Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[BDutch]

Still hungry?

Hopefully sleeping. It’s 5-am in the UK.
Where do you live notabitail? Its not in your signature.

 

[notabitail]

Hopefully sleeping. It’s 5-am in the UK.
Where do you live notabitail? Its not in your signature.

Texas. Mountain Time Zone. 10:12 PM.

 

[BDutch]

Texas. Mountain Time Zone. 10:12 PM.

To add it in your signature:

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[Perris]

I'm still hungry.

That's your body telling you that you haven't hit one of your nutritional targets - sadly, not which one. It was a very impressive day's diet, so I'm at a loss to know what else or more your body thinks it needs right now. Are you getting enough salt?

I eat a lot of fruit

One of the surprises of my reading has been how little/few nutrients, relatively speaking, most fruit delivers, especially the modern varieties that have been bred to look good and taste good and never mind the nutritional values. It used to be true that an apple a day kept the doctor away, but it isn't anymore with supermarket apples.

 

[Ribh]

Oh, the Vorwerk have a striking plumage! Handsome.

Very pretty but I wasn't keen on their personalities.

 

[Shadrach]

We get a lot out of our gardens. We've learned to make many lunch/dinner meals that are planned around potatoes, canned tomatoes, onions, garlic, eggs, greens. Add one, two, or three other ingredients from the store, and there are a lot of options for yum.

Tax: Sunny, back when she had all her feathers.
View attachment 3979947

I've done the basics thrown together meals and I'm bored of them now. It is in part what has made me take more of an interest in cooking. I can cook but until recently I just haven't enjoyed doing it. Good quality tinned tomatoes are difficult to find at an acceptable price. I don't use tinned tomatoes much any more. I make my own tomato sauce with oven baked and marinated cherry tomatoes, organic sun dried tomatoes and tomato passat. It comes out much richer than by using tinned tomatoes.
I eat fewer potatoes, less pasta these days and more rice and lentil and grain pilaus.

 

[Shadrach]

Still hungry?

Yes, I woke up hungry.

 

[Shadrach]

Are you getting enough salt?

I don't know. Most people eat too much salt. I don't use much in my cooking. One can make most dishes taste acceptable if one chucks enough sugar and salt in it. It's part of how we get conned into buying the pre packaged crap.
Out of all the food problems we have the decline in nutrition per portion of the staples in particular is the most worrying aspect of the food we produce. It doesn't make any difference if it's organic, home grown, whatever, it's still less nutrition than the same foodstuff even twenty years ago.

 

[Perris]

It doesn't make any difference if it's organic, home grown, whatever, it's still less nutrition than the same foodstuff even twenty years ago.

2 things do make a big difference: variety of crop, and fertilizer.

Heritage varieties typically are much more nutritious than modern varieties, because modern varieties have been selected to suit the growers and shippers and retailers, leading to stuff that can be picked by machine, washed by machine, stored for months and months, packed by machine, and delivered to the supermarket as (ha ha) 'ripen at home' fruit that never actually ripens, but instead rots at room temperature (and tastes sweet if it tastes of anything) - and then the consumer gets the blame for large food waste rates...

And if you fertilize a field year after year with only NPK, what you grow in it will have lots of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (K), and very little else; and the higher the crop yield, and the deader the soil, the less and less of all those other nutrients that we need will be available to be taken up by the crop. And if it lacks them, we aren't going to get them by eating it, obviously.

The solution is to adopt or return to regenerative or traditional farming methods. Lower but better yields. And before anyone starts crying 'how then do we feed everyone on the planet?', I would ask them to have a look at the amount of food grown but lost or wasted on the dominant current model of agriculture, and the number of people starving on the dominant current model of agriculture. This FAO page is a good place to start
https://www.fao.org/platform-food-loss-waste/flw-data/en/

 

[Perris]

An add-on to the above, regarding cost. We pay for cheap food with our health, and health care bills. In the USA, the percentage of income spent on food has fallen by half since the 1950s. In the same time, the societal cost of healthcare has more than doubled. Americans spend about twice as much on healthcare per capita than other developed countries do, yet they 'land near the bottom of the heap on common health metrics', including on longevity, and today's children are 'expected to live shorter, less healthy lives than their parents'. Montgomery and Bikle, What Your Food Ate, 2022 chapter 1.