Compost ingredients?

[Jan Flora]

Heh. It didn't work! The moose came through, stepped on my peas and kept going. At least she didn't stop to graze. I'm putting a fishnet fence up today. (She's down on the lake right now, eating the water lilies...)

If you know the rancher, you'll know how/where the animals were butchered. If you buy an animal from us, you pick out the one you want, live.

We butcher on our ranch, never more than two animals in a day. (It's a *lot* of work!) The SO drives near the steer he wants, while the animal is grazing. He stays in the pickup and shoots the animal in the forehead once with a .300 Savage that's had the point of the bullet cut off. (Better blunt impact -- kills instantly. The animal dies with grass in it's mouth and never hears the shot that kills it.) He discovered that if he stays in the pickup, the animals ignore him. If he gets out, they all come in for their (organic) barley, then you've got a bunch of milling animals. If a stranger gets out of the truck, the herd leaves. (They've learned that when strangers show up, someone is going to die...) Most of our customers take everything but the hide and the moo. Some even take the hooves, to make a gelatin-like soup. We have lots of ethnic Russian neighbors. When customers don't want the tongue, kidneys, liver or heart, we give those to elders in the neighborhood who enjoy them.

We wait until there's snow on the ground, to have a clean place to work out on the meadow. The weather is also cool enough then to hang the carcass in our meat house for a couple of days, before it goes down to the local butcher. (It's easier to split a carcass after it's hung for awhile.) The butcher hangs the sides in his cooler at a certain temp (?) for up to 10 days, then breaks the carcass down into whatever cuts the customer has specified. (One of the questions on the "cut sheet" is "how many teenagers are you feeding?" because Tom will make the burger packages bigger, according to the teenage count in a household. He also asks how much and what kind of fat you want in the burger.)

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

[Jan Flora]

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

[Jan Flora]

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.

[...]

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.

[Jan Flora]

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

[Mike Stevenson]

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...

micro-biotics

[Pat Meadows]

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

[Pat Meadows]

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.

I can almost live on big salads throughout the summer!

Pat

[Andrew McMichael]

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

[Tom Jaszewski]

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....

[Tom Jaszewski]

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

[Sue Sorensen]

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!

[zxcvbob]

The rendering plant?

Best regards, Bob

[zxcvbob]

I havn't figured out where vegans and other strict orthodox vegetarians get their vitamin B12.

Bob

[Lorenzo L. Love]

Most get it from all the insects in their food. I doubt most vegetarians realize how much insect material is allowed in common foods like peanut butter and bread. And then there are all the poor insects that these savage vegetarians devour alive in their organic produce.

The few that manage to avoid sufficient animal protein in the form of insects get their B-12 by injection after being hospitalized for pernicious anemia.

Lorenzo L. Love

people living under the perpetual menace of war and invasion is very easy to govern. It demands no social reforms. It does not haggle over expenditures on armaments and military equipment. It pays without discussion, it ruins itself, and that is an excellent thing for the syndicates of financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors are an abundant source of gain.? Anatole France

[Jim Carter]

On Tue, 05 Aug 2003 20:44:19 -0500, zxcvbob wrote in rec.gardens.edible:

What foods provide vitamin B12?

Vitamin B12 is naturally found in animal foods including fish, milk and milk products, eggs, meat, and poultry. Fortified breakfast cereals are an excellent source of vitamin B12 and a particularly valuable source for vegetarians.

-- Gardening Zones Canada Zone 5a United States Zone 3a Near Ottawa, Ontario

[Pat Meadows]

B-12 supplements are one source.

I think tempeh and a few other non-animal foods have B12, but I'm not sure.

Pat

[Pat Meadows]

See:

Vegan Sources of Vitamin B12

A number of reliable vegan food sources for vitamin B12 are known. One brand of nutritional yeast, Red Star T-6635+, has been tested and shown to contain active vitamin B12.

The RDA (which includes a safety factor) for adults for vitamin B12 is 2.4 micrograms daily [4]. 2.4 micrograms of vitamin B12 are provided by a little less than 1 Tablespoon of Vegetarian Support Formula (Red Star T-6635+) nutritional yeast. A number of the recipes in this book contain nutritional yeast.

Another source of vitamin B12 is fortified cereal. We recommend checking the label of your favorite cereal since manufacturers have been known to stop including vitamin B12.

Other sources of vitamin B12 are vitamin B12-fortified soy milk, vitamin B12-fortified meat analogues (food made from wheat gluten or soybeans to resemble meat, poultry or fish), and vitamin B12 supplements. There are vitamin supplements which do not contain animal products.

Vegans who choose to use a vitamin B12 supplement, either as a single supplement or in a multi-vitamin should use supplements at least several times a week. Even though a supplement may contain many times the recom-mended level of vitamin B12, when vitamin B12 intake is high, not as much appears to be absorbed. This means in order to meet your needs, you should take the vitamin several times a week.

------------------------------------------------------------------

Pat

[Jan Flora]

Ruminants manufacture the B-complex vitamins in their digestive systems. (I'd have to look at my notes from an animal nutrition class to tell you exactly which chamber of the stomach makes it.) If it's a bacterial synthesis, they'd make it in their rumens -- the first chamber.

Don't know about mono-gastrics (people, pigs, horses). I'd have to look it up.

Jan

[Mike Stevenson]

According to the

B-12 is made in the large intestines of humans. It is also sopposedly unavailable to the body there becuase the large intestine cannot absorb B-12 into the bloodstream there. One would assume composting humanure would make this B-12 available to a person...

vegetarians get

[Jan Flora]

Good Lord -- you're a full-sized fellow! Do you eat cheese, milk, eggs and everything but, what, red meat, poultry and fish? I think I need to get some recipes from you, Tom.

One of the local ranching families is famous for big men. When the long, lost brother was coming home to work for us at the Soil & Water Conservation District here, his older brother said, "Yeah, it's a shame. He never did come into his full weight." (The long, lost brother weighs a whisker under 200 lbs. His brothers are all far closer to 300, but they're still hard-working men. They're just big & tall guys. Their mom just turned 80. She's still running the ranch and putting her hay up this week. She's 5'6" and 130 lbs. and _none_ of her sons mess with her. She's awesome. *g* She sold the cattle and runs wapati now.)

Jan