Participatory event maps Sydney’s sharing economy

1 May, 2018 | Perma-thinking

The Sharing Map geolocates an alternative, underground but not hidden economy in which monetary exchange plays a minor part


Sharing food is a sure way to get people to share information, and there was plenty of both at The Sharing Map Jam at Camperdown Commons, home to Pocket City Farm in Sydney’s Inner West.
As around 80 participants made their way to the Commons to gather in the shelter of the pavilion, they were greeted with tables of food prepared by Acre, the restaurant at the Commons. They were there to create Sydney’s first map of the sharing economy… the authentic sharing economy that is, not the corporatised version of Air BnB and Uber, which are business as usual reborn as platform capitalism.

A World Cafe process started the evening. Categories like transport, food and others were assigned to different tables and people spent ten minutes listing the sharing economy initiatives, like the Inner West Tool Library, the free courses at the Permaculture Interpretive Garden and others they knew of before moving on to the next table. And after that, more food.
By now the well fed crowd were ready to participate in one of the two sharing games the organisers prepared… one for organisations, the other for individuals. And after that… yet more food, this time of the dessert type.
As people talked and ate, a small crew were uploading the first of the sharing economy initiatives listed earlier in the evening. Seemingly suddenly, The Sharing Map of Sydney came into existence.

There was something empowering in compiling the information then watching it go live online immediately afterwards…

What was outstanding

Several things are notable about this event.
First, it was successful. Its smooth running was a credit to the mainly female crew who organised it. There was something empowering in compiling the information then watching it go live online immediately afterwards.
Second, the food, which I might have mentioned before. It was plentiful, timely for those attending straight after their day’s work, tasty and filling. Never underestimate food to drive an event to success.
Third, the process. World Cafe is participatory by its very nature. Add the sharing games and you have an evening that engaged all and gave it a pace that led to a successful launch of The Sharing Map website. No tedious sitting around meeting-style.
Fourth, the sharing map is only for free or minimal cost initiatives. Not businesses. It is essentially a community-focussed platform to map organisations and other entities that exchange goods and services as part of an informal community exchange system.
Fifth, The Sharing Map process was the type of participatory event that would qualify as social design in permaculture although permaculture was not represented there.

 
A City of Sydney grant made the event, and the food, possible. Over coming weeks, three additional, similar events were planned for other locales in the City of Sydney local government area. After that, the team wants to take the mapping process to other suburbs.
The Sharing Map geolocates an alternative, underground but not hidden economy in which monetary exchange plays a minor part.

 

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Food security the real focus of urban farming

1 May, 2018 | Perma-thinking

It is clear that there can be no meaningful conversation around urban agriculture that ignores food security

It was strange to walk out of a cafe where people sat at tables with plates full of food and into an evening seminar on food insecurity and urban agriculture. I couldn’t help but think that not far away on the other side of Sydney University, where the seminar was to take place, there were people probably experiencing food insecurity this same evening.
Over there, beyond the gates of the university, there were also others practicing the urban agriculture that was the theme of the seminar. They inhabited the community gardens dotted through this local government area as well as Pocket City Farm, a small, commercial, inner urban market garden within walking distance of the university.

The seminar, Urban Farming – Feeding the Future, was a Sydney flow-on of the urban agriculture conference in Melbourne the previous weekend. Brought together by Sydney University’s Sydney Environment Institute and the Healthy Food Systems Node at the Charles Perkins Centre were:

  • Lenore Newman, writer of a new book on Canadian cuisine and an urban geographer who holds a Canada Research Chair in Food Security and Environment at the University of the Fraser Valley
  • Toby Whittington, CEO and founder of Green World Revolution (and here) a social enterprise growing jobs for the unemployed through urban agriculture in Perth, Western Australia, and previously at Perth City Farm
  • Megan Battaglia, Masters of Sustainability student at the University of Sydney.

Lenore Newman

Informality the key to a useful conversation

Next day, the seminar was followed by a session, more a conversation, between Sydney University’s Alana Mann who works in communications and food issues, Lenore and Toby. That attracted people from the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network; Tarrania Suhood who has her own small business, InCollaboration, and works with the New Economy Network Australia; a couple PhD students including one from the University of Hawaii — both are researching urban agriculture; one from Randwick City Council sustainability unit; urban planner and urban agriculture expert, Ian Sinclair and others. The informality of this session allowed us to explore areas not covered in the seminar.

Connectivity is a key…

Much was learned. Ian explained that the Penrith Food Policy was an early local government initiative to come to terms with food security in Western Sydney. I supported this by telling the meeting about the South Sydney Council Food Policy, perhaps the first local government policy on food security in Australia when it was released in the mid-1990s. Alana Mann explained her involvement with the university and City of Sydney in looking at linking food enterprises with citizens via digital technologies and of a food systems incubator in the city. Connectivity is a key, she said.

Barriers political and social

With around eight percent of people living in the City of Sydney local government area experiencing food insecurity, which includes consistently missing meals because the cupboard is bare, there are significant barriers to establishing new food initiatives and dealing effectively with food insecurity.
These include:

  • the failure of government to recognise food insecurity as a social and economic problem
  • income inequity that makes foods unaffordable; low income people are more likely to be food insecure
  • transport and access to food retail and other sources
  • age, which limits mobility and access to food sources
  • the high costs of rents and household utilities that limit the amount left to spend on food.

Discussing alternative food systems, two trends were mentioned:

  • organic retailers are competing with food co-ops to attract organic food buyers; organic foods are now stocked by the big supermarket duopoly and other retailers; Sydney’s longest-running food co-op nearly went under last year, underlining how organic food sources have diversified and how there is increasing competition for the organic buyers’ dollar
  • the failure of a local farmers market to provide affordable food because of its high prices; one commentator put this down to the gentrification of inner urban areas; it goes against something the convener of the farmers’ market association said to me at the Blacktown Council food security workshop some years ago — Securing Our Food Future —  that farmers’ markets should be places where basic foods are obtainable. I would now add: at an affordable price.

Solutions beckon

Alana Mann advocates connecting food, its accessibility and affordability to local economies and urban planning. One of the commentators then raised that often-asked question that comes up when local food is discussed: how local is local?
I suggested it was up to four to five hours truck journey from the city. This includes the urban fringe market gardens, orchards and poultry farms, the ‘periurban agriculture’ as it is known to academics and food system advocates. Access to the food produced in different microclimates means this distance offers a range of foods for a diversified diet. It is also the distance disclosed through the practicality of running urban, hybrid community supported agriculture schemes like Sydney and Brisbane Food Connect. Recognising that some might say the distance too great, I said I avoid the term ‘local food’ and use instead ‘regional food’ because this supply chain accesses different geographic and climatic regions. Greater diversity brings greater security of food supply.
The loss of urban fringe farmland was expectedly raised. Ian Sinclair explained that the Sydney region produces five to six percent of Australia’s vegetables, much of which feeds the city. He said the value of food produced on Sydney’s urban fringe farms has recently risen although the land area occupied by them has declined. This links to the need to stop the spread of detached houses into farmland and the urbanisation of good quality productive land. Densifying population was a solution many agreed with, Ian saying that it was technically feasible but not socially feasible because some communities oppose taller apartment buildings and even apartment development altogether. A week later this was the subject of an article in the Australian Financial Review, Housing supply: NIMBYs preventing needed medium-density housing, Grattan says, reporting a finding of the Grattan Institute, which also proposes slashing immigrant numbers to take pressure off the strained housing market.

Fisherman’s daughter in Agriburbia

Lenore, a fisherman’s daughter, described a unique land tenure system where she lives near Vancouver. This is the Agricultural Land Reserve system that when introduced met opposition because some people thought it would push down the value of their land. The Reserve system is reminiscent of a similar proposal around a decade ago by the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance, now amalgamated with the Right To Food Coalition. It is her model for suburbs in which agriculture plays an ongoing role, what she calls “Agriburbia”. The Vancouver scheme retains agricultural land for farming rather than urban development, which in Vancouver can be done only on brownfield sites.
A result, Lenore said, is that urban sprawl is densifying. It might have been Ian Sinclair who said that a similar population densification is now being researched for Sydney’s old, middle ring suburbs like Bankstown. Lenore also explained that it has been socialist governments that took the initiative to preserve food-producing land, not the conservatives, yet conserving land for farming is an inherently conservative thing to do.

Another worthwhile event

The daytime session was more far participatory than the presentation format the Sydney Environment Institute usually has, because with a small group it was a many-to-many conversation rather than a one-to-many presentation. That’s not to denigrate the presentations, for they too are useful.
At some of the Institute’s seminars, academics present research findings that they put across as new. Those in the audience who have worked in the field know that some of these things are not new, that there are precedents. A suggestion was that researchers look into trends and practices from the outside rather than participate in relevant networks where they would discover more, such as is done in anthropological immersion research. This was reinforced for me when I worked in local government supporting community agriculture and landcare. When a young woman from a Melbourne university, promoted as an urban agriculture expert by the consultant hired to do the report for a proposed city farm presented her findings, I had to add as many city farms again to the list she had compiled and make other changes. It was that looking in from the outside again and having no connection to relevant networks.
The Urban farming events were another contribution to the conversation around food security and urban agriculture by the Sydney Environment Institute. It was clear that there are no easy answers and that simple solutions won’t work because urban agriculture and food security are complex problems. Urban agriculture is bound up with land access, economics and politics. Essentially, it is less a question of farming or land access and more a continuity of social, environmental, distribution and economic questions for which the answer is political.
It is clear that there can be no meaningful conversation around urban agriculture that ignores food security. They are closely connected as parts of a larger system.
Lenore Newman’s participation was made possible by Melbourne-based food advocacy, Sustain: The Australian Food Network.

More stories of food production in cities…

Here’s a review of last year’s urban agriculture symposium organised by staff from the University of Sydney’s law faculty that attracted participants from western, eastern and southern Sydney and as far away as Melbourne.
 
A busy city concourse is the last place I expected to stumble across a food garden. But that is what happened. So here’ s a picture story of the edible garden on Brisbane’s Southbank that I unexpectedly came across while wandering the banks of the muddy Brisbane River.
 
In Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs, not all that far from Coogee Beach, there’s a local government sustainability education centre with the Permaculture Interpretive Garden. It is a prototype development on public open space set up to trial permaculture landuse design and community resilience education in a local government context.
 

Feedback on review of import conditions for brassicaceous crop seeds into Aus

28 Apr, 2018 | Perma-thinking

A letter written by PA and sent to the Review:
On behalf of the 500 members of Permaculture Australia, we would like you to consider offering more time and a wider distribution of this proposal.
We are a member-based organisation of individuals and organisations who predominantly grow their own food organically. We are concerned that the proposal to treat major genera of Brassicaceae with fungicides on and off shore could adversely affect the potential for importation of rare and heirloom varieties.
Many of our member organisations and some member individuals are working with other seed savers around the world to preserve rare varieties by growing them to seed crop in a range of conditions (thus strengthening the growing conditions for the new/heirloom varieties).
We understand the risk of disease and are certainly not suggesting that it be taken less seriously. On the contrary, we would like to see a less ‘one size fits all’ and more targeted approach to the problem. Please can you allow more time and involve more organic producers in your study, so that we can help you develop policy that does not disenfranchise people who are attempting to improve the selection of Brassicaceae (and other Families as well!) available to producers in Australia.
Please seek further information and/or make your own submission at: http://www.agriculture.gov.au/biosecurity/risk-analysis/memos/ba2018-08

Thinking of leadership

11 Dec, 2017 | Perma-thinking

This story was first published in Open Forum in 2017.
Too much has been written about leadership. Too many books, Too many articles. So much has been written that we now risk submergence below the sheer weight of printed material.
Sure, the literature on leadership has succeeded in identifying particular types of leadership — leadership from behind, leadership by example, leadership by position — and that is useful and I will talk about examples later.
It is understandable that much leadership literature is directed at business. Business has to respond to and survive in a world beset by new technologies, a flowing stream of new ideas, dodgy economic trends, confused political leadership and changing social expectations. It looks for security in an environment in which there is no resource security, no market security, no security that is lasting in a world increasingly churned by change.

The cult of the entrepreneur

Once, we had business leadership heroes. IBM in the latter years of the Twentieth Century. Bill Gates. Steve Jobs. They have gone or faded. Now, we have clumsy, sometimes-malfunctioning and deceptive corporations and institutions in which there is declining public trust.
The likes of Gates and Jobs were entrepreneurs. They took calculated chances that sometimes failed but for the most part worked. We still have entrepreneurs and they are held up as glaring examples of leadership. All too often they bloom then fade like one-day daisies in a garden.
I don’t know if it is correct to talk of the cult of the entrepreneur, but we hear so much about it that to has started to sound like a cult. Hopeful young people flood to workshops yet few succeed in applying whatever knowledge they gain. Small businesses in Australia are frequently short-lived, though this might have to do with the churn in ideas, technology and economics as much as with entrepreneurs not succeeding or burning out.
Most of us cannot be entrepreneurs because we can’t afford the financial and other risks involved. Or the long, tiring hours. After attending a workshop on entrepreneuralism, a friend told me that he did not want to become an entrepreneur because of the demands of doing that would entail. Yet, he is a person of knowledge and ideas.

A different entrepreneurship

Through working in small business, government and the community sector I have come to realise that although entrepreneuralism is commonly associated with business, there are people out there working the chancy world of social entrepreneurship. They do this voluntarily or for little money, yet it involves leadership qualities as much as does any business.

Permaculture is a platform of ethics, design principles and characteristics upon which its practitioners develop useful applications.

One rainy morning I sat in Cafe Nero, my local caffeine filling station, and asked myself who were these people, these social entrepreneurs? I didn’t set out to list those I know working in the permaculture design system, but theirs’ were the names that appeared on my page.
Permaculture is commonly explained as a system of design for creating resilient communities. I prefer to think of permaculture as a platform of ethics, design principles and characteristics upon which its practitioners develop useful applications. Those might include urban agriculture, food security, energy and water efficient building design, community work, small scale international development, education and more.  Application is broad, and when it comes to the business side of it I think immediately of a landscape architect I know with his own small business, an architect specialising in passive and active solar design, someone who started a food distribution business, a young woman working in community exchange systems and a couple magazine publishers.
So, how did those names that came to mind that wet morning in Cafe Nero, and how do they demonstrate leadership?

David

With Bill Mollison, David Holmgren co-invented the permaculture design system.
His approach is an intellectual one. David is a thinker. An author. An educator. He is a leader through being one of the two originators of the design system — what we call ‘first starters’ advantage’. It is this, combined with his work, that lends him his intellectual and leadership authority.
Through writing books and articles, through public talks at conferences and maintaining an authoritative website, David built a credibility few if any in the field would challenge. Interestingly, he eschews participation in discussions on social media, preferring to remain aloof.
David’s, then, is leadership through being a public intellectual atop his first starter advantage in developing the design system.

Rosemary

Rosemary Morrow is different. Not for this woman now somewhere in her seventies the intellectual approach of David. Instead, Rosemary has built her leadership by doing, by her experience in the world.
That experience includes decades of teaching permaculture design. Perhaps more importantly, her leadership is built on her work in small-scale international development and working with her local community in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, Australia.
We might call her’s ‘leadership-by-doing’. She is down-to-earth, approachable and modest, illustrating the importance of personality to leadership.
For the past few years Rosemary has been passing on her extensive life experience in permaculture by teaching her own approach to community education to others.
Rosemary’s, then, is leadership by experience applied through an open, friendly personality.

Hannah

I like to think of Hannah Moloney’s style of leadership as leading-through-exuberance.
Hannah is a young Hobart woman who, with husband Anton, set up the aptly-named Good Life Permaculture, a name that suits Hannah’s outgoing personality. Hannah’s style, her language and her personal presentation attracts a primarily young cohort of students to her courses and to the other enterprises she engages in.
Of all mentioned so far, Hannah and Anton come closest to the conventional model of the entrepreneur as someone building their own small business.
Hannah’s, then, is leadership by exuberance and personal style.

Robyn

As one of the permaculture design system’s pioneers, Robyn Francis’ story is one of persistence. She not only persisted in teaching permaculture design through the decades, she persisted in developing her Djanbung Gardens permaculture centre in Nimbin. Since the mid-1990s it has been her educational base that she has turned it into something of a cultural centre in the town, a centre that attracts people from across Australia and that is visited by permaculture practitioners from other counties.
In doing these things and more Robyn faced substantial challenges. In meeting those challenges she helped establish a place for women in the worldwide leadership of permaculture. In doing this she was not alone and the success of herself and other women is suggested by the number of them in this short and inadequate article.
Robyn has also broadened the application of the permaculture design system, taking it into planning, international development and the teaching of specialist skills. I must add to this list of accomplishments her work in permaculture education, not only in teaching the permaculture design course but her role in developing Australia’s nationally accredited permaculture education program, Accredited Permaculture Training.
Robyn, then, leads through persistence and innovation in permaculture.

Cecilia

Cecilia Macaulay leads by a personality different to that of many other women in permaculture. They tend to present as earthy, practical woman whereas Cecilia, with her stylish clothing and through regularly visiting a hairdresser, comes across with a feminine presence that is extraverted, light and gentle.
As well as being an illustrator Cecilia is something of a domestic decluttering maven who applies the principles of permaculture design to home organisation. In doing this she brings a strong dose of the Japanese design ethic, having spent some time in the country. There can be an almost zen-like look to her work.
Whereas Hannah Moloney leads through her practical, can-do, exuberant personality, Cecilia leads through a feminine personality but one with a quiet exuberance.

Steve

Steve Batley is a Sydney-based landscape architect, horticulture and permaculture educator with his own small business, Sydney Organic Gardens. His approach to leadership is in some ways similar to Cecilia McCauley’s in that it is quiet, calm and considered. Steve doesn’t get fazed. It is also based on extensive knowledge of landscape design supplemented by a good working knowledge of horticulture.
As with many others in this article, Steve’s personality counts for much of his popularity as an educator at the Randwick Sustainabilty Hub and elsewhere. His leadership style could perhaps be described as conciliatory, with a soft masculinity and an ability to communicate permaculture and design concepts clearly in simple language.

Robert and Emma-Kate

Robert Pekin and Emma Kate Rose are entrepreneurial leaders in the classic, small business mold as well as social entrepreneurs.
Once a dairy farmer, Robert and partner, Emma Kate Rose, set up the successful, hybrid community supported agriculture business, Brisbane Food Connect, a social enterprise. Emma-Kate is a director and focuses mainly on marketing. The service links Brisbane region family and small scale farmers with eaters in the city to provide fresh, mainly organic foods. The couple are acknowledged as pioneers in this new approach to food and are called upon to advise start-ups across the country. With others, they created the Food Connect Foundation to assist social enterprise in the fair food business.
The couple are also active in the impact investment and community economics scene and led workshops at the 2017 conference of the New Economy Network Australia.
Robert and Emma Kate’s is a practical approach to developing business, based on the ethics and design principles of permaculture.

Bill

The late Bill Mollison’s leadership was different again. As co-inventor of the permaculture design system Bill, like David, fell into the natural leadership of first-starter. But his leadership stemmed from far more than that. It came out of a career that included scientific field research and, later, an academia about which he was critical.
Bill’s was also an intellectual leadership though his expression of that was different to David Holmgren’s style. That’s because Bill combined the intellectual and the practical. He was the sort of person who could discuss the theory of farm dam construction, design a farm dam and go out and build it. This is what people found attractive in him, this blend of the intellect and the practical combined with common sense.
Bill was something else, however. He was an iconoclast. A challenger of fixed, entrenched ideas whether those of academics, government or society. He would challenge these in a way that was designed to shake people out of their fixed views. That could put people off but it helped those ready for change to make that mental leap into a new way of seeing things and acting. In doing this Bill was a motivator.
Bill formulated his ideas in a number of books and a TV series called The Global Gardener that was broadcast on Australia’s ABC TV in the nineties.
His leadership, then, was that of first-starter combined with an assertive personality that was dismissive of pretentiousness and bad ideas. It was the challenging attitude of the iconoclast.

A crucible of leadership

The permaculture design system has turned out to be something of a crucible of informal leadership in civil society. Informality has been important because there is no leadership-by-appointed-position in permaculture. The design system self-structures as a distributed network. There is no head office. There is no CEO.
This makes it different to leadership in business or the leadeship of the go-it-alone entrepreneur. It calls upon the skills of the social entrepreneur in the way it works with people. Sure, there are small businesses built around permaculture and small business entrepreneurship has played a role in those. For the most part, though, leadership in permaculture has been based on personality, extensive knowledge and on daring to just get out there and do something. Taking action is much admired in permaculture circles.

Training for leadership

Just as in other fields of endeavour there is a need for training in permaculture to bring out sometimes latent leadership qualities.
People like Robina McCurdy in Aotearoa-New Zealand; Robyn Clayfield from Crystal Waters Permaculture Village; Erin Young with her sociocracy education for group decision making; and local government sustainability educator, Fiona Campbell, with her community resilience and community leadership course offer training in different aspects of leadership and entrepreneurialism.
Permaculture educators, too, are leaders and are too numerous to fully list here. Suffice to mention the Milkwood duo, Nick Ritar and Kirsten Bradley, who came later to permaculture and who for some years now have offered a range of training options to build the leadership skills of permaculture educators. For the past few years, Rosemary Morrow has been passing on her educational knowledge to others.
Now, thanks to this training, we see new leaders emerging: horticultural educators, Emma Daniell and Jon Kingston, an agricultural scientist; Annette Loudon, now a catalyst assisting people set up community exchange systems for cashless trading; Julian Lee with his science education program for young children.
Those mentioned are just a few. There are so many more.

Why grow your own food in order to be more healthy?

4 Sep, 2017 | Perma-thinking

It was nice to be asked to do a talk at the first Community Expo which happened Sat 2nd Sept 2017 at the public park in Stanthorpe next to the swimming pool. Its focus was health and wellbeing, so I decided to talk about the health benefits of growing your own food, as well as some more general healthy eating info. Here is a summary of my talk:

Why grow your own food in order to be more healthy?

Number 1: Know what is in your food.
After checking that your soil is free of contaminants with a soil test, you control how your food is grown and therefore what is in it. You therefore know there are no poisons – herbicides, pesticides, fungicides in it and that there are no GMOs because you do not buy those seeds. Genetic engineering technology used in food is untested and the foreign proteins are likely to be irritating to the digestive tract.

Number 2: Ensure the best nutrition in the food.
You can ensure your soil is alive with biology and therefore that the plants can access minerals and trace elements they need. Food can be eaten soon after being harvested and when things are properly ripe and not green. You can also grow health giving foods that are not available in markets and supermarkets (yacon is one of our favourites). This includes many common weeds – sheep’s sorrel, chickweed, dandelion, dock, lambs quarters, nettle, and so on, as well as thousands of heirloom varieties that have superior taste and therefore nutrients. In the US 20 plants produce 90% of the diet, 9 of these equal 75% of the total diet and rice, corn, and wheat equals 50% of the total. Where is the biodiversity?? (there are 30-80,000+ edibles available)

Number 3: Exercise outdoors.
Bending over, turning compost, and forking the soil all give the body muscles some work to do. Get some sunshine so that your body gets important Vitamin D. No sunscreen. Cover up before burning.

Number 4: Reduce fossil fuel use (or eco-footprint)
Reduce fossil fuel use of the food you eat so that pollution decreases. If you grow some of your own food, less artificial fertilizers are used, less transport needed (typically hundreds or thousands of kms), less storage, less packaging – this benefits the environment we all share – cleaner air and water for everyone!

Number 5: Make new friends
Make friends who also grow their own food. Share seeds, plants, knowledge, successes and failures. Exchange produce with them. Learn from each other and learn together. This is satisfying and beneficial to your soul.

What if you cannot grow some of your own food because you have nowhere to grow?

  1. Basil in a pot loves a window sill as do many other plants. Grow micro-greens (the green sprouts of seeds) inside with a grow light.
  2. Go to a Community Garden and grow food there.
  3. Ask a neighbour or friend if you can grow in their back yard or on their farm.
  4. Happy Pig Farm has offered land to use for reasonable exchange.
  5. Plant in pots or moveable containers if you rent.

Start with something…

What if you cannot grow (and exchange) all your food, but want quality purchased food to make up the difference?

  1. Get to know a local farmer or two. Find out how they grow food – do they grow ecologically or with artificial chemicals and poisons? Buy from them if eco-friendly. Another option is to buy from a food aggregator (eg Symara Farm) who sources from organic farmers
  2. Buy local honey from a beekeeper who uses no poisons
  3. Buy foods certified Organic – Woolworths, Aldi, even IGA has some organic dairy, GoVita has some organic
  4. Join a bulk buying group who buys Organic and supports Australian farmers – this makes Organic much more affordable.
  5. Buy from cafes and restaurants who use organic and local ingredients. Encourage them to use more and more of both.
  6. Buy local at market or shops or farm gate if no other option.
  7. Buy from supermarket, but avoid imported foods/ingredients.

Other healthy eating points:

MAKE:

  • alive foods – ferments, pickles, kefir, natural yogurt, simple cheeses, wine, vinegar, kombucha
  • meat and fish broths
  • breads (see note on grains below)

SEEK:

  • raw milk & cheeses
  • Organic whole grains – must be soaked overnight, sprouted, or fermented to reduce phytic acid that blocks Ca, Mg, Cu, Zn being absorbed in the gut. Grains need fresh milling.
  • high quality dairy
  • animal foods raised naturally without unnecessary poisons or medicines
  • lard for cooking with (pork, beef, poultry)
  • cold pressed extra virgin olive oil – ok for moderate heat cooking, best raw
  • coconut oil – ok for moderate heat cooking, best raw
  • organic superfoods in small amounts:
    • cod liver oil
    • high vitamin butter oil
    • evening primrose
    • borage or blackcurrant oil
    • bee pollen
    • acerola powder (berry)
    • wheat germ oil – vit E
    • azomite mineral powder
    • kelp/seaweed
    • probiotics
    • nutritional yeast processed at low temp
    • bitters
    • amalaki powder (indian fruit)
    • algae/spiralina
    • canned whole coconut milk (not lite)
    • flax seed oil

AVOID:

  • homogenised milk
  • low fat anything
  • pasteurised milk, unless you add lacto bacteria to ferment it
  • aspartame – artificial sweetener
  • packaged breakfast cereals – high pressure and heat extruded grains with high sugar content
  • MSG – neurotoxic
  • HFC – high fructose corn syrup – highly processed
  • alcohol – esp spirits, unpasteurised natural beer ok, organic wine without preservatives ok
  • caffeine
  • pharmaceuticals
  • smoking
  • soft drinks – esp diet
  • flour in all processed foods
  • vegetable oils
  • deep fried anything in veggie oil
  • processed SUGARs
  • canned foods

EXPERIMENT:

If you don’t think margarine or some other processed food is bad, put an amount on a saucer and leave outside. How long until eaten by insects, animals, mold, fungi? Compare with a natural food eg butter

These ideas mostly come from 3 books I have read lately: “Gut and Psychology Syndrome”, “Nourishing Traditions”, and “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration” as well as watching the recent docu-series on “The Truth about Cancer” and the start of “GMOs Revealed”.

Originally posted at: http://www.sugarloafpermaculture.net/blog/spg-community-expo

Transition Bondi: the new economy

16 Jun, 2017 | Perma-thinking

LIKE A CHRYSALIS EMERGING from its cocoon, a new economics is emerging from the dysfunctional body of the old. This new, humane economics got a hearing at the Transition Bondi seminar on 15 June this year.
Transition Bondi, operating around Bondi Beach in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs, has been running its community education program for some years now and continues its tradition of providing a meal of mainly local, organic food at its events. Convivially prepared by a team of volunteers, the food is sourced from the Sydney-region vege-box service (a hybrid community supported agriculture scheme), Ooooby.
The event attracted a full house and, after an introduction by Transition Bondi’s Lance Lieber, a bowl of mushroom soup and the main course, the evening started with the film, A New Economy.

Pocket City farms Michael Zagordis explains what the inner city market garden and education initiative does.

For anyone unaware of the alternative strand of economics coalescing around them, the film was an eye-opener. It focuses on the new economics developing in Canada, yet it is a new economics and an old, reformatted economics at the same time. That is, is takes established economic structures like co-operatives and social enterprise and reinvents them for contemporary times, adding digital platforms. A commercial urban farm, a microbrewery, a collaborative electronics working place, a hotel converted into a co-operative accommodation enterprise and Loomio — a decision-making platform resembling the sociocracy process of effective decision-making — were featured. Loomio was developed by a New Zealand co-op based in Wellington and has now been adopted by a diverse range of organisations worldwide.
Annette Loudon — the digital maven who has worked on the software enabling trading through Local Exchange and Trading Systems (LETS), the community-based, cashless, mutual credit systems that are part of the new economy and that have been operating in Australia and elsewhere since the late-1980s (LETS featured in permaculture design courses; permaculture did much to promote LETS) — introduced the speakers following the video.
The first was Michael Zagordis, manager of Pocket City Farms in Camperdown in inner Sydney. A small, commercial market garden supplying local people and restaurants with fresh, organically-grown produce, the farm has garnered considerable community support. Operating as a social enterprise, the farm is branching into associated, revenue-raising activity such as yoga and community education and is interested in setting up associated farmlets elsewhere in Sydney.
The second speaker was Robert Rosen. Robert was one of the people who set up the permaculture Earthbank initiative in the early 1980s to promote the then-emerging social (aka ‘ethical’) investment industry (and here) and to develop community economic systems. A businessman, entrepreneur and economic adviser with a focus on socially-beneficial enterprises, Robert works with community-based renewable energy investment schemes such as Pingala solar energy co-operative in Sydney (and here and here.

What a line-up: (from left) Transition Bondi’s Lance Lieber, Annette Loudon, Michael Zagordis and Robert Rosen.

The new economics

As a commentator said in the video, the new economics goes beyond Twentieth Century capitalism and socialism. It forms a major element in something new that is emerging — the co-operative commonwealth.
The co-operative commonwealth is a concept incorporating a host of ideas and initiatives that are appearing as a response to the shaky and often-destructive neoliberal economics that besets the modern world. It incorporates a range of initiatives:

  • social enterprise working in a diversity of areas
  • co-operatives of many types — worker, housing, consumer, food, platform co-operatives of worker/member/participant owners brought together around online platforms that facilitate their work or other activity
  • businesses that distribute some of their income to socially-useful purposes (such as adventure equipment company, Patagonia and make use of new technologies such as additive printing (3D printing) and associated tools to produce products of social value
  • moves to reclaim the public commons like public open space, public services, the internet, the atmosphere, water, the seas, land
  • community organising such as done through permaculture, environmental and social advocacies
  • the open-source movement
  • peer-to-peer collaboration, co-operation and sharing
  • and a lot more too.

The new economics in Australia

The first iteration of a new economics organisation in Australia was set up by then-architect, Michael Burnley and others in the 1990s and was based on the New Economics Foundation in the UK (the author was a member an edited their quarterly journal). Now, the New Economics Network Australia (NENA) is leading development. Standing room only at NENA’s two-day conference in Sydney last year attested to the growth of the movement. That is likely to be repeated at this September’s conference in Brisbane.
Attendees at Transition Bondi’s new economy event were a mixed lot, a range of ages and a range of backgrounds.
The organisation’s monthly talks and videos range widely across the socio-environmental-economic landscape to bring us not only the opportunity to network and to hear and meet people doing worthwhile things, but to bring us opportunities where we might find our own niches to take action towards a better society and way of life.