A growing number of Americans are rejecting processed foods and living off the land. Olivia Reingold meets the homesteaders who say ‘things mean more when you have less.’
Bari, this piece got me thinking about school lunches. PLEASE get someone to take that subject on. Like “Sold a Story” and its exposure of reading professionals disregarding proven methods of teaching kids how to read, the travesty of school lunch (breakfast) programs borders on insane. Colorful, sugar filled, additive laden food is dished out to kids on a daily basis (the poorest of which get this “food” for free). Those same kids are then required to sit and listen and learn when such a diet would have most of us either comatose or needing to jump on a trampoline. Each of our states has universities where students study nutrition but their knowledge is never utilized in the school lunch program. We are all aware of the unhealthy state of so many children - why can’t this issue get some play?
Now we have mutilation of children lauded as "gender affirming care" when filling a kid with Fruit Loops and Coke isn't regarded as child abuse. We are living in Bizarro World with a senile imbecile installed as the leader of the free world, dispensing family advice when he presides over the most dysfunctional clan imaginable.
I second Mary's nomination. The homestead kids featured in this article are unfathomably more physically and mentally healthy than an inner city public school kids. Aramark dominates the school lunch market with pure garbage. Coca-Cola, General Mills, Cargill, and other Big Food companies own the FDA which in turn makes recommendations that Lucky Charms is more nutritious than bacon. Meanwhile lunatics like NYC Mayor Eric Adams and The Dutch are pushing meat-free days at schools.
meat-free is absolutely horrific. Especially the Chemically produced "plant based" fake meats like fake hot dogs and fake burgers. Absolute garbage. Nothing but chemicals and more chemicals. No one should eat that garbage. Eat real meat.
If you care about animal welfare, as I do, buy Pasture Raised and Grass Fed. Factory-farmed meat isn't good either. Lots of diseases & antibiotics in those animals.
Part of the "hook" is the bad cop/bad cop polarization that Bizarro World sell's as reality. Hate, mockery, crisis, extreme emotion and the lie replace the real discussion American's deserve. Joe Biden, and his son, are in fact tragic and pitiable figure's trapped inside a rigged game D.C. that cares nothing for them, what the American Presidency represent's, or the people it was put in place to serve. And, the lie is so big and the perp's so heavily invested in it, no one can say or do what is necessary: He is a tired old man in failing mental health who should step down. ---- Then what? Harris? Thank's again to the DNC.
Dear FP friends, not you comprof, please give Gordon Comstock substack page a look. He has just posted an essay on Hunter the junky's "art" work. Gordon's web pages are will designed and thought out.
Give it a look. I have nothing to gain from this shameless plug. I just like his site.
Took our kid diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome out of public school (where she was fed fluff and low-fat chocolate milk), put her on a clean high fat no dye diet and 80% of the ticcing went down within 2 months. Added in lots of outside play during school hours and she is now a healthy adult and does NOT have Tourette’s. Passing the fight on to a new generation.
This is exactly what Andrew Wakefields original study was about. He was a gastronomist (gut doctor) no an anti-vax crusader. He published a peer-reviewed study in the Lancet talking about how cutting wheat out of autistic kids diets led to improvement of their autistic symptoms. He only tangentially mentioned that the symptoms had started after vaccination, and he only included that part bc the parents of the kids he was studying strongly urged him to do so. It was purely a diet based study. However the mere mention of vaccines led to to the Lancet rescinding the article under pressure from big pharma, and his co-authors of the study (7 other scientists) disavowing the study and excommunicating him from respectable science.
Both the guts microbiome and possible pharmaceutical influences play a heavy factor in children’s autistic symptoms.
It’s a tough road. I homeschooled my kids and then in high school when my son brought in a “healthy” lunch he was literally vilified by his peers. After a month or so he was refusing most everything I made. Sad.
Great idea. I recently moved to Japan and my third grader now looks forward to his school lunch--and the kids have to take turns on serving and cleanup duty! Living abroad in a society that will never really accept me is hard but getting my son out of US public schools was worth any price.
Hmm.....just imagine if maybe....just spit-balling here.....America tried some ideas from other countries, so maybe people wouldn't have to move abroad?
Hi again Comprof2.0! Actually I taught in public schools and a private school. At the time, the cafeteria ladies made the food in the cafeteria and I ate lunch there quite a bit, it was pretty good. Now the lunches are made in a central kitchen and have more processed food in them. No thanks.
Cynthia, Comprof is a troll. He was already banned once (a very hard thing to achieve here!), hence the 2.0. Interacting with him is pointless. This is an instance where "don't cast pearls before swine" is the best policy.
Oh right. I remember Michelle & her proposal for 10-dollar-a-pound baby arugula rather than 99 cent a pound butternut squash, the latter being more nutritionally dense.
Hey, Steven - if you've got a problem with school lunches or the American food system, why don't you go live in a 3rd world country and see how much you like it there?™
Eh? I agree with your reply to Jim; the existence of your comment and the existence of the article prove Celia M's lie. I'm English by the way; I look at ALL things American with a jaundiced eye.
And then there's the one about the statistician who drowned in a lake an average of 1 foot deep. Why does relative vs absolute risk come to mind. Rochelle & Tony used it to great advantage.
My husband works in Asia and I raise our sons in a small town in Canada. It’s not been an easy life but the path has made all the difference to who they are as young men. We went to Japan this spring and I was so relieved to see a very functional society on planet earth. Both Japanese and Koreans are exceedingly proud of their bloodlines and culture and, like you, my husband has never been fully accepted, but we are nuanced enough to see many sides as to why. Diversity really doesn’t seem like a good deal in the West now but both Japan and Korea will absolutely need immigration to survive with their birthrates......complex situations. Good luck with your Japan life and I hope it continues to serve your family. There is much to learn from these cultures.
In the very near future, low birthrates might no longer require immigration. There will surely be countless former white-collar workers whose jobs have been lost to AI and who will jump at the chance to staff the nursing homes.
every society has its "quirks" Japan too like tying women into intricate sexual poses in front of a paying audience for sexual pleasure.you can be the "rigger" or the "rope bunny". and ancient Japanese porn would have you believe every Japanese man has a penis so large it must be carried by servants in a wheelbarrow ( not true .. ask me how I know) I cannot speak for Canada other than you have a leader who looks like a pervert
What’s the point of this comment? Adds nothing to the discourse here. I guarantee every single culture has its own set of weird sexual perversions. We just seem to think that it all should be accepted and adopted into every corner of public life in the West now without discernment. Traditionally we have separated the sexes and adults and children in the sexual sphere for very common sense reasons until a minute ago.
Thats a shame. Sorry if you moved just for your kids sake. I do respect Japanese culture a lot for the way they have respect for authority and hard work highly valued. At the same time theres a lot of degeneracy in the culture there between hyper-consumerism, obedience to the state, and weird sexualization of inanimate things. I hope you enjoy your time there but please move back to the US at some point. All humans that love liberty must stand and fight for the US bc its the only battleground that matters in the war against global techno-tyranny. Japan is not safe if the US falls, in fact its more far gone than we are in many regards.
This whole issue is in dire need of investigative journalism. There are billions of government dollars going to school lunches, and that new food ranking made clear that there is some serious lobbying and rent-seeking going on in that world.
Dont get me started in the new food ranking! It claims that artificial egg replacement is healthier than real eggs! It also claims that general mills cereal is extremely healthy. How dumb do they think we are??
To say nothing of the exorbitant waste. I volunteered in my son’s elementary school lunch room and the children were required to take everything served which included fresh fruit. It hurt my heart to watch all the completely untouched apples, pears, oranges, etc. dumped into the trash….day after day after day!
Yep. Food for the body!! But, a least part of the spiritual/physical/mental malnutrition afflicting America is failure to feed the Soul. America is culturally rich and diverse. In a little over two centuries it has produced some of the greatest mind's, art, literature and technology the world has ever seen. But unless the citizen was connected to it before the DNC/CCP Davos fascist's began their war on "we the people" one would never know.
I’ve seen murder mysteries where they use the fact that pigs and hogs eat literally ANYTHING as the means for the killer to dispose of the body, the clothes get burned and the body goes in the pen with the animals, nothing is left, not even the hair or the bones.
And if I’m not mistaken, the fact that pigs/hogs are dirty eaters is why Jews and Muslims don’t eat pork. I think the animals get infested with parasites where if they’re not “processed” correctly eating them makes you sick. 2,000 years ago the only way to keep people healthy was to make it a sin to eat pork. They didn’t know yet the best way to process the meat.
So yes, they would eat the children. Dead or alive, they’ll eat humans along with whatever else you throw in the pen.
It makes me sad because you know that's the parents' faults for not serving normal food at home.
Kids should LOVE fruit. and Veggies. My 3 kids LOVE fresh fruits & veggies. Eat them everyday. When kids are infants, they all love fruits and veggies, which are the main ingredients in baby food. If parents feed their kids normal food (and themselves eat normal food), then the kids will keep loving fruits and veggies. The problem is parents who begin serving their kids crap junk food so the kids stop liking fruits and veggies.
Dinner at my parents' house was meat and veggies (green vegetables, often from the garden, not potatoes). I grew up thinking vegetables were a normal food, not something "icky."
I know some parents who always make something like mac-n-cheese for their kids to eat instead of whatever the adults are eating. They're setting the kids up for a lifetime of picky eating and poor nutrition.
My kids ate what we ate from the time they started eating solid foods. No "special" meals prepared for "little darlings." Once they were old enough to fix themselves a sandwich, they had the option of going in the kitchen and making their own dinner, which they almost never did.
When I was in elementary and junior high, we had real food for school lunch, cooked by women who were hired for their skill. In high school, the real food was largely replaced by fast-food options, but at least they were being cooked at the school.
I was stunned by my kids' lunch menus (which were provided to parents monthly, so "picky eaters" could be planned for). Not only was everything highly-processed "kid friendly" junk food, most of it was fried. And this was being supplied for both breakfast and lunch.
I was even more disappointed to learn that this "food" was prepared in a central district kitchen, then shipped to schools to be reheated on site. Instead of having nutrition specialists, school cafeterias were staffed by poorly-paid, part-time workers.
A few years back, I saw pictures of school lunches in European countries, compared to the Obama-required "healthy" lunches (which removed everything appetizing from the menu, but didn't really address the real issues). The European lunches looked more like what I ate as a child.
American elected political leadership (as we witness daily) is compromised. The tax dollar hog trough doesn't care about education, children or the American future. It is self-interested and selfish. At this moment American infrastructure and cities are in collapse, the DNC (which serves international corporate fascism) has captured and weaponized the Justice Department, the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. Remove the DNC from our neck's and replace the bureaucratic apparatchik's who serve them and we can begin a recovery. A well fed, well educated, empowered American child directly connected to the moral principal's and history that inform's his life is the last thing thug's want.
Mary, please review Michelle Obama's well-meaning effort to upgrade the nutritional quality of school foods. Nutritionally, they were A+ but consumer acceptance (students) was a giant F. We need education of young parents to expose their kids to better foods and minimize the junk.
The "health" requirements of those lunches excluded a lot of healthy foods, usually due to having a fat or sodium content just a tad above the limits. Creating tasty food with the allowed ingredients was a chef-level challenge, and the meals were not being made by chefs. I've never been a picky eater, but I can't blame kids for rejecting what amounted to a pile of low-flavor, poor-texture ingredients.
Our local elementary schools offer an annual "Lunch with Grandparents" day. I was appalled when in the second half of the lunch period an announcement was made for "Seconds". Nearly all of the kids went to the lunch line to purchase junk food products from Frito-Lay and others. I suspect the food was donated, and the proceeds used to boost the school's budget. The bigger issue is the programming of the kids to learn to eat junk food instead of healthy fare. I watched as much of their healthy lunches brought from home was discarded in favor of these second servings of junk.
I'm a mom of 3 kids & my oldest in 2nd grade so the story about the reading professionals disregarding proven methods of teaching kids how to read, was a good one for me. Very relevant.
I don't allow my kids to buy school lunch. My 2nd grader packs her own lunch, with my supervision. She makes a sandwich, a vegetable (cucumber is her favorite) & a fruit everyday. Snack is Cheerios or Goldfish crackers or pretzels.
Yes!! I have even approached our daughter’s elementary school teacher, but she wasn’t interested in how to change the menu. As a parent, aside from packing, I’m lost at how to change this system.
Its astonishing to me that ANYONE still trusts the CDC and NIH. They didnt get most of it wrong: they got ALL of it wrong, and given that their mistakes blatantly contradicted well known and long established SCIENCE, it can only have been on purpose. They all knew better. They were just told to lie, and they did.
And never forget the demonization of HCQ, which has been given to hundreds of millions of people yearly since 1955, with no problems. It is safer than aspirin—MUCH safer—and functions to get zinc into your cells efficiently.
And Ivermectin: its discoverers won the Nobel Prize.
And why did Big Pharma need to sideline those two medicines? BECAUSE THEY WORK, and if any nedicines had been advanced that worked, their gene therapy jabs would have had to go through normal safety testing, and it seems none of them would have passed.
More generally, I understand these homesteaders. Modern life is toxic physically, emotionally and spiritually.
The CDC website now also refers to ‘people’ who give birth and suggest that men can take hormones to stimulate milk production and that is perfectly safe for the infant. How can we trust them on ANYTHING if they publish this blatant misinformation?
Imagine approaching a pandemic where, for the first time in history, the healthy were quarantined and sick people were injected into nursing homes where the most vulnerable resided? And our media called the buffoons "epidemiologists" and "health care experts."
And governor Cuomo was tossed out for being a little handsy with the ladies, not a mention of ordering the sick into the long term care homes, a crime against humanity.
That was one of my first hints that the people in charge were not serious. We used to have a quarantine system, run by county health departments. The aim was to protect the public from sick people.
Lockdowns wrecked the economy (which I'm sure was the intention) without actually protecting anyone, since people in Covid-struck households were not prevented from going out during the few times the well were allowed to go out.
I agree with everything you say except your first paragraph. We know that Big Pharma only cared about profits but we won’t know the motivations of the key people at CDC and NIH without the application of real journalism and effective cross-examination. I suspect most are true believers or were afraid to go against the grain.
It is my belief that that most people panicked and accepted what the media told them. I did not get vaccinated because i know it takes decades to develop safe and effective vaccines. I took zinc and in the winter vitamins A, C and D. I am at my high school weight and exercise every day. I have not had so much as a sniffle. I did have a sore throat one night. I gargled with salty water and it was gone by the next morning.
I have rejected processed foods and excess packaging for 55 years. It is not revolutionary. It is the application of uncommon sense.
Anthony Fauci is in videos you can easily look up saying masks don’t work either as PPE or what is apparently known as Source Protection. Both individually in separate interviews.
And that is across the board. Don’t get me started on masking children.
And a key member of the British advisory panel said they knew in FEBRUARY of 2020 lockdowns would kill more people than they saved. And they clearly did.
And Fauci and others were perfectly aware HCQ was safe. The study they used to denigrate it was written by a fraudulent and shadowy company called Surgisphere, which was seemingly CREATED for that purpose, and all of whose “data” was fake. The Lancet had to issue a retraction. But Fauci never mentioned the retraction.
No: all of it was 180 degrees out of phase with known best practices and good data of long standing.
No explanation but willful and orchestrated deception explains the facts. Fauci is a mass murderer.
I can't believe I am quoting RFK Jr., but he is right to note BigPharm stood to lose $200M if effective, cheap treatments like HCQ, Ivermectin, and Quercetin+zinc were allowed. The Emergency Use Authorization requires that "No other treatments can be available."
I trust individual medical professionals that follow the scientific method, but NOT.ONE.INSTITUTION that takes government money. They all do due to Medicare and Medicaid, be aware.
If you read The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert Kennedy, as I did, you would really respect him - 900 pages, 2000 footnotes & not one fact disputed in a court of law. He did the world a favor by revealing Fauci's evil & corruption but was ignored or vilified by the MSM.
He's come around on that. Listen to his current views. He no longer believes 'climate change' is a problem. However, he's still very involved in cleaning up the environment (water, air, soil).
That's good to hear. That's probably closer to where I stand.
I still feel like I fall under the conservationist/environmentalist umbrella to an extent, but Climate Change™ seems like a purposely vague term that can't be proven or disproven, by design. It serves no purpose other than to consolidate governmental control of utilities.
Will do. Guys like him and Trump authentically say it like it is against 'The Narratives' perpetuated by people in power and their media arms(I repeat myself).
Not really. He is BUILDING his reputation. It was trash before; we were taken in by the soundbites; we forgot to "trust, but verify". I thought because Joe; JFK; RFK; and Ted were bigots I'd helicopter, RFKjr was cut from the same cloth but with an extra dash of swivel-eyed loony.
I'm Aspie and there was the simplistic accusation he was anti-vax and supported a load of unsubstantiated, even disproven umpty times, bullshit about Autism. He didn't HAVE a reputation six months ago. Then the levee broke...
Some of what he runs with might still prove bull; but that is the point: on a whole lot of medical and science topics either the research hasn't been done; done properly; or the results have been skewed.
If not for Faucists; the CCP; Wuhan; and Kung 'Flu, RFKjr would probably STILL have no reputation to lose. Mind, the God-Emperor would be 2/3 thru a triumphant second term.
Agreed. I trust his research on vaccine's and autism over any other at this point(which includes his sources). He was just interviewed by the insufferable, neo-con Hannity and he shut Hannity up on several topics and it was glorious.
History reveals Joe K to be a corrupt asshat, JFK to be an above average president who was getting too close to organized crime and the CIA(I repeat myself) so he had to be killed, and Teddy to be another spoiled, connected killer of Mary Jo. I will celebrate Teddy's 14 year of sobriety next month. What is the saying: a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality? I praise RFK Jr. overall.
"we won’t know the motivations of the key people at CDC and NIH without the application of real journalism and effective cross-examination." -- Both receive funding from BigPharma. 'Nuff said.
Occam, anyone? HCQ and Ivermectin had to be silenced because they were cheap. Never never EVER fail to consider the economics. Same reason the bigs were so desperate to get their swill into... infants!!! Made me literally sick, that did. And does. And the sewage is slowly, slowly leaking from its containment.
They were not just cheap: the law prohibits issuing Emergency Use Authorizations if existing medicines show efficacy. The jabs mever would have been approved if HCQ and Ivermectin had been seriously tried on a wide scale.
True; there is an ever-growing rap sheet that ranges from the expedient to the outright evil. But I submit that the bucks-to-billions incentive is, alone, sufficient.
It wasn't that bucks-to-billions was incentive, it was the "it's good to be helping" authority that morphed into "gee, this is fun; we want more of it" that got my hackles up
They get it right. You just don't understand that they don;t have an interest in your health. Their goal is to maintain the govt/phrama cycle just like the military-industrial complex. Look at in that light and they are highly succesful.
I saw a report last evening that a billion dollar's in currency has disappeared off the streets of Australia and the government is pushing central bank digital dollar's hard as it can. The DNC is the face of the CCP/EU/WEF juggernaut in America. The dotted line connection to the propagandist CDC, NIH and Wuhan all speak to an international criminal financial cartel trying to overlay a CCP style social control model on Western Democracies. This article doesn't mention the now year's long battle Dutch farmers (2nd most productive in the world) have been engaged in to prevent the Davos/EU crowd from seizing their land and destroying their livelihoods. (And we shouldn't forget that the grandfather's of these farmer's comprised the underground that fought the Nazi menace in WWII.) Remove the DNC and maybe we can de-weaponize our Justice Department, the CIA and the FBI. And, prevent the weaponization of the total weaponization of the IRS.
I am aware of no discrete studies that showed efficacy of the drugs you mention in the context of preventing or lessening the effects of Covid-19. Could you identify some for us?
Otherwise, your screed seems much like a screed.
Don't get me wrong, I too wonder why anyone would trust the CDC or NIH on anything. File their statements in the "That interesting" file until other, scientifically rigorous evidence comes along to back up what they have to say...
Being the first to opine is not THE seal of approval. And being the first to opine is often being the first to be wrong.
And can you REALLY ask seriously why no supportive studies have been published in the United States?
And to be clear, both HCQ and Ivermectin (and Quercetin and probably Artemesinin) act to get zinc into cells, so they work best as part of medical “stacks”, which also ideally include Vitamins A, C and D and according to many, an antibiotic like Z-pack, which all act as anti-inflammatories.
Outside the very old, the death rate from COVID should have been even less than the fraction of 1% it actually was, and very close to zero.
no sorry you are incorrect. all ivermectin is the same. the dosage is different and it does have some anti viral properties and it is not just for horses.. stop the misinformation please
No, I am absolutely correct. Because I never said there were "different" types of Ivermectin. I just said, stupid MAGAs were going to feed supply stores and using that kind....which I actually have no problem with in retrospect.
So....I'll say it again: Ivermectin is for intestinal worms/parasites. It is not an "anti-viral."
So, now it's Ivermectin COMBINED with something else.... got it. Hmm....it would seem the Zinc, which helps the body fight of infection, would seem the be "the real MVP" of this combination, right?
The truth is: Ivermectin is an anti-parasite drug. Covid is not caused by a parasite.
So....probably get better results just taking Zinc, if you don't want to get vaccinated.
If people were interested in saving lives, then they should have supported vaccination, then maybe they wouldn't have gotten the "Herman Cain Award."
Oh, I am GLAD you mentioned "vaccination". I was afraid we would get away from that. This will be my last post for a while, since I have a life, but I'll check back in the morning and engage indefinitely on this.
Here is my question: given no other information, which medical remedy would seem safer: one that has been given to tens of millions of people a year for thirty years and which underwent traditional FDA approval; or one which was rushed through trials which were only allowed by Emergency Use Authorization, and which use a technology--injected genetically engineered mRNA--that has never been in widespread use anywhere, and which has killed hundreds of people within ten minutes of getting it?
Why do you attack the first, whose worst trait might be inefficacy--although the data is good that is works well--and defend so vociferously a medicine which after six months makes people MORE vulnerable to COVID that those who chose not to participate in these Phase 3 trials?
Not precisely. It was FDA approved for—and won tge Nobel Prize for—River Blindness and Elephantiasis specifically. It is listed as “essential” medicines for both by the WHO.
But my cousin has been on HCQ for Lupus for twenty years. Is that bad? I literally cannot follow the contortions you are impelled into by an inability to tell or admit truth.
So, to be clear, you oppose the use of HCQ for Lupus even though it was proven to a help a lot twenty or more years ago?
And because you probably dont know this, I will point out Lupus is an autoimmune disorder, which is not a virus.
And HCQ helps with Rheumatoid arthritis which is ALSO not caused by a virus. Should those prescriptions be stopped because you know something the doctors prescribing them don’t?
Please do reply, because I am enjoying this, and am far from done. I have simply learned that with yiu the best process is to ask one question at a time, watch you avoid it, point out you avoided it, respond to your latest Red Herring then continue throwing logic and facts out until you quit or I lose interest.
Yes or no: should off label use of HCQ be stopped?
I'm going to make a general comment for the one or two other people who may be reading this. This "logic" is so fantastical, so ludicrous, that I really think it is properly schizophrenic. The author has lost all touch with reality testing; and of course a genuine and open concern for truth was lost long before that.
When I use the S word, this is precisely what I am talking about. They speak word salads that make no sense, and if you are confused, it is not your fault.
As far as I can tell, you need a prescription from a doctor for the human version of ivermectin. My hairdresser was put on ivermectin when she and her whole family got Covid in 2021 (none of them were vaccinated). I think the doctor gave it to her husband and teenage children, but maybe not the 6 year old. The adults and teens were sick as dogs, flat on their backs for two weeks, but the 6 year old didn’t have any symptoms (just a positive test). She had lingering symptoms for about a month afterwards.
When I got Covid after vaccination and booster, all I had was a sore throat for 2 days that I attributed to allergies. The only reason I knew I had it was because I was in Amsterdam after a cruise around the U.K. and Ireland, and I needed a negative test to fly home. I stayed in Amsterdam for 4 days and got a recovery letter from an online doctor in Italy so I could fly home after my hotel stay was over. My husband tested negative and continued to test negative, so as far as we know, he never got Covid.
I have no knowledge as to why people or doctors think ivermectin works with Covid. But I kind of doubt it would have saved all those hundreds of thousands of people who were overwhelming the hospitals and dying on ventilators in 2020.
www.c19early.com The evidence for its use in a stack of medicines and vitamins is very good.
But how would best practices--dosages, intervals, stacks--evolve when the doctors involved risk losing their licenses in the first case in American history of off label prescription being Verboten by the AMA (which is also patently corrupt)?
I know many people who have taken Ivermectin. Not one had a problem. COVID did not even scare me enough to try and get some. I've had, I think. all three of the major variants. None of them even slowed me down, except the first time, where I had to sleep an extra 4 hours.
This whole thing is ludicrous. It is beyond astounding to me that people who paid for college educations can be buying any of this nonsense.
Any port in a storm. I've a friend who animal rescues; they've built a huge vetinary knowledge base from that. Contrasting that with human medicine, human medicine very often loses. Except for us, animals can't talk or talk back. Leads to a lot of very different conclusions often times. Your mouse weighs a few ounces; an elephant a few tons and you can't do one fits all.
Folk aren't daft, even you are cogent some of the time :-), if we can't get it packaged for us we'll get it packaged for horses and adjust the dose as neccessary. It isn't as if we can't access that info: we've ALL got the WWW. Plenty of folk stood up and made the resources available or linked to it.
When I saw figures from Southern Africa, I thought "WTF, these should trend markedly the other way. Something is not right here; I'm being sold a pup." Ivermectin proved to be the missing link; when you normalised the data accounting for it, the anomaly went away.
Even more died or were injured from "vaccines". IF you fire up your browser on 'phone; tablet; or PC, a couple of clicks will get you the right information on Ivermectin and Hydrochloroquine.
Could you say the same for the "vaccines"? No; the research hadn't been done and the data wasn't there. It didn't exist yet.
There will ALWAYS be folk who do no due diligence; don't read the label; or only half listen to their doctor. Folk who will take Asprin over Paracetomol because the former seems to deal with pain better will give themselves stomach ulcers and die from them, for example.
The Alphabet public health agencies prevented doctors from prescribing it, didn’t they? But only for COVID. They could still prescribe Ivermectin for scabies—which is also an off-label use—all day long.
Think about it: both HCQ and Ivermectin were prescribed throughout the pandemic by doctors for anything BUT COVID. But where COVID was concerned they risked losing their license.
Why? why would health professionals be prevented from seeking solutions in the biggest engineered disaster in human history outside of war? Why? I just tomd you: these infernal gene therapies COULD NOT HAVE BEEN APPROVED if doctors had been permitted to do what they were trained to do.
Ivermectin is not horse paste is it? Its discoverers won the Nobel Prize.
And using medicines off label fir new conditions is STANDARD PRACTICE, and has been for at least a hundred years, but has likely been a standard since Medicine existed.
Are you also upset HCQ is used for Lupus and Rheumatoid Arthritis? Are you upset Ivermectin is used for scabies? Those are off label uses. The FDA only approves medicines once for one condition but every day in every doctors office in the country scrips are written for off label use of FDA approved medicines.
And HCQ was approved in the 1950’s and Ivermectin in the 1980’s.
You are spouting illogical and actually harmful nonsense.
Compost is trolling as usual. its common practice to troll this way. But of course we have lots of medicines that were developed for one thing and found to be helpful for other things, happens all the time when they start testing a drug, sometimes there are good side effects observed, like the little blue pill was developed as a heart medicine, blood pressure, and ended up being a "chubby" med of choice.
A large portion of FDA approved medicines are used off label.
The whole METHOD for dealing with new illnesses was distributed learning, which is what you get when you allow people with 12 years of college, or something like that, to use their professional judgement.
But the people responsible fir disease control and protecting public health wanted to make this pandemic WORSE, not better. And they succeeded. Most of them, along with the people who bought them, belong in jail.
Those same "christians" are rabid gatekeepers over who can be allowed to be considered Christians. Believing in Jesus Christ as one's Savior is not adequate in their minds. I'm LDS, and my Catholic friends and I trade stories about how we're "not Christian" all the time.
She may have been using the interviewees’ own terms. If someone tells a reporter she is a Christian, or a Catholic, should you not write that? If it had been primarily a religious event, maybe you would be digging deeper into the meanings.
Yea, its still very common colloquially for OG protestant christians to say “catholic or christian?”. I mean Protestant Americans had a fear of Rome influencing America since the founding, so the reconciliation between protestants and catholics didnt really happen until the 1960s Id say. In the South, you’ll hear this nomenclature a lot more. The average evangelical would also consider Mormons, Jehovah Witness, and several other denominations to be different than themselves. There are significant theological differences between evangelicals and catholics so its not really that surprising. A lot of people raised protestant just dont know bc there’s no catholics in their hometown. Not a gaffe on the author’s part, just a reflection of some people’s attitudes
Yup. I converted to Judaism (from Lutheran) in college. My father volunteered to call his holy-roller Baptist brother to break the news. Brother paused after hearing it, and said, "He's Jewish? That's fine, Jews, they're all right. As long as he's not Catholic."
To rewrite Dean Martin, "Everyone hates somebody, sometime . . ."
Depends if you are the Pope or Billy Graham. From eaches perspective; the other isn't a Xtian.
From the perspective of someone who has read the NT with a critical eye, ALL Xtianities are heresies that aren't actually Xtian. If you take what individual Catholics; Lutherans; or Calvinists, etc. tell you about their Xtian beliefs, hardly any adhere to the official creed of their particular cult.
I have mentioned before in a previous story, in a previous comment, my grandparents in southern Italy basically lived the life of farmers in every sense of the word. My grandfather grew everything. Tobacco, hazelnuts, fruit, corn that fed the chickens that gave them the eggs, that they would sometimes kill to also eat. The yearly slaughter of the pig, etc. on and on. My mother used to say when she was growing up there she and her grandmother would make cheese almost daily, "We had cheese as much as we had daily bread", my mother used to say - To this day it's one of my favorite quotes from my mother. These people are rich, rich in food and life.
Every summer I would go there and visit. I would see how hard work it was but I was extremely envious because the food was amazing and nothing like I was getting back home in America. They were growing and raising all the food they needed.
It was a very simple life. There was an Italian saying about the less you have(in material things), the happier in life you were. Sure, money pays the bills, but there is a lot of truth in that saying.
So I am not surprised at all with this article and what's happening in America.
My husband's family lives in Eastern Europe, and we take the kids to visit every few years. Some live on a cliffside in a little hut, and they have an olive grove, almond trees, raise lots of chickens and goats. They have giant clay amphorae filled with their own olive oil and always send us home with a lot. Others live in a walled villa with citrus and apricot trees and huge gardens with lots of eggplant, tomatoes, squash, and beans. Everyone makes their own house wine. We go for weeks, eat everything fresh, and hit the beach when it gets too hot. I'm not a beach person, but there you can find one with one or two other people, and I can swim and stay for hours. I'm convinced the combination is why so many people we know there are in their 90s and still going strong, still working outside, still sharp as a tack.
That was once village life in Texas. Nobody went hungry. It is still present across parts of Mexico. The psychology of "plenty"--that is, the human moral reason that spring's from hard work and direct connection to the Earth and the Season's. We should remember that our Constitution was written for a nation of self-reliant farmer's. I once heard the AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT leader Russell Means say that the issue of our time isn't human right's but natural right's. That is, can you get food, water and shelter independently of the Federal Government. It was a prescient statement. Our government has been compromised and captured, by most notably a corrupt DNC, and serve's an international cartel of corporate fascist's. The COVID lockdown was a test run. After the 2008 looting it further weakened the American economy, unleashed the social/economic chaos surrounding us and set up the manipulation of the supply chain's that provide us with food and supplies. They fully intend to bring us to our knee's. The DNC war on speech and freedom parallels the Davos inspired thought crime arrest's and prosecution's now taking place across Europe. The free people's of the world are under assault.
Wondering why it was necessary to connect people genuinely concerned with our diet and food supply with the fringe elements of society. Because it is becoming increasingly clear that processed food is unhealthy, even our produce and meat is lacking because our soils are depleted and our meat is improperly fed and processed, our medical community knows virtually nothing about nutrition and our captured government pushes idiocy such as the discredited "food pyramid." So, although this article was mildly interesting, it almost trivializes the true problems with health in our society and the obesity and auto immune epidemic that is far more deadly than the "pandemic" that turned our nation on its head due to the nitwits we had in charge of it. A health profession and government that is captured by big pharma and agribusiness is antithetical to America's health.
I think that it's because we didn't used to think of these kinds of people as fringe elements. They were definitely a minority, but they weren't vilified by the MSM as they are now. I remember as a kid in the 70s in No. California that there were tons of people who were doing this exact kind of thing. Mother Earth News was a popular magazine for those wanting to live a more agricultural lifestyle. We thought of them as being "crunchy, granola types", but not as weirdos to be mocked or looked down upon.
These days anything that makes a person less dependent on "The Experts" (these days I always feel that should have the TM symbol next to it) and the government is painted as fringe to try and marginalize its impact. If they can subtly make a reader mentally tie them to genuinely fringe people like The Duggars or vaguely mysterious polygamous sects, then they can also make a reader skeptical of them in general.
My parents were part of that movement in the 70s (and they continue to live it to this day). It was big--"living the good life." Lots of people followed Helen and Scott Nearing, Eliot Coleman, who branched off and did his own thing and is still going strong up in Maine. It brought a lot of different people together--a lot of my parents' friends who did it were hippies or strongly libertarian and just didn't want to do things the "normal" way, others had religious reasons, some were survivalists. And most everyone else said "hey, do what you want to do."
Now, not so much. Someone told me a while ago that Facebook had warnings pop up on pages teaching people to grow and preserve their own food, saying the content might be a sign of extremism. And strangely, the Department of Agriculture wants you to register your garden because they want to foster a "more diverse and resilient local food system to empower communities to address issues like nutrition access and climate change."
My parents dabbled in it - 100 chickens, 50 turkeys, 3 goats, honeybee hives, fruit trees, a 1 acre garden, 45 acres of land with an artesian well - but they always kept their "regular" business, as well. They finally gave up the hobby farming when the business began to consume so much of their time that there was not enough left to make farming pleasurable to them anymore.
My parents were not "crunchy" by any measure, but they were children of the Depression, and from families that had been dirt poor even before the Depression. They grew a large garden every year. It was not any kind of "statement" for them; it was simply what they did.
Yes. It was what my family did, too, along with aunts, uncles, friends, and neighbors. The rural working class in the small town in which I grew up couldn't afford to "hire out," so they attended to food production and most repairs and maintenance themselves.
My dad got his picture in the Denver Post in 1928, when he was 12 years old. He had turned a vacant lot into a plot of corn taller than he was, all by his own efforts.
My parents generation and older were all farmers. All had big gardens and did canning every fall. They all butchered their own animals. My generation mostly doesn't farm anymore. Some of it is corporate farming. You can barely make a living on a small family farm unless you are growing animals for Hormel. You need big expensive equipment that farmers rent because nobody can afford to buy them. Farming has completely changed and it isn't going back. I think they want everyone in big cities. Noticed during Covid big city people were almost helpless when store ran out of stuff and there was no hamburger in the grocery store or it was $8 a pound. get around that by splitting animals with a friend of mine from local farmers. I buy meat once a year now and freeze it. Much better tasting and I don't car what is in the grocery store. Way cheaper too.
My folks did a lot of this in my childhood because they didn't make enough money to hire other people do it for them. They grew their own produce, built their own home, fixed the well pump and furnace when broken, did most of their own plumbing and electrical repairs, and even dug out and replaced a septic tank and field once when it pooped out, pun intended :-) If a tree fell, we cut it up and dried the wood for the fireplace; even though we had a furnace, when the power went out in winter, the fireplace kept us warm.
We were normal residents of a rural small town. Most of our neighbors did the same. Today it would be "prepping" or "off the grid," but in the 1950s and '60, it was "life."
So true. But the “revolution” works for those few with the means — intellectual, physical, financial — to question and, dare I say rebel. Unfortunately, the government has nurtured generations of people cutting across all demographics who are locked into a system that promotes deadly habits. Awful schools serving three free meals to our kids 365 days a year. Terrible medical care. No-holds-barred EBT cards. Legal pot. Obama phones. All things tech. Now CT’s illustrious junior senator Chris Murphy wants to launch the Office for Social Connection. The list is long of government’s insidious good intentions. How do we spread the values highlighted here? Not one more government program, for a start.
I seriously question the goodness of many of the intentions. There's a CS Lewis quote that tangentially applies -- the most evil is not the Evil, it's the "friend" who's Doing It For Your Own... Good. (One more (possibly) unintended consequence of attempting to kick God to the curb: There is no anchor for defining The Good.)
Chris Murphy - a mole faced malefactor who should embarrass the nutty Nutmeg state but, instead manages to keep getting re-elected despite a record of abysmal failure. Such is life in the Democrat satrapies.
As a serious God-believer who is now raising her own chickens and vegetables (and who loves to hang out with the young famers of my area who now raise and sell their own pasture-raised livestock), I stand tall and proud as one of the "fringe elements of society." : )
This was my thought as well. I don't particularly appreciate the implication that people questioning the almighty FDA are nutjobs and outliers. These people are buying into the way of life that was practiced for millennia, and plenty of people are doing it in their own back yards, it's not just so-called "homesteaders."
We've gone from the federal government encouraging people to grow their own food (google victory gardens or war gardens) to the FDA (or F-Duh, as Joel Salatin calls it) telling us everything we get from our back yards might be unsafe or carry pathogens and we should only eat things that have been maximally processed for our safety.
Meanwhile, we have HOAs telling us that we can only have manicured lawns in neighborhoods and something as simple as planting a fruit tree has to go through layers of approval before it can be blessed by some arbitrary governing body. In reality, many homes have enough yard space to grow a large portion of what they would need to have a healthy diet of fruit and vegetables, if we would just stop expecting every neighborhood to have acres of grass. It's time we wake up and realize that we don't need government intervention to tell us what we should eat, and where we should get it. This isn't fringe lunacy, it's common sense.
Totally agree. I see more and more people (in my suburban/urban area…older neighborhood with no HOA) with patio gardens or small backyard gardens/ fruit trees and shrubs. Definitely not homesteading, but we’re able to grow enough fruits/veggies (tomatoes, beans, carrots) for generally 4 months of the year.
I agree with this. Tired of the framing that anyone who questions received “wisdom” or chooses to live a more challenging and engaged life is a crackpot.
I've got to confess that I smelled a whiff of condescension in this article. I wonder why the author choose a homesteading fair in Idaho (which most associate with White Supremacist preppers) instead of one of the many fairs put on by Mother Earth News. Instead of interviewing Joel Salatin (a long-time MEN homesteading expert who is Christian), she chose to interview people that Leftists could dismiss as religious crazies.
Most of the folks who attend Joel's conferences are also very religious. I know from experience. I, too, live in VA, not too far from Joel. Love him to death. As long as the "religious folks" are trying to burn me at the stake (I'm a Quaker), I love hanging out with them. : )
"Wondering why it was necessary to connect people genuinely concerned with our diet and food supply with the fringe elements of society."
I don't think the author was connecting the two, bur rather pointing out that preppers and homesteaders are NOT loony: self-reliance takes a lot of work, brainpower, and determination that the loony do not possess in abundance.
Great article but I could do without the sneering. The positive elements come through despite the writer’s mockery. Maybe the writer is a vegetarian these sound like very nice, smart people to me.
I would like to hear the honest takes and lessons learned from some of Bari’s writers when they get back to their costal ivory tower ‘mainstream’ lives and truly do some soul searching on their experience with these ‘fringe’ elements of society.
Maybe the biggest learnings are for them, not the reader. Spending time among the rest of us might just teach them something, or make them question what they have been brought to believe by their big government/corporate/MSM overlords.
They come off as dismissive in most of Bari’s recent pieces, because they have been taught as costal elites that they are better than these people. They can’t help it.
They act like they are anthropologists enlightening other elites about this new breed of humans, rather than acknowledging that it’s their own programming and blindspots that they cling to that are, in fact, fringe.
I’ve been critical of some of the blatant political slant creeping into these ‘fringe pockets of society’ pieces of late, but maybe they are in fact moving the needle - Just not as intended. It is my hope that they are opening the eyes of the authors, of Bari and her staff, and that even though they can’t help but look down of these groups, that maybe the interactions chip away at their own elitist-influenced understandings of what is ‘normal’. And that they will be better authority-questioning journalists, and people, as a result.
I agree. It was startling to hear the sneer. I thought, do you eat meat? How do you think it’s produced? They’re very removed from their food’s origins. They’re actually not as clever as they are.
I re-read it to see what you and @TXFrog were talking about that maybe I had overreacted to upon my first read. You’re both right, it’s not as blatant as some TFP articles… which I think inspired my initial thought that maybe the author sees something there that they haven’t been allowed to think out loud within their circles.
I think it may have been the “most are Catholic or Christian”, the Motel 6 reference, and some of the highlighted comments - “vaccine injury,” as one example, that kinda piqued my radar… which is probably a bit over-sensitive these days.
As I read this article I can't identify a single black person, and it reminded me of a conversation I had. I was talking with a friend about my dream to buy some land in a rural area, build a house for myself and other family, and just live a nice life. We're both black, and he said he could never because of racists and that there isnt enough black people in that area. I simply replied with "Im an American too; manifest destiny". Im not sure if he actually understood where I'm coming from, and I partially believe its because he's a descendant from slaves. My parents moved to America from the Caribbean because life was better in America, settled here, and built a life for themselves on foreign land. If I feel as if life is better for me in rural areas, I should be able to do the same thing my parents did. However for him, his family came here unwillingly, so there's some form of hostility.
I see these photos without any black people and I don't see a place that I don't belong, but rather a place where I can be because there are people who I have a common interest in. If I were to view it on the angle of race, it would be a place where I can be a trailblazer in, like my parents were too.
Thanks for this piece. You’ve seen my little dairy herd. We milk one every morning and sell raw milk to many homesteading families in our area. Families who have no electricity, cook on a wood stove, hand wash clothes, homeschool, culture all their dairy from us because it keeps better. I personally think we work our tails off milking, processing milk by making our own cheese and butter, selling or bartering it to other families...hauling manure every day, moving fence line, hauling some more manure...so much manure. but the truth is I’m a soft city person compared to homesteaders. I have electricity, modern appliances, an electric water pump, indoor plumbing. Air conditioning. I can put my tomatoes in the freezer at the end of the season instead of canning them on my wood fired stove in 95 degree heat waves.
I think your style is more common than this article would lead you to believe. I have several friends - mid 30s ish that “homestead” with all the modern conveniences of electricity and plumbing. They raise pigs, chickens, cows, gardens, homeschool and largely live as free of the system as possible. None of them would refer to themselves as homesteaders.
Same I guess. I laughed about the manure comment - so true. I just don’t understand how one crosses from whatever we’re doing to homesteading. Is not having modern plumbing the requirement? Or is it 100% self-sufficiency?
I don’t know either. I don’t even think our off grid customers are 100% self sufficiency because I’ve seen them at the laundry mat. (I would go to the laundry mat too mind you). Maybe it’s self definition.
That, m'lady, is huge. The washing machine may have added significantly to women's life expectancy. Don't believe it? Try washing one pair of bluejeans by hand.
Right? Agreed 100%. I was just illustrating that I consider them absolutely homesteaders but I don’t know why you would want to be, to your physical exhaustion, washing clothes by hand.
Looks like I'll be swimming against the tide, but here goes.
There is more beneficial, healthy, clean, wholesome and unadulterated food in today's world than there ever was and it's available down the street in most supermarkets. The food problem in today's society is an abundance problem, including an abundance of good and not-so-good foods that are fueling an epidemic of obesity and other health problems. (The average weight of a male in the US in 1950 was about 166; today it is about 199.) People need to start making better choices.
And please, we cannot let the recent fiasco with Covid blind us to the fact that vaccines have been a Godsend to the human race. There is a reason why the average life expectancy has gone from 47 years in 1900 to almost 80 years today. It is principally because kids no longer die in their early lives from diseases that ripped through homesteader communities like the Grand Reaper, e.g., measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, polio, to name a few. Within the last month, a vaccine for respiratory syncytial virus was added to the list. (If you don't know how deadly RSV can be, read up on it.)
Stories like this that focus on how idyllic the homestead lifestyle can be miss the larger picture that very few people are cut out for a life of hard physical work, sacrifice and privation. People who could not keep up with the demands of frontier life in 19th Century America found only early graves.
Re: your last paragraph: I think part of the issue here in response to this article is all-or-nothing thinking. You’re either living entirely off grid washing your clothes by hand and raising all of your own food start to finish, total self-sufficiency, or you’re grossly overweight, buying bags of chips at Publix and spending your days sedentary in front of a screen in an air conditioned room with no windows. It doesn’t have to be that black and white! One can certainly appreciate things like grocery stores and vaccines while also recognizing the value in productive homemaking and participating in it in a sustainable way.
That's actually not entirely true. We have more access to calories, sure, but what passes for a vegetable these days is largely devoid of vitamins, minerals, and other essential nutrients. This is also true for dairy, meat, and staple crops like grain. Even far left Nat Geo is willing to admit this (https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/environment-and-conservation/2022/05/fruits-and-vegetables-are-less-nutritious-than-they-used-to-be). Most of this is attributable to glyphosate and nitrogen urea based agricultural that effective desertifies soils into lifeless clods of dirt. If there's no life in the soil, the plants and animals raised on it are going to be far less chemically complex than they would be had they been raised on living soil.
Can't argue with you about the vaccines, but I would argue that antibiotics are probably more of a factor in terms of increased longevity. Modern ag is essentially taking what was a near literal gift from God and turning it into a way to eek a few extra bucks out of a chicken CAFO. And that's to say nothing about what those same antibiotics are doing to our water supply and gut biome.
And Gene, I think you'd be surprised what people are capable of. Take a look at this personal ad from 1865 (https://tinyurl.com/smjz2hpk). I don't think you have any idea what it takes to clear 100 sqft of Aroostook County soil let alone 18 acres - BY HAND. It's densely forested and rocky as hell. Yes, homesteading is tough work but this kid never had anyone to tell him it was impossible. Expectation dictates outcome.
I never lay claim to being "entirely true," but I can't agree with the statement that vegetable these days for "largely devoid" of vitamins, minerals and other essential nutrients. The NatGeo paper you cite is a popular (i.e., soft) science article that provides no real support for the proposition you make.
And it should be kept in mind that the fruits and vegetables that people consumed on the homesteads of yore (1) had to be locally grown and quickly consumed because there was no refrigeration and produce spoiled quickly, (2) had to survive the predictable and uncontrollable infestations of insects, fungi, etc., (3) were highly dependent on local growing conditions such as temperature and rain fall, and, worst of all, (4) took extraordinary amounts of human labor to produce. The fruits and vegetables that made it to the table were those few fruits and vegetables that ran the entire gamut. The last point you make about the amount of labor involved in clearing the land seems to support my point.
I must also take exception with the statement that expectation dictates outcome. It would be more accurate to say that expectations sometimes correlate with outcomes, but nothing more. I am sure that the homesteaders all started with the highest of expectations, but how many expectations turned into disillusions? If a homestead family confronted a significant medical problem for one of its key members such as a major orthopedic fracture, there was no trauma center within easy drive. Events like that could bring all optimistic expectations to a bitter end.
Ya gonna make me dig around on Web of Science, eh? 😉 The nutritional differences is pretty well established. Here’s an article from the Journal of the American Society for Horticulture Science - https://journals.ashs.org/configurable/content/journals$002fhortsci$002f44$002f1$002farticle-p15.xml?t:ac=journals%24002fhortsci%24002f44%24002f1%24002farticle-p15.xml&t:ac=journals%24002fhortsci%24002f44%24002f1%24002farticle-p15.xml. The original publication that established this was from 2004. That’s paywalled, unfortunately. Interestingly, plants that struggle are actually more nutritious. Photochemistry, what gives plants it’s nutritional oomph, is actually enhanced via stress response. A good example is the difference in capsaicin you find between a hydroponically grown pepper vs one that struggled in the Mexican sun. Plant cultivars also play a huge role. I don’t know if you’ve ever eaten a native black cherry or strawberry, but compared to the sugar water filled balloons that passes for modern varietals, the photochemistry just doesn’t compare. Most of what’s in the supermarket wouldn’t be recognizable to Thomas Jefferson in terms of taste and even appearance. Interestingly, plants quick spoilage was a feature for improved nutrition, not a bug. Drying increased the density of plant matter in a recipe and fermentation absolutely exploded the bioavailability of many nutrients not to mention increased exposure to beneficial bacteria. And certainly growing conditions played a factor. Right plant, right place. Our ancestors knew better than to try and grow russet potatoes in Georgia!
And I think you’re taking my last sentence too literally. I was a city kid up until around age 30 and would have sworn up and down that running my own homestead was well beyond anything I’d be able to pull off. Hell, I barely knew which end of the hammer to use. Now, I produce hundreds of bushels of apples every year, raise chickens, pigs, ducks, and rabbits and while I’m no contractor, I think the cabin I built looks pretty sweet. We are capable of far more than we give ourselves credit for. That’s all I meant by that.
I can somehow tell there are very few obstacles on the frontier that would withstand your determined persistence. If I ever needed someone to help me build a homestead far from civilization, you would most certainly be on the short list.
I agree with you to a large extent and see the main problem in the fact that many or most people know nothing about cooking anymore or are simply too lazy. It's just so much easier to fall back on prepared foods with all their additives. My grandparents in Germany over 100 years ago grew their own produce and kept a few pigs, chickens and ducks plus two cows for milk. It was a hard life, and most people don't want to return to it. I also learned to cut the bad bits out of fruit and save leftovers instead of throwing them away (of course,back then, the pigs could eat them). It's really a pity that venerable skills like cooking have largely died out and there is tremendous ignorance about food and its preparation. There is great satisfaction in preparing a tasty and healthful meal,a factor that is often ignored. I admire people like the homesteaders but am sure their lifestyle will never become mainstream.
Honestly that is not fair. We are expected to work, raise children and entertain them with multiple activities. Where is time or energy to meal plan, shop through the abundant grocery store, cook, clean and teach the kids how to cook. It’s not laziness. There is just too much to do in this crazy modern world and not near enough time. It’s hard to pick what to give up when you can just pick up prepared food
I agree completely. People like your grandparents are the exception rather than the rule.
I think the principal problem with this article is that it offers up a conclusion that is not warranted by the data. The proposition is that people who live the demanding life of homesteaders are happier, healthier and more independent than those in the general population. Okay, I'll accept that for purposes of argument, but why is that? Is it because homesteading made them happier, healthier and more independent? Is it because happier, healthier and more independent people are more inclined to go into homesteading in the first place? Is it because those who tried homesteading and were NOT happy, healthy and independent were culled out of the homesteading population under study?
From a psychological perspective, they're probably happier because changing to that lifestyle gave them a sense of competency, mastery of self and over skills, personal responsibility, and autonomy/independence, all things that we desire for "actualization". Some people find it in office work, construction, higher ed, etc. For these people, this was their avenue to agency.
Good counterpoints, balances nicely with the article and the discussion in the comments.
I found this article to be very relevant in light of the autism article of last week. The loss of human health is extremely noticeable in our day and age, but so is the abundance of human health. We are getting so many things right that are helping people thrive, while also getting things wrong that cause people to suffer.
Homesteads and no vaccines, or city living and all the modern medicine one can handle. The real truth of human health is probably somewhere in between. For the time being with my city desk job, that is the line that I am looking for.
Gotta admit, I have given this some serious thought. If I were 28 or even 38 and not 58, I think I would go for it.
That said, I have been vacillating between retiring to Mexico and living in a small town house and buying a few acres of land in TN, KY or VA, somewhere rural, and growing my own food etc. Also been thinking about how to support that over the long haul. If I do it, I will likely still have to work in my current career in some fashion, perhaps as a gig worker, and then supplement with other things. Actually looking to learn how to turn wood and how to do blacksmithing. Been thinking about putting a shop on that land and doing handmade crafts with wood and cast iron. Maybe get good enough to sell some stuff online.
Either way, I am looking forward to a time that I can unplug from this ugly way of life shaped by master manipulators and liars.
I wish these folks the best ... all the farmers and ranchers and homesteaders. I sometimes wonder, here in my pleasant mid-size southern city, where city folks think the meat, dairy and grain products come from? How much effort goes into to it all? Every big and small store and market in the entire nation has milk, eggs, meat, dairy products and the daily bread of life - such an ENORMOUS mostly unappreciated undertaking. Meanwhile, the only products coming out of Washington, D.C. are rules, regulations, and taxes - bureaucrats fleecing the countryside harvesting money, tending their crops of memos and meetings feeding discord and division. The Capitol Pox infects us all. Poor George Washington is spinning in his grave.
I give these people credit, but let’s be real. When people had no other option than to live this way, they sought ways to make their food production more reliable and predictable. Sometimes crops failed, animals got sick, people went hungry. There’s no chance of that today. So yes, slaughter your own farm animals, milk your own cows, grow your own corn, but when disease wipes them out, when worms eat the corn stalks, there’s still Krogers for these new “pioneers”.
And I suspect an awful lot if not most of these homesteaders have another source of income or investments from when they had another source of income. That doesn't diminish what they are doing to try to live healthy, it just makes it possible.
I live in Texas. Right now severe drought, super high temps, not all land is fertile enough to grow vegetables, and we have bonified wild life. Deer, raccoons, coyotes, fox, snakes, lizards, fish and everything in between. You would be feeding wildlife before you fed yourself. Some land is for cattle grazing, and right now it is rough for the cattlemen and women. We also have water issues, not enough, well water, and not enough river water. Real homesteading is hard, unrelenting, everyday, no vacations, or holidays. The land needs to be cared for and finding out what it takes to care for your land can take a lifetime. You are absolutely on target.
Same. I think being able to change your mindset from the home being a unit of consumption to the home being a unit of production is so valuable. You don’t need to live totally off the land! That’s so hard and it’s not (and never has been) for everyone. BUT everyone can do something. Grow some vegetables, start a compost pile, keep some chickens or bees, make your own sauerkraut and jam. Yes you can buy all that stuff at the store and it’s quicker and often even cheaper, but the steps taken toward greater self-sufficiency are what pay dividends.
I have cut out processed sugar and most bread while following a modified fasting diet. Result?...I have lost 25 pounds, my cholesterol is down 60 points and my knees don't hurt any more. It's really not that hard...g.
You don't have to use an outhouse in the back. If you have a yard, you can set up a "composting bucket" in your bathroom (a five-gallon bucket with a toilet seat on top), sprinkling peat moss on top of your poop and/or after your done. Then, when the bucket is full, you can spread your "mixture" at the base of trees in your yard or in your flower bed. That's what I do. (And, yeah, most everyone in my family thinks I'm crazy, but I hate the thought of using clean water to flush away pee and poop. In this very small way, I get to give back to the Earth. For me, it's a spiritual practice--and not stinky at all.)
Bari, this piece got me thinking about school lunches. PLEASE get someone to take that subject on. Like “Sold a Story” and its exposure of reading professionals disregarding proven methods of teaching kids how to read, the travesty of school lunch (breakfast) programs borders on insane. Colorful, sugar filled, additive laden food is dished out to kids on a daily basis (the poorest of which get this “food” for free). Those same kids are then required to sit and listen and learn when such a diet would have most of us either comatose or needing to jump on a trampoline. Each of our states has universities where students study nutrition but their knowledge is never utilized in the school lunch program. We are all aware of the unhealthy state of so many children - why can’t this issue get some play?
Now we have mutilation of children lauded as "gender affirming care" when filling a kid with Fruit Loops and Coke isn't regarded as child abuse. We are living in Bizarro World with a senile imbecile installed as the leader of the free world, dispensing family advice when he presides over the most dysfunctional clan imaginable.
I second Mary's nomination. The homestead kids featured in this article are unfathomably more physically and mentally healthy than an inner city public school kids. Aramark dominates the school lunch market with pure garbage. Coca-Cola, General Mills, Cargill, and other Big Food companies own the FDA which in turn makes recommendations that Lucky Charms is more nutritious than bacon. Meanwhile lunatics like NYC Mayor Eric Adams and The Dutch are pushing meat-free days at schools.
DO NOT COMPLY DO NOT EAT THE BUGS. Here are better diet and exercise tips: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/diet-exercise-guide-gong-bao-chicken
Imagine anyone taking medical advice from a clownish blob such as "Doctor" Peter Hotez? lol
meat-free is absolutely horrific. Especially the Chemically produced "plant based" fake meats like fake hot dogs and fake burgers. Absolute garbage. Nothing but chemicals and more chemicals. No one should eat that garbage. Eat real meat.
If you care about animal welfare, as I do, buy Pasture Raised and Grass Fed. Factory-farmed meat isn't good either. Lots of diseases & antibiotics in those animals.
someone fed me a fake dog once me being the A-Hole I am took one bite and spit it on the floor
In Korea, that sentence would parse quite differently than in the US. Made me shake my head. Kegogi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_meat_consumption_in_South_Korea
'The homestead kids featured in this article are unfathomably more physically and mentally healthy than an inner city public school kids.'
And right you are. But the adults I saw in the photos?
Not so much..(the physical part, anyway)
I noticed that, too. Many of the adults need some ... fine-tuning.
Don't forget the USDA, too.
Part of the "hook" is the bad cop/bad cop polarization that Bizarro World sell's as reality. Hate, mockery, crisis, extreme emotion and the lie replace the real discussion American's deserve. Joe Biden, and his son, are in fact tragic and pitiable figure's trapped inside a rigged game D.C. that cares nothing for them, what the American Presidency represent's, or the people it was put in place to serve. And, the lie is so big and the perp's so heavily invested in it, no one can say or do what is necessary: He is a tired old man in failing mental health who should step down. ---- Then what? Harris? Thank's again to the DNC.
Off topic:
Dear FP friends, not you comprof, please give Gordon Comstock substack page a look. He has just posted an essay on Hunter the junky's "art" work. Gordon's web pages are will designed and thought out.
Give it a look. I have nothing to gain from this shameless plug. I just like his site.
https://www.sub-verses.com/p/hunter-bidens-art-critic/comments#comment-21444952
Took our kid diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome out of public school (where she was fed fluff and low-fat chocolate milk), put her on a clean high fat no dye diet and 80% of the ticcing went down within 2 months. Added in lots of outside play during school hours and she is now a healthy adult and does NOT have Tourette’s. Passing the fight on to a new generation.
This is exactly what Andrew Wakefields original study was about. He was a gastronomist (gut doctor) no an anti-vax crusader. He published a peer-reviewed study in the Lancet talking about how cutting wheat out of autistic kids diets led to improvement of their autistic symptoms. He only tangentially mentioned that the symptoms had started after vaccination, and he only included that part bc the parents of the kids he was studying strongly urged him to do so. It was purely a diet based study. However the mere mention of vaccines led to to the Lancet rescinding the article under pressure from big pharma, and his co-authors of the study (7 other scientists) disavowing the study and excommunicating him from respectable science.
Both the guts microbiome and possible pharmaceutical influences play a heavy factor in children’s autistic symptoms.
when didn't you make her a lunch. glad she is better. you sound as though she was force fed
I tried! But she was a kid and kept eating what the other kids had anyway!
It’s a tough road. I homeschooled my kids and then in high school when my son brought in a “healthy” lunch he was literally vilified by his peers. After a month or so he was refusing most everything I made. Sad.
Great idea. I recently moved to Japan and my third grader now looks forward to his school lunch--and the kids have to take turns on serving and cleanup duty! Living abroad in a society that will never really accept me is hard but getting my son out of US public schools was worth any price.
Hmm.....just imagine if maybe....just spit-balling here.....America tried some ideas from other countries, so maybe people wouldn't have to move abroad?
Leftists won't let us. They've nixed everything about European school systems.
Lol!!!
Boy.....can't wait to hear your argument for that.
Seem to remember Michelle Obama tried to do some work with school lunches, and the "Lesftists" weren't the ones calling it "Communism."
Hi again Comprof2.0! Actually I taught in public schools and a private school. At the time, the cafeteria ladies made the food in the cafeteria and I ate lunch there quite a bit, it was pretty good. Now the lunches are made in a central kitchen and have more processed food in them. No thanks.
Cynthia, Comprof is a troll. He was already banned once (a very hard thing to achieve here!), hence the 2.0. Interacting with him is pointless. This is an instance where "don't cast pearls before swine" is the best policy.
There is no gain talking to it, its a vile nasty creature.
Fascinating. When was that? The 70s?
Michelle Obama tried to make some inroads on improving school lunches.
It was called "Communism."
Oh right. I remember Michelle & her proposal for 10-dollar-a-pound baby arugula rather than 99 cent a pound butternut squash, the latter being more nutritionally dense.
No, you don't.
Lol.....yeah....it was the arugula ;) Bullshit
No. I remember her efforts being called "Communism." Period.
So you can STFU with your complaining now.
Her school lunch program was garbage. I remember they called a tomato a vegetable which it isn't. The program was a failure.
How does this article come to be written then, and how is it Comprof2.0 of all folk is making this comment?
Hey, Steven - if you've got a problem with school lunches or the American food system, why don't you go live in a 3rd world country and see how much you like it there?™
Eh? I agree with your reply to Jim; the existence of your comment and the existence of the article prove Celia M's lie. I'm English by the way; I look at ALL things American with a jaundiced eye.
It has always been the right which gets the vapors about furriners'. They're all communists, you know.
Not Shelly.
Per capita, cities are extremely safe.
And then there's the one about the statistician who drowned in a lake an average of 1 foot deep. Why does relative vs absolute risk come to mind. Rochelle & Tony used it to great advantage.
Not Shellyne Rodriguez, former NYC college professor
My husband works in Asia and I raise our sons in a small town in Canada. It’s not been an easy life but the path has made all the difference to who they are as young men. We went to Japan this spring and I was so relieved to see a very functional society on planet earth. Both Japanese and Koreans are exceedingly proud of their bloodlines and culture and, like you, my husband has never been fully accepted, but we are nuanced enough to see many sides as to why. Diversity really doesn’t seem like a good deal in the West now but both Japan and Korea will absolutely need immigration to survive with their birthrates......complex situations. Good luck with your Japan life and I hope it continues to serve your family. There is much to learn from these cultures.
In the very near future, low birthrates might no longer require immigration. There will surely be countless former white-collar workers whose jobs have been lost to AI and who will jump at the chance to staff the nursing homes.
every society has its "quirks" Japan too like tying women into intricate sexual poses in front of a paying audience for sexual pleasure.you can be the "rigger" or the "rope bunny". and ancient Japanese porn would have you believe every Japanese man has a penis so large it must be carried by servants in a wheelbarrow ( not true .. ask me how I know) I cannot speak for Canada other than you have a leader who looks like a pervert
What’s the point of this comment? Adds nothing to the discourse here. I guarantee every single culture has its own set of weird sexual perversions. We just seem to think that it all should be accepted and adopted into every corner of public life in the West now without discernment. Traditionally we have separated the sexes and adults and children in the sexual sphere for very common sense reasons until a minute ago.
"The Rising Sun" by Michael Crichton said the Japanese are the most racist people in the world so you are correct. They will never accept you.
I have a Japanese friend, they are proud their 100% Japanese bloodlines.
Thats a shame. Sorry if you moved just for your kids sake. I do respect Japanese culture a lot for the way they have respect for authority and hard work highly valued. At the same time theres a lot of degeneracy in the culture there between hyper-consumerism, obedience to the state, and weird sexualization of inanimate things. I hope you enjoy your time there but please move back to the US at some point. All humans that love liberty must stand and fight for the US bc its the only battleground that matters in the war against global techno-tyranny. Japan is not safe if the US falls, in fact its more far gone than we are in many regards.
This whole issue is in dire need of investigative journalism. There are billions of government dollars going to school lunches, and that new food ranking made clear that there is some serious lobbying and rent-seeking going on in that world.
Dont get me started in the new food ranking! It claims that artificial egg replacement is healthier than real eggs! It also claims that general mills cereal is extremely healthy. How dumb do they think we are??
""How dumb do they think we are?? """ Think ?? they know exactly how dumb we are look to the Prez
You should also take on the subject of hospital food. It alone can ruin your health.
Hospitals are annuitizing their business with the food they serve patients. All high carb low fat garbage.
takes me 2 weeks to recover from hospital ""food"
My wife and I had a good laugh when the local hospital had a McDonald's installed. Trolling for future patients....
To say nothing of the exorbitant waste. I volunteered in my son’s elementary school lunch room and the children were required to take everything served which included fresh fruit. It hurt my heart to watch all the completely untouched apples, pears, oranges, etc. dumped into the trash….day after day after day!
Back in the day, farmers would relieve the schools of their food waste and literally "feed it to the hogs"
Now we skip the farmer and just turn the kids into the hogs
So true. Not even hogs would eat the garbage kids are ingesting these days
Yep. Food for the body!! But, a least part of the spiritual/physical/mental malnutrition afflicting America is failure to feed the Soul. America is culturally rich and diverse. In a little over two centuries it has produced some of the greatest mind's, art, literature and technology the world has ever seen. But unless the citizen was connected to it before the DNC/CCP Davos fascist's began their war on "we the people" one would never know.
yes they would. they would even eat the children
I’ve seen murder mysteries where they use the fact that pigs and hogs eat literally ANYTHING as the means for the killer to dispose of the body, the clothes get burned and the body goes in the pen with the animals, nothing is left, not even the hair or the bones.
And if I’m not mistaken, the fact that pigs/hogs are dirty eaters is why Jews and Muslims don’t eat pork. I think the animals get infested with parasites where if they’re not “processed” correctly eating them makes you sick. 2,000 years ago the only way to keep people healthy was to make it a sin to eat pork. They didn’t know yet the best way to process the meat.
So yes, they would eat the children. Dead or alive, they’ll eat humans along with whatever else you throw in the pen.
It makes me sad because you know that's the parents' faults for not serving normal food at home.
Kids should LOVE fruit. and Veggies. My 3 kids LOVE fresh fruits & veggies. Eat them everyday. When kids are infants, they all love fruits and veggies, which are the main ingredients in baby food. If parents feed their kids normal food (and themselves eat normal food), then the kids will keep loving fruits and veggies. The problem is parents who begin serving their kids crap junk food so the kids stop liking fruits and veggies.
Dinner at my parents' house was meat and veggies (green vegetables, often from the garden, not potatoes). I grew up thinking vegetables were a normal food, not something "icky."
I know some parents who always make something like mac-n-cheese for their kids to eat instead of whatever the adults are eating. They're setting the kids up for a lifetime of picky eating and poor nutrition.
My kids ate what we ate from the time they started eating solid foods. No "special" meals prepared for "little darlings." Once they were old enough to fix themselves a sandwich, they had the option of going in the kitchen and making their own dinner, which they almost never did.
And they shouldn't force kids to take foods they won't eat because of the exorbitant waste. Waste is destructive. It's terrible.
I actually run a Zero Waste household. We eat everything and All Leftovers are eaten. I don't make anything new if there are leftovers.
When I was in elementary and junior high, we had real food for school lunch, cooked by women who were hired for their skill. In high school, the real food was largely replaced by fast-food options, but at least they were being cooked at the school.
I was stunned by my kids' lunch menus (which were provided to parents monthly, so "picky eaters" could be planned for). Not only was everything highly-processed "kid friendly" junk food, most of it was fried. And this was being supplied for both breakfast and lunch.
I was even more disappointed to learn that this "food" was prepared in a central district kitchen, then shipped to schools to be reheated on site. Instead of having nutrition specialists, school cafeterias were staffed by poorly-paid, part-time workers.
A few years back, I saw pictures of school lunches in European countries, compared to the Obama-required "healthy" lunches (which removed everything appetizing from the menu, but didn't really address the real issues). The European lunches looked more like what I ate as a child.
American elected political leadership (as we witness daily) is compromised. The tax dollar hog trough doesn't care about education, children or the American future. It is self-interested and selfish. At this moment American infrastructure and cities are in collapse, the DNC (which serves international corporate fascism) has captured and weaponized the Justice Department, the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. Remove the DNC from our neck's and replace the bureaucratic apparatchik's who serve them and we can begin a recovery. A well fed, well educated, empowered American child directly connected to the moral principal's and history that inform's his life is the last thing thug's want.
Conditioned from an early age to eat the gruel
Mary, please review Michelle Obama's well-meaning effort to upgrade the nutritional quality of school foods. Nutritionally, they were A+ but consumer acceptance (students) was a giant F. We need education of young parents to expose their kids to better foods and minimize the junk.
The "health" requirements of those lunches excluded a lot of healthy foods, usually due to having a fat or sodium content just a tad above the limits. Creating tasty food with the allowed ingredients was a chef-level challenge, and the meals were not being made by chefs. I've never been a picky eater, but I can't blame kids for rejecting what amounted to a pile of low-flavor, poor-texture ingredients.
Because cost was a giant F.
She thinks everyone in the world has the money for a personal chef.
Like a lot else, the Japanese have raised school lunches to an art form. One of many YT videos on how they do this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoTd6kP1zNY
LOL!! Would love to see how the Fox News crowd would react if American schools tried that.
Our local elementary schools offer an annual "Lunch with Grandparents" day. I was appalled when in the second half of the lunch period an announcement was made for "Seconds". Nearly all of the kids went to the lunch line to purchase junk food products from Frito-Lay and others. I suspect the food was donated, and the proceeds used to boost the school's budget. The bigger issue is the programming of the kids to learn to eat junk food instead of healthy fare. I watched as much of their healthy lunches brought from home was discarded in favor of these second servings of junk.
One citizen at a time, reconnecting one life at a time ,one day at a time, to the America we all are is the way home.
Michelle Obama tried the "school lunch" thing. It was called "Communism."
I'm a mom of 3 kids & my oldest in 2nd grade so the story about the reading professionals disregarding proven methods of teaching kids how to read, was a good one for me. Very relevant.
I don't allow my kids to buy school lunch. My 2nd grader packs her own lunch, with my supervision. She makes a sandwich, a vegetable (cucumber is her favorite) & a fruit everyday. Snack is Cheerios or Goldfish crackers or pretzels.
Yes, this is such an important issue. I wrote about this, and also, eating together as a family, many years ago: https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=20-05-015-v&readcode=&readtherest=true#therest
Yes!! I have even approached our daughter’s elementary school teacher, but she wasn’t interested in how to change the menu. As a parent, aside from packing, I’m lost at how to change this system.
IN A word $$$$$$$$$$$$
DIdn't Michelle Obama solve this issue? 😂
Its astonishing to me that ANYONE still trusts the CDC and NIH. They didnt get most of it wrong: they got ALL of it wrong, and given that their mistakes blatantly contradicted well known and long established SCIENCE, it can only have been on purpose. They all knew better. They were just told to lie, and they did.
And never forget the demonization of HCQ, which has been given to hundreds of millions of people yearly since 1955, with no problems. It is safer than aspirin—MUCH safer—and functions to get zinc into your cells efficiently.
And Ivermectin: its discoverers won the Nobel Prize.
And why did Big Pharma need to sideline those two medicines? BECAUSE THEY WORK, and if any nedicines had been advanced that worked, their gene therapy jabs would have had to go through normal safety testing, and it seems none of them would have passed.
More generally, I understand these homesteaders. Modern life is toxic physically, emotionally and spiritually.
The CDC website now also refers to ‘people’ who give birth and suggest that men can take hormones to stimulate milk production and that is perfectly safe for the infant. How can we trust them on ANYTHING if they publish this blatant misinformation?
"Misinformation" or patent lunacy?
Patent lunacy and deception for sure!
Corruption. It seems everything and everyone is for sale.
Because a fish rots from the head......
Imagine approaching a pandemic where, for the first time in history, the healthy were quarantined and sick people were injected into nursing homes where the most vulnerable resided? And our media called the buffoons "epidemiologists" and "health care experts."
Imagine a panicdemic which caused more harm than a pandemic.
Witnessed it first hand, with everyone else.
And governor Cuomo was tossed out for being a little handsy with the ladies, not a mention of ordering the sick into the long term care homes, a crime against humanity.
Exactly. And which fits NY Penal Law's definition of criminally negligent homicide to a a T.
A few night's ago I watched NETWORK again. "Mad as HELL and ...."
That was one of my first hints that the people in charge were not serious. We used to have a quarantine system, run by county health departments. The aim was to protect the public from sick people.
Lockdowns wrecked the economy (which I'm sure was the intention) without actually protecting anyone, since people in Covid-struck households were not prevented from going out during the few times the well were allowed to go out.
Why imagine?
Barry Cooper
I agree with everything you say except your first paragraph. We know that Big Pharma only cared about profits but we won’t know the motivations of the key people at CDC and NIH without the application of real journalism and effective cross-examination. I suspect most are true believers or were afraid to go against the grain.
It is my belief that that most people panicked and accepted what the media told them. I did not get vaccinated because i know it takes decades to develop safe and effective vaccines. I took zinc and in the winter vitamins A, C and D. I am at my high school weight and exercise every day. I have not had so much as a sniffle. I did have a sore throat one night. I gargled with salty water and it was gone by the next morning.
I have rejected processed foods and excess packaging for 55 years. It is not revolutionary. It is the application of uncommon sense.
Anthony Fauci is in videos you can easily look up saying masks don’t work either as PPE or what is apparently known as Source Protection. Both individually in separate interviews.
And that is across the board. Don’t get me started on masking children.
And a key member of the British advisory panel said they knew in FEBRUARY of 2020 lockdowns would kill more people than they saved. And they clearly did.
And Fauci and others were perfectly aware HCQ was safe. The study they used to denigrate it was written by a fraudulent and shadowy company called Surgisphere, which was seemingly CREATED for that purpose, and all of whose “data” was fake. The Lancet had to issue a retraction. But Fauci never mentioned the retraction.
No: all of it was 180 degrees out of phase with known best practices and good data of long standing.
No explanation but willful and orchestrated deception explains the facts. Fauci is a mass murderer.
I can't believe I am quoting RFK Jr., but he is right to note BigPharm stood to lose $200M if effective, cheap treatments like HCQ, Ivermectin, and Quercetin+zinc were allowed. The Emergency Use Authorization requires that "No other treatments can be available."
I trust individual medical professionals that follow the scientific method, but NOT.ONE.INSTITUTION that takes government money. They all do due to Medicare and Medicaid, be aware.
If you read The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert Kennedy, as I did, you would really respect him - 900 pages, 2000 footnotes & not one fact disputed in a court of law. He did the world a favor by revealing Fauci's evil & corruption but was ignored or vilified by the MSM.
Oh, I respect him overall just not his belief in ruining our way of life via eco-terrorism.
He is putting his reputation on the line in many ways and I definitely respect that.
He's come around on that. Listen to his current views. He no longer believes 'climate change' is a problem. However, he's still very involved in cleaning up the environment (water, air, soil).
That's good to hear. That's probably closer to where I stand.
I still feel like I fall under the conservationist/environmentalist umbrella to an extent, but Climate Change™ seems like a purposely vague term that can't be proven or disproven, by design. It serves no purpose other than to consolidate governmental control of utilities.
Will do. Guys like him and Trump authentically say it like it is against 'The Narratives' perpetuated by people in power and their media arms(I repeat myself).
Yes, Kennedy gets many things right, but not the "climate emergency" nonsense.
If he just gets real on that one subject, he'll be a force.
Not really. He is BUILDING his reputation. It was trash before; we were taken in by the soundbites; we forgot to "trust, but verify". I thought because Joe; JFK; RFK; and Ted were bigots I'd helicopter, RFKjr was cut from the same cloth but with an extra dash of swivel-eyed loony.
I'm Aspie and there was the simplistic accusation he was anti-vax and supported a load of unsubstantiated, even disproven umpty times, bullshit about Autism. He didn't HAVE a reputation six months ago. Then the levee broke...
Some of what he runs with might still prove bull; but that is the point: on a whole lot of medical and science topics either the research hasn't been done; done properly; or the results have been skewed.
If not for Faucists; the CCP; Wuhan; and Kung 'Flu, RFKjr would probably STILL have no reputation to lose. Mind, the God-Emperor would be 2/3 thru a triumphant second term.
Agreed. I trust his research on vaccine's and autism over any other at this point(which includes his sources). He was just interviewed by the insufferable, neo-con Hannity and he shut Hannity up on several topics and it was glorious.
History reveals Joe K to be a corrupt asshat, JFK to be an above average president who was getting too close to organized crime and the CIA(I repeat myself) so he had to be killed, and Teddy to be another spoiled, connected killer of Mary Jo. I will celebrate Teddy's 14 year of sobriety next month. What is the saying: a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality? I praise RFK Jr. overall.
And Gates'.
"we won’t know the motivations of the key people at CDC and NIH without the application of real journalism and effective cross-examination." -- Both receive funding from BigPharma. 'Nuff said.
Occam, anyone? HCQ and Ivermectin had to be silenced because they were cheap. Never never EVER fail to consider the economics. Same reason the bigs were so desperate to get their swill into... infants!!! Made me literally sick, that did. And does. And the sewage is slowly, slowly leaking from its containment.
They were not just cheap: the law prohibits issuing Emergency Use Authorizations if existing medicines show efficacy. The jabs mever would have been approved if HCQ and Ivermectin had been seriously tried on a wide scale.
Whether they worked on covid or not, the crime is saying they are unsafe, something millions take daily.
Just such blatant lies constantly
True; there is an ever-growing rap sheet that ranges from the expedient to the outright evil. But I submit that the bucks-to-billions incentive is, alone, sufficient.
It wasn't that bucks-to-billions was incentive, it was the "it's good to be helping" authority that morphed into "gee, this is fun; we want more of it" that got my hackles up
They get it right. You just don't understand that they don;t have an interest in your health. Their goal is to maintain the govt/phrama cycle just like the military-industrial complex. Look at in that light and they are highly succesful.
I saw a report last evening that a billion dollar's in currency has disappeared off the streets of Australia and the government is pushing central bank digital dollar's hard as it can. The DNC is the face of the CCP/EU/WEF juggernaut in America. The dotted line connection to the propagandist CDC, NIH and Wuhan all speak to an international criminal financial cartel trying to overlay a CCP style social control model on Western Democracies. This article doesn't mention the now year's long battle Dutch farmers (2nd most productive in the world) have been engaged in to prevent the Davos/EU crowd from seizing their land and destroying their livelihoods. (And we shouldn't forget that the grandfather's of these farmer's comprised the underground that fought the Nazi menace in WWII.) Remove the DNC and maybe we can de-weaponize our Justice Department, the CIA and the FBI. And, prevent the weaponization of the total weaponization of the IRS.
I am aware of no discrete studies that showed efficacy of the drugs you mention in the context of preventing or lessening the effects of Covid-19. Could you identify some for us?
Otherwise, your screed seems much like a screed.
Don't get me wrong, I too wonder why anyone would trust the CDC or NIH on anything. File their statements in the "That interesting" file until other, scientifically rigorous evidence comes along to back up what they have to say...
Being the first to opine is not THE seal of approval. And being the first to opine is often being the first to be wrong.
There are a LOT here: https://c19early.org/
And can you REALLY ask seriously why no supportive studies have been published in the United States?
And to be clear, both HCQ and Ivermectin (and Quercetin and probably Artemesinin) act to get zinc into cells, so they work best as part of medical “stacks”, which also ideally include Vitamins A, C and D and according to many, an antibiotic like Z-pack, which all act as anti-inflammatories.
Outside the very old, the death rate from COVID should have been even less than the fraction of 1% it actually was, and very close to zero.
Yeah....HCQ is great for malaria and rheumatoid arthritis.
I think the issue was that MAGA people were taking the horse dewormer Ivermectin, paste, etc.....which is.....not the right kind?
no sorry you are incorrect. all ivermectin is the same. the dosage is different and it does have some anti viral properties and it is not just for horses.. stop the misinformation please
No, I am absolutely correct. Because I never said there were "different" types of Ivermectin. I just said, stupid MAGAs were going to feed supply stores and using that kind....which I actually have no problem with in retrospect.
So....I'll say it again: Ivermectin is for intestinal worms/parasites. It is not an "anti-viral."
Got it?
Stop the misinformation please.
And Ivermectin combined with zinc reduces death from COVID.
Is that bad? What goal exactly are you trying to support here? Its obviously not supporting truth or saving lives.
Oh.....now we're moving the goalpost....
So, now it's Ivermectin COMBINED with something else.... got it. Hmm....it would seem the Zinc, which helps the body fight of infection, would seem the be "the real MVP" of this combination, right?
The truth is: Ivermectin is an anti-parasite drug. Covid is not caused by a parasite.
So....probably get better results just taking Zinc, if you don't want to get vaccinated.
If people were interested in saving lives, then they should have supported vaccination, then maybe they wouldn't have gotten the "Herman Cain Award."
Oh, I am GLAD you mentioned "vaccination". I was afraid we would get away from that. This will be my last post for a while, since I have a life, but I'll check back in the morning and engage indefinitely on this.
Here is my question: given no other information, which medical remedy would seem safer: one that has been given to tens of millions of people a year for thirty years and which underwent traditional FDA approval; or one which was rushed through trials which were only allowed by Emergency Use Authorization, and which use a technology--injected genetically engineered mRNA--that has never been in widespread use anywhere, and which has killed hundreds of people within ten minutes of getting it?
Why do you attack the first, whose worst trait might be inefficacy--although the data is good that is works well--and defend so vociferously a medicine which after six months makes people MORE vulnerable to COVID that those who chose not to participate in these Phase 3 trials?
Not precisely. It was FDA approved for—and won tge Nobel Prize for—River Blindness and Elephantiasis specifically. It is listed as “essential” medicines for both by the WHO.
But my cousin has been on HCQ for Lupus for twenty years. Is that bad? I literally cannot follow the contortions you are impelled into by an inability to tell or admit truth.
No. Precisely. Yes, lots of medicines are "essential"....for DIFFERENT maladies/issues. Are you really this dumb?
1. What causes River Blindness and Elephantiasis? Is it a parasite? Yes or No?
2. Was Covid a parasitic infection? Yes or No?
3. Is Lupus causes by a virus? Yes or No?
4. Is Covid an autoimmune issue/problem? Yes or No?
HCQ. Is. Not. Medication. For. Viruses.
So, to be clear, you oppose the use of HCQ for Lupus even though it was proven to a help a lot twenty or more years ago?
And because you probably dont know this, I will point out Lupus is an autoimmune disorder, which is not a virus.
And HCQ helps with Rheumatoid arthritis which is ALSO not caused by a virus. Should those prescriptions be stopped because you know something the doctors prescribing them don’t?
Please do reply, because I am enjoying this, and am far from done. I have simply learned that with yiu the best process is to ask one question at a time, watch you avoid it, point out you avoided it, respond to your latest Red Herring then continue throwing logic and facts out until you quit or I lose interest.
Yes or no: should off label use of HCQ be stopped?
I'm going to make a general comment for the one or two other people who may be reading this. This "logic" is so fantastical, so ludicrous, that I really think it is properly schizophrenic. The author has lost all touch with reality testing; and of course a genuine and open concern for truth was lost long before that.
When I use the S word, this is precisely what I am talking about. They speak word salads that make no sense, and if you are confused, it is not your fault.
And where did you go to get it? Whole Foods? Trader Joe's? Dollar Tree Store?
Your dismissiveness is trending toward bullying. Why am I not surprised?
As far as I can tell, you need a prescription from a doctor for the human version of ivermectin. My hairdresser was put on ivermectin when she and her whole family got Covid in 2021 (none of them were vaccinated). I think the doctor gave it to her husband and teenage children, but maybe not the 6 year old. The adults and teens were sick as dogs, flat on their backs for two weeks, but the 6 year old didn’t have any symptoms (just a positive test). She had lingering symptoms for about a month afterwards.
When I got Covid after vaccination and booster, all I had was a sore throat for 2 days that I attributed to allergies. The only reason I knew I had it was because I was in Amsterdam after a cruise around the U.K. and Ireland, and I needed a negative test to fly home. I stayed in Amsterdam for 4 days and got a recovery letter from an online doctor in Italy so I could fly home after my hotel stay was over. My husband tested negative and continued to test negative, so as far as we know, he never got Covid.
I have no knowledge as to why people or doctors think ivermectin works with Covid. But I kind of doubt it would have saved all those hundreds of thousands of people who were overwhelming the hospitals and dying on ventilators in 2020.
www.c19early.com The evidence for its use in a stack of medicines and vitamins is very good.
But how would best practices--dosages, intervals, stacks--evolve when the doctors involved risk losing their licenses in the first case in American history of off label prescription being Verboten by the AMA (which is also patently corrupt)?
I know many people who have taken Ivermectin. Not one had a problem. COVID did not even scare me enough to try and get some. I've had, I think. all three of the major variants. None of them even slowed me down, except the first time, where I had to sleep an extra 4 hours.
This whole thing is ludicrous. It is beyond astounding to me that people who paid for college educations can be buying any of this nonsense.
Any port in a storm. I've a friend who animal rescues; they've built a huge vetinary knowledge base from that. Contrasting that with human medicine, human medicine very often loses. Except for us, animals can't talk or talk back. Leads to a lot of very different conclusions often times. Your mouse weighs a few ounces; an elephant a few tons and you can't do one fits all.
Folk aren't daft, even you are cogent some of the time :-), if we can't get it packaged for us we'll get it packaged for horses and adjust the dose as neccessary. It isn't as if we can't access that info: we've ALL got the WWW. Plenty of folk stood up and made the resources available or linked to it.
When I saw figures from Southern Africa, I thought "WTF, these should trend markedly the other way. Something is not right here; I'm being sold a pup." Ivermectin proved to be the missing link; when you normalised the data accounting for it, the anomaly went away.
"Folks aren't daft."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/ivermectin-dead-new-mexico-covid-b1927767.html
https://www.unmc.edu/healthsecurity/transmission/2023/03/14/an-ivermectin-influencer-died-now-his-followers-are-worried-about-their-own-severe-symptoms/
https://news.yahoo.com/anti-vaxx-police-officer-had-205911771.html
https://www.princewilliamtimes.com/news/updated-culpeper-county-woman-dies-after-family-sued-fauquier-hospital-to-allow-her-to-be/article_743146e0-5d1a-11ec-922e-d394aedce55d.html
https://www.mississippifreepress.org/15002/person-hospitalized-after-taking-livestock-ivermectin-from-feed-store-to-treat-covid-19
https://nationalpost.com/news/americans-poisoning-themselves-with-horse-de-worming-drug-to-treat-covid-19
Even more died or were injured from "vaccines". IF you fire up your browser on 'phone; tablet; or PC, a couple of clicks will get you the right information on Ivermectin and Hydrochloroquine.
Could you say the same for the "vaccines"? No; the research hadn't been done and the data wasn't there. It didn't exist yet.
There will ALWAYS be folk who do no due diligence; don't read the label; or only half listen to their doctor. Folk who will take Asprin over Paracetomol because the former seems to deal with pain better will give themselves stomach ulcers and die from them, for example.
Do we know how many were killed by the vaccine.
No need to "fire up a browser." Have the right information.
HCQ is for malaria.
Ivermectin is for intestinal worms.
Sorry. That is what those drugs are for.
And Viagra is for high blood pressure. Ever heard of off-label applications?
The Alphabet public health agencies prevented doctors from prescribing it, didn’t they? But only for COVID. They could still prescribe Ivermectin for scabies—which is also an off-label use—all day long.
Think about it: both HCQ and Ivermectin were prescribed throughout the pandemic by doctors for anything BUT COVID. But where COVID was concerned they risked losing their license.
Why? why would health professionals be prevented from seeking solutions in the biggest engineered disaster in human history outside of war? Why? I just tomd you: these infernal gene therapies COULD NOT HAVE BEEN APPROVED if doctors had been permitted to do what they were trained to do.
So, you're upset the doctors were not prescribing the Ivermectin horse paste to their human patients?
Ok....let me think about it.....
Probably....just throwing this out, ok?.....HCQ is for malaria, etc.....which is not Covid
And Ivermectin is for people with intestinal strongyloidiasis and onchocerciasis, caused by intestinal worms....which is not Covid.
Ivermectin is not horse paste is it? Its discoverers won the Nobel Prize.
And using medicines off label fir new conditions is STANDARD PRACTICE, and has been for at least a hundred years, but has likely been a standard since Medicine existed.
Are you also upset HCQ is used for Lupus and Rheumatoid Arthritis? Are you upset Ivermectin is used for scabies? Those are off label uses. The FDA only approves medicines once for one condition but every day in every doctors office in the country scrips are written for off label use of FDA approved medicines.
And HCQ was approved in the 1950’s and Ivermectin in the 1980’s.
You are spouting illogical and actually harmful nonsense.
Compost is trolling as usual. its common practice to troll this way. But of course we have lots of medicines that were developed for one thing and found to be helpful for other things, happens all the time when they start testing a drug, sometimes there are good side effects observed, like the little blue pill was developed as a heart medicine, blood pressure, and ended up being a "chubby" med of choice.
A large portion of FDA approved medicines are used off label.
The whole METHOD for dealing with new illnesses was distributed learning, which is what you get when you allow people with 12 years of college, or something like that, to use their professional judgement.
But the people responsible fir disease control and protecting public health wanted to make this pandemic WORSE, not better. And they succeeded. Most of them, along with the people who bought them, belong in jail.
would it be wrong to wish scabies upon him and deny him the "off label" treatment of ivermectin?? LOL
"either Catholic or Christian".. You might want to edit that to "either Catholic or Protestant Christians"
Saw that. Every Catholic is a Christian. Not every Christian is a Catholic. Wonder if Kamala could put that into a Venn diagram.
was my first thought when I read that... Catholics are Christians!
Sadly, some "christians" (lower case intentional) don't think so.
haha, when I lived in rural Georgia in the late 90s an older lady asked me "Do Catholics...believe in God?" :P
Those same "christians" are rabid gatekeepers over who can be allowed to be considered Christians. Believing in Jesus Christ as one's Savior is not adequate in their minds. I'm LDS, and my Catholic friends and I trade stories about how we're "not Christian" all the time.
We had a good laugh abt that since we are former “Christians” and now Catholics!
Our family went the other direction, mostly our parents' generation. We will all reunite in heaven.
Good catch. It clearly eluded the author.
She may have been using the interviewees’ own terms. If someone tells a reporter she is a Christian, or a Catholic, should you not write that? If it had been primarily a religious event, maybe you would be digging deeper into the meanings.
But it sticks out prominently that religious reasons brought a lot of folk into this thing, and religion is a huge part of the article.
Yea, its still very common colloquially for OG protestant christians to say “catholic or christian?”. I mean Protestant Americans had a fear of Rome influencing America since the founding, so the reconciliation between protestants and catholics didnt really happen until the 1960s Id say. In the South, you’ll hear this nomenclature a lot more. The average evangelical would also consider Mormons, Jehovah Witness, and several other denominations to be different than themselves. There are significant theological differences between evangelicals and catholics so its not really that surprising. A lot of people raised protestant just dont know bc there’s no catholics in their hometown. Not a gaffe on the author’s part, just a reflection of some people’s attitudes
Yup. I converted to Judaism (from Lutheran) in college. My father volunteered to call his holy-roller Baptist brother to break the news. Brother paused after hearing it, and said, "He's Jewish? That's fine, Jews, they're all right. As long as he's not Catholic."
To rewrite Dean Martin, "Everyone hates somebody, sometime . . ."
Thanks for beating me to it with this. It’s like “either Vietnamese or Asian.”
Depends if you are the Pope or Billy Graham. From eaches perspective; the other isn't a Xtian.
From the perspective of someone who has read the NT with a critical eye, ALL Xtianities are heresies that aren't actually Xtian. If you take what individual Catholics; Lutherans; or Calvinists, etc. tell you about their Xtian beliefs, hardly any adhere to the official creed of their particular cult.
Most come out as not even monotheists.
I have mentioned before in a previous story, in a previous comment, my grandparents in southern Italy basically lived the life of farmers in every sense of the word. My grandfather grew everything. Tobacco, hazelnuts, fruit, corn that fed the chickens that gave them the eggs, that they would sometimes kill to also eat. The yearly slaughter of the pig, etc. on and on. My mother used to say when she was growing up there she and her grandmother would make cheese almost daily, "We had cheese as much as we had daily bread", my mother used to say - To this day it's one of my favorite quotes from my mother. These people are rich, rich in food and life.
Every summer I would go there and visit. I would see how hard work it was but I was extremely envious because the food was amazing and nothing like I was getting back home in America. They were growing and raising all the food they needed.
It was a very simple life. There was an Italian saying about the less you have(in material things), the happier in life you were. Sure, money pays the bills, but there is a lot of truth in that saying.
So I am not surprised at all with this article and what's happening in America.
My husband's family lives in Eastern Europe, and we take the kids to visit every few years. Some live on a cliffside in a little hut, and they have an olive grove, almond trees, raise lots of chickens and goats. They have giant clay amphorae filled with their own olive oil and always send us home with a lot. Others live in a walled villa with citrus and apricot trees and huge gardens with lots of eggplant, tomatoes, squash, and beans. Everyone makes their own house wine. We go for weeks, eat everything fresh, and hit the beach when it gets too hot. I'm not a beach person, but there you can find one with one or two other people, and I can swim and stay for hours. I'm convinced the combination is why so many people we know there are in their 90s and still going strong, still working outside, still sharp as a tack.
Sounds amazing. I'd go every year if I had family like that. You're very lucky!
That was once village life in Texas. Nobody went hungry. It is still present across parts of Mexico. The psychology of "plenty"--that is, the human moral reason that spring's from hard work and direct connection to the Earth and the Season's. We should remember that our Constitution was written for a nation of self-reliant farmer's. I once heard the AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT leader Russell Means say that the issue of our time isn't human right's but natural right's. That is, can you get food, water and shelter independently of the Federal Government. It was a prescient statement. Our government has been compromised and captured, by most notably a corrupt DNC, and serve's an international cartel of corporate fascist's. The COVID lockdown was a test run. After the 2008 looting it further weakened the American economy, unleashed the social/economic chaos surrounding us and set up the manipulation of the supply chain's that provide us with food and supplies. They fully intend to bring us to our knee's. The DNC war on speech and freedom parallels the Davos inspired thought crime arrest's and prosecution's now taking place across Europe. The free people's of the world are under assault.
Thank you for sharing this lovely memory
Wondering why it was necessary to connect people genuinely concerned with our diet and food supply with the fringe elements of society. Because it is becoming increasingly clear that processed food is unhealthy, even our produce and meat is lacking because our soils are depleted and our meat is improperly fed and processed, our medical community knows virtually nothing about nutrition and our captured government pushes idiocy such as the discredited "food pyramid." So, although this article was mildly interesting, it almost trivializes the true problems with health in our society and the obesity and auto immune epidemic that is far more deadly than the "pandemic" that turned our nation on its head due to the nitwits we had in charge of it. A health profession and government that is captured by big pharma and agribusiness is antithetical to America's health.
I think that it's because we didn't used to think of these kinds of people as fringe elements. They were definitely a minority, but they weren't vilified by the MSM as they are now. I remember as a kid in the 70s in No. California that there were tons of people who were doing this exact kind of thing. Mother Earth News was a popular magazine for those wanting to live a more agricultural lifestyle. We thought of them as being "crunchy, granola types", but not as weirdos to be mocked or looked down upon.
These days anything that makes a person less dependent on "The Experts" (these days I always feel that should have the TM symbol next to it) and the government is painted as fringe to try and marginalize its impact. If they can subtly make a reader mentally tie them to genuinely fringe people like The Duggars or vaguely mysterious polygamous sects, then they can also make a reader skeptical of them in general.
My parents were part of that movement in the 70s (and they continue to live it to this day). It was big--"living the good life." Lots of people followed Helen and Scott Nearing, Eliot Coleman, who branched off and did his own thing and is still going strong up in Maine. It brought a lot of different people together--a lot of my parents' friends who did it were hippies or strongly libertarian and just didn't want to do things the "normal" way, others had religious reasons, some were survivalists. And most everyone else said "hey, do what you want to do."
Now, not so much. Someone told me a while ago that Facebook had warnings pop up on pages teaching people to grow and preserve their own food, saying the content might be a sign of extremism. And strangely, the Department of Agriculture wants you to register your garden because they want to foster a "more diverse and resilient local food system to empower communities to address issues like nutrition access and climate change."
Register my garden? Wow. Maybe I'll plant one just to NOT register it!
The DoA can kiss my ass.
My parents dabbled in it - 100 chickens, 50 turkeys, 3 goats, honeybee hives, fruit trees, a 1 acre garden, 45 acres of land with an artesian well - but they always kept their "regular" business, as well. They finally gave up the hobby farming when the business began to consume so much of their time that there was not enough left to make farming pleasurable to them anymore.
That is far more than a dabble, m'lady!
My parents were not "crunchy" by any measure, but they were children of the Depression, and from families that had been dirt poor even before the Depression. They grew a large garden every year. It was not any kind of "statement" for them; it was simply what they did.
Yes. It was what my family did, too, along with aunts, uncles, friends, and neighbors. The rural working class in the small town in which I grew up couldn't afford to "hire out," so they attended to food production and most repairs and maintenance themselves.
My dad got his picture in the Denver Post in 1928, when he was 12 years old. He had turned a vacant lot into a plot of corn taller than he was, all by his own efforts.
My parents generation and older were all farmers. All had big gardens and did canning every fall. They all butchered their own animals. My generation mostly doesn't farm anymore. Some of it is corporate farming. You can barely make a living on a small family farm unless you are growing animals for Hormel. You need big expensive equipment that farmers rent because nobody can afford to buy them. Farming has completely changed and it isn't going back. I think they want everyone in big cities. Noticed during Covid big city people were almost helpless when store ran out of stuff and there was no hamburger in the grocery store or it was $8 a pound. get around that by splitting animals with a friend of mine from local farmers. I buy meat once a year now and freeze it. Much better tasting and I don't car what is in the grocery store. Way cheaper too.
Wow!
My folks did a lot of this in my childhood because they didn't make enough money to hire other people do it for them. They grew their own produce, built their own home, fixed the well pump and furnace when broken, did most of their own plumbing and electrical repairs, and even dug out and replaced a septic tank and field once when it pooped out, pun intended :-) If a tree fell, we cut it up and dried the wood for the fireplace; even though we had a furnace, when the power went out in winter, the fireplace kept us warm.
We were normal residents of a rural small town. Most of our neighbors did the same. Today it would be "prepping" or "off the grid," but in the 1950s and '60, it was "life."
Your second paragraph in particular -- yes, absolutely. Thanks for playing along, Olivia!
Bingo!
So true. But the “revolution” works for those few with the means — intellectual, physical, financial — to question and, dare I say rebel. Unfortunately, the government has nurtured generations of people cutting across all demographics who are locked into a system that promotes deadly habits. Awful schools serving three free meals to our kids 365 days a year. Terrible medical care. No-holds-barred EBT cards. Legal pot. Obama phones. All things tech. Now CT’s illustrious junior senator Chris Murphy wants to launch the Office for Social Connection. The list is long of government’s insidious good intentions. How do we spread the values highlighted here? Not one more government program, for a start.
I seriously question the goodness of many of the intentions. There's a CS Lewis quote that tangentially applies -- the most evil is not the Evil, it's the "friend" who's Doing It For Your Own... Good. (One more (possibly) unintended consequence of attempting to kick God to the curb: There is no anchor for defining The Good.)
Chris Murphy - a mole faced malefactor who should embarrass the nutty Nutmeg state but, instead manages to keep getting re-elected despite a record of abysmal failure. Such is life in the Democrat satrapies.
As a serious God-believer who is now raising her own chickens and vegetables (and who loves to hang out with the young famers of my area who now raise and sell their own pasture-raised livestock), I stand tall and proud as one of the "fringe elements of society." : )
This was my thought as well. I don't particularly appreciate the implication that people questioning the almighty FDA are nutjobs and outliers. These people are buying into the way of life that was practiced for millennia, and plenty of people are doing it in their own back yards, it's not just so-called "homesteaders."
We've gone from the federal government encouraging people to grow their own food (google victory gardens or war gardens) to the FDA (or F-Duh, as Joel Salatin calls it) telling us everything we get from our back yards might be unsafe or carry pathogens and we should only eat things that have been maximally processed for our safety.
Meanwhile, we have HOAs telling us that we can only have manicured lawns in neighborhoods and something as simple as planting a fruit tree has to go through layers of approval before it can be blessed by some arbitrary governing body. In reality, many homes have enough yard space to grow a large portion of what they would need to have a healthy diet of fruit and vegetables, if we would just stop expecting every neighborhood to have acres of grass. It's time we wake up and realize that we don't need government intervention to tell us what we should eat, and where we should get it. This isn't fringe lunacy, it's common sense.
Totally agree. I see more and more people (in my suburban/urban area…older neighborhood with no HOA) with patio gardens or small backyard gardens/ fruit trees and shrubs. Definitely not homesteading, but we’re able to grow enough fruits/veggies (tomatoes, beans, carrots) for generally 4 months of the year.
I agree with this. Tired of the framing that anyone who questions received “wisdom” or chooses to live a more challenging and engaged life is a crackpot.
I've got to confess that I smelled a whiff of condescension in this article. I wonder why the author choose a homesteading fair in Idaho (which most associate with White Supremacist preppers) instead of one of the many fairs put on by Mother Earth News. Instead of interviewing Joel Salatin (a long-time MEN homesteading expert who is Christian), she chose to interview people that Leftists could dismiss as religious crazies.
I noticed that too. There has been a massive shift toward viewing anyone who thinks (or lives) outside the box with deep suspicion.
Most of the folks who attend Joel's conferences are also very religious. I know from experience. I, too, live in VA, not too far from Joel. Love him to death. As long as the "religious folks" are trying to burn me at the stake (I'm a Quaker), I love hanging out with them. : )
Oops. Meant to type "aren't trying to burn me at the stake"--ha!ha!
Leftists try to portray "religious folks" as Fundamentalist Evangelicals, despite that fact that they are not the majority of religious believers.
Crazy is still crazy even if it isn't the extremely crazy kind.
"Wondering why it was necessary to connect people genuinely concerned with our diet and food supply with the fringe elements of society."
I don't think the author was connecting the two, bur rather pointing out that preppers and homesteaders are NOT loony: self-reliance takes a lot of work, brainpower, and determination that the loony do not possess in abundance.
If America is so bad, why don't you go live in some 3rd world country and see how you like it there?!
Great article but I could do without the sneering. The positive elements come through despite the writer’s mockery. Maybe the writer is a vegetarian these sound like very nice, smart people to me.
I missed the sneering. It seemed like a pretty sympathetic article to me.
I agree. I got no sense of sneering or belittling. It was a good piece.
I have to agree. I didn't get a sense of sneering or condescension.
I would like to hear the honest takes and lessons learned from some of Bari’s writers when they get back to their costal ivory tower ‘mainstream’ lives and truly do some soul searching on their experience with these ‘fringe’ elements of society.
Maybe the biggest learnings are for them, not the reader. Spending time among the rest of us might just teach them something, or make them question what they have been brought to believe by their big government/corporate/MSM overlords.
They come off as dismissive in most of Bari’s recent pieces, because they have been taught as costal elites that they are better than these people. They can’t help it.
They act like they are anthropologists enlightening other elites about this new breed of humans, rather than acknowledging that it’s their own programming and blindspots that they cling to that are, in fact, fringe.
I’ve been critical of some of the blatant political slant creeping into these ‘fringe pockets of society’ pieces of late, but maybe they are in fact moving the needle - Just not as intended. It is my hope that they are opening the eyes of the authors, of Bari and her staff, and that even though they can’t help but look down of these groups, that maybe the interactions chip away at their own elitist-influenced understandings of what is ‘normal’. And that they will be better authority-questioning journalists, and people, as a result.
I agree. It was startling to hear the sneer. I thought, do you eat meat? How do you think it’s produced? They’re very removed from their food’s origins. They’re actually not as clever as they are.
I just felt jazzed as I read this article. Truly, it made me wish I had been there at the conference.
Interesting. I usually detect that in most TFP articles, but in this one I didn't.
I re-read it to see what you and @TXFrog were talking about that maybe I had overreacted to upon my first read. You’re both right, it’s not as blatant as some TFP articles… which I think inspired my initial thought that maybe the author sees something there that they haven’t been allowed to think out loud within their circles.
I think it may have been the “most are Catholic or Christian”, the Motel 6 reference, and some of the highlighted comments - “vaccine injury,” as one example, that kinda piqued my radar… which is probably a bit over-sensitive these days.
Yes. That’s it.
As I read this article I can't identify a single black person, and it reminded me of a conversation I had. I was talking with a friend about my dream to buy some land in a rural area, build a house for myself and other family, and just live a nice life. We're both black, and he said he could never because of racists and that there isnt enough black people in that area. I simply replied with "Im an American too; manifest destiny". Im not sure if he actually understood where I'm coming from, and I partially believe its because he's a descendant from slaves. My parents moved to America from the Caribbean because life was better in America, settled here, and built a life for themselves on foreign land. If I feel as if life is better for me in rural areas, I should be able to do the same thing my parents did. However for him, his family came here unwillingly, so there's some form of hostility.
I see these photos without any black people and I don't see a place that I don't belong, but rather a place where I can be because there are people who I have a common interest in. If I were to view it on the angle of race, it would be a place where I can be a trailblazer in, like my parents were too.
From the many videos I've watched, there are a few black families involved in homesteading; not many, but they're out there.
Thank you!
Thanks for this piece. You’ve seen my little dairy herd. We milk one every morning and sell raw milk to many homesteading families in our area. Families who have no electricity, cook on a wood stove, hand wash clothes, homeschool, culture all their dairy from us because it keeps better. I personally think we work our tails off milking, processing milk by making our own cheese and butter, selling or bartering it to other families...hauling manure every day, moving fence line, hauling some more manure...so much manure. but the truth is I’m a soft city person compared to homesteaders. I have electricity, modern appliances, an electric water pump, indoor plumbing. Air conditioning. I can put my tomatoes in the freezer at the end of the season instead of canning them on my wood fired stove in 95 degree heat waves.
I think your style is more common than this article would lead you to believe. I have several friends - mid 30s ish that “homestead” with all the modern conveniences of electricity and plumbing. They raise pigs, chickens, cows, gardens, homeschool and largely live as free of the system as possible. None of them would refer to themselves as homesteaders.
I’m definitely not a homesteader. But I work my ass off. 😆
Same I guess. I laughed about the manure comment - so true. I just don’t understand how one crosses from whatever we’re doing to homesteading. Is not having modern plumbing the requirement? Or is it 100% self-sufficiency?
I don’t know either. I don’t even think our off grid customers are 100% self sufficiency because I’ve seen them at the laundry mat. (I would go to the laundry mat too mind you). Maybe it’s self definition.
That, m'lady, is huge. The washing machine may have added significantly to women's life expectancy. Don't believe it? Try washing one pair of bluejeans by hand.
Right? Agreed 100%. I was just illustrating that I consider them absolutely homesteaders but I don’t know why you would want to be, to your physical exhaustion, washing clothes by hand.
Looks like I'll be swimming against the tide, but here goes.
There is more beneficial, healthy, clean, wholesome and unadulterated food in today's world than there ever was and it's available down the street in most supermarkets. The food problem in today's society is an abundance problem, including an abundance of good and not-so-good foods that are fueling an epidemic of obesity and other health problems. (The average weight of a male in the US in 1950 was about 166; today it is about 199.) People need to start making better choices.
And please, we cannot let the recent fiasco with Covid blind us to the fact that vaccines have been a Godsend to the human race. There is a reason why the average life expectancy has gone from 47 years in 1900 to almost 80 years today. It is principally because kids no longer die in their early lives from diseases that ripped through homesteader communities like the Grand Reaper, e.g., measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, polio, to name a few. Within the last month, a vaccine for respiratory syncytial virus was added to the list. (If you don't know how deadly RSV can be, read up on it.)
Stories like this that focus on how idyllic the homestead lifestyle can be miss the larger picture that very few people are cut out for a life of hard physical work, sacrifice and privation. People who could not keep up with the demands of frontier life in 19th Century America found only early graves.
Re: your last paragraph: I think part of the issue here in response to this article is all-or-nothing thinking. You’re either living entirely off grid washing your clothes by hand and raising all of your own food start to finish, total self-sufficiency, or you’re grossly overweight, buying bags of chips at Publix and spending your days sedentary in front of a screen in an air conditioned room with no windows. It doesn’t have to be that black and white! One can certainly appreciate things like grocery stores and vaccines while also recognizing the value in productive homemaking and participating in it in a sustainable way.
That's actually not entirely true. We have more access to calories, sure, but what passes for a vegetable these days is largely devoid of vitamins, minerals, and other essential nutrients. This is also true for dairy, meat, and staple crops like grain. Even far left Nat Geo is willing to admit this (https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/environment-and-conservation/2022/05/fruits-and-vegetables-are-less-nutritious-than-they-used-to-be). Most of this is attributable to glyphosate and nitrogen urea based agricultural that effective desertifies soils into lifeless clods of dirt. If there's no life in the soil, the plants and animals raised on it are going to be far less chemically complex than they would be had they been raised on living soil.
Can't argue with you about the vaccines, but I would argue that antibiotics are probably more of a factor in terms of increased longevity. Modern ag is essentially taking what was a near literal gift from God and turning it into a way to eek a few extra bucks out of a chicken CAFO. And that's to say nothing about what those same antibiotics are doing to our water supply and gut biome.
And Gene, I think you'd be surprised what people are capable of. Take a look at this personal ad from 1865 (https://tinyurl.com/smjz2hpk). I don't think you have any idea what it takes to clear 100 sqft of Aroostook County soil let alone 18 acres - BY HAND. It's densely forested and rocky as hell. Yes, homesteading is tough work but this kid never had anyone to tell him it was impossible. Expectation dictates outcome.
I never lay claim to being "entirely true," but I can't agree with the statement that vegetable these days for "largely devoid" of vitamins, minerals and other essential nutrients. The NatGeo paper you cite is a popular (i.e., soft) science article that provides no real support for the proposition you make.
And it should be kept in mind that the fruits and vegetables that people consumed on the homesteads of yore (1) had to be locally grown and quickly consumed because there was no refrigeration and produce spoiled quickly, (2) had to survive the predictable and uncontrollable infestations of insects, fungi, etc., (3) were highly dependent on local growing conditions such as temperature and rain fall, and, worst of all, (4) took extraordinary amounts of human labor to produce. The fruits and vegetables that made it to the table were those few fruits and vegetables that ran the entire gamut. The last point you make about the amount of labor involved in clearing the land seems to support my point.
I must also take exception with the statement that expectation dictates outcome. It would be more accurate to say that expectations sometimes correlate with outcomes, but nothing more. I am sure that the homesteaders all started with the highest of expectations, but how many expectations turned into disillusions? If a homestead family confronted a significant medical problem for one of its key members such as a major orthopedic fracture, there was no trauma center within easy drive. Events like that could bring all optimistic expectations to a bitter end.
Ya gonna make me dig around on Web of Science, eh? 😉 The nutritional differences is pretty well established. Here’s an article from the Journal of the American Society for Horticulture Science - https://journals.ashs.org/configurable/content/journals$002fhortsci$002f44$002f1$002farticle-p15.xml?t:ac=journals%24002fhortsci%24002f44%24002f1%24002farticle-p15.xml&t:ac=journals%24002fhortsci%24002f44%24002f1%24002farticle-p15.xml. The original publication that established this was from 2004. That’s paywalled, unfortunately. Interestingly, plants that struggle are actually more nutritious. Photochemistry, what gives plants it’s nutritional oomph, is actually enhanced via stress response. A good example is the difference in capsaicin you find between a hydroponically grown pepper vs one that struggled in the Mexican sun. Plant cultivars also play a huge role. I don’t know if you’ve ever eaten a native black cherry or strawberry, but compared to the sugar water filled balloons that passes for modern varietals, the photochemistry just doesn’t compare. Most of what’s in the supermarket wouldn’t be recognizable to Thomas Jefferson in terms of taste and even appearance. Interestingly, plants quick spoilage was a feature for improved nutrition, not a bug. Drying increased the density of plant matter in a recipe and fermentation absolutely exploded the bioavailability of many nutrients not to mention increased exposure to beneficial bacteria. And certainly growing conditions played a factor. Right plant, right place. Our ancestors knew better than to try and grow russet potatoes in Georgia!
And I think you’re taking my last sentence too literally. I was a city kid up until around age 30 and would have sworn up and down that running my own homestead was well beyond anything I’d be able to pull off. Hell, I barely knew which end of the hammer to use. Now, I produce hundreds of bushels of apples every year, raise chickens, pigs, ducks, and rabbits and while I’m no contractor, I think the cabin I built looks pretty sweet. We are capable of far more than we give ourselves credit for. That’s all I meant by that.
I can somehow tell there are very few obstacles on the frontier that would withstand your determined persistence. If I ever needed someone to help me build a homestead far from civilization, you would most certainly be on the short list.
It would be my pleasure! But I don’t do cows. Those things scare the bejesus out of me!
I agree with you to a large extent and see the main problem in the fact that many or most people know nothing about cooking anymore or are simply too lazy. It's just so much easier to fall back on prepared foods with all their additives. My grandparents in Germany over 100 years ago grew their own produce and kept a few pigs, chickens and ducks plus two cows for milk. It was a hard life, and most people don't want to return to it. I also learned to cut the bad bits out of fruit and save leftovers instead of throwing them away (of course,back then, the pigs could eat them). It's really a pity that venerable skills like cooking have largely died out and there is tremendous ignorance about food and its preparation. There is great satisfaction in preparing a tasty and healthful meal,a factor that is often ignored. I admire people like the homesteaders but am sure their lifestyle will never become mainstream.
Honestly that is not fair. We are expected to work, raise children and entertain them with multiple activities. Where is time or energy to meal plan, shop through the abundant grocery store, cook, clean and teach the kids how to cook. It’s not laziness. There is just too much to do in this crazy modern world and not near enough time. It’s hard to pick what to give up when you can just pick up prepared food
I agree completely. People like your grandparents are the exception rather than the rule.
I think the principal problem with this article is that it offers up a conclusion that is not warranted by the data. The proposition is that people who live the demanding life of homesteaders are happier, healthier and more independent than those in the general population. Okay, I'll accept that for purposes of argument, but why is that? Is it because homesteading made them happier, healthier and more independent? Is it because happier, healthier and more independent people are more inclined to go into homesteading in the first place? Is it because those who tried homesteading and were NOT happy, healthy and independent were culled out of the homesteading population under study?
From a psychological perspective, they're probably happier because changing to that lifestyle gave them a sense of competency, mastery of self and over skills, personal responsibility, and autonomy/independence, all things that we desire for "actualization". Some people find it in office work, construction, higher ed, etc. For these people, this was their avenue to agency.
That is a good argument or perspective at least.
Good counterpoints, balances nicely with the article and the discussion in the comments.
I found this article to be very relevant in light of the autism article of last week. The loss of human health is extremely noticeable in our day and age, but so is the abundance of human health. We are getting so many things right that are helping people thrive, while also getting things wrong that cause people to suffer.
Homesteads and no vaccines, or city living and all the modern medicine one can handle. The real truth of human health is probably somewhere in between. For the time being with my city desk job, that is the line that I am looking for.
Gotta admit, I have given this some serious thought. If I were 28 or even 38 and not 58, I think I would go for it.
That said, I have been vacillating between retiring to Mexico and living in a small town house and buying a few acres of land in TN, KY or VA, somewhere rural, and growing my own food etc. Also been thinking about how to support that over the long haul. If I do it, I will likely still have to work in my current career in some fashion, perhaps as a gig worker, and then supplement with other things. Actually looking to learn how to turn wood and how to do blacksmithing. Been thinking about putting a shop on that land and doing handmade crafts with wood and cast iron. Maybe get good enough to sell some stuff online.
Either way, I am looking forward to a time that I can unplug from this ugly way of life shaped by master manipulators and liars.
Sound great when you are young-in your 50s. At 70, it’s a heck of a lot of work just to keep the yard and garden up. Chopping wood? No way.
I wish you luck and good fortune! I wish I were physically able to do the same.
I wish these folks the best ... all the farmers and ranchers and homesteaders. I sometimes wonder, here in my pleasant mid-size southern city, where city folks think the meat, dairy and grain products come from? How much effort goes into to it all? Every big and small store and market in the entire nation has milk, eggs, meat, dairy products and the daily bread of life - such an ENORMOUS mostly unappreciated undertaking. Meanwhile, the only products coming out of Washington, D.C. are rules, regulations, and taxes - bureaucrats fleecing the countryside harvesting money, tending their crops of memos and meetings feeding discord and division. The Capitol Pox infects us all. Poor George Washington is spinning in his grave.
Wonderful piece. I admire people who chuck their degrees to live a more wholesome life and teach their kids how to live outside the matrix.
I give these people credit, but let’s be real. When people had no other option than to live this way, they sought ways to make their food production more reliable and predictable. Sometimes crops failed, animals got sick, people went hungry. There’s no chance of that today. So yes, slaughter your own farm animals, milk your own cows, grow your own corn, but when disease wipes them out, when worms eat the corn stalks, there’s still Krogers for these new “pioneers”.
And I suspect an awful lot if not most of these homesteaders have another source of income or investments from when they had another source of income. That doesn't diminish what they are doing to try to live healthy, it just makes it possible.
Yes. And how many tomatoes can one grow in the window box of a north-facing apartment?
Agree with this 100%
I live in Texas. Right now severe drought, super high temps, not all land is fertile enough to grow vegetables, and we have bonified wild life. Deer, raccoons, coyotes, fox, snakes, lizards, fish and everything in between. You would be feeding wildlife before you fed yourself. Some land is for cattle grazing, and right now it is rough for the cattlemen and women. We also have water issues, not enough, well water, and not enough river water. Real homesteading is hard, unrelenting, everyday, no vacations, or holidays. The land needs to be cared for and finding out what it takes to care for your land can take a lifetime. You are absolutely on target.
Oh wow: most attendees were "religious—either Catholic or Christian." I was not aware Pope Francis' work had got quite that far yet.
Huh?
We live in a small town, not on a farm but we have chickens and a good backyard garden, anything you can do makes a difference!
Same. I think being able to change your mindset from the home being a unit of consumption to the home being a unit of production is so valuable. You don’t need to live totally off the land! That’s so hard and it’s not (and never has been) for everyone. BUT everyone can do something. Grow some vegetables, start a compost pile, keep some chickens or bees, make your own sauerkraut and jam. Yes you can buy all that stuff at the store and it’s quicker and often even cheaper, but the steps taken toward greater self-sufficiency are what pay dividends.
One pushback: You don't make sauerkraut. You prepare cabbage to become sauerkraut. Yum.
Ha! So true!
I like the idea of giving up processed foods and foods with added grams of sugar, but no way am I gonna start using an outhouse in the back.
I have cut out processed sugar and most bread while following a modified fasting diet. Result?...I have lost 25 pounds, my cholesterol is down 60 points and my knees don't hurt any more. It's really not that hard...g.
You don't have to use an outhouse in the back. If you have a yard, you can set up a "composting bucket" in your bathroom (a five-gallon bucket with a toilet seat on top), sprinkling peat moss on top of your poop and/or after your done. Then, when the bucket is full, you can spread your "mixture" at the base of trees in your yard or in your flower bed. That's what I do. (And, yeah, most everyone in my family thinks I'm crazy, but I hate the thought of using clean water to flush away pee and poop. In this very small way, I get to give back to the Earth. For me, it's a spiritual practice--and not stinky at all.)
Don’t give my wife any ideas…💩😷
But the nutrients you're flushing!