The Helpful Gardener
Mod
Posts: 7491
Joined: Mon Feb 09, 2004 9:17 pm
Location: Colchester, CT

Nature's Food Mandala

Here is some of the most concrete advice in this book. While much of the other dictates must be accepted on faith as more esoteric or conceptual, here Sensei gives us a clear and tactile mandate.
A natural diet lies right at our feet.
As the locovore movement deepens and spreads across the planet, we apply rational reasons for it's adoption. Less shipping, more local economy, better food with higher nutrient densities. But F-san has again taken a more spiritually constructed reasoning...
The villagers know the delicious flavor of food, but they cannot taste the mysterious flavor of nature. No it is rather that they can taste it but cannot express it in words.
Is this the part of our gardening we cannot get the chemically reliant to conceive? It would seem not as Sensei has set a clear dichotomy between organics and natural farming. He does speak to the returning of wild vegetables to flavors like their ancestral predecessors elsewhere; is this that mysterious flavor? Is it the game in wild meats, or the slight bitter in my lambsquarters? Or is it something more?

HG

User avatar
rainbowgardener
Super Green Thumb
Posts: 25279
Joined: Sun Feb 15, 2009 6:04 pm
Location: TN/GA 7b

His mandala doesn't speak to me very much... it is so Japanese and it is heavy on seafood which I don't eat.

It would be interesting and very educational, to work on making an American version, with what edible weeds/wildflowers as well as farm veggies are locally available month by month.

We are done with corn early this year because of the drought. If I were to eat strictly locally, I wouldn't eat any more corn til next summer, except for the little bit I froze from this summer's harvest...

I think the answer to my dilemma about how to be a winter local-vore is in the food distribution system. All of the frozen corn in the grocery is big companies like birds-eye, that get corn from all over, truck it to some central processing plant and then ship it all over the country. In the growing season, I can get locally grown corn at the farmer's market. We need a winter farmer's market where I could get locally grown frozen corn.

Or maybe it's in my lifestyle. If I bought lots more farmer's market corn in season and froze it myself... That would mean lots more freezer space and lots more time and energy spent freezing/ canning etc.

Until we are all living on the land and feeding ourselves, we really need a different food system, where locally grown corn (etc, I'm just using the corn as eg) would be frozen here, sent to our local groceries, so I could just go to the grocery and buy locally grown frozen corn.



Return to “One Straw Revolution - Masanobu Fukuoka”