That Time I was a Vegan

Okay, purists will say I was never a Vegan. I can agree with that. However, I was on a Vegan diet -totally plant based. Veganism isn’t just a diet to most people, it’s about not exploiting animals at all. By that measure I was a really bad Vegan. Not only did I wear a leather jacket, I still went hunting. Yep, really the worst of Vegans.

However, it was the diet that I ate. How did that happen? After suffering terrible injury to my lungs as a Firefighter, I could barely breath. Lung capacity was down to a tiny fraction of what I once had. To make matters worse, my weakened lungs were constantly filling with fluids. After being bounced around to a lot of different doctors, one recommended that I try a Vegan diet.

At that point I felt that I had nothing to lose. After three days on the diet I felt 100% better. Two thoughts ran through my head. The first was “Oh my God this works!” The second thought was “Oh my God this works so now I’m stuck with a Vegan diet.” I loved a good plate of steak and eggs and meats of all kinds. How hard was it to stay on a Vegan diet? Well, think if it this way. If it was the cost of not getting waterboarded every day, you’d gladly go on one too. Sure beat drowning in my own fluids.

I was on a Vegan diet for seven years and my health got quite a bit better. However, it wasn’t always easy. After seven years I found I could add fish without feeling any negative effects. That was nice and made eating out a whole lot easier. Then later on my lovely wife and I were traveling through rural Texas. Twenty years ago there weren’t a lot of vegetarian options available out in the back country. That, and their fish offerings were terrible. That’s when I added chicken to my diet and discovered that it didn’t give me any problems.

It was not all that long after that I eventually added most other meats to my diet. One thing that I still consume sparingly is milk products. Those appear to sometimes give me congestion issues. I don’t eat as much meat as used to and it tends to be much cleaner meats than what I once ate. Generally, I feel better when they come from local sources that are organically raised or nearly so.

So what happened? One of the things I suffered from after my firefighting days was massive chemical sensitivities. To this day my lovely wife does not wear perfume and scented candles are banned from the house. However, I’m not nearly as sensitive as I used to be. My guess is that the plant based diet I was on just put me into less contact with the chemicals that triggered reactions. Taking a break from those chemicals allowed my body to heal.

So why am I not still on a Vegan diet? Frankly, I now feel better as an omnivore. Once my breathing situation sorted itself out I was able to add more diversity to my food choices.

-Sixbears

Rice farmer

This article caught my eye. It's about a way farmers are significantly increasing the yield of rice and other crops. There's no special soil additives, pesticides, or GMOS. It's a pretty low tech planting and field management system that works. No one has to buy anything or pay a license fee.

There are countries backing the method and millions are now using it. This is huge. One of the arguments against the system is that so far it hasn't scaled up well to big commercial operations. I looked at that as a plus. Nothing wrong with the little guy getting the advantage once in a while. I see a lot of articles and videos about problems that plague the common people. Rarely do I see solutions.

-Sixbears

A Good Cup of Coffee

My lovely wife and I drink a fair amount of coffee. We take our coffee seriously. Life is too short for bad coffee, but a small bag of organic fair trade coffee costs dearly at the grocery store. To save money, I buy in bulk 35 – 40 pounds of coffee at a time. It only costs a few more dollars to ship 40 pounds as it does to ship 5.

Green coffee (unroasted) is the way to go. Green coffee can go years without an loss of flavor. It's only after it's roasted that the clock starts running. It's also much cheaper to buy it green. I get mine from Dean's Beans. We have to relationship with the company other than the fact that I buy their coffee.

Why fair trade organic? The fair trade label indicates that the farmer who actually grew the coffee makes a living wage. Usually, most of the profit from coffee goes to middle men. Organic means the trees were grown in a more natural setting. There are other trees and plants mixed in. In fact, unlike a plantation, birds and animals live among the coffee trees. With all the coffee I drink, there's a small forest out there that I'm supporting.

Of course, you need a way of roasting the coffee. The easiest is to buy a regular coffee roaster. Mine cost about 80 bucks some years ago. Measure out the coffee, set the timer, and the coffee is done. There are many different models out there, but there's no need to spend over $150. When camping, I can roast coffee using a dry cast iron frying pan with a cover. This takes a bit of skill. The fire has to be hot but not too hot. The pans needs to be shook, like making popcorn. In fact as the coffee roasts, it makes a sound like popcorn. The first pop is called the “first crack.” Once all the coffee pops, it's usable. If you like a darker roast, listen for the second softer pop, known as the “second crack.” The outer skin of the coffee bean, the chaff, separates when roasted. A coffee roasting machine will have a ways of dealing with the chaff. If you pan roast, just dump the coffee into a shallow cooling pan and blow the chaff away. There are whole books written about coffee roasting, but this will get you started.

Here's where I differ from the coffee purist. A true coffee fanatic will only use a burr grinder to grind coffee. That's great, but none of the one's I've bought have held up. In the end, I go back to the cheapo coffee grinders that you can get anywhere. I'm still looking for a good hand grinder. The older ones that actually grind coffee have caught the eye of collectors and decorate shelves. Prices are high. The modern knock offs don't work nearly as well. I bought one and soon came to conclusion that it's main function was decorative.

A drip style coffee maker is supposed to capture more of the flavor. That may be true, but my lovely wife and I did so much tent camping that we got used to using a stainless steel peculator. It's your basic old fashioned place on the fire coffee maker. The coffee is hotter than from a drip machine so it stays hot longer in a thermos or an air pot. The coffee made in the morning is still hot enough to drink in the afternoon. Another bonus is that there's no coffee filters to throw away. (or to buy)

Okay, how's this for a green hippy dippy cup of coffee. Fair trade organic and bought in bulk to reduce packaging. Roasted using a roaster power by solar generated electricity. The coffee is brewed in a reusable percolator with no disposable filters. It's heated on a woodstove burning sustainability harvested firewood. The coffee is poured into reusable ceramic mugs, some of which were made by a local potter. I drink my coffee black, but my lovely wife sweetens it with either local honey or maple syrup. Her creamer comes from local farms.

My dad said that if he had to do all that for a cup of coffee, he'd quit drinking the stuff. What does he know, the poor guy drinks instant.

-Sixbears

Your low energy future

A lot of what I do would not be a mystery to my great grandparents: wood heat, gardens, and water from a hand dug well. Other things are firmly in the 21st century: solar electricity, computers, and mp3 players.

In spite of doing a lot of stuff in an old fashioned way, I really don't want to live in the 19th century. I don't want a horse, or cows, or have to do every darn thing by hand. I like being able to drive places, have light at the flick of a switch, and be able to connect to the world with a computer.

Lots of things that were done back then were pretty darn hard. Plowing fields while looking at the south end of a north bound mule is not my idea of a good time. I'm more the read a good book in a hammock sort of guy. Instead of row crops, something like permaculture is more my speed. Set up a food system that pretty much runs itself. I've taken some steps in that direction and plan to do more.

As our energy resources start heading down to the 19th century level, it doesn't mean we have to live the way they did back then. We have many years of accumulated knowledge. There are plenty of useful ideas that don't rely on petroleum products. All that hippie tech from the 70's: alternative energy, unusual building methods, organic gardening for example, have had the kinks worked out of them. Decades later, we know what gives the most benefit for the least input.

Oil isn't going to go away tomorrow. However, odds are they'll be a lot less of it. What we should do is save it for things we have no substitute for and stop using it for non essential reasons. For example, oil derived medicines and equipment are essential for modern medicine. Should we be waisting precious oil on brightly colored junk toys that break the first time kids use them?

Some people in the sustainability movement envision a world where people live more like the Amish but also have computers. That's fine, but I think the Amish use too much energy and work too hard. My gut feeling is that techniques that work for a lazy guy like me should work for many other people.

-Sixbears

Coffee

The prophet Mohammad said that coffee gave him the strength to unhorse forty men and to possess forty women.

It gives me the strength to get out a saw horse and possess one woman. Guess that's why he started a major religion and I didn't.

Coffee is one of my luxuries. I can cut back on a lot of stuff, but coffee is one of the last things to go. During a particularly rough financial patch, our middle daughter only realized how tough things were when I came home with a vacuum packed bag of generic store brand coffee. That hit home more than the fact we hardly had any Christmas presents that year. We were drinking crappy coffee -times were tough.

I never want things to get that bad again. That's why I keep a fair stockpile of coffee. Green beans store well. Coffee only starts to lose its flavor a couple days after after it's roasted. By roasting your own green beans, you pretty much always have a good cup of coffee. How long do green beans last? I've heard anything from two years to ten. Personally, I keep about a year's worth of beans and have not noticed any lost of flavor.

My beans come from Dean's Beans. http://www.deansbeans.com/ I've no connection to the company other than liking their coffee. There a lot of different coffee roasters out there. There's one for sale at the Dean's Beans site. Another popular coffee supplier is Sweet Maria's. http://www.sweetmarias.com/ They have a lot of good information and selection of roasters.

When camping I use a cast iron fry pan with a lid to roast coffee. Roasting coffee is similar to making popcorn. You use a medium hot fire, and keep the beans moving along in a dry pan. Like popcorn, you listen for a popping sound. In coffee parlance, that's known as the first "crack." After all your beans have gone though the first crack, it's coffee. If you like darker roasted coffee, listen for a more subtle pop later in the roast, that's the second crack. Beyond that you can roast it a bit more, but risk turning coffee into very expensive charcoal. Pour the beans into a shallow pan for cooling. The outer skin of the coffee leaves behind a light chaff. Just blow that away.

In the warmer months, I roast coffee outside on the deck. My roaster makes a fair amount of smoke and I also like being able to dump the chaff outside. In the winter, I roast my coffee in the bathroom. Sounds odd, I know: Sixbears's Bathroom Blend. The reason is that the smoke would set off every smoke detector in the house. The bathroom fan blows the smoke outside. My bathroom ends up smelling like roasted coffee, but that's better than most bathroom smells.

People ask me how I store roasted coffee. I really don't. Usually I'm about one day ahead of my consumption, so storage really isn't a problem. The beans just go on an old mason jar one day then into the coffee pot the next.

Your average coffee tree only produces a couple of pounds of coffee per year. I'm supporting a whole forest of trees somewhere out in the world. Because of that, my coffee is fair trade organic shade grown. Organic coffee growing supports a whole ecosystem of plants, birds and animals, unlike plantation grown which is a chemically dependent mono crop. Fair trade makes sure the farmers earn a living. That way I can enjoy my coffee without the bitter aftertaste of labor exploitation.

Buying in bulk, including the cost of shipping, my coffee comes in at under $5/lb. Pretty darn good price for quality coffee.

The only problem with coffee is that I can't grow it myself. If I lived in Hawaii or the Florida Key, I might try it. Here in NH, I'm out of luck. I am encouraged that coffee was being traded around the world back in the days of sailing ships. If all the oil runs dry, sailing ships can bring my coffee once more.

Sure, there are so called substitutes to coffee. If you mean by substitute that it's dark, bitter and lacks caffeine, then there is. I've tried everything from roasted dandelion root to wild chicory. Believe me, they aren't substitutes. My only hope is that I have enough green beans in storage to weather any disruption in world coffee trade.

If I have to give it up, it won't be pretty.

-Sixbears