Check and balance

Organic farms, biodynamic farms, conventional farms, they are all the same!

Overworked farmers and farm hands, full of diesel guzzling tractors and machineries all aiming to increase crop and livestock yield, so that they can feed this ever growing and very demanding world. And in parts of developed society you have groups of people using their strength and energy perform activities like crossfit, or running on a treadmill in an air conditioned gym when they could be contributing their strength to pulling a plough, hoeing the land or simply weeding.

Sometimes this warped and misguided part of society just do not deserve the food they eat to just expend it on something mindless like this. Where is the balance?? Where are the checks and measures.

Oh wait, we do have one very bias measure: money

The farmers are tired, the people working on the farms are worn out, the machineries keep breaking down and the animals looks lost. Maybe it's just today, or maybe it's the weather, winter is setting in and now comes the time for self reflection and thinking, and so I conclude with this:

If everyone takes charge of growing their own food, and manage their calorie intake in accordance to energy expended on food production perhaps achieving a close looped system, the world may yet become a more balanced one, and you will get fit in the process of doing it ;-)

Products Of Mother Earth

Interesting fact I learnt this week.

'We're all connected' humans, plants and animals, just look at the chemical makeup of hemoglobin and chlorophyll, the structure of the cells are the same, the only diffrence comes from the core of iron and magnesium.

If you put chlorophyll under UV light it will give off a red glow and vice versa for blood.

Uncanny isn't it.

Think about this when you drink your next glass of milk

We go by everyday consuming food not being aware of what it takes to produce that piece of cheese or that glass of milk. What goes on in a dairy industry is away from many peoples general awareness, it's a ugly ugly industry and dairy farms are generally a very depressing place to be.

I spent the last 3 days working on an organic dairy farm, 200 cows cross bred between the holstein and freesia, this create a breed that is able to produce up to 7000 liters of milk a year from one cow! These cows are not the work of nature but a manipulation of humans growing demand for milk and milk related products, and the ultimate victims are the cows themselves. Most cows have lots of trouble carrying their huge udders around something whic was bred into them, they're more prone to injury due to the disproportionate body frames, many sprained ankles, tumor on legs and broken backs. They don't lead a particularly good life being forced through the milk production line twice a day they hardly ever get time out at the fields. The calves spend their first 4 days with the mother and are weaned off, this cause great stress for both calf and mother. The cows kept in a concrete floored barn literally swim in their own piss and poo.

I'm depressed, and very saddened by this whole experience, but very glad I was able to see and work for a couple of days in this dairy farm. If I do consider to continue drinking milk in the future I will be more aware of where my milk comes from before buying, but i'm leaning towards dropping dairy from my diet altogether.

Life on college

Being surrounded by the seasons again is refreshing from the monotony of Singapore's tropical climate I've been surrounded with these past month. Weather is starting to get Chilly and the leaves are turning red then brown and finally will fall back onto the ground, the mushrooms are receding and the last of the autumn squashes are harvested and feasted upon. This is the season when the earth breaths in, a time when it rest and recover only to breath out in spring again and give life to all around.

Enjoy!

The grounds of Emerson College, really a place of outstanding natural beauty

Can't be in Agriculture school without a vegetable garden

College life with people, picking mushrooms and feeding people with it, I think the drummer had too one too many mushroom ;-)

Pepenbury an area for adults with learning disability where they do horticulture therapy, arts and craft and woodwork. They also work with animals which helps them keep in touch with nature and ground them to become more aware of their surroundings! A very special place!

Exact Sensory Fantasy

The 16th century was a huge turning point for the human race, this was the period where the world moved from the golden ages where we were connected to the spiritual world to one that is driven by reason and sense and with that direction it has brought us to this day in the 21st century.

In the old ages people viewed the world as the centre, we’re the centre of the universe and the sun, moon, mercury were thought to be revolving around the earth, this was all based on what they could see when they looked into the sky, they had no telescope, they had no complex mathematics to calculate the projection of the stars and planets.

People during that time of what we call the golden ages in Rome, Greece, China, middle empire of the arab world viewed themselves as being part of nature, in tune to the rhythm of the seasons. They viewed the world by first understanding their inner self, they were subjective and full of sympathy and fantasised and dreamed, they walked among the gods in their own spiritual world. The art of that time distinctively represented this mindset of people of that time depicting goddesses and angels, they believed that they were part of the cosmos among the goddesses and gods and are one with nature.

During the turn of that century from the 1500 to the 1600, 3 distinct events happened in Europe that changed the course of human development forever. Copenicus and his discovery of the cosmos and how all planets revolve around the sun, the earth was no longer at the center and all that was thought of before where god was supposely suppose to reside is now revealed to be of nothingness, in 1543, Mercator developed the first atlas and created the first view of the world, a few years later Vesalius dissected the human body and documented it into a book, we were now seen as blood vessels, bones and muscles and have proven that we no longer posses a spiritual soul in our chest. These 3 development brought a new age of reasoning, gods and spirituality was being questioned, it has become a world dictated by sense and logic, people started to view the world from the outside in, no longer concerned about their inner being, but driven by objects and antipathy observing things from a distance hoping to form an exact view of something, never getting too close for any sympathy. This in turn brought about the age of science and the world as we know of today.

Something changed in the 1500, humans started to lose their inherent connection to the world and to nature. Has science and the age of reasoning really brought about progress? How do you define progress? Has this progress caused an in-balance in the world we live in today?

Osho says:'in this age of reason, we are masters of knowledge, but orphans in wisdom" humans have evolved now to the stage where we use our upper cortex of the brain more - the reason brain. and left the lower cortex, the feeling brain behind. We have to re-connect and achieve an equilibrium as floating too far right or too far left has it’s own circumstances; seen in Goethe work of Faust and Werther.

Perhaps this so called progress of the internet and mass communication would be a tool that would help the human race reach enlightenment quick enough to get us out of this mess and maybe bring warmth back once again into our lives.

You are what you eat: The danger’s of eating out of season

Eating out of season has been something we never questioned, fresh salad in winter, spinach and fresh strawberries during x’mas. In the northern hemisphere this equates to the unnecessary luxury of imports, science and fossil fuel has also enabled us to grow vegetables in a heated greenhouse out of season for businesses to reap the benefits of economic value from these vegetables when supplies are low and demands is at it’s peak; carbon emission aside what is the true cost of eating food that are grown out of season?

To understand this we need to look at how a plant works. The plant extracts nutrients such as nitrates from the soil and stores this within the plant turning this into protein and sugar used by the plant for growth. For this to happen it requires sunlight for photosynthesis and in winter the hours of sunlight will decrease significantly.

Scientific research carried out in the 60s on spinach and lettuce (Spinach and lettuce are two of the vegetables that has the tendency to hold on to nitrates) has shown that these vegetables while grown in shade contain a higher level of nitrates than those grown in full sun. Imagine the growth of vegetable out of season in a heated greenhouse in just 6 hours of sunlight? The amount of nitrates in the spinach of lettuce may far exceed what has been deemed safe.

The truth to the matter is, consuming excessive amounts of nitrates have been scientifically proven to be one of the major factors that cause cancer; this has also been a huge topic of debate within the EU on the level of nitrates being discharged by the conventional agriculture industry into the water tables of Europe.

We cannot fool nature, trying to grow something that is out of season in a heated greenhouse powered by fossil fuel is a sign of humans excessive demand, we need to respect the forces of nature and live within the seasons and with this understanding and respect we may be duly rewarded by her.

You are what you eat: The Adam's Apple

How many of us actually understand the food that we eat? Where it comes from? How it is grown and what quality they possess? Many of what we know are passed down by our parents, Television and now the internet and many a time we blindly fall into a cycle of blind faith and believing that something is actually good and safe for us!

We all love a good salad with fresh cherry tomatoes or perhaps a potato salad and this is more so in the west, whilst in tropical south east asia eggplant and chilli dominate many of our local dishes but what value do these vegetables bring to our health and are we actually eating the right stuff or are we slowly poisoning ourselves?

Potatoes, Tomatoes, Chili, Peppers, eggplants are all part of the nightshade family, infamous for it’s poisonous quality. They contain solanine a neurotoxic chemical used as a sedative that has varying effects on the human health. Try eating a whole bunch of potatoes for 3 meals a day 7 days a week, and you may start to feel sluggish, tired, a headache will set in, and as you increase the solanine levels in your bloodstream you will start to feel ill or depressed and hitting a few hundred milligrams can kill you in less than 30 mintues. But that’s not it, other chemicals are also present in potatoes such as scopolamine ,atropine and nicotine. Scopolamine has been used as a "truth drug"; atropine is a hallucinogenic drug also used to treat cardiac arrest; and nicotine of course is an addictive insecticide

Stenier through his study and his connection of the spiritual realm has classified potatoes with an intrinsic quality of causing general heaviness to the body creating a levity effect to the mental body and bringing it down to earth, the mental body enters a state of unconsciousness and drive people towards a false sense of security.

The tomato plant, a gorgeous vegetable producing sweet fruits high in vitamin C and other goodness. Again part of the nightshade family it contains most of the chemicals mentioned above. Stenier through his observation of the tomato plant realised that it is a self content plant that pulls itself away from the environment, it didn’t need to be rotated like other vegetable and can live in the same spot for many years without any degeneration of the crop. And if you were to use compost made from tomato plants, that is, if you were to let the tomatoes grow in their own compost, they would grow even better. Tomatoes have no desire to step outside of themselves, no desire to step outside the realm of strong vitality. That’s where they want to stay. They are the least social beings in the entire plant kingdom. They do not want anything from strangers, and above all, they do not want any fertilizer that has gone through a composting process; they reject all that. This is the reason that they can influence what works independently within the human or animal organism.” And because of this Stenier has said:’ people diagnosed as having cancer should immediately be forbidden to eat tomatoes, because cancer from its very inception makes a certain part of the human or animal body independent of the rest of the organism.”

Please don’t be alarmed with what I’ve shared here, life has to go on and a lot of the time these vegetables bring more goodness to our life than the poison within them, awareness is your best weapon and remember to always do things in moderation.