Great Grandma was right when she said, “You are what you eat.” Too bad she was already dead by the time most of us came along. Since then we have come to believe not in the wisdom of the ages, but in the goddess of convenience.

Real food is what the body was designed to eat: fruits and vegetables, nuts, beans, legumes and, yes, even meat. Our modern food system is attempting to trump thousands of years of evolution. How can we believe that health is sustainable with a diet from cheap fast-food chains and highly-processed TV dinners? Clearly we have been brainwashed since GG died and need to realize that chemicals do not a food make.

In Part 1, I convinced you that the topics of food and modern day digestive disorders have everything to do with homesteading. In my own experience, looking back to old world recipes has had an incredible impact on my health. I know so many who have become lactose and/or gluten intolerant, other bodies that are cholesterol-excessed, diabetes-driven, or too readily fat-absorbed. Nearly every complaint, ailment, and disease from arthritis to zits, and dare we suggest cancer too, will someday be traced back to diet, I am quite convinced. Getting back to nature has “cured” countless people of these modern diseases of the digestive system.

I am not a doctor or nutritionist or any other kind of health expert, but I do have a personal experience with several of them. I was having digestive issues for several years that seemed to be getting worse, so I did what most people do, I complained, and agonized, and made excuses, and eventually went to the doctor. A specialist actually, gastrointestinal.

But I also did what not so many people do, I went to a nutritionist as well. These two experiences were like night and day.

In the specialist’s office I waited about an hour before a nurse ushered me into another room to take my vitals and invited me to wait again for the doctor. The doctor spent about five minutes with me, and repeated back to me the same information I had just written on the form. He asked me not one single additional question about my diet or lifestyle before rattling off the long list of tests I would need before I would make an appointment to see him again. These started with extensive blood work and ended with a colonoscopy, and would take several weeks before he would see the complete results and be able to make a reasonable prognosis. I knew I couldn’t wait weeks before beginning to consider possible causes and solutions.

So I made an appointment with a holistic practitioner, a “nutritionist” as she was forced to rename herself after several legal encounters that sounded oddly similar to those malpractice issues chiropractors used to encounter so often. In her office I also waited for nearly an hour, but she immediately apologized for that, and she then took my vitals. So far not all that different from the experience at the specialist’s office, minus the 20 or so patients crowding impatiently in the specialist’s waiting room.

But that’s where things went totally different. She actually read my form and asked dozens of questions based on what I’d written. She peered at my tongue, into my eyes, and examined the beds of my fingernails. She told me on the spot what she thought was wrong with me: intolerance to both wheat and dairy. (NO! I inwardly shrieked, That can’t be!) She advised two herbal medications and told me to read the book Eat Right 4 Your Type. She suggested some simple blood tests to make sure there was nothing more serious happening. I left her office feeling informed and empowered and ready to take action, a very far cry from the irritation and confusion and general helplessness I felt when leaving the gastrointestinal specialist’s office.

I was devastated that she might be right, but thrilled that she gave me something I could try right away. I immediately checked out the book from the library and read it in two days. I started taking the herbal remedies she mentioned, and kept a food journal. I thought I could go about two days without my two favorite foods, three tops, but that was all. Life’s too short to sacrifice so much!

But within two days the symptoms that had driven me to the doctor had disappeared. That gave me the motivation to go three days, then four. She was onto something, the book was right, I felt amazing! After one month other symptoms I thought were totally unrelated also began disappearing. By the time the secretary at the gastrointestinal specialist’s office called to remind me of my follow-up visit, I laughed in her ear and said, “But I’m already CURED!”

After the first year or so of strictly following the diet laid out in Eat Right 4 Your Type, I was totally sold. According to the author, whose father had begun researching the effect of foods on different blood types during his own life, all people with Type O blood have some level of intolerance to wheat and dairy. This causes inflammation, which in turn causes many other symptoms, which in turn become diseases: arthritis, IBS, allergies, fibroids, the list goes on and on.

For me, and a lucky few, total abstinence is not required. Knowing you can still eat your favs makes a huge difference to your perceived deprivation quotient (that is of course only if you haven’t developed to “real disease” stage yet). Whenever I slip and thoroughly enjoy a baguette with Camembert, the symptoms return. But at least I now know why! That is an incredible feeling of empowerment. Just like when you overindulge in alcohol, you get a hangover; there is no mystery there, you know it will go away in a day or so. When I stop ingesting what my body considers poison, the symptoms go away.

Three years later it doesn’t feel like such a sacrifice anymore, because my health is so much better. I have found substitutes I love, and it has been a fun learning experience searching for new foods and recipes. It’s part of the reason I truly believe in the homesteading lifestyle, or any other back-to-nature ideals. The incredibly long process that takes our crops from the fields to our tables has gotten way out of control. We have seperated ourselves so completely from the process of creating our food that not only have we accepted our ignorance, but our bodies are at full-on war against us.

Processed foods rely on many of the same ingredients: wheat, dairy, corn, artificial flavor enhancers, preservatives. But we still go to the medical doctor for the issues that should be solved by a dietician, nutritionist, or natural health practitioners, because they do not require a medical doctor to prescribe yet another medication. The Food & Drug Administration combines foods and drugs for a reason. While this is logical, it is also ironic: nowadays the drug and chemical companies are making sure the foods we eat require more of the drugs they sell.

Don’t pop another pill, make your meals from scratch!

Fascinating food documentaries:
Food, Inc.
King Corn
The Future Of Food 

It was a lot harder to take down than it was to put up: one action physically taxing, the other, emotionally. It was midnight, and I was alone. It was a tough decision finally made after too much wine. To see the lights go out, all the needles falling at my feet, to see it in its decrepit and withered state, past death, just a dried up reminder of a sparkling vision. I hope you can understand my pain. It didn’t even make it until the week of Christmas. The cost of a metal tree stand: $1 at the second-hand store. But I just had to have one homemade, of wood, far from seaworthy.

When it was going up, well, by the end it had taken days. But it was crafted with more love than any tree I’ve ever decorated. It was the first tree of our first home. That’s right, at 41, I consider this house my first home. I have owned other houses before, and my family house growing up was certainly a lovely home, but it was not mine, and those others were investments, not real homes. This one is it, the simple country fixer-upper that cost about $25,000 once you subtract the land price.

Like the house, the tree was also a fixer-upper. “Frankentree” hubby dubbed it instantly when he learned the process he would need to help with: drilling little holes in the side of the trunk so we could fill in the gaps with additional branches to make it look fuller. The tree came from our yard, a small cedar, not exactly the full-figured, richly green variety specially grown as Christmas trees. Nothing new was purchased for this tree. The pièce de résistance: popcorn and cranberries painstakingly strung together by me, the woman who hates sewing more than any other activity and gets an insta-migraine simply from threading a needle.

Frankentree it was, but I keep thinking of the old Dolly Parton song, “Coat of Many Colors.” That song makes me cry. Maybe you remember it? It’s about a poor girl who is teased at school for her handmade coat, but she doesn’t care, because she saw all the love that went into making it from the throwaway scraps they’d been given. That’s how I felt about that tree. Dolly’s song will live forever, but alas, the tree is already gone: the homemade stand didn’t allow for water, which I knew would be a problem, but I just had to try it anyway.

A tree that doesn’t last until Christmas, well, under any circumstances at all, I guess I cannot call that a success. But was it really a failure? I lost a lot of hours on that tree. But did I really lose them? For me, the measure of success for my time or labor is always weighed in the experience, and the experience of creating that tree in this home was the most memorable of my life. It’s sad to see it come down prematurely, but next year I doubt I will try to replicate it in any way. And that brings another song to mind, one that defines my life as much as The Coat of Many Colors defines Frankentree. It’s by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, “I’d rather regret something I did, than something I didn’t do.”

Goodbye Frankentree, you’ve shed your last mess on this floor. But, you did teach me something very valuable: I will never try a homemade stand or string popcorn and cranberries again for the rest of my life. Frankentree will remain unique forever. 

Allergies, Intolerances, IBS? The typical American diet is truly, well, let’s be totally frank here, it’s disgusting. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE the comfort foods: mac & cheese, burgers and dogs, pizza, BBQ, all of it. At one time in our recent past, these were good foods. Sometimes you can still find them that way, or better yet, create them at home yourself, from scratch, not from a box. Nowadays, the crap that passes for these “traditional” American foods should not be called food at all, they need another word entirely, one that means they have been processed so completely that only the form, some remote part of its original shape or appearance, make it something that once resembled something we should be calling food.

You may think the topics of food and modern day digestive disorders have nothing to do with homesteading, but you’d be dead wrong. Homesteading is a lifestyle founded on self-reliance, especially concerning our basic needs. Luckily when you live in the south, food can trump every other need, including shelter. We camped for two winters while building our cabin; we were cold, but even then we never ate convenience foods, except maybe once, when days of rain kept us from cooking so long we were forced to heat up canned soup on the propane burner inside the tent. Looking back now with the smell of roasted chicken and garlic wafting through the room while the temperature outside is already dipping down into the 20s, we laugh, “How did we do it?” We laugh some more when the pup whines at the door, because now he is also already spoiled by the warm fire. I really don’t know exactly how we did it, but there’s no doubt, we even liked doing it.

You can’t even begin to consider yourself self-sufficient if you open your freezer door to a stock pile of convenience foods rather than foods in their “natural” state. Controlling as much of the food chain as possible solves the primary homesteading issue, at least philosophically: If I need it, I want to be able to produce it, or at the very least, have the knowledge and skill to do so. It also solves a practical homesteading issue: For one thing the doctors are far away, but mostly I really hate doctors’ offices, hospitals, clinics, and every other place that is full of sick strangers and reeks of antiseptic. That is a fantastic motivator for staying healthy.

The closer our food is to its source, the more nutritious it is, period. There are digestive enzymes, delicate minerals and vitamins, probiotics, all kinds of good stuff that I will admit I have no real knowledge about, except that THEY WORK!

I am a case to prove it, and so are loads more folks. Being the lifetime cheese and bread lover any Francophile would be, when I had to give them both up it was, well honestly, at first it was just plain murder. But by “giving them up” I found that I really didn’t have to surrender them totally. I simply had to change their position on my menu. They could no longer be at the top, right after water and wine, they had to be way down there somewhere between rarely and only during PMS.

So, how did I, and so many others do it, and without the help of convenience foods or modern medicine? Check back next time, and I’ll reveal all my secrets.

Three startling facts that have little to do with you: The Roman Empire went to war on hemp, and I don’t mean they were high, but it could be they smoked the closely-related plant as well; hemp is among the oldest cultivated plants known to man; hemp was farmed in this region as recently as the 1940s.

Three startling facts that have everything to do with you: As a fiber hemp is easier to grow and has more varied uses than any other existing fiber; hemp could easily and cost-effectively replace trees as the world’s renewable source for paper production; hemp seeds are as nutritious and variable as soybeans and require a fraction of the pesticides and herbicides.

The outlawing of this highly useful plant is now well-known to have been a combination of government coercion and misinformation, sold after-the-fact to the public by that good old-fashioned stand-by: propaganda.

But this is not a “hippie plant” any more than cotton is. We are doing an incredible disservice to its diversity by tangling it up so closely with the drug version of Cannabis. “Hemp-fests” and “hemp exhibitions” are rarely more than barely-masked covers for the legalization, growing, and usage of Ganja. These are two completely different issues that we are succeeding in creating more confusion and alienating potential support from farmers, politicians, and older folks who wish to disassociate themselves from the drug.

The first home to be built of hemp in the United States is now under construction in Tennessee. Like medical marijuana, many states are in the process of passing their own legislation in order to grow hemp industrially. Congressman Ron Paul is among the most prominent and vocal advocates, going as far as to propose that the plant could become the next “Gold Standard.”

While I agree wholeheartedly that the plant must again be made legal, Paul unfortunately is not going far enough. By clarifying “industrial” hemp in his legislation he is not proposing that you and I could grow hemp for food, fabric, or any other of its legitimate proven uses, but rather it could be grown by industry. The individual, small-scale farmer, or self-sufficiency-crazed folks like myself would need a special license. So, while he is taking a long-needed step in the right direction, he is completely ignoring the real hemp hypocrisy: it is a PLANT! It is a harmless, incredibly useful, non-toxic, non-mind-altering PLANT. Just as I am “allowed” to grow soybeans, or tomatoes, or cotton, so should I be able to choose to grow hemp. DUH!

George Washington said, “Make the most of the Indian hemp seed, and sow it everywhere.” I’d love to Georgie Boy, but it is illegal, can you imagine?!

Some Hemp Resources

Video: The Hemp Revolution 
General Information 
Ron Paul on Hemp 

The knives come out again, and handy hubby begins the sharpening ritual. This time the beast to butcher is not an ugly feral pig but a spectacularly graceful deer, maybe the very same one I gaze at often from my office window. I am forced to deal anew with my own hypocrisy and those attitudes and habits born of convenience.

The “cute” animals, why is it so much harder to eat them? Why don’t we consider dogs or horses to be fair game at the table while other cultures do? Why do so many more people eat and enjoy turkey, than say, rabbit? Rabbit meat is delicious, taste kind of like ... chicken.

We don’t have many deer around here, not nearly as many as you would think, and I wonder why that is. I’ve seen more deer grazing in the suburbs of the east coast than I have ever witnessed on the vast acreage and sprawling countryside of all East Texas. Is that because we are over-hunting them? Or because they don’t appreciate sharing their wilderness space with cattle? Or because the coyote take down too many of their young? Or are there just as many of them hidden from sight – necessarily more wary of humans out here than those in the east coast suburbs who know they won’t get shot?

Hours, days, yes, ok, an entire lifetime could go by ruminating over such questions, which always take me back again to why I consider these issues over the plight of the cute deer, but not of the ugly pig?

Once I’ve had enough of such mental flagellation, I relate these thoughts to handy hubby: I know he will put it all into perspective for me. His eyes screw up after my five minute soliloquy where I again repeat maybe I should not eat animals, I am not willing to kill many of them or even see them killed. It is terribly hypocritical, and I should be ashamed that I can live my life in such a way! There’s no logic to eating the ugly animals only, so evidently the only logic is to eat none of them.

The vultures and crows are squawking “die, die, die” as they circle over the deer’s entrails. Handy Hubby listens absent-mindedly while carrying in parts of the carcass. When I am at last done and leave a space for his reply, he cocks his head back over his shoulder, a hind quarter balanced on the other one, and he says, “So because I have no interest, aptitude, will, or sense for growing cucumbers, I better stop eatin’ ’em, it sounds like, and by your kind of logic I have to give up veggies in general?” He LOVES a good broccoli almost as much as he loves a good steak.

Hmmm? Moral issue aside, he does have a point there. Doesn’t he? Well, he at least presented a whole new side to the argument I had never before considered.

Ah, handy hubby, thank God there’s men like you to keep women like me from analyzing ourselves to death.

Like most folks in this country, I grew up giving so little thought to the elaborate process of how food appeared in the grocery store chain that I may as well have believed it were miraculously grown, raised, killed or harvested right there in Kroger by the checkout girl herself. Like so many of us, I grew up on frozen pot pies, canned green beans, macaroni and cheese, and bologna sandwiches on Wonder bread.

Recently I have begun to understand the challenges and rewards of producing some of our own food. This Thanksgiving, after only eight months here, we would be able to serve our entire dinner from food raised right here on our property. It would not be a traditional meal, but it would be delicious: wild acorn-fed pork, sweet potato pie, garden fresh salad of arugula, tomatoes, broccoli, and 3 kinds of peppers, and a fresh green bean and spaghetti squash casserole (this last dish would be thanks to our closest neighbor’s more successful fall garden). For dessert, well, perhaps a melon medley could suffice, since our fig and pecan trees have died. Other fall garden failures were the Brussels sprouts, cabbage, beans, and romaine. All this was grown (and not so well-grown) without the use of pesticides or herbicides or chemical fertilizers. We could feed our family this Thanksgiving, but what about the rest of the county, let alone the country?

We hear how tough farmers have it and that is no doubt the truth. Still, as a society, we separate them physically, economically, and sometimes intellectually from our mainstream world. Our pop culture relegates the farmer to silly, stupid roles in shows like Green Acres, or that ridiculous reality show with Paris Hilton. We villainize him for needing to make a decent living at his work, without stopping to think why those providing our very means of survival deserve to make a fraction of what your average NYC stock broker might earn. Do you have any clue who works harder? We criticize the farmers for everything from pesticide use to land erosion issues without any effort to first try to see realistically into his reality. So few of us have any clue at all of what the farmer’s world is like that we don’t realize most young farmers today have college degrees, and advanced degrees are not uncommon.

In truth, life’s not any easier or simpler out here than it is anywhere else, but it suits some of us. Does the farmer tell the stock broker how to do his job if he knows nothing about the market? So why do we all criticize the farmer when we are clueless about growing food? We need the farmer more than we need any other single professional, even the blessed President of the U.S.A. That’s the plain and simple truth.

Thank you, all you farmer families, for providing for us, even while we continue to relegate most of you to the lowest rungs of economic and social status. We need you, we are slowly learning, please be patient with us.