How To Create World Peace

This topic conjures up images of beauty pageant contestants with Vaseline on their teeth a la Miss Congeniality. But I think it's something worth talking about, especially on Memorial Day weekend. I think when most people imagine a solution to war, they think the answer is something big like massive demilitarization or huge programs donating massive amounts of money to fight hunger and poverty. But I think the answer is much simpler and smaller and more powerful than that. It's so small and simple that it probably sounds trite and cliched.

I think the only way to achieve world peace is for us to have peace in our hearts.

To me, having peace in our hearts means that we do things to create a better, safer existence for others. Sometimes that means not fighting. When we forgive someone who has wronged us and move on with our lives, we have peace in our hearts. When we choose to work things out with our spouse instead of fighting each other, we have peace in our hearts.

Sometimes it does mean taking up arms. There is a remarkable story in the Latter Day Saint Book of Mormon about a people who were very war like and thirsted for bloodshed. They eventually became Christians and realized how sacred life is and how evil it is to thirst for the blood of another. They made a covenant with God and promised that they would never go to war again, not even to defend their own lives because they were afraid that for them, this might lead them into sin again. But several years later, another tribe came to war against them and began slaughtering their people in the streets. They knew they needed to defend themselves, but feared that doing so would endanger their souls. However, they had many sons who were in their teens to twenties who had not entered the covenant since they were only children at the time. These young men went to war so that they could protect their people and give them a safe life. They had peace in their hearts, even in the midst of war. This reminds me of something I once heard in a documentary about the Marine Corps. A retired Marine officer said that probably more so than anybody, Marines hate war and that until you have been to war and seen and experienced it, you can't understand how terrible it is. But as terrible as going to war is, he said that he and his brothers at arms were willing to do it because there are people who threaten the safety of America and her people.

And that's the amazing thing. We don't have to wait for external conditions to change for peace to exist. I think some of the greatest peace the world has ever known has been during times of conflict. Just look at people like Corrie Ten Boom, Viktor Frankl, John Rabe, and Oskar Schindler. Someone like Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg had to have peace in his heart to endanger himself with a plot to assassinate Hitler and try to end a war that he saw as a waste of human life. Members of the Resistance in Europe had peace in their hearts as they took immense personal risks to fight oppression. Ironically enough, sometimes people who say they want peace more than anything have war in their hearts, like those who persecuted soldiers returning from the Vietnam War, or extremists who bomb abortion clinics. In fact, if we wait for the world to change before we feel peace, we will be waiting a very long time. Having peace in our hearts leads us to be the change we want to see.

The other amazing thing about having peace in our hearts is that it can spread if we let it. When we raise our children with love and acceptance and love and serve one another, we are contributing to world peace. I can't think of any cruel dictator or serial killer who says he had a happy and secure childhood. Saddam Hussein's mother tried to abort him and let him know every day that he was not wanted. Hitler hated his alcoholic father who terrorized his family. So the flip side of this is who knows how much suffering has been averted by people showing genuine love and kindness to another? That is the way to achieve world peace. Maybe the best way we can celebrate Memorial Day and honor our soldiers is to find ways to create more peace in the world.

How To Eat Coconut Well On A Budget

Coconut cream concentrate. I LOVE this stuff! We like to use a lot of coconut milk and coconut butter around here and this is a very healthy and cost effective way of doing it. Coconut cream concentrate is also called coconut butter and is basically coconut meat and oil that has been dried and put in a jar. The fabulous thing is that you can add 1-2 teaspoons of it to some water and make coconut milk, however you may want to add a little more for extra richness and flavor. A small 16 oz. jar of coconut cream concentrate will give you 96 servings of coconut milk (at 2 tsp. per 8 oz. of water) for about $12. Wow! It keeps really well too, we will be buying a large jar for food storage after our current one runs out. I use coconut cream concentrate in candies, Hot Pink Breakfast Smoothies, and also when I make Thai and Indian curries. We bought a jar about six weeks ago and even with heavy use it's low, but still not out yet. I'd estimate a 16 oz. jar will last about two months. I buy it at Good Earth, a local health foods store in my area. Make sure that before you use your coconut cream, you warm it by placing it in a bowl of hot water and letting it melt inside the jar, then stir the meat and oil together.

Another great coconut savings is buying bulk unrefined coconut oil from Mountain Rose Herbs.  We use it as lotion, deodorant and in cooking, so one little jar doesn't last us very long and adds up really quickly. So we go to Mountain Rose Herbs and order their 5 gallon bucket of coconut oil. (They are a business focused on supplying herbalists and natural personal care products, so I imagine they probably thought the only people who would be using 5 gallons of coconut oil are those who make and sell body butter, but it's the same stuff in the tiny jars at the grocery store, so it's completely edible and very high quality.) This requires some money up front (about $250 plus shipping, unless you are REALLY lucky like I was once and they had it on sale for $80), but is well worth it because even with heavy use, one bucket lasts us about 8 months. Unrefined coconut oil keeps very well for months on end, so again, it is a great food storage item.

Malamute and I really like buying things we normally eat and that keep well in large quantities because it insulates more from financial ups and downs. If we have large quantities of something on hand, then even if we meet with tight finances, we have some extra food to see us through. We are really excited to start building our food storage, so I will probably have a couple more posts coming on this topic!

The Hunger Games

Last week Malamute and I took Duckling and went to a double feature at the local drive-in. We saw Mirror Mirror (pretty good) and The Hunger Games (WOW!). We were so impressed that we started reading the book. I'm generally quite skeptical of hugely popular books, but this one seemed to have a fascinating premise and to the potential to be tale about the triumph of the human spirit, so I had significantly more hope than I did when I picked up Twilight. (But that's another post for another day.)

The Hunger Games has been a little hard for me to read. There are a lot of things that hit very close to home for me. The part where eleven year old Katniss and her family are starving and she has nothing to give them until Peeta throws her some bread brought back a lot of feelings I have kept hidden away for years.

One of the interesting things Malamute and I have been noting is how much food there is outside the fence. There are berries and greens and animals to hunt. But most people stay inside the fence because they think they can't get any food out there or that it's too dangerous. Remember in the beginning how Gale says that they could just leave and go off in the woods and live off the land? Katniss says it's impossible. But it's really her own thinking that is keeping her inside District 12. All of the problems she brings up to Gale could be overcome.

Another interesting thing I wonder about is how things would change if all the people of Panem could provide their own food for themselves by homesteading. If they could have their own food, the Capitol would lose it's big weapon. But the people of Panem are convinced that they can't provide for themselves without the Capitol and the price to pay is the Hunger Games.

It makes you think, doesn't it? But then that's why everyone is reading this book in the first place.

Green smoothies and Self confidence

I'm trying to blog from an old iPad right now with no keyboard, so this will be short. Iam really starting to enjoy green smoothies after almost three years. I have found a bunch of recipes and got Robyn Openshaw's Big Book of Green Smoothies and I have been having so much fun trying new recipes! I can't wait to make new smoothies now! It's been a while since I started the self acceptance experiment and I still have ups and downs, but over all, I feel better. I don't think I'm such a loser any more. And I know better things are coming. (why am I blogging from an iPad, you ask? Duckling ruined the battery on my ancient laptop, so I am on a first generation iPad now. Be patient with these posts as I try to figure out how to blog without my beloved laptop Agnes.) =)

Confession: I'm Starting To Love Raw Beets

When I was little, my mom decided that the best way to deal with our family's low income was not to get my dad more career training, but for her to start working at cheap daycare centers. Of course that meant that while she was babysitting other people's kids, someone had to babysit my brother and sister and me. Thus, my siblings and I spent a good portion of our childhoods at the cheap daycare centers. It was in these shacks full of unhappy children and impatient women that I was first introduced to beets. Canned beets are a cheap food, so they were found in abundance at meal times, even though no one wanted to eat them and the bright red, denatured vegetables always ended up in a bucket with unwanted milk and peas. They smelled gross, looked gross, and tasted gross. I thought I would hate beets for the rest of my life.

Then Malamute started eating raw when I was pregnant and he brought beets home from the grocery store and started putting them into smoothies. I thought beets tasted like dirt. It wasn't until after Duckling was born and I tried Agi's Raw Foods Ginger Beet Flaxseed Crackers that I found anything with beets that I thought tasted good. Slowly, I began to like roasted beets with spices. Then a couple of months ago, we started drinking Green Smoothie Girl's Hot Pink Breakfast Smoothie. Those Hot Pink Smoothies were good. Last week, I found myself craving Hot Pink Breakfast Smoothies and especially looking forward to the raw beets. Then, I found a recipe for a "traffic light" smoothie wherein the red light consisted of raspberries and half a beet. I had to make it. Had to. And it was soooo good! I made a Hot Pink Breakfast Smoothie that day too and I had one today. I think I'm getting addicted to these beet smoothies.

As much as I hate to admit it, Dwight Schrute and I have one thing in common: a love of raw beets.

The Food in Your Backyard

You may not know it, but there is probably food growing in your backyard already. All those pesky "weeds" are actually good sources of food! For example:

Dandelion: Monsanto (the creators of Round-up) don't want you to know this, but dandelions are highly edible, nutritious, and of course, easy to grow! All parts of the dandelion are edible: the leaves, stalks, roots and even the flowers. We all know what dandelions look like and they are very easy to find. Sometimes people mistake cat's ear and dandelion because they are very similar looking (the difference is the leaves; cat's ear has leaves with rounded teeth), but not to worry because cat's ear is also very edible and nutritious. Just about everything from the dandelion family is edible.

Shepherd's purse: Another easy to find "weed". Again everything is edible on shepherd's purse, though I've read that the heart-ish shaped seed pods are tough and hard to do much with, they won't hurt you. Tincture of shepherd's purse is actually great for controlling internal and external bleeding, even hemorrhaging. Though the tincture and extract should not be consumed by pregnant or lactating women, for actual eating purposes, the leaves, roots, stalks, etc. are fine.

Mallow: This is a plant you have probably seen all over the place. And all of it is edible! Through a rather labor intensive process, you can even make marshmallows from it.

Those suffering from nature paranoia are quick to say that eating wild plants is dangerous because there are some plants that look so much alike that even experts can't tell them apart and that you will eat something poisonous and DIE. Not true. There are always differentiating factors among plants. For example, let's take chickweed (edible) and scarlet pimpernel (poisonous, odds fish!) Initially, they look very much alike, maybe even identical to the untrained eye, but when you turn them over, you'll see that scarlet pimpernel has black spots on  the underside of its leaves and no fine hairs, unlike chickweed which has fine hairs and no black spots.

Let me also take a moment to address the John Krakauer/Into the Wild issue. No one has done more to slander wild foods and foraging than John Krakauer. In his book Into the Wild, Krakauer relates what he calls the true story of Christopher McCandless, a disillusioned rich kid who decided to head off into the Alaska wilderness and live off the land. According to Krakauer, McCandless mistook a poisonous plant for an edible one and dies. The over dramatic drivel was made into a movie by Sean Penn which has since perpetuated the myth of dangerous foraging. It should be noted though that a) the autopsy of McCandless's body showed that he died of starvation, not poisoning, b) McCandless was not an expert forager, and c) John Krakauer is full of crap. After seeing the way he represented Mormons as dangerous, backward, benighted cultists in his book Under the Banner of Heaven, I didn't hold out much hope for an accurate picture of wild foods in Into the Wild. And unfortunately Mr. Krakauer delivered.

Finding good quality plants is easiest up in the mountains where there are fewer pollutants and toxins. Last year, Malamute, Duckling, the dogs and I all went to up to Sundance and picked some of the most delightful dandelions I have ever tasted. It's possible to find good edible weeds in urbanized areas, but you have to look for places like abandoned lots that are away from busy roads. (Unfortunately, a lot of edible plants grow off of freeways and busy roads. Don't eat them unless you are starving because they have been sucking up car exhaust for months.) Make sure the land hasn't been sprayed either. Sprayed dandelions are shriveled, shrunken, gnarled looking things. Don't eat them. They don't look appetizing anyway. The area where I live has exploded in development over the past 15 years, so it's been a challenge finding places to forage. However, I found a housing development with several vacant, unsold lots off of the road (thank you 2008 housing downturn for giving me places to forage!) The weeds are growing beautifully with no indications of spraying, so I will be heading there to forage.

It is crucial to find good information on edible plants before foraging. I highly suggest John Kallas's Edible Wild Plants as a superb place to start. If you've ever wondered how to make pizza, omelets, soup, salads and tostadas with chickweed, wild spinach, nipplewort, and curly dock, this will teach you.

The Moon Landing: It Happened

Apparently more and more Americans are starting to believe that the moon landing was a hoax. It wasn't. It's a subject I've researched extensively and to be honest I find most of the people out there crowing about Apollo 11 being a hoax to be insufferable kill-joys. No matter the evidence to the contrary, they insist that mankind's most wondrous technological achievement could never have happened. I find it sad. There are a number of great articles (and a Mythbusters episode) out there refuting the arguments of the hoax proponents, but the funny thing is how much common sense evidence is right in front of Americans' faces:

• Real conspiracies don't stay quiet- People can't keep their mouths shut when there is a juicy secret. For example, the FDA has not been able to keep its former employees from telling the world about the dangers of MSG and artificial sweeteners. The cattle barons couldn't keep Oprah from doing a whole show devoted to their mistreatment of animals and people with footage obtained through secret cameras and willing slaughterhouse workers. And while Bernie Madoff committed ultra-secret fraud for decades, even he was caught. There's always a whistleblower, an investigative reporter, witnesses, victims, and inconvenient photographs. Most of the conspiracy theorists seem to think that the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs were made up of a few government types, a few scientists and the astronauts. The reality is that it was a massive undertaking that required thousands and thousands of people. (Take note, that means thousands and thousands of jobs. Forget the stimulus, let's head to Mars.) There were rocket scientists and engineers in Huntsville, NASA controllers in Houston, staff at Cape Canaveral who actually did the launches, engineers and factory workers from various contractors and subcontractors like Grumman Aerospace, Pratt and Whitney, Beech Aircraft and North American Rockwell to assemble the massive amounts of necessary equipment, the astronauts who crewed the missions, back up crews, doctors and medical staff, families who lived on base, and then maintenance staff to keep the whole thing running.   In the fifty-some-odd years since the space program first got going, none of those people have come forward purporting to have any credible evidence that the moon landing was a hoax. Which means that all the "evidence" of a hoax comes from people who have no first hand experience or involvement whatsoever with the space program.
• Qualifications? And along those lines it should be noted that among the conspiracy theorists there are few experts in film, photography, physics, or engineering. Which means that the "evidence" for arguments in favor of a moon landing hoax comes from people who are not qualified in the fields in which they are claiming special knowledge.
• Kaput! And finally, if the moon landing really was a hoax, the stories of the space program would be a whole lot slicker without as many mistakes. Like we would have faked footage of the Apollo 12 landing to keep us peasants happy and believing in the government's awesome power. But we don't have any footage from the Apollo 12 landing beyond a big white flash and then blackness because astronaut Alan Bean accidentally pointed the camera at the sun during the live broadcast. (This was a big disappointment for my dad. He was crazy about the space program and was over the moon- no pun intended- when the Apollo 12 landing was set to take place on his birthday. He got up early to watch it and was subsequently disappointed when the camera was fried and the news media had to ad lib the rest of the broadcast.) If the moon landing were a hoax, the Apollo 13 disaster would not have been broadcast for the whole world. When you are trying to pull the wool over people's eyes and impress them with their government's supposed awesome power, you never, ever, ever release stories of weakness and disaster. You only tell the good parts. Case in point, the Soviet space program started out with a bang, but couldn't keep up with the US. Rather than tell their people that the Americans had superior technology (and quality control), they simply hushed up a lot of mistakes and deaths as best they could. The deaths of some cosmonauts weren't actually confirmed until the information leaked out after the Cold War ended. In contrast, every mistake of the US space program was broadcast for the world to see. Washington was so infuriated with the fatal Apollo 1 fire that they almost pulled the plug on the space program right then and there.

So have a look at the original footage of Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon and take a moment to enjoy the "Wow!" factor. =)