The Mad Luddite

When is it waste?

2012-02-08T05:54:00.000-08:00

I'm smack in the middle of putting my household together. This has meant buying a lot of stuff - some of which it actually irks me to buy, and which goes against my normal sensibilities. A good example of this is plastic storage containers. It's not just that they're plastic, but that they're labeled as 'disposable'.

So why did I buy them? Well, for a number of reasons: First, they're really cheap and there are just so many things I need to establish a working household, and need now, I can't afford to pass up a bargain; Second, while they're billed as 'disposable', my experience is that they can be reused often and actually hold up for a long time, even a couple years if well taken care of; Third, and this is the real heart of the matter - since I plan to cook a lot, and mostly from scratch or near-scratch, I need to be able to store things. To cook effectively for one, I need to be able to cook in quantity and save what isn't consumed immediately for later use, especially for lunches. In order to be saved, the food has to be stored in something. Thus, plastic storage containers, and no small number of them are a logical choice, and seem to be a wise use of my limited money. So is it wasteful to purchase these containers?

Thinking about this led to my questioning other aspects of waste - money vs. time; money vs. resources; time vs. resources; space vs. energy; etc. More permanent, non-plastic (or less-plastic) solutions to the problem of food storage that I came up with are mason jars; re-cycled jars from gorcery store products, and commercial glass bowl (like pyrex) with plasticy resealable lids. I do use mason jars for storing dry goods in, as well as for sprouting, and a few other things. I like the commercial pyrex bowls too, but they're expensive, and the lids are still plastic. Admittedly though, I usually don't repurpose the glass jars that come with grocery store products, and simply put them in the recycling bin. Obviously, this is something I need to correct.

Another conundrum occurred to me while thinking about this and dealing with a limited budget: most food stuffs - from potato chips to spices are cheaper when bought in bulk quantities. For a larger group of people, this is a no-brainer. But what about for a single-person household? Should we only buy small quantities, and sacrifice our money and the time it took to earn that money? To me, the logical course is to buy the large quantities, and take steps to mitigate spoilage through repackaging. Unfortunately, this seems to mean learning to live with more plastic.

So what's the biggest waste? My time and money, the resources used for 'disposable packaging', or letting food go to waste?

Life, Plus or Minus Plastic

2012-01-23T09:49:00.000-08:00

I'm no great fan of plastic. The primary reason for this is because of the role it has played in eliminating the craftsman from the manufacturing process, but also because it promotes the idea of disposability, put another way, waste. Despite this there are some arguments to me made for plastic as a material: There are some jobs for which is plastic is well-suited, and there's just so much of it around - to eliminate it entirely, or to reject it completely is to commit the sin of waste in a different way. The solution, as with so many other issues of technology, is to use plastic wisely and responsibly.

I came at this issue initially intending to eliminate plastic completely. Like many other eco-minded Americans, I started by amassing several canvas bags to use in place of plastic grocery store bags. This led to the surprising discovery that I really depended on platic bags, and had used them in numerous applications from ad hoc waterproofing material, to pipe patches, to well... bags for carrying all sorts of things. In fact, I found that of all the platic items I encountered in modern American life, those ubiquitous and scandalous plastic bags were one of the items I was most likely to reuse and repurpose. So I've struck a compromise: I try to reduce the number of plastic bags I consume, but rather than suffer a guilt attack everytime I end up with one, I save them as a precious resource, and re-use them.

Lately I've been shopping around alot for household items, and stocking up a pantry. As much as possible, I look for non-platic solutions to my household needs. Still, I find plastic is everywhere, and trying to boycott plastic is even harder than trying to boycott Chinese-made goods. At this point, I'm not even sure that it can actually be done. Still, I believe that just because I can't do everything doesn't mean I can't do anything at all. Just because I can't eliminate plastic doesn't mean that I can't reduce the amount that I use, and that I can't use it responsibly when I do.

A simple example will suffice I think. Water bottles. Water is my beverage of choice when I'm not drinking coffee or tea. When purchasing bottled water, plastic is almost always involved. Generally speaking, I don't buy bottled water, more because it's simply filtered tap-water, and thuse represents a near 100% profit margin for the bottlers. Instead, I have one of those water pitchers with the filter, and have a selection of permanent water bottles made from a variety of materials - some are stainless steel, and others are nalgene plastic - but even the stainless water bottles aren't plastic free, because the tops are made of plastic. The water pitcher and the filter assembly are... made of plastic.

Whether I like it or not, plastic is, and, for the immediate future, will remain part of my life.

Still in a holding pattern...

2012-01-17T07:33:00.000-08:00

... and will be for another three weeks or so. If you think it gets old reading about it, try living it.

The Potholder Saga

I mentioned last week that I attempted to make a potholder with one of those loopy looms but that my inner 5 year-old abandoned me at the end. Not one to give up easily, I put my thinking cap on and decided to salvage the thing. The solution I came up with was to take a piece of coat hanger wire and bend a stop on one end and a loop on the other. I then transfered all of the remaining loops onto this piece of wire (bending it as needed at the corner) and pulled off one loop at a time as I was ready to deal with it. I'm now the proud owner of one ugly potholder.

As I mentioned before, the technique doesn't really seem worth the trouble, except for the fact that I have a daughter who turns six tomorrow and she thinks making potholders out of little loopy things is a fabulous idea. I'm putting the whole thing aside until the next rainy weekend, at which time we'll let her have a go at it.

A cool website

Makezine recently featured a spot on their website about a knockdown backyard pizza oven. The source of the idea was Gardenfork.tv wich turns out to be a really cool site, with lots of advice and ideas on green living. They have some good looking dogs too.

Tough Week

2012-01-13T03:29:00.000-08:00

There's real content coming, I promise. This week has kept me moving to the point of exhaustion though. I had to drive down to Charlottesville, Va (nice town, by the way) for a second opinion from a doctor. I got one, alright, in direct contradiction to my regular doctor. So what do I do now? Get a third opinion and hope it breaks the tie?

I decided though, since despite the difference of opinions, and because regardless of which one is right, the recommended treatment is exactly the same - and of course my symptoms don't change because the diagnosis did, that I'm just not going to worry about it. Too many other things going on right now.

An attempt at craftiness

I thought I would get crafty and try making a potholder with those loop thingies - you know, the kind you made in art class when you were 5. It starts out pretty easy, but gets a little tricky at the end. Approximately half-way through the process of getting the finished potholder off, the tension on the loom had relaxed so much that the remaining loops just poped off. Since nothing was holding them together, the edges started to unweave. It is salvage-able, but it doesn't make me want to make more potholders this way. I can't really recommend the method at this point to anyone who isn't 5.

This was really just a whim, inspired by the realization that I'm going to be needing my own potholders soon. My grandmother crocheted her potholders, and I though homemade potholders would be very much in keeping with my vision of life, so I picked up the loom at the local craft store. Considering I don't have a viable source of making loops of my own, and refuse to depend on having to buy the materials (and the colors are kind of funky anyway), I don't think this is really a viable means of production. The loom is made of metal, so I'll be looking for a way to use it for something else.

A good cooking blog

I've lived in Virginia for very nearly 10 years now, and frankly I don't want to live anywhere else. I'm still a Texan at heart though, and one of the things I miss most is the food. Honestly, recreating the food here in the land of country ham is the main reason I set about learning to cook. Recently I found a great blog by another displaced Texan who has made it her mission. She recently published a cookbook The Homesick Texan which I heartily recommend. Her recipes and mine don't necessarily match, but she's ventured out a lot further than I have and I'll be looking to her blog and her book for inspiration a lot.

Plans, plans, plans

2012-01-05T05:04:00.000-08:00

Winter is still holding us fast in its grip here in the northern Shenandoah Valley. Outdoor activity is tough due to radical fluctuations in temperature, there's nothing to plant, nothing to water, and most of my indoor activities are limited due to the flux going on in my domestic life. Everybody is prone to anger, and the most innocent of comments or gestures can have dramatic, long term effects. My coping strategy is to be 'small', to take up as little space as possible, and hold out for the physical separation which is still a few weeks away.

What I can do, however, is plan for the future. It's not exactly a bright, shining future, but neither is it exactly dark and dreary. There will be serious financial challenges since the bulk of my income is going to child support and spousal support, but I'm no stranger to poverty or limited means. Despite the fact that my income is effectively rolling back about 15 years, there are certain advantages that I've never had before:

First, I no longer define my self by a material yardstick. Who I am and what I can do is much more important to me. It's only because I've been both places before: abject poverty and material success that I can fully appreciate that the new state of my life will be neither, but also include some of both, and I work at it without allowing myself to be seduced by the siren call of modern you-are-what-you-can-buy, the potential for a pretty good life awaits me.

Second, I have a home now. It's not the perfect home, and it's not what I make my first choice, but it is mine, and it's sustainable. I also have the freedom now to develop it in the way that I see fit without the constraint of someone else's expectations or trying to present an image that has no basis in reality.

Third, I possess now the gifts of knowledge and some small understanding of what is is truly important, including the knowledge of how to turn small resources into greater ones. I can plant seeds and harvest crops, preserve those crops and make food from them; I understand that to throw away anything of the smallest value is to commit the sin of waste. I can, with my own hands and the sweat of my brow craft much of what I need to sustain life, if only I resolve to do so and persevere.

----

I'm not starting entirely from scratch, but there's a lot of work to be done to convert my home from a mediocre palace of consumption to a homestead of production. To accomplish this, I have to build infrastructure, establish new habits, and actually do a lot of things that up to this point have only been idle fantasies or intermittent pastimes.

First in order of importance is food production. Gardening will be the deciding factor on whether I subsist on the dreg of the industrial food system, or feast on the healthy provenance of God and Nature. I live in a suburb of a small city, in a house designed to exploit the 'Grid' and not to be self-sustaining. My lot is a little less than an acre. It won't every fully nourish me and my children, but it can make a significant contribution. I have several projects in the works to move towards this end:

Edible Landscaping: Once spring emerges, I'll be replacing ornamentals with edibles. The permanent flower bed between my house and driveway is going to be devoted entirely to kitchen herbs and a few perennial vegetables. I already have established fruit trees, and will be planting more. I'll post pictures and commentary on the process as it develops

Above-Ground Gardening: The soil here is rocky and not prone to draining well. I've already built one permanent garden bed measuring 12' x 4', and I'll be building several more as time, materials, and other resources allow. I expect to have as many as 10 by the end of the year, at which time I'll evaluate the need and space requirements for more.

Container Gardening: This serves multiple purposes - it allows other wise unusable space to be productive; being portable, it allows one to extend the growing season by starting plants earlier, maintaining them later into the season, and creating the specials conditions needed for plants that would otherwise not be viable in one's local climate.

Crops themselves are only one step in the process of food production. Crops aren't exactly food yet, until they're actually on your plate. They also don't last forever and have to be stored or preserved. Then there's actually cooking them, which is not really that small a task, particularly when dealing with whole, raw ingredients. Some plans in this area which I'll be documenting are:

Canning: I've helped others with the canning process, but never actually done it by myself before, and then only the water bath method. I've watched other cook with a pressure cooker before, but I'm only vaguely familiar with the process of pressure canning. This will be a real adventure, and I'm looking forward to it.

Pickling and Fermentation: I've made pickles before, and I know people who regularly make their own Kimchi and Sauerkraut. These and other dishes can be a great and healthy addition to anyone's diet.

Cooking From Scratch: This is one area where I'm really pretty comfortable. I enjoy cooking as much as I enjoy eating. I've always shied away from pre-made options anyway, but I have to admit that quite often I've succumbed to the temptation of convenience. Now I have a financial incentive to avoid the industrial alternative.

It takes more than food to live a happy and fulfilled life, and there's more than gardening to living sustainably, lightly, and responsibly. My home is going to need furnishings, tools, textiles and other items, many of which I can manufature myself in whole or in part. There's also free time to account for, kids to entertain and instruct, maintenance and home-improvement. Plans in this area include:

Music: I play guitar and tin-whistle. My daughter is learning the violin, and both my son and daughter are aspiring harmonica players. We already enjoy making noise together, and are developing a repetoire of songs we can play. Making your own music is fun, enriching experience that improves the mind, the body, and the spirit.

Woodworking: This is another area that I'm really comfortable with. I don't have every tool in the catalog, but I learned a while back that skill makes up for not having all the fancy gadgets, and that skill only requires practice and dedication. A lot of the furniture that's 'mine' is already stuff I made myself. I'll be making a lot more in the future and posting the results here.

General Tinkering: Something I've always done, and a skill that's paid many dividends, both monetarily and in a sense of satisfaction. I like to make things and I like to fix things, from small engines to metal fabrication to electronic gadgets to household fixtures.

Sewing and Needlecraft: This is generally considered a male past time, or a skill set that men are encouraged to pursue, but it remains vital. Clothes need mending or alterations; knitting and crocheting are simple, productive activities that can be done while talking, watching television, or simply relaxing. I've also always been fascinated by the art of weaving fabric and spinning fiber into thread and yarn that can then be woven.

Finally, there's the Luddite Philosophy of living responsibly and sustainably, using tools rather being used by tools against one's own enlightened self interest - of being able to sustain one's own life without relying on others for basic needs.

Waste not, want not: Also known as 'Reduce, Reuse, Recycle'. This includes lowering energy dependence, composting, repurposing, and not falling into the traps of convenience and responsibility. Creativity can play a large role here, and is something I plan to explore in great detail.

Community Development: This means helping neighbors, strangers, and nature itself. It means getting to know people, being ready to lend a helping hand, and being proactive about the problems and potential problems in the world around us.

Well, that's all for now, but there's plenty more to come. Having written this, I'm actually looking forward to the future.

I'm putting the blog back together....

2011-12-26T10:36:00.001-08:00

I took a sabbatical from writing.... .... among other things.... but now I'm back.

Life changes, and mine in particular tends to change a lot all at once. It makes me dizzy when I think about it too much, so I try not to. Skipping the melodrama, which no one cares about in the least, my life is about to experience a soft-reboot. Hopefully, I'll recover from this faster than the previous hard re-boots I've experienced in the past.

My marriage is ending.

There I said it. It's my marriage though, and not my whole life. I don't like the fact that it's happening, but there really isn't much I can do about it. The sad fact about divorce is that the marriage being terminated, in most cases actually ended long before the legal paperwork was drafted. That's certainly true in my case.

I'm still a father though, and I'm still a thinking, feeling, mostly rational man, and rationally, I've got to continue to live the best life that I can, and although my children won't be living with me any longer, I still need to provide a home for them, and I still really NEED a home for myself.

So that's where I'm focusing my efforts - turning my house into a home. A real home.

For the foreseeable future, that what this blog is going to be focusing on - my quest to turn my little bit of suburban Virginia in a home; a place of rest, recuperation, love, affection, production, viability, sustainability and strength. It'll be tough and it will be a lot of work, but I'm tired of living like a turtle.

So, I'll be posting here again on a regular basis - weekly at least, and documenting my progress. I hope someone comes along to read it.

Metal-workers blues

2010-11-18T05:16:00.000-08:00

My eternal DIY quest has, in the past, largely been confined to carpentry, electricity/electronics, cooking, gardening and the like. When it comes to woodworking, I considered myself pretty competent - at the level of the serious amateur, and I have some nice furniture pieces to show for it. Wood is comfortable to me, but I have to admit that I've always been fascinated and impressed by those who can work with metal.

Not being one to respect confinement, or the division of labor, I've recently been trying to make useful things out of metal. I decided on a project - a universal coil winder designed by the imminent late genius David Gingery. I really can't rave about Mr. Gingery enough. The was a man who knew how to make things, as I understand it, he was a high school shop teacher, and he wrote several books - many of which can be found at Lindsay's Technical Books. Lindsay's, by the way, is a Luddite's paradise, and really has to be experienced to be believed.

Gingery considers this contraption to be easy to make, and a good introduction to working with metal. Everything you need to make it can be obtained at your local hardware store, as can all of the tools needed, if you don't have them already. I have a lot of tools, and I had a lot of the materials needed, so I got to work.

I learned a couple of hard lessons really fast. First, when Gingery says that this is an easy project, you have to remember that this is coming from a man who casts metal in his back yard, and writes books on how to build lathes from scrap metal. Second, while a background in wood working is useful, metal is a very different material from wood, and things like, say, the ability to cut a straight line along a mark to with less than 1/8" of variance don't necessarily translate directly. Third, the metal equivalent to a plane is a file, and getting rid of that 1/8" of variance is a lot more difficult when you're working with steel.

As a woodworker, I pride myself on being competent with un-powered tools. When I use a powertool, it's usually to avoid tedium rather than reliance. I've found that I get far more accurate results with hand-tools than I do with power tools, particularly when doing joinery. Initially, I took this stance with metal as well. When I needed to make a cut on a piece of 1 1/2" x 1 1'2" angle iron, I got out my hacksaw, set ip my miter box, and got to work. Just getting a clean starting kerf turned out to be a major chore, and the final result was less than satisfying. Disappointed, I took my stock to work, where we have a metal cutting bandsaw, and found the results to be equally, if differently disappointing and accuracy to be just as elusive. So out came the file, and what seemed like an eternity of trying to true up my cut.

I'm sure that accuracy comes with practice, but man is it hard, tedious work. I'm going to keep at it, even if I have to buy more angle iron, but until then, I'll be singing the metal workers blues.

The smell of rotting cabbage

2010-11-04T05:11:00.000-07:00

I'm talking Kimchi, the staple of Korean cuisine.

My father-in-law, who doesn't claim to be a luddite, but who is a great environmentalist - greater than I can ever hope to be has been experimenting with fermented vegetables. On a recent visit, he brought me a jar of his more recent efforts - home made Kimchi. removing the lid, one is greeted by a stench that has to be experienced to be believed. If you can get past that, however, and put the stuff in your mouth, the experience is wonderful. Vegetables, packed with salt, and fermented in the brine of their own juices take on an amazing flavor, retain a crunchiness only dreamed of in store-bought pickled vegetables, and have amazing health benefits. My wife, who doesn't like anything with a strong smell to it said, "I don't know if I like it or not, but I can't stop eating it"

Kimchi isn't the only tradition of fermented vegetables by any means. The Japanese have tsukemono, and mother-in-law recently gave me this book as a gift with all the instructions on how to get started. I can't wait to start. Most of you are probably familiar with the German tradition of sauerkraut, and most other cultures have some similar tradition. Sandor Katz has also been preaching the virtues of naturally fermented foods, most notably in his book Wild Fermentation, and at his website of the same name.

All pickled vegetables are not created equally however. In the US, most of the pickles we consume are the quick pickled variety. These vegetables are not fermented in the traditional sense, and do not confer the same health benefits as those wwhich are naturally fermented. My parents-in-law, for example, report that since they've added fermented pickles to their diet on a regular basis, they no longer need antacids to be able to get a decent night's sleep. I can attest to similar benefits, although I attribute most of my success to reducing my intake of refined sugar to almost nothing.

Unplanned Time Away

2010-11-04T05:02:00.000-07:00

I didn't plan this latest absence.

As a self-proclaimed Luddite, I have a great respect for Mother Nature, but sometimes she can be a real bitch. She exposed this side of herself to me in a big way lately, reminding me in dramatic fashion that I am not 18 anymore (my wife, who can also be bitchy at times, likes to point out that I'm not even 38 anymore).

I have a neuroligical condition that's been hanging over my head for ten years now, and while I thought I had beat it into submission, it recently reared it's ugly head again to let me know that the war isn't over, and left me to live as a pile of immobile goo for a couple days, and forced me back into the care of a neuroligist and a pharmaceutical regime to manage things.

Needless to say, I don't like it one little bit. I'm back though, and even if I'm a little slower, I'm taking up the mantle again, and pursuing the sustainable life. While I was laying in the hospital, I took great pride in the fact that if I was never able to pick up another tool, the last job I did - the job I was doing when I was laid low, was building a compost bin out of reclaimed lumber. It's a heck of a compost bin too.

So, I have a bit of a back log on posts, several essays that are half-written, projects that need documenting, and other things to report. I'll be getting them out as fast as I can.

Luddite Technology – Crystal Radios

2010-08-26T07:24:00.001-07:00

Listen to the radio without using any electricity, including electricity stored in a battery!

That sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s not only possible, but relatively easy to do and can even be done with no special parts (although using some special parts can definitely improve the performance). There is a catch of course, namely that without having a source of electricity, the signal you use won’t be very loud, and you’ll have to listen via ear phones (and a particular type at that – more later).

The simplest of radios can be built with simple wire, a crystal or equivalent, and an earphone. I’ve built this kind of radio, and while it works – which seems miraculous enough – its performance is less than spectacular. It only picks up the very strongest of AM stations, and it picks them all up at once. Fortunately, we can do much better by adding more wire in the correct configuration, a tunable capacitor or two, and a handful of other innovations.

Simplest Possible Radio
(Courtesy of Wikipedia)

More specific and detailed construction information can be found on the Internet , and in the interest of space, I won’t go into the details here – at least not yet. My daughter and I are about to start working on building our own crystal sets, and I’ll post the results and pictures of the results (I have built crystal radios in the past, but none of them have survived the frequent moves I’ve made, so I can attest to the fact that they do work). What makes this topic of interest, and of importance to Luddites, is that absolutely everything needed to establish contact with the outside world can be made at home, with little knowledge – with the exception of the earphone (this could also be made at home, but would require a little more knowledge and skill), and without using any external power.

Now don’t get me wrong. A crystal radio is a poor substitute for even the cheapest modern AM/FM radio in terms of ease of use, portability, and sound fidelity. If you have one, I wouldn’t throw it away simply because you can now make you own. I would however, still build one, simply because you can. Why? Because doing so is a step toward independence. It’s one less chain binding you to the culture of external dependence.

It’s also a good example to show that technology itself isn’t the enemy. In its proper place, technology can be liberating and empowering. As I’ve said many times, technology is supposed to work for human, humans aren’t supposed to work for technology and that includes the self and externally imposed slavery of having to work to acquire it. The crystal radio is enabling because it provides a path for those who actually need a radio to acquire one without undue expense of resources.

A historical example of the utility of the crystal radio can be found in World War II. GI’s in the European Theater listened to radios for both news and morale. Clever German scientists and engineers discovered a way to detect the presence of US troops by the signal generated in the local oscillator of their portable radios. The radios were consequently banned; leaving the GI’s to do without a vital link to the outside world. Clever soldiers began building crystal radios with materials they had on hand, restoring the link. The radios they built were crystal sets, which don’t have a local oscillator, and thus did not give away their position.

Part of what makes the foxhole radios so amazing from a technical perspective, is that they didn’t actually have a crystal. The detector (the role the crystal plays) was created by holding a razorblade to a flame and using the scorch-mark as a primitive semi-conductor – in effect, a diode. That is sheer, liberating genius, and even if it didn’t play a major role, anything that kept the morale of our soldiers up certainly helped the Allies win the war.

There is a fly in the ointment to all of this, however. These crystal radios are restricted to analog signals. The current push toward digital broadcast will make them obsolete. This, strictly speaking, doesn’t mean that you can’t still build your own radios, but it does mean that you must have an external power source because the electronics needed to decode a digital signal consume power.

I work in the field of technology and communications, and although it hasn’t really been a career enhancing position, I’ve long been opposed to the digitalization of media and communications. My opposition is based on the principle of accessibility. An analog signal is accessible in a much wider array of circumstances than a digital signal, albeit at the expense of quality. The human ear (and eye) can listen or see around a great deal of noise such as static, artifacts, or other interference. A digital signal is either perfect or unavailable, due to the nature of the decoding the ones and zeros that make up a digital signal, and in marginal conditions digital signals fail long before analog systems. They are also far more dependent on stable power conditions. (There are a few exceptions to this statement, predominantly found in the world of HAM radio, which I’ll discuss in future posts, but these aren’t actually ‘digital’ modes of communications – a CW signal (morse code) for example, is either ‘on’ or ‘off’, but the actual information isn’t directly contained in the ‘on’ or ‘off’ state, and the human ear can decode weak CW signals through a process of inference).

The move to digital communications and media is driven by the pursuit of money. Manufacturers want to sell you the equipment needed to decode the equipment, and thus the encoding schemes are often proprietary for the express purpose of limiting access to customers. Media content providers encrypt their products to limit the ways in which you use your purchases. In principle this is fair enough, and everyone deserves to be rewarded fairly for the fruits of their labors. In practice though, they are accomplishing these goals through the use of the common airwaves, which they hold only through public trust – part of that trust is that they provide critical information and make it freely available. The transition of the public airwaves to proprietary formats is, in my opinion, a violation of that trust.

Food Culture

2010-08-17T03:27:00.000-07:00

“Eat food or die,” a guy I know once said. This seems beyond obvious, but history has shown us many instances where people, both collectively and individually, have chosen to die rather than to eat. It would be easy to dismiss these instances as proof that the gene-pool is self-chlorinating, but I think that to do so is to ignore a valuable lesson.

A good example of this phenomenon – of people choosing to die rather than to eat – can be found in the Viking culture of Greenland. The Vikings settled in Greenland during an uncharacteristically warm climatic period which enabled them to bring with them the agricultural and culinary practices of their homeland. Eventually, the climate swung back to normal and their agricultural and culinary practices could no longer be maintained. The Viking culture of Greenland waned to virtual non-existence, with a dramatic increase in deaths due to mal-nutrition, and an emigration of Vikings back to their homelands.

One of the curious aspects of the Greenland Viking culture to anthropologists and historians is that they didn’t eat fish. I don’t like fish either, but then I don’t live in Greenland. The Inuit people – the closest thing Greenland has to a native people – survived the same period that did the Vikings in by subsisting on fish and other marine life as they have for millennia. Food, perfectly normal and acceptable food, was literally swimming all around the Vikings, but rather than change their diets they instead chose to starve and leave. No one is really sure why the Greenland Vikings refused to eat fish. It seems an odd thing for a sea-faring people, especially when their Nordic parent culture includes sea food. Whatever the reason though, for several generations, they simply refused to acknowledge that fish were food, and this led to their demise.

The point of this brief history lesson is that what we consider to be food isn’t solely dependent on what’s available, on edibility, nutrition, or anything scientific. As members of a culture, we subscribe to a particular set of rules that informs us what is ‘food’ and what isn’t. This is something I touched on in my last post dealing with weeds – perfectly edible and nutritious foods are growing wild in our yards and green spaces, but most people not only refuse to eat them, but are completely oblivious to the fact they are actually food. Furthermore, those brave souls who are willing to buck tradition and harvest this bounty and thought of as strange.

This is the difference between food and food culture. ‘Food’ is merely an edible substance. ‘Food Culture’ is a set of rules, generally tied to a place and a group of people, which specify food as acceptable, how food is gathered or produced, the proper methods of preparation, when to eat, how to eat, and how much to eat. Traditional food culture is tied to a place and to a people and is thus a local or regional phenomenon as well as an ethnic one. It is in fact a part of how ethnicity and regionality are determined. Even in our modern world, there is a food culture, in spite of the fact that in its current state, it is focused on eliminating regional and ethnic variations to develop a kind of culinary hegemony.

The verbalized principle of modern food culture is that anyone should be able to eat whatever they want whenever they want it, so long as they can afford it. This is accomplished through market economics – producing foodstuffs where it is cheap to do so, and transporting them to a place where they can fetch the best prices, thereby enriching the producers as the window of season shifts around the world, and theoretically at least, ensuring that everyone has a rich and varied diet. This is a laudable goal, but ultimately rests on flawed assumptions about the nature of food, productivity, economics, culture, and human nature.

Obviously, as the case of the Greenland Vikings illustrates, traditional food cultures can fail, although one could make the argument that it was a failure on the part of the Vikings to realize that food culture is tied to a place as well as a people. The sum total of food culture however, is meant to educate the people in a particular place on how to best, most effectively, and safely utilize the food resources of their area in a sustainable manner. In a similar way, the modern food culture has potential flaws in that it see that food culture is tied to either a people or a place. This creates a systemic vulnerability and a dependence which represents a danger to everyone.

Danger? Yes, Danger! If you’re like most people in this country, your food comes from somewhere other than where you live. Chances are that you actually eat very little that comes from where you live. Implicitly this means that your life depends on someone delivering one of the basic requirements for life. What happens if they stop doing it? What are YOU going to eat, and where are YOU going to get it from, and how are YOU going to get it?

These questions are neither rhetorical nor trivial. They aren’t necessarily even meant to prompt you into trying to grow and produce all of your own food. The point of asking them is point out that food has to come from somewhere, and if it isn’t coming from somewhere else, it has to come from where you are. There’s a pretty good chance that food is growing and being produced somewhere pretty close to you, but if you don’t know where that is, or what forms it takes, it isn’t going to do you much good.

That, ultimately, is what this post is about. It’s a question I’ve started asking myself, my friends, and my neighbors. How is your food culture defined? What are you doing to ensure that your food culture is sustainable and viable? If all external inputs were removed, would you eat food or die?

Enough with the salad already…..

2010-08-10T05:46:00.000-07:00

I know it seems like I’m fixated or something, but this will be the last one for a while:

My latest salad creation:

Bowl full of mixed baby arugula and lemon grass (ideally, cut fresh from your salad bowl)

1 thinly sliced red onion

½ thinly sliced cucumber

Vinegar, salt, pepper, grated cheese (if desired)

Place sliced onions in a sieve and soak in cold water for half hour. Throw away water. Add sliced cucumber to sieve. Add ½ cup of vinegar to a bowl, and add cucumbers and onions add salt and pepper to taste. Fill bowl with cold water until vegetables are covered. Let soak for a half hour.

Drain onions and cucumbers and add to bowl of greens. Toss and dress with a light vinaigrette. Top with grated hard cheese like Parmesan or Romano (or whatever else you have and/or like)

Salad under Foot

2010-08-09T08:50:00.000-07:00

In my last post I wrote about growing salad greens in a bowl or pot, and what a wonderful source of fresh organic leaves it is. In my exuberance, I nearly forgot about the other source of greens I’ve been exploring this summer – the weeds growing like gangbusters while my grass dies due to drought. In general usage, weeds are a nuisance and not given much attention, and they’re usually found growing where you don’t want them to grow (or are trying to grow something else. On closer examination however, some of these weeds have uses.

The most common weeds in my area are dandelion, plantago (plantain), and burdock. All three of these plants are edible, at least in part, and also medicinal. Dandelion and Plantain provide greens for salads. Burdock leaves can be harvested in the spring, but this plant is usually valued for its roots, which are eaten like a vegetable. All parts of the dandelion are edible and have various uses, including the famous wine made from its flowers.

What makes these plants special is that they grow on their own. They require no effort on your part – in fact, just the opposite is true, as anyone who has ever tried to maintain a lawn knows, effort is required to keep them from growing. They are literally free food, there for the taking – well, there is a small cost – one has to get over the idea of harvesting weeds from their lawn or other public green spaces; one has to prepare themselves to eat something they’ve been taught to despise all their lives; and one has to be willing to accept the questioning looks and possible scorn of those who believe that food can only come from stores.

If it helps, many of these so called weeds used to be cultivated as crops, and in some places still are. Plantago, for example, is still widely grown in gardens around the world. Another ‘weed’, chicory, is widely grown in some places, and is somewhat famous as an additive or substitute for coffee in New Orleans. Here where I live, it simply grows wild, any place and every place it can, and it’s flowers are a scenic staple along the sides of roads. It should also be noted that in many upscale restaurants, salads of ‘wild greens’ are a featured item on the menu, and examining these expensive little piles a green that dandelions, rocket, chicory, and other ‘weeds’ are prominently present. Our ancestors used and relied on these crops, but now that knowledge has been largely, but not entirely lost.

If you’re interested, as a Luddite Apprentice, or simply looking for a free meal, the place to start is with a good field guide to edible and medicinal plants. Then spend some time outside comparing your weeds to what you find in the book. Remember that details are important here. There are many plants or radically different species that look very similar during various parts of the growth cycle, and the only way to distinguish a friendly plant from a dangerous one may be small things like the way the leaves grow from the stem. If you have any doubt, you should consult an expert, in person.

Salad Bowls

2010-08-02T05:52:00.000-07:00

I like salad. I’m a firm believer that eating raw vegetables has health benefits that exceed the value of those same vegetables (or similar one) cooked. There’s some science behind my belief, but when it comes down to it, really, I eat them because I like them. Most of the salads I eat are based on a bed of greens – sometimes they’re nothing but a bed of greens, and if you like salad greens you’re probably aware that the younger they are, the better they taste.

Over this past winter, I experimented with sprouting. Sprouting is quick and easy, and I tried all different kinds, and subsequently bought a lot of seeds. As soon as spring kicked in though, and it did so early and with a vengeance this year, my thought and appetite returned to greens and for the most part I gave up sprouting. This, in spite of the fact that I don’t have a proper garden this year. I confess, I was buying those little plastic tubs of organic baby greens from the local grocery store, as well as some from my local farmer’s market when they were available.

Then I had one of those head –slapper moment. Why on earth was I buying greens that I could just as easily grow myself? Most of those sprouting seeds I’d bought were for greens and salad herbs. So I got out a large pot, filled it with dirt, some home-made compost (which I continue to make even though I don’t have a proper garden yet) and seeded it with sprouting seeds, added water, and about three weeks later, harvested a nice crop of mixed baby salad greens large enough to provide a dinner salad for three adults and two children.

After harvesting my first salad, I hand tilled the soil in the pot, and started a new batch. Also, because it was so good and so popular, I started two more pots, staggered by a couple days. Homegrown salad greens are now becoming a staple of our household diet. More pots and we could have fresh, organic salad everyday, with exactly the mix of greens we want.

The news just gets better and better though. First, there’s the cost: A bag of mixed green sprouting seeds costs about the same as one plastic tub of organic greens from the grocery store – I’ve grown seven salads from the first bag so far, and have at least enough for three more. Next there’s the environmental impact: no plastic tubs, no driving to the store, no importing our greens from California. This isn’t the 100-mile diet – this is the 100-foot diet. With seed-saving (by allowing a pot to grow, bolt, and grow to seed), the price and environmental impact could be reduced even further – to almost nothing. Finally, there’s the fact that by growing the salad in pots, once the weather turns cold, the bowls can be moved inside and continue to grow fresh greens through the winter (albeit a little more slowly. You can trick mother nature, but only within certain limits).

The grocery store owners probably disagree, but for my family and me, this is a win-win.

Luddite Music

2010-07-12T07:19:00.001-07:00

In an age of runaway consumerism, the patenting and copyrighting of absolutely everything, and a near total dependence on high technology, one might be excused for assuming that the Luddite lifestyle consist of nothing but grueling, oppressive, backbreaking labor. This simply isn’t true, there’s plenty of time for leisure and recreation, and one of my favorite pastimes is homemade music.

I grew up in the age of rock-and-roll, and was especially keen on progressive ‘art-rock’. Most of my rock-and-roll fantasies involved me behind a rack of keyboards and synthesizers. Trying to morph these fantasies into reality, I soon learned, however, that I couldn’t make that kind of music on the meager amount of money I had to spend in pursuit of my dream. About the same time I discovered this, I discovered folk music – in my case, Irish and Scottish folk music, and it was a revelation. Here were people creating complex, listenable music wherever they were, whenever they felt like it, and doing it without truckloads of expensive equipment, and in most cases without even electricity.

There are of course, several traditions of acoustic and traditional music. I have my preferences and if you don’t already, you’ll have yours too. When it comes down to it though, you don’t even have to choose a tradition – there’s plenty of modern and contemporary music available to choose from as well. There are a couple of reasons I like traditional music though:

It’s freely available – no copyrights to worry about
There’s a lot of it – more than you can imagine, thousands and thousands of songs available, and of every type imaginable.
It’s ‘people’ music – it was made by people for people to enjoy, sing, play, eat, grieve, celebrate, live, work and dance to.
There’s a kind of synergy between the music and the instruments: The instruments influenced the music and the music influenced the instruments.
It’s as simple and easy or as complex and demanding as you want it to be. The level of entry is where ever you are right now – whether you’ve played and instrument or sang your whole life, or whether you’re simply dreaming about it and have never made anything resembling music in your life.

Now I’m not a great, good, or even competent musician. I can bang a bit on a piano or a guitar, and I can read music. The instrument I find myself playing most often though is the Irish Tin Whistle. What I like about the tin whistle is that it’s rugged, small, easy, and cheap. My current favorite whistle (I have 6 or so) cost me 12 bucks – my first one cost me about 6 bucks. There are dozens of options though, such as the before mentioned piano, guitar, as well as the harmonica, mandolin, fiddle, various percussion instruments, autoharps, dulcimers, accordions, brass, woodwinds, and who knows what else. The key to a Luddite though, is that it be relatively simple, and require minimal inputs (The Luddite Code says that we’re willing to substitute skill for technology, and that the technology we use should work for us rather than us working for it).

I said above that the level of entry into music was wherever you are right now. This is definitely true, but you need to beware the pitfall of all new musicians. You can start playing music from day one, but it will be a while before you’re playing anything and everything you want to play and playing it as well as you want. Like everything Luddite, there’s some work involved. It’s fun work though, and it’s building a useful skill. The payoff though, is a new kind of independence – being able to create your own music, when, where, and how you want. You’ll make friends and entertain the kids, and for me that’s the best part. It’s a great feeling blowing on my whistle and having the kids dance around, be silly, goofy, and happy as a result of blowing a simple tune.

The Luddite Guild

2010-07-09T06:45:00.000-07:00

Over at The Archdruid Report John Michael Greer has issued a challenge for followers to become ‘Green Wizards’ – that is masters of appropriate technology. While I don’t disbelieve in magic or even druidery, I am a Christian and more pragmatic – I believe that hard work, properly applied, is more important than magic, so while I am pursuing his course of study (which has nothing to do with magic, necessarily), I’m putting my own stamp on it, borrowing a page from the past, and organizing a guild – The Guild of Luddite Practitioners.

Mr. Greer’s timing is impeccable, and reflects a train of thought I’ve been pursuing recently that was recently brought to relevance by starting to read Slow Food Nation by Carlo Petrini. Where Greer has his Wizards, and I have my Luddites, Mr. Petrini has developed the concept of the ‘gastronome’. Like myself, and presumably Mr. Greer, Mr. Petrini has discovered that any solution to the world’s problems requires going back to our roots, and to extend the metaphor of the tree, the roots are deep, elaborate, and complex, touching every area of human knowledge and wisdom. The tree cannot live without the roots, and understanding the roots is a daunting task. ‘Where do I start?’ is no small question, and like many great questions, it has no single ‘best’ answer.

What I’ve come to realize is that where you start isn’t so important as the fact that you do start, and that you keep some basic tenets in mind. One of the things I’ve learned is that it’s even easier to start with a problem that has a known solution and work backwards that it is to start with an unsolved problem and work forward. An example of this that I recently faced was removing rust from old tools. The most immediate solution available was to use Naval Jelly (phosphoric acid), but me being me, I wondered how they used to do it, and how would I do it if couldn’t just run to the store and by a tub of Naval Jelly. I found a plethora of solutions – from sanding and abrasives, to chemicals, to electrolysis. Eventually I settled on electrolysis because it meant that I didn’t have to buy anything at all. (I plan to write a future column on the process).

In the Guild of Luddite Practitioners, most of us are just Apprentices, those some of us might qualify as Journeymen in particular aspects, and true Masters are as rare as hen’s teeth. In normal guild operations, Apprentices must train under Masters, and only a Master is considered worthy of recruiting Apprentices. In these times however, until such time as a new tradition can be restored, we as Apprentices must recruit our fellows and introduce them to the work of the Masters and Journeymen. The barriers against entrance are high – taking up this work means voluntarily forgoing some of the creature comforts that our society believe it is due, it means working hard, often failing and learning lessons the hard way, but the benefits are true freedom and independence and hopefully someday, becoming Masters ourselves, and passing on our knowledge to a future generation.

Luddite Heroes - Dennis Shelly

2010-07-08T06:35:00.000-07:00

You won’t find his name in Wikipedia or any reference book. I’m not even sure you’ll find his name in the phone book, but if you ever meet him you won’t forget him, and with only a few minutes of conversation, you’ll realize that he is no ordinary man. I had the honor of working with Dennis for four years before my career took me elsewhere and I truly miss his presence.

Dennis is a man of many talents and true principles – a lover of animals and plants, of old machines, open land and simple solutions. He is a mechanic, an electrician, a carpenter, a plumber, a painter, and who knows what else. If it’s broke, Dennis can fix it. If there’s a problem, Dennis can solve it, and if he has his way, he’ll solve it with a minimum of technology and expense.

I learned many things from Dennis in our time as colleagues. Things like ‘If it’s worth making, it’s worth fixing’ and I was always impressed with his solutions. Although I was his supervisor, I frequently had to admit that his solutions were better than anything I would have come up with.

Coming Soon!

2010-05-14T07:21:00.000-07:00

As early as next week, I'll be introducing a new series of posts called 'Luddite Technology' in which I undertake a project and document with pictures, data, drawings, and other information of interest. It was never my intention that this blog would simply be a political exposition, but that it would include practical information on how to live an independent life. These columns will be the first step in accomplishing that goal.

Luddite Politics

2010-04-16T06:49:00.000-07:00

I’ve been watching the development of the Tea Party with a mixture of emotions for several months now, and I’ve been trying to figure out why it has no appeal to me, despite the fact that the apparent premise seems so much like I would. I finally figured it out.

This morning I was watching coverage of the Boston Tea Party (2010, not 1773) and one of the attendees made a remark about purging the Republican Party of ‘RINO’s, that is ‘Republicans In Name Only’. That’s when it occurred to me, that despite their ardent claims to the contrary, the Tea Partiers are ‘Independents In Name Only’. Any theoretical readers of this blog who identify with the Tea Party are probably pretty ticked off about now, but wait, let me explain, and I’ll show you what I think a real independent is.

The essence of the Tea Party world view, as it appears from the outside, is that the United States should rightfully dominate the world. They see this as a benign domination of course, one that ensures all people are free (especially Americans), that global trade and economics flourish on a level playing field, and that every entity, be it corporation or individual prospers or perishes by its own merit. That all sounds pretty good in principle, but it falls apart on closer inspection.

The first faulty premise is that the world view is based on the economics of money rather than the economics of wealth. By definition, as explained in previous posts, this means dependence – money is only an abstraction of wealth and the production of money, be it fiat or specie, is regulated and controlled by the powers-that-be and restricted from the individual to the benefit of said powers.

This leads to the second faulty premise, which is that the status quo is inherently fair, to the extent that governments, including, and maybe especially, our own are not involved. I reject this premise on several grounds. First, the status quo is undeniably skewed to the benefit of Americans, and can hardly be considered fair for the individuals on the other side of the trade. This is the flip side of any political philosophy built on the foundation of US superiority, no matter how benign its intent. What the Tea Party wants to preserve is a political and economic imbalance where in the American people are not required to change their lifestyle, can continue to consume the majority of the world’s resources, implicitly at the expense of everyone else.

The third faulty premise is based on ignoring the role of debt in the perceived prosperity of the American people. The dirty secret of capitalism is that it inherently relies on debt. The development of wealth in complex societies requires currency. Currency accumulates in the hands of those exercising political power and those who have successfully developed wealth in the past. To expand and create new wealth, currency must usually be borrowed, in one form or another, by those with access to some means of production but no currency, from those who have currency, for a fee of course, ensuring that those who control the accumulation of currency maintain that control. America has succeeded in the past several decades by controlling the accumulation of currency by controlling the creation of the currency that serves as the medium of global trade (the US Dollar) and financed itself and its expansion by borrowing against those dollars. Because the expansion has been focused on the flow of currency rather than the production of real worth, the result is a tremendous deficit, both foreign and domestic.

The Tea Party seems to believe that the deficit can be solved by eliminating welfare spending, lowering taxes, and easing regulations. It’s interesting though that for all their talk of limiting government to the confines of strictly-interpreted constitutionalism, they are dead set against touching the single greatest line item in the budget, and if fact would rather expand it, in spite of the fact that the US spends more on it that most other countries in the world combined – that is, of course, Defense. They would go a long way toward building credibility in my book if they began advocating a reduction in size and expense of the Defense department to levels sufficient to carry out the mission implied by its name, rather than the expeditionary force that it actually is. After all, if the US is truly the messenger of good will and fairness that it claims to be, why should the rest of the world be so dead set on destroying us?

To be truly independent, as individuals and as a nation, we must learn to produce our own needs and finance our wants with the surplus. A truly wealthy and independent people produce more wealth than they consume – anything else is only the illusion of wealth, and they must be capable of distinguishing their own needs from their wants. A nation of independent and autonomous individuals does not rely on its credit-worthiness to maintain its lifestyle, and no nation of such individuals can consider itself to be wealthy until all of its citizens are capable of sustaining themselves in an adequate and sustainable way by the fruits of their own labor with a little surplus left over for ‘economic stimulus’.

In my opinion, the vision endorsed by the Tea Party fails to meet the criteria of ‘independent’, nor does it represent a long-term, sustainable solution. The only surplus it produces is cheap symbolism, and a siren song luring its victims toward the image of a non-existent past, ignoring the economics of real wealth.

Sabbatical

2010-04-15T05:28:00.000-07:00

Probably no one noticed, but I haven't posted for a few months. This was mostly due to time restraints, but primarily due to a loss of inspiration. Having taken a couple months off, I've got my groove back and I'm working on several new essays. In addition to the essays, I'm also working on some technical articles explaining how to actually do things to enhance the Luddite experience.

The Tyranny of Marketing

2009-12-16T11:17:00.000-08:00

I wrote in an earlier post that all human beings have the same basic needs: air, water, food, warmth, shelter, and other humans. These aren’t the only needs we have of course, and one needs many other things to lead even the most responsible of lives. That doesn’t even cover ‘wants’ which everyone has and aren’t necessarily frivolous.

Some needs, like air, food, and water are obvious, but others not so much. Some needs, even abstract, derived, or advanced needs dictate the terms of their fulfillment, and must be met specifically. Others, even simple needs, such as what to eat can be in any number of ways with no obvious right or wrong way to meet them. This raises the question of how do we know what we need or want?

For most of human history answering this question has been pretty straight forward. There were only so many options available and you picked one based on ease, habit, culture, or personal preference or what-have-you, and that was that. As with so many other things, industrialization and capitalism changed all that.

Industrialism concerned itself with producing goods, and capitalism took over the business of distributing them. It’s no accident that capitalism arose when it did, at the dawn of the Industrial age – industrialism, in the interest of efficiency arranged itself so that it could produce the same item over and over, as quickly as possible, and as cheaply as possible. This worked great up to a point. The factory that made wool socks was able to provide wool socks to people who may never have been able to afford wool socks before, or even better, more than one pair of socks. Eventually though, everyone who wants (and can afford them) wool socks has all the wool socks they need or want, but the factory still has a warehouse full, and has to keep making things and selling them in order to pay off the loans they took to buy their weaving machines and maybe pay their employees.

One of the first solutions floated to this problem was to put the unwanted wool socks onto a boat and ship them off to another place and sell them there, ideally to people who didn’t have wool socks. This wasn’t an adequate solution however, and further action was required so capitalism came up with an answer: Marketing and Advertising.

The underlying principle is a sound one. Maybe there are people out there who don’t know the wonders of wool socks, or don’t know that they should wear clean socks every day. Marketers find out who these people are, what magazines they read, and design creative ways to inform them about the importance of keeping their feet clean and dry.

This doesn’t necessarily violate anyone’s morals, and underlies the basic principles of the market: make a superior product at a reasonable price. New problems start to arise however, when multiple manufacturers making the same product and begin to compete for market share. Continuing our example, all wool socks are essentially the same, a person only needs so many, and the price can only go down so far. Competition is now no longer about manufacturing efficiency or quality but reduced to who has the most effective marketing campaign.

Once people realized that there was money to be made in marketing and advertising, they became industries in their own right. The emergence of mass media was a tremendous boon and has become a mere subsidiary of the advertising and marketing industries. You might think of television, radio, print media (magazines, newspapers, etc.), and to a growing extent, the Web as a means of acquiring information and entertainment, but to the people who control those media they are nothing more than a means of delivering advertisements.

I worked for many years in the Television industry. Viewers think of television as a means of entertainment, and the commercials as an annoyance that has to be tolerated to get to what they want. Broadcasters and networks however are more concerned with the commercials than the shows that interrupt them. I once had a conversation with an irate viewer about an interruption to his favorite show. He kept insisting that he was my customer and had a right to restitution for missing his show. I finally explained to him in blunt terms that he wasn’t our customer, but in fact our product. We sold his eyeballs and ears to the highest bidder.

Television and the other broadcast media aren’t the only ones selling your eyes and ears. Supermarkets sell off their shelf space and floor layouts; municipalities auction off the naming rights to public arenas, movie producers negotiate which products you see actors use on the silver screen; news organizations alter their editorial policy for advertisers and run thinly disguised advertisements as news. And to what end? What’s their objective?

Quite simply to convince you and your family – especially your children – that you absolutely need their product to function and thrive. It’s working too. It wasn’t so long ago that a phone was considered a luxury – now one is considered disadvantaged if every member of their family doesn’t have their own cell phone. Televisions along with cable are considered essential safety equipment now, so that households can ‘stay informed about public safety announcements’. The average American is so inundated with marketing and advertising – essentially from birth - that they no longer have any real idea of what they actually need or where those needs come from, how they’re actually manufactured or why those needs exist.

When one voices these facts, the most typical response is that it’s the fault of parents. Certainly there is some blame there, but the parents themselves are also victims. Make no mistake about it. Marketing is a science and an industry. Very smart people spend their working lives figuring out new and creative ways to get to people and invade their mental space. Even if you throw your television away, rip the radio out of your car, never open a magazine or newspaper, they will still find ways to reach you. That’s what they do.

Capitalists will argue that advertisement is free speech, protected by the First Amendment. Don’t get me wrong, I like free speech. Railing against the marketing and advertising industries would seem to fly in the face of that. Maybe it does, and I certainly don’t know the answer to this problem, but it is undeniably a problem I would argue, and to a certain extent the government agrees, that advertising is a product produced by an industry, and thus subject to the laws and regulations any other product must face. The sad truth however, is that the government is in the collective pocket of industry, and is unlikely to intervene in any way that will interrupt the flow of profits to political donors.

That last statement might seem cynical until you think about it for a while. A good example is that you are essentially legally obligated to send your children to school. Schools, in the interest of funding however, allow corporations to donate in exchange for the companies being allowed to advertise to students. The school sports stadium is ringed with commercial bill boards. There is no escape (although there are some rules they have to follow).

Marketers have co-opted every aspect of our society – our culture, our clothing, our entertainment, what we eat and drink, where we go, and what we do when we get there. They do it without our permission and frequently with the implied force of government behind them. That my friends, is tyranny.

Monkeying with my diet

2009-12-11T05:55:00.000-08:00

As I travel down the path to Luddism and liberation, I've come to the opinion that this means to be a locavore, consuming primarily foods produced in my local area. This is problematic on several levels: As someone who has traveled the world, lived all over the place, and finally settled in a place and climate very different from the one of my origins, I've developed a taste for exotic foods, including staples that aren't available from local sources. Foremost among these is rice. I eat tons of rice, I can eat it as the foundation of any and every meal. Unfortunately, rice doesn't grow (that I know of) in the Northern Shenandoah Valley.

For the mean time, at least, I'm eating rice anyway. What I did decide to change though was to cut down on my meat consumption. Basically what I decided was this: Until I could regularly acquire locally produced meat, I would give up meat for lunch and dinner and eat all the rice and vegetables I want. I've been at it for a little over a month now and in spite of the fact that I've been chowing down on white rice, I've actually lost weight. My pants fit again!

Other than consuming 2/3 less meat than normal, the only other change I've made is to completely give up Coke. I didn't drink that much anyway - less than one can per day on average.

Liberation Through Luddism

2009-12-11T05:53:00.000-08:00

Last week I ranted, so this week I’m going to rave. From the beginning, as I made my plans for what I wanted to do with this blog, it was my intention that for every post I ranted about what was wrong with the world and society and technology and whatever else ticks me off, I would offer at least one counter-post that offered a solution, a correction, or a course of action. Over the next several weeks I plan to alternate between themes of ‘Tyranny of ‘X’’ and ‘Liberation through ‘Y’’.

I’ve taken the label of Luddite, but as I indicated in an earlier post, I’m not truly a Luddite. What I actually am is a radical who questions the role of technology in our lives, and puts forth the proposition that the goal that all humans ought to be working for is a better life for us, our children, grandchildren, and so on down the line. If technology facilitates this, then we should use technology. Unfortunately, most of the time technology, most of the time, is nothing more than a wedge used by political and industrial forces to exploit and weaken humans, reducing them to cogs in a machine to further their own ends. My end goal is not a world free of technology, but instead a world full of free, fulfilled human beings living in harmony with themselves and the greater and all-inclusive world.

Luddism is a means to that end. I’m agnostic as to whether or not a single person can change the world, but I’m a firm believer that that a single person can change their life. I also believe that any single person can influence the lives of others through their own good example, and that if enough individuals change their lives of their own free world, eventually the rest of the world will notice.

So how does one achieve liberation through Luddism?

First, by realizing that the only true wealth in this world is the means of production, and by taking the necessary steps to acquire those means. In other words, become a producer rather than simply a consumer of wealth, and own what you produce. When net consumption is unavoidable, consume wisely – buy quality goods that can be repaired or re-used. Recycle, reuse, or re-purpose everything possible.

To become a producer, even in a limited way, is just about the most subversive and effective form of protest one can make about the state of the modern world. Where most people start down the road of home production is gardening – a tomato plant and maybe a few herbs to start. Even if you don’t take the additional step of learning to preserve your produce, the tomatoes you produce instead of buying for your summer salads or a pot of marinara represent economic transactions that did not take place.

The rewards aren’t immediate, of course. It takes a good two months from seedling to picking your first tomato, but there are definite rewards, both in the short term and the long term: the most obvious is that the tomatoes you pick the day they’re ready to eat taste so much better than the ones you buy from the store. There’s also an innate satisfaction that comes from eating food you produced yourself. You’ll also learn something in the process if you’ve never grown vegetables before – there are other creatures that like to eat tomatoes and tomato plants – you’ll have to learn what to do about them; you have to tend the plants, which while not onerous tends to be forgotten about occasionally. Weather has an affect too, and no longer is just a circumstance you have to dress according to. But this is real human life. The weather and bugs are part of real life, and learning to deal with them brings one back to the first economy.

Food is important enough that I’m going to give it a full posting (at least one and probably several) but it isn’t the only way to become a producer, nor do you have to confine yourself to the first economy of raw goods. There are numerous ways to become a second economy producer, some require expensive tools, materials, and/or years of expertise, but there are plenty that don’t. One good example is thread craft: for less than 20 bucks, you can buy a set of needles or hooks, a ball of yarn or thread, an instruction manual, and a book of patterns that are everything you need to get started knitting or crocheting. With a single dedicated afternoon of following along with the book, or with someone who already knows how, you can actually begin producing finished goods.. Eventually, by sticking with it, you can produce high quality items useful to yourself and potentially others.

The second way one can achieve liberation through Luddism is, whenever possible, buy directly from the producer. In fact, not only should one buy directly from the producer, but should do their best to build up a personal relationship, even a friendship with them. This helps to ensure that they keep producing, helps ensure that you get the quality you want, and can lead to unexpected opportunities for both of you.

No matter how efficient, skilled, or resource-laden you are, it’s unlikely that it’s possible, and not even necessarily desirable, that you can produce everything you yours need. All of us live in communities, even if they’re sparse ones. Establishing relationships with your neighbors, especially the producing ones, is a form of security. The stronger the ties that bind us to each other, the less likely we are to be at each other’s throats and even casual friendships can mitigate the possibility of conflicts.

Yet another way of achieving liberation through Luddism is through the use of tools. The astute reader may have noticed by now, that one of the few things I actually encourage people to buy are tools. Tools are an investment, as is learning to use them effectively. Tools and the skills needed to use them represent the means of production and thus are the cornerstone to true wealth.

It’s true that all tools don’t have to be bought, and learning to make your own tools, or make tools for others is a kind of meta-wealth. Still, the largest obstacle modern humans face is a chicken and egg type scenario of not knowing how to get started, and the purchase of basic tools helps to solve that riddle.

Anyone who’s ever taken a shop class remembers being told over and over to use the right tool for the job. There’s certainly an argument to be made for that position, but to a Luddite, the right tool for a job is the tool available that can get the job done. I’ll admit that I have a fixation on tools. Some I make for myself, but the majority of the tools I have and certainly all of the most important ones, I bought.

Maybe the most important thing that Luddism has to offer in the quest for liberation is that it’s built on the premise of learning to use what you have to accomplish what you need to do. Luddism is a philosophy of accomplishment and problem-solving. It means producing wealth, self-reliance, making do and creating solutions with the means at hand. There’s a learning curve for those of raised on convenience, and weaned on technology, but the results are worth it. Casting off the shackles of dependence and the ability to meet ones own needs are the very definition of Liberation.

The Tyranny of Money

2009-12-03T06:36:00.000-08:00

It is said that money makes the world go round. A quick empirical observation would make this seem so incredibly obvious that it doesn’t bear thinking about. I’ve been thinking about it anyway. Money makes the world go round now, but did it always? Historically, that answer is no, although you have to go back a ways to find a time when it didn’t. That isn’t the point though. The point is that there was a time where humans existed without money, and someone had to invent it.

If there was a time when there was no such thing as money, and humans were capable existing without it, could there then be a future time when humans – either through choice, circumstance, or necessity – exist without money again? Conceivably, this answer is yes. The real question isn’t whether or not it’s possible, but whether or not it’s desirable. It’s not a matter of ‘could?’ but ‘should?’

To answer the question of ‘should?’ we first have to ask ourselves what to we get out of each side of the deal. This is a complicated question, and volumes have been written to explain what money is, how it works, how to use it, and what it does for us. Even if you’ve read these volumes, the matter isn’t solved – there’s still the matter of faith – what you believe money is and does. There are several schools of thought, and devotees of all of them, some of whom hold to their ideas with an almost religious fervor. I don’t want to get into that discussion, at least not at this point, so I’m going to give a working, as agnostic as possible, definition and use that for the purposes of this discussion: Money is a tool used to facilitate the transfer of wealth.

I happen to be an adherent of E.F. Schumacher’s as modified by John Michael Greer when it comes to what wealth is. In a nutshell, there are three categories of wealth:

Category One – raw resources, renewable or otherwise, derived or extracted from the earth. This category includes ores, minerals, water, plants, animals, etc.

Category Two – finished goods. This category consists of those things of category one to which human labor is applied as well as those things made up of one or more category two goods. Money, as a commodity is part of this category.

Category Three – This category is a meta-category, and consists only of money that is produced through the manipulation of money. Banking and finance are in this category.

Most ordinary people live the bulk of their lives in the first two categories and only occasionally brush against the third when we take a mortgage on a house, get student loans, or buy a car. We live our lives as a cog in the wheel of some production or service machine, for which we receive money and use that money to buy the real things that are necessary for life. We might save a little and shop around for interest or yield, maybe even a little bit, but for the most part, the third category is apparently invisible.

At least it used to be. In the last couple years, this third economy has come to dominate the news and have a real impact on the lives of many ordinary people as they lose their jobs, homes, and savings. Misbehavior on the part of investment bankers and no small amount of just plain criminality have thrown a bucket of cold water in our collective faces and shown us that the third economy is a major presence in all of our lives and quite possibly the single greatest threat to our well-being.

Money as a commodity is a useful technology. This is the best possible argument that the gold-bugs have going for them. It provides a standard measure by which the relative value of goods can be measured, making it easier to trade disparate goods and services, convert perishable or ephemeral goods to something that can be saved for a rainy day, and deal with issues of surplus, but make no mistake – Money is a form of technology, and like every technology is only as good as it’s benefits to us as individuals and groups are.

That answers the question of the benefits of money, but what about the bad side? What are the detractions from this technology? Like any other technology, it has the tendency to ‘run away’ from the sound limits that necessitated its invention and develop a logic of its own with the net effect of becoming a crutch (I’ll be discussing more of these technological crutches in future posts) to the point that societies become dependent and the ability to survive without it is impaired.

I can’t state this plainly enough. Life is possible without money. Humans need air, water, food, warmth, shelter, and other humans. Everything else is a want or a fiction. It is societies, institutions, and to some extent cultures that need the abstractions of money and so forth, not the humans who are the component parts. To be sure though, collapsing societies are usually detrimental to individual health.

The most insidious evil of industrialization is that it has increasingly moved people away from the first and second economies where humans naturally occur and placed them in the third economy. This may seem to a counter-intuitive statement at first, since the obvious aim of industry seems to be to produce second economy goods, but when you think about it for a while it begins to make sense. Moving people to the third economy makes them dependent on money, which in turn makes them dependent on the financial industry.

Why does this create dependence? In simplest terms, it did so because money got between the common man and the production of wealth. Originally, the common man produced some or all of his own subsistence directly and traded the surplus for money. Increasingly, and exponentially with the coming of industrialization, the primary activity of the common man became the trading of labor for money, then in turn trading money for subsistence in the form of first economy goods. Gradually this has evolved into what we have in the present day where the common man trades labor for money and then trades that money for mostly second economy goods. We’re told this is progress.

In this world, first economy goods are seen as near worthless. Give your modern American a live pig and a bushel of raw wheat and tell them to make supper and they can neither produce pork chops or a loaf of bread. Most wouldn’t even know where to start. Increasingly, if you gave them a raw pork chop and a bag of flour, they still wouldn’t know where to start. We, as modern humans can no longer feed ourselves without the intervention of technology, which we must have money to acquire, and this is how money and those who control it have become tyrants.

Fun With Butter

2009-11-27T05:13:00.000-08:00

Today would have been mi abuela’s 100th birthday. She didn’t quite make it and passed away a couple months shy of 98. I still miss her, but at the risk of sounding trite, she’s still with me in a very real way and I’m working to see that the wisdom she passed down to me is passed down to my children as well.

Although she had very little formal education, my grandmother was a smart woman who could not only think on her feet, but had no problem arguing with conventional wisdom. One of the things she credited her long life to was butter. Yes, I said butter. Butter is good for you, she insisted, much better than any margarine, oleo, or other butter substitute. If you’re worried about fat, she insisted, don’t use so much.

Although she didn’t approve, I grew up to become a competent cook. (Grandma didn’t like men in her kitchen. I was thirty before I was allowed to even open the refrigerator at her house). Many cooks will tell you that their secret ingredient is love. Not me, mine is butter. I’m not sure I believe in butter as health-food, but I use it anyway for no other reason than that it tastes better. It turns out though, that she might have been at least partially right.

As I contemplate and strategize to achieve a simpler life, one of the stumbling blocks I came upon was dairy. I know how to make butter and cheese, but it’s unlikely that I’m ever going to own a cow and without raw ingredients, that knowledge is academic. Of course, it’s possible that I might be able to barter for dairy, but then there’s the matter of preservation. So I did some research and this is what I found:

Ghee

Ghee is clarified butter. It’s made by simmering unsalted butter in a large pot until all of the water has been boiled off and the milk solids have settled to the bottom. The clear-yellow liquid is your clarified butter and is spooned off to avoid disturbing the sediment at the bottom of the pot. You now have ghee which can be stored without refrigeration so long as you keep it in an airtight container and free of moisture. Ghee can be canned, and if you visit a Middle Eastern grocer, you can find pre-canned ghee on the shelves. I haven’t canned any myself, so I don’t know the details yet. I’ll find out though and post the results.

Ghee is composed entirely of saturated fat and some studies have shown that ghee reduces serum cholesterol (LDL). Clarified butter consists of short-chain fatty acids that are metabolized very quickly by the human body. It also has a higher smoke point than regular butter, making it useful for sautéing.

The Fun Part

Ghee, although it may not be called Ghee is used around the world in interesting ways. Niter Kibbeh is a variation used in Ethiopian cuisine. It differs from ordinary ghee in that during the simmering stage, spice like cumin, coriander, turmeric, cardamom, cinnamon, garlic, cloves, or nutmeg are added. The herbs themselves are not included in the finished project. This adds interesting flavors and scents to what might otherwise be a boring dish. There are endless variations and combinations of spices that can be used. I’ve experimented with some and the results have been amazing. It’s even more satisfying when you’ve cut the herbs from your garden just before you add them to the simmering butter.

I’m a Luddite and I’m OK

2009-11-25T05:19:00.000-08:00

Why would a self-identified Luddite create a blog? That’s a good question and the answer is that I’m not the sort of Luddite that’s opposed to technology simply for the sake of opposing technology. I don’t think that the original Luddites were either. What they and I oppose is technology for the sake of technology at the expense of human beings and their quality of life.

The champions of technology will claim that industrialization and its accoutrements have brought freedom to the common man, allowing him to pursue more noble endeavors. I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt in most cases that this is their actual intention – or part of it at least, so long as it doesn’t interfere with the collection of profits, but their vision falls as short as state communism when it comes to dealing with people made of flesh and blood. What it’s actually done is reduce an entire species to dependence on the abstraction that is money by making them wage slaves and systematically eliminated their ability and even the knowledge that it is possible to actually sustain their own lives.

Industrialization is built on the precept that human labor is an evil that must be eliminated through the use of machines of, failing that, reduced to a mind-numbing triviality that would be considered abusive were it imposed on monkeys. Why is human labor evil? Because humans expect their labor to fulfill their physical, emotional, and mental needs. This deprives industry of the capital it feels entitled to, and the more proficient human labor is, the more industry relies on these proficiencies, the more capital it is deprived of.

When King Ludd started on his rampage back in the 1800’s, it wasn’t because he didn’t like machines. It was because the people who owned the machines – mechanical looms to begin with – destroyed the value of craft and with it a craftsman’s ability to earn a living. The lifetime a master weaver had spent perfecting his skills and craft was made obsolete, replaced by a machine that was minded by a person without even the skills of an apprentice.

It was argued then and continues to be argued now against those of my ilk that the Master and Journeyman weavers were acting selfishly, solely to protect their own interest and that the benefits – that thousands of unemployable people now had access to jobs that previously didn’t exist and finished goods once available only to the wealthy were now available to everyone. There’s a certain legitimacy to that argument, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.

Part of the untold story is that it made the common man dependent on money. Where previously subsistence had been possible, if not altogether comfortable, without cash, it has increasingly become an absolute necessity. People who had once produced the bulk of their diet directly were now dependent on wages and deprived of the means of production. The amount of labor required for the common man and his family did not decrease under industrialization, but increased.

The fact of the matter is that not only are human beings supposed to work, but it’s unavoidable. The only question is what kind of work are they going to do: Are they going to work at some trivial task for the sole aim of earning sufficient cash to maintain themselves and their families, or are they going to do work that is meaningful, and that contributes directly to their well being? My position and one that I intend to develop in subsequent postings is that by choosing how we work and what we work on, we can free ourselves from the bonds of money and industrialism.

The Beginning

2009-11-24T06:01:00.000-08:00

Should anyone ever read this, welcome to my blog. I've created this virtual home on the web hoping to meet and discuss with other intelligent persons matters important to me. What are those matters? Food, sustainability, politics, economics, philosophy, religion, ecology, and technology. That's a pretty wide spectrum, I realize, and maybe too much to bite off at one time, but we'll see how it goes.