Lift Up Your Hearts!

I must share a wonderful article from Yankee Magazine. Many years ago, when we were first married, my in-laws gave us a subscription. It was interesting, but not so much so that I've missed it in the many years since we let our subscription lapse.  But recently I came upon "The Heirloom Apple Hunters," and was overwhelmed by a wave of homesickness for the Northeast. I've come to love Florida; what's more, New York and New England have changed far too much for me to want to move back there. But oh how I miss the scents of autumn, the nip of cool air after summer, the play of light on multi-colored leaves—and I especially miss the apples.

"The Heirloom Apple Hunters" is what I was looking for, and didn't find, when I read Endangered Eating. I am so happy that there are still those who remember what apples, and apple cider, once tasted like. When apples sparkled with variety, and a broad spectrum of taste. It's good to know that a few ("the happy few") are putting action to their longing, and labor to rescue the perishing, even among the vegetable kingdom.

Here are a few personal keywords that leapt out at me, and which might pique the interest of some of my readers: Maine, Colby College, Black Oxford, Blue Pearmain.

And the usual short quotes:

Welcome to the Maine apple hunt: an ad hoc effort to save heritage apples, the rare survivors of a vast and nearly vanished orchard landscape once filled with thousands of varieties. According to a 1905 catalog by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, some 14,000 kinds of apples were grown between 1804 and 1904, mostly in small orchards on land too marginal for other crops. There were apples as small and red as cherries, fruits that were ghostly white and others so dark they looked black, and monstrously pimpled russets. There were others so tart and juicy they tasted effervescent, or left the flavor of banana, coconut, or clove lingering on the tongue. New England in particular had the most diverse and longest history of apple propagation in the country, because colonists here were first to bring trees from abroad, and Maine alone grew more than 600 varieties during this time.

Todd Little-Siebold spends his days off investigating strange apple trees. One October morning, the tree that piqued his interest belonged to a young couple in Penobscot, an 18th-century village along a rocky shoreline of Maine’s Blue Hill Peninsula. The couple had connected with Little-Siebold after hearing about the Drap d’Or de Bretagne, a rare French apple thought lost to history that Little-Siebold and fellow apple hunters found four years ago in a neighboring town. This couple wondered whether their own tree might be another Drap d’Or, or some other missing and special Malus domestica.

Little-Siebold was all for it. “My problem is I have AADHD—Apple Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. I’m like, ‘Apple! There’s an apple! Let’s go get the apple!’” he says. “It’s addictive. It’s like a treasure hunt every day.”

“These apples weren’t being trademarked; they weren’t even being written about,” says John Bunker, a Maine apple historian who mentors Little-Siebold. ... [B]y the early 20th century, as the agricultural market globalized, apples were being bred more for shelf appeal, durability, and transport than for flavor. Federal agricultural agents encouraged farmers to rip out their unique varieties for lucrative mass-market alternatives like Red Delicious, Granny Smith, and McIntosh. This development, combined with the Great Depression and a pair of catastrophic winters, decimated hundreds of thousands of Maine’s apple trees. The few that survived are now reaching the end of their natural lifespan, just as old farms and undeveloped land are disappearing from Maine’s landscape. “If we’re going to save them,” says Bunker, “we have to do it now.”

Each year, Little-Siebold, Bunker, and the dozen or so other volunteer apple hunters in Maine send samples from up to 40 promising trees to the Washington State DNA lab. The ones confirmed as rare are then grafted onto rootstock at the Maine Heritage Orchard in Unity, which Bunker founded as a living archive in 2012. So far, there are about 300 local heritage varieties in the orchard, and over the past six years DNA testing has helped correct about a dozen misidentified varieties.

Maybe someday our grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, will again be able to taste the wonders my generation once took for granted and let slip out of our lives. May the Black Oxford tree our grandson planted in his front yard live long and prosper!

When I promised you more Mollie Engelhart, I was anticipating drawing on a backlog of her earlier columns that I've marked for the purpose. But today's jumped out at me and took precedence. "When Did Everything Become Disposable?" is her reflections on the trend of travelling to an event empty-handed, buying everything needed at the site (coolers, tents, chairs, clothes), and abandoning it all when the event is over.

I worked at Coachella for years as a food vendor, and I watched some version of this happen every time. People would fly in from another state or another country, stop at Walmart or REI, buy everything they needed for the weekend, and then leave much of it behind. ... At Coachella, we actually used to get excited when the festival ended because other people’s waste was valuable to us. ... The person who bought a cooler, tent, or canopy on Friday saw garbage by Monday. I saw equipment I might use for another decade.

It would be easy to ... blame spoiled festivalgoers or “kids these days.” But then I look around my own house. ... I would never buy a tent and leave it in a field three days later. But how fundamentally different is the mountain of barely used stuff inside my own house? Maybe my version of the festival campground is simply accumulated over 11 years and hidden behind walls where nobody can take a drone photograph of it.

I don’t want to wag my finger at the people who left their tents behind. I want to ask what happened to all of us. ... Maybe what we have lost is bigger than our ability to recycle. We have lost our relationship with objects. ... For most of human history, things were expensive not simply in money but also in human labor and resources. Clothes were patched. Shoes were resoled. Tools were sharpened. Jars were saved. Furniture was repaired. Children’s clothes were passed down among siblings and cousins. Things stayed in families long enough to acquire stories. ... Now, we live in a world where a tent can cost less than checking an extra bag on an airplane. When that happens, disposability isn’t simply a character flaw. We have built the economics around it. Something can be incredibly costly in resources while being incredibly cheap in dollars, and throwing it away becomes the rational choice for the person who bought it.

Maybe that’s one small place to begin. Before buying something, we could ask not only “How much does this cost?” or “Do I need this?” but also “What happens to this thing when I’m done with it?”

The problem isn't new, Mollie says, and I agree with her. I remember a story told by Don Aslett, probably back in the 1990's, in which he took over a unprofitable service that did the job of decorating a venue for Christmas every year: taking the decorations out of storage, setting them all up, then later removing, repacking, and returning them to storage. Under Aslett's direction, the money-losing business began making a substantial profit. How did he accomplish this? Every year, he bought new decorations, throwing them away when the event was over, saving a great deal of money that had gone into labor and storage charges. At the time, I understood the point he was making, but it made me feel queasy. It still does, even if it makes economic sense.

I couldn't resist making my own comment on the article:

You’ve put your finger on something that has been bothering me for several years. When my father moved from his big Victorian house to a small cottage, my daughter was newly married and thrilled to be the recipient of some of his furniture. Nowadays it seems people would rather buy “disposable” furniture from IKEA than inherit a beautiful, well-crafted antique that has been in their family for generations. Given how mobile many people’s lifestyles are, that makes some sense, but it’s just one more of the many pressures that are stripping young people of their sense of history and family.

Debunked by Nature: How a Vegan-Chef-Turned-Regenerative-Farmer Discovered that Mother Nature Is a Conservative by Mollie Engelhart (Acres U.S.A., Inc., 2025)

When and where I first heard about Mollie Engelhart I no longer remember, but it is enough to realize that the foreword of this book is written by Joel Salatin, whose agricultural revolution I've admired for years.

I've been enjoying Engelhart's well-written columns for a long time, and have occasionally quoted from them here.  So I decided it was high time that I read the book in which she documents her journey from celebrated vegan chef to regenerative farmer, which is well-written, informative, and inspirational.  Once again I grew impatient waiting for either our library to acquire it, or Amazon to offer a good Kindle deal, and decided to support an author I admire by paying full price.  The Kindle version at this moment is $10, the paperback twice that—and if you have Kindle Unlimited you can read it for free.  I highly recommend it for anyone who cares about food:  its quality, its availability, where it comes from, animal welfare, and healing our land.

Quotations can't do the story justice, but here they are anyway.  You can expect more posts pointing to Mollie Englehart's work in the future, as I become more and more impressed with her life and thoughts.  

I came to Fillmore expecting a fight. What I found were Christian homeschool moms ordering from Azure Standard like I did, families raising their own food, people committed to health and freedom. There were Trump signs, sure—but the people weren’t villains. They were kind. They were showing up for their land, their kids, and their neighbors. The story I’d believed about who these people were just didn’t hold. (pp 8-9)

The deeper I got into the land, the more the noise fell away. Mimi’s death cracked me open. The soil kept me grounded. And the community I once feared became a family I didn’t know I needed. I thought I’d lost everything. But that loss was actually the beginning of the life I was always meant to live. (p 10)

Then we moved to the farm, and everything flipped. That city idea—men as optional—fell apart the second we stepped into real work. Fillmore wasn’t a place for theories; it was dirt, sweat, and survival. My husband’s hands started shaping the land—planting orchards, installing irrigation, turning rocky soil into something alive. I’d design the layout of where everything would go—from animals to compost piles to gardens and greenhouses—and he’d dig the trenches, haul the pipes, and make it happen. I could plan, nurture, and hustle, but when it came to raw strength—to holding the line against nature’s chaos—I saw what he brought. It wasn’t optional—it was the backbone. (p 25)

Nature doesn’t mess around. When it hits, you don’t debate. You need strength, action, someone who’ll step up. My husband did, and does—every day, not just in floods. He’d butcher a sheep when dogs tore through it and process it for the community, while I’d just freeze up. He’d fix things when they break and haul hay when the animals needed it. I’d plan the feed, but he moved it. I’d birth kids at home, nurture them, keep the rhythm; he’d plant the orchards that fed us.

Back in LA, I’d have bristled at this—at 36, I’d have said, “I don’t need that.” But at 46, on the farm, I’m grateful. Grateful for my marriage, for my four kids, for serving my husband and family in ways I once didn’t understand. Suffering doesn’t come from embracing womanhood—it comes from fighting it. We’ve got to stop outsourcing masculinity, pretending it’s optional just because we can order groceries online. It’s not toxic—it’s essential—a balance to femininity.

If you think men don’t matter, ask yourself: in a disaster, would you want only women and kids around? If no, you already know the truth. We need men—strong men—not just one, but a whole society of them. Without that, we can’t stand. (pp 25-26)

Standing in the field with my cow, I know she belongs here. And I belong here—we belong together. She’s not a pollutant; she’s a partner. ...  My cow’s cycle is clean; an electric car’s is a shell game. We don’t need more tech—we need less arrogance and more scaling up of regenerative agriculture. We need more mimicking of what nature already does. Grazing cattle mimic bison herds, cover crops shield the soil, and microbes do their work. It’s not sexy, but it’s real, small-scale energy. ... With my cow I feel it—we’re part of this, not above it. Farmers who swap Big Ag for living soil aren’t just feeding us—they’re healing what we broke. It’s hard work, not a get-rich scheme—that’s why it’s sidelined. My cow and I will return to the earth. The wind turbines will rust in heaps. The real fix isn’t coming out of some factory—it’s under our feet, in the living soil. (p 41)

That radical faith, trusting the path, is what’s missing today. We don’t trust each other, ourselves, or God, so the government steps in—telling us how to eat, raise kids, run businesses. Have we let this happen because we’re disconnected from the sacred, from nature? If we could quiet the noise and hear God’s whispers, maybe we’d finally know what to do.(p 47)

It’s time to reconnect—with nature, with our food, with each other. Start small: herbs on your stoop, a market haul, a meal with no factory fingerprints. Ask where it’s from. Grow something—anything. Link up with neighbors; swap what you’ve got. We must start somewhere—plant a garden or a small orchard, get a flock of chickens, have a couple of milk goats, and trade with your neighbors. We must start depending on local food. We must start creating local food. This is a national security imperative.  (pp 57-58)

In today’s society, discomfort is treated like a plague—something to dodge, medicate, or banish. We’ve convinced ourselves that unease is a danger signal, a threat to our peace, rather than what it really is: a spark for growth, a rite of passage, a sacred call to rise. This comfort fixation has wormed its way into everything—parenting, work, relationships—and it’s left us fragile, cracking under the lightest load. We’ve forgotten how to see discomfort as a guide, not a foe. (p 59)

Real life doesn’t coddle either. Farm life is blunt. The cows don’t care if you’re spent—they need feed. The beans don’t wait for your mood—they need water. Parenting’s no different. I’ve breastfed for ten years straight, my body a lifeline for my kids. I’ve changed diapers daily for a decade—thousands. I’ve been pregnant six times in twelve years: four births that remade me, two losses that tore me open. There’s no pause, no “self-discovery” jaunt to Bali. It’s relentless, holy service—raw, draining, radiant. I wouldn’t trade it. (p 60)

We’ve conditioned young women to see their bodies as tools for personal gain—sex, power, looks. But nothing prepared me for the gorgeous, total annihilation of self that motherhood demands. It’s not easy—nights of tears, mornings of doubt—but it’s the richest reward I’ve known. We need to train our girls for that, to be comfortable with discomfort, because those holy moments—birth, nurturing, sacrifice—demand it. I want my daughters—my two-year-old with her muddy boots and my seven-year-old with her sharp mind—to get this. Their bodies are sacred, not just because they’re theirs, but because they tie them to something bigger: their families, their babies, their communities, their husbands. That’s not oppression—it’s a gift, a sacrifice, a blessing all at once. (p 63)

Discomfort is how we grow. Trauma’s real, but it doesn’t have to rule us. Animals show us—after a predator scare, a goat will shake, shedding the fear, then graze like it’s nothing. We humans cling. We replay the hurt, weaving stories around it. I’ve had trauma—sexual assault in my music industry days. Men with money and power wanted access to my body, and so they took it by force. It was wrong. It cut deep. It left marks. But I chose not to carry it forever. I understand what it is to have compassion for young men filled with testosterone, lacking wisdom, trying to find their way in the world. I did dumb things when I was young as well. It doesn’t take away what they did, but it gives me the power to shake it off. I felt it, faced it, let it go—not because it was small, but because I wouldn’t let it define me.

I know folks wrecked by less. A hand grazing their bottom at a bar, a crude remark—they’ve turned those into lifelong weights. They carry more trauma from that than I do from being violated. Why? They were never taught to sit with discomfort, to process and release. They were told every unease is a wound, every slight a scar. I’m not dismissing their pain—their pain is real. But I’m reclaiming our power. What happens to us isn’t who we are. How we respond is. (pp 63-64).

Embracing traditional ways of living—hands in the dirt, food from the field, life close to nature—led me to a truth that hit like a thunderclap: we belong here. Not as intruders, not as a blight, but as part of this earth, woven into its fabric.

Yet there’s this creeping idea out there, whispered in classrooms and shouted through policies, that it’s fine for us to be poisoned—that it’s no big deal if male sperm counts have crashed 50 percent in forty years or if fertility struggles shadow every developed nation. The modern green movement often runs on a quiet engine: humans are the problem, a species to be culled or contained. They don’t say it outright—not usually—but the vibe seeps through: we’re a plague, a stain on the planet, better off walled away from nature so it can limp back to health without us.

That’s the ugliest lie I’ve ever heard.

We belong here. We’re not separate from the whole—we’re in it, of it. Sure, we’ve messed up. We’ve scarred the soil, fouled the water, choked the air—I won’t pretend otherwise. But the fix isn’t to shrink back, to abandon nature like it’s a museum exhibit we’re banned from touching. The real power, the truest union, comes when we step into nature with respect, with understanding—using our brains, our hands, our science to amplify the beauty in God’s design.

We’re not helpless—we’re potent, brimming with potential. But when we buy the lie that we’re a plague, that there’s too many of us, we crumple. Fear takes over, apathy sets in, and we stop doing what’s right. We let the poison flow unchecked. (p 65)

[R]eal diversity isn’t just tolerating difference; it’s wrestling with it. It’s sitting across from someone who sees the world upside-down from you and choosing to listen anyway. In a culture that’s quick to cancel, that’s radical. It’s taught me patience, sharpened my arguments, and kept me humble. ... And that’s the real test—can you stay close with people as your life changes, as your views change, and as you see the world differently?

The importance of loving people we don’t agree with is immeasurable. We must be able to separate the being—the expression of God in front of us—from the ideas that being holds true. We are not our ideas. I’m the same person I always was, and yet this entire book is about how my ideas shifted drastically over the years. (p 103)

Unfortunately, much of the equity conversation is pushing us further apart rather than closer together. The ever-moving goalposts should always be a warning. When I was younger, equality meant fair treatment—same rules, same chances. Then it became equity: different rules to level the playing field. Now it’s something else entirely—reparations, dismantling systems, rewriting history. Every time we think we’re close, the goalposts move again. It’s like chasing a mirage in the desert: the closer you get, the farther it slips away. (p 104)

I’ve come to understand this: Nature allows for movement within the limits of structure. The birds don’t migrate in chaos. They follow patterns—routes that are shaped by weather, food, season, and survival. And when a food source is threatened, animals defend it. When a species is vulnerable, it retreats inward to protect itself. This is not cruelty. It’s wisdom. It’s instinct. It’s order. ...[A] secure border isn’t unnatural. In fact, it may be one of the most natural things a nation can do. (p 109)

Here’s the hard truth: the southern border is not secured by the United States government. It’s secured by the cartels. Every person crossing is paying $10,000 to $13,000—often more—to make the trip. They are pre-scheduled to be robbed en route, and often extorted again once they arrive. The cartels run a billion-dollar operation, and we fund it every time we eat inexpensive produce picked by someone who had to cross illegally to get that job. And we do need that labor. Desperately. Anyone who tells you otherwise hasn’t run a restaurant, harvested a field, or worked in a meat packing plant. We’ve raised a generation of weak-bodied, weak-minded young people who believe hard work is beneath them and discomfort is a trauma. Our economy is addicted to the labor of immigrants—but our policies pretend we’re not. And that dishonesty is killing people. (p 110)

Here’s the truth we have to face: we need the labor. A border is not racist. A wall is not racist. I have a fence around my property—not because I hate my neighbors’ cows, but because I don’t want them eating my grass. And yet, this is a constant issue. My neighbor’s cows get through my fence. They eat my grass. I fix the fence. It’s not because I dislike their cows. Their cows are beautiful, majestic beings, just like mine. But I don’t want to feed them—unless, ultimately, they are going to contribute to my family’s life at the end of their own. In the same way, we want people in this country who want to contribute to this country. And we must create a pathway for those who want to come, work, and then go home to their families.

That's why I've proposed a ten-year low-skill work visa. It would allow people to work, pay taxes, visit home, and live in dignity. It would protect women from rape, children from trafficking, and all migrants from murder and extortion. It would give people a legal alternative to risking their lives and their bodies. Applicants would need a clean criminal record. They’d be required to stay employed. The visa could be renewed once, but would never lead to citizenship—not even through marriage. The best case might be a green card. The goal is contribution, not permanent relocation. There would be a fee of $10,000 per person—meaning that same amount of money people currently pay the cartels would go to the US government instead. The grip of those cartels on society would be weakened. Unlike our current system, it would allow people to keep connection with their home—so they’re not forced into a forever exile from the people who raised them. It would dismantle the business model of the cartels overnight. It would allow people to fly directly into the cities where work is needed—no more desert crossings, no more smugglers, no more horror stories. Just honest labor for honest pay. (pp 111-112)

We’re not all called to be regenerative farmers, though I’ll admit I sometimes wish everyone could feel the dirt under their nails the way I do now. I feel happier (and, I think, even look happier!) as a cattle rancher than I ever did as a vegan chef. We’re not all meant to leave our lives behind, abandon the cities, and go live off-grid in the wilderness with nothing but a tent and a prayer. That’s not the point. But we are all here, at this specific moment in time, for a reason. Modern life pulls us away from that reason—distracting us with the endless chase for money, status, fleeting recognition, the next promotion, the next shiny thing. It’s a treadmill we can’t step off, a noise so loud it drowns out the quiet voice inside. Yet, in those rare moments when we do step away—when the phone’s off, the screens are dark, and the world hushes—we sense it. A stirring. A knowing. Something calling us back to what’s real.

For some, that calling might be to tend the soil, to grow food, to provide nourishment for others. I felt that pull when I left Sage Vegan Bistro behind and sank my hands into the rocky earth of Fillmore. For others, it might be to nurture something else—a marriage through the hard seasons, a family through the chaos of raising kids, a community through the small, unglamorous acts of showing up. It could be as simple as growing herbs on a windowsill in a cramped apartment, watching those green shoots defy the concrete jungle outside.

These acts matter. They’re not trivial. They tether us back to what has always sustained human life: food, family, faith, and community. They’re threads in a tapestry we’ve let fray, but they’re still there, waiting to be picked up. (pp 122-123)

[E]ven if your path doesn’t lead you to a farm, you’re still being called to tend to something. That’s the universal thread—we’re all stewards of something, whether we recognize it or not. ... [H]ow do we reconnect? It’s not about grand gestures—it’s about small, deliberate steps. (pp 124, 126)

I'm not unsympathetic to those who are genuinely suffering in the heat. I spent the first 30+ years of my life in the Northeast, where air conditioning was almost unheard of, even in critical care hospitals. The laboratory where I worked in the 1970's only had air conditioning in the computer rooms, and that only because—like art—the machines would not work under conditions that people were expected to endure with patience. Even in Florida, my grandparents' house, like most buildings before the late 20th century, had no air conditioning. (It was, however, intelligently built: two blocks from the ocean, and constructed for maximum cross-ventilation, to take advantage of every breeze.) I know unrelenting heat.

So how did we manage?

• Buildings, like my grandparents' house, were built to take the heat into account, with cross-ventilating windows, breezy porches, and shady trees arching over the roofs. Central Florida as it is built now could not exist without the HVAC industry.
• House windows were habitually opened as soon as the outside air cooled off at night, which it did most weeks of the year in the Northeast, and closed when the day began to heat up. This practice has a power that I didn't fully appreciate until we moved to Florida, where the nighttime cooling is ofttimes non-existent.
• Swimming: in ponds, lakes, pools, and/or the ocean. Plastic kiddie pools and running through the sprinkler helped a lot, too. When we first moved to Florida, we kept the A/C set in the 80's, and spent a lot of time in the pool. That kept us cool, but took a terrible toll on our energy. Once we gave in and brought the inside temperature down to the high 70's, we used the pool less—but got a lot more accomplished.
• Another advantage the more northern climes have is that the really unbearable temperatures are only for a short time. When we lived in Rochester, there were usually only two or three weeks in the summer when I was reduced to nursing my baby while immersed in a cool-water bath, and planning excursions based on whether or not the destination was air conditioned. In Florida, sans A/C, that would be the majority of the year.
• A few very lucky people had jobs in air conditioned buildings. As for the rest of us: we suffered; we endured; we dialed down our activities to keep our bodies cooler and our minds saner. And we looked forward to the first hints of autumn.

But that was then, and this is now, and now what makes it possible to have a comfortable, productive society is air conditioning. It's no secret that the closest thing the American South has to a secular saint is Willis Carrier. Air conditioning is as critical in the Sun Belt as heating is in the Snow Belt. Having heard people seriously suggest that the cause of France's heat wave is American air conditioning, I can only say, "Come back and talk to me about giving up my A/C after you've lived a winter in your country without heating." Better yet, discover air conditioning for yourself. Even if you only need it for a few weeks out of the year, you'll feel better, and can be pleased with how low your A/C bills are compared with ours, just as we Southerners feel better about our heating bills in winter when we look at yours.

You might also consider investing in public places of respite, as I've seen in various cities here, where people can come in to get warm, or to get cool, depending on the season. As I said in my last post, one can stand a much greater intensity and duration of heat or cold if one can occasionally retreat to a more comfortable situation.

And gelaterias. We all need more gelaterias.

Sunday mornings, when I was a young child, often meant going to church. But even more religiously, it meant blueberry pancakes. The pancakes were from a box mix, quite likely Aunt Jemima, although I don't remember for sure. The blueberries, however, were local, hand-picked by our family from a small blueberry farm owned by one of my father's co-workers, Viv Merschon. Mr. Merschon lived in a delightful stone house that he built with his own hands, and always let us eat as many berries as we wished while we were picking.

Our syrup wasn't Aunt Jemima—we shunned commercial fake syrup like the plague—but it wasn't real maple syrup, either. Even living in Upstate New York, that was beyond our budget. We made our own syrup with white sugar, brown sugar, water, and Mapeleine (maple extract). My recollection of the process was to bring 1 cup water, 1 cup white sugar, and 2 cups brown sugar to a boil, and stir until the sugar was dissolved. Then add 1/4 teaspoon (or maybe 1/2) Mapeleine, stir well, and serve. To this day, although I almost always use pure maple syrup (preferring Grade B, which apparently doesn't exist anymore), this homemade syrup ranks higher than any store-bought substitute.

And of course there was bacon. We weren't much of a family for sausage; I've since come to like it a lot, but it will never take the place of bacon when it comes to eating pancakes. The same budget that closed the door to real maple syrup meant that bacon was rationed: three half-slices each. We never felt underprivileged, but happy to have bacon at all, and content to know what was our share.

I don't think it was thrift, per se, that made my mother save the grease that rendered out of the bacon. That was common practice in those days—why waste such a good source of fat and flavor? But that's a story for another post.

Forevergreen is a new, short, animated film.  I know nothing about it except that a friend recommended it, and I found it enjoyable and moving.  I belive this preview (of the entire film) will only be available for free for a week, so if you're interested, watch it soon.  It's 13 minutes long.

As I wrote in Let the Worms Decide, I decided to do my own experiment on what our composting worms think of junk food.

I began the experiment with the worms "hungry"; I had let the available food dwindle 'way down in hopes of increasing their willingness to accept my offerings. I placed a clean paper towel on top of the moisture mat for greater visibility for the camera; normally their food goes under the mat, but I knew the clever little creatures would find it. From left to right, top to bottom: chocolate chips (60% cacao), a Starburst candy, two gummy bears, two Hallowe'en-sized Twizzlers (strawberry), an Airheads candy, brown rice, a piece of paper towel soaked with local, raw honey, some arugula, and a banana skin.

Four days later, the chocolate chips had apparently begun to mold, and the Starburst was completely covered in it. The other candy had softened and faded, but was untouched. The rice was very popular, but it's hard to tell what they thought of the honey. The arugula showed a small amount of interest, and there was some activity at one end of the banana skin.

After seven days I took pity on the worms and ended the experiment so I could give them a larger quantity of food I know they like. As you can see, there was a lot more worm activity. The rice was completely gone, and there had obviously been a lot of action around the arugula and the end of the banana (note all the worm castings). The chocolate showed a reasonable amount of interest and there were a number of worms around the candy—but they may have been munching on the paper towel. The Airhead seems to have been totally ignored.

It's hard to draw any firm conclusions. The worms can't really eat many items until the bugs and microfauna have done their pre-processing work, and some foods may take longer than others. I don't know why the arugula went so slowly; usually greens go quickly, but perhaps arugula is too "spicy" for the worms—I know they don't like the strong-flavored lemon balm.

I would have thought that the candy, being mostly sugar, should have been easy for them to handle. But I was wrong. According to my Brave browser's AI,

Red wiggler worms should not eat candy. Candy is high in sugar and often contains oils, artificial ingredients, and other additives that can harm the worms or disrupt the balance of the composting environment. While red wigglers can consume a variety of organic matter, including fruits and vegetables, they should not be fed processed foods like candy, cookies, or cake, as these can lead to poor bin conditions and attract pests.

So there you go. Ultra-processed foods are bad for worms, and probably for people, too. Then again, chocolate is bad for dogs, they say, and good for people (in limited quantities), so make your own decisions.

"Let the Worms Decide" is an Epoch Times article that caught my eye first because of the author, Joel Salatin, and secondly because I knew what kind of worms he was talking about. We've been vermicomposting since 2009, and I know a little bit about what our worms will and will not eat.

Salatin begins with a story from a middle school program he visited in California, where students worked on a small farm half a day each week.

They had a worm box about 8 feet by 3 feet by 3 feet. Imagine an oversized coffin. If you want to see children get excited, show them a worm box. It’s mesmerizing with all the slithering, slimy worm activity....

One week, the farmers assigned homework: “Bring food on Monday.” The students dutifully brought some food: Twizzlers, Gummy Bears, Froot Loops—you get the idea. They placed their “food” in one end of the worm box. The farm ladies put different items in the other end: an apple, a pork chop, and a glob of yogurt, among other things. The following week, the students, eager to see what had transpired, ran to the box and opened it.

They pulled out their Gummy Bears, Twizzlers, and Froot Loops—untouched. When they tried to find the food items that the farmers had placed at the other end, all that food was gone. The day’s lesson was obvious: “Why would you want to eat something worms won’t even eat?” I'll bet a lot of young people made some different eating decisions that day.

Tongue not totally in cheek, Salatin proposes turning our expensive—and too-easily corrupted—food safety testing over to composting worms.

I’ve known and worked with many worm farmers over the years who explain how sensitive their “livestock” is to unacceptable items placed in their boxes. If they like the substance, they devour it readily. If they don’t, they move away and give it a wide berth.

If worms are that decisive and timely to determine healthy versus unhealthy things in their environment, why not ask them to share their preferences with all of us?

Worms don’t vote, don’t listen to lobbyists, don’t invest in Wall Street, or watch ads. They are about as objective a researcher as you could ever want. Goodness, they aren’t even swayed by money.

Here’s my idea: why not get a small plot of land—perhaps 5 acres—and set up 100 worm boxes? Everything Americans apply to the soil or put in our mouths would undergo the worm test for a week. What the worms ate would get a green light. What the worms didn’t eat would get a red light.

We could hire a couple of college students to run the program. If glyphosate is really innocuous, let’s see if the worms like it. If Coca-Cola is really nutritious, let’s see if the worms like it. Pour it in and see if they want to come to that area, or if they avoid it like the plague. If Red Dye 29 is a wonderful food additive, or monosodium glutamate (MSG), put them in the worm bed and let the worms vote.

Based on my experience, I see a few problems with this scenario, as I'm sure Salatin himself does. Worms will eat (and detoxify) some really nasty things, given enough time for their cohabiting microorganisms to break them down. The farmers who sold us our system have huge vermiculture setups in which they say the worms will devour battery acid in small quantities. Just because you can convince a worm to eat something, that doesn't mean I want it in my food. But the one-week test would probably take care of that problem. Maybe the worms will eventually eat something, if they get hungry enough, but they definitely have their favorites and, like a small child at the dinner table, will go for the good stuff first.

That same small child may reject his beets despite their certified goodness, and my worms will reject things I find great. Like homegrown, organic lemon balm. Or citrus peels. (Granted, I never tried them on the chocolate-covered variety.) Some worms don't like broccoli; fortunately, ours eat it right up. So it's not a foolproof system.

That said, Salatin makes an important point: If something we're doing causes natural systems to thrive, that could be a clue that we may be going in the right direction. On the other hand, a failing system is a red warning light that should give us pause.

Stay tuned for the results of my own experiment.  We have leftover Hallowe'en candy, including the above-mentioned Twizzlers.  I plan to make an offering to the worms and see what they have to say.

It began as a student project by Professor Jamie Rector's class at the University of California, Berkeley. They wanted to investigate methane emissions from abandoned and sealed oil wells. What the students discovered could turn the approach to California's environmental concerns on its head.

As they researched California’s abandoned oil wells, Rector’s students discovered an abundance of natural oil seeps located above the same fields—and came to a surprising conclusion. Geologically driven, natural oil seeps are a major contributor to California’s greenhouse emissions, they say. And drilling—long seen as the problem, not the answer—might be a panacea for emissions.

Natural seeps occur when liquid oil and gas leak to the Earth’s surface, both on land and under water. California sits on actively moving tectonic plates, which create fractured reservoirs and pathways for the oil to escape. ... Waters off Southern California are rife with seeps, and oil and gas fields ... have some of the highest natural hydrocarbon seep rates in the world, emitting gases such as methane, as well as toxic volatile organic compounds (VOCs). But these geologically driven seeps, Rector notes, have been largely unaccounted for in assessing how oil production fields contribute to California’s greenhouse gas emissions.

“There are hundreds of studies linking oil and gas fields to greenhouse gas emissions, to cancer rates, to climate justice, to groundwater pollution and everything else,” said Rector. “And yet none of these studies ever considered the possibility that it wasn’t from equipment or production, but natural seeps above the oil fields.” ... Rector’s team calculates that natural seeps, together with orphaned wells, produce 50 times more methane emissions than oil and gas equipment leaks in Southern California.

If seeps are driving emissions above oil fields, Rector reasons, plugging abandoned wells may do little to help pollution. In fact, he posits, the only demonstrated way to reduce natural seep emissions is by depleting underlying reservoirs—that is, by drilling.

Pointing to studies showing that oil production has reduced and even eliminated seeps, he suggests California’s current regulatory environment may be counterproductive.
“The crazy thing is, by stopping oil and gas production in California, after we’ve regulated and really gotten equipment emissions way down, we may be increasing seep emissions,” Rector said. “Because these seeps come up through the oil and gas fields, and the only way to stop it is by producing oil.”

The article is much longer than these excerpts, and the situation is of course complex, both scientifically and politically, but I see it as yet another demonstration of the truth that simplistic solutions with the best of intentions often lead to harmful, unintended consequences.

Here's an interesting look at attempts to replace farms and ranches with industrial food production facilities.

I'm not totally against efforts to use technology to create flesh; I'm quite excited about the possibility of using 3D printers to create hearts, kidneys, and other organs for those who need them. That, too, is still a far-off dream, but it sure beats re-defining death so that more organs can be harvested for transplant, as was recently suggested in the New York Times. (The link will be useless to you if, like me, you can't get into the NYT, but you can see the headline.)

The main reason I like that video is how it reveals the incredible complexities of natural life, which we take for granted until we try to mimic them. Lab-grown meat is no more likely to replicate—in taste or nutrition—a fire-grilled steak from a purely grass-fed steer than vanillin can replace a vanilla bean, or oat milk the marvellous liquid that comes from a well-tended cow.

There are a lot of things about the good ol' days that I don't miss—smoking on airplanes is at the top of the list—but recently I was gloriously reminded of one of the benefits that we took for granted at the time: good showers.

I don't think anyone born after 1990 has any idea what a good shower feels like. For almost 25 years it has taken me twice as long as previously to take a shower, because the flow from today's emasculated nozzles is so weak. Maybe if you've stood under a waterfall, or a tropical rainstorm, you have an idea of the joy of a shower free from unnecessary regulation, but it's pure bliss after all this wimpy stuff, let me tell you.

As I stood under the shower, the thought crossed my mind: I know President Trump has a lot of more important things to think about, but I sure wish he'd get rid of the shower head restrictions.

I thought it was just a useless wish. But like my similar dreams that companies would get rid of the junk that fills much of our food, or that someone would take seriously the catastrophic rise in allergies, autism, ADHD, and other afflictions that have replaced measles, mumps, and chicken pox as parental concerns. But at last, we as a country are attempting to address those and other long-time concerns of mine, so I though maybe shower heads had a chance.

Lo and behold, today I learned that President Trump has already rescinded—not the original 1992 regulation of showerheads, which I would have preferred, but at least the subsequent re-interpretations of the rules that were considerably more onerous. I'll celebrate victories when I see them.

There are many ways to conserve resources. One size fits all rarely works well. I'll take shorter, more powerful showers; you're welcome to take longer, wimpier ones.

Maybe it's time to stimulate the economy by buying new showerheads. As long as they're made in America.

Make showers great again!

Mike Wimmer is 16 years old, loves cars and video games, recently earned his PhD, started doing contract work for the United States Special Operations Command at age 10, and has a viable technology, with a working prototype, that could help save our endangered coral reefs.

“I always had an innovative mindset and the idea to want to solve challenges with new technologies,” he said, adding that he pushed himself “to go even farther, even faster, even better.” He wants his work to “have a positive impact on the world.”

I'd love to see him collaborate with Elon Musk. Although, given Wimmer's own predilection for entrepreneurship, he probably has it in him to become Musk's nearest competitor.

Wimmer’s latest underwater gambit is one in a series of robotics and AI startups under his belt. He’s been building companies since age 10, including Next Era Innovations.

Here's the Epoch Times article on Mike Wimmer; there's more available online, but if you search for him don't get confused by the artist of the same name.

This is my dream garden. It's not an achievable dream at this point in my life, and even if I were much younger, there's a lot more to creating a system like this than he discusses. It's not so much a garden as a very small farm (albeit this one is in suburban Long Island), and requires farm-level work. For one thing, you can't decide to go out of town without arranging for someone to care for your plants and animals. It's like being a pet owner, only a lot more intense—you can't pack up your chickens and take them to a kennel, and neighbors who will happily feed your cat might draw the line at milking goats.

If this is ever going to be your dream, it's probably easiest to start dreaming early in life, when you're making decisions about family, employment, and home location.

Nonetheless, there's a lot of inspiration to be gained from Mike G.'s experience, especially in seeing how much he accomplished in under five years of consistently pursuring his goal, taking one step at a time, and learning along the way.

I often hesitate to share articles from the Epoch Times, because although many of them are free to read, some people have been put off by the requirement to enter an e-mail address. I understand, and am grateful that I have an infinite supply of e-mail addresses to use—and thus to block if they start generating spam. (One of the blessings of having your own domain.) However, there are many articles worth sharing, so I'm going to start posting some of them for those who aren't turned away by the requirement for an address (assuming they are still doing that).

From Veganism to Vitalism: Why I Left Industrial Plant-Based Culture for Real Food, Real Soil, and Real Community, by Mollie Engelhart, warmed my heart for the same reasons Polyface Farms and Joel Salatin have impressed me so much. To whet your appetite, here are a few quotations from the article.

My commitment to the environment led me to start my own farm as a way to manage the food waste from my restaurants. I was the founder and executive chef of Sage Vegan Bistro, which eventually became Sage Regenerative Bistro. I wanted to close the loop—grow the food, feed the people, compost the scraps, and build healthy soil. But the deeper I got into that system, the more I began to see the cracks in the story I had believed so fully.

Living on the land and growing my own food broke me wide open. I started to realize that the version of “ethical eating” I had bought into—and helped promote—left out most of the truth.

I found myself drawn to the small farmers around me—the ones working with animals, not against them. I began visiting more of their farms, asking more questions, and slowly, inevitably, became one of them. I went from observing to participating.

When you bring animals onto the land—when cows graze, chickens scratch, and pigs root—you build an ecosystem. Nutrients cycle naturally. Soil comes alive. There’s a rhythm to it, a divine order. Every part has a role. The death of one thing nourishes the life of another. And when you participate in that cycle, it humbles you. It teaches you. It changes you.

I didn’t leave veganism because I stopped caring about animals. I left because I started caring more—about the whole picture. About ecosystems. About what happens before the almond milk hits the shelf. About the water, the soil, the labor, the waste, and the long chain of consequences that “ethical” labels so often obscure.

Regeneration isn’t just a farming practice. It’s a worldview. It means taking full responsibility—for our choices, for our impact, for our role in the cycle of life. It’s not about purity or perfection. It’s about participation. ... The way back is right beneath our feet—in the soil, in our communities, and in the relationships we build with the land and each other.

Here are some related posts, from 2009 to 2023.

• Conservationist Living
• Strange Bedfellows? Not Really
• The Omnivore's Dilemma
• Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal,
• Fruitless Fall
• The Raw Milk Revoution
• Small (Agriculture) Is Beautiful

The last is part of a speech given by Joel Salatin in 2022, which I reproduce here:

Are you listeining, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.? This could go a long way toward making American healthy again.

I believe our new Secretary of Health and Human Services is listening; at least, I have hope that progress will be made toward encouraging regenerative farming, sustainable agriculture, and food freedom in general.