This weekend I finally fulfilled a long-time dream and re-read The Cook by Harry Kressing. For anyone who loves cooking or who is interested in psychology and sinister plots, I highly recommend this book. For anyone who has worked in the service industry, catering for the excessively rich and snobby, this book is a delightful fantasy where the clever and hard-working cook turns the tables and soon has the boss for his butler. All the little details about cooking, the kitchen, the cookbooks (even a cookbook for cats!), the hunting and the shopping give a wonderful glimpse into what running an old manor kitchen might have been like. In this age of gluten-free and allergies for every imaginable food, The Cook also offers a parallel with every character’s special needs being catered to with the ease and flourish of a very accomplished chef. It is one of those books you just can’t put down, but with its 244 pages it is a quick read. You can’t truly call yourself a foodie if you haven’t read The Cook.

Read more ...

The 17th of April is the International Day of Peasant Struggle. On April 17 1997, after three months of protest for the defense of Mother Earth and for the cultivation of the coca leaf in Bolivia, seven indigenous peasants, including a child and its mother, were massacred. Today is the day, around the world people come together to network on how we can intensify the mobilization for the rights of peasants everywhere. This post is offered in memory of those who have and who are struggling for access to land.

I recently read On Guerrilla Gardening: The Why, What and How of Cultivating Neglected Public Space by Richard Reynolds. It is a beautiful book full of fantastic photos of guerrilla gardening around the world. There are a lot of helpful and practical hints, tips and suggestions as well as the history of guerrilla gardening around the world. This book is a great resource as well as a fun coffee-table book, not often do you find a practical coffee-table book like this one, I highly recommend you read the whole thing, but just to get you started here are some of my favorite passages from this fantastic book:

Read more ...

After reading Anna’s positive experiences with the GAPs diet I ordered the book and have just finished reading it, I have tried a lot of diets over the years especially after living in a moldy apartment in Wellington, NZ which has resulted in problems with my digestive tract ever since. November last year was a month of non-stop rain here in Vancouver, BC and with the temperature change, was the perfect breeding ground for mushrooms, mold and yeasts. As a result our health problems reared their ugly heads again and showed us that we still have an overgrowth of harmful yeast in our systems. In some ways this is good because we at least know that we need to deal with it.

Read more ...

I recently came across a very special book called The Feng Shui Cookbook: Creating Health and Harmony in Your Kitchen by Elizabeth Miles. Although this book is small and easy to overlook it is a very different breed than the glossy-food-porn-coffee-table cookbooks that we see so much of these days. Elizabeth Miles has done an incredible job of condensing a layered and vast amount of information and experience into a very handy and practical guide to conscious cooking.

I have heard about Feng shui for years but never really looked too deep into it, so reading this cookbook has been very eye-opening for me, she gives a very good description:

Feng shui is the ecology of flow, the architecture of energy. Based on the idea that good fortune results when people live in balance with their environments and their inner natures, feng shui has been praised as an environmentally sound practice that emphasizes respecting rather than tampering with nature. Today, this ancient and intuitive idea is so forgotten as to seem revolutionary. -p4, 5

Read more ...

Food Security & Sustainability: For The Times Ahead by Harvest McCampbell, published by Bio Diverse Press in May 2008 arrived just in time.

This book is a level headed and comprehensive look at what is coming our way. Without fear-mongering and trying to get rich off of your fears, Harvest McCampbell provides a wealth of resources and practical steps that you can take to prepare for the transition that our world is gearing up for.

Harvest shares her vision of a Green World that her Grandmother passed down to her, and makes us consider how we would survive if we woke up one day in a world without asphalt or cars. In this book Harvest shares her answers to the question her Gram used to ask her when they were out in the woods gathering wild food and herbs.

“Maybe today, maybe when we get back to where we left the car, there will be no car, there will be no roads. Then what will we do Little One?”

In a few simple paragraphs, Harvest McCampbell filled my head with visions of the Green World her Gram spoke of and my heart with a secure feeling of hope. This book points to how we can each help each other to find our way through the mess we have made of things by working together with respect and confidence.

Read more ...

I bought this book when I was a student at Wellpark College in New Zealand. It was 2001, I had fled the U.S. of A in 1999 after working for Clean Water Action and reading several books about the amount of genetically modified foods being unwittingly consumed in America. I was taking classes on nutrition. I had just completed a certificate course with the Institute of Optimum Nutrition in UK and was unsatisfied by the conflicting information various groups promoted.

Nourishing Traditions is in a certain sense equivalent to The Joy of Cooking which is a book home-cookers have relied on for years. It has comprehensive information about all the food groups and also brings attention to the importance of conscious cooking and the transmutive powers that cooking with love and respecting where the food comes from has on healing our bodies.

In 2002, I went to a course with Sally Fallon, the author of this cookbook. At that time the information that she included about fats and many other foods was extremely controversial. In fact even one of the teachers from my school, which is at the cutting edge of health, massage and traditional healing modalities, was offended by the information Sally gave about butter. Ghee has been considered a nourishing food for thousands of years in Ayervedic cooking.

Since that time I have seen the slow transformation of the industrial health industry to begrudgingly begin to admit some of the information they have promoted for the past 30 years is incorrect. Traditional and live-cultured foods have been wrongfully slandered and repressed. This book is a must have for anyone who has kids or is having trouble having kids.

I cannot stress enough how much I recommend this book, it has been my favorite present for weddings, birthdays or for any other reason for the last 7 years. It is worth every cent, I personally guarantee it.

Follow this link to more information about traditional diets and how bad processed foods are for your body. These are notes from the seminar by Sally Fallon mentioned above.

Read more ...

Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD

Medicinal Stories that Nourish the Soul

A culture that requires harm to one’s soul in order to follow the culture’s proscriptions is a very sick culture indeed. This culture can be the one a women lives in, but more damning yet, it can be the one she carries around and complies with within her own mind. -P189

Women Who Run with the Wolves is a very powerful book that I have found very helpful at crossroads in my life when I had to look deep into myself and understand who I was. I know there is a huge community of women who have also been supported by these ancient stories and the poetic way that Clarissa Pinkola Estes brings them to us. I would love to hear from you. Please feel free to post your favorite quote(s) and what they mean to you (or not) in the comments section.

I have been a South Park fan since episode one, but I will confess, they hit my button in the episode which mentioned Women Who Run with the Wolves. It is time my secret came to light–I get annoyed just thinking of Cartman badmouthing this sacred book, on the other hand, I also take this as a good sign–South Park is doing what it does best, pointing out where we take ourselves too seriously. If you have seen this episode, don’t let it deter you, this book is worth more than gold…

Read more ...

An Introduction to Myanmar Cuisine by Ma Thanegi

I had a great opportunity to meet Ma Thanegi, the amazing lady who authored this book, while in Myanmar (Burma). She is full of the spirit of adventure and has had some amazing experiences in her travels that she shares with vibrant energy. She has also written other books and articles that are also definitely worth reading.

This cookbook is the best I have come across so far about Burmese food. It focuses mainly on the food of the Bama people and not the other ethnic groups around the country. It lists the main ingredients used in Burmese food and describes how to use them, and it teaches you clearly how to make a wide variety of Burmese dishes. Absolutely fantastic book and worth every penny. I highly recommend it.

The following is from her introduction, which she has given me permission to post, and really shows the spirit of Burmese hospitality:

In Myanmar, to be Ei Wuk Kyay which means to be hospitable, is the criterion of perfect social behavior. Our food culture is based on sharing: with monks to whom many of the Buddhist Myanmar offer food on a daily basis and on special occasions called Soon Kyway and sharing lunchboxes among school friends or colleagues at work. Food and drink are offered free on special religious days in a ritual known as du Di Thar. Travelers stopping by a village would be welcomed to share a meal at the monastery if not at someone’s house. It gives not only joy but great merit to feed others with a generous heart, and this Buddhist concept rules the social life of the people.

Read more ...

Hypoglycemia: A Better Approach

By Dr. Paavo Airola (1977)

I know you might be thinking “Why not choose something more up to date?” Dr. Paavo Airola was addressing a conditions that most other Doctors were ignoring or attacking, at that time. I found this book a very interesting read with that perspective in mind. It is a good place to start if you are interested in hypoglycemia. Over the last 30 years or so, hypoglycemia has become a household word and much of what he says is now common knowledge.

It is also interesting because the AMA etc are still doing the same thing they were doing then-insisting that certain conditions are non-existent and later doing a complete 180 degree turn-around. We all know today that hypoglycemia is not an imaginary state of being. It is rampant in our societies today, often a pre-cursor to diabetes.

If you have a condition that the medical establishment won’t acknowledge, don’t feel like you are the crazy one. This is a well established pattern. In fact the establishment is proving itself insane under this definition of insanity: repeating the same mistakes over and over again, expecting to get a different result.

Dr. Paavo Airola recommends a diet for hypoglycemia which is included in this book. He also recommends avoiding high protein diets, because of the strain they put on your calcium resources and your adrenal glands. He highly recommends brewer’s yeast for hypoglycemics.

Read more ...