Metal-workers blues

My eternal DIY quest has, in the past, largely been confined to carpentry, electricity/electronics, cooking, gardening and the like. When it comes to woodworking, I considered myself pretty competent - at the level of the serious amateur, and I have some nice furniture pieces to show for it. Wood is comfortable to me, but I have to admit that I've always been fascinated and impressed by those who can work with metal.

Not being one to respect confinement, or the division of labor, I've recently been trying to make useful things out of metal. I decided on a project - a universal coil winder designed by the imminent late genius David Gingery. I really can't rave about Mr. Gingery enough. The was a man who knew how to make things, as I understand it, he was a high school shop teacher, and he wrote several books - many of which can be found at Lindsay's Technical Books. Lindsay's, by the way, is a Luddite's paradise, and really has to be experienced to be believed.

Gingery considers this contraption to be easy to make, and a good introduction to working with metal. Everything you need to make it can be obtained at your local hardware store, as can all of the tools needed, if you don't have them already. I have a lot of tools, and I had a lot of the materials needed, so I got to work.

I learned a couple of hard lessons really fast. First, when Gingery says that this is an easy project, you have to remember that this is coming from a man who casts metal in his back yard, and writes books on how to build lathes from scrap metal. Second, while a background in wood working is useful, metal is a very different material from wood, and things like, say, the ability to cut a straight line along a mark to with less than 1/8" of variance don't necessarily translate directly. Third, the metal equivalent to a plane is a file, and getting rid of that 1/8" of variance is a lot more difficult when you're working with steel.

As a woodworker, I pride myself on being competent with un-powered tools. When I use a powertool, it's usually to avoid tedium rather than reliance. I've found that I get far more accurate results with hand-tools than I do with power tools, particularly when doing joinery. Initially, I took this stance with metal as well. When I needed to make a cut on a piece of 1 1/2" x 1 1'2" angle iron, I got out my hacksaw, set ip my miter box, and got to work. Just getting a clean starting kerf turned out to be a major chore, and the final result was less than satisfying. Disappointed, I took my stock to work, where we have a metal cutting bandsaw, and found the results to be equally, if differently disappointing and accuracy to be just as elusive. So out came the file, and what seemed like an eternity of trying to true up my cut.

I'm sure that accuracy comes with practice, but man is it hard, tedious work. I'm going to keep at it, even if I have to buy more angle iron, but until then, I'll be singing the metal workers blues.

The smell of rotting cabbage

I'm talking Kimchi, the staple of Korean cuisine.

My father-in-law, who doesn't claim to be a luddite, but who is a great environmentalist - greater than I can ever hope to be has been experimenting with fermented vegetables. On a recent visit, he brought me a jar of his more recent efforts - home made Kimchi. removing the lid, one is greeted by a stench that has to be experienced to be believed. If you can get past that, however, and put the stuff in your mouth, the experience is wonderful. Vegetables, packed with salt, and fermented in the brine of their own juices take on an amazing flavor, retain a crunchiness only dreamed of in store-bought pickled vegetables, and have amazing health benefits. My wife, who doesn't like anything with a strong smell to it said, "I don't know if I like it or not, but I can't stop eating it"

Kimchi isn't the only tradition of fermented vegetables by any means. The Japanese have tsukemono, and mother-in-law recently gave me this book as a gift with all the instructions on how to get started. I can't wait to start. Most of you are probably familiar with the German tradition of sauerkraut, and most other cultures have some similar tradition. Sandor Katz has also been preaching the virtues of naturally fermented foods, most notably in his book Wild Fermentation, and at his website of the same name.

All pickled vegetables are not created equally however. In the US, most of the pickles we consume are the quick pickled variety. These vegetables are not fermented in the traditional sense, and do not confer the same health benefits as those wwhich are naturally fermented. My parents-in-law, for example, report that since they've added fermented pickles to their diet on a regular basis, they no longer need antacids to be able to get a decent night's sleep. I can attest to similar benefits, although I attribute most of my success to reducing my intake of refined sugar to almost nothing.

Unplanned Time Away

I didn't plan this latest absence.

As a self-proclaimed Luddite, I have a great respect for Mother Nature, but sometimes she can be a real bitch. She exposed this side of herself to me in a big way lately, reminding me in dramatic fashion that I am not 18 anymore (my wife, who can also be bitchy at times, likes to point out that I'm not even 38 anymore).

I have a neuroligical condition that's been hanging over my head for ten years now, and while I thought I had beat it into submission, it recently reared it's ugly head again to let me know that the war isn't over, and left me to live as a pile of immobile goo for a couple days, and forced me back into the care of a neuroligist and a pharmaceutical regime to manage things.

Needless to say, I don't like it one little bit. I'm back though, and even if I'm a little slower, I'm taking up the mantle again, and pursuing the sustainable life. While I was laying in the hospital, I took great pride in the fact that if I was never able to pick up another tool, the last job I did - the job I was doing when I was laid low, was building a compost bin out of reclaimed lumber. It's a heck of a compost bin too.

So, I have a bit of a back log on posts, several essays that are half-written, projects that need documenting, and other things to report. I'll be getting them out as fast as I can.

Luddite Technology – Crystal Radios

Listen to the radio without using any electricity, including electricity stored in a battery!

That sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s not only possible, but relatively easy to do and can even be done with no special parts (although using some special parts can definitely improve the performance). There is a catch of course, namely that without having a source of electricity, the signal you use won’t be very loud, and you’ll have to listen via ear phones (and a particular type at that – more later).

The simplest of radios can be built with simple wire, a crystal or equivalent, and an earphone. I’ve built this kind of radio, and while it works – which seems miraculous enough – its performance is less than spectacular. It only picks up the very strongest of AM stations, and it picks them all up at once. Fortunately, we can do much better by adding more wire in the correct configuration, a tunable capacitor or two, and a handful of other innovations.

Simplest Possible Radio
(Courtesy of Wikipedia)

More specific and detailed construction information can be found on the Internet , and in the interest of space, I won’t go into the details here – at least not yet. My daughter and I are about to start working on building our own crystal sets, and I’ll post the results and pictures of the results (I have built crystal radios in the past, but none of them have survived the frequent moves I’ve made, so I can attest to the fact that they do work). What makes this topic of interest, and of importance to Luddites, is that absolutely everything needed to establish contact with the outside world can be made at home, with little knowledge – with the exception of the earphone (this could also be made at home, but would require a little more knowledge and skill), and without using any external power.

Now don’t get me wrong. A crystal radio is a poor substitute for even the cheapest modern AM/FM radio in terms of ease of use, portability, and sound fidelity. If you have one, I wouldn’t throw it away simply because you can now make you own. I would however, still build one, simply because you can. Why? Because doing so is a step toward independence. It’s one less chain binding you to the culture of external dependence.

It’s also a good example to show that technology itself isn’t the enemy. In its proper place, technology can be liberating and empowering. As I’ve said many times, technology is supposed to work for human, humans aren’t supposed to work for technology and that includes the self and externally imposed slavery of having to work to acquire it. The crystal radio is enabling because it provides a path for those who actually need a radio to acquire one without undue expense of resources.

A historical example of the utility of the crystal radio can be found in World War II. GI’s in the European Theater listened to radios for both news and morale. Clever German scientists and engineers discovered a way to detect the presence of US troops by the signal generated in the local oscillator of their portable radios. The radios were consequently banned; leaving the GI’s to do without a vital link to the outside world. Clever soldiers began building crystal radios with materials they had on hand, restoring the link. The radios they built were crystal sets, which don’t have a local oscillator, and thus did not give away their position.

Part of what makes the foxhole radios so amazing from a technical perspective, is that they didn’t actually have a crystal. The detector (the role the crystal plays) was created by holding a razorblade to a flame and using the scorch-mark as a primitive semi-conductor – in effect, a diode. That is sheer, liberating genius, and even if it didn’t play a major role, anything that kept the morale of our soldiers up certainly helped the Allies win the war.

There is a fly in the ointment to all of this, however. These crystal radios are restricted to analog signals. The current push toward digital broadcast will make them obsolete. This, strictly speaking, doesn’t mean that you can’t still build your own radios, but it does mean that you must have an external power source because the electronics needed to decode a digital signal consume power.

I work in the field of technology and communications, and although it hasn’t really been a career enhancing position, I’ve long been opposed to the digitalization of media and communications. My opposition is based on the principle of accessibility. An analog signal is accessible in a much wider array of circumstances than a digital signal, albeit at the expense of quality. The human ear (and eye) can listen or see around a great deal of noise such as static, artifacts, or other interference. A digital signal is either perfect or unavailable, due to the nature of the decoding the ones and zeros that make up a digital signal, and in marginal conditions digital signals fail long before analog systems. They are also far more dependent on stable power conditions. (There are a few exceptions to this statement, predominantly found in the world of HAM radio, which I’ll discuss in future posts, but these aren’t actually ‘digital’ modes of communications – a CW signal (morse code) for example, is either ‘on’ or ‘off’, but the actual information isn’t directly contained in the ‘on’ or ‘off’ state, and the human ear can decode weak CW signals through a process of inference).

The move to digital communications and media is driven by the pursuit of money. Manufacturers want to sell you the equipment needed to decode the equipment, and thus the encoding schemes are often proprietary for the express purpose of limiting access to customers. Media content providers encrypt their products to limit the ways in which you use your purchases. In principle this is fair enough, and everyone deserves to be rewarded fairly for the fruits of their labors. In practice though, they are accomplishing these goals through the use of the common airwaves, which they hold only through public trust – part of that trust is that they provide critical information and make it freely available. The transition of the public airwaves to proprietary formats is, in my opinion, a violation of that trust.

Food Culture

“Eat food or die,” a guy I know once said. This seems beyond obvious, but history has shown us many instances where people, both collectively and individually, have chosen to die rather than to eat. It would be easy to dismiss these instances as proof that the gene-pool is self-chlorinating, but I think that to do so is to ignore a valuable lesson.

A good example of this phenomenon – of people choosing to die rather than to eat – can be found in the Viking culture of Greenland. The Vikings settled in Greenland during an uncharacteristically warm climatic period which enabled them to bring with them the agricultural and culinary practices of their homeland. Eventually, the climate swung back to normal and their agricultural and culinary practices could no longer be maintained. The Viking culture of Greenland waned to virtual non-existence, with a dramatic increase in deaths due to mal-nutrition, and an emigration of Vikings back to their homelands.

One of the curious aspects of the Greenland Viking culture to anthropologists and historians is that they didn’t eat fish. I don’t like fish either, but then I don’t live in Greenland. The Inuit people – the closest thing Greenland has to a native people – survived the same period that did the Vikings in by subsisting on fish and other marine life as they have for millennia. Food, perfectly normal and acceptable food, was literally swimming all around the Vikings, but rather than change their diets they instead chose to starve and leave. No one is really sure why the Greenland Vikings refused to eat fish. It seems an odd thing for a sea-faring people, especially when their Nordic parent culture includes sea food. Whatever the reason though, for several generations, they simply refused to acknowledge that fish were food, and this led to their demise.

The point of this brief history lesson is that what we consider to be food isn’t solely dependent on what’s available, on edibility, nutrition, or anything scientific. As members of a culture, we subscribe to a particular set of rules that informs us what is ‘food’ and what isn’t. This is something I touched on in my last post dealing with weeds – perfectly edible and nutritious foods are growing wild in our yards and green spaces, but most people not only refuse to eat them, but are completely oblivious to the fact they are actually food. Furthermore, those brave souls who are willing to buck tradition and harvest this bounty and thought of as strange.

This is the difference between food and food culture. ‘Food’ is merely an edible substance. ‘Food Culture’ is a set of rules, generally tied to a place and a group of people, which specify food as acceptable, how food is gathered or produced, the proper methods of preparation, when to eat, how to eat, and how much to eat. Traditional food culture is tied to a place and to a people and is thus a local or regional phenomenon as well as an ethnic one. It is in fact a part of how ethnicity and regionality are determined. Even in our modern world, there is a food culture, in spite of the fact that in its current state, it is focused on eliminating regional and ethnic variations to develop a kind of culinary hegemony.

The verbalized principle of modern food culture is that anyone should be able to eat whatever they want whenever they want it, so long as they can afford it. This is accomplished through market economics – producing foodstuffs where it is cheap to do so, and transporting them to a place where they can fetch the best prices, thereby enriching the producers as the window of season shifts around the world, and theoretically at least, ensuring that everyone has a rich and varied diet. This is a laudable goal, but ultimately rests on flawed assumptions about the nature of food, productivity, economics, culture, and human nature.

Obviously, as the case of the Greenland Vikings illustrates, traditional food cultures can fail, although one could make the argument that it was a failure on the part of the Vikings to realize that food culture is tied to a place as well as a people. The sum total of food culture however, is meant to educate the people in a particular place on how to best, most effectively, and safely utilize the food resources of their area in a sustainable manner. In a similar way, the modern food culture has potential flaws in that it see that food culture is tied to either a people or a place. This creates a systemic vulnerability and a dependence which represents a danger to everyone.

Danger? Yes, Danger! If you’re like most people in this country, your food comes from somewhere other than where you live. Chances are that you actually eat very little that comes from where you live. Implicitly this means that your life depends on someone delivering one of the basic requirements for life. What happens if they stop doing it? What are YOU going to eat, and where are YOU going to get it from, and how are YOU going to get it?

These questions are neither rhetorical nor trivial. They aren’t necessarily even meant to prompt you into trying to grow and produce all of your own food. The point of asking them is point out that food has to come from somewhere, and if it isn’t coming from somewhere else, it has to come from where you are. There’s a pretty good chance that food is growing and being produced somewhere pretty close to you, but if you don’t know where that is, or what forms it takes, it isn’t going to do you much good.

That, ultimately, is what this post is about. It’s a question I’ve started asking myself, my friends, and my neighbors. How is your food culture defined? What are you doing to ensure that your food culture is sustainable and viable? If all external inputs were removed, would you eat food or die?

Enough with the salad already…..

I know it seems like I’m fixated or something, but this will be the last one for a while:

My latest salad creation:

Bowl full of mixed baby arugula and lemon grass (ideally, cut fresh from your salad bowl)

1 thinly sliced red onion

½ thinly sliced cucumber

Vinegar, salt, pepper, grated cheese (if desired)

Place sliced onions in a sieve and soak in cold water for half hour. Throw away water. Add sliced cucumber to sieve. Add ½ cup of vinegar to a bowl, and add cucumbers and onions add salt and pepper to taste. Fill bowl with cold water until vegetables are covered. Let soak for a half hour.

Drain onions and cucumbers and add to bowl of greens. Toss and dress with a light vinaigrette. Top with grated hard cheese like Parmesan or Romano (or whatever else you have and/or like)

Salad under Foot

In my last post I wrote about growing salad greens in a bowl or pot, and what a wonderful source of fresh organic leaves it is. In my exuberance, I nearly forgot about the other source of greens I’ve been exploring this summer – the weeds growing like gangbusters while my grass dies due to drought. In general usage, weeds are a nuisance and not given much attention, and they’re usually found growing where you don’t want them to grow (or are trying to grow something else. On closer examination however, some of these weeds have uses.

The most common weeds in my area are dandelion, plantago (plantain), and burdock. All three of these plants are edible, at least in part, and also medicinal. Dandelion and Plantain provide greens for salads. Burdock leaves can be harvested in the spring, but this plant is usually valued for its roots, which are eaten like a vegetable. All parts of the dandelion are edible and have various uses, including the famous wine made from its flowers.

What makes these plants special is that they grow on their own. They require no effort on your part – in fact, just the opposite is true, as anyone who has ever tried to maintain a lawn knows, effort is required to keep them from growing. They are literally free food, there for the taking – well, there is a small cost – one has to get over the idea of harvesting weeds from their lawn or other public green spaces; one has to prepare themselves to eat something they’ve been taught to despise all their lives; and one has to be willing to accept the questioning looks and possible scorn of those who believe that food can only come from stores.

If it helps, many of these so called weeds used to be cultivated as crops, and in some places still are. Plantago, for example, is still widely grown in gardens around the world. Another ‘weed’, chicory, is widely grown in some places, and is somewhat famous as an additive or substitute for coffee in New Orleans. Here where I live, it simply grows wild, any place and every place it can, and it’s flowers are a scenic staple along the sides of roads. It should also be noted that in many upscale restaurants, salads of ‘wild greens’ are a featured item on the menu, and examining these expensive little piles a green that dandelions, rocket, chicory, and other ‘weeds’ are prominently present. Our ancestors used and relied on these crops, but now that knowledge has been largely, but not entirely lost.

If you’re interested, as a Luddite Apprentice, or simply looking for a free meal, the place to start is with a good field guide to edible and medicinal plants. Then spend some time outside comparing your weeds to what you find in the book. Remember that details are important here. There are many plants or radically different species that look very similar during various parts of the growth cycle, and the only way to distinguish a friendly plant from a dangerous one may be small things like the way the leaves grow from the stem. If you have any doubt, you should consult an expert, in person.