OrganicFarmer

I rarely buy the reduced price stuff....but I eat it every day. An organization called Food Not Bombs goes to all the yuppie stores and collects the expired or less than perfect food that is about to be thrown out. We meet at a local park and can pick one food item from each banana box until all the food is gone. I have gotten good at cutting out the bad parts of fruits and veggies :-) I am glad that people are so squeamish. It gives more food to us po' folks who could never afford to pay outrageous amounts of money for it.

When I moved out of my RV and into an apartment, I thought about buying a toaster. Then I started using my large Foreman grill. Dang! It makes way better bagels and toasted cheese sandwiches and toasted/grilled bread products than any toaster I have ever owned. I wish I had figured that out years ago.

Hi. I used to be a farmer. The roof of our underground house was sod. We had blackberry and raspberry bushes up there. My daughter would go on the roof to pick berries for breakfast. Her little friends thought that was the coolest thing. I think even more than the vegetables, I miss all the berries! There were also strawberries, blueberries, elderberries and currants out in the field. Nothing from the store tastes so good. I sold my pressure cookers with the farm. I would love to get an electric instant pot 7-in-1 Multi-Functional Cooker :-) What do you do with all your pressure cookers?

I have seen the freeze dryers on the local news. I wish I had one back when I was a farmer. My daughter was a long distance backpacker and bicyclist, plus we camped a lot. We did have a big Excalibur food dehydrater, though.

Our underground house was built from ideas in the $50 and Up Underground House Book by Mike Oehler. At first it was only 14x28 ft. - all one room, with no bathroom or kitchen or running water or electricity. It was built into a hill. Little by little we fixed it up, adding a room for my daughter, a bathroom with composting toilet, an 8x8 ft. root cellar, a 12x48 ft. solar greenhouse, and then, a workshop. The house grew to 1750 square feet. I was too sick to work at a "regular" job, so I started Peace and Carrots Farm CSA with the help of Voc-Rehab. This allowed me to work hardest in the spring, when I felt best, and slow down for the fall and winter, when I felt worst. I could work the hours I chose and rest whenever I needed to. I had always been a gardener. I had such a serious seed addiction that I needed to become a farmer so I had a reason to plant so many varieties. I think at one time I counted up 70-something different sorts of crops. Vermont has a very short growing season, but daylight lengths are long in the summer. As a food technician, I worked on projects like Devil Dog shelf life, Canadian Wyler's raspberry drink, Coco Lopez cream of coconut and the pina colada mix, infant formula for third world countries and the Saudi Arabian lunch program. The Saudi food was the most wholesome. Working in corporate America opened my eyes to the food industry and I realized I did not want to be part of it. I can still remember my food science teacher, who came from India, telling us that all canned foods had to be boiled. A girl raised her hand and asked if that was necessary for tuna. He said yes. Geeze! I was a vegetarian for 8 years. A different food science teacher said I had to taste the boiled cow tongue or I would get an F for the day. More disgust for the whole teaching experience. I also took all the dietetics classes right up to the point I was supposed to do an internship. Honestly, I thought that dietetics was stupid, too. The entire time I was in college, I believed in organic food and eating more naturally. This was mostly in the 70's. I was a lone voice in the wilderness at college. Up until then, much of my college education and work experience just pushed me away from the norm. I lost respect for what was being done and taught. I started finding jobs at natural food stores, doing crunchy-granola sort of cooking and specializing in catering natural foods. I always had my own organic gardens. Next thing I knew, I had one of the first CSA's in the country. Now that I am old, I eat pretty much anything. I cook all sorts of ways. I love all kinds of ethnic food. In my senior years, I am also too low income to buy and eat what I would like. I am too disabled to garden any more. I rarely buy processed foods on purpose, but take what I can get when it's donated. I give away the foods I find particularly egregious. I loved being a chef for the same reason I loved being a farmer....somebody else was paying for the raw ingredients, and I could be creative without being wealthy. I wanted to add pictures here, but I could not figure out how.

I have spent my whole life obsessed with good food I had a hard time in college, trying to find what I most wanted to learn, so I tried everything....environmental science, forestry, food science, dietetics and then social ecology. During those years I took every sort of class imaginable. It was a good foundation for what I ultimately became...a homesteader and organic farmer. I made my money all through college by being a cook, chef and caterer. I tried corporate America, but got disgusted with my job, inventing food for a major food company. That's when I chucked it all and moved to a cabin in the woods of Vermont. Eventually I moved to a farm and lived in an underground house. I spent a couple of decades there, having a CSA farm, unschooling my daughter, being a homesteader. I put up tons of my own food for years. Loved my root cellar! It's kind of embarrassing to admit, but I had 4000 cookbooks back then. I have pared it down to 3 bookshelves full now that I live in a senior apartment. I love to talk about almost anything food. The farm in my gravatar logo is no longer a physical place...except in my mind. I love that logo