Community Supported Agriculture, CSA, Produce Farm, U-Pick, Field Trips in Loudoun County, VA
Why Drink Apple Cider Vinegar?
Learn more here from Dr. Mercola.
In our last post, we concluded that when soil is healthy, plants and microbes dwell in symbiosis which produces high concentrations of the nutrients both need to thrive. Well, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the same relationship exists between people and the microbes that live in our digestive tract.
Ironically, however, the human species seems hell-bent on destroying those microbes, or at least reducing their numbers. One fundamental law of nature is that biodiversity is good, but modern culture seems to be at war with biodiversity. Most industrial agriculture functions on the principle of anti-diversity: single crops grown from genetically homogenous seed in soil rendered sterile by industrial grade antibiotics. And industrial medicine seems to work on the cleanliness principle as well: in 2016, the number of antibiotic prescriptions written in America corresponded to five out of ever six people in the country, and nearly a third of those were demonstrably unnecessary. We believe that cleaner is better, even though that may not be true.
It’s becoming clear that fighting bacteria is both futile and wrong-headed. It’s futile because within any given person, non-human cells out-number human cells by a factor of 1.3, and the number of non-human species living within a single person is comparable to the number of individual people living in one large city. And it’s wrong-headed for the same reason it would be crazy for a city to attack its own population. Sure: some people in town are deadbeats who pee in the pool and shoplift candy bars, but that doesn’t mean you fumigate the village with mustard gas.
We’re learning, for example, that some nutrients that play crucial roles in human health are produced only by the non-human species living in our gut, including three amino acids required to make the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine. What’s more, many of those species appear to communicate with our human cells in ways that tell our DNA what kinds of proteins to manufacture. So in a real sense, the bacteria we’re fighting actually makes us who we are.
As Dr. Zack Bush says, we should stop thinking of bacteria as invaders and realize that this space is more theirs than ours. We should thank them for letting us stay.
One way to encourage that thought shift is to deliberately cultivate the growth of bacteria in our bodies, especially our digestive tracts, which do far more than process food. In our next post we’ll talk about things we’re doing on the farm to help bacteria grow inside us.
The best reason to eat our strawberries is taste — once you try the real thing, it’s hard to go back to grocery store berries. But you might also consider this: industrial berries tend to be soaked with chemicals. In 2015 the Environmental Working Group reported that industrial growers in California use up to 300 pounds of pesticide per acre of plants. By comparison, sweet corn usually gets 5 pounds per acre.
Testing conducted by the US Department of Agriculture in 2015 and 2016 revealed an average of eight different kinds of pesticide per strawberry sample, compared with an average of two for most produce. “Ninety-nine percent of the samples tested had detectable levels of at least one pesticide,” according to the website Mercola, “and 1 in 5 samples had residues of 10 or more chemicals. The most contaminated sample had 22.”
The USDA study turned up 81 different pesticides in the samples from growers in the U.S., Mexico, and the Netherlands, including carbendazim, a hormone-disrupting fungicide linked to male reproductive damage, and bifenthrin, a pyrethroid insecticide classified as a possible human carcinogen. Mercola reports that “40 of the 1,174 samples contained pesticides that are actually illegal for use on strawberries.” 
And even the organic label may not be a safeguard against chemical infusion. That’s because the standards for organic certification apply only to the practices of the certified grower, not to the practices of nurseries where he or she may buy their starter plants — and most nurseries sterilize their soil with fumigants before planting.
So the best way to avoid consuming a chemical cocktail with every berry is to know the story of every berry you put in your mouth.
Come on out to the farm, and we’ll tell you the story of our berries. They’re clean — free of pesticides unless some infestation forces us to intervene, on which case we’ll let you know.
The food writer Mark Bittman has eaten just about everything you might put on a dinner plate, and he’s written about a lot of that food — how it tastes, where it comes from, and what it does to your body. He was the first food-focused columnist for The New York Times, and his book Eat Vegan Before 6:00 reached the top of the New York Times Bestseller List. Recently Bittman joined forces with Dr. David Katz, founder of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale to answer an important question: what should we eat?
Their position in a nutshell is that we should eat a lot of plants. But we all know that issues spiral out from eating plants in many directions, so they’ve addressed those issues in question-answer format. That conversation is available on the Grub Street blog. It’s a very informative read that will make you glad to be a CSA member.
In a world where the goodness of anti-bacterialism is taken for granted, encouraging bacteria to infect your food seems almost as wrong as flag-burning. Don’t the hand-sanitizing stations screwed to the walls of all our public buildings confirm the status of bacteria as a public enemy? The word itself sounds unhealthy, like saying it too often might turn your tongue white or make your skin break out.
But the truth is that we need bacteria to stay alive — certain kinds, anyway. By one measure, nearly 1,000 different species of bacteria live in your intestinal tract, and research has shown that their health is crucial to yours. Healthy gut bacteria seem to have wide-ranging positive effects on your immune system, your central nervous system, your endocrinal system, your heart, your brain, and your capacity to absorb nourishment.
One of the easiest ways to nurture your gut biome is to eat fermented vegetables. You may associate term ‘fermented’ with the process that creates wine or beer, but the agent involved in that process is yeast, not bacteria, and the by-product is alcohol, which has largely toxic effects on your body, not the beneficial effects of the lactic acid produced by the lactobacillus family.
Fermentation is a traditional food-preservation technique which uses small quantities of salt to 
prohibit the growth of harmful bacteria and encourage the growth of lactobacillus, which thrives in the presence of salt. The fermented vegetable most of us are familiar with is sauerkraut, which is cabbage preserved by lactobacillus, and while cabbage is included in many popular ferment recipes, it’s far from the only vegetable that lends itself to fermentation. Almost any vegetable can be fermented, but the process alters flavor in unpredictable ways which may not harmonize with the original taste and aroma of all foods.
One of the great things about fermentation is that anyone can do it, at home, with no fancy equipment. All you need is a big bowl, a big jar or crock, and some salt. Most recipes recommend mineral salts rather than iodized table salts. The quality of your fermented end-product will depend on several factors, including the quality of the food you start with. Local, sustainably-grown vegetables are usually best in taste and nutritional density, 
but conventional supermarket produce works, too. Many recipes and how-to guides are available online, most of which encourage you to make your brine by mixing salt and water, but it’s also possible to extract brine water from the cabbage itself with the help of salt and hand strength.
Fermenting is a great way to make the most of those large quantities of carrots, beans, squash, or cabbage that come in all at once when you start to eat according to the seasons. It’s also a great way to discover flavors you’ve never tasted before — so why not plunge in? Happy bacteria to you!
