Episode-780- Anitra Kerr from Simply Living Smart
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Anitra Kerr of Simply Living Smart
Anitra Kerr has been working to help people become more prepared for over five years. Since 2006, her mission has been to teach people all over the world how to live simpler and smarter lives thru healthy eating and organization.
Anitra believes iving simpler and smarter leads to a healthier and less stressful life. Plus, learning how to use your food storage in your daily living saves money!
Today she joins us to discuss…
- Using whole grains in your storage and daily cooking
- Why it is important to store grains other than wheat
- The role herbs play in cooking and health
- How simple living can create a more rewarding life
- Sources of protein for vegetarians
- Cooking with dehydrated vegetables
- Grinding grains and making multi grain flours
- Sprouting grains
- Making ezekiel bread
- Using your “preps” in daily life
Additional Resources for Today’s Show
- Members Support Brigade
- TSP Gear Shop
- Join Our Forum
- ShelfReliance.com – (sponsor of the day)
- The Berkey Guy – (sponsor of the day)
- Anitra’s Links
Anitra on FacebookAnitra on Twitter
Remember to comment, chime in and tell us your thoughts, this podcast is one man’s opinion, not a lecture or sermon. Also please enter our listener appreciation contest and help spread the word about our show. Also remember you can call in your questions and comments to 866-65-THINK and you might hear yourself on the air.
“How simple living can create a more rewarding life”
Interesting. Synchronicity. I was just earlier searching the net for topics of this matter. There’s just too much clutter of many forms in this world today. I don’t think we’re meant to live this way. Too many weights physically and spiritually taxing us. Over the years, I’ve found lightening the load to truly make a difference.
Pressure cooker:
If you subscribe to the paleo schtick a la Rob wolf, you probably don’t want to use a pressure cooker with beans. Soaking beans mitigates the bad chemicals, pressure cooking doesn’t eliminate those chemicals.
was wondering where you get the paint cans you store dehydrated veggies n stuff in
I get paint cans for storage at Home Depot and Lowes. In the paint section near the buckets. They have gallon and pint size.
Gallon and quart size rather.
@roundabouts I get them from a company called The Cary Company.
http://www.thecarycompany.com/
What the heck exactly is provita or provida? All I get when googling appears to be nothing similar to a “grain”.
@ Ron – I think this is what she was referring to http://www.healthyharvest.com/pro-vitamixforsprouting1.aspx
This looks like a better price http://www.lifesprouts.com/Products?product=01P
PRO-VITA (a mix of Adzuki Beans, Fenugreek, Lentils, Green Peas, Mung Beans, Triticale, and Wheat) is a “blend of sprouting seeds that provide a well-rounded proportion of vitamins, minerals, and proteins for natural healthy living. This mix requires only 1½ days of sprouting at room temperature and will store in the refrigerator for several days.”
Check out this site for more information: http://www.lifesprouts.com/Products?product=01P
Hope this helps! 🙂
Jack – really enjoyed this show. I especially liked how you and Anitra each learned from the other. I have followed her for a while and really like her down to earth approach to food storage and preparation. Great show!
Hey Jack, at 37:17 you mentioned that food from today’s commercial farms has only a fraction of the nutritional value of the same food 100 years ago. Could I get a source for that information? I’d like to study that a bit more. Thanks.
@Ryan it is a widely known fact and even acknowledged by main stream nutritionists. It is all about the lack of soil quality. You can google something like declining nutritional value foods and find mountains of info on it.
I don’t have a specific citation here but hopefully I can show you the logic of how this happens. Keep in mind I have an MS in agronomy and my university was very much a promoter of mainstream agriculture.
Mainstream agriculture relies on chemical additions as fertilizer. Generally, N, P, K, Ca, and occasionally Fe and B are added. (if you forget your chemistry, that’s nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, calcium, iron, and boron). However, plants need up to 40 elements to optimally thrive. For decades we have said “oh they need such small amounts of stuff like Mn or Mo or Si that the soil has a great reserve of these and we need not worry”). Well, now imagine a soy field that has been cropped corn-soy for 50 years. Can you see how Mn– which is hyperaccumulated in soy– might be short in this field? I should add here that not only Mn, but several other elements will probably be in short supply at this point.
The upshot here is that if the plant is unable to mine the soil any longer for the micronutrients it needs, it will not be able to put that into its edible parts either. So if a chard plant is able to get only 50% of the Mg (magnesium) it needs– very common as pH adjusted soils are often fertilized with limestone. Some limestone contains magnesium, some (calcitic) does not. So this plant that’s short in magnesium will also mean that the chard you eat will not get you as much magnesium as you could have gotten in an optimal soil. This is very, very common these days.
The solution, of course, is to use a truly complete amendment. The best possible one, in my not-so-humble opinion is compost, preferably with herbivorous animal manure as a significant component. I’ve seen what a lack of animal manure can do to a cropping system reliant on compost and it ain’t pretty.
@Lidia, Awesome post. Let me add another component which of course is largely handled by compost.
NPK fertilizer in and of itself isn’t evil and isn’t directly harmful, it is the complete reliance on it that ends up literally “burning up” all soil nutrients rapidly. Once that happens soil becomes a sponge of dead media to grow on and hold more fertilizer. Now we test farms that have been doing NPK for years and find the plants are phosphorus deficient but he ground is literally SOAKED in phosphorus.
How is this possible? The SOIL IS DEAD, all life is extinguished in it. The reality is living soil has BILLIONS of living things in it and we really understand only about 1% of all the roles the little creatures play in the ecosystem. Consider this factoid I just got from a Bill Mollison lecture.
“In one square meter of soil there is over 600 kilometers of fungal structures”
Now that is just the fungus! It is simply impossible to believe that any plant grown in sterile soil could ever take up nutrient as optimally as in a system that is alive. So we are seeing plants that are deficient in phosphorus even when we dump phosphorus onto the field. Why? The system is so dead the plants can’t take it up, this is specifically the case in tree systems like with Pecans in Texas.
I am actually working on an episode about soil, it is really fascinating when you start to delve into it.
I neglected to mention this yesterday, and you are correct. There are numerous very beneficial fungi that literally form associations with plant roots. They get extra sugars from the plants and in exchange they help the plant extract elements from the soil. This is similar, but not the same as the bacterial associations in Fabacid (pea, bean, etc) plants. You are absolutely correct that good compost should act as a fungal amendment as well as a nutrient amendment.
One really scary consequence of glyphosate resistant GMOs is that glyphosate appears to be doing a real number to the beneficial soil biota and actually seems to be helping Fusarium spp. in some way. So now we have millions of acres of farmland that are being depleted in VAMs and the other good stuff and are unnaturally high in pathogenic fungi such as the Fusarium. This cannot go well.
On a slightly different tack, NPK can be directly harmful under certain conditions. It would take too long for me to reply in post, but do research the phenomenon of “salting up” a soil. It happens around here a LOT. Compost, btw, does not salt up a soil. The only way I know to amend such a soil is to plant it to red clover for 5-10 years. You cannot turn it back in, rather you burn the residues to ash and literally trash that, to get the excess salts away from the land.
Thanks, Jack, for restarting 5 minutes with Jack! My husband and I watched all of the first 37 episodes (some more than once) and were hoping you would find your way back to sharing your business ideas! So thanks for taking the time to bring the idea back to life! (BTW, our fineflies.com website is all about fishing with flies!)
I knew I heard of the Wonder Mill Jr somewhere before. Heh.
http://willitgrind.com/
This lady is awesome and all but she went on and on and on…..
Jack. Great Show as usual. As far as the Paleo Diet goes, can you eat the sprouts/wheat grass juice? As you have stated, some of the grains, like wheat, dont taste good in the grain state. But once they are sprouted they are still in a natural state and taste good. Just Curious. Thanks
@theflyingswordfish, short answer, yes because they are not grains at that point they are greens.
Not speaking for Jack, I think it is along the lines that, after sprouting, the wheat becomes more vegetation than “grain” and as stated in the show the nutritional make up is altered, esp the glycemic factor as much of the sugar is used by the plant for energy to break through the hull.
Also jmtc I think Jack uses the Paleo diet more as a guideline rather than something written in stone.
Sprinkle some nutritional yeast or cheese powder on kale chips, it’s amazing.
Too bad I’m not single and Anitra is not single and I’m not a Mormon 😉 I’ve loved her for years. I showed some of her videos to my wife and all I got was a cold, cold stare. Doh!
OK then, even if you don’t eat grains or legumes (I glazed over on all the stuff related to those), do check out Anitra’s site for some very cool pantry/kitchen organizing ideas, just to mention one thing. I’ll be going back to see what other goodies there are. BTW, the site freezes IE dead in its tracks but is perfect with Firefox.
And Gregg – cold shower dude. LOL! Better still, write a song about it.
Good show but wow… that lady likes to talk! You didn’t get a word in edgewise, Jack! Lol! 😉
Just heard this one today! I can’t wait to check out how to include my “hardcore preps” (beans, rice, wheat, etc.) into everyday living. I had noticed that the more pasta we ate the more rotund I got! This might be a better alternative for us considering our current financial constraints.