The Weblog

This page contains news, event information, and other items added by Ian and Adam, the resident farmers at Old 99. We send out a message every week, but most are set with a delete date about two weeks later. I archive some of the posts if they have content other than weekly availability of produce and meat.

You can send me questions too, which if they are of a general nature, I can post to this Old99 blog.



 
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Old 99 Farm Week of Feb 23 2014


This post expired on February 26, 2024.

Ouch, wednesday already. btw, did anyone read that post I referred to last week about 16 wonderful farms leading the way?

We have 49 items in the market this week. I have updated quantities in stock and some prices up/down, depending. I had sort of hoped when I opened my inbox mail that there would be the usual sampling of orders for pickup tomorrow. Nope. It’s hard to be convinced that I have something worth offering here: healthy food, grown locally, picked fresh, organic. If not in a range and assortment that we are accustomed to in the supermarket, then at least the high nutrition heavies: pastured meats, eggs, leafy greens, honey, all organic.

So consider this latest post from
Chris Martenson’s Peak Prosperity site. About Sugar. (his excerpts indented.)

One of the interesting things to emerge from my recent research into nutritional health is the extent to which major food companies — for decades — have been suppressing information on the awful health effects of some of their major products.

Sugar is the biggie.

There is now overwhelming evidence tying heart disease and metabolic syndrome to sugar, and yet we have pretty much zero fresh guidance coming from the FDA and/or USDA. The evidence has been out there for a long time, and yet we have soft drink vending machines in nearly every public school in the nation dispensing “fruit juice” that is crammed with fructose, yogurt loaded with sugar, as well as soda itself (depending on the state).

Why have the government agencies responsible for public health allowed food and soft drink companies to load up our kids with sugar? And remained utterly silent, in general, on the topic?

Today we might be emotionally tempted to believe that all of this happened in the ‘bad old days’ and that nothing so craven could happen now. After all, we have access to much better information through the internet – surely they cannot keep the truth hidden? But the evidence doesn’t support that hope.

Instead, we should expect that nothing at all has changed. And that much of what passes for ‘good science’ in medicine and health today is polluted with corporate and financial self-interest that is, at best, only coincidentally-aligned with actual human and ecological health.

Okay, here’s the deal. Because we are surrounded by a vast marketing machine that works double overtime to assure we have poor access to good nutritional information, and because our daily shopping trips are more like hopping blindfolded through a minefield, and because ‘eating healthy’ is now much more expensive than eating poorly, we all need some support in this area.

I know I do.

In fact, studies show that success in sticking with new exercise and eating regimes is highly correlated with having good support networks.

[just heard of the book Younger Next Year, 2007, Crowley and Lodge, laying out the ‘how-to’ live healthier in the last 30 years of life. Especially guys over 60.]

On the other side of the question, who has the energy to scour the aisles and food labels to separate the gems from the grenades? Who has the money to afford to eat locally-grown organic vegetables with every meal and only buy pasture raised, non-hormone and antibiotic-free meat? Not everybody.

A big part of being resilient is being healthy; but now I want to amend that to say ‘being normal.’

[Grain Brain is one 2013 book I have read, with gusto, Perlmutter puts it on paper about the science of gluten induced unhealthiness.]

Chris says he’s “going to be dialing up our focus here on helping us all get the support we need to become normal, which is to say healthy, and that begins with eating well”.

If you ever needed one more nudge towards having a garden, this would be it.

[My hot bed is now ready for planting, temperature of soil is 10dC on top of 2ft of manure at 60dC. Should have baby greens in a month, started seeds a month ago. Maybe next year I can sell fresh cow manure by the pickup load for your backyard hotbed gardens!]

The idea here is not to suddenly decide to adopt an entirely new eating regime (although some might decide to go that route), but to go with our ‘step zero’ approach and pick just one thing. One tiny decision you can make today, to cut out one source of nutritional inflammation from your diet today.

[Our family started with swearing off orange juice and tetrapaks in the kids’ lunches. Now, 10 years later, it’s getting off gluten and GMO corn/soy.]

As soon as I can get the word out that I have a steady supply of delicious organic farm eggs, and the folks start coming, I’ll be putting the price back up to $6.50 for XL where it should be. Please help me do that so I can keep up my interest in the egg enterprise!

Yeah, healthy eating,
Ian and Camelia