Perennial Roots Farm

biodynamic farm & garden

weston price

You are the Quality of What You Eat

FarmersStewart Lundy

Visited Bob Mattie at Elysium Farm today. He grows good pigs. At his farm, you can understand why Rudolf Steiner called pigs "heavenly" creatures (perplexing his audience). These animals are vast accumulators of cosmic substantiality, the stuff of life. Cosmic substance is the richness of soil and the essence of life: fat. Alchemists called this fat "Sulfur" because it's what makes candles burn and brains stay on. Fat makes life go boom. Alchemists saw this fat condensing in the dew gifted every morning.

Why does it matter? As Steiner himself indicated, the fat of any animal has the least of the character of the animal itself - fat is a coalescence of plant sugars and nutrients the way that beeswax is a special concentration of honey. Fat is stored up sunlight.

Here I have to buck convention a bit with a hair-splitting quibble. We are NOT what we eat. We are the QUALITY of whatever we eat. Eating corn doesn't make us corny. Eating bones doesn't make dogs boney. But eating healthy food, for the most part, makes us healthy. Fat from animals or plants in toxic conditions collects toxicity. Fat from healthy conditions is a condensation of the entire thriving environment. By eating, we bring outside conditions inside us. It is as if you have a photograph of the welfare of an animal (or plant) in the flavor and aroma of its fat. If we eat unhealthy food, it doesn't matter if it's an animal or a plant at all! We are the *quality* of whatever we eat. Therefore, focus on quality. Eat less meat, sure, but also eat BETTER meat.

Pictured here is Bob filling a tote with sea salt and probiotics and vinegar to further improve the health of his noble beasts and his thoughtful customers. Wanna be sick? Eat cheap food and sick animals and sad plants all day every day.

Or get bacon from Bob.

It's always busiest in spring

Stewart Lundy
Tending thousands of spring seedlings

It’s always busiest preparing in spring. The workload is almost three times what it is almost any other time of the year. The winter “break” is welcome, assuming you aren’t preoccupied with small repairs, building infrastructure, and catching up on paperwork. But by the time spring approaches, who’s really had time to balance their soils properly? This is an entirely separate skillset and can seem daunting for backyard gardeners and farmers alike. But if you want to get the best yield for your time and you want to get the best flavor (as well as nutrient-density) you want to have balanced soils. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer liked to say that what we see produced in the garden today is not really the effect of what we did this year but rather the effect of what we did last year. Though it may seem early, farmers and gardeners should already been thinking of next year even as we get started in spring.

For those of us with busy lives but still with an active desire to get the best out of our gardens, we offer consultations to be a helping hand through the year. For the smallholder or the commercial grower, we offer decades of collective experience and can customize a program just for you.

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