Empowering Self-Reliance and Sustainable Living & Microbiomes
Empowering Self-Reliance and Sustainable Living & Microbiomes
Articles exploring food as a practical tool for nourishment, resilience and rebuilding the body. These pieces include nutrient-dense foods, traditional preparations, cultured foods, broths, herbs and foods grown from biologically active soil.
This is about ancestral food, not as nostalgia, but as pattern recognition. It is also about the future Gratitude Meals we will offer at the Gratitude Cafe, meals that come from lived experience and are anchored in something deeply personal. This article will discuss my Healing Soup , but it …
There is something essential missing from most of the food people are eating today, and it is not listed on any label. It is not a vitamin, not a mineral, not protein or fat. Those are all there, at least on paper. What is missing is the living layer that …
We talk about “B vitamins” as if they are a single substance you can swallow, measure, or fix with a pill, but in the body they behave more like a living network. Vitamin B is never just one thing, and that is where the misunderstanding usually begins. They are a …
Cholesterol has become one of the most misunderstood substances in the body. It is often spoken about as if it were a toxin that must be lowered at all costs, yet it is one of the most essential molecules for life. Every cell membrane depends on it. Hormones depend on …
The pomegranate’s outer skin is a universe of medicine that most people throw away. Most people who know me know that when I began to study the soil, my whole way of seeing health changed. Once I understood how the soil food web functions, I saw how every part of …
Coffee blossoms are a brief candle of the coffee tree. They open after the first good rains, bright white, breathing out a perfume that sits somewhere between jasmine, citrus, and honeyed vanilla. Inside those petals are the same energetic signatures that move sap through the plant, guide bees to nectar, …
Vitamin C is one of those nutrients that has been misunderstood in the modern world. Most people think of it as ascorbic acid or citric acid, but those are only the shell of something much more complex. They are the empty frame of a living compound that nature designed as …
I never imagined that I would one day use banana flowers as medicine. But, here in Ecuador, they hang in the garden, bold and purple, their petals opening one by one to reveal tiny hands of bananas inside. They looked more like ornaments than remedies, too grand to be anything …
We have all heard of taking turmeric (curcumin) with black pepper (piperine) to enhance the bioavailability and absorption of curcumin. Piperine, the bioactive compound found in black pepper, has been shown to significantly increase the absorption of curcumin by inhibiting metabolic enzymes that break it down and increasing intestinal permeability. …
Not all medicine grows in our garden. I deeply believe in using what we cultivate and forage here in Ecuador, but some plants are so profoundly restorative to the body’s inner terrain that they are worth bringing in. Slippery elm is one of them. This is not a tropical tree. …