On Mon, 04 Aug 2003 15:31:39 -0800, (Jan Flora)
wrote:

PBS is going to run a show on friday here that was produced by
Hal Cannon. It's about cowboys. If I know Hal, he'll have stuff in there
about a cowboy's relationship to the land and to the animals. (And I do
know Hal. Met him at the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, NV a few
years ago.) Catch that show, if you can. It might explain a lot.

Jan


Thanks Jan, I learned a lot from this exchange. (still not gonna eat
cow, but am pretty impressed by the care some pasture feeders put into
their production)

I'll look for the PBS story!

In article , tomj wrote:

On Mon, 04 Aug 2003 15:31:39 -0800, (Jan Flora)
wrote:

PBS is going to run a show on friday here that was produced by
Hal Cannon. It's about cowboys. If I know Hal, he'll have stuff in there
about a cowboy's relationship to the land and to the animals. (And I do
know Hal. Met him at the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, NV a few
years ago.) Catch that show, if you can. It might explain a lot.

Jan


Thanks Jan, I learned a lot from this exchange. (still not gonna eat
cow, but am pretty impressed by the care some pasture feeders put into
their production)

I'll look for the PBS story!

I'm not trying to convince you to eat beef; just trying to let you know that
we aren't all heartless corporate slash & burn, overgrazing, phone book, dead
chicken & sheep "by-product" feeding monsters. (Yes, they feed old phone books
to cattle now. Isn't that special? =:-O Ruminants can digest cellulose,
but you
won't catch me feeding cardboard or phone books...)

Some folks have been on the land for generations, raising food for people
to eat.
If they didn't care for the land and the critters, they would have starved
out and
had to move to the cities. (The Depression ran my FIL's family into
sharecropping
in Texas. They lost their ranch to the bank. Dad came here to Alaska,
homesteaded
and built this place into a ranch in 1951. My MIL's ranch has the 5th generation
on the ground now. Her great-grandmother homesteaded the place in the 1860's
in Middle Park, Colorado. I'm waiting right now for a show about John Wesley
Powell going "Down the Colorado" to come on PBS. Janice's great-uncle, Jack
Sumner, was Powell's guide on that trip. Janice's home ranch is on the
headwaters
of the Colorado.)

Jan

In article , Pat Meadows
wrote:

On Mon, 4 Aug 2003 12:28:36 -0700,
wrote:

Eggs don't have faces, neither does milk. However seafood does. These
people need to make up their minds.

It's simple - the generally accepted definitions go like
this:

vegetarian - eats no dead animals (this is the simplest way
to express it), many eat both eggs and milk, some eat one
but not the other [1].

vegan - eats no dead animals and no animal products either
(no eggs, no dairy foods, usually no honey) Many vegans also
do not use leather, or other similar animal-based products.
[2].

It's somewhat irritating to vegetarians when those who eat
seafood or chicken (for instance) call themselves
'vegetarians' because this creates confusion.

Yep, it does cause confusion. I know a lot of folks who don't eat
red meat, but eat seafood & poultry and call themselves vegetarians.
I have a cousin who is a vegan, who always looks too thin & puny.

It's hard in Alaska to be able to afford a totally veggie diet, because
veggies are *so* expensive up here. A cucumber is $1.49 at the
market. A peach is $1.50. An organic cuke at the Farmer's Market
can cost you $3. (We can't grow peaches here.) An artichoke is
normally $3. OTOH, 10# of Alaska-grown spuds is $2.99 and 5# of
Alaska-grown carrots is $2.99. We can grow root crops and brassicas
up here like crazy, but can't grow hot weather crops commercially
and sell them cheaply. Hothouse 'maters up here are $4/lb all year long.
I don't know what the organic 'maters cost at the Farmers Market.
Rice & beans are cheap up here, by the 50 or 100# sacks, but you
need a balanced diet and greens are just flat expensive in the north.
Lots of us forage for greens and mushrooms, but we have 7 months
of snow here, so the foraging season is limited.

I don't think of tofu as "food," but you probably do. Someone gave me
a soyburger once without telling me what it was. I commented on it
tasting funny. She spat, "It's soy, what's wrong with it??" I said,
"It ain't bad, but I'm a beef cattle rancher." She inspected her shoes,
until her face quit being red.

[...]

Pat (not a vegetarian at the moment, but have been one in
the past and likely will be again in the future)

I've never been a vegetarian, per se, but at times have quit eating
meat because I was too poor to buy meat (going to college) or for
health reasons, when I had to take the heavy protein load off my
system. I feel better when I limit my meat intake. Pop lives on meat
and spuds. I'm able to juggle our menu so he gets lots of meat and I get
big salads and some meat, and we're both happy.

Tofu sucks, IMO. Big salads, OTOH, rock, especially when they come
out of your own garden : ) And, IMO, broccali is a food group. I just
love it, so I have 8 broccali plants in my garden. (I'm misspelling it,
huh? *laugh*)

Jan

PS: Since this thread started with compost, I have to report that the
compost pile I started at about the same time we started this thread --
well, it's done. It got hot; it cooked along; I turned it last night and it's
done. I found a good website for any northern gardeners who don't think
they can make good, hot compost, written by a gal down on Kodiak Island,
Alaska. (150 miles south of me.) Also looked at the Compost Calculator
website and got my C:: N ratio pretty close. That's probably what did the
trick. That's a *very* cool website.

In article , "Mike
Stevenson" wrote:

Fishes have faces...ask any 5 year old. I think that vegans BTW don't eat
ANY animal or animal based product. No milk, no cheese, no gelatin (if you
don't know you don't want to). I've also heard of so called micro-biotics
that wont eat the above but also retrict themselves to seaweeds and the
like. Unfortunately due to man's dumping activities its argueable whether
seafood is really all that safe to eat anymore. And recently a number of
articles detailing how most of the big fish populations are all but wiped
out. It doesn't look promising...

You've never looked an Irish Lord in the face! =:-O

The feds just did a survey on 600 pregnant Alaska Native women.
They took hair samples and tested for Hg. (mercury) All of the
women (who live in the bush and eat mostly fish) tested way below
EPA levels for Hg.

Our mercury levels in Alaskan wild fish is .65 ppm. The EPA safe food
level is 4 parts per million (ppm).

To start with: wild fish populations in Alaska are healthy. I don't know
where you are, but our salmon (5 kinds), halibut, crab (4 kinds), scallops,
clams (4 kinds), pollack, cod (3 kinds), oysters, mussles, and shrimp
populations are doing fine. Just because you guys fished out your fisheries,
we haven't. God knows that the canneries from Seattle tried, but Alaska
got statehood in 1959 and got control of the fisheries before they succeded.

The by-catch (unwanted fish) that factory trawlers off coastal Alaska
throw away every year could *feed the entire world* for one day. (Read
that sentence again and think about it. Then write to your congressman.)

Factory trawlers need to be run off our seas. Tyson (Chicken) owns loads
of those trawlers. They do mile-long trawls that clear-cut the ocean bottom.
It's like clear-cutting the forest. Nothing survives, but the shareholders
smile.

(A "trawl" is a weighted net that sinks to the ocean floor and catches
everything there. A trawl net creates a kill-zone on the ocean floor.)

I live in a commercial fishing town. Most of my friends and neighbors
are comemercial fishermen. I catch most of the fish I eat. What's your
connection with the sea, Mike? Do you read stuff in the newpaper and
believe it, or do you have a direct connection with the sea and your food?

Jan
Homer, Alaska


"Jan Flora" wrote in message
...
In article , Pat Meadows
wrote:

On Sun, 03 Aug 2003 02:09:15 -0800, (Jan
Flora) wrote:



One of the ranchers in our cattlemans association is married to a
vegetarian. It's NBD. When we have to go to convention banquets,
he gets her prime rib and she gets his king crab legs : )

She's not a vegetarian then, she's someone who doesn't eat
meat, but does eat fish.

Vegetarian, by definition, means someone who doesn't eat red
meat, doesn't eat poultry, and doesn't eat seafood - in
short, a vegetarian doesn't eat any dead animals.

What's 'NBD'? I can't figure that out.

Pat

The veggies I've talked to say that there are lots of kinds. Vegans
won't eat eggs, they drink soy milk, and don't eat any flesh. Around
here, there are lots of folks who won't eat "anything with a face."
They'll eat seafood though. I say eat whatever you want and be happy.

NBD = no big deal.

Jan

Jeezz you almost sound defensive. It wasn't like anyone was accusing you of
eating all the fish...

A number of news agencies have recently begun reporting that populations of
large fish such as tuna, mackarel, cod are at one percent (1%) of the levels
from 50 years ago. These news agencies include CNN, Fox Cable News, and
MSNBC. I did not write the articles, nor am I one of the scientists who
participated or tabulated the data in these studies. I'm glad that the fish
in Alaska are safe to eat, and alive and well. But the Alaskan coast
represents a small portion of the world. And this study is talking about
WORLD fish populations. Other countries do not take the care and restraint
neccessary to converse and cultivate thier fish populations in order to
preserve them. We are also talking about "wild" fish roaming the open ocean
in vast schools, not fisheries. The world-wide population of people has
tripled in the past 50 years. Advances in refrigeration, packing,
preservation, and harvesting has allowed more fish to be caught, sold, and
consumed by these higher concentrations of people. This and the increased
belief by "land-lubbers" that seafood is health food has increased
world-wide fish consumption exponentially...

And for the record I'm from Baltimore, MD. This is on the Chesapeake Bay,
which has been fished long before Europeans people even discovered Alaska.
The crustecean populations there are nearly decimated, though Chesapeake Bay
crabs are renowed. The crabs and clams also have been found with toxic
levels of mercury, lead, and arsenic. Fish from many areas of the Bay and
the connecting rivers are considered unsafe to eat due to pollutants in the
water. Much of the East Coast of the US was or is industrialized, and
continue even with EPA standards to dump harmful substances in the water. In
the past they dumped industrial wastes into the waters unabated. As I said I
am glad that Alaska is doing fine, but never having been heavily
industrialized, its easy to see why the waters in your area would continue
to be safe and thriving. Unfortunately the rest of the states are not
neccesarily in such good shape. And this isn't even taking into account
other industrialized and/or developing nations that may or may not have any
enviromental standards in place to protect thier waters, or conservation
standards to protect thier fish populations...

"Jan Flora" wrote in message
...
In article , "Mike
Stevenson" wrote:

Fishes have faces...ask any 5 year old. I think that vegans BTW don't
eat
ANY animal or animal based product. No milk, no cheese, no gelatin (if
you
don't know you don't want to). I've also heard of so called
micro-biotics
that wont eat the above but also retrict themselves to seaweeds and the
like. Unfortunately due to man's dumping activities its argueable
whether
seafood is really all that safe to eat anymore. And recently a number of
articles detailing how most of the big fish populations are all but
wiped
out. It doesn't look promising...

You've never looked an Irish Lord in the face! =:-O

The feds just did a survey on 600 pregnant Alaska Native women.
They took hair samples and tested for Hg. (mercury) All of the
women (who live in the bush and eat mostly fish) tested way below
EPA levels for Hg.

Our mercury levels in Alaskan wild fish is .65 ppm. The EPA safe food
level is 4 parts per million (ppm).

To start with: wild fish populations in Alaska are healthy. I don't know
where you are, but our salmon (5 kinds), halibut, crab (4 kinds),
scallops,
clams (4 kinds), pollack, cod (3 kinds), oysters, mussles, and shrimp
populations are doing fine. Just because you guys fished out your
fisheries,
we haven't. God knows that the canneries from Seattle tried, but Alaska
got statehood in 1959 and got control of the fisheries before they
succeded.

The by-catch (unwanted fish) that factory trawlers off coastal Alaska
throw away every year could *feed the entire world* for one day. (Read
that sentence again and think about it. Then write to your congressman.)

Factory trawlers need to be run off our seas. Tyson (Chicken) owns loads
of those trawlers. They do mile-long trawls that clear-cut the ocean
bottom.
It's like clear-cutting the forest. Nothing survives, but the shareholders
smile.

(A "trawl" is a weighted net that sinks to the ocean floor and catches
everything there. A trawl net creates a kill-zone on the ocean floor.)

I live in a commercial fishing town. Most of my friends and neighbors
are comemercial fishermen. I catch most of the fish I eat. What's your
connection with the sea, Mike? Do you read stuff in the newpaper and
believe it, or do you have a direct connection with the sea and your food?

Jan
Homer, Alaska


"Jan Flora" wrote in message
...
In article , Pat Meadows
wrote:

On Sun, 03 Aug 2003 02:09:15 -0800, (Jan
Flora) wrote:



One of the ranchers in our cattlemans association is married to a
vegetarian. It's NBD. When we have to go to convention banquets,
he gets her prime rib and she gets his king crab legs : )

She's not a vegetarian then, she's someone who doesn't eat
meat, but does eat fish.

Vegetarian, by definition, means someone who doesn't eat red
meat, doesn't eat poultry, and doesn't eat seafood - in
short, a vegetarian doesn't eat any dead animals.

What's 'NBD'? I can't figure that out.

Pat

The veggies I've talked to say that there are lots of kinds. Vegans
won't eat eggs, they drink soy milk, and don't eat any flesh. Around
here, there are lots of folks who won't eat "anything with a face."
They'll eat seafood though. I say eat whatever you want and be happy.

NBD = no big deal.

Jan

On Mon, 04 Aug 2003 17:07:27 -0500, Aaron Baugher
wrote:



Main Entry: veg·an

: a strict vegetarian who consumes no animal food or dairy
products; also : one who abstains from using animal products
(as leather)

This one's consistent too, but I'd think it'd be awfully expensive to
get a balanced diet with enough protein.

No, not at all. If anything it's cheap: but it does require
cooking - usually more time-consuming cooking than a hunk of
meat.

This is the wonderful thing about meat: it's a cinch to
cook. This is why I'm not a vegetarian at the moment,
mostly.

Pat

On Tue, 05 Aug 2003 01:47:36 -0800, (Jan
Flora) wrote:



I don't think of tofu as "food," but you probably do. Someone gave me
a soyburger once without telling me what it was. I commented on it
tasting funny. She spat, "It's soy, what's wrong with it??" I said,
"It ain't bad, but I'm a beef cattle rancher." She inspected her shoes,
until her face quit being red.


I do indeed think of tofu as food.

I'll bet you'd think of it as food too if you tried my
recipes for tofu-chocolate mousse or tofu-chocolate pie.
Or pumpkin-tofu cheesecake.

I also like frozen tofu cutlets: the tofu is frozen and
thawed (totally changing its texture), then breaded and
baked or fried, and served with a sauce (usually pasta sauce
in our house).

I'd be happy to email them to you. If you want them, let me
know.



Tofu sucks, IMO. Big salads, OTOH, rock, especially when they come
out of your own garden : )

I can almost live on big salads throughout the summer!

Pat

Pat Meadows wrote:

this:

vegetarian - eats no dead animals (this is the simplest way
to express it), many eat both eggs and milk, some eat one
but not the other [1].


Lacto-vegetarians eat milk and cheese, but not eggs. Ovo-vegetarians eat eggs
but not milk and cheese. Lacto-ovo vegetarian is the same thing as vegetarian.
Vegans [pronounced vee-gan], as you note, eat no dairy products or eggs.




Andrew

On Mon, 04 Aug 2003 20:02:26 -0800, (Jan Flora)
wrote:

I'm not trying to convince you to eat beef; just trying to let you know that
we aren't all heartless corporate slash & burn, overgrazing, phone book, dead
chicken & sheep "by-product" feeding monsters. (Yes, they feed old phone books
to cattle now. Isn't that special? =:-O Ruminants can digest cellulose,
but you
won't catch me feeding cardboard or phone books...)



Not a chance in the world I'd be a part of eating anything killed for
food. I do accept my decision as a personal choice and have
appreciated your "style" and grace for providing a kinder gentler
alternative.

Thanks for all the input.

namaste,
tomj

On Mon, 04 Aug 2003 20:02:26 -0800, (Jan Flora)
wrote:

. I'm waiting right now for a show about John Wesley
Powell going "Down the Colorado" to come on PBS.
I did too...I've waled and rafted much of the canyon and found the
program fascinating. I live within 200 miles of the canyon...now if we
could get rid of those helicopters....

On Tue, 05 Aug 2003 01:47:36 -0800, (Jan Flora)
wrote:

I have a cousin who is a vegan, who always looks too thin & puny.


LOL i top 250!!! hardly sickly...

Xref: 127.0.0.1 rec.gardens.edible:61165

I could relate to the difficulty of eating vegetarian in Alaska. It was
even worse when I was there in the 1970s; there was no farmer's market and
hardly anybody was a vegetarian. When I moved down the Coast to Oregon (I
later settled in the Seattle area), I was overwhelmed by the bounty of good
produce. When I was going to the U of O, there were FREE plums, apples,
tomatoes, etc., from people's gardens--they would just put them out on the
curb, or put up a sign saying, "Please pick the plums." I loved it!


"Jan Flora" wrote in message
...
In article , Pat Meadows
wrote:

On Mon, 4 Aug 2003 12:28:36 -0700,
wrote:

Eggs don't have faces, neither does milk. However seafood does. These
people need to make up their minds.

It's simple - the generally accepted definitions go like
this:

vegetarian - eats no dead animals (this is the simplest way
to express it), many eat both eggs and milk, some eat one
but not the other [1].

vegan - eats no dead animals and no animal products either
(no eggs, no dairy foods, usually no honey) Many vegans also
do not use leather, or other similar animal-based products.
[2].

It's somewhat irritating to vegetarians when those who eat
seafood or chicken (for instance) call themselves
'vegetarians' because this creates confusion.

Yep, it does cause confusion. I know a lot of folks who don't eat
red meat, but eat seafood & poultry and call themselves vegetarians.
I have a cousin who is a vegan, who always looks too thin & puny.

It's hard in Alaska to be able to afford a totally veggie diet, because
veggies are *so* expensive up here. A cucumber is $1.49 at the
market. A peach is $1.50. An organic cuke at the Farmer's Market
can cost you $3. (We can't grow peaches here.) An artichoke is
normally $3. OTOH, 10# of Alaska-grown spuds is $2.99 and 5# of
Alaska-grown carrots is $2.99. We can grow root crops and brassicas
up here like crazy, but can't grow hot weather crops commercially
and sell them cheaply. Hothouse 'maters up here are $4/lb all year long.
I don't know what the organic 'maters cost at the Farmers Market.
Rice & beans are cheap up here, by the 50 or 100# sacks, but you
need a balanced diet and greens are just flat expensive in the north.
Lots of us forage for greens and mushrooms, but we have 7 months
of snow here, so the foraging season is limited.

I don't think of tofu as "food," but you probably do. Someone gave me
a soyburger once without telling me what it was. I commented on it
tasting funny. She spat, "It's soy, what's wrong with it??" I said,
"It ain't bad, but I'm a beef cattle rancher." She inspected her shoes,
until her face quit being red.

[...]

Pat (not a vegetarian at the moment, but have been one in
the past and likely will be again in the future)

I've never been a vegetarian, per se, but at times have quit eating
meat because I was too poor to buy meat (going to college) or for
health reasons, when I had to take the heavy protein load off my
system. I feel better when I limit my meat intake. Pop lives on meat
and spuds. I'm able to juggle our menu so he gets lots of meat and I get
big salads and some meat, and we're both happy.

Tofu sucks, IMO. Big salads, OTOH, rock, especially when they come
out of your own garden : ) And, IMO, broccali is a food group. I just
love it, so I have 8 broccali plants in my garden. (I'm misspelling it,
huh? *laugh*)

Jan

PS: Since this thread started with compost, I have to report that the
compost pile I started at about the same time we started this thread --
well, it's done. It got hot; it cooked along; I turned it last night and
it's
done. I found a good website for any northern gardeners who don't think
they can make good, hot compost, written by a gal down on Kodiak Island,
Alaska. (150 miles south of me.) Also looked at the Compost Calculator
website and got my C:: N ratio pretty close. That's probably what did the
trick. That's a *very* cool website.

TomC wrote:

A local dairy farmer sells compost and manure. Guess where his dead cows
go!


The rendering plant?

Best regards,
Bob

Jan Flora wrote:

One of the ranchers in our cattlemans association is married to a
vegetarian. It's NBD. When we have to go to convention banquets,
he gets her prime rib and she gets his king crab legs : )


Why would a vegetarian eat crab legs? (Yeah, I know; because they taste
good). So she's not really a vegetarian, but on some kind of no red meat
diet. Or else she thinks fish and crustaceans are vegetables.


Best regards,
Bob

In article , zxcvbob
wrote:

Jan Flora wrote:

One of the ranchers in our cattlemans association is married to a
vegetarian. It's NBD. When we have to go to convention banquets,
he gets her prime rib and she gets his king crab legs : )


Why would a vegetarian eat crab legs? (Yeah, I know; because they taste
good). So she's not really a vegetarian, but on some kind of no red meat
diet. Or else she thinks fish and crustaceans are vegetables.


Best regards,
Bob

I think she's a "no red meat, thanks" type of vegetarian. AFAIK, she doesn't
eat chicken either, but eats fish & shellfish.

When one of my buds got his first ever commercial fishing job, it was back
east. He told the cook that he didn't eat meat, so the cook and Andy had
lobster for dinner that night and the rest of the crew had hot dogs. That
caused quit an uproar in the galley ;-) Andy still doesn't eat meat, but he's
still fishing. His boat is the "China Cat." He fishes the Copper River sockeyes
that ya'll down south love so much. (So do we!)

Andy is the first gardener I ever heard talk about blue potatoes. He grows
a big crop of them every year. Now everyone up here grows them. (Spuds
and all root crops grow lavishly up here in the Frozen North.) I'm growing
six different kinds of spuds this year -- most of them Alaskan cultivars.
(I'm trying to pull this thread somewhat back on topic...)

Jan