Answer: It is normal and healthy to gain some weight at menopause and it may be that this period of weight gain has coincided with you going on the diet. A couple of suggestions would be to cut out any grains for the time being; also to not use any coconut milk, only coconut oil. I have heard from one person who found out she was sensitive to coconut, and it made her gain weight. But the allergens would not be in the oil. A final suggestion would be to go to 2 meals per day–a good breakfast and then eat around 2 pm and nothing after.

Question:I appreciate the benefits of raw milk but in Sally’s book she writes that traditionally milk was always consumed in some form of fermented state and that it is only a modern practice to consume milk raw. Is it appropriate to drink raw milk or should it be fermented? Is the nutritional and health (assimilation) benefits applicable for both means?

Answer:I didn’t say “always” I said “often” Dairying cultures consumed raw milk both fresh and fermented.

Question: I am writing this on behalf of a friend who is 2 months pregnant. She has been scared off raw milk by her doctor (who also studied natural med). She is concerned about listeria. Her raw milk source was Aphrodite. I remember reading that Kefir raw milk is 100% safe from any nasty pathogens. Is this true? I myself feel completely safe and blessed consuming raw milk but I’m not qualified enough to reassure my friend. Any suggestions? Can I reassure her that kefired raw milk is completely safe? - Cathy.

Answer: The chance of getting listeria in raw milk is virtually nil. The only outbreaks of listeria in raw milk were in mexican style soft cheese. She is much more likely to get listeria from pasteurized milk. Last month 3 people died from listeria in pasteurized milk in Massachusetts. She should drink 1 quart whole milk per day and the milk should be raw!

Dreams of a life without alienation. Where we live close to our relatives but not in their laps. Where the daily drudgery of traffic is replaced with a jaunty walk to work along a promenade where the only wheels are those of bicycles, buggies and prams. We dream of living in a village where we know almost everyone. Where artists colour our streets and children are safe to play. Where our waste water is used to fertilise the village farms and create biodesiel to run our small, quiet, community buggies. Dreams of living close to the land and close to each other. Dreams, dare I say it, of community.

For many years I’ve been praying for village life. With three children under 6, stuck in a tiny box in suburbia, I was so lonely I thought my heart would break. I was lost in the needs of my children and there was no outlet, much less any one to share the joys and burdens of mothering with. I dreamed of planting a garden with sisters while other sisters took turns at holding babies. I dreamed of sending boys off with my brothers to become men.

We moved to Byron Bay to try to capture some sense of village. We rented a large house close to the beach and invited others to live with us. It was a great improvement from the Gold Coast where a visit to my friend took 3/4 hour of bumper to bumper traffic and the soundtrack to a swim in the kid-safe creek was grinding highway roar. Here in Byron Bay, we’ve shared our home with a menagerie of brilliant souls dedicated to the idea of community. Together we’ve stepped, sometimes bumbling, into the dark unknown of communal living and we’ve certainly tread in some bogs. Learning, learning we’re finally beginning to create the experience we always hoped for. The next step is creating a long term option for those who, like us, see the idiocy of suburbia and who hope for a return of the village.

Enter stage left, Claude Lewenz.

Born of 16 years researching, brainstorming with friends and colleagues, experimenting and finally living his dream, Claude Lewenz’s book, “How to Build a Village”, answers our prayers. It’s all there. How to use architecture to encourage inclusion, safety, beauty, diversity; to discourage alienation, untenable local politicians and business people, and best of all how to discourage traffic? Simple, limit population to 10,000 people, the space to 100 acres, the streets to fit only people. Wall the village in so cars can’t enter. Build open plazas which belong to everyone, not just caffeine and alcohol pushers. Plazas where children can play, teens can hang and artists can work, unaccosted. Everyone can walk to work. Village buggies are available to cart large items. Car parks on the outskirts of the village store your car. Hire a ‘village car’ for long drives to nearby villages, cities or natural attractions. But primary to what Claude calls the Human Scaled Village is the strength of the local economy. Food is grown by villagers, local businesses keep the money in the village as does one the most underutilised assets of our generation - telecommuting.

Where did Claude Lewenz get all these wonderful ideas? I asked him..

I grew up in a supportive neighbourhood where not only did no one lock their doors, but after school I could walk into a neighbour’s home and visit… no knocking, just a welcome. As I got older, I found that slowly vanishing, and when as an adult I began to look for such a place to call home for my family, I discovered it no longer existed. I began asking questions. I want to live in a Village with my family. I want to visit other Villages. As I spoke with others, I found they wanted the same thing. Gradually those dialogues emerged into a calling.

Was there a moment you realised you must be part of changing the way we live together to save our world?

If we build ten thousand of these Villages we may very well save the world… or at least save humanity’s place in the world, but “the world” is abstract except for people who don’t live in reality. A friend of mine, Elisabet Sahtouris, says she found a dictionary that defined reality as a non-derivative experience. That means that almost all we are told, see on TV, read in books and magazines and now on the web, is not real. We have to learn to discern what is likely to be real and many of us spend most of our lives in a non-real construct. This is made easier when we engineer our own non-derivative (real) experience so it becomes standardised and flavourless: Wake up in a heated or air-conditioned room, turn on the TV, shower in treated water, microwave our packaged breakfast, listen to the news in our car on the way to the office.. We hardly notice what is real anymore as we get excited by the news we see on TV, but ignore the slow decay of life around us in our real world.

For me, saving the world is not real, because it is a derivative experience.

Building a village is real, as long as it is our village. But if we build those villages based on universal patterns - what Plato calls the forms, which for him is the highest form of reality, then our local work may enable humans to live on earth in a way that ensures both parties (humans and earth) get along a lot better.

As for the book, there is a big difference between chattering about an idea and actually working through the details so ordinary people can make the idea manifest. At this time, books still are more tactile for people than web sites. You can take them to a cafe and read, or share the pictures with someone. Buying a book is like taking the first step on a long journey, it is a commitment saying “Yes, I am going to do this.” It’s a way of gifting an idea to someone else, where the content far exceeds the purchase price.

Remember that to build a Village, one has to get permission from elected and appointed officials. They are expecting car-scaled designs, so the idea of a 5,000 to 10,000 population community without cars is unfamiliar. Better to give them a book they can take away and read at their leisure; otherwise their mind can go on overload.

If a group of people decide they not only want to live in a Village, but to design their own plaza, they all need to get on the same page. A book helps them do that, and then the book shows them how to actually position themselves so they can design their own plaza (it requires at least 20 families capable of buying homes and workplaces, and capable of committing to the design process).

All those circumstances led me to conclude the best way I could proceed was to put my findings into a book.

Reading your book, I find my self saying, “of course”, “why not”, “it’s so simply”. And yet we don’t live this way. The adage “It takes a village to raise a child” rings in our ears, it seems we hear it daily. What do you think stops modern people from creating their own village? Why aren’t we doing it already?

Short answer: Energy flows where attention goes.

First reason we don’t build our own villages is the power of America. Americans passed zoning laws that forced separation so people had to use cars. And when you are poor, getting to own a car is great stuff. So the Depression era kids who came back from war loved it: a car, a kitchen where pressing buttons accomplished what took their Depression-era Mom all day to do and then a drive in burger joint. The suburbs were so seductive that few noticed their true cost. Fifty years later we are so dependent on the American system (which was voluntarily adopted by Australia, New Zealand, Canada and more recently the old countries of Europe) that most people who seek changes can only think of tweaking the system… a more efficient car, biofuel, or going back to rail.

There was a fellow in California who tried to build an environmentally friendly suburb. He succeeded, but it was so difficult no other developer wants to go there. The hassle he had with the authorities over health, safety, fire, etc, was so difficult, other developers said it wasn’t worth it. He was trying to tweak the suburb.

What I have done is to start from scratch. I look at as many details as I can, and then come up with solutions that avoid the problems. For example, you don’t encounter the same fire department regulations, needing wide streets to accommodate big fire trucks, if you build out of fireproof materials with sprinklers so nothing will burn. If you create your own local economy, the Village can sell out in months, because your target market becomes millions of people not the few hundred who might find jobs on offer in that region. This overcomes a major investment challenge faced by normal developments. It adds a whole new meaning to the phrase The buyer comes first.

Finally, one of the biggest things is that people need permission. Strange, but true. Apple Computer is successful in part because 25 years ago, on the first new-employees orientation lecture, Steve Jobs would welcome new recruits by literally saying “I give you permission to innovate.” A lot of the book is to give people permission.

In your book you state that villages are becoming viable again. What do you mean by that?

Economically viable. Meaning that technology shifts makes it possible to have a thriving local economy.

Villages emerged when nomads settled down. Most died when industrialisation needed to buy huge, expensive machines that needed hundreds or thousands of workers living nearby… thus the cities rose to prominence and the young left the village. White collar workers needed to be near their lawyers, accountants, bankers, advisors, suppliers and even near their competitors. Now my laptop can write a letter or even a book, do all my accounting, make copies of documents… in short do all the things that in 1980 requires an office staff of twenty and hundreds of thousands of dollars in office equipment. Now, when I need research done, I post it on guru.com, and an expert bids for it from Oxford, England. Now telecommunications means that we can select where to live based on quality of life. Soon we will get to the Star Trek screen, where you and I will have this conversation in front of a large video screen - perhaps even simulated 3 D - supported by fast enough broadband (and smart enough software) to emulate a face to face meeting. When that happens, distance is irrelevant, thus selection of location becomes based on quality of life, not proximity. This shift in technology makes villages become viable once again.

This interview is a good example. We have never met. You send your questions from Byron Bay, Australia to a 17 character series of letters separated by the @ and a dot sign that finds me on Waiheke Island in New Zealand. Magically, it popped up on my screen as I was doing something else. Sitting on a South Pacific island in an earth brick office with one of the world’s finest views, where we drink and shower in rainwater and the air is so clean rare lichen grows on the trees, I am able to answer you. I could not have done that 20 years ago when my office was in a city and we had 17 people working there to be economically sustainable. My book is for sale on Amazon on a server somewhere in the world. When your readers place the order from a PC on their desk at home, a company in Tennessee sends it to them in Australia (or wherever) and pays me in NZ so I can continue to live on an island on the other side of the world. Those new conditions make it possible for Villages to once again become viable.

What’s the difference between a human-scaled village and a 60s commune or a 80s ashram?

Everything.

Size, scale, scope, character, purpose, longevity, to name but a few.

A human-scaled village requires a critical mass of 5,000 to 10,000 persons. Such intentional communities as a commune or ashram would be likely to have a few hundred people.
A village would have at least 2,000 buildings at 20-30 buildings per acre, reflecting a capital value around $1 billion or more. Most people would have mortgages and own title to their home.
A village would have a huge infrastructure with dozens of plazas, many streets, a sophisticated water and sewage treatment system, advanced technologies and so on.
A village would have thousands of people working at jobs everyday - mainstream jobs including ones a commune would abhor, like consultants who advise Fortune 500 companies how to make more money.
A village would have a vast range of people with different politics, philosophies, economic status, and personalities. A cross section of society.
A village would have a wide range of activities on at all times. On one plaza, the actors guild would run the theatre. On another a group of believers may build a church, mosque or temple. Down in the youth zone, kids would be dancing in the street to loud music. On my plaza the outdoor cafes would be the centre of connection. I would be enjoying slow food, long dialogue, perhaps a game of chess.
A village is intended to last for centuries and never get boring.

Communes, ashrams and similar intentional communities tend to attract like-minded people, not unlike gated-golfing communities. They serve an entirely different purpose in the tapestry of human life. Many tend to be small, transient and non-durable (meaning the kids often move away and don’t come back). They tend to be based on a particular, although sometimes vague, philosophy often with heavy use of the word should - expectations about what people should and should not do. In many cases, they tend to be reactive, often made up of middle-class, voluntary refugees, reacting to and rejecting the sanitary middle-class life of their childhood.

Forget apples and oranges, the commune/ashram and the human-scaled village are as different as a family orchard and a rainforest. Different scale, different scope, different systems, different ecology.

Tell us about your plan to ban motor vehicles from villages?

Human scale or machine scale - you choose, but you can’t have both. Prince Charles’s village of Poundbury tried to domesticate the car; it didn’t work.

How to do it? Easy. Walls and gates. Ever been to a fancy new mega shopping mall? The one with hundreds of stores and nothing worth buying? They don’t have cars driving up and down between the stores. Of course they have a tarmac moat, a wasteland of cars parked outside, but that’s because people only shop in the mall, not live there. I bring up that awful analogy because local government officials get it, when I remind them that they approve car-free models all the time.

Banning them is simple. Build a wall, have gates and bollards so they can’t get in. Put a big motorpool outside the Village gate, and stock it with whatever cars people want. Soon most people will figure out its easier to rent a car when you need to go from the Village to somewhere else, but a few will need to own a car… either because they really do need it, or because the car is their identity, and that’s OK. They can rent or own a space, just like people in cities do. If you live on the 20th floor in a city apartment house, you don’t park your car in a two-car garage next to your bedroom, you walk to it in the 300-car garage down the street.

The Village will allow small golf-cart sized electric vehicles inside the village walls. Load up your suitcase, skis and a weeks worth of food, drive the golf cart to the motorpool, load it in the back of the rental SUV (that you really do intend to shift into 4 wheel drive to get to the skifield) and you’re sweet. But after that, for the next 20 weeks, you may discover you are so active and enjoying your Village life, you haven’t seen a car, much less sat in one. Oh, by the way, the SUV was powered with B-100 biofuel made from the sewage treatment plant using algae - one acre of algae produces 10,000 gallons of biofuel. One acre of corn makes 18 gallons, but it requires 9 gallons of diesel to plant and harvest. So your tailpipe is sweet too. Poo power.

Can we convert current suburbs to villages?

Yes, but it will be painful. We have to wait until circumstances change. A cull-de-sac and a Village plaza are about the same size. Where a cull-de-sac has eight McMansions around it, we would get about 50 or 80 homes and workplaces. To do this, the suburb’s supporting infrastructure will need to collapse, something likely to happen if the price of fuel rises to the point where people can no longer afford it. However, I leave that to someone else to figure out. If you want to see how to do it, look at how they rebuilt Beirut after the war. All the landowners pooled their properties into a single corporation where they exchanged title for shares. This allowed them to do a comprehensive rebuild. Great idea - a Lebanese banker friend of mine put it together. Sadly, it was made possible because they had bombed the old buildings into rubble. But suburbs are so badly built out of such flimsy material (compared to old cities), that one won’t need a war, just a shift in the economic realities.

What do you say to people who are frightened to share their children with their own parents much less strangers? Is the cultural divide between the generations able to be breached?

Kids are a lot more durable than we realise. Someone who is that frightened for their children and so unable to relate to others will seek out an environment that accomodates those needs - probably one more dependent on TV, computer games and franchised services and entertainment to keep children occupied and separated. Such parents will self-select. They won’t chose a Village, or if they do and are uncomfortable, they will move out.

To answer the last question, considerable thought went into how to create a safer environment for children.
They are physically safer. They can play on the streets and not get run over because there are no cars. Because the Village is walled, young ones are less likely to wander off.
They are in public, and the public will define what it deems as acceptable conduct. At all times, thousands of people will be around. If someone starts acting weird, others step in.
The pressures that make adults violent are less. Who ever came up with this stupid idea that two parents (or one solo) can raise a family alone and not break under the pressure of it? (hear hear - Ed)
Scale is important. In 5,000-10,000 population communities, especially organised around neighbourhoods (plazas), people take responsibility. Only when communities grow larger do people become apathetic. If someone is hurting a child, Villagers will speak up, and the Village, through the right of public auction after due process of contract law, has the ability to take action if a citizen is of danger to children.

You suggest village based decisions are made by a Village Council. What do you say to people who argue that a 4th level of government is the last thing we need; more bureaucracy will make life harder not easier?

Bureaucracy is something that occurs when the population gets over 10,000 persons. That’s why we have the absolute population cap, and set out the Village walls, so it simply can’t get beyond that size. When you have a population 5,000 to 10,000 the people in public service are your neighbours. You run into them, and they can’t get away with the same nonsense. They know it and you know it. I know this because I have lived in such places. It really does work. They call it grocery-line democracy.

In your book, you say those of the Baby boomer generation should consider village living as retirement services will be scarce because of longevity trends. While it is statistically true that we are living longer, for the moment, the increase in morbidity puts a dampener on the idea of baby boomers being of much use in these villages. What will we do with the disproportionate percent of invalid, chronically ill people? (Henderson’s Increased Morbidity observations) Will they be able to even walk well enough to use the promenades and plazas? Will their minds hold strong enough to offer any wisdom as Dementia increases? And what of the local insurance program? Will it be taken up with ailing elderly hip replacements?

The book proposes that the Village fund the construction of nursing bed facilities out of the savings from not having to put in a vehicle-standard roading infrastructure. It proposes that the Village then fund the supervisory staff out of an annual assessment (AKA rates or property tax). This would be in lieu of shipping such people outside their community where they find themselves in an alien place that is depressing to the point of making life not worth living. That’s all it proposes.

The Village would not be paying for hip replacements, medical services or any of the other things for which we have national or private medical insurance systems at present. If the state pays for nursing home care, the Village would get reimbursed from the state, thus placing a lower ongoing burden on the Villagers. If Villagers wanted to form a co-op to buy medical insurance at wholesale rates (5,000 people can negotiate a discount, just as a corporation employing 5,000 workers can), this would be encouraged to lower the cost of living. But the insurance they would purchase would be normal. It is unlikely that the Village would be large enough to support a hip-replacement hospital. However, it may turn out that over decades of living in a pedestrian Village, fewer Villagers will need new hips because they walked more - use it or lose it.

The idea is simply that we don’t throw away our old people. Longevity is not the issue. I was on an Indian reservation where to earn a living they made pottery sold to visitors. There was a very old lady, probably over 100, who was almost blind, weak and shaky. As she got older, the children she taught pottery got younger and younger, since her skills diminished as her infirmity grew. Her pottery was the only piece I bought that day. “Being of much use” is the wrong standard.

The reason Baby Boomers get attention is the stark reality facing them, as it has faced previous generations ever since we invented the nuclear family and began farming old people out to retirement homes. The Village is designed to accomodate all stages of life. If an old person loses their wits and begins wandering, the walls mean they are likely to stay within the Village where they won’t get run down by a car. Hundreds of neighbours will see them wandering, know who they are, and make sure they get brought back home again. Dementia is part of life. We have, as of late, invented a life where we want everything to be sanitary, not inconvenient or unpleasant. It’s not making us any happier.

What happens if a village’s population grows too large for it’s border?

No homes for sale, no new ones can be built. Using the biological model, the cell bifurcates. Build or move to another already built village. When we run out of empty good land, buy a suburb, rip it down and build one there. The only non-negotiable is the Village walls and the 10,000 population cap. Breach either of those two and you get bureaucracy and sprawl.

Tell us about food. How does living in the human-scaled village help us to be more ethical, eco friendly and healthier in our food choices?

The Human Scaled Village brings in 5,000 to 10,000 new mouths to feed. That’s a lot of food. I recommend selecting a place where the Village land is marginal for agriculture, but surrounded by good farmland with farmers struggling to make a living because of yo-yo global commodity prices, rising fuel costs, and other variables.

Contract with those farmers to grow a wide range of foods. Set an organic standard not because its PC, but because it tastes better and is good for our bodies. Using part of the infrastructure budget to train the farmers, to loan them money to plant the trees and plants. The reason to chemically grow is to increase yield. Farmers getting paid a fair price are happy to get a lower yield not using chemicals. Did you know that in NZ the number one death cause is cancer, and the highest cancer rate is among farmers? That’s probably the best way to convince a farmer to go organic, provided you pay them more… which is easy to do if you cut out the middleman, transport, packaging, financing and overhead.

Put an “intranet” in every home, so food orders are handled by smart software. Shift from a measures system to a units system. Instead of buying 20 kg of apples, make a standard set of reusable boxes, bottles, etc. You buy a red box of apples, and one time it is 20.5 kg and the next 19.5. Who cares as long as the red box looks full? But from a management standpoint, the kid filling the box with fresh-picked apples just does it by eye… no need to worry about the precise KGs (we belong to a food co-op, and this constant worry about weights and measures drives me nuts… when I eat the apple, I don’t weigh it first). When you build the Village require a food box in front of every house, next to the mailbox. In this way, the food is picked at the farm, the intranet identifies where it goes. It is brought to the motorpool/depot, transferred to smaller electric floats in street number order (first in/last out), and placed in the food box. Billing is on-line with automatic bank or credit union debit.

Bottom line, most of the food is grown on the nearby farms including solar hothouse growing. Because the middleman, packaging and transport charges are removed, the farmer earns more, and the Villager pays less. Set a fixed price irregardless of the variables of the global market. Establish a farm bank where Villagers loan farmers money to plant seed in the Spring. When farmers want to sell up, the Village may elect to buy the farm, and run it as a co-op. Build the sewage treatment plant as an algae biofuel plant (B-100 = diesel) and give farmers first priority on biofuel purchases. Sell it to them at the production cost, not at the current spot market for diesel (do not amortise the capital cost of building the plant - that is part of the infrastructure paid for at time of construction). Simple stuff really. All you need is permission.

Become a Slow Food community. See slowfood.com if you are unfamiliar. In slow food, it embraces all the ethical, eco-friendly and healthy aspects of food, but its selling point is the wonderful taste of food, the art of preparing, the oft-forgotten wonders of local and heirloom varieties, and of course, the art of eating. Food is to be enjoyed with others. Allow hours to dine, to engage in dialogue, to enjoy the company of others. And to do all these things affordably. Go to a Greek island, and dine for hours. The bill will not break you, for they do not look at food that way. That’s slow food.

Identify Villagers who love to make food and pay to send them to the old world where people still make great food - the best cheese of Italy never gets down here; it’s great because of how they make it. Bring knowledge back. Invite some of the people from there to come live in your Village for a year to teach you.

Go to the indigenous people of your area, invite them to become both food suppliers and food teachers.

Start a seed saving programme, bring back a hundred varieties of apples.

………….

“How to Build a Village” is filled with delightfully sensible advice such as this.

My favourite part is where Claude talks about avoiding current trends of upgrading deteriorated urban property by middle-class or affluent people, often resulting in displacement of lower-income people. :

“The Village needs many artists. Many artists need the Village. To keep its artists, the Village must prevent gentrification. It must have a plan where artists become homeowners and never get priced out of the market. Why? Creative and performing artists hold an important place in any community, they hold the mirror up to society, showing not the image we want to see, but the masks we wear, and what lies behind the mask. The artists transform a community into vibrant, interesting place. ”

We know this story well here in Byron Bay. In the 90s our streets crawled with hippies and ferals, artist and musicians, peace activists and professional protesters. People flocked here for the Blues Festival to taste the freedom of expression and dynamic idealism the locals exuded. But then early retirees and lifestyle hunters began swarming in from Sydney and Melbourne and began to buy the lovely old beach houses and do them up. They wanted a taste of the past with the vibrancy of that special Byron energy. Hundreds came. Hundreds followed the property boom and prices for housing soared. And guess what. Ten years later, much of the colour has gone. The Ferals and artists, unable to afford the rent hikes left; replaced by franchise clothing stores you see at any mall any where, hordes of drunk schoolies and back packer tourists, terrible cafe food and service mixed with poorly planned infrastructure. Many of us still hold the dream though. Will we make it back to community? I certainly feel more hopeful since reading Claude’s book.

I also loved the idea of Parallel Market Home Ownership:

‘In creating the overall business plan to finance the Village, some funds are set aside to subsidise the price of some of the homes – perhaps 20 - 33% of them. The original sale price is set at an “affordability price” for specific target buyers such as youth, artists, elders, and workers in service where income would not compete with the open market demand or Village housing (see the chart below where income determines affordability). The targeted buyer gets to purchase the home at a substantial discount, but when they go to sell, they must sell only in the “parallel market”, meaning to another buyer in their target market. For example, if a target market includes public servants and teachers, a police officer moving on could sell to a teacher, but not to a stock broker who would be prepared to pay more. In this way, the average wage in the target market determines the average home price in that parallel housing market, and gentrification is minimised. Cheating is discouraged by a simple mechanism. If a buyer is found to have fraudulently claimed to be in the target market, the Village retains the right of public auction – it notifies the buyer their home will be sold at a no reserve auction if not sold privately to a proper buyer in the target market within a reasonable period of time.’

Such sense! Claude writes about the ridiculousness of calling the average house price of $500,000 affordable. For a teacher, who’s income is around $40,000 affordable would be around $200,000. Why should teachers live many suburbs away from the children they teach because they can’t afford the homes nearby. Keeping housing for service oriented professions near the plaza’s where the school class rooms are within walking distance is much more sane.

‘The appeal of this approach is in its self-regulation. If due to inflation, the earnings band jumps from $50,000 a year to 100,000, then the market price of the house will also double. The collective Village will benefit by being assured its teachers and public servants will always be able to buy a home in the Village.’

I don’t know about you, but this little Nourisher is inspired. I’m buying the book and dreaming it up. Dream charts, affirmations, sharing the dream with powerful members of my community. I haven’t been so excited by a book since Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions. You can get a copy at VillageForum.com

Using nutrition, Dr. Weston A. Price reduced the rate of tooth decay 250 times in seventeen individuals who had severe tooth decay. In this group, approximately half of all teeth had been affected by decay prior to Price’s nutritional program. After the program, only two new cavities formed within a three year time period putting the rate of reoccurance at 0.4%. 1

No longer should we accept dental surgery or the dangerous chemical fluoride as our only hope and solution for tooth decay. My book, “Cure Tooth Decay: Heal And Prevent Cavities With Nutrition”, describes another way to heal teeth that flies in the face of the medical dogma that believes in disease and suffering.

I began investigating tooth decay, and health in general, because my own daughter was afflicted with tooth decay at the age of one. Children’s tooth decay is commonly referred to as “Baby Bottle Mouth” because it is supposed to happen when children drink fruit juices from bottles. My daughter did not eat sweets frequently, never had fruit juice, was breastfed regularly, and has almost never eaten any type of processed foods, which are known to be harmful and decay promoting.

Weston Price documented how our modern nutrition program is a primary cause of disease and tooth decay. The theory that tooth decay is caused by germs and bacteria is outdated and it does not hold water. The reason is that germs do not like to eat nutrient devoid foods. Germs and bacteria need sustenance just like we do. So when the dental associations say that germs cause tooth decay by eating certain foods and producing acid, it is unreasonable to believe since germs cannot eat devitalized foods like white sugar and white flour - the foods that we know cause tooth decay.

Weston Price was widely respected in his time, and frequently published in many dental journals, including several articles in the Journal of the American Dental Association. Why have his wise words been forgotten, and what did he teach us?

Three Important Food Factors

Dr. Price documented that both water-soluble and fat-soluble vitamins are missing from our modern diets. Of particular note, is the near complete absence of fat-soluble vitamins in our modern diet. Without eating those special foods, and it does not have to be large amounts of them, but frequently, and enough to fulfill your bodies needs, you can be susceptible to tooth decay, gum disease, and other diseases.

Eating special foods with fat-soluble vitamins won’t cure tooth decay in themselves, but they are a part of the cure.

These special foods are as follows:

1. Raw grass-fed dairy including, milk, cheese, cream and butter.
2. Organs of sea animals including fish organs, fish heads, fish eggs, oysters, clams, mussels, and crab and lobster with the innards.
3. Organs of land animals, including liver, bone marrow, tongue, heart, kidneys, pancreas, adrenal glands, gonads and for the more adventurous, brain, eyes and stomach lining.

Dr. Price found that a characteristic of groups containing a high immunity to tooth decay is that they ate regularly from two of these three food categories.

Our modern diet is so lacking in these special foods, and they are not consumed in regular amounts, so it is no wonder why our bodies degenerate.

Tooth Decay Gets Worse Over Time

In an extensive study of over 15,000 people, the Centers for Disease Control published some statistics regarding tooth decay that should be cause for alarm for most people.

Here is a summary: The older you get, the more your teeth are affected by decay. That’s why old people have dentures (fake teeth) and most young people do not…yet.

On average, people in the 16-19 age group have 11.6% of all teeth affected by decay at one time. This steadily increases, and by the time adults are over 60, more than half of their teeth (62.36%) have been affected by decay. A total of 93.1% of all people over the age of 60 have had teeth affected by tooth decay.

If brushing, flossing, massive fluoridation campaigns, and dental surgery were effective in preventing tooth decay, it would not get worse over time. It would stay the same, or get better. This is what I refer to as unscientifically sound practices. If we are to examine the effects of our dental care as a society, the statistics clearly show it is a failure, as tooth decay becomes worse and worse over time. Either Nature is fundamentally flawed and has doomed us to a life that includes decaying teeth, or humans are flawed in understanding and utilizing Nature.

Until we change the way we live, and return to more natural and life-building foods, the trend of tooth decay worsening with age, will continue.

What Really Causes Tooth Decay

After reading and studying the work of Weston Price, the late Harvard Professor Earnest Hooten said we need to consider the habits and ways of the indigenous people, because “it is store-food that has given us store-teeth.”

Time and time again, Dr. Price documented the tragic plight of indigenous people coming into contact with modern industrialization. Many of these groups enjoyed generation after generation of life without significant tooth decay. But after the arrival of industry and commerce, and with them modern foods, their teeth began to degenerate very rapidly.

Freedom From Tooth Decay

This is just an introduction to how you can be free of tooth decay, and avoid those pesky root canals. Our teeth can rebuild themselves, and cover themselves over with a hard and glassy layer, provided we give ourselves the right kind of nutrition.

Living Without Tooth Decay

I have written an entire book on how to live without tooth decay and how to heal your teeth with good nutrition. I cannot give you all the answers in an article, but I can let you know that there is a new way to having healthy teeth.

I was diagnosed with three cavities two and a half years ago. But through regulating my diet, and eating special foods, my teeth have become stronger and the cavities have halted. My daughter has lived with her tooth decay without the need for dental surgery for close to three years now. With enhanced nutrition her mood has improved, and her teeth have protected themselves internally from infection; this is called arrested decay.

In our society we have deep beliefs in disease and suffering. We believe that “life is suffering.” Or some say that “to be human is to be in a state of sin.” Many of us are not totally conscious of these beliefs, or others like them, so we inadvertently look past answers staring us blatantly in the face. We promote systems such as dental surgery and water fluoridation, which are many times not necessary given the light of knowledge showing us that our teeth are not designed to decay.

You can minimize your tooth decay, indeed prevent it entirely and even heal it once a cavity has formed, if you make good choices for yourself based on the knowledge of decay-free indigenous people.

We continue to fool ourselves, saying that diseases are not curable. But it is time to move away from these limiting beliefs. The cause of tooth decay is known, and knowable. From this knowledge, let us become empowered to take more responsibility for our dental health.

You can learn how to live without tooth decay. You can heal and prevent cavities. To purchase a digital or print copy of Cure Tooth Decay, visit curetoothdecay.com

1 Price, Weston A, DDS, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Keats Publishing, Inc., New Canaan, CT, 1939

Sauerkraut, sour cabbage, is a german lacto fermented cabbage dish. In the 18th Century Captain James Cook used sauerkraut to prevent the death of his sailors from scurvy but Germany’s sauerkraut is actually a version of chinese kraut, brought to Europe by the hoards of Gengis Khan.
Raw cabbage is implicated in depressed thyroid functioning, while fermented cabbage and other vegetables provide many health benefits and should not be under estimated for their healing powers. Sally Fallon in her book, Nourishing Traditions provides some excellent instructions on the fermentation of vegetables and fruits, in addition to grains, nuts, seeds, fish and meat.

Basic Recipe for Sauerkraut

• 1 litre glass jar with plastic lid or spring lid
• 1 Cabbage Medium sized (1kg)
• 1 tablespoon sea salt
• 4 tablespoons of Kefir whey (you may use already fermented sauerkraut for an innoculant or simply add another tablespoon of salt.)
• 1 tablespoon of carraway seeds or fresh chopped dill.

Germans have always sliced the cabbage with a specially made machine and pounded them with a wooden mortar in a large crock to bruise the cell walls.
Grate cabbage with a hand grater or process in a food processor, then mix in a large food grade plastic bucket (get them at a hardware store) with the salt and Kefir whey. Pound with a meat mallot or wooden pounder of some kind. I’ve been known to use a pick handle, a clean one of course. Pound until the juices cause suction when you pull the pounder out of the mix.

Press the mixture into a clean glass jar using a wooden spoon. Press firmly until the juice rises to the top and covers the mixture, which it will do when it is pounded enough. Leave at least one inch or more of space at the top of the jar to allow for expansion.
Cover the kraut and store the jar in a cupboard for 3-5 days (depending on the ambient temperature) before transferring to the refrigerator. The sauerkraut may be consumed after a couple of weeks, though if you allow the fermentation process to continue for a month or so in the refrigerator you will be well rewarded with a most delicious flavour. I love sauerkraut at 4 months old.

As with all fermenting, follow your nose. If it smells putrid or you have any doubts about the quality, then discard the sauerkraut and start again.

Commonly Asked Questions Answered by Sally Fallon

Question: In Nourishing Traditions and Eat Fat Lose Fat, the sauerkraut instruction is to place cabbage in a tightly closed jar, with expansion room. However, in Wild Fermentation, the instruction is to add a weight (e.g., a smaller jar filled with water) to keep cabbage below liquid line. This also is the instruction with my Harsch crock (custom weights) and the practice of old-timers with board and plate (for weight). Is the cabbage (recipe with closed lid and no weights) safe from problems because of the closed lid? We noticed the shredded cabbage did expand in closed lid process, which lifted kraut above the liquid line during three days. No kahm yeast appeared, so we ate even kraut above liquid line.

Answer: There are many ways to make sauerkraut, With my method, you push down into the jar with a pounder and don’t really need weights.

Question: Young children aren’t fond of the caraway flavor. I understand caraway is a fermentation aid. Can we just add extra salt or whey instead?

Answer: there are many ways to do sauerkraut–the caraway is not necessary.

Question: Is there increased nutritional/probiotic benefit from fermenting kraut longer than three days? Does it continue to grow good properties in refrigerator, or is the ‘fridge time’ only a flavor/texture enhancement?

Answer: Hard to say, more research is needed! It will definitely get more sour if you leave it longer, so it is really a matter of taste.

The following story is, unfortunately, true.

Before the 1950’s, most bakeries in Australia, indeed the world, ran 2 shifts of workers because the dough was fermented throughout the night, long and slow. That bread was made from plain, unbleached wheat flour, and now, seen in retrospect, was superior to most breads of today.

I would often visit our local bakery with my uncle, who home-delivered bread for many years. During the 50’s, the US-based bakery giant Tip Top came to Brisbane, and started to buy up all the small bakeries it could; other giants competed with them, meaning that in very quick time we had only 2 or 3 bakers in the entire city, ditto in all parts of Australia.

One of the very first actions these corporate bakers were to take was to introduce the fast loaf (3 hours from start to finish), effectively eliminating the need for half, or one entire shift, of their labour force. This was actually required by a new law called The Bread Act.

This seemingly innocuous cost-cutting decision would relentlessly impact and compromise the health of each and every bread lover since – that’s virtually everybody since the 50’s – and would cause countless deaths, bestow myriad miseries, as it continues to do. The first act of a major tragedy that still plays, everywhere, everyday.

Very basic bread that had once been fermented for a healthy 8 hours or more was now brewing in just 2 hours! Yeast levels were increased, accelerants and proving agents introduced. Glutens, starches and malts were not given the remotest opportunity to convert to their digestible potentials, in a sickly anti-nutrient-laden, gluepot stew. Breads are still made this way, even the so-called health breads!

Fast-made bread is one of the most destructive implementations into the modern diet. It has become normal fare, and poorly-prepared and poorly-digested wheat is the chief contributor to the current plague of “gluten-intolerance”, obesity, diabetes, candida diseases and many allergenic conditions.

Gluten (once properly fermented) is a wonderful vegetable protein. It is actually a mix of the two elastic proteins, gliadin and glutenin. So-called gluten-intolerant adults and kids are eating my long-ferment bread with amazement at, delight in, the taste, the clarity and the painless, satisfactory satiety.

Sure, be intolerant of gluten in its under-prepared, expedient form. It most certainly is toxic. Such sensitivity is wise and self-preserving, but do not condemn gluten and wheat via this premise. We are not gluten-intolerant; we are allergic to the accelerating haste of modern life!

Wheat is, yes, potentially one of the most highly allergenic foods on the planet, but like soya beans, converts to a truly great food once it is fermented long enough.

All current breads, pastas, pizzas, cakes, biscuits, and on and on and on, contain complex proteins which have not been given the requisite fermentation time to convert to their excellent, digestible alter-egos.
Wheat also contains a difficult starch and a highly allergenic maltose, but within that same complexity, when correctly fermented, there lies varied and splendid nutrients – 18 amino acids (proteins), complex carbohydrate (a super efficient source of energy), B vitamins, iron, zinc, selenium and magnesium, and maltase.

From a demon to a god in one ferment.

The catastrophic changes in bakery procedures were a disaster that went largely unnoticed in the 50’s, except by my baker/uncle and a few other observant souls. He became aware that from that fateful change onwards, many of his customers began to grow ill. Amy MacGrath made the same observation in her book “One Man’s Poison.”

Of course the 50’s also saw the introduction of mass pasteurisation of milk and other food perversions, so there were several developing culprits. This period marked the beginning of the end for bread and milk as healthy, nutritious staples, and signalled the onset of the demise of food in general.

Today, the absolute extreme of this perfidy is found in Hot Bread kitchens, which produce loaves of very toxic, allergy-inducing crud, in just 40 minutes from start of dough to baked finish!

Long Ferment Bread

The longer the ferment, the less yeast is required. Over time, even the smallest amount of yeast will slowly grow and spread throughout a dough. The addition of ginger powder (instead of sugar) to the original mix helps to create a strident growth network for even and healthy leavening to occur.

Sourdough leaven is a fine option to baker’s yeast, but bear in mind that sourdough is also yeast, also a leavening agent. It’s just that in sourdough the yeasts are attracted, gathered wild from the atmosphere.

Remember, whether you employ baker’s yeast or sourdough as the leaven, the actual dough fermenting time must be longer than 6 hours!

I have not only gluten-intolerants enjoying my wheat/granulated yeast bread, but also yeast-sensitive folk are also reporting no reaction – not 100% success of course, but enough to suggest that, just as proteins and starches transform in the long ferment process, the yeast positively alters also.

The tremendous upsurge in cases of gluten, carbohydrate and lactose sensitivity is a totally modern phenomena, and finds its origins in quick, economically convenient, and incorrect food preparation - forging a delusional, diversionary path that we have charted in just the last 50 years, far far away from traditional lines.

Bran is Bullshit!

Actually, far, far better to eat bullshit than bran! True.

Bran is the outer husk of any grain or seed, it is indigestible, and its high phytate content robs our bodies of nutrients, especially minerals, and stifles digestion. If we are eating well, we don’t need such gross fibrous brooms to “sweep out” our bowels.

Bran robs us of nutrients in another way also: Because bran is an irritant to the bowel, its radical stimulation of the peristaltic motion means that any foods accompanying the bran get shunted along far too rapidly in the bowel, severely restricting the crucial extraction of minerals and vitamins which would occur in a normal (slow) passage through the colon.

Not even to their pigs would the Chinese give bran, from any grain (rice included).

In 1542 England, the government-published “Dyetary of Health” stated “bread having too much bran is not laudable”. At that time, the rich ate plain bread, the poor ate the waste, the brown.

Bran is now lauded as a lifesaver, is present in so many of today’s foods. A huge market has been created for what was, for thousands of years, and deservedly so, rubbish.

Don’t toss it out though, it’s ideal for the compost heap or chipboard manufacture.

I have experimented with fermenting bran-rich wholemeal flour doughs for over 24 hours and still the resulting bread is indigestible.

The germ of grains too, like bran, is loaded with anti-nutrients.

Wheat germ oil is an excellent food, but prone to rapid rancidification, and this is true of the whole germ of any grain – not to be eaten raw, even if it’s super fresh – makes no difference, ‘cause the anti-nutrient phytates are still present.

This is what wholemeal means - that the bran and sometimes the germ too are left in the flour.

So you see, this is my case(not yet rested) - that whole don’t necessarily mean wholesome!

The ancient, tried and true slow-ferment baking way rejected outright the germ and bran of grains. It fermented doughs overnight, and delivered nourishing, allergen-free, 100% digestible bread from unbleached, long-fermented plain flour, just like my uncle did, and just like many of today’s tradition-savvy Italian and French bakers do.

Ask your bakers how long they leave their bread dough sit, or is it stand?

Some excellent bread bakers do exist – Sonoma in Sydney, Crystal Waters in Qld, SOL in Brisbane, and Goanna Bakery in Lismore. But don’t eat loaves that have been dusted with raw flour. This defeats and pollutes the basic purpose of the long fermentation.

Cereal Killers

“Puffed” cereals are particularly irksome because of the high heat and pressure processing, but flakes and other shaped cereals are no better, including the so-called health versions. Studies have shown that these heat-extruded grain preparations can have an even more adverse effect on the blood sugar than refined sugar.

Nevertheless, in television advertising, they are totally misrepresented as almost wonder foods, supported by sports stars with false and fabricated health claims.

All mueslis, cereals, fast-rise breads, puffed rice/corn cakes, pizza bases, pastas, pastries and biscuits contain under-prepared grains, and most contain dextro-malt, lecithin or glucose in one or more of their many disguises – hence numerous toxic, mineral-denying, anti-nutrient allergens plus indigestible proteins and carbs, etc. are being ingested. Yet most of these extremely popular foods can also be made from the same, but carefully fermented grains. It just takes time.

From the early 1960’s onwards, as a result of championing brown rice and wholemeal everything, we have given many deleterious substances totally unwarranted and misleading kudos. And we are suffering, en masse.

Billions of Asian (and other) peoples have eaten, for millennia, not whole, not brown, but white rice, exclusively!

How do proponents of brown rice get around this amazing statistic? Do they seriously think that these ancient societies got it wrong?

Give us a break!

The first cereal-gathering people would have tried eating and cooking grains many different ways, over aeons, as their stomachs’ and bodies’ reactions refined their attitudes to each grain. The white rice diet of Asia is the result of such ageless observation and tradition, from both dietary and medical standpoints.

If brown rice were healthier, they’d be eating it!

How many times have you heard that we need to eat more vegetarian fare to curb Climate Change? Greepeace and even David Suzuki put it in their top ten actions we can take. It seems every green magazine I pick up, every green blog I read, I’m shamed for living as what my body is designed to be, an omnivore. This makes me feel very sad and a little angry. Here’s why:

1. The current population of cattle in the US is only marginally more than the numbers the Native Bison (or Buffalo) enjoyed before Europeans arrived: 96 million cattle have replaced most of the estimated 60 to 100 million Bison that existed in the 19th century. How could there be too many cattle now? This is how..
   The figures Suzuki and Greenpeace are working from actually reveal what industrial factory farming is using and outputting. The ancient practice of subsistence grass farming is a totally different picture. Much of the resources used for the beef industry are used in the production of grains fed to confined cattle. There is no reason for this except to boost the bottom line of ‘agricorp’ companies. No ruminant should be eating grain or soy. Industrial agriculture only does so because governments subsidise their feed.
2. It is very easy to throw about grandiose, knee jerk recommendations which get headlines but it is Greenpeace’s very followers who will suffer from living by them. I live in Byron Bay, some call it a vegetarian paradise. Australia’s modern affair with vegetarianism began right here, more than 30 years ago. Looking around me, I witness first hand the ravages such a diet leaves in it’s wake. Young, idealistic 20 somethings may not notice immediately the affects of such a diet. However, coming into their 50s and 60s now, I see many long time vegetarians; exhausted, overwhelmed and caffeine addicted from years of underNourishing themselves. (BTW It takes 140 Litres of water to make enough coffee for one cup. I challenge you to find a vegetarian who isn’t caffeine addicted. I haven’t yet.)
   Many lose their creativity and the naturally buoyant, positive attitude which is our birthright. Many wind up, infertile, unmotivated, ineffective and resentful without knowing why. Greenpeace needs robust, energetic, creative people to work with them toward change. Their recommendations threaten to deny them and our Earth of just this.
3. Grass fed, properly managed animal foods are actually a great way to sequester many billions of metric tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere.

To be more responsible, Greenpeace should recommend we boycott confined, grain fed animal foods and demand grass fed animal foods. Is that too complicated for our ‘dumbed down’ population?

Some Facts about Grass Fed Meat

• Grazing land comprises more than half the total land surface of the Earth.
• Soil organic carbon is the largest reservoir in interaction with the atmosphere. It contains 82% of terrestrial carbon.
• Forests can be net carbon emitters in their early stages and take many years to reach their sequestration potential
• “An acre of pasture can sequester more carbon than an acre of forest.” We can offset the nations entire emissions, simply by planting more grass either as winter crops or instead of crops. - Dr Chistine Jones of the Carbon Coalition.
• “Soil represents the largest carbon sink over which we have control. Improvements in soil carbon levels could be made in all rural areas, whereas the regions suited to carbon sequestration in plantation timber are limited.” - Dr Christine Jones
• 50% to 66% of the historic carbon loss (42 to 78 gigatons of carbon) was created by the world’s poorly managed, degraded agricultural soils and is therefore ripe to become the world’s greatest carbon sink.

Difference between carbon farming pasture (right) and ordinary pasture: courtesy of the Carbon Farmer’s of Australia Association.

• Introducing carbon credits for grass farmers who manage their grazing so they actually sequester carbon will also help improve water retention and soil erosion issues.

Raising grain-fed cattle is resource-intensive. It takes more than 35 fossil fuel calories to create one calorie of energy from grain-fed meat. A cow must consume about 8 pounds of grain (3.6kg) in order to yield one pound of meat (450gm), grain which is grown with fossil fuels and pesticides. Much of the exorbitant water use in grain feeding CAFOs is for cleaning the tonnes of waste, waste that in grass farming is a vital resource for soil fertility. Why do this when you can just let the cow go on the grass? Answer: corporate ‘bottom line’ industrial farming.

The ‘methane cattle fart’ statistic we hear all the time is taken from the writings of Dr Andrew Moxey, a widely respected economist who exposed modern agriculture’s contribution to emissions. He says “methane from livestock accounts for 20 per cent of green house gas emissions”, but reading just a little further, you’ll find he also says: “nitrous oxide from fertilizer adds up to 26 per cent [and] carbon dioxide from ploughing up grassland is the major contributor…45 per cent“.

What is on the agenda of people who continually misquote Moxey?

What environmentalists are saying is we should eat the grains instead of the cattle. What they don’t realise is neither we nor the cattle need the grains. They don’t realise this because they’ve been indoctrinated into the idea that we can (and should) eat a grain based diet. No mind that our ancestors never did. No mind that following a grain based diet has brought us to the point where 8% of the western population suffer diabetes (this is expected to quadruple by 2050). No mind that by 2020, 80% of all Australian adults and a third of all children will be overweight or obese. 37% of American Children are already overweight and the CDC predict that figure will be 50% by 2020. It also predicts that the generation of children who are currently under 10 years old are unlikely to outlive their parents.

Even so the USDA still recommends we continue with the sudden diet change that they initiated post world war II. (Please note the USDA food pyramid is created by the US Department of Agriculture - not the US department of Nutrition nor the US department of Health.) Before their self serving dietary recommendations, humans had never tried to consume 6 servings of grain foods. That’s three sandwiches a day. We couldn’t grow, harvest and process that much grain by hand. Only with the advent of the petrol driven harvest combine and industrial processing (dollars for the new manufacturing giants of the 50s) could we even consider eating this much grain, let alone feed it to our livestock. So why is it now the only other option to vegetarianism?

Why are we so easily hoodwinked?

We’re given two options:

1. Eat animals who eat grains
2. Eat grains.

Why do we fall for this trick? Why are even the most intelligent and highly educated of us lead to believe these are our only choices? Here’s what I see:

It is very difficult to imagine a lifestyle other than one that is part of and supported by the industrial complex. Industrial agriculture and, sadly, feminism has ushered in a completely new perspective on money, farming and Nourishing our family. A perspective we find it hard to veer from. Building a life around dignified farming, a life where the labour of over half the tribal group - that of the women and to some degree the children - is not quantified by money, is beyond our comprehension. What used to be the asset and province of the family is now quantified by money. Today, we outsource feeding our family, maintaining our health and the even caring for our children. Meanwhile, grandparents are idle or busy entertaining themselves, alone - a phenomenon, never before witnessed by our kind.

Never before have we been so separated from the realities of our condition - so separated, we believe we can subsist in a purely vegetarian system delivered to us by an industrial food chain. We can easily swap messy meat and milk for soy and grain products, conveniently processed, packaged and stored at our local supermarket.

I find it intriguing that environmentalists don’t mention grass farming at all. Don’t they know about it? If non-organic agriculture makes more greenhouse gases than industrial animal farming, why are we not told to go completely organic and eat grass fed animals? Why instead are we fed messages of guilt and denial?

I believe we are seeing Christianity in it’s most obtuse manifestation: a generation of martyrs, suffering the ravages of vegetarianism. Saviours of our innocent Earth, putting her before themselves. Pity it doesn’t work that way. Our new martyrs are only weakening their bodies and their progeny, separating themselves further from agriculture and the land for yet another false doctrine. Martyrs they are but not to the environment, to the soy industry and to grain barons.

We Need Farm Animals

Ask any organic or bio dynamic farmer if they can maintain soil fertility without animal manure.. lots of it. They’ll tell you no. As Mark Purdey, farmer and BSE expert puts it, “If the vegetarian vision is to gain precedence over our global agricultural systems, then chemical and biotech agriculture would boom to make good the shortfall of fertility lost once our livestock were annihilated.”

“The preservation of fertility is the first duty of all that live by the land. Leave the land in a better state than when you took it over.” - George Henderson.

Most urban Westerners have little understanding of the realities of farming. And this is the grain baron’s biggest asset. They now nod smugly at ‘environmental’ messages that scare us into eating more of their product. Heart Disease, Obesity, Cancer and now Global Warming is caused by meat eating? What Tripe. Truth is, the more grass fed meat from small, local farms we eat, the less money they make.

In following USDAs recommendations and indeed Greenpeace’s call to go vego, we can remain separated from the muck and mess of mixed farming. We can continue our sterile food mythology; purity through denial, from the dirty truth that animals must die for our sustenance. And most importantly for grain cartels and their government buddies, we can continue to work a 40 hour week so we can afford to buy their ‘healthy’ breads, tofu and soy yoghurt.. So we can afford to pay rising medical costs which inevitably line the pockets of Big Pharma. The very medical costs which are caused by eating from the industrial food chain.

We are lost in a maze of propaganda, designed to confuse and disempower us, purely for the economic benefit of the few. Unfortunately, environmentalists who recommend vegetarianism are just another group of well meaning individuals who’ve lost connection to the land and a physical experience of balance with her. Lacking this connection and living only in the mind, they have unwittingly become the mouth pieces of selfish agribusiness.

What’s the Alternative?

Luckily, we have all we need to make real changes to improve our footprint and our health and wellbeing. Our alternative can be summed up in one word. Re-localise.

The internet is our best ally and our courage, faith and strong bodies our best tools. Some expectations, personal politics and even some laws are still in our way, but no blockage we can’t remove, together with vision and resolve.

Imagine this:

You live in an urban environment where culture and agriculture have equal value. We’ve redesigned our cities into many small, walled villages so we can reconnect with our community, sharing sunny plazas with our fellow villagers where:

• children play under the watchful eye of the whole community,
• teens hang in semi-private enclaves,
• elders live on the plaza with access to family and carers and large open windows they can watch the village life go by,
• community gardens are shared among villagers
• food preparation, handicrafts, music and art workshops happen every other day, and
• no cars are allowed!

Imagine now, that every member of your village is part of a shared farming arrangement. You own your own animals and employ a farming family to care for your animals; paying them for the next season’s meat (and any other crops) in advance. Your farmer brings your food to you every week or to the marketplace along with other little tidbits you can buy for cash to spice up your larder. There’s no waste and no separation. Taking an active part in ensuring the quality, quantity and price of your food remains stable, you know your animals are treated humanely and cared for in a way that supports and does not degrade the environment. (Farmers who are paid a living wage are unlikely to harm their farmland or their animals and cutting out the many, many middle men in the current system will give them and their animals the standard of living they deserve.)

How much less fossil fuels, pesticides, fertilizers and plastic packaging could we spare our delicate ecology? Is localised, community supported mixed farming an answer to our climate woes? Can we create such a system?

Thanks to online technology, this is completely possible for an inner city community to achieve. Your farm may be hundreds of miles away, but there is no reason you can’t have a cosy relationship with your farmer. Angelic Organics CSA is an excellent example of this. Farmer John communicates with his thousands of subscribers weekly. They even come to the farm on weekends to visit their vegies.

This scenario seems to me way more Nourishing for people and the planet than simply going to the store and buying some Tofu on the way to my job at the car factory.

Reconnecting with farms, busting the nuclear family and relocalising services is possible. But government can’t do it for us. We’ve got to create it ourselves.

If you want to begin creating this reality, have hope, there are others, many others who want it too.

Start by reading this book: How to Build a Village by Claude Lewenz.

Check out the second in the Zeitgeist series.

Join a CSA near you. (There’s one in Perth and one in Brisbane.) Or start one yourself.

To specifically access grass fed animals through CSAs, subscriber to Herdshare.com and please don’t become vegetarian to save on greenhouse emissions, there are so many other, much better ways.

Robinson’s exhaustive study gives a blow by blow account of the hell that is a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) or factory farm, then, just when you think you’re going to be sick, burst into tears or join PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), she shares the story of our saviours, pasture raising farmers. Folks like Joel Salatin who farm animals with compassion. Folks who charge more money for their product so their animals live with dignity. Folks whose animals exist as they were designed to. They have free access to pasture. They are protected from predators and from over crowding.

Along with the ethical and environmental issues, Robinson tackles the nutritional differences between pasture fed and conventionally raised animal foods.

What is Conventional Raising?

In Australia conventionally raised animals could be free roaming on pasture that may or may not be fertilized, herbicide and pesticide ridden, dipped in insecticides at intervals, then grain finished. They could also be housed in factory farms their whole lives, mutilated to avoid harm to each other, standing in their own excrement, riddled with antibiotics and growth hormones and fed arsenic to increase their appetite and growth rate.

What is Pasture Raising?

The Australian and US Organic standards do not required certified members to pasture feed. Organic animals in Australia require only 50% of the feed of ruminants to be provided by grazing. There is no pasture raising organisation in Australia or the UK like the American Grass Fed Association and certainly no standards certification. If there were one, Jo Robinson, would certainly be their ambassador. Pasture fed means just that. The animal is fed on pasture, grasses, grown in the ground. They don’t eat out of date confectionery, manure from other animals, soy meal left over after the oil has been extracted using toxic hexane chemicals, citrus peel and grains… Grass and hay. That is all. From start to finish. That’s what you need to make sure of when you ask your butcher, “is it pasture raised?”

A few nutritional facts that are bound to shock:

• it costs more money per pound to raise pigs indoors on concrete than on pasture (study quoted in the book)
• Organic Milk is less nutritious than pasture fed only milk
• pasture raised animal foods has more Vitamin E and CLA
• pastured animal food contains 50/50 Omega 3 and 6 while conventionally raised animal food has an excess of Omega 6, known to be involved in heart disease, cancer and other degenerative diseases.
• even organic animals that have been fed grains have an unnatural balance of Omega 3 and 6 (1/3 grain creates double Omega 6 to 3 and 2/3 grain makes 4 times Omega 6 to Omega 3)
• Grass fed eggs and butter have a rich yellow orange colour because they are rich in beta-carotene, even organic milk from cows living on grains is white and pasty, requiring natural yellow colouring.

These facts can be found in Robinson’s handbook along with references.

To top it all off, Pasture Perfect has a recipe section. Since they are not marbled with mostly polyunsaturated fat, pasture raised meats need special cooking techniques.

Jo Robinson’s book is a well researched and documented handbook on what is touted as the ‘better than organic’ food standard. If you’re serious about health, fair trade, family farms and the environment, you can’t not read it.

To find out more about Pasture raised animal foods and buy Jo’s book, visit her site: EatWild.com

To resist factory farming go to the Grace Factory Farm Project or the EU Healthy Beef Project.

Answer: It is definitely worth a try.  Be sure to do the whole therapy, with bedrest, hot baths and the enemas for detox.  - Sally

Question: Is bee pollen really all that beneficial, I am only asking because I am confused and have come across articles that say there is nothing to the health claims that science can prove.

Also if there any any real significant benefits, is it safe for children to take, if so from what age and what proportions? - Mum

Answer: Yes, I think it is beneficial, but even better to just eat some unprocessed honey containing bee pollen. - Sally

Question: I am a nursing mother and recently purchased BLUE ICE Gold Therapeutics. I liked it because it has CLO and butter oil combined. The stuff is a lot more concentrated than the high vitamin CLO (you get the same A and D amount in 1 ml of GT as you would in a 1/2 tsp of HV CLO). I am taking 4 ml of the GT, which is equal to 20,000 IU’s of vitamin A. In addition to that, I am also taking 1 tsp of fish oil because this seems like such a small amount of oil. Should I stop the fish oil? My 5 month old also gets 1/2 ml of the GT, with no fish oil. Also in the summer months what should I take when I don’t need the vitamin D? I have been doing 2 tsp of fish oil and taking shark liver oil (now brand), equal to 20,000 IU’s of vitamin A.

Answer:We dont’ recommend fish oil under any circumstances. Just fish LIVER oil to provide A and D with a small amount of DHA/EPA. You still need to take cod liver oil for vitamin A in the Summer. If you are getting a LOT of sun, then take a brand of clo that has very little D. Don’t take the fish oil. - Sally

Question: I have been reading your book (Nourishing Traditions) for a while now and have eagerly been applying the principles of traditional diets in as many ways as I can. I would appreciate some help however, and I’m not sure where to turn.

My problem is that my wife (who is 21) has innumerable chronic health issues, all of which fall into the dreaded category of sub-clinical, hard-to-describe ills which medical doctors never take very seriously, or at any rate, have no explanation nor solution for.

I’m not sure if this is the best place to ask, but as I said, I’m not sure where to turn, and most advice I can find is too general to be of much help. So I would much appreciate your advice, or at least some recommendations of who to ask and what to look for.

Briefly, her issues are :

- Chronic digestive problems (severe stomach pains for no apparent reason, stomach pains with anything too acidic, occasional constipation, etc).

- Chronic headaches. Now that she’s pregnant, it seems in fact to be continual rather than chronic.

- Chronic insomnia.

- Chronic fatigue (has to take at least one nap at day, and since her pregnancy, at least two!).

- Depression (often verging on suicidal).

- Seeming bone fragility. I say “seeming” because there is no actual breakage, just what seems to be mini-cracks in a few places, such that, for example, moving her right arm in a certain position causes intense pain. There’s nothing too severe, but I’m a bit concerned that it looks as though her bone structure is weak.

- Frequent skin dryness and slow healing of wounds (leaving scars and stretch marks).

- Rather severe dyspareunia (most of the time).

- Tinnitus.

- Darier disease.

- Seemingly bad circulation (or at least, that’s my explanation — her hands and feet get ice cold very fast).

- Intolerance to all legumes, as well as allergy to pears.

- A bit of asthma, but not too severe.

- Fragile nails (I think this is related to Darier disease though), which she incessantly bites, to make matters worse.

- Slight obesity.

On top of all that, she is now 5 weeks pregnant and has been going through intense pains (stomach, vaginal area, head, legs, and pretty much everything else, along with frequent trembling and sometimes even difficulty moving at all). For about a week and a half it was terrible (immediately after her missed period), so much so that I took her to the emergency ward, only to be told, after much examination, that pain can be normal at the beginning of pregnancy and that she should take painkillers to overcome it. (Actually, she took painkillers to survive, but it was never close to stopping the pain…) Now, for the last week or so, it’s been considerably better, and a bit different — a lot of nausea (though not much actual vomiting), and a bit of all the same symptoms as before, but definitely less intense.

So, over the last few days, I’ve been trying hard to figure out what exactly is wrong and what we can do to make the pregnancy go as well as possible, as well as avoid her as much pain as we can. So, in addition to trying to improve our diet, I bought a lot of supplements. I can’t accept the idea that her pains are normal. Her diet was very sub-optimal during her growing years, and so I would not be surprised if she had severe deficiencies, but I don’t know what she lacks most nor how to fix it. I’m sure in the long run, a lot of her issues would be resolved by a nutrient-rich diet, which is what I’m working on, but is there anything I can do to try to make up for years of bad food?

There are many people pushing many different cure-alls, several of which I have experimented with (high doses of ascorbic acid, Adele Davis and her vitamin recommendations for pregnancy, etc), but none seem to have any obvious result. The recommendations on the WAPF site are all very good too, but they’re all so general, it’s hard to tell what exactly is needed for her particular condition. I give her about 18000 IU of vitamin A and about 3000 IU vitamin D from cod liver oil every day, as well as about a tablespoon of wheat germ oil for vitamin E (as well as an extra vitamin E capsule), B1, B6/Magnesium, B12, and some acerola tablets. I expect this is all wonderful, but we haven’t noticed any change whatsoever (except perhaps that her nails might have become marginally less fragile).

So, there you have a rather complete description of our trouble. I’m probably forgetting some of the symptoms, but you have the main ones. There are also deep emotional issues from her childhood (broken family, etc), which might have a relationship with some of these problems, but I can’t imagine it could cause everything. Besides, even if the cause were entirely emotional, that wouldn’t help us solve it…

So, if you have any ideas what might be wrong, I would greatly appreciate your help. I can imagine that it must not be easy to give medical advice by correspondence, but perhaps some of the symptoms I described will sound familiar to you or perhaps you would have advice on who else we could ask…?

At any rate, I would be very grateful for any helpful reply you could make. - Thanks in advance, Jonathan

Answer: It is so hard to answer this question, not knowing what she is eating.  But in general, I would suggest following our diet for pregnant and nursing women, with lots of butter, egg yolks, liver (pate) seafood, bone broths, raw milk if you can get it, plus cod liver oil AND at the same time getting off all the junk food.  The book Performance without Pain may also be helpful.  - Best, Sally

May I recommend Dr Tom Cowan, Author of “Fourfold Path to Healing” as he focuses on traditional food ways as part of each protocol he prepares. Here is an article he wrote about Chronic Fatigue.

http://editor.nourishedmagazine.com.au/articles/chronic-fatigue-syndrome

Chronic illness takes a long time to recover from but it does happen. There is a chronic fatigue survivor on Nourished - Katrina at Green Pastures. She may offer support.

As your wife rebuilds her body and builds another’s she’ll need plenty of nutrient dense food. I’ve heard of people taking up to 50,000 IU of Cod Liver Oil daily. Perhaps doing away with any grains at all and concentrating on broths, raw dairy, organ meats (some raw), sea foods, animal fats, coconut products and eating only fermented vegetables would help. Avoid grains, fruit, sugars, alcohol and caffeine.

You sound as though you’re under a tremendous amount of strain yourself. Remember to Nourish yourself also. Often we forget that after the birth, there is breastfeeding, sleepless nights and physical strain to deal with. Make sure you have spare hands to care for your new family.

Please, feel free to ask for support from the Nourished Community by commenting on this article.