How much money to save to get few acres in Big Island (house, allergies)

[hotzcatz]

Considering it is Kansoku who started the discussion, his mention of "fruitarian" is probably for financial reasons and not particularly dietary or culinary ones. Back to more or less the original topic:

You can produce enough food on an acre to live on if you grow the right stuff. There's chickens and eggs, there's all sorts of tropical fruits, there's feral pigs running across the land, too. There's plenty to eat. However, you still need a bit of income to pay for things like taxes and buy stuff you can't grow or make for yourself. However, by growing and making all the stuff yourself, you don't need much of an income. There are a lot of folks up around the Volcano area - Fern Forest and Eden Roc, for two of the "subdivisions" where there are a lot of folks trying to be self-sustaining. They aren't quite there yet, but they are trying to get there. Their web forum is: Sensible Simplicity Forum: Discussing Sustainability

As for how much for the acre? It can be from less than $10K to somewhere just over $10K at the moment. In the Puna/Volcano/Keaau/Kurtistown/Mountainview area, properties with soil are considered very desirable. Not all lots have dirt on them, ya know. But, plants will grow in almost pure cinder so you can grow some stuff and start working on building up some soil. There's loads of free mulch at the Hilo dump.

[OpenD]

Originally Posted by Vaedrem

...we all choose what we eat, there is no such thing as a natural human diet...

I disagree. The so-called Paleolithic Diet is the closest thing we have to a Natural Diet, because it strives to reproduce the diet our bodies evolved to over the 4.5+ million years before we invented agriculture.

IOW, heavy on the roots and tubers, nuts and seeds, plus meat and eggs and insects. Virtually no grains, no greens, no fruit, and no dairy. That is what our bodies run best on.

Originally Posted by Vaedrem

, and vegetarians/vegans are very healthy without meat or fish

Make that "CAN be very healthy without meat or fish, if properly supplemented, but in many cases are not..." Let me preface the rest of this by saying I'm a trained macrobiotic cook, and a trained raw food vegan chef. I happen, ironically, to be among the 1/3 of the population who will never thrive on a vegetarian diet due to my body type. It took many years of striving to discover that simple fact. I honor those who choose a vegetarian diet, at the same time I note that it is an artificial diet that does not work for everyone.

Have you missed the recent studies which have shown increased rates of atherosclerosis and risk of stroke due to vegan diets? Not what anyone was expecting, was it?

Originally Posted by Vaedrem

...fruitarianism does have varying results, but not because of that.

Simply stated, our bodies evolved on a diet which included little or no fruit, so devising a diet consisting of nothing but fruit... um... yeah. Ask yourself this... have you ever met a fruitarian who seemed sane? I don't mean that disrespectfully, it's just an observation from life... all that sugar... it's a proven toxin.

[hotzcatz]

All true, but this is Kansoku asking, so I'm suspecting the "fruitarian" isn't a current diet but one he's hoping will be a frugal diet.

What is the cheapest healthy diet folks can have? Grow most of their own food? What would they need to grow and what sort of supplements would he need and can he do it on an acre in Puna?

Sweet potatoes grow pretty easy, so there's a starch. Eggs from chickens for proteins. No leafy greens? Don't let my grannie hear about that or she'd rise out of her grave and learn how to post things online in forums. Vegetables? No bread? No milk?

[Tenzo]

Just go up to the remote parts of Kauai. There are bunch of people living off the land illegaly.
The live on wild fruits, fish and the occasional lost hiker

****urrrpp**

[OpenD]

Originally Posted by hotzcatz

What is the cheapest healthy diet folks can have? Grow most of their own food? What would they need to grow and what sort of supplements would he need and can he do it on an acre in Puna?

Remembering the Depression era tracts I've seen about feeding a family of four from a quarter acre, I'd say so, yeah.

Originally Posted by hotzcatz

Sweet potatoes grow pretty easy, so there's a starch.

Taro also grows well, as does breadfruit.

Originally Posted by hotzcatz

Eggs from chickens for proteins.

And chickens. Make that "concentrated protein," since even lettuce contains protein. Maybe a little piggy. Maybe a tilapia pond. Or go with meatless staples like rice and beans that give the classic amino acid complexes required to replace meat in the diet. Even with high shipping prices to import, these are still fairly inexpensive foods.

Originally Posted by hotzcatz

No leafy greens?

Okinawan spinach grows like mad here. Lots of Asian greens do well. And the tops from root veggies like beets and carrots are tasty and nutritious.

Originally Posted by hotzcatz

Vegetables?

Cabbage and other brassicas like Bok Choy and broccoli do well in Puna. Green onions and leeks. Legumes like pea pods and beans.

Originally Posted by hotzcatz

No bread?

Flatbreads, maybe, and porridge. For subsistence farming, I'd stick with seeds/grains that do well in the rain. Amaranth, for instance, and flax. I make tasty, crisp flaxseed crackers and flatbread without baking.

Originally Posted by hotzcatz

No milk?

No milk. Although the verdict isn't 100% clear, there is now a lot of evidence that adults don't need and really are better off not drinking milk. Dairy was added to the human diet in northern climates as a way to deal with long, dark, cold winters, and we don't have that situation, so why eat that way?

I think a lot can be learned from traditional Hawiian diets, not only what they ate but also what they did not. There were no cows in those canoes...

[Kansoku]

Here's a good site to learn about the 811 diet (which is mostly fruitarian) The Raw Food Diet

[hotzcatz]

Well, you could learn how to grow all these things in a tropical environment by WWOOFing. Here's some folks near Honomu who grow lots of raw foods: Vegetables & Fruits on Akaka Falls Road in Honomu I don't personally know them, but they live in a nice area. Rural, somewhat remote yet beautiful and if you were looking to learn how to grow vegetables in the tropics, they'd know.

Hey, OpenD, how do you make flaxseed crackers and flatbread without baking?

[OpenD]

Originally Posted by Kansoku

Here's a good site to learn about the 811 diet (which is mostly fruitarian) The Raw Food Diet

Like I said, I trained as a raw food chef and worked in a vegan restaurant, so I'm quite familiar with the claims... as well as the rebuttals. The thing to keep in mind is that Fruitarianism is an unnatural, extreme diet and the rationales for it are all made up. Notice that this web page starts with a lie... that the body runs best on fruit. There is no scientific basis for this claim and no responsible nutritionist would say anything like that. As a matter of fact, the much touted "raw food high" seems to be nothing more than sugar overload. Oh, and here's a little known secret that the raw food community doesn't publicize... it's quite common for long-term juicers and raw foodists to lose their teeth. Seems to be caused by a combination of low Vitamin B-12 levels (which essential nutrient is only available in nature from eating animals or insects) and the fact that our teeth evolved around a diet with almost no sugar in it, so high sugar diets erode teeth rapidly.

Another thing they don't publicize is that only a fraction of the population, perhaps one third, will thrive on such an extreme diet, whereas another third will fail to thrive and eventually will sicken and can even die if their diet is not changed.

Research that was released publically yesterday may finally provide some understanding about why this is so... researchers have found that there are three different body types in the world, as distinguished by the dominent microbes in their digestive systems. Since the microbes in your body do much of the work of digesting food and making the nutrients available to your body, the kind of microbes you have determines which foods you will best be able to utilize.

I waded through all this, over the course of years, in the attempt to support a loved one with extreme allergies and immune-system issues. And I tried it all myself, repeatedly, ultimately finding that my body type was incompatible with vegan diets of every ilk. And that's an underlying truth that almost nobody will tell you... it's really NOT for everyone.

Another is that it is socially isolating. If you set yourself apart from the omnivores, you set yourself apart from a large portion of the human race. And that's something nobody really talks about... the way extreme diets like this isolate you from the mainstream.

Sincerely hoping this will provide some useful thought...

[OpenD]

Originally Posted by hotzcatz

Hey, OpenD, how do you make flaxseed crackers and flatbread without baking?

Oh, that's a simple trick from Raw Foods 101... when you soak flaxseeds in a little water, they exude a mucilaginous gel. After a little bit you can stir them up, then spread them out on a flat surface like a cookie sheet to dry. In Puna you need a dehydrator or warm oven or place in the sun to finish them up to a crisp, cracker-like consistency.

If you grind the flaxseeds first you get more of a flour consistency, and you can add a bit of herbs or veg or other ingredients for different flavors and texture.

Chef OpenD

[hotzcatz]

So are folks born with each type of microbe suite or can they change them over the years? Are they transferrable? Hmm, new "microbe" pills to take before changing your diet? If there's three different types of digestive systems, that might explain why there is such a variation of success on different diets, especially the weight loss types. Do you have a link for that research they posted yesterday? Who are the researchers, are they credible?

So, if there's three different types, then perhaps Kansoku is one of the proper types to thrive on a fruitarian diet. Then and again, there is apparently a one in three shot, so the odds are slightly against it.

Too much sugar is also really bad for livers as well as teeth.

Do you think the flaxseed cracker would work with sesame seeds? I've got some of those laying around, but I don't have any flaxseed at the moment. I'd think folks would have eaten a lot more flax when they used to keep a field of it around for making cloth with. Flax is what linen is made out of and before the cotton gin was invented, flax was one of the fibers of choice for spinning into fiber to weave into summer weight cloth.