This.
It might be a good exercise for orchardmerc to buy a big sack of rye, a bunch of feed corn, and a few bags of dried peas and try eating nothing but that for a month. It can’t hurt to get a preview of this self sufficient life thing and see how it goes prior to the hard part of actually producing a few dozen pounds of rye, corn, and peas.
I’ve already said in this thread that is what I have done.
Not living only on it no. I never said that was my intention but buying food that I intend to grow.
But that’s the ideal right? The idea is to get as close as you can to just eating what you grow, and you’ve indicated you’re mostly interested in growing grains and legumes for the sake of caloric efficiency. Do correct me if that’s not right.
That being the case, it’d be pretty simple, and cheap, for you to get a real life example of what that ideal is actually like by purchasing a month’s worth of whole, dry grains, legumes, of whichever varieties you plan to grow, in the proportions you expect to grow them in. And then you can live on that for a month and see how it goes. It’d be a really solid way to experimentally model your system. In an ideal world, you would live off the food you plan to grow, so it would be cool go ahead and give that ideal a test run and spend a month or so living in a close model of your ideal world, no?
I just said that is exactly what I have been doing for almost a year so this isn’t the ‘gotcha’ you think it is.
I don’t mean it as a gotcha, I’m just not convinced of the seriousness of this endeavor.
If you don’t mind sharing, what has constituted the bulk of your diet for the last year, your most common meal, and what’s it made from? It’s one thing if you’ve tested boiled wheat berries a few times, it’s another entirely if that’s what you eat five days a week for example.
enjoyment aside, having an herb garden does not take up that much space and herbs/ variety in general is how you dont get deficiencies.
Speaking of deficiencies: did you get a chance to look into nixtamalization?
I eat a balanced vegan diet with all the necessary macro nutrients.
I eat the many types of food discussed already in this thread, not just wheat. I have already stated that so I am not sure why you are cherry picking my comments.
I wrote I eat sweet potatoes, lentils, peas, root vegetables among some of the things I mentioned in the discussion already.
So you are selectively picking just single quotes I have made and using them out of context.
I thought it just meant the processing of corn into less healthy forms or rather just more processed which may or may not be less healthy that the whole kernels?
huh how did you get that out of it? No it makes vitamins bioavailable in corn that otherwise arent. If you just eat corn without doing nixtamalization as a major part of your diet you will get pellagra.
it makes it more nutritious not less
I didn’t watch the video so I didn’t get anything out of it lol. No reason just nixatmitization was not high on my list of priorities.
it should be cause i actually think its all grains. modern grains are supplemented with niacin to avoid the pellagra problem (like if you just buy flour from the store). If you grow it yourself there wotn be any of that and you will need to nixtamalize your grains to not be deficient as they used to before modern agriculture forgot about it
I see. I will take my chances for now. So much else to do!
Again, I don’t mean this to be combative, please don’t take my comments as so.
I highlighted wheat since that’s the one you said you grew the most of, so presumably that’d be the main part of your planned diet. And you haven’t mentioned that you plan to mill and refine it, but did mention you tested boiling it. I am honestly curious if you’ve tried living on exactly the foods you plan to grow in the forms you plan to process them into, because as best I can tell, you haven’t.
It would rule out sweet potatoes, for example, since in the UK you need special soil and a greenhouse to reliably get sweet potato crops as they require a very long, hot, sunny growing season and very well drained soil–even here in eastern North Carolina the harvest for greenhouse-started sweet potatoes isn’t ready until right around first frost, and our climate is subtropical.
It’s also important that you are aware of the differences in processing. As snarfing is trying to point out, grains are deficient in niacin, and almost all grains you eat have niacin added in some way or other. Going back to the example of wheat, I mentioned the boiled berries because even chemically speaking, wheat berries and wheat flour are extremely different. Commercial white wheat flour, if dry, is mostly starch, has a long shelf life and is fortified with iron and niacin. Wheat berries, on the other hand, are more nutritious in theory, as it still contains dietary fiber, some (but less than fortified flour) iron and niacin, and a bit more protein and healthy fats than flour. However, the shelf life is shorter. The issue is the fats, wheat has a high proportion of polyunsaturated fats in the outer portions of the berry, which after prolonged storage oxidize, giving the wheat a strong rancid flavor and making them quite unhealthy to eat (lots of oxidative stress, there’s a reason our bodies instinctively don’t want to eat oxidized, ie rancid, fats–they’re bad for you). Mold is the other issue, as the heat of the milling process helps dry the wheat and dramatically reduces the chances of mold formation, making flour a considerably safer storage option than unmilled grains. Look into the history of flour, there’s actually quite a lot of useful (and potentially life-saving!) information as to why things are done the way they are and why fortified white wheat flour specifically is the most common form now.
That’s just the example of wheat. There are similar intricacies and subtleties to almost everything you’ve mentioned. Are you aware of which legumes are safe to eat raw and which ones contain potent neurotoxins that are only rendered safe by prolonged cooking at high temperature? A dozen undercooked beans of the wrong variety can literally kill an adult human. Eating too much corn can give you pellagra. Eating even modest quantities of broad beans aka fava beans can cause hemolytic anemia in certain people. Rickets, cheilosis, goiter, beri-beri, Menke’s disease, etc. are all very unpleasant things that result from imbalanced diets. To avoid them, you either need to research them all extensively and research the nutrient profiles of the things you plan to grow, or you need to conduct real life tests. These aren’t gotcha’s, these are FYIs, and of serious import.
This is why I want to know if you’ve tested your plans in real life. Your current diet has very little resemblance to the diet you’re talking about producing for yourself. You are eating plants that you yourself can’t grow, and even of the ones you can grow, you’re likely eating them in forms that have been significantly processed to alter their nutritional composition.
Again, don’t take what I’m saying as the attacks of a “naysayer.” Take it as the comments from someone who is trying to point out the blind spots you might have and the information that you seem to have missed.
yes i dont think its a gotcha, i think we all genuinely want to support you in your journey to grow everything you eat, and pointing out blind spots like this is how youre going to get there, imo. Its why i brought up nixtimalizing but the point about grain storage is great, i did not consider that.
speaking of: mushroom growing may be a good source to persue as well. a few reasons 1) have unique nutrients 2) can use space that otherwise isnt well suited to growing crops.
Yes I have. I clearly replied to that when another user asked me it:
I would be happy to discuss if the questions were coming from a place of genuine curiosity and an open debate about different techniques but they have the flavour of condescension that “kid you haven’t thought this through” when I have been studying it for the past year or two.
I answer the questions, but you don’t seem to read them or you take the one thing in the list which may not immediately be apparent that grows here (sweet potatoes do btw as there are hardy varieties) and dismiss the whole list based on that one item.
I also wrote I eat turnips, other root vegetables, lentils, peas and all that kind of stuff and have been buying them for years anyway just because that was my diet as a vegan yet somehow none of those have registered as ‘counting’ with you as things that I could grow.
Most UK produce can be grown in the UK and is eaten by a large proportion of society so I don’t know what is so sensational to you about that. I was already eating most of the stuff as part of a balanced diet, like most other inhabitants of Britain.
So I don’t know why you find it so hard to believe I am living on domestically produced foodstuffs.
The only regular part of my diet before this which was not domestic was rice and that is why I switched to wheat and other similar grains that grow here.
How much can you limit your diet and still thrive ?
This will not help you much… but I have eaten nothing but meat (mostly fatty ruminant meat) for 62 days… and have done several one month runs of that.
Elimination diet that absolutely heals my gut.
Had an autoimmune disease … but no more.
Had high blood pressure, triglycerides, cholesterol and took Rx meds for those… no more.
The bare minimum that I know that humans can survive and thrive on is the strict carnivore diet… also called the lions diet.
Beef (or any ruminant animal meat) salt, water.
You need to get around 70% of calories from fat, 30% from protein.
There are people who have to eat like to survive without terrible illnesses… and they have for many years.
I dont know of anyone that has ever experimented to find the minimum number of fruits, veggies, grains that you could survive and thrive on.
TNHunter
The whole “have you ever tried to live for a month eating that” argument is complete nonsense. It is based on the notion that there would somehow be an alternative if our supply lines collapse. If humans could survive on a South American mountain top eating nothing but human flesh, I am pretty sure they can survive a diet of corn, squash, and beans. Plenty of niacin in a pot of baked beans.
A diet of corn, squash, and beans would be fatal after a few months to a year as it contains no B12. Even if taking B12 supplements a host of issues remain:
Children on such a diet would have mental retardation from to the low levels of Omega fatty acids.
Men on such a diet would likely be infertile due to selenium and copper deficiencies.
Women, and to an extent men, would likely develop anemia on such a diet as the iron in beans is very poorly available because of the antinutritional phytochemicals in beans.
I’m sorry to say it, but it’s actually really, really easy to get very sick and even die from a overly restrictive diet, especially plant only-diets without mushrooms, seafood, dairy, or meat.
Yeah but thats not all hes eating.
That being said idk why you wouldnt add thi gs like herbs for fun
I’ll grant that, I’m just replying to nil that a three sisters only diet is actually deadly. There’s a reason native Americans ate a lot of animals and gathered other plants and mushrooms, you will die living off the three sisters.