Oak du Jour

Pressed for time today, with promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep, so I'll leave you with this (click to enlarge).  Plant & nurture more oaks today, so we'll have more of these tomorrow.

Most importantly for today:  Win Twins!!!

Making Acorn Flour

I found this terrific blog post on making acorn flour.  It's a little different than the process I have used before; I have typically roughly ground the shelled acorns and then leached in boiling water, a la Euell Gibbons, dried them and then finely ground them.  This post suggests finely grinding them first and then leaching with warm tap water.  Makes sense since a lot more surface area will be exposed to the water - should speed the process considerably.

I'm looking forward to giving it a try later this week.  I'll be working with red oak which I've never done before, so rapid leaching of tannins will be important.  (J. Russell Smith theorized that ultimately high tannin acorns would be more valuable as a food crops because leaching tannins is relatively easy and yields a marketable by-product... but I don't intend to do any tanning in my back yard this fall.)

Really?

A guy at the airport last night was reading the latest issue of Scientific American. The cover story was, "Human Evolution Is Not Over."

And here I thought that the Earth's 4.5 billion years of existence and hundreds of millions of years of evolution culminated with... me.

I am sure the article is not nearly as inane as the headline, and that it makes valid points about the ways in which natural selection is at work within the human population without us thinking about it in those terms or being aware of it.  (Luckily for me - although decidedly not for my sons - baldness doesn't set in until after we have found the person who against all odds and reason became my life's partner.)

However one thing is certain regarding human evolution:  We sure haven't evolved as fast as our diet has changed.  The cultivation of grains is about 10,000 years old - the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.  The complete corn-ification of our diet is less than 50 years old.  I was just reading in The Omnivore's Dilemma that the ratio of Omega-3 fatty acids (from fish and grass fed animals) to Omega-6 fatty acids (from grains) has changed in a relatively short period of time from 1:1 to 1:10.  Many people (including me) believe that this change is an underlying cause of the complex of diseases considered to be "Western diseases":  Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, etc.

We are what we eat.  And we are what what we eat eats.  Say that five times fast.  And we're meant to eat nuts, predominantly acorns, and we're meant to eat animals that eat acorns and perennial grasses.

Maybe the sign that humans are truly evolving is when we realize what our slavery to cereal crops has done to our planet and ourselves, and go back to food production systems that are "less evolved."

Happiness is...

Followers!  Thank you to Oak Watch's recent new followers, although I have to admit I find the term a bit embarrassing.  Knowing some of the site's followers, some personally and some by correspondence, it's really me who follows and draws inspiration from them rather than the other way around.

We're on to something here.  Things are changing.  This site views these changes in the way humans relate to the land and our food through the prism of oak trees.

Thanks for finding me, and thanks for following.  I love comments and I always answer emails... maybe not right away, but eventually and I deeply value the correspondences I have with several readers.

Happy Birthday

Happy 1st Birthday
Nicholas Charles Siems

We love you so much
(even though your mother didn't let me name you Quercus M. Siems like I wanted to!)

10 bonus points for guessing would the M would have stood for!

Word of the day...

... is pannage.  From wiki:

Pannage is the practice of turning out domestic pigs in a wood or forest, in order that they may feed on fallen acorns, beechmast, chestnuts or other nuts. Historically, it was a right or privilege granted to local people on common land or in royal forests. Pannage is no longer carried out in most areas, but is still observed in the New Forest of Southern England, where it is also known as common of mast. It is still an important part of the forest ecology, and helps the husbandry of the other New Forest livestock – pigs can safely eat acorns as a large part of their diet, whereas excessive amounts may be poisonous to ponies and cattle.

I love the term "common of mast" - and I know someone else will love that term as well!

I also love the painting in the upper right of the Wikipedia post; the one guy looks like John Daly swinging a 3 iron.

Compare and Contrast

Here's the photo I mentioned last post.
Foreground: Overplanted unprofitable crop ready for harvest; overly cheap calories we eat mostly in the form of meat, sweeteners and additives - all to our detriment, and all because food science has found ways to cram 200 more calories a day of it down our maws, exploiting our natural cravings for sweetness and fat.
Background: Ignored and forgotten crop available for easy harvest.

Yes, it was an unbelievably gorgeous day.  Drove all day and didn't see a single cloud, falls colors were beautiful.  A welcome change from the recent deluges.