When I opened Milk Bar in November 2008, I was quite adamant about making sure the bakery was an honest reflection of life and food through my eyes. I had no intention beyond that.
I like to talk about food, ingredients, and how to adapt recipes. It's a dialogue.
Children are amazingly adaptable. What would be grotesquely abnormal became my normality in the prisoner of war camps. It became routine for me to line up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall. It became normal for me to go with my father to bathe in a mass shower.
Species co-evolve with the other species they eat, and very often, a relationship of interdependence develops: I'll feed you if you spread around my genes. A gradual process of mutual adaptation transforms something like an apple or a squash into a nutritious and tasty food for a hungry animal.
Innovations that are guided by smallholder farmers, adapted to local circumstances, and sustainable for the economy and environment will be necessary to ensure food security in the future.
I've had this terrible stomach problem for years, and that has made touring difficult. People would see me sitting in the corner by myself looking sick and gloomy. The reason is that I was trying to fight against the stomach pain, trying to hold my food down. People looked me and assumed I was some kind of addict.
There is no life to be found in violence. Every act of violence brings us closer to death. Whether it's the mundane violence we do to our bodies by overeating toxic food or drink or the extreme violence of child abuse, domestic warfare, life-threatening poverty, addiction, or state terrorism.
My three addictions of choice are food, love and work.
In general, the more food we eat in its natural state - without additives - and the less it is refined, the healthier it will be for us. Food can affect the mind, and deficiencies of certain elements in the body can promote mental depression.
I don't need the fillers, additives, excessive amounts of sugars, fats, salts and other measures taken to taint the natural goodness of real food.
How is it that mercury is not safe for food additives and Over the Counter drug products, but it is safe in our vaccines and dental amalgams?
When we realize that something as primal as the food that we choose to eat each day makes such an important difference in addressing both global warming and personal health, it empowers us and imbues these choices with meaning. If it's meaningful, then it's sustainable - and a meaningful life is a longer life.
There are blessings in being close to the soil, in raising your own food even if it is only a garden in your yard and a fruit tree or two. Those families will be fortunate who, in the last days, have an adequate supply of food because of their foresight and ability to produce their own.
There is abundant science out there that connects mercury exposure in vaccines to not only autism, but to ASD, to SIDS, to ADD, ADHD, language tics - which is like Tourette Syndrome - OCD, asthma, food allergies, and diabetes.
There are times when fixing things quickly is the only option: when you have to channel MacGyver, reach for the duct tape, and cobble together whatever solution works right now. If someone is choking on a morsel of food, you don't sit back, stroke your chin and take the Aristotelian long view. You quickly administer the Heimlich maneuvre.
The federal government spends about $2.51 per child per day to feed them lunch. Out of that, you have to pay for labor, facilities, and administrative costs, leaving about a dollar for food. Imagine trying to feed yourself a nutritious meal every day with only a dollar. Very difficult.
Another nice thing was that I would type out letters home for the admiral's stewards. They would then feed me the same food the admiral ate.
Bacon is so good by itself that to put it in any other food is an admission of failure. You're basically saying, 'I can't make this other food taste good, so I'll throw in bacon.'
If you are starving and young and in search of answers as to why your life is so difficult, fundamentalism can be alluring. We know this for a fact because former members of Boko Haram have admitted it: They offer impressionable young people money and the promise of food, while the group's mentors twist their minds with fanaticism.
Despite all the hype about local or green food, the single biggest impediment to wider adoption is not research, programs, organizations, or networking. It is the demonizing and criminalizing of virtually all indigenous and heritage-based food practices.
