveniently located in low income black neighborhoods, as they spew out toxic levels of arsenic, cadmium, chromium and lead. Clean energy indeed.
But once the unconscious consumers at home flip the switch on waking up to the true cost of living, we can make a difference. We’ll start to appreciate everything that we take for granted. Faced with the impact of our footprint, it’s easy to rationalize the rationing of our power struggle. To limit our use of a limited resource. To decide not to slide the electric thermostat up to eighty, and save enough juice so that our milk won’t spoil, besides, we already cleared the whole burning wood thing.
And it didn’t spoil, but it would separate. After a few days in the fridge, a couple inches of cream would settle on top of each jar. Good stuff. My first task would be to make butter, musta figured it our pretty well because it churned into the best butter I’d ever eaten, especially on a slice of fresh ground, whole Wheat, skillet bread. It was just pizza dough really, a simple recipe that I know by heart, so I patted out a thick slab and flipped it once in the covered cast iron. The grainy flour still warm from milling, today’s butter melting into the dense loaf, absolutely perfect for sopping up the daily catch of fish and eggs. Only one logical place to go from here, the only choice that my free will can afford, obviously we have to make pizza.
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Got the dough on lock, sauce should be a cinch with such fresh ingredients, so now all we gotta say is cheese. I’m more of a big picture guy though, leave the cheese mongering to the sous chefs, and luckily my assistant this week was far more kitchen capable than I pretend to be. Sara was here for a few days to pick up the basics of beekeeping, plus the double bonus of our never ending sweat lodge. She threw together some Basil infused farm cheese, still pretty soft, but perfect for spreading on warm bread, and should do just fine on a melty pizza pie. While she was pressing the cheese for more information, she realized that we had everything we needed to make pesto. Awesome, and presto, the Walnut and Basil concoction would definitely set tonight’s two pizzas apart. (But aren’t Walnuts illegal?)
Of course, I was a little out of shape at cooking in an actual oven, although this one was pretty far removed from any modern elements. A little tricky since the heat circulated over the top of the oven chamber, the polar opposite of the frozen pizza grill I’d mastered over the winter. So the top got done way before the bottom, no worries though, I’m better at improvising than the best of the heady jam noodlers, so I just set it on the scorching surface of the flat top. Delicioso.
Plus, Sara could toss a salad like no other. Freshly foraged greens from the wild world of weeds. 'Weeds', of course carrying a negative reputation, but they grow so easily because they are a natural part of the ecosystem that you plowed under to plant your garden. And they’re uber healthy. We already know that local wild edibles are supremely nutritious, which is why the supreme leaders of agrinomics convinced us to poison the freely growing abundance, while we struggle to get ahead of an inferior iceberg solution.
Her salad had a lot of Lamb’s Quarter, her favorite forest food, as well as a staple for many indigenous cultures. Super high in vitamins A and C, and a whole bunch of other stuff, plus it’s coated with a natural sodium dust, a simple salt solution to solve our spice supply situation. A variety of the plant is native to america, but it was such a staple of the european diet, that they brought their own invasive version as well.
'Invasive species' – hard to interpret the label as anything but “destroyer of worlds.” How dare this plant, with no inherent right to our homeland, decide to land in our new home? Consuming the vast abundance of natural nutrition, while uninhibited by any sign of eco-volved competition, how did they even get through our predatory customs?
Well, we brought them here, no need to stowaway as a refugee down with the slaves, we bought them a first class ticket to the manhandling of america. What else are we going to do, you don’t expect us to eat the soily sprouts of our new cornucopic home, do you? But that stuff is all so foreign to us, and you know how we feel about foreigners. Plus, we’re probably not even evolved enough to digest the uncolonized caloric content of our common countrymen. We figured it out though, gorged ourselves on the edible landscape of our stolen territory, and without concern of some bigger badder bully pushing us around. We invaded paradise to pave a parking lot. We are the invasive species.
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A species who migrates to a new ecosystem and destroys the long standing relationships of habitual habitat, yep, definitely sounds like us. Oh, but that’s different, we were just manifesting our destiny of global control. Getting pretty close too. It’s completely natural for a highly adaptive species to journey to faraway lands and settle into a niche, as they evolve hand-in-hand with their new home. Perfectly natural. We broke no natural law by 'discovering' a land already known to millions of natives. We have as much universal right to explore our options as anybody else, but so do Kudzu and Japanese Beetles.
How dare we live this destructive way of life, and criticize our immigrant brothers over their success of living in a good way? Sure, they disrupt the balance of power in the new neighborhood, but they’re still singing the song of Unci Maka. They instinctively follow the planetary protocols of evolving our living Mother Earth towards ultimate harmony. They may make some waves as they settle into their new digs, it’ll take some getting used to for those that have lived on this block for their entire life, but they’re friendly, they’re a connected living tissue of our conscious ecosystem, and of course they play by the rules. They don’t take more than they need, they understand the importance of sharing and the dangers of excess, because they believe in the garden.
Now, they do come in like a hurricane, devouring the lush landscape before the home team has a chance to eat, but they’re constantly evolving with the cycles of global equilibrium. They will find their pocket in no time, won’t skip a beat in the natural polyrhythms of our planet’s complex time signature. They are going through a phase of plentiful food and scarce predators, but as long as the whole band is tuned-in, their extended solo will eventually end and they’ll fall back into the groove of perpetual harmony.
A species who can dominate any terrain as they eat their way to the top, untethered by concern of being eaten themselves, well, wouldn’t a humanist have to agree that they’re simply enacting the destiny of the evolutionarily superior? Plus, at some point, their path of proliferation will prove plentiful for the progress of the predator population. As they realize their niche, they create a surplus of new nutrition, an alternative energy source ripe for the picking, and the first species to make the biofuel conversion will enjoy the advantage of abundance.
It’ll all work out in the long run. Always does. We’re only experiencing a small blip in the timeline of life, this kind of stuff happens all the time, we’re gonna be just fine. As long as everyone plays by the rules. The understanding that we do not own this planet, we are a part of it. A vital component to the soundtrack of life on Earth. Even all of the so-called invasives are humming the same melody, the entire organic orchestra is vibrating with love as they work their way towards the perfection of paradise. All of the invasives... except one.
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The human supremacy movement has no intention of sharing. Not only are we not willing to partake in the community biobuffet that provides for the extravagance of our entire family, we’re going to systematically mow it down as we superimpose the fallacy of factory farms, and their symbiotic partnership with the fractures of a concrete jungle. In what twisted reality could 'progress' run parallel to the planetary devastation insisted on by president primate? We applaud the architecture of our broken way of life, crumbling around us as our intelligence appears more artificial than the poisons we pour over the graves of our victims. Our bothers and sisters. Those who we either bury directly as we level the playing field, or subsequently starve out when we fence them into the margins of the human experience. We insist on inefficiency as we infect our mother with the degenerative disease of agriculture, infesting her infrastructure with the destruction of a developing nation. We could easily adapt to our surroundings with our superior survival fitness, but here we are, struggling to get by, forced to work overtime to pay the price of terraforming our own planet.
So what’s the alternative to the seizures of agriculture? If we don’t lay claim to the land and the water and the Sun and the lifeforce composing all that has ever been, how could we ever expect to succeed in a civilized competition that we hadn’t rigged from the very beginning? Why, that would require some type of prolific food source, an abundance of organisms who thrive in our local environment, and preferably those with limited competitors of consumption. So yeah, maybe it’s that simple, we can contain their population while sustaining our own. We can eat the invasive species.
Invasivore. I didn’t even make that one up. Someone who looks at these lifeforms not as pests, but as a bounty of natural nutrition, as they curb the overgrowth of the underbrush that is clogging up the digestion of our mother’s ecosystem. You can’t logically deny their right of way without simultaneously condemning the invasion of our own species, so for those convinced that the doctrines of colonization are the supreme laws of the land, the only rational compromise, is to comprise a new food chain of events designed to fuel the ideals of edenistic abundance.
It’s a no-brainer really (which is convenient since we seemed to have stopped using ours), not only are many of these imports way high in nutritional density, but it seems that by some cosmic coincidence, they actually appear to be providing organic remedies to the diseases plaguing the overgrowth of man. An invasive species cocktail sounds way more appealing than the chemical cocktail they give you before invasive surgery, especially once you realize that they actually taste really freaking good. But don’t take my word for it, feel free to recreate the taste bud temptations of taco tuesday on the farm.
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As per my preferred menu preparations, the follow-up to pizza night could be no less impressive to the senses. Plus, we still had some cheese. I had never made tortillas, but had been looking to expand my culinary repertoire to include off-the-grid tacos, so Sara and I double teamed the fresh flour formation and it was a wrap. We caught a few Perch after sweat and stopped by the garden on the way back to the barn. Not enough time to sour any cream, however I knew that a splash of Lemon would do the trick. No citrus trees on the appalachian farm of course, so I just used a little bit of the Sorrel that Sara had harvested earlier in the day.
Rich in vitamins A and C, it improves eyesight and disproves cancer, plus its tart flavor lends itself as a nice lemonade substitute. Both native and invasive varieties exist in america, this one was born here, and bore a familiar similarity – it looks like a Shamrock with heart shaped leaves. And the leaves are sour, as well as the seed pod 'pickles' that I’d eaten as a kid. Just muddle some up, and soon we’d have a delicious cream sauce, not done yet though.
On the way up from the garden I stopped by the Peach Tree, oh, did I not mention that we had more Peach Trees than atlanta? JK, there were just a few, but as full as they were, it seemed like an orchard. Nectarines had been in for the first couple weeks of my stay, but once the Peaches were ripe, it was game over. So tasty. Peaches and cream. And honey. As many as I could eat, which was a lot with my pre-sweat daily diet of raw foods backed by crystal clear water, seven or eight juicy Peaches a day, at least. Kept me as regular as a Peach smoothie machine, luckily the compost bucket seat was just across the barnyard of Sorrel.
And if that peach smoothie blowout isn't enough for you, then I guess I could tell you about the time we blew up the Vitamix. It's my claim to fame among foodies who cherish the indestructible kitchen gadget, but apparently if your frozen peaches are deep enough under, so much so that it sounds like you're whipping up a gravel milkshake, you should just chill for a bit. We didn't, and next thing we knew, there was a baseball size hole blowing out the side and exploding all over the place. So funny, and tragic, but the beauty of the rustic kitchen is that the clean up was a simple hose down. No smoothie though.
The best Peaches were the ugly ones. The half rotted ground scores. If part of it was over-ripe, then the rest was going to be fantabulous. Another secret to finding the perfect specimen? Just follow the bugs. There was an electric fence around the tree, it was there to keep out the Cows who were kept in containment, and it kept away the Deer too.
I’d imagine it goes without saying how I felt about the fences, about the concept of owning the rights to this living being, and the inability to share the fruit of its labor with all circles of life. But no perimeter of electrocution could ward off the inspection of the insects. A cloud of poison was certainly not an option, especially from members of our own species who have experienced the death grip of a toxic fog first hand.
So as the tree reached its seasonal adulthood, the Japanese Beetles would crowd around the most mature of its offspring. A built-in ripeness detector of following another’s insectual instincts. They could just feel it in their exoskeleton, a hardwiring to locate the peachiest cream of the crop, which was why we would harvest this year’s take before they could. A close monitoring of the tree would reveal the perfect moment between maximum ripeness and minimal insectifestation, at least until I came up with a signature camp-style menu plan.
I grabbed a few juicy ones, the fruit not the bugs, and set off to make some Peach salsa for our Perch tacos. Before I got the stove warmed up, I swabbed the cast iron for any leftover crumbs from yesterday’s creations. Not an original idea it turns out, there were already two Japanese Beetles who had stopped by last night to investigate the buttery smell of Garlic and Onions. They hadn’t faired that well, the intense heat had instantly converted them into little crispies, so obviously I ate them. Tasty little nibbles of buttery goodness.
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Entomophagy - the practice of eating bugs. An appetite turn-off at first mention, but the yuck-to-yum ratio actually pans out to be pretty appealing. In fact, many cultures around the world consume what we consider to be pests, we of course tend to spray them down with our homicidal tendencies. Makes since on paper I guess, especially when you consider that the pockets of agriculture hold the deed to our home. We already know that they are against a wild abundant food supply, it’s commonplace for them to wreck whatever functioning ecosystems remain, and now with the threat of a devastating invasion, they’ve managed to deepen our dependence on the agrimachine, as they impose the importance of using ecocide to save our artificially inflated diets. To be fair, the Beetles do wreak havoc on many of the plants that we enslave, but the human supremacist believes that we alone are in charge of destroying everything good in the world. So bug off.
Once you get over the indoctrinated disgust of ingesting the insiders of the natural world, it’s not even the white savior complex of rescuing Princess Peach that makes you feel so good, many of these insects are jampacked with nutritional facts. Like our Japanese Beetles, forty percent of their body mass is protein, as much per gram as an ear of cornfed beef, and they’re full of calcium, iron and zinc. Ants are good protein, and super high in iron too, especially the red ones, though the larvae are where it’s at. Termites have heart healthy unsaturated fats. Caterpillars have all that other stuff plus a bunch of potassium. Grasshoppers are ridiculously high in nutritional value, you can make protein flour from Crickets, and perhaps that plague of Locust was simply an incredible God-given bounty.
An entire food group of supremely satisfying satiation, and here we are, convinced that extermination is the only answer. Not that I would pretend to be surprised, they did the same thing to the Buffalo, back when they were trying to conquer a population who could sustain themselves on an abundant feast of nutrient density. So of course it makes since to constantly constrict our concept of cuisine, as they continue to conquer our country.
The hormonal invasion of bioticized Cows isn’t only detrimental to our own health, their pollution infects the veins of our precious mother and poisons all who attempt to make a home downstream. A single Cow produces waste as fast as twenty humans, and that’s fast enough, but their combined efforts dump a whopping ten billion gallons of sludge on us every single day. Our overcrowded ranch run-off, at the minimum boosts the nitrogen and phosphorus levels to a record high, which removes the oxygen that aquatic life needs, as it inflates the toxic Algae takeover being experienced nationwide. But it also spreads stuff like E. Coli into the public water supply. Due to our impression that wild animals are gross and only those held in captivity are tender enough for our weakened stomachs, we’ve willingly perpetuated a system that dumps devastation into our planet, and assures gratuitous grossness to any patches of wilderness still hanging on. Self-fulfilling prophecy, I guess.
Beetles make up twenty percent of our planet's multi-celled organisms, and the environmental impact of the invasive varieties seems way less cancerous than that of our own population, especially if we start to curb their numbers with our unending appetites. If we look at them with love instead of hatred. Gratitude over disgust. We can eat from a wealth of abundance, if we can quit being so greedy and look forward to sharing our future. If there’s even gonna be a future. For every steak you insist on ingesting today, there’s a correlated lowering of your children’s quality of life tomorrow. And they said eating bugs was disgusting.
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I never said that. I thought they were great. So did everybody else. I shook a bunch into a bucket, easiest hunt ever, and tossed them into a pan of sizzling Garlic butter. They were the most delicious nubbly bits that would make an excellent stand-alone bowl of movie munchies. Water Protectors don’t stand alone though, we up the ante on the game of life, we gotta go over the top with this one. Fresh ground tortillas, fresh fish of the day, fresh garden veggies in a Green Tomato/Corn/Onion/Peach/Jalapeno salsa, freshly foraged wild greens, freshly soured Sorrel cream, and some day old cheese. Aged to perfection. And top it all off with the crispy crackle of my new favorite protein supplement. There aren’t even words. The tastiest tacos I’d eaten since I left frybread country. The hesitaters were stunned when they were converted, I of course knew that a little butter goes a long way.
Well, isn’t that a conundrum? Eat bugs to reduce the demand of the industrial cattle industry, but only if we can keep our maids-a-milking. No, I don’t guess that quite works out. If I’m to discover a way of life in eco-harmony, then I probably have to learn how to cook without my beloved butterfingers. We already know that all of the imported oils spill destruction nearing the rate of petroleum, and now you’re telling me that locally produced butterfat is a mere by-product of slave labor. Well, what are we supposed to do? How in the world can we make frybread?
It’s not even the environmental implications of the cooking oil industry that are the grossest part, today’s 'healthy' choice of rancid heat extraction and trans fatty hydrogenation, has neutralized any possible benefit found in carcinogenic vegetable based oils. Such as vitamin E, destroyed during high heat processing, a procedure that also breaks up unsaturated fats and releases free radicals into your system. Free radicals sport an unpaired electron in their outer orbit, which literally rips your body apart from the inside, all the way down to your DNA. It just so happens that vitamin E is a safeguard from free radicals, but we burned it out and replaced it with chemical preservatives known to cause cancer and brain damage.
So what’s the alternative to our inferior aisles of artery cloggers? It’s to forget the misconception that alternatives to traditional foods are automatically conducive of a healthy fried lifestyle. In fact, the only alternative they provide, is an additional revenue stream for the Corn and Soybean domination of our leaky guts. Back in the forties, science was for sale to the highest bidder, so while exxon was buying the denial of negative emissions, big agriculture bought the belief of an unsaturated market. Their research focused on hydrogenated trans fats, but was presented as if this also included all saturated fats.
Saturated fats are simply “saturated” with hydrogen, which makes them more stable than the products of our maniacal mechanization. Also means that the traditional use of naturally occurring animal fats hasn’t broken its proven track record, it’s just that the profit margins of margarine grew as america’s arteries were the only ones facing restrictions. The healthy fat surrounding our heart is saturated, half of our cell membranes are made of the stuff, they help calcium to strengthen bones, protect the liver from intoxicants, and boost the effectiveness of our entire immune system. Maybe if we didn’t blindly follow the profiteers of production, we could open our eyes to a way of life that actually promoted living.
Rendered Bear fat is the preferred oil of these particular hills, calorically condensed as well as a versatile tool, but it's a pretty drastic jump from hunting Beetles to Baloo. Duck and Goose fat is the best available in the modern marketplace, as seen in the “Duck fat Brussel Sprout” episode of The Standing Rock Show. There’s also Chicken, beef and pork fat(lard), which are all of course products of captivation, and whose health benefits vary greatly depending on the diets of the hostages.
So yeah, I got no problem cooking with bacon grease, the problems arise from the cage-fed conditions that we subject our subjects to. I’d prefer to look towards the indigenous communities who understood that living in a good way, leads to a good life. If we can revitalize the planet into the cage-free Eden that she was meant to be, we’ll experience extravagance at a rate unknown to civilized man. There are already wild Pigs and Chickens, proof that these escapees can re-assimilate into a natural way of life, plus the forests will be resaturated with a gamut of game. As logic would have it, these feral creatures would burn off more of their fatty buildup than those forced to endure a sedentary lifestyle, but that’s precisely the point that quality overtakes quantity.
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So how did the pre-america Americans do it? Just like every other species that ever survived, they didn’t live in excess. They utilized every part of their prey, most certainly the fatty bits, and they respected the God-given abundance of their all powerful Mother Earth. They honored the sacrifices made by their brothers, and understood the importance of moderation, patience, and humility. They weren’t super-sizing Buffalo fat french fries everyday for lunch, their culture acted much more sparingly as they treated the animal like a delicacy. They held sacred the taking of another’s life in order to propel the evolution of our living planet. The sphere of life. And the bonus point, was that it helped to maintain a healthy level of fat saturation.
They also knew that the feast of today, isn’t necessarily going to be here tomorrow. Their diet changed with the seasons, as it does with a lot of other species, which coincidentally coincides with a diverse intake of a wide array of nutrition. Some days we eat Buffalo bites and Acorn bread, other days we enjoy Buffalo Berries and Acorn Squash. Our breathgiving mother is quite capable of providing an incredible menu, completely free of dietary restrictions. The uncolo