The following is a transcribed Video Q&A, so the text may not read like an edited article would. Scroll to the bottom to view this video in its entirety.
Okay three things, and this has nothing to do with whether you’re a Christian or not. This is just generic; it applies to everyone. Number one, get in your kitchen. In other words, start becoming a participant in this game. Getting in your kitchen and touching food, working with food, preparing, preserving, packaging gives you knowledge about food. What happens is that when we don’t participate in something we become ignorant of it. When we become ignorant, we become paranoid, fearful. Because we fear what we do not know. So, getting in your kitchen to make a home-centric food system is the first step toward moving forward in faith with food as opposed to fearing food because you don’t know it.
Number two, take your budget that you will have for this year—whatever your entertainment/recreation budget. Everybody has one of these. If you are eating out, going to Disneyland, a Caribbean cruise, Netflix, whatever soccer or little league, all of your entertainment/recreation budget of time and money. Spend this budget, this year, searching your community area for integrity food.
Every area, every community, has integrity food. And you can search that out and find those growers. Put some emphasis on it. Just as you would search for a church fellowship or search the Scripture to do a good Sunday school lesson, we need to be searching for partners who share a stewardship value. They are not all going to be Christians, but if their stewardship ethic resonates with divine pattern, with God’s templates, (i.e. not feeding their cows grain, feeding their cows dead cows, and not dumping a bunch of things that end in “cied”—the suffix for death—on their vegetables, these kind of things).
Finally, the third thing, is to see what you can do yourself. There are certainly people who for financial or living reasons cannot do anything but there are precious few. If you have a roof you can put a beehive on it. If you have a sink, you can put a Verma compositing thing under it. You don’t need a dog and cat, they just lay around all day and act entitled, instead get a couple chickens. The chickens can eat your table scraps and give you eggs. A dog and a cat are a terrible role model, they just sit there like victims of entitlement. The point is to be creative and do something for yourself.
You can do many things in your house. If you have a southern exposure, and most houses have a southern exposure, then you can put a solarium on it. A solarium can give you paths of solar heat, you can raise all your mesclun mix, and if you rewire your plumbing so you have grey water then you can run your grey water through there and have a nutrient dense water chestnut bed or something. If you have a yard or a lawn edible landscaping doesn’t take any more effort to grow a fruit tree or a nut tree than it does an ornamental tree. I’m not against beauty and that sort of thing but can’t we really do something.
If your kids just grow up and the only thing, they can be proud about is being the top points getter on Angry Birds, I think that is a much shallower way to self-actualize your persona than compared to if your child grows up and says I know how to make composite and grow tomatoes. I know how to butcher a chicken and cook it for Sunday dinner. Not only did those things put our children into contact with the wonder of life and death but we shortchange our children and ultimately cheapen the sanctity of life, cheapen the strength, mystery, and power of life when we don’t participate.
What are 3 ways that I can be more self-sufficient in caring for the earth? - Joel Salatin from crosswalkquestions on GodTube.
Photo Credit: ©GettyImages/ipopba