health Archives - Page 2 of 2 - The Sorting House

Forbidden Rice

Riz noir de Camargue (organic and local).

Black rice aka forbidden rice was known in China as the Emperor’s rice because it was apparently kept from the lower classes. It’s extremely high in anthocyanins due to its dark hue, which means amazing nutritional value and antioxidants! 👌

I’ll be honest, I do actually prefer Asian rice but I don’t really like the idea of my food travelling the world to get to me. Nor do I appreciate long production and distribution chains where numerous abuses to people and planet are often hidden for greedy profits. For a few years now I’ve been trying to reduce my consumption of imported products for this very reason.

Camargue is known for its white horses and pink flamingoes but is also a rice-growing region here in France. This means I have a choice to avoid unnecessary and overly polluting distribution in buying locally grown rice.

Supermarket-Free February

Today’s post is to show my solidarity with the social media challenge #fevriersanssupermarche ‘No-Supermarket February’ – that means no supermarkets for a month! Food shopping is to be done at farmer’s markets and small greengrocers, butchers, organic, bulk or specialist food shops instead.

The aim is to detach people from the belief that they must fund overly polluting mega-nationals to survive, and return some cash flow into the smaller, local economies that help our communities thrive.

I Explore

I explore wisdom,
I seek new understanding.
I remain open for it to find me.
🧜‍♀️

“Don’t let corporations cook for you.”

@michael.pollan

Some other damn-good-things Michael Pollan gone done said, “It’s true, we’re way too busy, and working longer and longer hours. But consider that, in the last decade or so, we’ve all found two hours a day to be online outside of work. So where did we get THAT time? The day is still only 24 hours long. The point is we always find time for things we value – and we’ve come to devalue cooking…that was a big mistake…”

“As long as we let corporations do most of our cooking for us, our agriculture will continue to be dominated by giant monocultures of grain and animal factories. Big companies only know how to buy from big farms. That means the movement to build a more diversified and local agriculture can develop only so far…”

Take back this power now. Start by shopping locally for ingredients (with less packaging, favour loose bulk, organic & fair trade as much as possible) that you then make into your favourite meals and snacks for yourself. Why? It feels good to learn new things, challenge yourself. Plus it’s the satisfaction of caring for yourself and your planet. Why would you trust anyone else with something as important?

Do You Eat American Express?

_{Updated 4 August 2022 – Original 13 November 2019}

Do you eat American Express?

Plastic is everywhere, killing wildlife and polluting our beautiful places, but even if you couldn’t care less about any of that, did you know that we humans, yes even you, are actually ingesting about the equivalent of a credit card in microplastic EACH week? Mostly through water but also beer and seafood and all other manner of things you probably wouldn’t even imagine.

Although we can easily ignore the state of things from our positions of comfort and privilege, do we really want to be consuming this amount of hormone-disrupting, disease-causing chemicals every week until we die? What about our children? Our pets? Not really.

Everything (that matters) IS Nature

_{Post updated 30 August 2022 – Original post 29 October 2019}

One that is not in harmony with nature, is not in harmony with themselves.

“In our busy modern lives, it’s easy to forget that we are a part of nature.
We know that vibrant green vistas soothe us. Vast wilderness inspires us.
The limitless clusters of stars in the night sky fill us with aching wonder. And yet it’s easy to feel detached from it all.”
Sandy Sitron

However detached we become, we must not forget that without nature there is no life. Without life, there is no you and without you there is nothing.
Everything is everything and everything is nature.

Are you making time to reconnect with that forgotten part of you, to appreciate it and protect it? 🌱