Category Archives: Biodynamic Farming

Re-Imagining Money

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money-butterfly

What is money? What can our relationship with money teach us? How does money connect us to what we care most about, both personally, and as a community? Join us for an evening of conversation with John Bloom to explore these and other questions.

John Bloom is Vice President, Organizational Culture at RSF Social Finance in San Francisco. In his work at RSF he addresses the intersection of money and spirit by facilitating conversations and developing programs that support personal and social transformation. As part of this work he has also helped develop awareness of issues of land and biodynamic agriculture.

Bloom is the author of The Genius of Money and writes frequently for RSF’s Reimagine Money blog. In his latest book, Inhabiting Interdependence, he explores approaches toward transforming the conventional habits of mind and practice that have led to today’s economic imbalance in our own lives, and in society as a whole. Acknowledging that money has permeated almost every aspect of daily life, including our relationships to nature and to one another, Bloom suggests we reconsider our personal and cultural conditioning, and our systems of economic exchange. He asks us to imagine how, in the next economy, we might steward our natural resources, work, and forms of capital in a framework that supports and celebrates our humanity and our capacities as individual human beings.

John Bloom will visit Rhode Island to lead a conversation about money, values, and the need for a new understanding of our economic selves. At Meadowbrook Waldorf School on Wednesday, November 30th at 6:30 pm. Open to all, admission free. Join us, and please share this invitation to help bring voices from all walks of life into the evening’s conversation.

Sustainable Beekeeping: October 3 & 4, 2014

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Everyone should have an interest in beekeeping since our very lives depend on it. ~ Rudolf Steiner
43-150x150Bees are essential to our food supply, pollinating 40 – 70% of our diet including apples, peaches, strawberries, nuts, avocados, broccoli as well as many important medicinal plants. In a series of lectures given in 1923 Rudolf Steiner predicted the dire state of today’s honeybee. He stated that within 50 to 80 years we would see the consequences of practices such as breeding queen bees artificially and mechanizing the naturally organic forces of the beehive.
Last summer Time magazine published an article to highlight The Plight of the Honeybee
and Wholefoods in Garden City, RI removed all of its pollination dependent produce illustrating This is what your supermarket looks like without bees. Since then the USDA Agricultural Research Service which has been monitoring Colony Collapse Disorder since 2006, is reporting that “Despite a number of claims in the general and scientific media, a cause or causes of CCD have not been identified by researchers.”

14_young_unfertilized_queen-150x150Gunther Hauk has long been a beekeeper and advocate. In his book Toward Saving the Honeybee he finds that over the last 150 years beekeeping has fallen prey to the same misguided approaches as conventional agriculture. Featured in the internationally acclaimed documentary, Queen of the Sun Hauk examines how respect for the wisdom inherent in the natural laws of life, such as diversity and limits of growth have given way to the laws of industry that demand millions of acres of mono-cultures to meet the needs of large, powerful corporations.
In his article, The Honeybee Crisis: A Curse or a Blessing? Hauk recoginzes the current bee crisis as a call to action. He began the nonprofit Spikenard Farm as a honeybee sanctuary in 2006 and he is committed to ensuring that the knowledge and practice of sustainable, biodynamic beekeeping continues to grow. In his lectures Steiner spoke of the unconscious wisdom contained in the beehive and how this relates to the human experiences of health, civilization, and the cosmos. (His collected lectures are available in the volume Bees from SteinerBooks with an introduction written by Hauk.) The riddles of how bees democratically achieve consensus or understand the highly complicated dances that guide them to nectar and pollen supply are just part of what Goethe called nature’s open mystery.

Join us at Meadowbrook to learn more about conscious, sustainable beekeeping with Gunther Hauk in October on Friday 3rd & Saturday 4th. For more information and to reserve your place contact AdultEd@meadowbrookschool.com

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Farm to Table: Is home canning safe?

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Contributed by Teri Gregg

Home canning

Are home-canned products safe to eat?

Is it safe to eat Aunt Gab’s or Grandma Mary’s pickles, green beans and preserves?  Every year, people proudly give their homemade canned goods for gifts and the wary recipients leave them in their cupboard for years wondering if they are really safe to eat. If this sounds like you, then here is some helpful information to help you decide when to toss a canned good and when to sing Aunt Gab’s and Grandma Mary’s praises!

What is canning?

Canning is a method of preserving food in which the food contents are processed and sealed in an airtight container. Canning provides a shelf life typically ranging from one to five years, In 1795 the French military offered a cash prize of 12,000 francs for a new method to preserve food. Nicolas Alpert  suggested canning, and the process was first proven in 1806 in tests conducted by the French navy.  The packaging prevents microorganisms from entering and proliferating inside.

To prevent the food from being spoiled before and during containment, a number of methods are used: pasteurisation, boiling (and other applications of high temperature over a period of time), refrigeration, freezing, drying, vacuum treatment, antimicrobial agents that are natural to the recipe of the foods being preserved, a sufficient dose of ionizing radiation, submersion in a strong saline solution, acid, base, osmotically extreme (for example very sugary) or other microbially-challenging environments.

Other than sterilization, no method is perfectly dependable as a preservative. That said, really, only foods with a low acidity (most veggies, meat, seafood, poultry and dairy products) need sterilization under high temperatures.  This is achieved through pressure canning.  Foods that can be safely canned in ordinary boiling bath water are highly acidic such as most fruits, pickled vegetables (anything canned in vinegar) or other foods to which acidic additives have been added.

Simply put, if your great aunty (or Teri) gives you jam, jelly or anything pickled in vinegar, it is more than likely okay and most assuredly NOT going to kill you.  The worst thing that would happen is it may not have been sealed properly and it will get moldy.  This is easily seen (or smelled) and should just be thrown out.  If the seal has been compromised at all, again, just throw it out.

Home canning and a bit about botulism

Foodborne botulism (which is what everyone is afraid of getting!) results from contaminated foodstuffs in which C. botulinum spores have been allowed to germinate and produce botulism toxin, and this typically occurs in canned non-acidic food substances. SO, again, simply put, this means that if you get a jar of green beans that are canned in just salt water, not vinegar!,  there is a chance, albeit small, that it has grown botulism.    Botulism is a rare but serious paralytic illness, leading to paralysis that typically starts with the muscles of the face and then spreads towards the limbs. In severe forms, it leads to paralysis of the breathing muscles and causes respiratory failure.  So.  What to do about those green beans.  If Grandma Mary is up to snuff on the latest information on how to pressure can, then I would go ahead and eat them!  The latest recipes have all the benefit of the litigious world we live in and have made it almost impossible (IF ALL STEPS ARE FOLLOWED!) to pressure can improperly. HOWEVER! if she poo poos the latest information and uses old school, or old world methods, I would consider giving it to the mouse outside first and see what happens. (ONLY KIDDING!  I like mice!)

Try the jams, jellies, marmalades, chutneys, relishes, pickled veggies with confidence! And send the thank you note singing their praises. The others may need your brave trust…..or a reserved spot in the pantry to honor the effort. (Really, don’t feed the mice)