Author: jennynazak

The other day, a plant-whisperer friend, who’s always bringing me cuttings and other goodies, brought me a Miracle Fruit. It was a tiny (about pill-size) bright-red smooth ovoid fruit. Eat this, he told me, and for a little while afterward, anything you drink or eat that ordinarily tastes sour will taste super sweet.

So I gave it a try. The fruit itself (which is mostly taken up by a seed in the middle that you don’t eat) tasted pleasantly sweet.

After ingesting the fruit (felt like popping a mystery adventure pill!), I took a sip of my “morning tonic” (water with a bit of cider-vinegar). Sure enough, my drink, which of course is usually tart, had suddenly been transformed into a super-sweet apple elixir.

Miracle Fruit. It occurred to me that it could have useful application. For example, if a person had to take an extremely unpleasant-tasting medicine, eating a Miracle Fruit immediately beforehand could make the medicine easier to swallow.

But then it occurred to me that Miracle Fruit could have a dangerous side. Things taste sour for a reason. For example, if you drank an entire glass of straight vinegar or concentrated lemon juice because Miracle Fruit made it taste sweet, you could hurt your esophagus or stomach! My advice would be, if you eat a Miracle Fruit, don’t eat or drink anything out of the ordinary for awhile afterward; stick to only foods and drinks you know, in familiar concentrations.

Reflecting upon my Miracle Fruit experience, I was struck by the thought that we are surrounded, metaphorically speaking, by potential “Miracle Fruit” of various kinds in our everyday lives. And they keep us from noticing the aspects of our lives and our society that are deeply sour (or bitter). So we keep enduring those sour or bitter things instead of avoiding or changing them as we would be better off doing.

For example, economic security could be a “Miracle Fruit” obscuring the sour taste of a bad marriage. Or a soul-sucking job.

Our climate-controlled, noise-insulating houses, with their closed doors and windows, can be “Miracle Fruit” dulling our sensitivities to the brutishly noisy, hot environment we have created outdoors. The harsh noise and toxic fumes of the landscaping equipment that scalps the grass and trees; the hot air spewing out the back ends of people’s air-conditioners.

Our cars, traveling bubbles that they are, can be a “Miracle Fruit” that keeps us from experiencing the blistering heat of our excessively paved, deforested world, and realizing we really need to have a lot more trees and other vegetation all around us.

White privilege can be a “Miracle Fruit” rendering us oblivious to the fact that systemic racism harms us all, not only the Black people and other people of color who it harms most.

Blind patriotism, with its feel-good self-righteousness, is a “Miracle Fruit” that numbs us to the horrors we wreak by waging war.

Stock-market gains and a “booming economy” can be a “Miracle Fruit” that erases the sour taste of how those corporations are gaining their prosperity: at the expense of their employees; indigenous peoples’ lands; our rivers and oceans and forests.

Our abundant supply of cable TV, internet, and other entertainment on tap can be a “Miracle Fruit” that dulls our ability to perceive the sourness of living in an HOA neighborhood where any creative urges we might have are quashed by a fussbudget culture that curtails self-expression.

Food or alcohol, indulged in excess, can be a “Miracle Fruit” dulling our spiritual tastebuds to the sense of loss that comes of not challenging ourselves to go make something creative, or go out walking and meet a new person.

I don’t want anyone to feel guilty about indulging in comforts and pleasures; I certainly have my comforts and pleasures. (For example, I love watching a show called Dexter! I watch it with my neighbor, on his wide-screen TV. We get together for an evening of Dexter-binging once every couple of weeks.)

We just can’t allow those little indulgences to become “Miracle Fruit” that dull our ability to fully taste the flavor of our lives. Things that taste sour, taste sour (or bitter) for a reason. By choosing to experience their flavor as is, we are more likely to get motivated to change what needs to be changed, in our lives or in the world. And that, in the long run, is really sweet!

All this aside, eating the Miracle Fruit, and then having my vinegar-water taste sweet, was a wild fun experience! Try it sometime if you get the chance.

What other metaphorical examples of “Miracle Fruit” can you think of, in the world or in your life?

Further Reading:

“The Evolution of Bitter Taste,” by Robert Christopher Bruner on ScholarBlogs. Fun facts on how bitter taste works; how humans evolved bitter-taste receptors.

“Miracle Fruit” entry in Britannica.com

Avoiding styrofoam and single-use plastics is a challenge at the best of times, but the Covid pandemic has made it even tougher, as many of us are trying to support our local restaurants by ordering takeout/delivery food.

I am doing a survey to find out if people are willing to pay extra for backyard-compostable takeout containers as an alternative to plastic or styrofoam. So far, a lot of people in my local eco groups have said they would be willing. Amounts range from 50 cents extra to 10 dollars extra! Obviously folks care about this. I myself would be willing to pay about $5 extra.

I plan to share my findings with local restaurants, and work with them to get backyard-compostable containers as an option.

Here are my survey questions; feel free to use them to poll people in your area.

1 — Would you be willing to pay extra for paper or other backyard-compostable containers if it were an option?
(Y/N)

2 — If yes, how much extra would you be willing to pay per order? (enter a dollar amount or range)

In my previous post “Where Green Meets Thrift,” I talk about how great it is when the eco thing and the thrifty thing are one and the same. (Buying clothes at thrift stores instead of buying new is one common example of this.)

The takeout-container thing, alas, is not an example of a situation where green meets thrift. At least not right now. Containers made from cardboard, bagasse (sugarcane waste), and other backyard-compostable materials tend to be priced many times as high as plastic or styrofoam containers.

Plastic and styrofoam are cheap in part because the manufacturers and sellers don’t have to pay the full cost of their product. I’m referring to the cost on the back end. The cost to towns and cities of cleaning up those containers when they become litter; the environmental cost as they end up in landfill where they may take hundreds of years to break down, leaching toxins all the while.

Since green does not yet intersect thrift when it comes to takeout containers, those of us who care, and are in a position to do so, can help by being willing to pay more for cardboard or other household-compostable options.

An idea I have often suggested to fellow eco-minded folks is making containers out of nontoxic “invasive” plants such as reeds or cogon grass. I have not yet delved into detailed research on this possibility, but I think it’s worth exploring, not only as an environmentally friendly container option but also as an opportunity for investors, and as a potentially high-demand niche for your local manufacturing sector.

Papyrus, the thick paperlike material used by ancient Egyptians as a writing surface, was made by laying sliced reeds perpendicular to one another and pressing them flat. Supposedly the reeds contained a natural adhesive that, when dry, kept the reeds together as a sheet.

I have no doubt that the plant kingdom offers many other potential solutions to our takeout quandary as well.

Another solution: If you order quite regularly from some establishment(s), and have a good rapport with them, you might ask them if you can give them a package of biodegradable/backyard-compostable containers to keep on hand for your orders. Or even better: If you can spare the money, buy them several packages of such containers so they can offer them to other eco-minded customers and see how many customers end up choosing the eco option.

That said, the real place where green meets thrift is our own reusable containers. If we could convince restaurants to stop being so afraid of lawsuits (resulting from some customer getting sick from their own inadequately cleaned container), this would be the greenest and thriftiest solution.

Or restaurants could send out their own reusable containers for takeout and delivery. Customers would pay a deposit on the containers.

When I lived in Japan, a common sight in neighborhoods was noodle-delivery guys on motor scooters. They’d bring your ramen or soba to your door in real, reusable bowls with reusable lids. After eating, you’d leave the dishes outside your door and the delivery guy would be back within an hour or so to retrieve them.

This might not work in most parts of the USA for various reasons. But my point is, we should be looking into this topic and finding alternatives to all this plastic and styrofoam we’re generating. It’s literally a growing problem.

When green intersects with thrift, it’s a happy day, both for people and for the planet. Yesterday in an online local community group I belong to, someone posted a flyer for a community school-uniform exchange. People are asked to donate their kids’ school uniforms that no longer fit, so that another child can use them. Uniforms are going to be collected all summer, and people with kids needing uniforms can register to get the sizes they need.

The uniform exchange was motivated by a wish to help people through hard times.

The fact that it also helps the environment (by cutting out the eco-footprint associated with manufacture, transport, retail of new uniforms) is just the icing on the cake.

I love when this happens! What examples have you noticed lately, of green intersecting with thrift?

Starting a list of unsustainable attitudes/values/social norms that are contributing to eco degradation, economic hardship, and other suffering throughout the world. As you may have noticed, I sometimes post “open-ended” posts, which are often lists. (I call such posts open-ended because I start with what I’ve got, and revisit the post to add other items as they occur to me. Sometimes I’m still adding items months later!) 

obsessive symmetry

obsessive neatness

giving exalted status to college, so-called “higher ed”; denigrating other forms of learning; not acknowledging that there are other, possibly better, paths to success and good citizenship

exalting youth; devaluing age

anti-sensitivity: branding sensitive people as lunatics needing meds

obsessive need for “order” and security

anti-visionary: calling young people with imagination and vision “impractical” or “naive”; anyone who manages to make it to adulthood with this sensitivity & imagination intact is dubbed eccentric, naive, not worth listening to

extreme risk-aversion

fear/intolerance of nature

me-first

On the whole, my local paper Daytona Beach News-Journal offers pretty good coverage of gardening topics. Correspondent Lynette Walther is a good writer. 

This article about plants NOT to plant because they “take over” is good advice from a conventional gardening perspective, and also from a native-habitat perspective. We don’t want invasive plants choking out our vegetable patch or crowding out native plants. 

That said – speaking from a PERMACULTURE design perspective, with patterns and the long view in mind, I don’t think it’s a bad thing that we have some plants that are this tenacious. Human activity, including excessive pavement, factory agriculture, and destructive residential and commercial landscaping practices, has seriously degraded the land.

There may come a time, if soil depletion continues and we have an extended drought, that ANY vegetation will be needed to help check erosion and stave off desertification. (Maybe it’s just me, but overall I’m more worried about desertification than I am about sea-level rise or extreme wet weather. A Facebook friend in Ohio said a 6-mile square which includes him has gotten 0.5 inches of rain since May! Normal would be 8-10 inches. Even my friends in Ireland experienced a major drought this year. )

Super tenacious plants may one day help screen our food/medicine gardens and our homes from a merciless sun in a treeless landscape. Furthermore, photosynthesis is an endothermic (heat-absorbing) reaction, and as humanity’s bad habits continue to heat up the planet, super-tenacious plants may one day be the only thing that stands between us and literally being cooked alive. I pray things never reach that point, and I am doing everything I can think of to reduce that likelihood. But as eco-minded folk, we need to be prepared to design for all possibilities. And today’s “pesky” tenacious plants might be tomorrow’s essential allies.

In my opinion, the best thing we can do with most invasive plants is cut them back; either “chop and drop” for mulch, or harvest as material for basketweaving, papermaking, and such. Cogon grass, considered highly invasive here in Florida, is used to make sleeping-mats in one region of China (according to a book I found online by doing a search “cogon grass basketweaving.”)

And extending the conversation to invasive animals and insects, I read the other day that Sudan and neighboring countries are having their worst locust plague in 70 years. Awhile back, I saw an article about restaurants in Israel capitalizing on the bounty. The writer pointed out that humans can only eat so many locusts. But this morning, as I was walking on the beach (where many ideas come to me), it occurred to me that maybe the bugs could be used as an ingredient in pet food as well.

Further Reading: I am currently rereading Beyond the War on Invasive Species: A Permaculture Approach to Ecosystems Restoration, by Tao Orion; published by Chelsea Green. From the publisher’s site: “Concerns that invasive species represent significant threats to global biodiversity and ecological integrity permeate conversations from schoolrooms to board rooms, and concerned citizens grapple with how to rapidly and efficiently manage their populations. These worries have culminated in an ongoing “war on invasive species,” where the arsenal is stocked with bulldozers, chainsaws, and herbicides put to the task of their immediate eradication. In Hawaii, mangrove trees (Avicennia spp.) are sprayed with glyphosate and left to decompose on the sandy shorelines where they grow, and in Washington, helicopters apply the herbicide Imazapyr to smooth cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora) growing in estuaries. The “war on invasive species” is in full swing, but given the scope of such potentially dangerous and ecologically degrading eradication practices, it is necessary to question the very nature of the battle.”

In a recent post on this blog, I talked about the importance of knowing what we have, having it in appropriate quantity, and remembering where it is stored. (In permaculture design, this principle is called “Stocking.”) In an affluent society, where people readily accumulate “stuff” even without trying, even in fact when outright RESISTING, that becomes a challenging task.

My inheritance of thread, needles, fabric now spans four generations of women. We were a long line of seamstresses, quilters, knitters, crocheters.

Of course, even if we remember what we have, we may possess it in excess quantity such that it succumbs to damage or decay before getting used up. That’s what seems to have happened to the 10 little spools of silk darning-thread in this tiny slim cardboard box that I discovered within a large Container Store box of thread I inherited from my Mom. The thread breaks readily with a tug of the hand. It can be hard to know in advance how much of something we’ll need, and erring on the side of excess may be human nature, especially if you’ve known times of scarcity or carry them in your ancestral memory. (Which, hey, is probably all of us to a degree.)

I have captured its beauty just now in photos (which you can see in this post on my Deep Green Facebook page ), and also have honored its creation by looking up the name of the mill on the box. The Heminway & Bartlett Silk Mfg. Co., Watertown, Connecticut.

And, although it might seem sad, I am now going to compost the box of thread. The entire box and its contents are returnable to Mother Earth without harm, and there’s actually great dignity and beauty to that. I wish we would be quick to return to old packaging methods like this. (Update: The little box of old silk thread fits into my newly organized thread-box without a squeeze, so I’m keeping it for now; it is just so charming.)

My online search yielded a website dedicated to old mills in Connecticut! For each mill, it gives historic information as well as any current purposes the old mill building is being used for. Apparently part of “my” mill is now being used as a day spa!

H&B was a silk-thread mill founded in the 1880s. And apparently it did not close til the early 2000s. Here is the “old mills” website, open to H&B’s page.

Many times (in this blog, and out and about in the world) I get started on a topic, only to find it doesn’t tie up neatly. I keep finding other threads of connection.

My maternal grandfather owned a knitting mill in Fall River, Massachusetts. (He also had a career as an efficiency consultant for factories and other companies. He was an engineer, educated at MIT.)

My maternal grandmother could knit and read at the same time, she was that good. My maternal grandparents were of English and Scottish descent and I believe though don’t know for sure that the ancestors from that side came over in the 1700s. There were some French Huguenots in the mix also.

On my Dad’s side, both my grandmother and my grandfather worked at a sewing factory. GenTex Corp., in Carbondale, Pennsylvania. (Grandpa was also the teacher at the one-room schoolhouse in the hamlet of Simpson PA.) The ancestors on that side of my family came over from Eastern Europe in the early 1900s. They spoke a language that wasn’t pure Polish but I believe most of them identified as Polish. The women on that side of the family were geniuses with a needle and thread; the men were virtuoso carpenters.

Some of this information might be wrong. Pretty much everyone in the generation before ours is gone now though, so things are hard to check. It’s one thing I regret: not having been more of a student of my ancestry. Not that it’s easy in this modern bleached-white culture, but many people do have knowledge of those ancestral threads. Losing our ancestral connections is an extremely unmooring sensation.

In school, my favorite-favorite subjects were Art and Home Ec. But I had a hard time admitting that to myself because, in “book-smart” circles, those were considered classes for “dumb people,” and if you were book-smart you were expected to aim higher, go to college. Quite honestly, I struggled with most academic subjects, once they expected you to get your nose out of the book and actually put pen to paper; dissect and analyze; make pronouncements. But I was raised in a privileged environment (where I was led to believe I was “academically gifted,” despite the fact that my work in academic subjects was only ever mediocre at best, aside from a seemingly natural affinity for learning languages), so not only did I get into college; I actually made it through college (by the skin of my teeth, though I’m not sure anyone, even my own parents, knew how thin a skin that was). I didn’t even know being a seamstress could be a serious thing.

No regrets about my path; it’s a rich tapestry of many colors and textures. My only regret would be that I may have taken someone else’s spot in college (or later, in office jobs) who deserved it more. Anyway, whether or not that actually happened, I am privileged, and as such I owe it to my ancestors, to my living family members, to my community, and to society as a whole to use my privilege in service of the greater good.

The box of thread I’m sorting and organizing now is a clear plastic rectangle-cube about a foot wide, a foot and a half long, and six inches deep. It contains countless spools of thread, still good, in a full range of colors. The contents of this box are only a tiny fraction of my thread stash (let alone my stash of embroidery flosses). Somehow even just sitting still in the box, the spools have become unspooled, and threads tangled. Just now I wound them all up. A satisfying outcome if you’re obsessive like me.

I’m thinking of putting a post on NextDoor just to let people know they should talk to me before even thinking about buying thread. Or seam-binding. Or — great gods and little fishhooks (a favorite expression of my grandfather’s who owned the knitting mill) — zippers. So many zippers, of all possible colors and I mean all possible colors, still in their original packaging.

For some years now, my general policy on travel has been: Minimize unnecessary trips. Avoid flying. Don’t accept car rides that are out of someone’s way. Get around in town mainly by bicycle, foot, or bus. Get around long-distance mainly by Greyhound or Amtrak.

I did travel a lot when I was younger, including long-distance car trips and airplane travel. Awhile back I actually purchased carbon offsets to mitigate every flight I could remember taking in my adult life. And air travel post-9/11 has become such an unpleasant experience that I have little trouble resisting it. (And that was before Covid!) Unless one of my siblings (brother, sister, brother-in-law) or nieces needed me for something, you couldn’t pay me to get on a plane right now. I have on a couple of occasions rented cars to get to my family who live several states away.

Now, with Covid continuing, but some people wanting to get back to normal social gatherings, I started formulating some updates to my travel policy: No long-distance travel except for emergencies. If I want to visit my family, I might have to rent a van and quarantine in their yard. I will travel by bus or train again when buses and trains become open-air! (You know, like that Durango-to-Silverton excursion train.) Get around town only by bicycle or foot.

I may have to bend these guidelines at some point but for now they feel good. I’ve actually been doing a lot more walking since the pandemic hit.

Oh and here’s my ideal travel method: foot or bicycle, long-distance, by paved interstate paths dotted with camping oases. THAT is some travel I could really get excited about! It would take me about 6 days to reach my siblings by bicycle, but it’d be a fun journey. Can you imagine? Sort of like an interstate highway with truck stops, but for cyclists and pedestrians.

By the way, in a previous post I referred to myself as a “Doomer Lite.” One example: Not enough of a doomer to stockpile generators and MREs, but enough of a doomer to be aware of how many days it would take me to walk to my family if TSHTF and the world were to, like, suddenly run out of gasoline. I could cover the distance on foot in 30 days or less. Which is better than when I lived in Texas; that trip would’ve taken a good two months or more on foot.

But this train of thought is too Doomer-ish for me. Really I just want paved interstate hike/bikeways dotted with campsites right now, because it would make travel ever so much more fun, convenient, and rich.

Back in 2007, I took a solo bicycle ride from Austin to New Mexico. I rode for six days, camping just by the roadside wherever. It was a great experience but would have been even better if there were dedicated walk/bike lanes, and officially permitted campsites.