Why I Am A Locavore: Or Why Eating Local is Beyond Being Omnivore or Vegan

We are living in a time when people are further removed from nature than ever before. We spray our vegetables with suicides. We feed our animals junk food. We've put our animals in bad living conditions and we've done so for ourselves.Not wanting to work in a veal fattening cubicle, I became an English teacher, but for how long can I do when there are better things I need to do, I ask myself a lot. For now, I'll stick to food.

I tried different diets in an effort to eat sustainably. But what I discovered that it isn't so much about what thing you are eating but the story of where it came from and its place in the environment. When I started to look more at indigenous people, anthrobiology and I found than the older ways of living were  less complicated. I did this while looking at Native American recipes and studuing other cultures foods and I found the same themes, and overlapping themes. Acorns were used by the Native Americans and Koreans.. It wasn't complicated. All of them generally ate plants and animals, sometimes insects and bugs. Some cultures had more plant fats and others had more animals fats. What was important is that there population was control but the limits of the ecosystem and if they were greedy, then there was starvation.

It seems our a sustainable diet is really about what can be sustainable grown in our area. Somethings are lcoally grown but are not sustainable. They need to be both. There are a lot of people using a lot of fossil fuel dependent technology to grow plants or raise animals that aren't suitable for the climate. Cows that are being raised in the Utah dessert may make economic sense  but even if we ignore the ethical reasons its insane from a sustainability view point.  Buying tomatoes from a hothouse that is grown in Alaska is equally insane. Both require fossil fuel energy.

What does eating local mean. It means that there is less that we can eat but what we know is edible changes as more knowledge is eaten.

To eat local,  it means that we have to a better understanding of our local environment and what grows. So in some cultures that means less will be available that we are used to eating.

In Thailand where there is ruminant protein, there is less beef, so they eat more bugs and other things. In the remaining inuit communities fats from sea animals make the difference between life and death.To try to grow plants in the artic circle would be insane. And to eat seal in Korea would be insane. So really there is no naturally  right and sustainable diet for one place that is right for another place.

As an ecollogically driven person, I've had to face inconvenient facts. Right now, I can't eat  100 percent austainably. I can only move towards that with more knowledge until I can supply myself with my own food. I ask questions. I look at labeling and ask Is this food grown in Korea? Do I really need to eat it? Can I grow his myself?

It means chaning our diets according to our situation. If you are a vegan in Korea, and you are shipping in hemp protein powder, quinoa, and chia seeds. We can have the same conclusion about omnivores, getting grassfed beef from Australia that is not good either.

Many of us will continue to fall into the traps of just listening to people like myself talk about it, but we will continue to scratch our heads if we don't gain more of a knowledge of indigenous diets.

Barefoot Greg

I'm going to start running again and I need running shoes.

There's something I've learned from personal experience which has also been confirmed by scientific studies  reported in this NYTIMEs article: Expensive running shoes are a scam. We are designed to be strong runners and modern shoe technology is part of the problem. However, the good options are weird and wacky to many people and I may have to rely on surrogate options right now. But the truth is..

"We were born to run," proclaims Dr. Lieberman, an evolutionary biology professor from Harvard, in another NYtimes article.

Dr. Lieberman contradicts on a the popular belief that hunter-gatherers didn't run a lot. They did a lot of that despite the fact hunter gatherer people work much less than we do. We were designed to be great runners. Our head evolved to bob so we could run a longer distance without the force of impact that pigs and other animals have.

"Before bows and arrows and before horses were tamed, we did “persistence hunting” where we ran kudu, wildebeest and zebra into exhaustion. These animals can’t pant when they gallop. They overheat. People would find a big animal and chase it till it collapsed. You need no technology to do this, just the ability to run long distances, which all of us have. "

His findings were published in Nature and year later he was giving a lecture when he met a man named "Barefoot Bob." Wearing socks with duck tape wrapped around his feet, Bob said he didn't like to run in shoes. Shoes hurt him. So Lieberman started to wonder if the injuries people suffered while running was from the shoes they were wearing.

So he tested Bob and found his impact was less from his feet to his head while he was barefoot running.

Then Lieberman went to African and found strong runners running almost with no shoes at all with different impacts and strength.

But some runners have used this method. A Daily Mail article has a picture of Ethiopian runner Abebe Bikila winning the 1960 Olympic Marathon barefoot.

This being said, shoes aren't bad. They were designed to protect people's feet from parasites in the ground. It's just that they are too complicated. Something simple is what is needed.

Lieberman himself runs barefooted in the summer times and wears shoes that fit like a glove. I've been looking at this style like Vibrams for sometime. I think its an improvement in design. But I find there are problems that have discouraged me from buying them. One, they are made of plastic. Two, they are 100 dollars and for the price too expensive for something designed with a thin sole. That will wear out quickly. I want to minimize my support of large scale corporations and having to buy more shoes every year gives more support and makes me poorer.

There are more eco friendly options. One is to design and make my own shoes. Esparadilles designs like Tom's shoes can be made yourself and ca Design your Own Espadrilles is a group of individualson facebook who each makes and sells their on Espadrilles.  Two, is to try "Barefoot Bob" style with its socks wrapped in duck tape. Even more ecofriendly and affordable than buying something like Vibrams which use so much plastic.  .

At this moment, I've opted for the second option.  This of until  I can make them myself.

One day, I can opt out of this abusive industry and make my own shoes with out the exploitation of other people. Then maybe some day after this day I can use natural materials  from plants I've gathered or animals I've hunted.

For now I'll be wearing my own Barefoot Bob sneakers while training. If anybody looks at me strangely I won't be surprised. But the good thing is that I don't care either. I'd rather make things simpler and more eco.

P.S.

I went for a run later in the day practically barefoot. I removed the inside padding from two sole pads from a pair of old shoes I have. I put my feet into the socks. I then put a sole under each sock and while holding the soles on the bottom of the socks, I put a sock over each foot.  Then I ran. My feet were landing on the balls of my feet. I didn't feel the normal tension I do in running shoes. I woke up today without the usual soreness. It's quite good.

5 Seconds of Fame

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I was in the Chosun Ilbo yesterday. It was about Wwoofing in Korea. It was a short 300 word piece. A teacher roughly translated it for me.. The article started by saying that with worn and cut hands I was picking food. I was on the farm because in the future I want to be a farmer. 

Wwoof Korea expects 1,000 volunteers in the future for this great program.That's great. We need more farmers in this world. 

My wife proposed Sunday that we pay for organic ingredients together. Wooo! This means that we will share meals but we will be eating healthy healing foods too!

Monday 


I went shopping for organic basics. Lotte Mart is my only option at the moment but I will be participating in a CSA very soon!

First stop at the mart was buying some great vegetables. I bought 100 grams each of chicory, and three other varieties of lettuce. 

The labeling for them was easy and a good way to study Korean. 

These small anchovies are not the strong disgusting stuff that were served in the buffets when I was a kid in the states. That taste is from the processing. Dried they are very tasty when made into banchan. They are very healthy and are also very ecologically sustainable. 

I bought some. 

I went to buy organic sesame oil and organic rice vinegar and spotted organic mayonaise and ketchup too. I wonder how they compare to my delicious ketchup and mayonaise. 

I bought the sesame oil and rice vinegar and moved onto finding some happy eggs. 

However the labeling of these items of organic as really confusing. So for the moment I've held off buying them.

I got organic flour, anchovies, squid, garlic chives, organic soy sauce, organic sesame oil, and organic tofu.

Tuesday

My wife's birthday. She requested a curry a favorite of an English person. So I set out to buy a happy chicken to be part of her birthday curry.  I searched about Lotte Mart asking for the best organic chicken I could find. I found two types that come from traditional villages. I chose this smaller one for 8,000 won. Organic meat is more expensive because of higher quality. I don't want less in my body. If I could choose between 1 organic drum stick vs a a whole factory farmed chicken. I would choose the healthier drum stick anytime. That drum stick has more power.

I don't believe in the mixes so I made my own recipe out of what I had. I don't have ghee or all the spices for an indian curry so I used the following for a Korean take:

cumin

tumeric

sesame oil

garlic

garlic chives

1 tablespoon of crushed black pepper

1/4 cup of organic yogurt

4 organic long Korean green  peppers or gochu peppers

1/4 of the chicken

1/2 an onion

I chopped the chicken and marinated it in sesame oil and tumeric for 10 minutes. 

I pan fried cumin with crushed black pepper to intensify the spices for a few minutes. I put it aside. 

In a sepparate pan I fried  onion and  salt and peppers. 

Then I combined everything together with the chicken for some minutes on high heat.. I don't like my chicken to be dry so after it browned I added 1/2 cup of organic beef stock I made the other day and simmered it for 3 minutes. Then I added the yoghurt and simmered it for a few minutes. 

And Walla!

Without different colors it looks a 10th of delicious as it was. But trust me. It was brown on the outside and juicy on the inside. The taste of happy chicken is better. It has more character. 

We are with big plain salad of Korean greens.  

And a little cheesecake. There is nothing healthy about this bakery's food. But for a birthday you need cake and I don't have an oven. Maybe MeePee from Alien's Day Out can start making omnivore options. ;)

It was a positive experience to eat this with my wife and enjoy it. That's necessary too!

Wednesday

With teaching English again, I have less time to spend on organics and farming.  In the time I had,  I worked on eco-ideas for Mulme Healing Farm in my free time. I have an opportunity to eco build in the future so I'm researching for good ideas to contribute for the design. I also caught up on other reading. 

I read an article in the NYTimes that made me feel angry. It was about the new FDA regulations for farmers.  The solution to the problems of the ecoli outbreak is to require farmers to build expensive facilities to sepparate animals from the plants. However, what made me angry was that cows carry a mutated form ecoli that containminates the food. And the NYTimes quouted the FDA blaming the contamination on deer. Deer? Deer? Does this mean the regulations involve walling in nature. No the real issue is factory farming animals. If you factory farm the cows and then kill the sick animals and happen to rinse the blood from the water into your irrigation system you have a problem. But clearly this issue is being burried. 

Anyway I continued on with my day. 

I finished a great day at school and did chores around town.

I broke my meditaion into two pats so I could do a half hour between basketball with the shop owner near my apartment. We played 2 on 2 with strangers.

My heart was there but my legs weren't. I was gangly and slow. I think I'll get better in shape for it eventually. Now I'm uncoordinated and out of practice. 

When I fnished. I was hungry so I ate a salad. I did meditation at 9.I was soo tired that I literally fell asleep and my wife woke me up. I missed gumdo training, Ooops!