On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 06:34:09 -0600, "Bob Peterson"
wrote:


"Robert Sturgeon" wrote in message
news
On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 03:08:42 GMT,
(Richard A. Lewis) wrote:

"Bob Peterson" wrote:


"Andrew Ostrander" wrote in message
...
But isn't it possible to grow oil-producing plants, like peanuts or
sunflowers or canola, and get calory-rich oils from them?

maybe. but wouldn't it be muich simpler to just grow some pigs and
cows?

Animals can be seen as basically nothing more than calorie
accumulators in that their one real function is to eat massive amounts
of relatively low cal fodder and process/condense it into high cal
food for you with, hopefully, as little of your time as possible
invested. Wild animals are as close to perfect as you can get for the
role since you have nothing invested except a hunting trip. Anything
else, domesticated livestock and such, starts to force a tradeoff in
terms of the total cals spent obtaining the cals vs how much they
return.

Both herding and hunting are trade-offs. Herding vastly
increases your chances of finding the animal you're
"hunting," as well as allowing you to use the animal's milk
- at the cost of additional calories spent doing the
herding. The question is - do you spend fewer calories
hunting (in which case you may come up empty handed) or more
calories herding? The historic evidence seems to favor
herding.

The same holds true for vegetable oils/nuts etc.

Grains are another great example. In theory, they provide lots of
concentrated cals in a very dense food that seems to be perfect. In
reality, they take so much extra time and effort to process them into
food that they lose much of their advantage. One can easily say "I'll
simply eat three loaves of bread a day" and it sounds logical....but
that would be dismissing the 600 cals per loaf work that it took to
get that bread to your table.

It only takes 600 calories (assumning that is correct) if
there is no division of labor. It certainly doesn't take
600 calories to put a loaf of bread on a modern American's
table.

I'd be willing to bet you are wrong there. Modern agriculture uses an
enormous amount of energy.

I'm not talking about diesel fuel or electricity. I'm
talking about human energy expended.

(rest snipped)

Robert Sturgeon,
proud member of the vast right wing conspiracy
and the evil gun culture.

(bob peterson) writes:

Did you take a look at how much time was spent on this project? I
don't doubt it took every minute he admitted to. If you think self
suffiency is for you think about the amount of effort just to grow
enough food to starve.

If you translate this to a real life situation where you have 10
hours a day worth of other work to do just to survive, its clear
that this type of arrangement is only for desperation mode, and even
then you probably cannot do it alone.

Yes, that's right: nobody survived before industrialisation.

--
mike [at] mike [dash] warren.com
URL:http://www.mike-warren.com
GPG: 0x579911BD :: 87F2 4D98 BDB0 0E90 EE2A 0CF9 1087 0884 5799 11BD

In article ,
wrote:

On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 00:14:56 -0800,
(paghat) wrote:


Heh. You keep pretending tires trashing up the garden are decorative AND
properly hidden by rhubarb but get offended when someone bothers to
mention they can be neither one! No one with even a rudimentary sense of
aesthetics would go for the jugular on that one. People who mistake
garbage tires for garden decorations ARE trashoid! No way around it. Just
like anyone who falls in their open sesspool IS covered in shit. They can
call it a pefume mudbath till the cows come home, but shit IS fecal & worn
out tires ARE garbage.

Paggy old dear..who the **** gives a shit about aesthetics? Function,
utility, ability are the only criteria.

William Morris believed function & beauty could go hand in hand; it was
also what the American crafts movement was about. One doesn't have to live
in an ugly ******** in order for everything to be sufficiently
utilitarian!

Anything else is purely a
waste of resources. If you have the resources to Pretty it up, fine.
But my dear paghat, aesthetics are for those who can afford it.

It is ridiculous to justify ugliness with plaints about wastefulness or
perogatives of the wealthy or anything except simple bad taste, poor
judgement, & lack of creativity.

My sweety made a beautiful arbor out of alder trunks & branches that a
neighbor had cut down & which we dragged home for building material. It is
just fabulously beautiful, totally effective, & cost-free.

Rusticity doesn't have to be junky. A good sense of naturalness, of
beauty, can make a scared age-worn & cracked rail fence more beautiful
than any "expensive" fence. Indeed, a split rail fence with its natural
rustic charm vastly outpaces a plasticized never-needs-painting pizza-shit
that cost some tasteless moron a fortune.

Not I,
not in money or in time or in resources. Nor can many if not most
here, afford it.

I would like to believe "many of not most" who purport to love country
living using up minimal resources do in fact know the difference between a
junked up property making excuses for the trashy ugliness of every square
inch of it, & the rustic beauty of things permitted as much as possible to
have a natural woodland flavor, or American Gothic charm, or simple
wholesome rusticity.

Deal with lifes little reality checks, ok?

Sounds like advice you need to take: IF as you convey here you can't tell
the difference between wastefulness & good taste, then the reality you
need to check is you envy the the rich too much to think only they can
afford not to be ugly, & what you have merely is bad taste. Now could be
your property is more charming than you realize, because very often less
is more when it comes to aesthetic value; but as you seem not to know the
difference, that does put you at higher risk of junking the place up so
badly that you make a hooverville look ritzy by comparison.

-paggers

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/

Noah Simoneaux wrote:
On Sun, 14 Dec 2003 19:50:33 GMT, (dstvns) wrote:
On Sun, 14 Dec 2003 01:42:22 GMT, (Richard A.
Lewis) wrote:

On a 3,000-4,000cal diet, you'll need to eat approximately 12 pounds
of potatoes per day just to maintain your body weight. Add in the
artichokes, if they're of a comparable cal level as the taters, and
you got just over two days of food before you start starving.

Who the hell eats 4 thousand calories a day?

I doubt if many people trying to live a self-sufficient lifestyle would.

as being self sufficient takes a lot of physical work, I think they'd
at least eat that much. - But I think we had that already ...

Maren

(Tallgrass) wrote in message . com...
Thanks for the info and gardening tips. Now I have a definitive use
for those old tires in the ravines.

Excellent. Using existing materials is very commendable.


This refrigerator is in a ravine, as well. Walkable, but don't think
I can get the garden tractor down there. Not quite sure how I will
get this bugger up the hill.


If u decide to haul it up, remove the motor first. Maybe u could wrap
a rope around it and use the tractor to pull it up.

In article ,
(Edgar S.) wrote:

(Tallgrass) wrote in message
. com...
Thanks for the info and gardening tips. Now I have a definitive use
for those old tires in the ravines.

Excellent. Using existing materials is very commendable.


This refrigerator is in a ravine, as well. Walkable, but don't think
I can get the garden tractor down there. Not quite sure how I will
get this bugger up the hill.


If u decide to haul it up, remove the motor first. Maybe u could wrap
a rope around it and use the tractor to pull it up.

Old metal liners removed from refrigerators can be sunk in the ground &
used as waterily & goldfish ponds. Newer refrigerators often have plastic
liners that can crack so not as easily adaptable as ponds, but the old
metal liners are perfectly rectangular with the back completely flat to
serve as a "floor" of a tank, & so strong they can even be free-standing
full of water. They can even have a window cut on one long side, with
glass cemented to the inside, & used as fifty-five or sixty gallon
tropical tanks; if placed into a homemade wooden & lidded front-frame
cabinet, very tidy & attractive even for indoors.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/

(simy1) wrote in message . com...

I have a feeling your argument does not stand up. At least here in the
US, the caloric production per acre is close to 12-15000 calories per
day for a whole year (and indeed US vegans do survive on far less than
1 acre).

Are you considering how much that production depends on oil for
fertilizer, or fuel for tractors?

How about food suplements from the store, such as soybeans or vit B12?
They could be shipped thousands of miles, and few would be aware of
that, or the ecological cost of that shipping.

Parts of the US cannot provide a balanced veg only diet grown locally,
due to weather and soil. (I live in one of these areas.)

"Offbreed" wrote in message
om...
(simy1) wrote in message
. com...

I have a feeling your argument does not stand up. At least here in the
US, the caloric production per acre is close to 12-15000 calories per
day for a whole year (and indeed US vegans do survive on far less than
1 acre).

Are you considering how much that production depends on oil for
fertilizer, or fuel for tractors?

How about food suplements from the store, such as soybeans or vit B12?
They could be shipped thousands of miles, and few would be aware of
that, or the ecological cost of that shipping.

Parts of the US cannot provide a balanced veg only diet grown locally,
due to weather and soil. (I live in one of these areas.)

there really is no such thing as a balanced veg only diet.

(Edgar S.) wrote in message . com...
(Tallgrass) wrote in message . com...
Thanks for the info and gardening tips. Now I have a definitive use
for those old tires in the ravines.

Excellent. Using existing materials is very commendable.

This refrigerator is in a ravine, as well. Walkable, but don't think
I can get the garden tractor down there. Not quite sure how I will
get this bugger up the hill.

If u decide to haul it up, remove the motor first. Maybe u could wrap
a rope around it and use the tractor to pull it up.

Thanks for the tip on the motor.

And if I get a long enough rope on the 'fridge, I can use the RamVan
to pull it out of the ravine!

My place looks somewhat picturesque, until gazing directly down into
this creekbed. "Out of sight, out of mind" must have been the
previous owner(s)' motto.

Another reason to buy a harness for the malamute!

Linda H.

On 16 Dec 2003 18:53:44 -0800,
(Tallgrass) wrote:

(Edgar S.) wrote in message . com...
(Tallgrass) wrote in message . com...
Thanks for the info and gardening tips. Now I have a definitive use
for those old tires in the ravines.

Excellent. Using existing materials is very commendable.

This refrigerator is in a ravine, as well. Walkable, but don't think
I can get the garden tractor down there. Not quite sure how I will
get this bugger up the hill.

If u decide to haul it up, remove the motor first. Maybe u could wrap
a rope around it and use the tractor to pull it up.

Thanks for the tip on the motor.

And if I get a long enough rope on the 'fridge, I can use the RamVan
to pull it out of the ravine!

My place looks somewhat picturesque, until gazing directly down into
this creekbed. "Out of sight, out of mind" must have been the
previous owner(s)' motto.

Another reason to buy a harness for the malamute!

If you look in a book which covers climbing rescues, there are many
different systems using portable gear and rope to make a hauling
system with significant mechanical advantage. Same gear and technique
would be useful for a number of other things.

No vehicle required, although other people make this a good bit
simpler and safer.

Happy trails,
Gary (net.yogi.bear)
------------------------------------------------
at the 51st percentile of ursine intelligence

Gary D. Schwartz, Needham, MA, USA
Please reply to: garyDOTschwartzATpoboxDOTcom

On 15 Dec 2003 14:50:55 -0800,
(Tallgrass) wrote:

It comes down to the biochemistry of the carbon bonds in vegetable
fats vs. those in animal fats. The animal fats are saturated
fats...two bonds between the carbon atoms. The vegetable fats are
often Unsaturated fats...one bond between the carbon atoms.
Breaking/metabolising the bonds produces energy; More bonds means more
energy to release per quantity of fat. Saturated fats have more
energy/calories than unsaturated fats.

ooops...you got it exactly backwards here...UNsaturated fats have two
bonds between two carbons in at least one place on the chain, and
Saturated fats only have one bond between all the carbons...they are
"Saturated" with hydrogen.

The energy released from both types of fats is grossly the same (9
Calories per gram), but certain types of unsaturated fats are not
produced by the human body but are needed in the diet to stay healthy.

ck (a DO physician, not an MD)
--
country doc in louisiana
(no fancy sayings right now)

"Bob Peterson" wrote in there really is no such
thing as a balanced veg only diet.

Well, this is clearly incorrect, and scientifically unsound. As Diet for a
Small Planet proved 40 years ago, amino acids from different plant groups
can be combined so as to constitute completely useable protein for the body.
(ie legumes combined with grains = complete protein) . There is only one
essential nutrient that is not commonly found in plant foods, and that is
vitamin B12. However, it is said to be manufactured by certain yeasts and I
think can be a byproduct of certain kinds of fermentation, although I'm not
sure how extensively this has been researched. (Of course it is available
in eggs and milk, but I assume you're counting those as non-plant sources,
as I do). It is pretty widely accepted that our distant simian ancestors (on
the basis of examination of teeth and skeletal remains) were nearly
completely vegetarian, with perhaps an occasional supplement of a handful of
termites or other insects found in their foraging, so it is eating meat and
meat products which is a newer part of our evolution. However, the density
of calories, both fat and protein in meat was a boon to mankind when it
began to eat it, and probably assisted in the transition from animal to
human. But eating meat also carries risks. Tainted meat has been a source of
many deaths in the past - from salmonella poisoning, trichinosis, etc - to
things like mad-cow disease in the present. In a self-sufficient kind of
farming/herding situation, all meats would have to be eaten fresh, or old
ways of preserving meats with salt, or by dry curing would have to revived.
In any case, there is not a situation I can imagine where a small operation
would be able to supply meat on a daily basis. My grandmother, born in
Ireland in 1890, frequently mentioned that in her childhood, they only had
meat 3 times a YEAR......that was in a family of 11, living on perhaps 5
acres total. Milk of course is a different story - but also not available
year around in nature......

Robert Sturgeon wrote:

Both herding and hunting are trade-offs. Herding vastly
increases your chances of finding the animal you're
"hunting," as well as allowing you to use the animal's milk
- at the cost of additional calories spent doing the
herding. The question is - do you spend fewer calories
hunting (in which case you may come up empty handed) or more
calories herding? The historic evidence seems to favor
herding.

You're absolutely right, Robert. Domestication of animals was what
began the road towards civilization, not the planting of crops as
quite a few folks still believe. When mankind found out that he could
grow rabbits in a pen, he was able to eventually break the
"hunter/gatherer" cycle that had continually forced him to move on.

It only takes 600 calories (assumning that is correct) if
there is no division of labor. It certainly doesn't take
600 calories to put a loaf of bread on a modern American's
table.

It takes a minimum of 600 cals per loaf of bread no matter who does
the actual labor or how. The only reason it doesn't cost *you* 600
cals in modern America is the use of machinery.

Self-sufficiency....you will be planting/tending/harvesting all the
grain and then, when most other crops would be ready to eat, you will
more than double the necessary cals by winnowing/grinding/baking it.

No matter how you cut it, a grain-based diet, without the benefit of
machinery or a local ag co-op, is a labor-intensive one.

Self-sufficiency is just another way of saying - no division
of labor. It's the division of labor (along with technical
progress) that increases output. Self-sufficiency is a
great leap backwards.

Yes, it is....but some folks like the challenge and the reward. Me, I
learned how to knap flint into arrowheads not because they were better
than a Kolpin Twister on an aluminum shaft etc but because it was
simply one more skill to have mastered. Passin ton that skill to the
Boyscouts my wife and I often work with is reward enough.

ral

Robert Sturgeon,
proud member of the vast right wing conspiracy
and the evil gun culture.

Exactly 19 acres...
We have 19 acres of vineyard and we never run out of wine.
Skully
"Mike Warren" wrote in message
news:eHGDb.730362$9l5.518038@pd7tw2no...
(bob peterson) writes:

Did you take a look at how much time was spent on this project? I
don't doubt it took every minute he admitted to. If you think self
suffiency is for you think about the amount of effort just to grow
enough food to starve.

If you translate this to a real life situation where you have 10
hours a day worth of other work to do just to survive, its clear
that this type of arrangement is only for desperation mode, and even
then you probably cannot do it alone.

Yes, that's right: nobody survived before industrialisation.

--
mike [at] mike [dash] warren.com
URL:http://www.mike-warren.com
GPG: 0x579911BD :: 87F2 4D98 BDB0 0E90 EE2A 0CF9 1087 0884 5799 11BD

On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 16:48:10 GMT, Mike Warren
wrote:

(bob peterson) writes:

Did you take a look at how much time was spent on this project? I
don't doubt it took every minute he admitted to. If you think self
suffiency is for you think about the amount of effort just to grow
enough food to starve.

If you translate this to a real life situation where you have 10
hours a day worth of other work to do just to survive, its clear
that this type of arrangement is only for desperation mode, and even
then you probably cannot do it alone.

Yes, that's right: nobody survived before industrialisation.

Very few survived *alone*. Division of labor and specialization are
early characteristics of human living. Hunter/gatherer cultures are,
by definition, not all hunters OR all gatherers. It's just more
efficient to devote *some* concentrated effort (and experience and
knowledge) to different tasks.. Has little to do with
industrialization. Unless that is interpreted as cooperation and
specializaion within a larger group.

Consider land use. It must be rare that a single plot of ground of
whatever size would be ideal for growing grain AND veg AND fruit AND
beekeeping AND animal fodder. You don't grow tomatoes in a rice paddy;
you grow as much rice as you can and trade for tomatoes.