Dear Readers and Friends

My apologies for the delay in posts. I am spending some time with family right now. I appreciate those of you that read my posts and the friendships that are evolving. I am grateful. Check back in with me; I will be writing again when the time presents itself.
Sweetness to all,
Jenell

New Year's Revolution

For Christmas this year my daughter got me David Suzuki’s Green Guide. Although it details the catastrophic impact we have on our planet, it wasn’t at all paralyzing. In fact, David Suzuki outlines meaningful actions that we can take to change our relationship to agriculture, transportation, energy use, and politics. I am definitely going to be referring back to various sections to slowly change my awareness and habits. There are so many possibilities, from simple to more challenging. It is empowering. Suzuki also includes references for further research (books, documentaries and websites). Here is one of many lists he suggests:

12 Guiding Principles of Sustainable Consumption

1. Remember the big picture. Spend less time worrying about plastic bags and disposable cups and more time thinking about where you live, energy use in your home, how often and how far you drive (and fly), and what you eat.


2. Don’t buy stuff that you don’t need. Among the three environmental commandments—reduce, reuse, and recycle—reduce is by far the most important.


3. Make food, not waste. Before you buy something, think ahead to when you’ll stop using it. Every product, when you’re finished with it, should be food for either the biological economy (readily biodegradable materials) or the industrial economy (recyclable or reusable raw materials for new products).


4. Buy local. The closer to home a product is grown, built, or made, generally the lower transportation costs associated with pollution.


5. Go for quality, not quantity. Select durable products and maximize their reuse through regular maintenance and care.


6. Support renewable energy. Seek out products and businesses that rely on wind, solar, geothermal, or other renewable sources of power.


7. Make healthy choices. Avoid purchasing or using toxic and hazardous products.


8. Look for a high proportion of recycled content. To fulfill the promise of recycling requires people to purchase recycled products.


9. Demand better options…. The more people vote for environmentally informed candidates, speak up on behalf of innovative green solutions, and push for change, the sooner the shift towards a sustainable future will come about.

Among the many suggestions, there were only a couple things that didn’t vibe with me. I don’t agree with Suzuki’s recommendation to eat highly processed soy products for regular meat substitutes, and I don’t agree that we should use compact fluorescent lights. Here’s an article a friend of mine wrote on CFLs, and another on a more healthful alternative—incandescent lights. David Suzuki is human and has his own perceptual lense. He is a scientist and a modern man. I would prefer more back to basics ideas, but that is my perceptual lense. So despite the fact that I don’t agree with everything he says, I do sense that David Suzuki truly loves the natural world. He has integrity, and I trust him.

Today I signed up for his Nature Challenge. He sends a weekly e-newsletter, suggesting things you can do. Check out his website. If your library doesn’t have his book, request it. And if you just can’t get it, his website is very informative. It is largely addressed to his fellow Canadians, but the principles are universal.

And what’s more universal than time? I appreciate that Suzuki addresses our busy lifestyles. He says, “If you’re time-poor because of work or other obligations, then you’re much more likely to drive than cycle or take transit, more likely to eat fast food or junk food than prepare a healthy meal, and more likely to buy inefficient or potentially toxic products (because you lack the time to do any research). When people are time poor, they have less time to spend on the activities that create happiness, such as socializing with friends, pursuing hobbies, and engaging with their communities.” This, in itself, is revolutionary. And we homeschoolers are leaders in that front. We have time to figure out our relationships with ourselves, each other, the environment, and the spirit.

While I ardently believe in homeschooling as a revolutionary act, I have been pretty loose with my ideals and my homeschooling this year. I want to start working towards health again. So, while I don’t normally have New Year's resolutions, I really need to reassess my life and clarify my intentions. But I felt like the list in my head kept growing and growing. I’m so far from who I want to be! How did this happen?! I was feeling a lot of anxiety as the New Year approached. When I actually wrote my list down, however, it wasn’t so long. And, in fact, it was basically in line with what Suzuki says above, a wish to spend time on activities that create happiness, such as socializing with friends, pursuing hobbies, and engaging with my community.

This is my New Year’s wish to all of you.

The Sleepwalker and the Spotlight

To see a child eat—is pleasure. Visceral goodness.
Eating with their fingers. Smacking their lips.
Food encircling their mouth in delight.

I am not an authority on etiquette or grace,
But I no longer eat like a child.
My food is consumed more quietly,
With functional refinement, barely touching my lips.
Rarely is a meal experienced in such a sensual, lip-smacking way.

I recently noticed, however, that I was eating loudly—
Eating loudly, perhaps, because I was eating quickly,
Shoveling. I became aware—
Like I’d been transported to a darkened, lonely stage,
And the spotlight…landing…on…me.

I was slightly embarrassed,
Like a sleepwalker being awoken
And not knowing how she got there.

From behind the red velvet curtain, an old soul reminded me—
Do not confuse etiquette with grace. Be mindful.

My spotlight expanded.
In front of me—a bowl of tangerines.

And I began my innocent monologue:

Taking hold of the tangerine,
You are taking a trip
(The inside-out
Of a mobius strip).

Peeling the tangerine,
You unleash a fragrant mist
(Scent of earthly lovers
In a springtime tryst).

Come together earth and rain,
Take hold of bundled seed,
Burst forth in fragile blossom,
And in the fruit is freed.

Each segment a ray,
Bringing light to my soul,
A season of suns,
Making me whole.

From inside-out
To outside-in,
Celestial star songs
Dripping down my chin.

~Jenell Heimbach

Persimmon Apple Crumble

Crust

• 1 1/2 C flour
• 1 1/2 C sugar
• 2 Tbl. milk
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 1/2 C oil

1. Mix flour, salt and sugar.
2. Make a well in the middle and add the milk and oil. Mix until all ingredients are blended.
3. Form evenly to cover the bottom and edges of a 9 inch pie pan.

Filling

• 4 C Pink Lady or Fuji apples, peeled and thinly sliced
• 2 C Fuyu persimmons, thinly sliced
• 3/4 C sugar
• 2 Tbl. flour
• 1 tsp. cinnamon

1. Mix all ingredients thoroughly and fill piecrust.
2. Bake crust and filling for 25 minutes at 375 degrees using the center rack.

Topping

• 1 C flour
• 1/2-1 C sugar
• 1 stick butter, firm
• 3/4 C chopped crispied almonds

1. While pie is baking, make the topping.
2. Mix dry ingredients well.
3. Cut butter into small pieces and blend into dry mixture using hands until a course mixture is formed.
4. When pie has cooked for 25 minutes, carefully remove from oven.
5. Starting on the outside, crumble topping over the filling until completely covered.
6. Bake an additional 25 minutes, or until top is golden brown.

Chef's Note: This recipe was adapted from Annie Main at Good Humus Farm. The recipe called for 1 cup of sugar in the topping. While my family liked it, I thought it could use less sugar and still be good. You might want to adjust the sugar amounts to your liking. I also used Nourishing Traditions crispy nuts in the topping. Here's a link for how to make them. This recipe was really fast and easy to make. I made it for myself for dinner one rare night when my family were all out and about. We've been eating it for breakfast all this week, too!

Meditations at Lagunitas

Meditations at Lagunitas

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

~Robert Hass

This post is inspired by and in response to Mon of Holistic Mama. She wrote a great post today about the extinction of words.

Happy Birthday

Birthday Rap

Despite the fact
That you're not an early riser;
Twice your age,
But I'm none the wiser.
You've got an open heart
And an open mind;
Within everyone
You see the divine.
On the Human Potential Movement,
You put a new spin~
Bringing to life
What you envision within.
Guitar, pencil and wool
You bend to your will
While reuben, chai and sushi
Give you your fill.
Happy Birthday, hippie sista'!
So sad we missed ya.
But you're in our heart
Whether near or afar....

~Jenell Heimbach

In Defense of Food Book Review

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars

Having first read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and then The Botany of Desire, I was in awe. To produce all that research, to go out in the field for interviews and first-hand experience, and then to orchestrate it all in such objective and eloquent prose—that was superhuman! And I became a humble worshipper.

Pollan’s newest work In Defense of Food is another such brilliant creation. He first talks about nutritionism, which is the reduction of foods into their constituent parts: carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and vitamins (which weren’t “discovered” until 1912!). Pollan next sets his sites on Industry (yes, with a capital “I”), and how Industry has used the science of nutritionism to commodify their products. And—not only did—does—Industry use scientific research, it also funds it, so that you have the cereal Industry touting their cholesterol-reducing effects or the pork Industry announcing it’s “the other white meat.” Then you have the diet Industry selling the Atkins diet one year and the McDougall Program the next. While he is not in any way opposed to science, Michael Pollan suggests that we have become dependent upon the “experts” to tell us what food is made of. Good nutrients? Bad nutrients? Pollan posits that thinking about food out of context disempowers the eater.

And so, in the final section of the book, Pollan aims to re-contextualize those nutrients back into what we all can recognize as food. He provides suggestions that will help us re-establish a relationship to where food comes from, how it can be made into a meal and how that meal can sustain a community. He says:

1. DON’T EAT ANYTHING YOUR GREAT GRANDMOTHER WOULDN’T RECOGNIZE AS FOOD.
2. AVOID FOOD PRODUCTS CONTAINING INGREDIENTS THAT ARE A) UNFAMILIAR, B) UNPRONOUNCEABLE, C) MORE THAN FIVE IN NUMBER, OR THAT INCLUDE D) HIGH-FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP.
3. AVOID FOOD PRODUCTS THAT MAKE HEALTH CLAIMS.
4. SHOP THE PERIPHERIES OF THE SUPERMARKET AND STAY OUT OF THE MIDDLE.
5. GET OUT OF THE SUPERMARKET WHENEVER POSSIBLE.
6. EAT MOSTLY PLANTS, ESPECIALLY LEAVES.
7. YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT EATS TOO.
8. IF YOU HAVE THE SPACE, BUY A FREEZER.
9. EAT LIKE AN OMNIVORE.
10. EAT WELL-GROWN FOOD FROM HEALTHY SOILS.
11. EAT WILD FOODS WHEN YOU CAN.
12. BE THE KIND OF PERSON WHO TAKES SUPPLEMENTS.
13. EAT MORE LIKE THE FRENCH. OR THE ITALIANS. OR THE JAPANESE. OR THE INDIANS. OR THE GREEKS.
14. REGARD NONTRADITIONAL FOODS WITH SKEPTICISM.
15. DON’T LOOK FOR THE MAGIC BULLET IN THE TRADITIONAL DIET.
16. HAVE A GLASS OF WINE WITH DINNER.
17. PAY MORE, EAT LESS.
18. EAT MEALS.
19. DO ALL YOUR EATING AT A TABLE.
20. DON’T GET YOUR FUEL FROM THE SAME PLACE YOUR CAR DOES.
21. TRY NOT TO EAT ALONE.
22. CONSULT YOUR GUT.
23. EAT SLOWLY.
24. COOK AND, IF YOU CAN, PLANT A GARDEN.

In this last section, Pollan expounds upon each item and ties it into the previous sections’ how-tos and wherefores. Pollan does like to play with words, so this list may seem a little enigmatic. You’ll just have to read the book! Michael Pollan masterfully synthesizes information from a growing movement of people who are reclaiming their health and their lives.


View all my reviews.