The Good Life Lab

by Wendy Jehanara Tremayne

  Water. Close your eyes and breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. See the color of water: green. Notice that, like water, the direction of this breath is downward. In nature water moves down from cloud to mountaintops to riverbeds and into oceans. It seeps into earth to reach roots and aquifers. Imagine water pouring over the top of your head, like a cracked egg that oozes over the face and body. Let it pass through you and seep into the ground below. Notice that water has delivered nutrition to you, to the life of the earth. Remember that you are made mostly of water and that your body filters water in specialized ways. Your urine contains nitrogen, a chemical element that supports the life of plants. As you consider water, think of it in all forms: mist, the water that makes up a hurricane, a tidal wave, a babbling brook. The earth is home to only one water. It circulates through natural processes; there will never be new water.

  Fire. Close your eyes and breathe in through your mouth and out through your nose. See the color of fire: red. Notice how this breath’s direction is upward like a flame. Heat rises. The sun is a nuclear furnace that is millions of degrees hot. Its solar energy is stored or transmuted in the life of the earth: plants, animals, insects, and people, everything that lives. The heat of the molten core of the planet makes life possible. Light provides daytime and enables sight. Our bodies have a thermostat that keeps us in a delicate range of temperature; it burns a fever that kills bacteria. While breathing in, imagine a cauldron in your belly and increase its heat. Let the ash from the cauldron be taken by the breath as you exhale. Remember that carbon supports life by bonding to things and carrying them away. Fire transmutes heat to light.

  Air. Close your eyes and breathe in and out through your mouth. The color of air is blue. Notice this breath’s direction: zigzagging like the wind. Each of us breathes a first and last breath; in between we are one of many filters that change the composition of the air of the planet. We take in oxygen that is delivered to all parts of our body. We exhale humidity and carbon dioxide. While inhaling, recognize the forms of air: wind, tornado, breeze, breath. Air carries kites and blows leaves into nooks. It enters the pores of plants and people and is felt by the cilia inside our lungs.

  End your contemplation by remembering that at some level of magnification everything material is porous: bone, tissue, tree, and stone. Nothing is impenetrable. When you open your eyes, remember your porousness and take in all you need for health and happiness. Without a clear boundary, you and what is other than you are no longer separate.

  Identify local plants. Notice what grows where you live. At a party being thrown for a phycologist (algae scientist) friend of ours, we were surrounded by PhD students from an agricultural university. A guest was complaining about a fungal skin problem. While he was telling us about it, Mikey and I noticed that out the window behind him was a stand of creosote bush, one of the strongest antifungal plants in existence. I pointed to the bush. The PhD student knew the Latin name for creosote. But he did not know that the plant’s alkaloids had antifungal properties that were the answer to his problem.

  Pick up a local plant guide for reference. These guides point us back to nature, the truest book. Find out which plants are edible and which have medicinal value. Visit a local herb shop and ask the people who work there about the important plants of your region. Familiarize yourself with these master plants. They often contain remedies to ailments common to where you live. Replace food in your diet and remedies bought in pharmacies with natural local alternatives.

  I was surprised when I learned that the pretty shrub growing wild along the Rio Grande is the wolfberry bush, which produces goji berries, a super fruit that is quite expensive to buy.

  Find out where your water comes from. Water is essential to life. Know where your water comes from (a well? a town or city supply?). Learn about the aquifer, the reservoirs, the lakes, and the rivers near you. How is the water cleaned? Are there industries that use it? How many people rely on the same source you do? Is it sustainable? Find out about water conservation and recycling techniques.

  Cook at home. There are few things more sensuous than food. It connects us to nature and to our senses. It costs less to buy high-quality food and cook at home than it does to buy poor-quality food that’s been dressed up as fancy and prepared in restaurants. Eat only food: not chemicals, additives, or preservatives. Michael Pollan offers a simple rule for this: “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”

  Don’t hoard. Hoarding is a response to believing there is not enough. There’s always going to be more.

  Hoarding unused materials keeps them out of circulation, makes them unavailable to people who need them, and weighs the hoarder down with a feeling of not being able to keep up. Take only what you need at the time and have a specific use for, and let the rest go. More will come when it is needed.

  When you acquire something new, pass on or repurpose something similar that you own; this prevents clutter. I have found that the fewer things I own, the more I actually use what I own. We tend to appreciate goods more when we have fewer of them.

  Give stuff away. In Truth or Consequences, dumpsters are free stores. When I lived in Brooklyn, the steps of brownstones were mini free marts stocked with items no longer useful to their previous owners. If your community does not have a way to pass on free goods, consider placing a box next to the trash and labeling it free stuff to draw the attention of those who might want the goods inside.

  At least once a year Mikey and I dig through the drawers and closets in our home and shed, looking for the things that have not proven useful enough to hang on to. We gather the goods not worthy of selling online and droplift them during the holiday season (see page 133).

  Own (or share) tools. Things that make other things enable us to make or fix what we need.

  Consider the value of labor. When choosing the tasks that are worth your time, it’s important to have a way to gauge the value of the labor you are considering expending. Value is different for each of us. I keep for myself labors that I love, such as gardening and wildcrafting. I would never pay anyone to do those things for me. But some labors I love less; they not worth doing myself. A few questions can help you determine the labors to keep and those to let go of.

  What is the real cost of doing it myself? When my VW Beetle’s window regulator broke and needed to be repaired, I looked up the cost of the part: $100. I added that to the cost of labor if a shop were to fix it (according to an online manual: $80 an hour at 3.5 hours): $280. Taking it to a shop included the risk that it would take a mechanic longer than the time estimated and my car might be held up for days. I decided it was worth “paying myself” to do it. I ordered the part and did the repair at home. It took me the same 3.5 hours that the repair manual projected and was not particularly difficult. Two well-produced YouTube videos made by someone who had done his own repair helped me through the process. When the other window regulator broke, a known flaw in the VW design, I fixed it in a snap without hesitation.

  What if I get it wrong? This can be a hard question to answer. When Mikey and I considered replacing the toilet, we thought about what would happen if we messed up. Where we live, plumbers are hard to find and it can take weeks to lure them to your home. If we messed up our install and needed someone in a hurry, we might find ourselves left in a lurch. But we also reasoned that it would not cost more to have a plumber fix our botched install if we failed than it would cost for the plumber to do the install in the first place. Since we had a second toilet, we went ahead and replaced it ourselves.

  Will I learn something that I want to know? Consider whether the job offers you knowledge that you want to have. Mikey wanted to make prototypes and odd-shaped objects out of a variety of materials. He bought a computer numerical control (CNC) machine that is a digital drill press and router. It runs under the control of a computer and works by cutting away material to make objects. CNC machines can be used to make things out of wood, plastic, glass, meta
l, and stone. Mikey knew that it would take him at least six months to begin to learn how to use it, but he knew that he wanted to learn.

  Both of us learned to weld because we knew that it opened the door to many different projects that we wanted to build ourselves, including ferro-cement buildings, furniture, art, and gates. I love plants and wanted to learn more about them, so I happily took on that study and learned to make my own medicines. On the other hand, when we lost power in part of our home, concerned about safety and the risk of fire, we hired an electrician.

  Does it require special or one-time tools? When Mikey and I added up the amount of money we spent annually on wine (approximately $3,000), we knew that it was worth our spending a couple of hundred dollars on one-time purchases of specialized equipment such as carboys, bottle racks, and a corker. When Mikey was repairing a part of the grease conversion kit on our WVO Mercedes, he chopped up a tool and welded a bunch of parts to it to create a one-time-use tool because it would have been silly and expensive to buy something comparable.

  Do you have the time? If you have no free time, you might not want to take on a lifestyle change that requires time. There is no point in taking on harvesting WVO, filtering it, and making it into biofuel if you have a full-time job and barely enough free time as it is. Making biofuel is a time-consuming practice. It might be worth buying it from a nearby maker or, if it’s available, at the pump.

  Does it contribute to the quality of my life? We value the organic tomato. We are willing to work hard for the food we grow in our garden. The garden is our health insurance plan, and it provides us with a great deal of happiness and pleasure. The labor we gave to the first year of gardening, when infrastructure needed to be built, mistakes made, and lessons learned, amounted to our being paid 50 cents an hour for our work, but we didn’t mind because the garden made us happy. Each year the garden requires less labor, so the value of the time we spend on it increases.

  What’s the cost to my body? We each get one body. Take care of your original equipment. Recovering from a back injury, a hernia, and other kinds of injuries can take us out of commission for a long time. If you are 25 years old, go ahead and use railroad ties for fence posts and install them yourself. But if you are older, you might want to hire someone younger to do the job. Or choose a lighter material to work with and do the job yourself.

  Never lift what you can drag, never drag what you can roll, never roll what you can leave.

  — Jan Adkins, Moving Heavy Things

  What is available? We have access to fresh, locally grown eggs. For this reason, we do not raise chickens. Honey is harder to come by and it is expensive, so we raise bees. Honey’s high dollar value and ease to manage make raising bees worthwhile for us.

  Kitchen Magic

  Eating with the fullest pleasure is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.

  — Wendell Berry

  I was raised on microwaved fried chicken, chocolate milk made from powdered Quik, and Cap’n Crunch cereal. I survived the first 10 years of my life on pizza from a box that came from the freezer that my mom called the Frigidaire. No one taught me how to cook or prepare food. Looking back on the early years of my life, I remember being tired and run-down. I had frequent stomach problems, and I got sick often.

  In high school I began to cook, simply because I did not want to eat what was in the freezer. In college I prepared food for groups of friends and learned the social value of feeding people. Back then I thought that by boiling pasta shells from a box, stuffing them with ricotta cheese from a plastic container, and dumping tomato sauce from a can on top, I’d cooked something that I could call homemade. Today I can hardly find a fancy restaurant that lives up to the standard to which I’ve grown accustomed. Thanks to my garden, local community, local farmers, and some mad skills, I eat high-quality, nutritious food all the time.

  The idea that life is as interesting as your interest in it is celebrated in the kitchen. Our Holy Scrap kitchen is a lab, workshop, and teaching space. Here our garden’s bounty and plants that we forage are processed and preserved, honey is separated from wax, salves and medicines are made, and live food is fermented in jars and bottles of great variety. Our kitchen is host to skill-sharing parties where our friends and community learn to bake bread, make cheeses, and process and bottle kombucha, wine, and mead. We’ve hosted numerous pancake- and pasta-making parties in which every hour different guests are elected to work the stove and flip the cakes, mix the batter, roll out the dough, or serve.

  In the kitchen, being a maker of things offers some of the greatest rewards: financial savings, vibrant health, pleasure, creativity, and expanding knowledge of science, chemistry, biology, botany, and alchemy (to name a few). Making food and medicine produces a tangible end product that can be shared with friends. Like magic charms, making and gifting food invite friendship and abundance into your life. Give someone a loaf of bread, a bottle of homemade wine, or a cupcake, and you have gained a friend. Teach people how to make these things themselves, and you’ve strengthened your community.

  The personality of our kitchen is a reflection of our diet and lifestyle, which shapeshifts to match what our garden has produced, what local foods are available, how our health is, and what the conditions of the world are. When Mikey and I lived in New York City, we were vegans; that helped us skirt many of the downsides of industrial food production. In New Mexico, with different options, we eat animal products. When we befriended a farmer who raises a couple of dairy cows, our objections to dairy disappeared and we began making our own raw cheese and yogurt. Experimentation with diet can reveal a food allergy and the need to modify one’s diet. Whenever another fruit or vegetable is added to the list of genetically modified foods, we make a new effort to avoid it or seek an alternative.

  Mikey and I are slow-food eaters, by which I mean that all our meals are made at home from scratch and from raw ingredients mostly from our region, grown in our garden, or foraged nearby. We favor local indigenous plants for food and medicine, and enjoy live and fermented foods active with microorganisms. We raise several cultures in our kitchen, including three varieties of kombucha (jun, red wine, and a common variety), kefir, yogurt starter, koji (for making sake, miso, and tamari), and we keep on hand meso- and thermophilic cultures to make cheese.

  The few recipes that I share in this book are meant to point you in the right direction; you will develop your own favorites informed by where you live and who you are. You’ll want to think about healthy replacements for junk food; beverages so delicious, nutritious, and interesting that you will forget about store-bought drinks completely; living foods that are also medicinal; unusual ways to process food; quirky tricks and techniques; ways to make foods that are not available in stores; things that you must make yourself in order to include them in your diet. We also provide tips about using freely obtained local plants.

  A highly functional kitchen capable of processing sophisticated food and medicine starts with good tools. On the following page is a list of the more unusual tools we consider essential. (We’ve left out the obvious, things like the potato peeler and the paring knife.)

  Tuesday seems to be our catch-up-on-cooking day. This week we made kombucha, yogurt, Chihuahua cheese (semi-hard, somewhat like cheddar), mesquite molasses, and racked wine.

  Kitchen Tools

  Vacuum sealer. Removes air from bags and mason jars

  Oxygenator. Produces oxygenated water used for household cleaning; removing bacteria, molds, and fungus from produce; and sterilizing bottles for storage of homemade beverages

  Stovetop smoker

  Thrift shop popcorn maker. Roasting coffee (see page 229)

  Several coffee grinders. Grinds seeds, nuts, dried plant roots, coffee

  Digital thermometer. With a probe and temperature-based
programmable alarm

  Hand-cranked pasta maker

  High-powered blender. Model with a strong motor seconds as a hammer mill

  Large food processor

  Temperature controllers. Controls temperature of environments for fermenting and making yogurt, bread, wine, and cheese; convert chest freezers into refrigerators (see page 170)

  Stainless steel widemouthed funnels. Various sizes

  Press. Homemade jack press or an AeroPress for filtering liquid extractions

  Juicers. Handheld juicer for large citrus, a small juice press for lemons and limes, and a powerful electric juicer for most other fruits and vegetables

  Stainless-steel compost bucket. With lid

  Electric distiller. For drinking water, tincture making, and refilling battery cells

  A local plant book. Our favorite food book, American Indian Food and Lore: 150 Authentic Recipes, by Carolyn Neithammer, we found on Amazon for $1.65. If I were heading into the desert to live off the land and could bring only one thing, I would bring this book.

  Beverages

  “The average American consumes 44.7 gallons of soft drinks annually,” Mark Bittman reported in the New York Times in July 2011. Based on the supermarket price of $2 a gallon, the average American household (a family of four) spends about $500 on carbonated sugar (most likely high-fructose corn syrup and water.)

  Considering that most households consume other beverages, too — coffee and tea, summer drinks, fruit juices — it is easy to estimate that many households spend thousands of dollars a year on beverages. This number can be reduced to next to nothing. At the same time, the quality of the beverages can be healthful and even medicinal. Homemade beverages connect us to the natural environment and are free of preservatives, additives, and packaging. Delicious, too!