Hello Foodie Cooks, Farmers, Urban Homesteaders, and Followers,
It's 2014, and I am coming up on the four year anniversary of Foodie
Out Of The Closet Blog. I clearly started this endeavor in February 2010 with
my Foodie Manifesto and it has been a fun adventure of videos, audio podcasts,
meeting new people (farmers and makers) in the community who are passionate
about sustainability and the future of our planet.
I hope you don’t mind I quote myself.
After
finishing my graduate degree at John F. Kennedy University in psychology, and
practicing for a few years in the community, I fell into an emotional slump. I
was reading and watching many films about the demise of our planet, and was
seriously passing through Eco-Anxiety. The most productive phase of this
Anxiety Disorder is when you become an active spearhead to bring awareness to
the community. I quit my job and began doing my Foodie Out Of The Closet blog,
incorporating all my love for cooking, food, farming, and planet awareness. I
set out one morning to interview the local vendors at my farmers market, in
Oakland.
This time of reflection has brought me right back to focus on the
new home my husband and I have begun to invest our energy into. It has been
such a long time coming, that we are able to live our lives as we imagine it, gardening
where we grow as much organic food as we eat, raising chickens, collecting our
own rainwater (California drought permitting), solar powering our home, among
others things such as living minimally and as gently as possible on this precious
planet. This home has not only been a great blessing that we have actively
manifested, but also a lot of work! My husband just finished installing wood
floors, which was no easy job, for one person. Of course, I provided the
lemonade, the meals, and supportive remarks! The next project will be to remove
the two satellite dishes on the roof from previous owners, installing rain gutters,
followed by building a fence to give us more privacy in our back yard, and
immediately following that, building a chicken coop!
This brings me to raising our baby heritage breed chicks, and the losses that
become little thorns of change in our lifestyle. Raising your hens is a bit of
double-edged sword. For one thing, we are being more sustainable because we are
not driving to the farmers market which thankfully lowers our carbon foot
print, we are recycling wasted food from our own kitchen, they are wondrous
fertilizers and bugs eaters, lovely pets, and moreover we are more
self-sustaining; but at the same time, there will be this loss of community in
not visiting with our local farmer Mr. Ledesma at the farmers market and talking about his farm and the
growing seasons, most of all buying his delicious eggs. It’s a tricky balancing act,
and obviously, the positives outweigh the losses, but let’s not even imagine that
we can do urban farming completely isolated.
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| Top to bottom: Myrtle - Black Australorp Pepper - Plymouth Rock Mrs. Rhodes - Rhode Island Red Goldie - Cochin Bantam. |
Our business is now directed to a local homesteaders shop called
Pollinate Farm and Garden in Oakland, California, for baby heritage chicks, organic baby chicken
feed, wood shavings, grit, and other necessities of raising chickens at home. We
are certainly engaged in the community, like never before, as I will be sharing
our backyard chicken eggs with friends and strangers in the community. For
example, with the Home Depot salesman who cut wire fencing for me without
charge as he found out I was raising baby chickens in an incubator, only if I
brought him back some fresh eggs in a few months. We will also be supporting local
establishments like Economy Lumber that has great recycled wood pieces for
our future chicken coop. We do our best to remain as local as possible.
