That’s great. 
Funny thing is, I’m the other way around. Hot sauce, wow, not afraid of kraut or tempi, but this 
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That’s a good new year resolution!
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My first kraut was a disaster, the second was okay. My first hot sauce was pretty great, and the second is fantastic. I don’t know why, because kraut is supposed to be dead easy.
I took some of the onions and garlic and put them into jars with the brine, but without blending. Fermented onion is my new favorite thing to add to sandwiches. So zingy! And, kind of hot because they hung out with the chiles for so long.
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Yeah, and that is where my head hits my desk. I am 100% with Pollan on this one. Eat mostly plants.
Ironically even on farm-to-table-organic produce animals are still being terribly abused. We are borne, we suffer, and we die. I am all for reducing the suffering, but it will never be zero. The protest of not consuming dead animals, or not consuming something made with the aid of dead animals, is a philosophical and practical impossibility.
(I’m not actually arguing with you, just stating my position)
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Oh, absolutely. The Jainists are the ultimate expression of this, wearing cloths around their mouths to prevent inhaling any bugs and sweeping the ground as they walk to brush any insects out of the way. No matter what you do, animals are involved in the process somewhere along the way. And I doubt many hard-core vegans are fooling themselves thinking otherwise, but avoiding dairy, leather, meat, honey, etc. is their way of contributing as little as possible to animal suffering.
At some point, myself, I realized that I could have a positive impact in a lot of other ways without eating shitty fake eggs and fake cheese.
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I was vegan for a number of years (9 years) and I wish it worked that way.
At some point I realized that it is a naive notion that you can eat or live in a way that doesn’t harm animals, you can only really remove the impact from your direct line of site to a degree.
I agree.
The average person will ONLY chomp down on 7,000 animals during their lives, according to the Vegetarian Calculator. It breaks down to 11 cows, 27 pigs, 2,400 chickens, 80 turkeys, 30 sheep and 4,500 fish. Food raised animals is incredibly efficient.
When you calculate animal life in habitat loss for alternate proteins, things like soy production are the number one driver of rain forest deforestation. You easily hit the same number of animal lives in a few years consumption of soy. Habitat loss has a much greater impact on animal life then food production. Of course, the numbers become trickier when you try and calculate soy being fed to food animals as part of their feed. Regardless how I ran the numbers, there was no escaping that life impacts life, and that changing your diet to vegetarian for animal impact reasons did not achieve the desired goal and often ironically resulted in greater impact (number of lives) if one consumes modern commercial factory produced vegetarian products.
I’m all for people eating however makes them feel best and what aligns best for them. I still eat vegetarian 1-2 days a week even though I eat meat now. In fact I’m eating a veggie soup right now. I stick to quality ingredients, be it veg or meat, I find that the care for quality in production makes a huge difference. Quality ingredients, whole foods, and time honored prep methods. I get what I can locally, but i’m too much of a foodie to pretend that I’m not consuming quality stuff sourced from all around the world and the impact that has…we do our best and make our choices i guess. 
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One last thing, cause it always sticks in my craw.
If people ate more honey, there would be more demand. More demand means more hives. More hives means more bees. More bees means better competition with other species of less desirable bees. And that means more pollinators for plants desperate for pollination.
Vegans, eat your honey. Otherwise you are killing the world.
(I’m done now)
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Not to mention HONEY is delicious! 
My “one last thing” would be that ironically it is looking like our small animal friends (insects) are going to be coming to our rescue as far as dramatically increasing the efficiency of our food supply chains. They likely will play a huge role in mitigating environmental impact of our far too large human population. It takes a lot of cricket or meal worm lives to equal one cow life worth of food, but then we start discussing how we attribute value to life. Whether or not swatting a mosquito is the same as harpooning a whale. what does quality of life mean to a meal worm or cricket? will there be free range varieties?
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I always mocked my vegan friends who went honey-free. TBH, in my experience, the honey-free thing isn’t really very popular or widespread among vegans, especially since locally-sourced honey is more and more popular. Wool’s another thing a small number of vegans avoid but others embrace.
What @redesigned said is extremely true. It really comes down to efficiency and smart use of resources.
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The cultural conditioning is just plain interesting. Lobster and crab? Grab the garlic sauce! Crickets and larvae? Call the exterminator! Yet just based on entropy insects are waaaay more efficient as a food than vertabrates. Some day we will have to embrace them, along with greater quantities of things like seaweed.
Which reminds me, I haven’t gone seaweed hunting this year 
(This one doesn’t count towards my Last One declaration)
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Excellent points. I remember these conversations all too well! 
wool is awesome, keeps you warm and dry in winter, breathes well. The alternatives are cotton (much larger environmental impact, higher chemical usage) which is a sponge for water, or something fleece made from petroleum/plastic. Same with shoes or belts, leather lasts and lasts, synthetics have a huge impact, which do you choose.
At some point I started going for the more natural choice, which I think was the first crack in my wall of life rules that led to my personal revolution and new more flexible life rules. hee hee.
Growing a garden is a great way to get extra yummy local food, unique hard to find foods, and connect with the natural cycle of things. It makes you think about what is living in your area besides you. Even a small patio garden in the city provides a small oasis of life and will receive many visitors.
Yum sea bugs! I love crab, although I’ve been slightly put off by crabs after reading about sacculina, which is really just a type of shellfish i guess…still. 
Yes and things like crickets can consume much of the waste in the food chain and turn it back into food, which is HUGE!!!
Which seaweeds do you harvest? I’ve always wanted to collect more seaweed myself, I love most seaweeds. When i lived on the coast, farmers would collect it both for eating and for soil amendment.
I havent started harvesting 'weed yet (heh), and a large toxic algae bloom prevented me from starting this year. Perhaps I’ll hit the California coast in 2016. I really hope I can find some laver.
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I was thinking of hitting the Strait of Juan de Fuca in the San Juan Islands, so that PNW guide is just the ticket!
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Today was tasting time.
They were both decent-tasting and crunchy, but need some more time for the flavors to develop. The last time I had pickled beets, they were some grocery store abomination and tasted NOTHING like what’s going on here.
I ended up adding another garlic clove to each jar. I didn’t have enough garlic on hand when I started the ferment, so hopefully this will help.
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I recommend this facebook group called Wild Fermentation if you use facebook and aren’t already a member of the group. So much great fermentation talk.
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Is there a thread for wild foraging?
I don’t have too much room for a bunch of jars in my home, but I live on the edge of the suburbs.
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This is the first time I regret not having a bookface account!
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Fermentation batch #8, started today:
Carrots!
About 6 medium carrots. 5 cut into sticks, 1 cut into rounds.
Added this packet of “pickling spice” that came with my original pickling kit, plus 2 cloves garlic.
Also added 1 T of brine from sauerkraut batch #6. Covered with water/sea salt brine, then topped with a pickle pebble.
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You are making me so jelly. I had to leave my kraut up north. And there is Sooo much produce right here, and I have no jars!!
But you were at Target earlier! You could’ve picked up a case of 'em!
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