sastyk
Posts by this author
July 14, 2011
Over the years I've written a great deal about SNAP/Food Stamps and other hunger alleviation programs, but I've never written anything specifically about WIC, which I have tended to lump in with other food programs. I've been thinking, however, a lot about WIC lately, because it has come on the…
July 13, 2011
There's an article about a couple of recent cases charging people (read: mothers) with neglect if they (gasp!) dare to go to sleep around their children.
A couple of weeks ago in Delaware, a woman put her 3-year-old down for a nap and then took a nap herself. The 3-year-old got up and somehow…
July 11, 2011
A reader, who asks to remain anonymous writes me that her graduate school boyfriend (soon hopefully to be fiance) has decided he wants a farm. He's looking for jobs in rural areas, and wants them to buy land together. The boyfriend grew up in rural Albania and is apparently pretty comfortable in…
July 7, 2011
Don't get me wrong, I like to eat out. And what parent of many doesn't like the idea of food they don't have to cook and dishes they don't have to wash. At times restaurants and bakeries even may provide more energy efficiency than home cooking, especially in small households - one industrial…
July 4, 2011
Almost all conversations with every other parent of late includes "Have you read Go the Fuck to Sleep yet? Have you heard Samuel Jackson read it?...." It is safe to say that the book touches a nerve. And it is extraordinarily funny, and it does evoke precisely the reactions that most of us have…
July 3, 2011
Last night as I went about my chores, I was mulling over a possible post on how farming is actually easier than most people think it is. I'm winding up a stretch of time where Eric and the boys have been in NYC visiting Grandma, while I stayed at home to tend the farm. While Eric and I don't have…
July 1, 2011
I've written previously that I suspect that given the enormous pressure to feed a world of 9-10billion people that will dominate the political, social and activist dynamics of this century, Land access is going to be one of the central issues. Indeed, in much of the Global South it has been for…
July 1, 2011
The always-wonderful Matron of Husbandry has a lovely post about pasture diversity and grass-feeding that did better (and purtier - she always has lots of great pix) something I've been meaning to do - ie, explore what you learn from grass farming that no one else teaches. For all the books I've…
June 27, 2011
As I gear up to finish my Adapting-in-Place book, I've been thinking a lot about the role of the informal economy in supporting a culture that can't keep growing and consuming resources at the same rate. As those of you who have been following my work for a while know, the informal economy…
June 27, 2011
Friday was a fabulous day, after a very, very long week. For a week, we frantically prepared for our final home visit. Some of it was pretty normal stuff - minor repairs, etc... Some of it, I think was pretty weird - who knew that freshly washed window screens were a requirement to be a good…
June 21, 2011
I came home last Monday night after three days spent in Washington working on business for the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, and it was one of the most glorious homecomings I could imagine. Not only was there the joy of coming home to my boys and Eric, but also my home is more…
June 17, 2011
I have one more crazy week involving travel and lots of other responsibilities, culminating in our final home visit in our foster care certification (as some of you will recall, we had a tough visit our second time with a social worker who was totally appalled by the farm - our social worker's…
June 14, 2011
In a previous post several of my commenters observed that they lived in places too humid for solar dehydrating, and had been using electric food dryers. We have similar issues here - the summers are very humid, and there is a tendency for things not to dry rapidly enough, while reabsorbing…
June 10, 2011
In thousands of ways, UN policy helps shape how we respond to emerging crises, from basic poverty to world political events, from food to climate change and population. What is emerging, however, is that UN analyses are increasingly diverging from reality - as they attempt to describe our future,…
June 10, 2011
Note: I'm off to DC for ASPO-USA's annual spring board meeting. The blog will be quiet. I leave you with one of my all-time favorite re-runs, lightly updated to reflect the ongoing disconnect between dream and reality ;-). But what would life be without fantasy? I find it helpful to reflect on…
June 7, 2011
My current favorite news story is one by Reuters about an outbreak of e,coli in Germany attributed to organically grown bean sprouts with the ridiculous headline "E. Coli Outbreak Poses Questions for Organic Farming." Now it is absolutely true that there is a nasty outbreak of e.coli in Germany…
June 7, 2011
Richard Glover has a very funny - and in many ways on-target analysis here.
Don't get me wrong - as I've said many times before, I know a lot of people who don't take climate change seriously, but who also recognize for various other reasons that we can't burn fossil fuels the way we are. I…
June 7, 2011
This year will be interesting - we anticipate adding two or three more people to our household (and maybe more - we're gently looking for a housemate or two once things settle down with the foster kids). In past years I've mostly been able to keep up with the "every year the kids get bigger and…
June 6, 2011
Hi Folks - Back from the wedding and shivaree, and catching up...slowly. Tired and have much farm stuff to catch up on as well, so bear with me one more day.
In the meantime, Fred Pearce has a great essay in Nature on what's wrong with the UN population revisions that anticipate 10+billion by the…
May 31, 2011
My food storage and preservation class starts today, and I thought it was worth reproducing this essay - the very basics of getting started on storing food. Why would you want to do this? Well, there are a couple of reasons. First of all, I don't think anyone who has tracked events over the last…
May 25, 2011
It seemed up here in the north that spring would never come - and now we're headed rapidly into that time of year when everything is ripe and abundant in our gardens and at local farms, and learning to put food up can make it possible for you to enjoy summer in winter, and continue eating locally…
May 24, 2011
One of my many other hats is the one I wear as a member of the ASPO-USA board and editor of the Peak Oil Review Commentary. My favorite kind of commentary is the one that puts together short pieces from a lot of thinkers, all answering the same question - and this must be the favorite of a lot of…
May 23, 2011
Summer is just about here, and you need some summer reading. Light. Fuzzy. Delightful. Amusing. Perfect for the deck chair or the sand. Nevermind the fact that you are a low-energy, transitioning, cheap, homseteading type, and your deck chair is probably planted on your porch, and the sand is…
May 19, 2011
The UN FAO reminds us of the sheer scope of world food waste - 1/3 of all the food produced, most of it produce, goes to waste. While we'll never get food waste to zero, this is a scandal in a world worrying about how it will feed itself.
This is not news - the statistics have been similar for a…
May 18, 2011
Crap. We've had so much flooding (not the house, thankfully, but the creek has breached its banks, the driveway is flooded and the barn has about a ton of much-needed ;-P mud added to it) that I have to cancel our planned open farm day this Sunday. We're just not going to be in shape for it, and…
May 17, 2011
A recent email I received was pretty typical - I won't quote it here because the person meant well, but the sum up was this - they laud my decision to adopt, argue that I should have done it earlier, and point out that adoption is the solution to the population crisis. People who want children…
May 17, 2011
So it turns out that there *was* a meltdown around reactor #1. Quite a lot of people suspected this from the visual evidence, but TEPCO and the Japanese government denied, denied, denied. Accusations that those arguing for a meltdown were all internet conspiracy theorists (which also occurred…
May 17, 2011
The old punchline "Practice, practice, practice" applies to more than musical performance. It applies to the project of coming to terms with our new circumstances, and perhaps embracing our new lives. If you live in parts of Japan right now, or in the flooded Mississippi, or in areas recently…
May 16, 2011
There's a really good debate going on in the combox of my Khaki Markets Post on an issue that I've been meaning to write about for a while - to what extent is it possible for people who are seeking the same social ends to work together when they use different political means. In the comboxes the…
May 10, 2011
Whenever I talk about going to lower energy usage, a percentage of people shout out something like "But that would mean going back tothe stone age, to lepers walking the streets and people throwing their feces out the window on our heads!!!" I think it is fair to say that variations on the "…