Book Review: A World Without Bees

Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum shed light on a fascinating (and previously unknown to me) topic: the unexplained, and so far unstoppable, deaths of honeybees around the world in recent years. Some blame viruses, or parasites, or pesticides... other options explored by the authors include the overworking of honeybees and climate change. They don't seem to come down on the side of any particular theory, which is refreshingly objective and allows the reader to draw their own conclusions from the information presented. However, whatever theory readers prefer, in the end we're as much in the dark as the authors, beekeepers, and bee researchers are on this issue.

As much as I enjoyed learning about a new and interesting thing, I was disappointed by the way the book was written. The structuring of the material was incoherent, and was presented so repetitively that the book was very annoying to read in some ways. There was no logical progression from one theory to another, and no helpful collation of information about each theory in one place. Instead it jumped back and forth from one to another, over and over again. It felt like the authors were writing the book in a hurry and hadn't bothered to organise it better, and that they had tried to make it longer than it needed to be by repeating themselves constantly.

So, I would recommend that people read the book because the issue is such a fascinating and important one, but that if anything else on the subject comes out which is clearer and better written, go for that instead. I'll definitely be looking for some more books about bees in general - for example, I want to know more about the 'waggle dance' the bees do to communicate information back to the hive, very cool!

For all its faults, at least this book got my attention - I now know something about the issue of honeybee deaths, and how the world would fare without these important insects. I'm definitely interested in knowing more about what is causing this terrible phenomenon. Hopefully some governments somewhere will realise how serious the problem may get, and throw some money at solving it, because by the sounds of it, it's a bit low on the priority list right now...

Lumpy (but yummy!) yoghurt, and my epic ethic sagas continued...

What a wonderful trip to Moe! Absolutely lovely spending time with family, and seeing my nieces head off to school/kinder. We also went to one of their swimming lessons; the children were so cute, and so courageous as they learnt to handle the water. I couldn't believe how confidently some of them - all of about 3 or 4 years old - jumped from the side of the pool into the water. I could actually see myself enjoying going to swimming lessons with some kids of my own and watching them encounter water for the first time! Boy did that day make me feel clucky :)

The yogurt the girls and I made was yummy with a teaspoon of sugar sprinkled over it, and a strawberry cut up. It probably didn't even need the sugar, but it helped make it go down easier, especially because it looked a bit gross - the whey had separated from the rest (as I expected it to do) but the yoghurt itself looked firm and set and yummy... the guide said to stir the whey back in as it is apparently nutritious. This I did, only to find that stirring the yoghurt made it very lumpy looking. I might look into the whole whey issue and see if other people drain it off instead of stirring it back in - I prefer non-lumpy yoghurt, and even my niece took a look at it and decided against it, so it might be something to work on perfecting before I serve it up to guests!

Still, the taste was good so I feel emboldened to try again... as soon as I get another easiyo (I gave the other one to my A.S.I.L, whose daughters LOVE yoghurt, so they should get plenty of use out of it!). It's nice to know there'll be someone I know out there making yoghurt that'll understand when I whinge about whey and lumps, and who I can point to when other people accuse me of being a strange and solitary freak ;)

In other news, the grace period for soft drink is over - I have read up a bit on the fructose issue, and from what I can tell some scientists don't think it's the leading reason for weight gain and obesity but that it is one of many serious factors, while others think fructose is the devil incarnate when it comes to the spread of obesity in the U.S. particularly. I found enough to worry me; after I read up a bit on the effects of sugary drinks on teeth as well I mentally put my foot down. I am suitably motivated to give up sweet fizzy stuff, ESPECIALLY seeing as I seem to be slipping back into coke drinking (two cans in two days ugh) and want to nip that nasty habit in the bud again before it turns into a fully blown caffeine addiction a second time. Last time I gave coke up (cold turkey) I got the shakes, headaches and extreme grumpiness for a few days. I can't believe some parents let their kids drink that stuff *shudder*



I now have a 'Soft Drink Confessions' count happening on the side of my blog, where I'll count the amount of soft drink cups/cans I drink, and what percentage of them are coke. Hopefully neither number will creep up from now on, but at least if they do I'll know I have to confess them here.

Another thing that happened over the last two days was that I got some reading done (it happens when you take the train to the country. Awesome.) I'm nearly finished reading Bitter Chocolate by Carol Off, and it's a shocking read. As in, the things Carol Off writes about are shocking, not the writing itself. It's actually very well written (when am I going to find one in my must-read pile that isn't? Surely it's time for a tear-it-to-shreds book review?). I was horrified -though admittedly, not that surprised- by her accounts of slavery and human rights abuses in the chocolate industry's past. Much more shocking was that it is still going on, in one form or another, today! And with children! I can't believe that children are exploited and abused to make the west's favourite (legal) addictive treat. Horrible, horrible stuff to read, and very eye opening. I can't believe that this is the first I'm hearing about it, though I've seen plenty of 'fair trade' chocolate around the place these days and had an inkling that all may not be well with my cherry ripes and milky ways. Amazing how I subconsciously 'decided' not to research it before now.



I think another ban might be in order, or at least a selective one. I just got home and had a look through my kitchen: for someone on weight watchers I sure have a lot of chocolate lying around or hiding away! I think, to prevent wastage of food I've already bought, I'll have a rule that I'm allowed to finish/give away any chocolate that's in my kitchen now, but not buy any new chocolate UNLESS it's fair trade stuff. I also won't offend friends and family by rejecting any chocolate I'm given as a gift, but I'll make it known that I'm changing over to the more ethical variety (I've told Mum tonight, but she always buys us fair trade choccy for presents anyway, go Mum!). This might mean that I have to get off my butt and learn how to use chocolate in cooking so I can transform fair trade blocks of chocolate into versions of some of my favourite chocolate treats - ice magic to go on ice cream (it might have to be more like chocolate sauce), lamingtons, chocolate covered turkish delight, and cherry ripes. I'm sure I can come up with some tasty (and probably healthier) alternatives. Hmmm maybe instead of cherry ripes I could do fresh cherries and strawberries dipped in melted fair trade chocolate. YUM!

Mum told me tonight that she'd like to read the Carol Off book, especially because she might be doing some stuff around fair trade chocolate with her students this year, which is just fantastic :D

Living the Good Life... Tassie sounds pretty good right now!

Ugh. After all this heat, I feel like I should follow Linda Cockburn to chilly Tasmania, where the temperature today and for the rest of the week is exactly where I like it - low to mid 20s, mainly fine but with a shower or two over the week *sigh* Things outside in Melbourne are much cooler, but my apartment is still coming down off a boiling-point high, and no amount of coaxing through open windows and fans will convince it to cool it down before it's good and ready :)

Having said that, my easiyo yoghurt maker arrived today (eep! I'll be trying that out soon!), I spent a bit of time with some great friends this morning, and I have just finished sitting in front of a fan for the last half hour while sipping soda water and cordial and reading the last of Living the Good Life by Linda Cockburn. SO inspiring! I spoke to Ma tonight and she's reading Animal Vegetable Miracle and loves it already, one chapter in - I feel like throwing a big thankyou out to people like Cockburn and Kingsolver for going through things like that and writing about them. It makes it so much easier to be motivated to change the little things along the way when you know that someone else out there made changes that were far more drastic and lifechanging, and lived to tell the tale.



OK, what was it that I loved about Living the Good Life? I think it was honestly written, with all the problems and lapses (which were, however, surpisingly few considering!) included. Linda and Trev get along well but there are some real moments of tension - it's clear that they are very different people, and this means they deal quite differently with the six month challenge. It didn't feel like Linda and Trev had a really easy time of it, and that was with a few years to prepare and make changes that would help them during their experiment. However, they stick at it, and at many times you can sense how 'together' their family seems as they travel along their journey. They survive it as a family.

There were some truly hilarious moments in the book, many of them involving the goat, Possum, who sometimes seems like too much trouble, but provides the family with milk (and therefore cheese, too). Their son, Caleb, also comes across as a funny, witty, lively, child that gets a lot out of the changes that this couple made to their lives. I was really touched by the close relationship between Linda and Caleb - the decision to let him home school because he asks to, the way they play games together, the way she bends the rules to buys him chocolate from the shops for easter so that his fantasy isn't ruined... I felt like they were good people, very normal, doing the best they could - and succeeding - at drastically changing their lives. It came across as difficult, but very achievable and very rewarding.

Ooh I have just stumbled upon Linda's blog, something else to read through and be inspired by!

I also came across a segment they did on 'Today Tonight' (not my favourite program, but I'm glad that the people who do like it got to hear about Linda and Trev) that was up on youtube. Cool.

Feelin hot, hot, hot...

I sweltered my way through the third day of 43+ degree days here in Melbourne, ugh! I am not made to endure heat; anything over 30 and I wilt and cannot function properly.

No air conditioner at home (a good thing, environmentally, but that's little comfort in 43 degree heat), but the other aircon-users in my area managed to make the power go out for most of the evening. That meant not even a fan for me, little-miss-whingey-pants.

So... I sweated and cursed my way through the evening, ordered a very unhealthy takeaway dinner as my oven and microwave were out of action, and sat outside in the shade to read Living the Good Life by Linda Cockburn in the dying light of the day.

Thankfully the book was so awesome I read my way through the power outage, and found to my delight that both the power and the promised cool change arrived at 9pm. I even managed to feel a little ashamed of how reliant I was on power as I munched on my oven-cooked-takeaway-pizza, in front of an electric fan, blogging on my energy-consuming-computer.

How true that we don't know what we've got till it's gone :)

Right now I'm reading under my newly-appreciated electric light, trying to coax the cool air into my stuffy apartment via open windows and doors...

A Year of Slow Food

Well, things seem to be moving at a super fast pace this week - getting ready for my new course, finishing my last week at work, trying to get around and do things socially and at home on my crutches, organising youth allowance and a concession card etc.

So it was nice to occasionally take a time out and read a bit of A Year of Slow Food by David and Gerda Foster. It wasn't a revolutionary or an inspiring book, it didn't electrify me like some of the books I've been reading lately. Instead the writing reflected the way of life - it was a lovely, gentle, slow look at a couple living a sustainable, largely self-sufficient lifestyle with their family: growing and cooking good food, keeping bees and livestock, working, raising a family, and just generally getting on with life. Each time I read a chapter I felt satisfied, content, and cheerful. It felt like those times you eat yummy, healthy food and get that good feeling deep down in your belly. Which seems to be what slow food is about.

I highly recommend this book. It goes into the 'soul food' category.

Great recipes too!

One leg, two crutches, three great gigs!

Haven't posted for a few days but I'm sure you (as in my non-existant imaginary reader) will understand when you hear how busy I've been... I've lost enough weight now that my prosthetic leg isn't fitting properly. I switched to crutches until the skin under one of my arms split (maybe because I wouldn't stop doing stuff, I'm a shocker). I then got myself some crutches that sit at the hands/wrists... I'm still doing too much and OW my hands hurt.

Still, who could NOT do too much? I had tickets I bought pre-crutches to:
1. Cinematic orchestra at the Palais on the 20/01
2. Kel Day, Emma Wall & Ann Vriend at Manchester Lane on 22/01
3. Paul Kelly and Leonard Cohen at Rochford Winery on 24/10

Plus lots of fun socialising and catching up in between. What can I say, I don't know how to slow down!

*photo above added 25/01: Leonard Cohen on the large screen next to the stage - he rocked!

Which is probably why I should be (and am, hooray!) reading A Year of Slow Food by David & Gerda Foster... only one chapter so far as I'm also trying to get through my Nietzsche reader, but it's great reading already :)

I must say that being on the crutches has slowed down my efforts at cooking new things and cleaning the house chemical free - or cleaning the house at all. During the week it's all I can do to get to work, get through the day, go out and socialise or see gigs, and then get home again. It seems you can be a worker and socialite on crutches, or a worker and homebody on crutches. Ah well I've clearly made this week's choice. I'm comforting myself with the thought that on the weekend (between Leonard Cohen on Saturday and a party on sunday lol) I will clean it from top to bottom, crutches or no. At the moment it's a sty. Harrumph.

At least I got to test drive my new soap shaker - brilliant! I'm not 100% sure that I'm getting all the soap off of the dishes when I rinse them - it LOOKS like I am - but I guess I'll find out next time I eat off one ;)

How I Get into Debt

Hmmm I am TRYING to get debt free before I stop working in February, but I'm not doing too well at it. Today I ordered more books:

Living the Good Life by Linda Cockburn
Choosing Eden by Adrienne Langman
CWA Cookery Book & Helpful Hints by CWA
Sweet Poison: Why Sugar is Making Us Fat by David Gillespie
Home Creamery by Kathy Farrell-Kingsley
Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale & Why We Bought It by Elizabeth Royte

*sigh*

And they're the books that made the final cut... there were many more in the running. It'll probably be easier to stop buying books when I'm not working with them all day five days a week! (who am I kidding really?)

Animal Vegetable Miracle - read it!!!

In my first post I listed one of the books that inspired my move toward a better life: Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable Miracle

This book blew my mind. I have since lent it to a friend and plan to lend it out again when I get it back. Who would have thought a book about a family's attempts to grow their own food or source it locally would be so interesting? It's very well written, and easy to read. I really felt like I liked the author and her family by the end of the book. I certainly liked the sound of what they accomplished. If only I wasnt in an apartment with no backyard or balcony! I have put a big pot of roma tomatoes and basil, and little pots of cherry tomatoes and strawberries in part of the shared space (no complaints yet, hooray!), but I'd really love to grow more of my own food, and have room for things like a compost bin or a worm farm. Sigh.

Barbara Kingsolver doesn't just grow her own food - she harvests it, cooks it, preserves it, shares it with friends, teaches her children about it... and then has time to write a book about it! Talk about superwoman. After I finished reading the book I had a sudden urge to buy a big property in the middle of nowhere and become a dietarily self-sufficient locavore. I had to reconsider when I realised that:

a) I go nuts when I feel isolated from friends and family
b) I just know I would end up driving to the city a lot, therefore using lots of petrol
c) a small country town could be a problem for queers
d) a small country town could be a problem for the desired future CHILDREN of queers

So, I resolved to (probably) live in the 'burbs, but take whatever I could learn from Kingsolver's book and apply it to my urban context. I started to think about how you would go about using space creatively to fit as many vegetables as you could into the yard of a property closer to the city, being creative with the space you had. Other ideas started to creep in - adding skills like cheesemaking, breadmaking etc to my dietary self-sufficiency repertoire; retrofitting an existing house to be eco-friendly rather than building a new eco-friendly one from scratch further out from the city; getting involved in public transport activism and using public transport/carpooling/walking as much as possible to make the best of the convenient location we buy in... there were more ideas - some of them a bit wacky I'll admit - but I won't bore you. The point I'm making is that something in the book resonated with a part of me that I think I've suppressed over the years - the part that wants to live the way I believe it is right for me to live. That part of me went from a whisper to a loud scream after I finished reading. There aren't many books that I would call a Turning Point Book, but this is one of them.

Thanks Barbara!


Here is a story about this book from 'The Book Show" on the ABC - you might need to click 'show transcript'. If you can't be bothered reading the whole thing, here's a bit of an excerpt:

"Kingsolver's not the first person to write about the mess we've made of feeding ourselves. There are scores of books out at the moment about the business of eating. Some of them, like Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, are enlightening as well as grim. But some of them are tiresome, haranguing, even smug. Not this one. Kingsolver hits just the right tone, mixing worthy sentiment with humour, homespun wisdom, and unadorned fact. She has a great sense of pace, too, changing gear when your attention starts to drift, moving from gardening minutiae to an anecdote about Lily's chicken business (her youngest daughter is very entrepreneurial), then shifting back when levity gets too cute by reminding us of the import of the family's goal."

For another review of this book see Julie's post on Towards Sustainability.

Give a girl a fish and she'll eat for a day...

When I was ten years old, I read a book called The Livewire Guide to Going, Being and Staying Veggie by Juliet Gellatley. Somehow, inspired by that book, I found the willpower to become a strict vegetarian for eleven years. Then, when I hit my twenties, I started craving meat. A lot. I even dreamt about it! Steak with mushroom sauce featured prominently, as did roast lamb, butter chicken, fish and chips, chicken sausages, beef in black bean sauce... I cracked after a few years of these dreams, when I made a dish of crumbed lemon chicken for friends. On an impulse I gobbled a piece of it down, and it tasted SO good. It marked the beginning of the horrible/wonderful Year Of Meat - I ate so much meat, it was like I was making up for eleven years of deprivation. I was loving the taste, my body was telling me it was the right thing to do by it health-wise... You'd think that'd be the end of the story right?

The problem being that I just couldn't reconcile what I was doing with what I believed, so I had guilt guilt guilt galore for the whole year. To make matters worse my views on meat had matured and broadened and became as much about the environment and sustainability as they were about animal rights. So how could I believe in animal rights and an environmentally friendly and sustainable meat-free lifestyle, and yet be stuffing my face with chops and steak? Hypocrisy much?

So I tried cutting out all meat except fish from my diet. I felt I couldn't cut everything out again without failing, so it was better to cut out most than none at all. Fish seemed the obvious choice because it seemed to offer health benefits that other foods couldn't easily substitute, and because it was the only animal I could imagine killing myself (weird but there it is). I also felt, after finding the book Guide to Fish: Choosing and cooking sustainable species, that I could at least satisfy the sustainable/environmental aspect of my concerns, if not the animal rights one. So, I became a pescatarian (or "vegequarian" lol).
The Guide to Fish uses a super user-friendly system of colour coding - green means the fish is considered sustainable enough to eat regularly (Australian salmon's my favourite!), amber means it is a fish you should buy less often (the author suggests once every few weeks), and red means don't buy it at all. Seeing as I eat fish about once a week, I tend to eat the amber ones even more occasionally, usually once a month (I have a taste for Barramundi). The book also tells you great info about each fish: when it's in season, what the fresh fillet should look like, the texture and flavour of the fish, and which method of cooking best suits each species. Amazing! I carry this book around with me when I do my shopping for fish, and read through it when I get a spare minute to try and memorise which fish are a definite no-no. Before I bought this book I had eaten shark (flake) and swordfish, which this book puts on the red list. I had really enjoyed the taste of both, but have committed to never eating red list fish. I would like to know more about these red-list fish though, so that I'm making that commitment with my eyes open.

I do hope, at some point, to move beyond imagining being able to kill a fish, and actually do it. If I can handle it, then bring on the many years of fish eating. If it's horribly traumatic and I can't imagine ever doing it again, I may have to give fish up again (my poor friends and family, how will they ever keep up with what I do and don't eat!). I think it's important to experience this, as I want to make decisions like this with my eyes open from now on...

The possibility of so-called 'ethical' meat - kangaroo, free range, organic etc - is something I'd like to research further too. I don't know if killing an animal can be ethical at all in my mind, but maybe very occasionally eating meat that is as ethical as possible could help stem the daily cravings for it that I still get without breaking the conscience bank... I doubt I can go and watch a kangaroo being shot, but it may be possible to do a tour of a free range chicken or organic meat supplier? Anyway that's something to investigate along the way.